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.

Kelly’s remark frames intelligence as an emergent property: no single component of a mind (or a complex system) needs to be “smart” for the whole to behave intelligently. By likening the brain to a “society” of tiny modules, he echoes a modular, networked view of cognition in which simple units—neurons, routines, heuristics—interact to produce higher-level capacities such as reasoning, perception, and creativity. The quote also generalizes beyond neuroscience: it suggests that distributed systems (ecosystems, markets, the internet, or AI built from many simple parts) can generate robust, adaptive “smartness” through connectivity, feedback, and collective dynamics rather than centralized control.