LOOMUS Book Picks Grounded in First-Principles Thinking

Models of the Mind

By Grace Lindsay

Models of the Mind

Math you didn't write, doing what your brain already does.

H
"
— The Big Idea
The brain cannot be understood
through words alone.

A reading of Models of the Mind
by Grace Lindsay

— The Architecture

Five imports. One brain.

i. NEURON the spike, the circuit ii. RECEPTIVE FIELDS what one neuron sees H iii. INFO THEORY the brain as a channel iv. DYNAMICS populations, attractors v. BAYES perception as inference — five imported maths, one brain still in fog

Every era reads the brain
in its newest math.

Hopfield's basin

— memory as a marble rolling downhill

FACE LILY SONG ? PARTIAL HINT — the marble settles into the nearest valley

Physics-of-spin-glasses, accidentally inventing recall. Drop the brain into a noisy hint — it rolls into the nearest memory it knows.

— Why founders should read this

The math you import
is the brain you can see.

Perceptrons. Hopfield nets. Boltzmann machines. Bayesian brains. Transformers. Each one revealed a face; none was wrong. Bet on the capability layer, not the paradigm — the paradigm rotates roughly every fifteen years.

— The graveyard

Transformers are the latest, not the last.

THE PARADIGMS PERCEPTRON 1958 HOPFIELD 1982 BAYESIAN 1995 TRANSFORMERS 2017 → ↑ you are here ? ~2035? PROMINENCE each one revealed a face, then made room for the next

Every era's final answer
was the next era's opening move.

— 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
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No. 02
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No. 03
The Coming Wave
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Catastrophe, dystopia, or the narrow path. Pick one — and build it.
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No. 04
Models of the Mind
Grace Lindsay
Every era reads the brain in its newest math. Transformers are the latest, not the last.
— You're here
No. 05
The Story of Art
E. H. Gombrich
A first-principles tour of why humans make pictures.
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No. 06
Life 3.0
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Three levels of life. We're about to invent the third — and choose between twelve futures.
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