Collective intelligence in human society: is there such a thing as ‘collective knowledge’, and how does it work?
I. Collective intelligence in insects… and in humanity
It is only in relatively recent times that the study of organised insects led scientists to postulate the concept of collective intelligence. Though this can be variously defined, the expression generally refers to a complex decision-making system that emerges spontaneously from the interactions of very simple individual agents.
Collective intelligence is capable of planning, strategising, remembering, adapting, and learning. The physical structures it creates, like ant hives and termite mounds, are astonishingly complex works of engineering and architecture, inclusive of adaptable internal systems to regulate ventilation, temperature and humidity. By any account these structures look like the product of intention and design, even if none of the individuals that make up the hive has these intellectual qualities.
Our newfound respect for the intelligence of insects notwithstanding, we remain reluctant to acknowledge parallels between the systems created by these elementary creatures and those created by humanity itself.
Human beings, as we know, possess intelligence at the individual level. While we can and do create some very sophisticated systems, it is the systems that emerge from our intelligence — not the other way round. Thus, our systems may be designed and operated by us — like nation-states, with their written constitutions and their human-led executives; or else they may be unthinking, rules-based systems that operate automatically like giant machines — as many people describe capitalism and its blind pursuit of profit.
It is less immediately apparent how the interactions of human beings may lead to the emergence of a system comparable to collective intelligence — that is to say, a system that is not the fruit of design or intentionality, but which is itself capable of design and intentionality. Surely this type of phenomenon is an evolutionary exclusive to social insects, and it never needed to (or even could) emerge among a species of super-intelligent individuals like homo sapiens?
As our understanding of complex systems grows, it may be time to revise these assumptions. Indeed, it seems increasingly likely that humanity as such may be an entity that is much more than the sum of all individual human beings. In fact, humanity may well be a system capable of making its own decisions, plans and strategies, and these will not necessarily correspond to what human beings think or desire individually.
Moreover, the systems we create that are most structurally analogous to those created by insects may, in fact, emerge precisely from those qualities we possess that make us most unlike other animals — particularly insects.
I wish to make precisely this argument by exploring a topic that is most typically and exclusively associated to human and individual intelligence, namely our idea of knowledge.
II. Is there such a thing as collective knowledge?
Surely knowledge is among the most distinctive qualities of human intelligence. We allow that sophisticated animals like chimpanzees or dolphins may share in concepts like awareness and complex emotions — but we don’t really think of them as having or pursuing knowledge in any meaningful way, except perhaps in elementary terms like ‘knowing the route to get home’, or ‘knowing how to crack a nut open’.
Knowledge is the object of enduring philosophical study. It is also generally connoted with virtue and merit: the ‘pursuit of knowledge’ is a self-justifying human goal; individuals who possess or seek knowledge, like great philosophers or scientists, are celebrated as admirable human beings; civilisations are judged as being more advanced when they no longer dedicate themselves exclusively to warfare and expansion but also to developing their knowledge.
At the same time, our representations of knowledge — like those of intelligence — have always painted it as something individualistic in nature. Philosophers from Plato to Kant have asked themselves questions like ‘What can any individual know?’, or ‘What is the relationship between the consciousness of an individual and the knowable truth?’
Significantly less attention has been devoted to the idea of collective knowledge. Few philosophers have posed questions like — what does the concept of ‘knowledge’ mean for a group of people? What is it possible for a group of people to know together?
It may seem natural to assume that collective knowledge is basically just the sum of the knowledge of all individuals. The idea that one hundred people put together could inadvertently create a system that knows more than everything that each of them knows separately does not make intuitive sense.
And yet this is exactly the same fallacy that we have long fallen for in relation to intelligence. The study of insects has shown us that considering the intelligence of a group forces us to think differently of intelligence itself. Likewise, considering the knowledge of a group forces us to rethink our concept of knowledge.
III. Knowledge as a relational performance to establish status
One of the most ancient questions in philosophy is — what is knowledge?
But if we wish to consider the matter of collective knowledge, perhaps a more interesting and pertinent question is — how does knowledge work?
A personal anecdote comes to mind. I was once having a conversation with a cousin of mine, a boy aged 11 or 12 at the time. The Pokémon videogame series was a big fad in his class, and so he challenged me to a little game: in turns, one of us chose a picture of a Pokémon creature, and the other was supposed to say what its name was. I was several years older than my cousin and I did not play Pokémon, so I lost very quickly.
Like all such games, this was a social ritual, in which my cousin invited me to create rapport with him by engaging in a shared activity. It was also, of course, a contest of knowledge.
Although they tend to take more complex forms than straightforward ‘contests’, adults also have rituals which involve some form of mutual demonstration of knowledge. Thus, conversations about topics like literature, music and film almost inevitably compel those involved to reveal what they do or do not know. Activities like friends watching sports together usually invite commentary and appreciation that once again demonstrate knowledge of the sport.
Human beings, then, will demonstrate knowledge in a variety of social rituals. However, notice that this knowledge will always be a function of its social group — and not just something that exists in relation to the individual. In the examples above, demonstrating knowledge of 19th Century novels in the context of a football game — or vice versa — could lead to some perverse consequences.
What sort of ‘perverse consequences’ are we talking about? Consider the Pokémon anecdote. If my 12-year-old cousin demonstrated his great knowledge of Pokémon creatures with his peers in school, he would in all likelihood earn some measure of respect. On the other hand, I was aged 17 or 18 at the time. If I had done the same in my class, I would probably have lost respect for revealing an interest that back then was perceived as childish and/or geeky. I might even have found myself dubbed a nerd, or a loser. The same knowledge deployed in different social groups has opposite consequences — and both are distinctly related to social status.
