Index of terms

Where each term of the Study Guide is introduced

The 450 terms that the essays with study pages introduce. Each links to the section that introduces it. Where a term is the essays’ own, or is used in a stipulated sense, a gloss follows.

Back to the Study Guide · Concept graph

0–9 · A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · Z

0–9

2-simplicial attention: Dispersed Minds, Simulated Selves.

A

abnormality with a price: a weight w on each abnormality, which turns the selection of minimal models into a distribution over models and plays the part of an inverse temperature. Presumed Normal. Used in Before the Search Settles.
acquaintance: the actual regulatory involvement with representational vehicles, which requires the vehicle to exist. Can Two Minds Share One Experience. Used in Presence and Actuality, What Phenomenal Intuition Gets Right.
adaptive logic: a lower limit logic, a set of abnormalities presumed false, and a strategy for reading the premises as normally as possible. Presumed Normal. Used in An Ontology That Pays for Itself, Before the Search Settles.
advantage-weighted regression: How Does a Policy Improve?.
aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty: How Does a Policy Improve?.
algorithm C: the 2005 thesis’s procedure that constructs a term from a sequence of choices alongside type inference, returning a term and a substitution. What Should a Program Inherit?.
amortization: How Does a Policy Improve?. Used in Before the Search Settles.
amortization argument for weights: Where Experience Goes. Used in How LLMs Could Place Explicit Memories.
amortization as learning and as efficiency: raising the ceiling attainable at fixed data, against cutting the compute needed to reach a ceiling already attainable. The Given and the Found.
amortizing search versus amortizing discovery: speeding up search under a correctness condition that is given, against finding the condition. The Given and the Found. Used in A Parser Without a Grammar, Before the Search Settles.
amplitude and sign of a learning signal: the target’s confidence sets the size of the update; whether the target is grounded in truth sets its direction. The Given and the Found. Used in Before the Search Settles.
anti-unification: What Must Be True?. Used in What Should a Program Inherit?.
appraisal variables: Cognitive Architectures.
argumentation framework and extension: Presumed Normal.
Aristotle’s first and second law: in Heller’s reconstruction: a free body stays at absolute rest, and force is proportional to velocity. The Standard of Motion. Used in The Demon Is a Learner.
assimilation and accommodation: Building Minds.
attention as approximate unbinding: The Algebraic Mind Meets the Neural World. Used in Merge and Selection.
Attention Residuals: Every Layer a Store.
attunement: Carlsmith’s term for meaning-laden receptivity to the world. Poetry as a Mode of Thinking.
availability through character: an occurrence is selected for attention through what distinguishes it, as in a content-addressable memory, without a separate address. What Phenomenal Intuition Gets Right. Used in Experience, Selfhood, and the Organization of a Mind.

B

bandit and exploration: The Bookmaker Is a Learner. Used in An Ontology That Pays for Itself, Before the Search Settles.
Bargmann algebra: The Standard of Motion: The Mathematics.
baseline and advantage: How Can a Reward Train a Neural Network?. Used in How Does a Policy Improve?.
belief state: in the NextLat paper’s sense: a hidden state sufficient for predicting the future sequence. Which World Model?.
Bellman expectation equation: How Can a Reward Train a Neural Network?.
Bellman optimality equations: How Can a Reward Train a Neural Network?.
best-parse code: coding a sentence by its single best parse and then the words given the parse, at a cost of -\log P(t^*\mid x) bits above the best the grammar allows. An Ontology That Pays for Itself.
binding problem of stacked attention: Merge and Selection.
binding regulation: regulation that holds contents together in one field of co-present items; a candidate for what the experiential mode adds to minded regulation. Experience, Selfhood, and the Organization of a Mind. Used in Is the Monastery Minded?.
Boltzmann’s assumption: two balls about to collide are independent. The Demon Is a Learner. Used in Before the Search Settles, The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
Bombelli–Henson–Sorkin theorem: The Standard of Motion: The Mathematics.
bootstrapping: How Can a Reward Train a Neural Network?. Used in How Does a Policy Improve?.
bounded and persistent observer: Wolfram’s two conditions on an observer: computationally bounded, and persistent in time. Quantum Mechanics, Observers, and the Ruliad. Used in Presence and Actuality, The Standard of Motion.
bounded rationality: Cognitive Architectures.
branchlike hypersurface and foliation: Quantum Mechanics, Observers, and the Ruliad.
breadth and depth: Tao’s distinction between what AI tools and human researchers each excel at. The Operations of Discovery.
break-even for consolidation: How LLMs Could Place Explicit Memories.
broadcast that returns: broadcast that gathers information from which corrections come back to the vehicles; the outbound half of a regulatory loop. Experience, Selfhood, and the Organization of a Mind.

