Fw: Is "unconscious co-intelligence" part of nature? (long)

[Peggy Holman]

Given the talk about democracy recently, I just couldn't resist sending
this.  The part that got me most was:

For example, observations of group behavior showed that red
deer moved when more that 60 percent of adults stood up -
that is, voted with their feet.


Sure sounds like Open Space to me!

Peggy
Bellevue, WA


----- Original Message -----
From: "Tom Atlee" <cii at igc.org>
To: "undisclosed list" <cii at igc.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 11:55 AM
Subject: Is "unconscious co-intelligence" part of nature?


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Dear friends,

I am fascinated by descriptions of co-intelligent patterns in nature,
mathematics and reality.  The occasionally humorous article below
(thanks to David Duemler) describes the "voting" behavior of social
animals.  A shorter, more sober news story on the same subject,
"Democracy beats despotism in the animal world," can be found at
<http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993248>.

The idea of coherent collective behavior emerging out of independent
individual behavior is described in Kevin Kelly's famous concept of
"hive mind" <http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/ch2-b.html>.  In the
"Hive Mind" chapter of his book OUT OF CONTROL, he describes birds
flocking and 5000 people in an audience collectively steering a
virtual plane in for a landing with no one in charge.

Another creative researcher in this area, Norman Johnson (see
<http://ishi.lanl.gov/symintel.html>  and
<http://ishi.lanl.gov/diversity/documents_div.html>) describes how
"intelligent" computer-generated entities he's created, independently
working their way through a computer-generated maze, take an average
of 34 steps to get through on their first try.  He has been
fascinated to discover that when he superimposes the paths taken by
more than twenty of these entities, the majority path (the one
generated by plotting the course taken by most enitties at each
choice point) is a perfect 9-step solution through the maze -- a path
taken by no one of the individual entities.  The "collective
solution" is far better than any of the individual ones.

Again, there's an oft-quoted story (e.g.,
<http://www.polyconomics.com/searchbase/les18.html>) that tells how
Jack Treynor, former editor of the Financial Analysts Journal, passed
a large jar of beans around his business school class, asking each
student to guess how many beans were in the jar.  While the guesses
varied wildly, the average answer was almost always within three
percent of the correct number.

There's a significant phenomena here, an unconscious emergent form of
collective "mind" and self-organization, that is clearly a factor in
collective intelligence.  But we shouldn't jump to quickly to
conclusions, because it is also clearly a factor in some forms of
collective stupidity such as "groupthink" and mob behavior.

We need research and reflection to integrate what we are learning
about this phenomena with what we are learning about the more
conscious forms of collective intelligence -- such as those that
manifest through powerful group processes like the World Cafe and
Dynamic Faciltiation... or which show up during creative
whole-systems activities like Open Space Technology and Future Search
Conferences... or that are facilitated by new political institutions
like Citizens Juries, Wisdom Councils and Consensus Conferences.

  There is need for both theory and practice here, weaving together
both conscious and unconscious collective intelligence for the
benefit of communities and societies.

The resulting knowledge would be profoundly useful to humanity as a
whole.  It is the sort of knowledge out of which a new, wiser
civilization could arise.

Coheartedly,
Tom

_ _ _ __

<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/14/science/life/14DEMO.html?ex=1043547
150&ei=1&en=b3e8ddee7c8a8b98>
NY TIMES, January 14, 2002

Contrary to Orwell, Democracy Rules on the Big Animal Farm

January 14, 2003
By JAMES GORMAN


When red deer stand up and honeybees dance, they are not
simply stretching their legs or indicating where the nectar
is, according to a new study. As bizarre as it may seem,
they are voting on whether to move to greener pastures or
richer flowers.

The process is unconscious, the researchers say. No deer
counts votes or checks ballots; bees do not know the
difference between a dimple and a chad. But no one deer or
bee or buffalo decides when the group moves. If democracy
means that actions are taken based not on a ruler's
preference, but the preferences of a majority, then animals
have democracy.

