The Laws of Thought: The Quest for a Mathematical Theory of the Mind - Hardcover

A mathematical framework for human reasoning. Bayesian statistics meets cognitive science. How brains actually update beliefs based on new evidence.

Bayes' Rule is elegant: if you know the base rate of something (how common it is) and you have new evidence, you can calculate a rational belief update. But humans don't do this cleanly. We're biased. We overweight recent information. We stick to our priors. Lake explores what Bayes' Rule actually explains about human cognition and where it breaks down. The book is technical but written for smart people without a statistics background.

Cognitive scientists and AI researchers read this. So do faculty teaching probabilistic reasoning or decision-making. It's also assigned in courses on artificial intelligence where the question is whether you can build minds from mathematics.

DETAILS
- Hardcover
- Cognitive science, Bayesian reasoning, artificial intelligence, mathematics