C

canonical form and connection form: The Standard of Motion: The Mathematics.
carrier of motion: after Wolfram’s “carriers of pure motion”: a persistent structure that moves without changing. The Standard of Motion.
Carroll algebra: The Standard of Motion: The Mathematics.
catastrophic interference: Cognitive Architectures. Used in Building Minds.
causal graph: Quantum Mechanics, Observers, and the Ruliad. Used in The Standard of Motion.
causal invariance: Quantum Mechanics, Observers, and the Ruliad. Used in The Standard of Motion.
center of epistemic gravity: the organization around which epistemic regulation coheres, named without installing an observer; adapted from Dennett’s center of narrative gravity. Can Two Minds Share One Experience.
central conjecture: psychological explanation gains valid traction on a system if and only if the five-component mechanism is running in it. Minds by Degrees. Used in Is the Monastery Minded?.
chunking: Cognitive Architectures. Used in Building Minds.
chunks and activation: Cognitive Architectures.
clean recall and picking the right answer: Every Layer a Store.
coarse graining: The Demon Is a Learner. Used in The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
cog view: general intelligence as coverage of a set of functional roles, each of which may be absent, underpowered or filled outside the network. Which AGI?. Used in What Persists When the Agents Change?.
cognition, broad and narrow: information processing of any kind, against conceptual processing only. What Is a Concept?.
cognition (narrow sense): the recipients of access: reasoning, speech and the selection of action. The Grain of the Hard Problem.
cognitive architecture: Cognitive Architectures.
cognitive cycle: Cognitive Architectures.
cognitive envelope: What Is a Concept?.
collapse of strata: positional and functional information superimposed in one residual stream. A Parser Without a Grammar.
combinatorial wall: over the n! finishing orders of a race, matching pair bets is NP-hard and exact LMSR pricing is #P-hard for both betting languages. The Bookmaker Is a Learner. Used in Before the Search Settles.
common ground: An Ontology That Pays for Itself.
Common Model of Cognition: Cognitive Architectures. Used in Building Minds.
compiled/interpreted gap: a skill followed as written instructions against a skill consolidated into fluent, implicit, composable competence. Which AGI?. Used in What Persists When the Agents Change?, Which World Model?.
Complementary Learning Systems: Cognitive Architectures. Used in Building Minds.
composition problem: how modular core knowledge systems come to exchange information. Building Minds.
conceptual atomism: What Is a Concept?.
condition and marking: Presumed Normal. Used in Before the Search Settles.
condition as an abductive answer: the condition of an adaptive derivation of G, read as a hypothesis of normality under which the premises entail G. Presumed Normal.
confluence: Quantum Mechanics, Observers, and the Ruliad.
conjugate representation of a cost function: The Bookmaker Is a Learner: The Mathematics. Used in The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
connection, geodesic and curvature: The Standard of Motion: The Mathematics.
consolidation as an M-step: Where Experience Goes.
constant-function market maker: The Bookmaker Is a Learner.
constant-test fragment: premises only test variables against the two constants, and conclusions contain no constructors. What Must Be True?.
constructive criterion: a proof that a constructible model of an organization is possible, preserving its constitutive relations and embedding, establishes that the organization is real. Presence and Actuality. Used in Experience, Selfhood, and the Organization of a Mind.
content, format, origin and dynamics: the four axes along which the essay sorts theories of concepts. What Is a Concept?.
content-sensitive regulation: organized activity that maintains, revises and coordinates representing states, responsive to differences relevant to their representational roles. Presence and Actuality. Used in Experience, Selfhood, and the Organization of a Mind, Is the Monastery Minded?.
content-tracking difference: relations among vehicles mirror relations among what they represent, in the causal structure of their organization; Shepard and Chipman’s second-order isomorphism. What Phenomenal Intuition Gets Right. Used in Experience, Selfhood, and the Organization of a Mind.
context extension: Filling the Stores.
Continuity and Compositionality Principles: The Algebraic Mind Meets the Neural World.
contraction and deformation: The Standard of Motion. Used in The Standard of Motion: The Mathematics.
control as inference: How Does a Policy Improve?.
convergence as a learned proxy: the system’s internal signal of having settled is a trained artifact, calibrated only as far as the data that shaped it. The Given and the Found.
core knowledge: What Is a Concept?. Used in Building Minds.
correctness condition: what makes an answer right: a fact about the task, prior to any network. The Given and the Found. Used in A Parser Without a Grammar.
cost of elicitation: the examples, additional training, search, tool calls and experimenter-supplied information needed to bring a capacity out. Which World Model?.
cost-function market and the LMSR: The Bookmaker Is a Learner. Used in Before the Search Settles, The Bookmaker Is a Learner: The Mathematics, The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics, The Demon Is a Learner.
coverage condition: Learning About What You Do Not Do.
criterion of belonging: an occurrence belongs to the subject whose regulation partly constitutes it. Experience, Selfhood, and the Organization of a Mind. Used in Is the Monastery Minded?.

D

Dab-formula and unreliable set: Presumed Normal.
deadly triad: Learning About What You Do Not Do.
deduction, generalization and abduction: Peirce’s three operations as the thesis uses them: work out consequences, find a common description of cases, supply the missing condition. What Must Be True?. Used in What Should a Program Inherit?.
defensive forecasting: Before the Search Settles.
deflationary and substantive answers about consolidation: consolidation as amortization, against consolidation as representation learning. How LLMs Could Place Explicit Memories.
delta-rule memory: Where Experience Goes. Used in Every Layer a Store, How LLMs Could Place Explicit Memories.
dense warm-up: Filling the Stores.
depth and breadth: iterations within one trajectory, which entrench its basin, and independent restarts, which cover more basins. The Given and the Found. Used in A Parser Without a Grammar.
detailed balance: The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
dichotomic maps: Cognitive Architectures.
Direct Preference Optimization: How Does a Policy Improve?.
discounted occupancy: How Does a Policy Improve?.
distilling a selector from the attention it replaces: Filling the Stores. Used in How LLMs Could Place Explicit Memories.
distraction issue: How LLMs Could Place Explicit Memories.
distributive IS-A: IS-A says only what holds of every member, so a fact about a kind needs a singular term for the kind. An Ontology That Pays for Itself.
dreaming phase: a consolidation pass in which the same model re-reads, merges and prunes its memory files after activity. Which AGI?.

