Elan’s Substack

The End of the World (Models)

Generative Processing and the Illusion of the Internal Map

Feb 6 • Elan Barenholtz, Ph.D.

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January 2026

Ego Death?

Observerless phenomenology and the construction of self in the autoregressive framework

Jan 5 • Elan Barenholtz, Ph.D.

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December 2025

Sequences Are All You Need

How Generative Modeling Drove the Evolution of Memory and Cognition

Dec 18, 2025 • Elan Barenholtz, Ph.D.

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September 2025

Auto-Autoregression

How the Brain Learns to Write its Own Next Move

Sep 26, 2025 • Elan Barenholtz, Ph.D.

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Beyond Binding

Unified Consciousness as Recursive Global Computation

Sep 5, 2025 • Elan Barenholtz, Ph.D.

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August 2025

Syntax is Dead! Long Live Syntax!

Grammar as an emergent property of generative language

Aug 8, 2025 • Elan Barenholtz, Ph.D.

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July 2025

The Paradoxical Present

The present, by definition, should be still.

Jul 23, 2025 • Elan Barenholtz, Ph.D.

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Beyond Prediction: Reconceptualizing Cognition as Generative Autoregression

Note: This essay lays out a high-level theoretical framework.

Jul 18, 2025 • Elan Barenholtz, Ph.D.

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The Unspoken Word

What people without inner monologues reveal about the true nature of language—and thought itself.

Jul 8, 2025 • Elan Barenholtz, Ph.D.

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June 2025

Is your Brain a Large Language Model?

Conversation with Prof. William Hahn and Addy Cha

Jun 19, 2025 • Elan Barenholtz, Ph.D.

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1:10:11

Autogeneration: The Hidden Property of Language Now Revealed

One of the most profound insights revealed by large language models is that language is not just autoregressive.

Jun 12, 2025 • Elan Barenholtz, Ph.D.

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LLMs are Doing What We Do. Maybe That's A Problem. Maybe not.

Why Apple's big new deflationary result may not mean what everyone thinks it does

Jun 8, 2025 • Elan Barenholtz, Ph.D.

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