Swarm cognition

aggregation, artificial intelligence, cognitive closure, cognitive systems, collective intentionality, complexity, computational intelligence, consciousness, distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, Embedded, emergence, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, extended mind, hayek, neurophilosophy, particle swarm optimization, scott turner, situated cognition, social cognition, sociocognition, spontaneous order, stigmergic, stigmergy, swarm, swarm behavior, swarm intelligence

Here is a terrific presentation entitled  “Macrotermes as models of swarm cognition” by Scott Turner. He writes:

This presentation was given at the Workshop on Research Efforts and Future Directions in Neuroergonomics and Neuromorphics sponsored by the US Army Research Office on 23-25 October 2007 in College Park Maryland. The presentation outlines the developing theme of our research of the termite-mound system as a cognitive system that has knowledge of its world and can map that knowledge onto functional structure. I concentrate on the “Collective Structural Defense” (CSD), which is the process of mound regeneration, repair and structural regulation 

Download here (28 mins, 65 MB, swf slide show with audio)

There is much else of interest on Turner’s website – well worth checking out if you have an interest in swarm intelligence and related topics. For those with an interest extended mind (for or against) Turner’s book THE EXTENDED ORGANISM: The Physiology of Animal-Built Structures should be consulted. I’ve rarely seen this work cited – it offers grist to the extended mind mill:

Building on Richard Dawkins’s classic, The Extended Phenotype, Turner shows why drawing the boundary of an organism’s physiology at the skin of the animal is arbitrary.

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