E

efference copy: Where Does Seeing Become Thinking?.
efficacy-matching: two profiles attain comparable general capability without being behaviorally equivalent. Which AGI?.
e-graph: What Should a Program Inherit?.
emergent invariant speed: the cap on the carriers of motion, which observers built from them would measure in place of the substrate’s own limit. The Standard of Motion.
entropy production: The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
epistemic action: Kirsh and Maglio’s term for a move that makes information easier to obtain or compute, as against one that directly advances the objective. Where Does Seeing Become Thinking?.
epistemic regulation: regulation that addresses content through its vehicles, responsive to what they carry and how they function in the cognitive economy. Can Two Minds Share One Experience.
equilibration: Building Minds.
equilibrium internalization: The Given and the Found.
esse: Aquinas’s act of being, borrowed by Wójcik for the actuality a theory of consciousness must account for. Presence and Actuality.
E-step and M-step of policy improvement: How Does a Policy Improve?. Used in Where Experience Goes.
evaluative mentality: the five conditions plus valenced states that function as evaluations within the economy. Minds by Degrees.
evidential weight: the pressure of a real unsolved problem, brought by someone for whom it is unresolved. The Operations of Discovery.
executive function: Building Minds.
experiential occurrence: a representational vehicle sustained in a particular mode of content-sensitive regulation; the proposal identifies an experience with it. Can Two Minds Share One Experience. Used in Presence and Actuality, What Phenomenal Intuition Gets Right.
explicit memory: a fact the weights do not contain, found where it was written down. How LLMs Could Place Explicit Memories.
exponential tilt: How Does a Policy Improve?. Used in The Bookmaker Is a Learner, The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics, The Demon Is a Learner, Who Teaches the Weights?.
expressive power and learnability: The Algebraic Mind Meets the Neural World.
externalist attribution: attributing an experience to a source while making its phenomenal status depend on downstream uptake that cannot affect the source. Experience, Selfhood, and the Organization of a Mind.

F

fake thinking: Carlsmith’s term for the form of cognition without its function. Poetry as a Mode of Thinking.
fast mapping: Building Minds.
field of its own: a phenomenal field binding contents held in different members into one co-present whole, beyond the members’ fields. Is the Monastery Minded?.
final derivability: Presumed Normal.
fine-grained functionalism: a label the position could bear if function means the actual causal organization at the relevant grain; the author avoids it. What Phenomenal Intuition Gets Right.
five capacities of a world model: representing structure, tracking the current situation, predicting consequences, using a model, and maintaining a model; they vary independently. Which World Model?. Used in What Persists When the Agents Change?.
five conditions of mentality: organizational unity, structured vehicles, accuracy-responsive dynamics, simulation with internal function, multi-level content. Minds by Degrees. Used in Can Two Minds Share One Experience, Experience, Selfhood, and the Organization of a Mind, Is the Monastery Minded?, The Bookmaker Is a Learner, What Phenomenal Intuition Gets Right.
five meanings of depth: Every Layer a Store.
five remedies for stale keys: How LLMs Could Place Explicit Memories.
five ways to keep the past of a context: full history, a rolling window, selected entries, compressed entries, a recurrent state. Every Layer a Store.
flow conservation: How Does a Policy Improve?.
fluctuation theorem and Jarzynski equality: The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
fluctuation–dissipation relation: The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
follow the regularized leader: The Bookmaker Is a Learner. Used in The Bookmaker Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
forced adjacency: placing together things that analytic thinking must keep separate. Poetry as a Mode of Thinking. Used in The Operations of Discovery.
forgetting within a task: Who Teaches the Weights?. Used in Before the Search Settles, Learning About What You Do Not Do, The Demon Is a Learner, Where Experience Goes.
formalisms as coordinates: each grammatical tradition fixes one axis of design, and the architecture’s position on each axis is read off; none is a candidate for being the Transformer’s grammar. A Parser Without a Grammar.
format turn: asking how concepts represent, in what vehicle, before settling what they represent. What Is a Concept?. Used in Where Does Seeing Become Thinking?.
for-me-ness, me-ness and mineness: Guillot’s distinctions: an experience’s presence to its subject, awareness of oneself, and awareness of an experience as one’s own. Experience, Selfhood, and the Organization of a Mind.
four questions for reading an algorithm: How Does a Policy Improve?.
four questions of a store: what writes the store, when, how much it holds before its entries interfere, and what reading it costs. Every Layer a Store.
frame bundle and teleparallelism: The Standard of Motion. Used in The Standard of Motion: The Mathematics.
free energy: The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
functional characterization of concepts: concepts are whatever plays the concept role: structures in long-term memory that are activated, compose into thoughts, and guide inference and action. What Is a Concept?. Used in Where Does Seeing Become Thinking?.
functional elegance: Cognitive Architectures.

G

Gaifman inductivity: Before the Search Settles.
gap test: neighboring speeds must be realized by nearly the same pattern, at the scale an observer resolves. The Standard of Motion: The Mathematics.
gaps and gluts: Before the Search Settles.
Gated DeltaNet and Kimi Delta Attention: Every Layer a Store.
gating: Dispersed Minds, Simulated Selves.
genealogical identity: a module stays a descendant of the same module while its implementation changes; duplication creates a new identity. What Should a Program Inherit?.
general value function: Learning About What You Do Not Do. Used in Where Experience Goes.
generalized advantage estimation: How Can a Reward Train a Neural Network?.
generalized policy improvement: Learning About What You Do Not Do.
generations of neurocompositional computing: The Algebraic Mind Meets the Neural World. Used in Merge and Selection.
generative constraint: a formal restriction, such as sound-patterning, that makes otherwise unlikely associations discoverable. Poetry as a Mode of Thinking.
generator of a flow: The Standard of Motion: The Mathematics.
Gibbs state: The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
global broadcast: Cognitive Architectures. Used in Dispersed Minds, Simulated Selves.
Global Workspace markers: Dispersed Minds, Simulated Selves.
goal compass: Beckmann, Queloz and Freitas’s name for a directional representation, separate from the map, that steers travel toward a distant goal. Which World Model?.
GQ(λ): Learning About What You Do Not Do.
graded mentality: degrees along several partially independent dimensions, so that the useful answer is a profile. Minds by Degrees.
gradient blend: a single continuous state superposing partial structures, not a probability distribution over parses. Merge and Selection. Used in A Parser Without a Grammar.
grain at which the carrier is corrected: fine enough to individuate the regulated vehicles, coarse enough to abstract from where their components sit. Experience, Selfhood, and the Organization of a Mind.
grain dependency: experiential character depends on organization at a particular grain, which no concept the subject deploys can express. The Grain of the Hard Problem.
grain-plural integration: integration without IIT’s exclusion postulate: a system can be weakly integrated at one grain and strongly at another, and both facts are real. Minds by Degrees. Used in Is the Monastery Minded?.
grammar as process: A Parser Without a Grammar.
grounded and ungrounded targets: The Given and the Found.
GRPO: How Can a Reward Train a Neural Network?. Used in Filling the Stores, Who Teaches the Weights?.

