About us
Our book club is structured around reading and discussing one non-fiction book each month, typically on the second Sunday of the month but rescheduled as needed based on holidays or travel. The meetings are currently hybrid but in person attendance is encouraged when possible. The meetings are facilitated to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to contribute. All members are encouraged to provide their opinions, and all opinions are valued and respected.
This book club does not solicit or accept payment related to book selection, and the organizer does not reach out to authors; all book nominations come from members only.
Click to see a list of books we have read and the group's rating. Every month we choose the book for two months ahead. Members prioritize their book choices in a Google Form and then we run a ranked choice algorithm on the resulting set of votes. Members can suggest books in their RSVP to a meeting, in the Google Form, or by messaging the organizer directly. It is at the organizer's discretion which books are included in any given vote.
Upcoming events
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The Emergent Mind by Gaurav Suri, Jay McClelland
Scott's House and Google Meet, Woolsey at College Ave, Berkeley, CA, USOur book for August is The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines by Gaurav Suri, Jay McClelland
For those who are interested, here is the link to the detailed results from the voting.
The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines (2025) is a work of popular science that examines how thought, perception, and decision-making take shape in both human brains and artificial intelligence systems. Its central concept is emergence—the idea that complex systems can arise from the interactions of many simple parts, none of which is individually intelligent. The authors build intuition for this idea using everyday examples, such as water molecules forming a liquid or ants collectively finding an efficient path, before extending it to neural networks: the framework, originally developed as a model of human cognition, that now underpins modern AI systems from chatbots to image generators. The book traces how the same principles that helped scientists understand perception, language, and choice in people came to drive advances in machine intelligence, and it argues that modeling the mind in this way does not reduce human beings to machines. It closes by considering the current limits of AI, which still depends on large amounts of data and lacks human-like goals, and the possibility of more autonomous systems emerging in the future.
The book is co-authored by two cognitive scientists. Jay McClelland is a professor of psychology, computer science, and linguistics at Stanford University, where he directs the Center for Mind, Brain, Computation, and Technology; he was a key figure in reviving neural network modeling in the 1980s, and his work helped lay the groundwork for today's deep learning. Gaurav Suri is an associate professor of psychology at San Francisco State University, a computational neuroscientist and experimental psychologist who studies motivation and decision-making, and a co-author of the novel A Certain Ambiguity. The two met in 2014, and this is their first book together. The Emergent Mind was named a Best Book of the Year by New Scientist and selected by the Next Big Idea Club, and it is written for a general audience without requiring a technical background.
This event will be hybrid. I will host the meeting in person at my house in Berkeley which is near the intersection of College Ave and Woolsey St. I will email people the address the Saturday before the meeting.
Here are the Google Meet details:
Google Meet link: https://meet.google.com/zem-xnbw-tuh
Or dial: (US) +1 641-854-0146 PIN: 637 012 874#7 attendees
Past events
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