The Emergent Mind
A compelling journey into the inner workings of human and artificial minds
“Deeply stimulating and disarmingly accessible” —Robert Sapolsky, author of Determined
Named a Best Book of the Year by New Scientist • Next Big Idea Club
When we are trying to solve a problem, what happens? We find ourselves weighing arguments, or relying on intuition, then reaching a conscious decision about what to do. What is going on behind the scenes?
In show that our experience is the tip of an iceberg of brain activity that can be captured in an artificial neural network. Such networks—initially developed as models of ourselves—have become the engines of artificial neural intelligence. Suri and McClelland aren’t reducing mankind to mere machines. Rather, they are showing how a data-driven neural network can create thoughts, emotions, and ideas—a mind—whether in humans or computers.
The Emergent Mind provides a fascinating account of how we reach decisions, why we change our minds, and how we are affected by context and experience. Ultimately, the book gives a new answer to one of our oldest questions: Not just how do minds work, but what does it mean to be a mind at all?
“Deeply stimulating and disarmingly accessible” —Robert Sapolsky, author of Determined
Named a Best Book of the Year by New Scientist • Next Big Idea Club
When we are trying to solve a problem, what happens? We find ourselves weighing arguments, or relying on intuition, then reaching a conscious decision about what to do. What is going on behind the scenes?
In show that our experience is the tip of an iceberg of brain activity that can be captured in an artificial neural network. Such networks—initially developed as models of ourselves—have become the engines of artificial neural intelligence. Suri and McClelland aren’t reducing mankind to mere machines. Rather, they are showing how a data-driven neural network can create thoughts, emotions, and ideas—a mind—whether in humans or computers.
The Emergent Mind provides a fascinating account of how we reach decisions, why we change our minds, and how we are affected by context and experience. Ultimately, the book gives a new answer to one of our oldest questions: Not just how do minds work, but what does it mean to be a mind at all?
Interview with the Authors
The Mind as Emerging Property of the Brain
How Physical Processes In the Brain Create the Mind
"Suri and McClelland present a rich but accessible explanation of how physical processes in the brain create the mind...They liken the mind to a flowing river—not located in any one part, but arising from a continuous stream of activity. While no single neuron “thinks,” the network’s dynamics give rise to mental life...The authors draw parallels to modern AI systems, where emergent properties stem from interactions in network elements."
- Kirkus Review
Like Water Molecules Forming a Liquid with Surprising Properties
Their core claim is that what we call “mind” is not a mysterious substance sitting somewhere behind the brain, but an emergent process: patterns that arise when billions of simple neurons interact over time. Our thoughts, perceptions and decisions, they argue, are the visible tip of a vast iceberg of neural activity.
The authors use accessible examples – water molecules forming a liquid with surprising properties, ants finding the shortest path around an obstacle – to build intuition for how minds can arise from simple neurons. They then extend this logic to show how patterns of activation across neural networks can represent concepts, memories and feelings."
Johan Steyn, Jan 26, 2026
Emerging Properties as Living Subjects
Thus we have an image of the mind as an emergent property of the brain. In their interview offered on the book (see below), they do not address the question of whether this emergent property might have agency of its own, such that it influences the brain. They do speak of bi-directional causation, but here they have in mind of how neuronal complexes within the brain have causal influence on one another. But they do not address the question of whether the emergent property itself has such an influence. The mind seems to be, for them, a product of the brain, but not, to use Whitehead's terminology, a dominant occasion of experience or "concrescing subject" of its own, which can act upon the brain.
Nor do they address the question of whether minds, understood as emergent properties, can 'emerge' with non-biological substrates: with machine substrates, for example. It is clear to them that AI has certain forms of intelligence, some surpassing human intelligence. Large-language models, for example, are 'neural networks' that can correct their own mistakes. 'think' in terms of representations, and make predictions. But this does not mean that machines have "consciousness." Consciousness involves awareness, feelings, emotions, and subjective aims. They do not think that AI systems have subjective aims, at least not yet.
On these two questions, panexperientalists influenced by Whitehead will have their own distinctive views.
On the first question, they propose that the emergent property of intelligence is indeed an agent in its own right. That the experiences enjoyed and suffered by a 'mind' can effect brain activity, even as brain activity also effects the mind. Thus the language of the mind being an emergent 'property' can be misleading. Better to speak of the mind as an emergent 'subject' with power of its own. On this view the flowing river of the mind, overlapping the brain, is by no means a mere epiphenomenon. It is, to use Whitehead's language, a concrescing subject. But, as Sure and McLelland so strongly argue, it 'does' emerge, even as it acts upon that from which it emerges, namely the brain. A recognition of this, on the part of Suri and McLelland, might help them better explain how the mind's experiences, inlfluence not only be brain chemistry but also by social factors and personal history, affect the brain.
On the second question - does mind require a biological substrate - panexperientialists also have a unique point of view. They will suggest that actual entities in any context, biological or otherwise, have awareness, feelings, technically named prehensions, emotions, technically called subjective forms, and subjective aims. This means that something like subjective experience is everywhere. "Apart from the experience os subjects," says Whitehead, "there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness." This in turn means that biological substrates are not necessary for experience to occur. Even the quantum events within the depths of silicon have sentience and also a certain kind of 'intelligence,.' For paneexperientialists this sentience is not necessarily conscious in a narrow sense. It may not be 'clear and distinct' as in the conscious perception of sense objects in human experience, or the conscious enterainment of goals, but it is aware.
Neither of these two question invalidate the ideas presented by Suri and McLelland. Indeed, their view that the mind is a product of the brain offers a corrective to tendencies within the Whitehead-influenced community to overemphasize the subjective unity of the mind, understood as a living subject, and underemphasize the fact that, in each concrescing moment of a person's life, multiple subjects are excercising agency, which means that the mind's unity is composite and pluralistic. The momentary unity of a mind includes the agency of the past actual world, including the agency of brain activity and the agency of the emergent subject, the mind that is being affected by the brain even as it is responding to that agency with creativity of its own. At any given moment the mind is not simply a "one" responding to many influences, or "many influences" producing the mere appearance of a "one," but rather a living process of, in Whitehead,s words, "the many becoming one."