H

Hamiltonian vector field: The Standard of Motion: The Mathematics. Used in The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
Harmony and scheduled quantization: Merge and Selection. Used in A Parser Without a Grammar.
Hedge as a bookmaker: The Bookmaker Is a Learner. Used in Before the Search Settles, The Bookmaker Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
here-and-there and equilibrium model: Presumed Normal.
hippocampal indexing: How LLMs Could Place Explicit Memories.
hosting and judging perspectives: representing two traditions in shared machinery against assessing their claims well. What Persists When the Agents Change?.
H-theorem for a Markov chain: The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
hypergraph rewriting: Quantum Mechanics, Observers, and the Ruliad. Used in The Standard of Motion.

I

iconic and discursive formats: What Is a Concept?. Used in Where Does Seeing Become Thinking?.
iconic representation: Block’s sense, stated more exactly than in the concept survey: analog tracking and mirroring, in which degrees of difference in what is represented correspond to degrees of difference in the representation. Where Does Seeing Become Thinking?.
identity proposal: an experience is a representational vehicle in its constitutive organization, not a further event it supports and not its abstract content. What Phenomenal Intuition Gets Right.
image: An Ontology That Pays for Itself.
implicit value of a context: Who Teaches the Weights?.
importance ratio: Learning About What You Do Not Do. Used in Filling the Stores, How LLMs Could Place Explicit Memories.
improvement separated from fitting: How Does a Policy Improve?.
independent check: a check that does not depend on the beliefs being trained, whether it is internal or external. Before the Search Settles.
information bottleneck: The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
interference between stored keys: Every Layer a Store.
internal and external dynamics: Presumed Normal.
internality: simulation outputs function as inputs to the system’s own further processing, not only for outside consumers. Minds by Degrees. Used in Is the Monastery Minded?.
intrinsic character (structural sense): character fixed by structure within the occurrence’s boundary, constitutive regulation included; not a categorical nature beneath structure. What Phenomenal Intuition Gets Right.

J

jaggedness: Karpathy’s word for a model that is brilliant and childish at once. The Operations of Discovery.
JEPA: Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture: predict representations of targets and not the targets themselves. Which World Model?. Used in The Demon Is a Learner.
joint constraint abduction: find one condition A with D_i\land A\models C_i for every case i, each D_i\land A consistent. What Must Be True?. Used in Presumed Normal.
jumping machines: Tao’s image for tools that solve a problem in one leap or fail, with no partial progress. The Operations of Discovery.

K

kinematical algebra: the Lie algebra of the rotations, translations and boosts that preserve a first law. The Standard of Motion. Used in The Standard of Motion: The Mathematics.
knowledge by construction: a reasoner derives an organization from a description and realizes it in its own regulated vehicles. The Grain of the Hard Problem.
Kolmogorov complexity: The Demon Is a Learner. Used in The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics.

L

the ladder: six dimensions along which a system was successively required to be unrestricted: domain, modality, horizon, memory, autonomy, ends. Which AGI?.
ladder of stores: Where Experience Goes. Used in How LLMs Could Place Explicit Memories.
λ-return and eligibility trace: How Can a Reward Train a Neural Network?. Used in How Does a Policy Improve?, Learning About What You Do Not Do.
Landauer’s principle: The Demon Is a Learner. Used in The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
landscape and search: the learned dynamics whose attractors are a trained surrogate for the condition, and the trajectory followed through it at inference. The Given and the Found.
Language of Thought: What Is a Concept?. Used in Where Does Seeing Become Thinking?.
Latent Sparse Attention: How LLMs Could Place Explicit Memories.
learned update rule: Where Experience Goes.
level and trajectory claims: “this system falls short” reports a level of performance; “this approach is a dead end” is a claim about a trend, and needs a metric, its movement across systems, and an expectation. Which World Model?.
Levin search: The Demon Is a Learner.
lexicon-grammar continuum as feature continuum: A Parser Without a Grammar.
library learning: finding definitions that let a collection of programs be rewritten more economically, paying for the definitions as well as their uses. What Should a Program Inherit?. Used in An Ontology That Pays for Itself.
Lie algebra and Lie bracket: The Standard of Motion: The Mathematics.
limit cycle as terminal behavior: a single trajectory that visits the valid answers in turn and does not settle; the essay’s own suggestion. The Given and the Found. Used in A Parser Without a Grammar.
linear schema: a common pattern in which each schema variable occurs only once, so that every hole can vary independently. What Should a Program Inherit?.
Liouville’s theorem: Hamiltonian flow preserves phase-space volume, so closed evolution loses no information. The Standard of Motion. Used in The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics, The Demon Is a Learner, The Standard of Motion: The Mathematics.
liquidity parameter: the b of the LMSR, which bounds the subsidy at b\log n and acts as an inverse learning rate. The Bookmaker Is a Learner. Used in Before the Search Settles, The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics, The Demon Is a Learner.
local, global and hybrid variants: corrections computed within a region, from information only broadcast supplies, or locally for character and globally for unity. Experience, Selfhood, and the Organization of a Mind. Used in Is the Monastery Minded?.
local memory: explicit, role-specific state that gives a shared conversation a different retained interpretation for each participant. What Persists When the Agents Change?.
logical induction criterion: Before the Search Settles.
logical omniscience: Before the Search Settles.
logical prior: Demski’s distribution over theories: draw sentences at random and keep each one that does not contradict those already kept. Before the Search Settles.
log-Sobolev inequality: The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics.

