Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina) / quote 37 of 68
The whole is more than its neurons
However, the Chinese Gym does serve as an illustration that the whole can be more than the sum of the parts. In a sub-symbolic system, the atomic units, neurons and their structured relationship to other neurons, do not individually do much at all. Only when the collection is seen as a whole can we start to speak of concepts such as distributed representations and cognition.