The Wonder of the Emergent Mind (with Gaurav Suri)

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2025

⏱️ 100 minutes

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Summary

How is your brain like an ant colony? They both use simple parts following simple rules which allows the whole to be so much more than the sum of the parts. Listen as neuroscientist and author Gaurav Suri explains how the mind emerges from the neural network of the brain, why habits form, why intuition often knows before language does, and why our post-hoc explanations can mislead us. The conversation then grapples with free will and responsibility without mysticism. Ultimately, Suri remains in awe of the emergent mind and at the end of the conversation makes the case for the essential importance of kindness and forgiveness.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.2	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.7	Our email address is mail at econTalk.org.
0:30.0	We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.7	Today is October 21st, 2025, and my guest is neuroscientist and author Gerov Surrey.
0:42.8	He's the co-author with Jay McLeod of the book, The Emergent Mind, How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines, which is our topic for today.
0:52.3	Gerov, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:54.6	Thank you, Russ.
0:55.4	Pleasure to be here.
0:56.7	So this is a rather extraordinary book.
1:00.0	It's got some very powerful explanations of the nuts and bolts of neural networks and
1:07.7	networks and large language models and the different aspects of those models that have come to be
1:14.9	part of our lives now in the form of various chat GPT and Claude and others.
1:21.5	But it also has some very deep ideas about the human experience and how we should think about it.
1:26.1	So I really encourage people to read this book.
1:29.9	It is, we've done a lot of episodes on, on AI, and we've done a not a small number of
1:37.6	neuroscience.
1:38.3	And this book really integrates them in such a fascinating way.
1:42.6	So my hat is off to you and your co-author, Jay McClelland.
1:47.7	Wonderful. Thank you. So let's start off with the title of the book, The Emergent Mind.
	...

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