This is perhaps sufficient to hazard a definition of knowledge in its social rather than individual nature: knowledge is a relational performance to establish status. It is not difficult to imagine how this might have evolved. Status is a measure of the value that a social group confers on an individual, and in prehistorical times, most types of available knowledge would have made someone valuable to their tribe (those who knew which herbs had healing properties would be able to cure the sick, for example). Equally apparent is the reason why knowledge would develop early connotations with ‘virtue’ and ‘merit’ — as an expression, among other things, of acknowledgment and respect for higher status.
The above definition is not intended to be reductive or cynical. I’m not trying to say something like ‘all knowledge is basically just a dick-waving competition and philosophers are only motivated by their thirst for power’.
In truth, the relational performance of knowledge is complex. It may well be cooperative rather than competitive, or even serve the opposite function — that of letting us establish lower status so as to forego conflict (‘Oh, I really am such a total dunce on the topic of ancient civilisations!’). As well, engaging in knowledge competitively (or too openly so) may often come across as ‘showing off’, which backfires to lower status for the speaker. Additionally, specific social groups may have unique performative rituals which simply don’t exist in other groups, creating their own ‘subcultures of knowledge’. Pop and Rock music, for example, with their powerful identitarian connotations, serve as social forums particularly for the teenage to young adult demographic.
Even more complex than the performance of knowledge is its social architecture — meaning, the criteria by which specific types of knowledge will distribute or erode status in and across various social groups. Thus, being an expert at a ‘geeky’ fantasy card game may only build your reputation in the community of the game’s players, while having read very many works of your culture’s literary canon will build respect with almost all adult members of that culture. Between these two extremes there exists an entire spectrum of types of knowledge that operate in a non-linear fashion in and across different groups, forming a cultural structure that is far too complex for us to break down here.
IV. Systemic emergence and the function of collective knowledge
The psychological incentive to gain knowledge is not a desire (conscious or otherwise) to build status. At its fundamental level, it is something much simpler.
For any human being talking to other human beings, it feels good to be listened to, and it feels bad to be ignored. Acquiring and demonstrating knowledge (of the socially appropriate type) is one non-violent way of making sure that when you speak, others will listen.
This is the elementary drive that leads to the human pursuit of knowledge — simply the desire to be listened to when we’re talking.
The highly complex system that we described above, in which human beings acquire and deploy knowledge to arrange themselves in different social groups and then in hierarchies of status within those groups, is one that emerges from the interactions of many different people all equipped with that simple, basic drive.
If you recall our initial discussion of the collective intelligence of insects, you may have noticed the structural parallel. For humans and insects alike, we are talking about a phenomenon known in modern science as systemic emergence, in which the interaction of very simple elements within a system generates collective properties or behaviour that appear to be designed or purposeful, and that amount to something greater than the sum of their individual elements.
To the extent that humanity as a whole has the ability to adapt and respond to its changing environment, and to make decisions informed by long-term rather than immediate interests, it is natural to say that we have collective intelligence — just like insects. The decision-making ability of humanity as a whole, in this context, is a property of the complex system emerging from the aggregate of the desires, the needs and the actions of all human beings collectively. The coordinated, costly, gradual transformation of our energy industries in response to global warming is the most obvious example of human collective intelligence, but it is far from the only one.
Unlike insects, however, our system of collective intelligence is also informed by its internal subsystem of collective knowledge (and in this sense, it is correct to say that knowledge is a distinctively and exclusively human concept). The functions of this subsystem are no doubt various, but we may simplify them here to one primary purpose: collective knowledge is what allows human collective intelligence to remember its past, and then make decisions that take its past experience into account.
This simplification is permissible because the vast majority of knowledge that builds social status is historical in nature. To say that someone is ‘knowledgeable’ about Rock music, for example, doesn’t mean that they are themselves capable of writing a good Rock song (the words for that would be ‘talented’, ‘skilled’, etc.). Instead, what it typically means is that they are well acquainted with the canon, the artists, the events, the places, the countries where Rock music was deployed — in other words, with its history.
The distribution of specific types of knowledge across specific social groups creates the neural structure of humanity, allowing the system as a whole to sort and prioritise the different elements of its knowledge in the process of decision-making. This neural structure is not ‘democratic’ or ‘egalitarian’ — not everyone’s knowledge matters equally. As people arrange themselves into hierarchies of status determined by their respective knowledge, each person in that hierarchy gains a different relative weight in the system’s behaviour.
Inasmuch as the collective intelligence of humanity has the ability to remember its past and let it inform decisions about its future, it is a system with a distributed understanding of where it came from and what it is (or at the very least, whose behaviour demonstrates such an understanding). And in this sense it is hardly metaphorical to say that the complex system called humanity is self-aware.
From here, the discussion might naturally shift to a debate on what ‘real’ self-awareness is, and whether that of humanity as a whole may compare to that of an individual human being. But its precise nature aside, what I find most striking about this incredibly complex collective system is the simplicity of its origins.
It is sufficient to equip human beings with a simple, basic desire to be heard when they are speaking, and then let them interact with each other — and what you get in due time is a great, overarching, almost transcendent self-awareness. Even a god, of our own unintentional creation. And this is what is meant by the concept of complex emergence, and it is manifest in insects with their elementary instincts no more and no less than it is in human beings with their unique, magnificent and endlessly developing philosophies of knowledge.