Alhambra Fields Institute Foundation · Granada
A private foundation, international from day one, with a central project:
An operating anthropological model, put to work on humanity’s most urgent challenges.
Explicit, open and verifiable: built with scientific evidence, rigorous thought, mathematics and AI.
Understanding the human being
to shape a better future
Our question, our focus
Our challenges are human problems. Unfortunately, we have stopped studying the human being from a holistic perspective, and today nobody offers an integrated picture of what a human being is.
AFI exists to build one: explicit, open and verifiable. Grounded in knowledge, that is, science and rigorous thought, with the help of AI and mathematics. Universal: built with contributions from every discipline and culture, and shared by them. Rigorous, understandable and operational, for the agents of change and for society at large.
The human being as a biological reality, with observable and quantifiable characteristics.
A subject capable of personal identity, meaning and interiority, what some traditions have called soul or spirit.
Only through a much deeper understanding of the human being will we be able to realize what is truly happening, and identify realistic ways to overcome humanity’s increasingly urgent challenges.
Why AFI exists
In each of them, what is missing is not resources or technology, but knowledge of how people actually feel, think and act.
The mechanisms, motivations and interests that generate, intensify or ease polarization.
How to bring its extraordinary potential into our lives without crossing the limits of what is human.
Economic and business models built on how people really are, not only on what they should be or do.
How memory, intelligence and critical thinking are formed, and how technology shapes them.
The drivers of behavior, and the obstacles to maturity, wellbeing and a meaningful life.
Where aggressiveness, violence and destructiveness come from, in all their forms.
Why caring for the planet is not a priority in individual behavior, and what would make it one.
How individual and collective interests can be reconciled so that collaboration becomes possible.
What leads a person to take their own life, one of the leading causes of death among the young.
If the obstacle to overcoming these challenges is ourselves, then we need to know much better how we are: our possibilities and limitations, how we perceive, what moves us, how we interact and react, and what we can expect of ourselves. It is a priority that cannot wait, above all now that AI threatens to outpace us.
These are not nine separate agendas. They are nine readings of the same question: what the human being actually is, and how that shapes what people do and can do.
The Human Being Map
The Anthropological Operating Map is AFI’s single project: every element with its record, its sources, its level of evidence and its data. What you see below is its visual representation, one part of it. The model is what stands behind the screen.
Containing
Built with the contributions of
Clearly specifying
What the starting model says
Each one of these statements can be discussed, corrected or refuted. That is the point of writing it down.
A higher animal with two elements new in evolution: reflexive consciousness and articulated, symbolic language. From there, human beings can know and value themselves; they can love, create, dominate and destroy.
Genome and environment interact throughout life. Neither genetic nor environmental determinism: the human being is never finished.
Capacities emerge in an order that can be described. Fear, aggressiveness or freedom mean different things depending on the moment of life in which they appear.
Behind every act there is a need, a desire and a will; underneath, two fundamental motors: power and pleasure.
The human being cannot fully know itself, is capable of self-deception, and lives between what it is and what it would like to be.
So that whoever does not share the model’s proposals can still use the rest of it.
How we work
Science and rigorous thought provide the meaning and the language, AI the scale, mathematics the proof. Not reducing people to numbers: representing what we know precisely enough to compare it, test it and improve it.
“Kant held that a field contains only as much real science as it contains mathematics. Our hypotheses about the human being are still far from that. Combining mathematics with AI and rigorous thought, we now have an opportunity we have never had before.”
Luis SecoAFI Vice President · Chair, Centre for Sustainable Development, Fields Institute · Professor of Mathematics, University of TorontoWhat AFI builds
A permanent scientific infrastructure, and a research program obliged to return standardized results to it. That obligation is what turns each project into a cumulative asset, not a report on a shelf.
The Human Knowledge Engine · five elements
The live application, a 3D room and an extended-reality experience: how the Map is seen and walked into.
Texts, datasets, expert judgment and measurement proxies, linked to the elements they explain.
Formal models that turn the Map’s variables into testable relations; AI that finds patterns at scale.
The cumulative memory of validated outputs. Every project must leave structured results.
A specialized AI assistant grounded in AFI’s curated knowledge, for researchers and, later, the public.