M

Machery’s heterogeneity thesis: What Is a Concept?. Used in Cognitive Architectures.
macrostate and microstate: The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
macrostate as predictor: a state that predicts its own future; what a predictor needs to keep. The Demon Is a Learner. Used in Before the Search Settles.
Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections: Every Layer a Store. Used in Filling the Stores.
manufactured target: a training target produced by a confident intermediate computation, such as a converged loop state or a search’s visit counts. The Given and the Found.
marginal attribution: Building Minds.
marginal polytope: The Bookmaker Is a Learner.
market scoring rule: The Bookmaker Is a Learner. Used in The Bookmaker Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
Markov state: How Can a Reward Train a Neural Network?.
mass as a central extension: The Standard of Motion. Used in The Standard of Motion: The Mathematics.
mass-covering and mode-seeking KL: How Does a Policy Improve?. Used in Where Experience Goes, Who Teaches the Weights?.
matching as pricing at zero temperature: as b\to0 the LMSR cost function tends to the house’s worst-case liability, which is what matching computes. The Bookmaker Is a Learner. Used in Presumed Normal.
maximal pole: the position that the ladder has no natural break between intelligence and agency. Which AGI?.
M-capacity: Building Minds.
mean field and the cavity method: The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
meaning without the mouth: an LLM’s access to what a poem says without its sound, rhythm and breath as vehicle. Poetry as a Mode of Thinking.
measurement as Knuth-Bendix completion: Quantum Mechanics, Observers, and the Ruliad.
Memorilla: How LLMs Could Place Explicit Memories.
Merge conjecture: the authors’ proposal that Merge over working-memory pointers is the domain-general operation behind chunking and linguistic syntax. Cognitive Architectures. Used in Building Minds, Dispersed Minds, Simulated Selves.
Merge-without-Move: combination that only adds, with no operation that relocates or deletes. A Parser Without a Grammar.
meta-epistemic grounding: perceptual contact that supports the truth-preserving character of processing without contributing to the content processed. What Is a Concept?. Used in Where Does Seeing Become Thinking?.
metastable overlap: sharing sustained over the phenomenal now by centers whose own dynamics can pull them apart. Can Two Minds Share One Experience.
minds as the kind of psychology: the natural kind that a selective, structural realism about psychology’s cumulative core commits us to. Minds by Degrees.
mirror descent: The Bookmaker Is a Learner. Used in The Demon Is a Learner.
missing selection relation and bag problem: the two manifestations of the selector’s exclusion: no record of which position governed, and no record of which daughter paired with which. Merge and Selection.
mixture of experts: Every Layer a Store. Used in Filling the Stores.
model identity and trajectory identity: copies of one model given one prompt still make different attempts, and each attempt becomes part of its own later context. What Persists When the Agents Change?.
model-predictive control: How Does a Policy Improve?.
momentum as the price of a constraint: The Standard of Motion.
monotone merge: the residual stream only adds, so it builds structure as a constraint grammar joins descriptions, not as a rewrite grammar replaces symbols. Merge and Selection. Used in A Parser Without a Grammar.
Morse–Smale flow: The Standard of Motion: The Mathematics.
motley mix: Dispersed Minds, Simulated Selves.
moving teacher and fixed anchor: Who Teaches the Weights?. Used in Before the Search Settles.
multicalibration: Before the Search Settles.
multiway invariance: Quantum Mechanics, Observers, and the Ruliad.
multiway system: Quantum Mechanics, Observers, and the Ruliad.
Muon: Filling the Stores.

N

nativist kernel: the domain-general learning biases that even a constructivist learner must have built in. Building Minds.
Neptune-proof: said of a result that the next data point will not destroy, as Neptune destroyed Bode’s law. The Operations of Discovery.
Newton–Cartan space-time: The Standard of Motion: The Mathematics.
No Expected Net Update: Before the Search Settles.
nogood: Presumed Normal.
non-deflationary mentality: real, thickly individuated structures in the system have the mental properties attributed to it; the attribution is not an interpretive gloss. Minds by Degrees.
non-dogmatism: Before the Search Settles.
nonequilibrium free energy: The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics.

O

on-policy and off-policy: How Can a Reward Train a Neural Network?. Used in Filling the Stores, How Does a Policy Improve?, Learning About What You Do Not Do, Who Teaches the Weights?.
on-policy distillation of specialists: Filling the Stores.
ontology ladder: actual computation, minded understanding, phenomenal occurrence: three demands, each short of the next. Can Two Minds Share One Experience.
open process and open weights: Filling the Stores.
operational individuation: the middle step of Thomas Epistemes’s reconstruction: an objectively operative organization whose relations matter to physical interactions. Presence and Actuality.
operations of discovery: the four operations of poetic thinking, claimed to be those of discovery in general. The Operations of Discovery.
operator/operand split: abstractions live in the weights, which act on the activations and carry none; activation rides only token positions. A Parser Without a Grammar.
optimal granularity: the step size at which the pull toward fewer, bigger steps balances the difficulty of learning a bigger step. The Given and the Found.
organ of perception: Hirshfield’s thesis that a poem discovers what is imperceptible without it. Poetry as a Mode of Thinking. Used in The Operations of Discovery.
outcome indistinguishability: Before the Search Settles.
outer loop: autoregressive generation, in which each generated token becomes input to the next forward pass. Dispersed Minds, Simulated Selves.
outer-product store: Every Layer a Store.
overdamped limit: The Demon Is a Learner. Used in The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
overflow beyond the discriminative profile: experiential character that no matching relation available to the subject fixes. The Grain of the Hard Problem.
override as additive cancellation: A Parser Without a Grammar.

