C4 · Compositional Compression in Cognition and Culture

Compositionality and cumulative culture are two foundations of human intelligence that have separately been proposed as ""the singular factor"" differentiating human cognition from other animals or AI. Compositionality is a core concept in cognitive science, allowing us to solve new problems by recombining familiar elements in novel ways. Cumulative culture is deeply rooted in anthropology, highlighting humanity's unique capacity to massively improve on the wisdom of past generations. Here, C4 (pronounced cee-four in a nod to the explosive compound) seeks to unify these domains under a mathematical framework for compositional compression, offering ground-breaking new predictions by accounting for synergistic interactions between representations. Just as information-theory provided foundational insights across numerous domains, C4 promises broad applications for understanding how humans encode and transmit recombinable fragments of knowledge --- internally within our brains, interpersonally between individuals, and multi-generationally across societal timescales. The goals are threefold: 1) To develop a framework for compositional compression that can explain curriculum effects in individual learning