The research program · three levels, one portfolio
The four questions at the head of the Map, led by Enrique Baca Baldomero and worked continuously, with a public state of the question every year.
A challenge of humanity reframed around the behaviors and motivations that produce it, with primary data and pathways for action.
One of the gaps the Map declares: what is known, debated, unknown and false, brought into focus.
The four major research lines
Knowledge transfer
The goal is not to inform more people, but to make human understanding usable by those who shape decisions: policy teams, companies, education systems, media, foundations and universities. Without forgetting society at large: understanding how people are will help everyone manage their own lives better.
A dedicated team turns each project into narratives, tools and pilots. What is adopted, rejected or cannot be used returns to the Engine as new questions and evidence of what works.
Initial proof that it works
Understand, formalize, apply, measure: the path the Engine and the research program are built to repeat on every challenge.
With Enrique Baca García’s psychiatric team and mathematicians of the Fields Institute.
Developed by members of the AFI promoting team.
In their words
Before technology completely outpaces humanity, the next revolution must be in our understanding of the human being.
After the Genome and the Brain projects, the Human Being Map can be the next great initiative to understand who we are.
AFI has to focus on researching and explaining what the human being is, not what it should be, or should do.
We want to be the world’s reference center for research and knowledge transfer on the human being. And we can do it step by step: every single effort will have an impact of its own and will contribute to the whole.
People
AFI’s governing bodies are being constituted.
Board of Trustees
Eduardo Díez-HochleitnerPresidentSocial impact, executive management and investment · SpainLeticia SoberónVice PresidentPsychology, collaborative intelligence · MexicoOmar HatamlehVice PresidentArtificial intelligence, NASA · USA, JordanLuis SecoVice PresidentChair, Centre for Sustainable Development, Fields Institute · Professor of Mathematics, University of Toronto
Enrique Baca GarcíaTrusteePsychiatry, UAM · Spain
Kumar MurtyTrusteeMathematics · India, Canada
Rolando BalsindeTrusteeStrategy · USA, Asia, Arab world
David Jiménez-BlancoTrusteeStrategy and finance · Spain
Fernando SavaterTrusteePhilosophy · Spain
Álvaro Pascual-LeoneTrusteeNeuroscience, Harvard · USA
Xavier SoberónTrusteeGenetics, UNAM · Mexico
Francisco HerreraTrusteeAI and computer science, UGR · Spain
Goyo PanaderoTrusteeCommunications
María GarcíaTrusteeGovernance of organizations · USA, Peru
Pilar GarcíaTrusteeFoundations, AEF · Spain
Gregorio JiménezTrusteeGranada ecosystemManagement
Economist and Kellogg MBA. Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, McKinsey & Company (partner) and Banco Santander, then a decade founding ventures in knowledge and collaborative intelligence. Co-author of the starting model.
Psychiatrist, former Full Professor of Psychiatry at the Autonomous University of Madrid, Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Vice President of the Real Colegio Libre de Eméritos. The key author of the starting anthropological model; chairs AFI’s Scientific and Ethical Committee.
Senior finance executive in telecommunications, insurance and banking: finance director at MásMóvil, with earlier roles at Línea Directa Aseguradora and Bankinter. Independent non-executive director of Allfunds Group and lecturer at Universidad Pontificia Comillas.
PhD in Science from the University of Pisa and alumnus of Harvard, Stanford, Chicago and IE. CEO and founder of Erasmus Equitis, investor and board member with experience in innovation, technology, venture capital and social impact.
Lawyer. Former Minister of Justice and Public Administration of the Regional Government of Andalusia and member of its highest advisory body, the Consejo Consultivo de Andalucía. Earlier, head of International Relations at Spain’s General Council of the Judiciary.
Scientific partners
A private cultural foundation created in 1988 to preserve and activate the work of leading academics and public thinkers: more than a hundred professors and experts across philosophy, history, sociology, medicine, genetics, economics, law and literature.
The Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences, at the University of Toronto, is one of the leading international centers for mathematical research. It carries the name of John Charles Fields, whose legacy is the Fields Medal.
With leading mathematicians and AI experts from the University of Toronto and the University of Granada.
Global from inception
Support AFI
AFI is financed by philanthropy and, increasingly, by its own income: training, applied projects and licensing. Every contribution is connected to the rest through the Engine.
