The Same Loop, Told in Two Languages: 'A Beautiful Loop' and the Four-Model Theory

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every so often you read a paper by someone you’ve never met and get a strange feeling — not that they’ve copied you, and not that you’ve copied them, but that the two of you have been walking around the same mountain from opposite sides and have just met at the summit.

That’s how I felt reading A Beautiful Loop: An active inference theory of consciousness, by Ruben Laukkonen, Karl Friston, and Shamil Chandaria. It describes, in a completely different vocabulary from mine, something that looks unmistakably like the core of the Four-Model Theory (FMT): a mind becomes conscious by looping a model of itself back onto itself.

Active Inference on Matthias Gruber — Blog

The Same Loop, Told in Two Languages: 'A Beautiful Loop' and the Four-Model Theory