"A brain is a society of very small, simple modules that cannot be said to be thinking, that are not smart in themselves. But when you have a network of them together, out of that arises a kind of smartness"
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Kelly is smuggling a political theory into a neuroscience metaphor: intelligence isn not a king on a throne, its a swarm with rules. By calling the brain a "society", he pushes back against the comforting idea of a single, commanding self. The units are "very small" and "simple", almost insultingly so, which is the point: the magic isnt in the parts, its in the architecture. He uses the phrase "cannot be said to be thinking" like a legal disclaimer, daring you to stop looking for mind in any one place.
The subtext is a quiet manifesto for the internet age. Kelly co-founded Wired and spent decades evangelizing networks, decentralization, and emergent order. This line reads like an argument for why complex systems - markets, ecosystems, open-source communities, even culture itself - can produce sophistication without a mastermind. "Not smart in themselves" is also a corrective to hero worship: genius becomes a property of connection, iteration, feedback loops.
The rhetoric works because it flatters modern skepticism. It tells you consciousness might be less a miracle than an outcome, less soul than systems engineering. Yet the final phrase, "a kind of smartness", stays deliberately modest. That hedge is strategic: it avoids sounding like a reductionist victory lap and leaves room for mystery, or at least for the fact that emergent intelligence can be powerful without being fully legible. In an era obsessed with AI and collective behavior, Kelly is rehearsing a secular creation story: complexity as the new sublime.
The subtext is a quiet manifesto for the internet age. Kelly co-founded Wired and spent decades evangelizing networks, decentralization, and emergent order. This line reads like an argument for why complex systems - markets, ecosystems, open-source communities, even culture itself - can produce sophistication without a mastermind. "Not smart in themselves" is also a corrective to hero worship: genius becomes a property of connection, iteration, feedback loops.
The rhetoric works because it flatters modern skepticism. It tells you consciousness might be less a miracle than an outcome, less soul than systems engineering. Yet the final phrase, "a kind of smartness", stays deliberately modest. That hedge is strategic: it avoids sounding like a reductionist victory lap and leaves room for mystery, or at least for the fact that emergent intelligence can be powerful without being fully legible. In an era obsessed with AI and collective behavior, Kelly is rehearsing a secular creation story: complexity as the new sublime.
Quote Details
| Topic | Artificial Intelligence |
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