ABSTRACT
For cognitive structures to be collective they have to inhere in some kind of social units. At the same time it is the shared systems of language and culture that enable membership in social units to be recognized and social units to function. A society – whether an independent social unit or a sub-unit of some larger unit – is an emergent collective entity. Even dynamic interactive versions of the master-slave approach did not work – no programmer was smart enough (and no one computer had adequate data) to anticipate all the problems that might arise and how they might be solved. The knowledge that makes up culture is learned but, for the most part without its being actively taught. We pick it up from our experience with people around us. The computers had to “converse” enough among themselves to monitor the status of relevant tasks being executed by neighbors.
