Can Collective Behavior of AI Agents Create Consciousness?

The collective behavior is a common type of behavior among humans as well as animals. It is defined in Dictionary.com as,

“The spontaneous, unstructured, and temporary behavior of a group of people in response to the same event, situation, etc.”

But for this article, we only consider the behavior of a set of machines or AI agents which behave individually according to their inputs and their internal factors and rules. These inputs can come from the environment which they are part of as well as from their fellow agents. Also for this article both structured and unstructured behaviors are being considered.

Collective behavior in machines isn’t a new idea. Swarm intelligence which is introduced by Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang in 1989, study the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized, natural or artificial systems. And this concept mostly used in the field of artificial intelligence.

These kind of studies is mostly focused on intelligence. But when it comes to consciousness, it is not that clear. The purpose of this article is to see whether this structured or unstructured collective behavior of AI agents can produce consciousness.

Collective behavior of AI agents and consciousness.

Fist of all, let’s look at the human body. If we consider a cell in the human body as a small micro machine we can say that the human body is a set of machines working to gather. And if the consciousness is an emergent product of the brain, then we might be able to say that the consciousness is a product of the collective behavior of neurons. So can we apply the same theory to AI. Can we make set of programs, interconnected with each other that can ultimately create consciousness. Actually, we have already done this. We have artificial neural networks. But the biological neurons are much more complex that actual neurons. So the artificial neurons must also become more similar to actual neurons.

But maybe it is only the functions or the inputs and outputs of neurons that we have to mimic (not the inner workings of the neurons). We don’t need to make artificial neurons, which are identical to real neurons in every way. China brain (also known as the Chinese Nation or Chinese Gym) is a thought experiment in philosophy of mind about this kind of a brain simulation through structured collective behavior. It is proposed by Ned Block and explains a situation where each citizen in China is asked to simulate the actions of a one neuron in the brain using using telephones or walkie-talkies to simulate the axons and dendrites that connect neurons. Although Block argues that China brain will not have a mind Some philosophers, like Daniel Dennett, have concluded that the China brain does create a mental state. If the china brain can create consciousness, replacing the people with machines which can simulate functions of neurons and also communicate may also produce a consciousness.

There is also a concept of collective consciousness in sociology. In the field of sociology, collective consciousness is a term introduced by French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1890) to identify a shared framework or a set of shared beliefs, ideas and moral attitudes which operate as a unifying force within society. If we consider a group of people as a single being, we can actually see some of the qualities of a consciousness within it. For example, we can see that a certain group of people or a community has an awareness of what’s happening in that group or community and also a control over it. And the self awareness and control are the essential parts of consciousness. And also a group can even conceptualize self which creates a boundary between that group and other similar groups (for example two nations). So, according to that theory even the unstructured or semi-structured collective behavior can maybe create consciousness.

But when applying this theory to the machines, we bump into a bit of a problem. Unlike machines, human society is comprised with conscious beings. So now the question will be, Can consciousness get emerged from the collective behavior of a group of agents who don’t have consciousness? In a society or a group, the actions of an individual person are consuming information, processing them (adding new information, manipulating he information, taking decisions according to the information, creating new information or storing information in memory) and passing them on to others in some form of communication. And all of these information processes don’t require consciousness (a philosophical zombie, which acts in the same way as a human can do the same things). So I don’t think it is necessary to have conscious beings to create a collective consciousness in this way. But these beings (or AI agents) must have the necessary intelligence be able to behave collectively like humans.

So we can see that consciousness through collective behavior might be a possibility. But still the individual AI agents should possess a considerable level intelligence in order to make the consciousness emerged from the collective.