Biologically Evolved Forms of Compositionality

A long term aim
Show how products of evolution that were selected because of their practical usefulness in many contexts, were eventually transformed into more general, less constrained, forms of information processing

including some forms of special-purpose spatial cognition shared with other species, which, in humans later provided foundations for deep mathematical discoveries.

Key Themes:
But not enough time for all:

Compositionality in biological evolution;

Compositionality in individual development;

Compositionality in mechanisms produced by evolution;

Compositionality in biological information processing;

Compositionality in epigenesis;

Compositionality in biological niches;

Compositionality as a source of mathematical domains;

Discrete compositionality (as in logic, algebra, lego bricks)

     vs continuous compositionality (e.g. plasticine, water, rubber bands)

     vs hybrid (discrete+continuous) compositionality

     (e.g. meccano, Euclidean geometry)

Compositionality as a source of mathematical problems and competences;

Compositionality as a source of creativity in evolution;

Uses of mathematical compositionality in evolution and its products;

Compositionality in fundamental and derived construction kits;

The Meta-Morphogenesis project

Metaphysical compositionality: a source of new kinds of entity -- including minds. Compare the relatively recent discoveries relating to types of virtual machine, including distributed virtual machines e.g. email systems, the World Wide Web.
Evolution made closely related discoveries long before we did.

NOTE:
Frege implicitly introduced two parallel kinds of compositionality, insofar as he distinguished Sinn (sense, connotation) and Bedeutung (reference, denotation). This has important implications mentioned in the full paper.

A consequence that he played down is that in some contexts there can be a clear sense, yet a failure of denotation, e.g.
     The father of the subject of this sentence is a mathematician
The subject of the sentence fails to refer, because of infinite recursion. So the sentence has no truth value: part of the information required to determine the truth value does not exist. There are many such cases which are often mis-diagnosed as generating contradictions instead of failure to have a truth value.
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/62-80.html#1971-03

Designers of programming languages normally try to make that impossible -- but in so doing they restrict the generative power of the languages.
END NOTE

Examples include new kinds of information required to meet new control functions.

The forms of computation required for this included new kinds of virtual machinery, e.g. running on brains, or on insect social networks.

Compare the development by humans of new kinds of virtual machinery since the mid 20th century.

An example of this was the production of visual information processing.
At first computer scientists thought of visual mechanisms as pattern classification mechanisms: sensor signals were segmented into items to which labels were attached identifying recognized patterns.

Max Clowes and others replaced this with the idea of visual systems dealing "syntax" in the images received and "semantics" in the interpretations of those images.

Getting such systems to work included resolving ambiguities of grouping and using context to resolve ambiguities of reference (does this line feature represent a concave edge or a convex edge?)

This required perceptual systems to make use of different ontologies:
-- ontologies for sensory information
-- ontologies for depicted scene contents

In some cases that required multi-layered ontologies, e.g. when you see a face you may see not only the physical features but also an emotion or a mood, which involves using an ontology of mental states.

Unfortunately some of the advances made at that time have been undermined by recent work treating perception as if it amounted to multi-layered pattern recognition.

The early AI researchers (e.g. Max Clowes, who introduced me to AI in 1969) pointed out that perfectly possible images/pictures could depict impossible scenes and therefore visual systems needed to be able to reason about impossibility.
Many examples are here:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/impossible.html

Here are nine blocks on a surface, shown in three possible configurations, including one in which one of the blocks is suspended above (or floats above) another block. How many other configurations are possible? How else could they be arranged? What sequences of block moves could produce the new arrangements?

Several more configurations of nine blocks are depicted below. You may or may not find one of them anomalous.

The above examples were all based on a picture by Oscar Reutersvard some time before the Penrose triangle.

The ability to detect such impossibilities depends on abilities to reason about structural relationships, not the ability to generalise from masses of examples.

In this case, and many of Escher's examples inspired by the Penrose triangle, the impossibilities arise from composition of relationships like: further, higher, more left and more right, each of which is transitive and antisymmetric. How can a biological brain represent and reason about such relationships, and understand spatial impossibility and necessity?

Young children don't all see the impossibilities that are obvious to older humans.

What has to change in their brains during development?

Jean Piaget investigated this question, but he lacked computational knowledge.

Most psychologists and neuroscientists don't understand the question.

Many current AI researchers seem to be equally ignorant.

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Figure Meta

Figure Meta above, based on ideas in Chappell & Sloman(2007), shows (crudely) how staggered gene expression can allow relatively abstract/schematic results of later gene expression to be instantiated using information gained during earlier interactions with the environment -- not necessarily using any standard form of learning. The box on the left containing "Records" is a gross oversimplification -- earlier results of interaction with the environment will feed into changes of design, e.g. development of grammars, not merely historical records.

Earlier stages of gene expression are indicated by left-most black downward arrows, and later stages by downward arrows to the right. The earlier stages are mainly determined by the genome and control not only early growth patterns but also forms of instinctive behaviour e.g. consuming nutrients or avoiding harmful entities.

Production of new species, and development of their individuals, both require use of the fundamental construction kit provided by physics and chemistry, and also increasingly many kinds of derived construction kit, discussed in more detail in Sloman(2017) and Sloman(kits), including construction kits for producing and modifying construction kits (meta-construction-kits??).

Figure FCK: The Fundamental Construction Kit

The space of possible trajectories for combining basic constituents is enormous, but routes can be shortened and search spaces shrunk by building derived construction kits (DCKs), that are able to assemble larger structures in fewer steps.

Evolution of ancient mathematical abilities

Compositionality in natural language

Intensional and extensional compositionality

Reasoning about appearance changes caused by motion

Spider creativity

More to be added!

Huge gaps between current AI and the forms of intelligence produced by biological evolution.

Evolution could not produce its intelligent animals by training them on data: the data did not exist!

I suspect our current models of computation have some deep unnoticed limitations, though it looks as if Alan Turing began to explore ways of filling the gap shortly before he died, in his 1952 paper:
The chemical basis of morphogenesis.

What would he have done if he had lived several decades longer?

My guess is: The Meta-Morphogenesis project
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/meta-morphogenesis.html

I've provided some snapshots of its contents. Much help needed.

Can category theory -- a major theme at the workshop -- help?