ABSTRACT
Repeated interactions between animals can generate stable patterns of collective behavior. This chapter examines how the strength of informational relations between the components of distributed systems can stabilize collective behaviour. It offers some reflections along the way, and clarifies the variety of different ways in which a computational approach can be used to understand collective behavior, and the possibility of collective mentality. In addressing the issue of collective mentality, some philosophers have adopted a dynamical approach. They have focused on patterns of self-organization, and argued that collective mentality requires neither collective computation nor collective mental representation. Others have focused on the ways that group members acquire, store, transmit, and manipulate information as they perform collaborative tasks; they hold that collective mentality emerges as a result of informational transactions, which can occur even in the absence of collective mental representations.
