LOOMUS Book Picks Grounded in First-Principles Thinking

A Brief History of Intelligence

By Max Bennett

A Brief History of Intelligence

Five breakthroughs. Half a billion years. One mind — yours — at the end of the line.

"
— The Big Idea
Intelligence didn't arrive.
It accumulated.

A reading of A Brief History of Intelligence
by Max Bennett

— The Architecture

A mind is a stack.

i. STEERING 550M YA ii. REINFORCING 500M YA iii. SIMULATING 100M YA iv. MENTALIZING 35M YA v. SPEAKING ~100K YA ↑ you are here

Each layer kept everything below it intact.
You don't replace a brain — you build on it.

Simulating

— imagination, with a fossil date

Inside the head, a possible world flickers awake — and with it, planning, dreaming, regret.

— Why founders should read this

LLMs arrived at step five
without taking the first four.

What's missing isn't size, it's stack. The gap between today's models and real intelligence isn't more parameters — it's four breakthroughs of evolution that we tried to skip.

— The comparison

Where today's AI sits.

HUMAN MIND 5 layers, stacked SPEAK MENTALIZE SIMULATE REINFORCE STEER 550M years deep FULL STACK VS TODAY'S LLM just the top SPEAK 4 layers missing ! TOP ONLY

Scale alone won't close that gap.
What's missing isn't size — it's stack.

— The Margin Notes Inbox

Got a thought after reading?
Slide it in here.

We read every message. No algorithm, no auto-reply — just Sophie and the LOOMUS team, with coffee, sometime this week.

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More from LOOMUS Book Picks

Curated by humans · No algorithm
No. 01
A Brief History of Intelligence
Max Bennett
Five evolutionary breakthroughs from worm to poet — and why LLMs only got the last one.
— You're here
No. 02
A Thousand Brains
Jeff Hawkins
A new theory of intelligence from the cortex up.
Read on LOOMUS →
No. 03
The Coming Wave
Mustafa Suleyman
Technology, power, and the great dilemma of our century.
Read on LOOMUS →
No. 04
Models of the Mind
Grace Lindsay
How maths shaped what we know about the brain.
Read on LOOMUS →
No. 05
The Story of Art
E. H. Gombrich
A first-principles tour of why humans make pictures.
Read on LOOMUS →
No. 06
Life 3.0
Max Tegmark
Three levels of life. We're about to invent the third — and choose between twelve futures.
Read on LOOMUS →
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