P

paradox resistance: Before the Search Settles.
parser without a grammar: structure without a discrete, stored, declarative grammar object. A Parser Without a Grammar.
passive and active invariance: the description does not depend on the observer’s frame; against it, every body has a moving twin at each speed. The Standard of Motion.
per-answer weighting: Learning About What You Do Not Do.
perceptual pluralism: What Is a Concept?. Used in Where Does Seeing Become Thinking?.
persistent carrier: something individuated by its causal structure whose later states receive the corrections computed from assessing its earlier ones. Experience, Selfhood, and the Organization of a Mind. Used in Is the Monastery Minded?.
persistent inquiry with replaceable interpreters: Wójcik’s proposal: explicit records carry an inquiry’s history so that it is recoverable across interpreters. What Persists When the Agents Change?.
perspectival subjectivity: revised sense: the unity and centering of a binding economy, with no represented viewer and no self-model. Experience, Selfhood, and the Organization of a Mind.
phenomenal-adjacent concepts: concepts a language model could ascribe to itself more accurately than the borrowed ‘conscious’ and ‘experiencing’. Dispersed Minds, Simulated Selves.
physical entropy: Zurek’s sum of the missing information and the algorithmic information content of the record. The Demon Is a Learner.
physics as a coarse-graining: in the Ruliad framework, bounded observers aggregate distinctions, and physical objects, states and relations emerge through that aggregation. Presence and Actuality.
physics as a science and physicalism as a metaphysics: one articulation of reality’s structure at one grain, against the claim that experience is part of that structure. The Grain of the Hard Problem.
placeholder symbols: Building Minds.
plateau before the facts: the stretch of training in which a model knows the kind of answer a template wants and not which answer. Filling the Stores.
pointer content and descriptive content: Brown’s terms: a HOROR’s descriptive content determines what is experienced, and its pointer content targets particular states without appearing in experience. Experience, Selfhood, and the Organization of a Mind.
Poisson bracket and Hamiltonian: The Standard of Motion. Used in The Standard of Motion: The Mathematics.
policy: How Can a Reward Train a Neural Network?.
policy iteration: How Can a Reward Train a Neural Network?. Used in How Does a Policy Improve?.
policy-improvement argument: How Does a Policy Improve?.
Polyak–Łojasiewicz condition: The Demon Is a Learner. Used in The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
possessing versus using a representation: a representation is a model when its organization supports inferences about the represented system, and explanatory when the agent uses those inferences; competence shows neither where the structure sits nor how it is used. Which World Model?. Used in What Persists When the Agents Change?, Where Does Seeing Become Thinking?.
precision through compression: a density that would become less precise if unpacked. Poetry as a Mode of Thinking. Used in The Operations of Discovery.
precondition and postcondition: What Must Be True?.
presence finer than recognition: the exact character of an experience is undergone at a grain finer than concepts, memory and report can carry. What Phenomenal Intuition Gets Right. Used in Experience, Selfhood, and the Organization of a Mind.
presentation and uptake: features of a presentation make a difference to what it enables the system to discriminate and do; the uptake is a further characterization of what is presented. What Phenomenal Intuition Gets Right.
presumption of independence: Before the Search Settles.
pretraining, mid-training, SFT, RL, distillation and drafter training: Filling the Stores.
primary persona: the assistant character a commercial model is trained to be; on the essay’s account there is no further self beneath it. Dispersed Minds, Simulated Selves.
principal bundle and parallelizable manifold: The Standard of Motion: The Mathematics.
process, deployment and lineage: the three referents of “AGI”: a network in its inference loop, the agent built around it, and the succession of such agents that a lab, its users and its retraining pipeline constitute. Which AGI?. Used in What Must Be True?, What Persists When the Agents Change?, Where Does Seeing Become Thinking?, Which World Model?.
profile: an assignment of fillers to the functional roles. Which AGI?. Used in What Persists When the Agents Change?.
projected Bellman error and gradient TD: Learning About What You Do Not Do.
proper scoring rule: The Bookmaker Is a Learner. Used in The Bookmaker Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
prototype and exemplar theories: What Is a Concept?. Used in Cognitive Architectures, Where Does Seeing Become Thinking?.
provenance graph: a record of which versions, documents and evaluation results were supplied to an attempt and which edits it produced. What Should a Program Inherit?.
provenance judgment: \mathrm{Prov}(T,P), source P asserts T: the only form of judgment, never itself a term. An Ontology That Pays for Itself. Used in Before the Search Settles.
proxytypes: What Is a Concept?. Used in Cognitive Architectures.

Q

query as valence specification: the query says what a position seeks, as a head’s valence list says what it must combine with. Merge and Selection. Used in A Parser Without a Grammar.
Quinean bootstrapping: What Is a Concept?. Used in Building Minds.

