New Books in Neuroscience · New Books Network
Gaurav Suri and Jay McClelland, "The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines" (Basic Books, 2025)
October 29, 2025·2 hr 21 min·14 clips
Jay McClelland reveals how wetness emerges from water molecules, a property that doesn't exist in individual atoms.
As heard by us
A measured look at how context, neural networks, and self-explaining minds shape understanding.
The episode treats The Emergent Mind as a plain but sturdy argument: intelligence is shaped by context, not by isolated rules. It moves from neural networks to the surrounding signals that shape perception and judgment, and the 1970s stocking experiment gives that idea a useful…
Why you'd press play
You want a patient guide to how minds and machines build understanding from context, even when they seem rule-bound without being rule engines.
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