Ganked from ozarque

[ironphoenix]

Undergraduate research shows leaderless honeybee organizing

Interesting in its own right, and also by analogy to societal models.

This suggests to me an analogy between neurons and honeybees, and more generally of cellular automata with emergent properties. Are honeybees (and other hive insect colonies, perhaps) "intelligent" en masse?

Comments

[jagash.livejournal.com]

Neat, need to read that when i have time. If i have time.

[ancalagon-tb.livejournal.com]

I have been reading about "emergent properties" lately - and that seems like a good example of it.

The question though - are human institutions intelligent?

[ironphoenix.livejournal.com]

It may be that if the automata are complex, their interactions in an ill-considered arrangement reduce the level of interesting/useful behaviour. Bureaucracy, anyone?

Organizations do have macroscopic behaviours different from those of the individuals who make them up, certainly. As for intelligence, the question which is hard to answer is that of defining the term. Certainly, organizational intelligence and knowledge are management buzzwords which link to useful concepts: one wants to run things in such a way that makes the organization behave as if it were intelligent, had knowledge, etc., whether or not it can be said to actually have those things.