LOOMUS Book Picks Grounded in First-Principles Thinking

A Thousand Brains

By Jeff Hawkins

A Thousand Brains

Your skull holds one mind. Your cortex holds thousands — each one building its own world.

"
— The Big Idea
Intelligence isn't one model.
It's thousands voting.

A reading of A Thousand Brains
by Jeff Hawkins

— The Architecture

A mind is a grid.

↑ what you perceive ~150,000 cortical columns. Each one a learner.

Knowledge doesn't live in one place.
It lives in many — and they vote.

Reference frames

— a map for everything you know

— the model your column built IDEA

Every object you know — and every idea you hold — has a map in your head. To think is to move along it.

— Why founders should read this

Today's AI predicts.
A brain navigates.

LLMs guess the next token. The cortex moves through a map it built from a body. Different geometry, different ceiling — and the bet that more parameters closes that gap mistakes the engine for the architecture.

— The comparison

Where real intelligence lives.

TODAY'S AI next-token prediction CORTEX sensorimotor navigation VS TOKENS LLM ONE BIG NET TOKENS one model, no body ! ENGINE ONLY FROM A BODY thousands of models, all moving FULL ARCHITECTURE

One model, no body.
Vs. thousands of models, all moving.

— 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.

Got it. Thank you.

Your note is in the inbox.
We'll write back when the kettle's on.

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.
Read on LOOMUS →
No. 02
A Thousand Brains
Jeff Hawkins
150,000 cortical columns. Each one a learner. All voting at once.
— You're here
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.
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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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