Not surprisingly, decisions based on majority preferences
tend to fit in with what most individuals in the group
want. But, the researchers say, this is not a mere
tautology. An analysis based on some hefty mathematical
models that they developed shows that democracy in groups
of animals can have a tangible survival edge over
despotism.

Dr. Tim Roper, of the University of Sussex in Brighton,
England, who did the research with Dr. Larissa Conradt and
reported it in the current issue of Nature, said that
despite the wording of the paper, "We're very anxious to
avoid any extrapolation to the political domain."

The voting habits of baboons and gorillas and buffalo are
not meant to be comparable to ward politics, attack ads on
television or negative campaigning that ignores the issues.


The parallel to human activity is on a different scale.
"There are human cases of decision making to which our
model would be relevant," Dr. Roper said, like "small
groups making rather simple decisions."

He offered an example: "Suppose you've got a few friends
who want to meet in the pub in the evening. In order to all
be at the same place in the same time, they've got to talk
it over."

Presumably the deer and swans don't whine as much as people
do, or threaten to find a new flock if everyone keeps going
to the same place with the soggy French fries. But the
question - how the decision gets made - is the same. And
although human groups have been well studied, and
individual animals, little attention has been paid to
decision making by groups of animals.

Dr. Thomas D. Seeley of Cornell, whose research on bees was
cited in the paper, but who was not aware of it in advance,
said: "I think it's a very important paper. The basic
phenomenon that they're looking at - group decision making
- is actually fairly common, but it's not well studied."

He said that most of the study of animal decision making
had been at the individual level, and although there seemed
to be groups that decided, en masse, to act, "there's
really been no theory about why you would expect the
decision making to be democratic, or distributed."

Dr. Seeley said he thought the phrasing of the decision
making in terms of democracy or despotism was fair, and
that the paper was "a good first step" that could lead to
other research.

Dr. Conradt and Dr. Roper did their research in two parts.
First they reviewed earlier research to determine whether
various group decisions were being directed by one
individual or seemed to come from the group as a whole.

For example, observations of group behavior showed that red
deer moved when more that 60 percent of adults stood up -
that is, voted with their feet. In African buffalo, he
said, adult females made the decisions, voting with the
direction of their gaze.

Whooper swans voted with head movements. They would move
when a large number made low intensity movements, or when a
smaller number made high intensity movements.

Somehow, unconsciously, the animals sense when enough of
them get the urge for going. It is certainly a decision by
a majority, but what to call it is another question. Dr.
Kathreen Ruckstuhl of the University of Cambridge, who
studies bighorn sheep and was familiar with some of the
studies of African buffalo the paper describes, said, "It
all depends on how you define democracy."

If no conscious act is required and democracy simply means
that the group acts according to the preference of a
majority, then it is democracy. She did question whether
anything corresponding to "despotism" could exist, since
even in a group that followed a leader, the implication of
coercion might be inappropriate.

The more complicated aspect of the research involved
mathematical models that Dr. Conradt and Dr. Roper
developed to analyze the benefits to animal groups of
different ways of decision making that they described as
democratic or despotic.

In essence the models compared costs to individuals of not
getting to do things when they wanted to. Having to wait or
hurry up was considered a cost, and the presumption was
that for animals as for people, time is money or food or
something important to survival.

These are abstract models, not ways to process the previous
research. And what they show is that when majorities
decide, more individuals get what they want, and that
should translate into better survival. There could, of
course, be situations with incredibly smart or sensitive
despots that maximize the benefit to the group, but Dr.
Conradt and Dr. Roper did not come up with them.

Dr. Roper said the research was meant to suggest a new way
of looking at decision making and a new area for research.
The models apply only to animals that make group decisions.

It may be that some animals, like domestic cats, for
instance, do not vote, do not care to vote and have no
interest in any sort of group activity. They were not,
however, a subject of the paper. Dr. Roper and Dr. Conradt
modeled democracy and despotism. They did not consider
anarchy.


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