R

rational analysis: Cognitive Architectures.
reach, latency and bandwidth: three properties of a channel between members: whether it lands on vehicles still under regulation, whether its loops close while they last, whether it carries the distinctions their regulation respects. Is the Monastery Minded?.
reality measure: how occurrences should be counted or weighted; left unresolved. Presence and Actuality.
reason, price and defeater: a reason is a latent structure with independence presumed beyond it; a price is the marginal probability it implies for one sentence; a defeater is structure found outside it. Before the Search Settles.
rebutting and undercutting defeaters: Presumed Normal.
recoverability and learned operation: information that could in principle answer a question, against a procedure that makes it available at a particular cost and reliability. Where Does Seeing Become Thinking?.
reflexive closure: the economy targets its own vehicles with pointers, the targeting is a real pattern of the economy, and it is put to regulatory use. Minds by Degrees. Used in Experience, Selfhood, and the Organization of a Mind.
register collision: unlike vocabularies meeting in a small textual space. Poetry as a Mode of Thinking. Used in The Operations of Discovery.
registers and treelets: The Algebraic Mind Meets the Neural World.
regret and no-regret learning: The Bookmaker Is a Learner. Used in Before the Search Settles.
REINFORCE: How Can a Reward Train a Neural Network?. Used in How Does a Policy Improve?.
relational complexity: Building Minds. Used in Dispersed Minds, Simulated Selves.
the relay: the essay’s name for Hanson’s market scoring rule: a trader is paid the score of their forecast minus the score of the forecast they replaced. The Bookmaker Is a Learner.
relevant and irrelevant memory: The Demon Is a Learner.
Reliability and Minimal Abnormality: Presumed Normal.
renewable surprise: Hirshfield’s term for discovery that cannot be cached and must be re-enacted at each reading. Poetry as a Mode of Thinking.
reparameterization trick: How Does a Policy Improve?.
reporters and relays: members who report their own contents, against members who relay the whole’s fine-grained signals. Is the Monastery Minded?.
reporting policy: the probability that a source mentions a fact, given the fact, the source and the audience it writes for. An Ontology That Pays for Itself.
representational conjecture: that training insulated within a trajectory reaches representational spaces which shared training and contextual adaptation do not. What Persists When the Agents Change?.
residual integration: the organization a level loses when its parts are severed along the boundaries that lose least. Is the Monastery Minded?. Used in The Bookmaker Is a Learner.
residual stream as blackboard: Dispersed Minds, Simulated Selves.
restricted ELBO: How Does a Policy Improve?.
return and discount factor: How Can a Reward Train a Neural Network?.
return-conditioned policy: How Does a Policy Improve?.
revisable abstraction: keeping access to the source and revising an abstraction when the task changes. Where Does Seeing Become Thinking?.
reward hacking: Filling the Stores.
rigid Lie algebra: one whose every small deformation is a change of basis: its second cohomology with coefficients in itself vanishes. The Standard of Motion: The Mathematics.
role tuple: \langle A,R,S,B\rangle\equiv\langle B,S,R,A\rangle: A plays role R toward B, which plays role S. An Ontology That Pays for Itself.
role-process: a process running in a member that uses institutional representations and is shaped by institutional corrections, so that it belongs to two economies at once. Is the Monastery Minded?.
rollout and policy: Filling the Stores.
route to determination: what a proposed distinction needs: an account of what would make it obtain, distinguish its instances, or establish its possibility. Presence and Actuality.
Ruliad and rulial space: Quantum Mechanics, Observers, and the Ruliad. Used in Presence and Actuality.

S

saturation: the mode of a vehicle whose configuration is continuously held against its target by sustained regulatory coupling over the specious present. Minds by Degrees. Used in Presence and Actuality.
schema mechanism: Building Minds.
score: The Demon Is a Learner. Used in The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
search as regularized policy improvement: How Does a Policy Improve?.
secondhand inheritance: a learner trained on text receives the structure that development put into the text, without undergoing the development. Building Minds.
seed and stalk: An Ontology That Pays for Itself.
selector: a second, cheaper store in front of the cache; it scores keys and the main attention reads only the winners. Every Layer a Store. Used in Filling the Stores, How LLMs Could Place Explicit Memories.
the selector is not in the value space: the query drives each combination and is never among the vectors the merge sums. Merge and Selection. Used in A Parser Without a Grammar.
Self and idealized sources: the system as the last judge, and contexts such as a novel’s canon treated as sources; only these are closed under inference. An Ontology That Pays for Itself. Used in Before the Search Settles.
self-distillation on a run’s own rollouts: SFT on rollouts collected from an RL run, started from a mid-trained checkpoint, after which RL resumes. Filling the Stores.
self-distillation with privileged context: Who Teaches the Weights?. Used in Before the Search Settles, How LLMs Could Place Explicit Memories, Where Experience Goes.
self-sustainment: the lineage produces the data, research and capital for its own next generation. Which AGI?.
semantic primes: What Is a Concept?.
semidecision procedure: What Must Be True?. Used in Presumed Normal.
sensory-based account of conscious thought: Cognitive Architectures.
sequential convex pari-mutuel mechanism: The Bookmaker Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
serial bottleneck: Cognitive Architectures. Used in Building Minds, Dispersed Minds, Simulated Selves.
set-max policy: Learning About What You Do Not Do.
shadow price: The Bookmaker Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
shared intentionality: Building Minds.
shared occurrence: one experiential occurrence jointly sustained by the compatible regulation of two distinct subjects. Can Two Minds Share One Experience. Used in Experience, Selfhood, and the Organization of a Mind, Is the Monastery Minded?, What Phenomenal Intuition Gets Right.
Sinkhorn iteration: Filling the Stores.
slip into simplicity: the unity of access to an occurrence is taken as evidence that what is accessed has no constitutive complexity. What Phenomenal Intuition Gets Right.
slop: in the deeper sense, output that is coherent and formally sophisticated but shaped by pressures that do not track truth. The Operations of Discovery.
Solomonoff’s prior: Before the Search Settles.
sound but incomplete deduction: The Given and the Found.
source, format and operations: where information comes from, how it is represented internally, and which operations are available over the representation; none determines the others. Where Does Seeing Become Thinking?.
spectrum of givenness: how much of the correctness condition is guaranteed by construction, and how much is approximated by a surrogate trustworthy only in distribution. The Given and the Found.
spurious attractor: a stable, low-residual state that decodes to the wrong answer. The Given and the Found.
stable algebra: Faddeev’s criterion: every small deformation of the structure is equivalent to it. The Standard of Motion. Used in The Standard of Motion: The Mathematics.
stable model and reduct: Presumed Normal.
stale keys: keys read by newer weights than the ones that wrote them. How LLMs Could Place Explicit Memories.
stale rollout: Filling the Stores. Used in How LLMs Could Place Explicit Memories.
Standard Model of the Mind: Cognitive Architectures.
standard of motion: Heller’s term: the motions a dynamics counts as free, against which a force shows as a deviation. The Standard of Motion. Used in The Standard of Motion: The Mathematics.
state value and action value: How Can a Reward Train a Neural Network?. Used in How Does a Policy Improve?.
store over depth: a memory written and read by the layers of one token’s pass. Every Layer a Store.
stores written in training and stores written while reading: the feed-forward layer holds what the model knows; the attention cache holds what the model has been told. Every Layer a Store. Used in Filling the Stores.
Stosszahlansatz: The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
structural stability: every small perturbation of the equations leaves the phase portrait topologically the same. The Standard of Motion. Used in The Demon Is a Learner, The Standard of Motion: The Mathematics.
subset betting and pair betting: The Bookmaker Is a Learner. Used in The Bookmaker Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
successor features: Learning About What You Do Not Do.
superposition: Dispersed Minds, Simulated Selves.
symbol manipulation (Marcus’s three hypotheses): The Algebraic Mind Meets the Neural World.
symbolic data and quantitative metadata: Cognitive Architectures.
synthetic item: Building Minds.
Systems A, B and M: Dupoux, LeCun and Malik’s division: learning from observation, learning through action, and the control of their interaction. Which World Model?.

