The Autoregressive Brain

A unified theory of cognition

next state = F(extended state, input)

Cognition is this next-state generation. Each new state (a percept, a thought, a stretch of inner speech) becomes part of the extended state and conditions everything that follows: the autoregressive loop. The neural activity underlying this process also drives the body through movement, speech, and autonomic and hormonal responses, but the system never observes its own outputs. Their consequences return only as sensation, one more input to the next state.

In this framework, perception, memory, language, reasoning, and action are not separate faculties. They are aspects of a single dynamics: the system generating each next state as the continuation of its own trajectory. What we call memory is the past persisting within the extended state and shaping each new one, not a store to be consulted. What we call attention is the convergence of multiple modalities into a single next state. What we call behavior is the world's response to neural activity that the system itself never directly observes.

Large language models are not merely analogies. They are running the linguistic case of the same architecture. Autoregressive generation over learned distributional structure produces composition, context-sensitivity, and apparent understanding without any of the machinery cognitive science has traditionally assumed is required.