The Emergent Mind

How does our consciousness, our ability to think, feel and act, actually work? This is one of the most fundamental mysteries about being human.

In The Emergent Mind, Gaurav Suri and Jay McClelland offer a groundbreaking new perspective. They reveal that the mind emerges from the way simple units, like the cells in your brain, interact with each other. This phenomenon is known as emergence, and it means that the whole system possesses abilities that none of the individual parts have on their own.

Drawing on the powerful idea of neural networks, this insightful book offers a clear path to understanding how mind-like abilities appear in both people and modern AI. You'll learn how this perspective explains different parts of how we think and behave:

• Memory: Explore how memories form and why they aren't always perfect reproductions.
• Context: Learn how context shapes everything, from what you perceive to how you understand others.
• Action and Choice: Understand what drives your decisions and actions.
• Knowledge and Learning: See how we learn and store what we know and how we use language.
• Artificial Intelligence: Get insights into how the concept of neural networks, initially used to model the human mind, is now the basis of today's powerful AI systems, including Large Language Models.

Written by leading experts in the field, The Emergent Mind is a must-read reading for anyone fascinated by human intelligence or the rise of AI. It provides a profound, yet accessible, view of how intelligence takes shape.