## What is the Mind If we take everything we've learned from modern A.I. since the transformation,¹ but throw away all the models, what have we learned? What was fundamentally different between the architectures before⁵ and after? And what have we learned as a species about neural computation, and the broader question of what constitutes "a mind" whether in organic systems or silicon? The main lessons, we would argue, can be summarized as follows: 1. The brain works by exploiting a pun between statistics and high dimensional linear algebra. 2. In a space of high enough dimension, almost everything is orthogonal. 3. This lets us allocate a new thought (high dimensional vector) with no need to manually ensure that it's "unallocated" (i.e., not already in some accidental relationship with other thoughts in the system.) 4. This can be thought of as a version of "malloc" implemented in one line of code, without requiring subtle or error prone heap management. 5. That one line of code is random initialization of a vector (not a matrix or some higher order tensor, there are no models here.) 6. In other words, in a sufficiently high dimensional space, any nonzero dot product is not a coincidence. 7. The system is built through a sparse code where only the nonzero dot products require energy to represent. Think of this as a binary coding scheme where 1s cost a dollar but 0s are free. The system will make 1s rare and 0s frequent. The 1s carry more than one bit of entropy, the 0s carry less than one. 8. [Footnote 1: Colloquial term for the year 0x00 P.A.² (cf. 2017, Old Calendar) commonly used in the intermediate years³ when a significant fraction of the population stood in active opposition to using the P.A. dating system of the New Calendar, because, in their words,] [Footnote 2: Post Apocalypse.] [Footnote 3: Namely, the years from 2017 O.C. until the publication of RFC-Ω by the ETAWGNN⁴ and the ISO standards that followed, which can be found on the ISO website somewhere presumably, but which we've refrained from citing here because there's a paywall and we're still waiting for approval to use the company credit card. I would just buy the thing myself with my own damn credit card but last time I did I got yelled at in that very polite way HR yells at you without raising their voice whenever you do anything that undermines their ability to gatekeep, but I digress.] [Footnote 4: End Times Administrative Working Group on Names and Numbers.] [Footnote 5: MLPs, LSTMs, GRUs, Capsule Networks, Neural Turing Machines, and all that stuff that seemed maybe pretty interesting for awhile before Transformers showed up and ate the world.]