Start small, grow on results
Every block of the program can start as a Pathfinder: a first stage with its own deliverable and a decision written in advance.
Contribute knowledge
The Map is meant to be discussed, corrected and refuted. If your research, your discipline or your culture can strengthen it, or show where it is wrong, we want to hear from you: researchers, clinicians, thinkers and experts from every field and every tradition.
How we want to be judged
Declaring the failure criteria in advance is the cheapest way an institution can be believed. These are the five the promoters have agreed to be judged on.
More elements, but no more variables with proxies and evidence levels: a better diagram, not a scientific instrument.
If projects end in reports rather than standardized outputs, this was a series of grants after all.
If no government, school system or company adopts a framework and keeps using it, transfer failed.
If our answers stop being the kind of thing evidence could contradict, AFI has become a school of thought.
A conception acceptable to every culture has to be argued with from inside each tradition, not read from outside.
And one that is not a failure. If the model is shown to be wrong in an important part, by evidence the institute itself produced, that is the program working. In Year 1 an external panel will try to refute the Map, and its verdict will be published.
Contact
Write to us to receive AFI’s foundational documents, or to arrange a conversation.
Owner of this website. Rafael Mira Prieto-Moreno, NIF 07217272X, founding promoter of the foundation being incorporated to develop the Alhambra Fields Institute project. Calle Perdices 5, 18697 La Herradura (Granada), Spain. Contact: contact@alhambrafieldsinstitute.org.
Once the foundation is registered, it will take over the ownership of this website and this notice will be updated with its details.
Purpose. To present the Alhambra Fields Institute project. The website carries out no commercial activity and sells nothing online.
Intellectual property. The texts, the Human Being Map, the images and the logos belong to their authors and to the promoters of AFI. They may be quoted with attribution; any other reproduction requires prior permission. The photographs of people are published with their permission.
Liability. The content is for information only. It describes a project in development, and its figures and descriptions may change. We are not responsible for the content of external websites linked from this one.
Applicable law. Spanish law. Any dispute will be submitted to the courts of Granada, without prejudice to the rights of consumers to go to the courts of their own domicile.
Data controller. Rafael Mira Prieto-Moreno, NIF 07217272X, founding promoter of the foundation being incorporated to develop the Alhambra Fields Institute project. Contact: contact@alhambrafieldsinstitute.org.
What data. This website has no forms. We only process the data you send us when you write to us by email: your name, your email address and the content of your message.
What for, and on what basis. To answer your message and, if you ask for them, to send you AFI’s documents. The legal basis is your request and our legitimate interest in answering it (Article 6.1(b) and (f) of the General Data Protection Regulation).
How long. For as long as needed to deal with your request and, at most, two years after our last contact, unless a continuing relationship requires otherwise or the law obliges us to keep them.
Who else sees them. No one, except the provider that hosts our email, acting as data processor within the European Union, and where the law requires it.
Your rights. You can ask for access, rectification, erasure, objection, restriction or portability by writing to contact@alhambrafieldsinstitute.org. You can also complain to the Spanish Data Protection Agency (www.aepd.es).
Once the foundation is registered, it will become the data controller, and we will update this notice.
Titular del sitio web. Rafael Mira Prieto-Moreno, NIF 07217272X, promotor fundador de la fundación en proceso de constitución que desarrollará el proyecto Alhambra Fields Institute. Calle Perdices 5, 18697 La Herradura (Granada), España. Contacto: contact@alhambrafieldsinstitute.org. Cuando la fundación quede inscrita, asumirá la titularidad de este sitio y se actualizarán estos datos.
Finalidad. Presentar el proyecto Alhambra Fields Institute. El sitio no realiza actividad comercial ni venta en línea.
Propiedad intelectual. Los textos, el Mapa del Ser Humano, las imágenes y los logotipos pertenecen a sus autores y a los promotores de AFI. Pueden citarse indicando la fuente; cualquier otra reproducción requiere autorización previa. Las fotografías de personas se publican con su permiso.
Responsabilidad. Los contenidos tienen carácter informativo y describen un proyecto en desarrollo; sus cifras y descripciones pueden cambiar. No respondemos del contenido de sitios externos enlazados.
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