Two threads, one loom.
Twenty-five centuries of mind research and seven decades of artificial intelligence, woven into a single chronology. Amber for the brain. Cyan for the machine. Bone for the moments they touch.
- -500
Greek and Vedic philosophers ask: what is mind?
- 1641
Descartes: cogito ergo sum.
- 1763
Bayes: probability as belief update.
- 1817
Babbage envisions the Analytical Engine.
- 1843
Ada Lovelace writes the first algorithm.
- 1872
Darwin: The Expression of the Emotions.
- 1890
William James: The Principles of Psychology.
- 1937
Turing's machine — computation defined.
- 1943
McCulloch & Pitts: neuron as logic gate.
- 1950
Turing: Computing Machinery and Intelligence.
- 1956
Dartmouth — AI is named.
- 1958
Polanyi: the tacit dimension of knowing.
- 1970
Gallup formalizes the mirror test.
- 1972
Tulving: episodic vs semantic memory.
- 1974
Nagel: What is it like to be a bat?
- 1983
Libet: the half-second before will.
- 1986
Backprop revives neural nets.
- 1994
Damasio: Descartes' Error.
- 1995
Chalmers names the Hard Problem.
- 1997
Deep Blue defeats Kasparov.
- 2004
Tononi: Integrated Information Theory.
- 2007
Hofstadter: I Am a Strange Loop.
- 2012
AlexNet — deep learning's coronation.
- 2016
AlphaGo · Move 37.
- 2017
Attention is All You Need (transformer).
- 2020
GPT-3 reaches 175B parameters.
- 2022
ChatGPT goes public; AI joins the mainstream.
- 2023
GPT-4 passes basic theory-of-mind tasks.
- 2024
AlphaProof tackles IMO problems.
- 2024
Sapolsky: Determined — no free will.
- 2025
Interpretability locates 'self' features in transformers.
- 2026
First major AI welfare research programs launch.