T

table of adversaries: where the adversary sits, inside the believer or outside, against what holds it to account, settlement over time or checks on demand. Before the Search Settles.
target directs, sources supply, MLP assembles: the three-way split of what unification does in one structure-driven step. Merge and Selection.
teacher and support: Who Teaches the Weights?.
temperature as a Lagrange multiplier: How Does a Policy Improve?. Used in The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
temperature as an exchange rate: the energy that buys one nat of entropy. The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
temporal coherence: one observer’s sustained encounter with a problem over years, which accumulates orientation. The Operations of Discovery.
temporal-difference error: How Can a Reward Train a Neural Network?. Used in How Does a Policy Improve?, Learning About What You Do Not Do, Where Experience Goes.
tensor product representation: The Algebraic Mind Meets the Neural World. Used in Dispersed Minds, Simulated Selves, Merge and Selection.
theory-theory: What Is a Concept?.
thermodynamic length: The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
thinking in negative space: letting what is not said carry the content. Poetry as a Mode of Thinking. Used in The Operations of Discovery.
thought anchors: Dispersed Minds, Simulated Selves.
three achievements of an open-ended reasoner: generating admissible hypotheses, selecting and testing them under a budget, revising the framing. What Must Be True?.
three geometries of gradient flow: weights under constant drag, densities under the Wasserstein distance, and probabilities under the Fisher drag; in each, velocity follows force. The Demon Is a Learner.
three grains: cognition, experience and physics, from coarse to fine. The Grain of the Hard Problem. Used in Is the Monastery Minded?.
three jobs of a world model: How Does a Policy Improve?.
three levels of evidence: recovering a variable from internal states, showing by intervention that it affects the answer, and explaining the transformation the model performs. Where Does Seeing Become Thinking?.
three placements of a memory: by position, where it arrived; by content, what it resembles; into connections, what it taught. How LLMs Could Place Explicit Memories.
three subjectivities: structural perspectivality, cognitive subjectivity and agentic subjectivity, which Nagel’s formula bundles. Minds by Degrees. Used in Experience, Selfhood, and the Organization of a Mind.
three tiers of understanding: Dispersed Minds, Simulated Selves.
three-part code and realization channel: ontology, facts given the ontology, and text given the facts and a lexicon; the last part is the channel, which should know syntax, word choice and paraphrase and nothing about the world. An Ontology That Pays for Itself.
total correlation: The Demon Is a Learner: The Mathematics.
tracking, assessment and intervention: the three aspects of the coordinated regulation conjectured to constitute an experiential episode. Experience, Selfhood, and the Organization of a Mind. Used in Is the Monastery Minded?.
training independence: The Algebraic Mind Meets the Neural World.
trajectory and front: a single agent’s cumulative, path-dependent learning against what the lineage as a whole has absorbed. Which AGI?. Used in What Persists When the Agents Change?.
transactive memory: a shared repository of trajectories from which other agents retrieve, matched to their current state. What Persists When the Agents Change?.
transition model: the control sense of “world model”: a predictor of the next state from an estimated state and a candidate action. Which World Model?.
truth-tracking and truth-bearers: experiential regulation keeps vehicles tracking what drives them moment by moment; judgments persist long enough to be assessed and revised. Is the Monastery Minded?.
two conditions on a teacher: it must know more than the student, and its targets must be ones the student can absorb. Who Teaches the Weights?. Used in How LLMs Could Place Explicit Memories.
two-part code: An Ontology That Pays for Itself. Used in Before the Search Settles, The Demon Is a Learner.
two-way reading: an asserted class-level tuple claims that every A stands in the relation to some B and every B stands in it to some A. An Ontology That Pays for Itself.

U

un-bundling: the architecture runs as separate mechanisms the design choices that a formalism’s single combinatory operation fuses. A Parser Without a Grammar.
underdetermination of the landscape: supervision constrains the model only along the trajectories training visits and leaves the rest free. The Given and the Found.
universality conjecture: Quantum Mechanics, Observers, and the Ruliad.
universally quantified one-to-one mapping (UQOTOM): The Algebraic Mind Meets the Neural World.
usable information: Who Teaches the Weights?. Used in Before the Search Settles, The Demon Is a Learner.

V

Vector Policy Optimization: Who Teaches the Weights?. Used in Learning About What You Do Not Do, The Given and the Found.
vehicle and content of a concept: What Is a Concept?. Used in Building Minds, Dispersed Minds, Simulated Selves.
vehicle role without determinate content: an occurrence keeps its place in an economy organized around representing when no particular content can be attributed to it. Presence and Actuality. Used in Experience, Selfhood, and the Organization of a Mind, What Phenomenal Intuition Gets Right.
violation of expectation: Building Minds.

W

weak and strong unfolding: weak: the whole state is passed explicitly from step to step in its own format; strong: each stage represents in a space of its own, matching only input–output behavior. Is the Monastery Minded?.
wealth of traders as a second learner: across many questions a market reweights its traders through their accumulated money, multiplicatively for those who stake a fixed fraction of their wealth, as Hedge reweights experts. The Bookmaker Is a Learner. Used in Before the Search Settles.
words and rules: The Algebraic Mind Meets the Neural World.
working memory: Cognitive Architectures.
working-memory pointers: Cognitive Architectures. Used in Building Minds, Dispersed Minds, Simulated Selves.
worldliness: a subject and its experiences are constituted by the actual processes that sustain them, not by an abstract specification realized across worlds. Can Two Minds Share One Experience.

Z

zone of proximal development: Building Minds.