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There was a time, way back in history (like a few years ago), when people thought that the queen or some other hierarchical ant was controlling the behaviour of others. But not only is that a weird idea - like when people thought that inside the microscopic egg of a woman was a perfectly formed miniature version of an adult, or worse, they once thought that we had little people inside our heads governing the big person that was our self. Which begs the question as to what is inside the head of the little person. But I am digressing here – but it misses the point as to where the real "intelligence" lies. The complexity is in the whole not the individual. It is so obvious that I sometimes wonder why folk didn't spot it earlier. Our brains are complicated bundles of nerve cells passing signals all over the place. The intelligence is not at one end of the nerve passing it to another location rather like a person on one end of a telephone but rather it is in the complexity of the system. The "emergent" behaviour is more complex than the predictable behaviour from the sum of the parts. I must mention here that it was Buckminster Fuller who first used the term "synergy" in the context of complex systems. The word originates from the world of metallurgy and refers to the effect where an alloy can be stronger than the sum of the metals which make it. And to complete this little example I would like to draw the comparison with the internet and human intelligence. Although we exhibit some useful phenomenon which we refer to as "intelligence" I suspect that the net result of the internet will be to produce some far more useful phenomena which will prove to be far "cleverer" that any individual human.
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