Knowledge Representation: Mental Models (Critical Notes I)

Mental Models Series

Despite the good intent and thorough research, the lack of appropriate definitions can easily make one mix concepts in the various explanatory pursuits. The best recent example is Adam Feel’s book on "Mental Models" in which the author doesn’t seem to correctly differentiate between mental processes, representations, concepts, models and the accessories used by mind in decisions and sense-making. Unfortunately, this is not an unique example, several books appeared recently on same topic seem to follow the same pattern.

It’s true that explaining how the mind works is a hardy endeavor as the subject finds itself at the intersection of several cognitive and non-cognitive sciences and pseudo-sciences, however one can still make use of a dictionary to test definitions’ correctness and appropriateness. If the dictionary definitions don’t resemble one’s understanding, then more likely the gap between one’s explanations and reality increases, the deeper one goes into the subject.

In the respective book, the most important distinction is between process and representation. A process is a series of actions or steps taken in order to transform an input into an output, or reach from a point to another. In respect to the mind, the process as transformation makes more sense. Perception, sense-making, recollecting, thinking, depicting, imagining are examples of mental processes even if they can maybe split in further subprocesses. In contrast, a representation is a description and encoding of something, typically an aspect of external or internal reality. Therefore, mental processes use representations and other elements of the mental space as inputs and outputs.

When one considers as process a mental model, which is nothing but a form of representation, then the characteristics associated with the model are far from being correct. Mental models don’t interpret by themselves, they don’t disguise even if their lack of clarity of understanding complicate our mental processes. They do not dictate or predetermine an action but predisposes one to a set of actions. Besides that, the quality of one’s thinking processes has an important impact on mental models’ usability.

Each person has a certain understanding of the world with a degree of fuzziness attached to it. How one reflects and interprets reality is somehow reflected in the quality of the models held. Any model has impact on the decisions made, independently whether the model is correct or wrong. A wrong model can lead to positive results, and in certain situations is enough to address a situation, same as the use of a good model can lead to undesired outcomes. In the end each model has a degree of appropriateness and applicability usually interpreted as value of truth. Being aware of these aspects is important in knowing when to use a model.

A model by itself comes with no guarantees. It has a potential, though it’s in our power to explore and exploit that potential. Having more models for a situation increases in theory one’s chances to succeed, though there are further aspects to consider like chance, right timing, the competitors, etc. Having a set of models doesn’t automatically equate with better information or intelligence, better or faster problem solving, same as the whish of being in control if one’s life is just an illusion.

One can think of the multitude of models like the pieces a puzzle attempting to reflect contiguous pieces of reality, though more than one model fits in one place, while the pieces can often overlap and change their form depending on context. It’s more of a multilayered impossible to solve puzzle, but day by day one can grasp more from it, and get eventually a better understanding about world’s texture.

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Knowledge Representation: Mental Models, or the Breaking of Complexity

Mental Models Series

To understand how something complex works one has two main tools  - the mechanistic, respectively the holistic approach. The mechanistic approach assumes that something can be understood by breaking it into parts (aka analysis) and then by combining the parts to form the whole (aka synthesis). However, this approach doesn’t always account for everything as there’s behavior and/or characteristics not explainable by the parts themselves. Considering that the whole is more than its parts, the holistic approach studies the interactions of the parts that lead to such unexpected effects (aka synergies), the challenge being to identify those characteristics, circumstances or conditions that lead to or related to these effects. Thus, when these two tools are combined within multiple iterations one can get closer to the essence.

When breaking things into parts we need first to look at the thing or object of study from a bird’s eyes view and identify the things that might look like parts. Even if the object of study looks amorphous, the experience doubled by intuition and perseverance can offer a starting point, and from there one can start iteratively to take things apart until one decides to stop. When and where one stops is a question of possible depth, as allowed by the object itself, by the techniques available or our grasping, respectively by the intended depth  -  the level chosen for approximation.

Between the whole and the lowest perceived components, one has the luxury of experimenting by breaking things apart (physically and/or mentally) and putting things together to form unitary parts  - parts that typically explain one or more functions or characteristics, respectively the whole. In addition, one can play with the object, consider it in a range of contexts, extrapolate its characteristics, identify behavior not explainable by the parts themselves. In the process one arrives to a set of facts (things known or proved to be true), respectively suppositions expressed as beliefs (things hold as true without proof), assumptions (things accepted as true without proof) or hypotheses (things who’s value of truth is not known, typically because of limited evidence).

One builds thus a (mental) model, an abstraction of the object of study. The parts and relations existing between the parts form the skeleton of the model, while the facts and suppositions attempt to give the model form. Unfortunately, models seldom accommodate all the facts, therefore what one ignores or considers into the model can make an important difference on whether the model is of any use. One is forced thus to advance theories on how the skeleton can accommodate the form, how form reflects the facts and suppositions.

Simple models can prove to be useful, especially when they allow approximating the real thing within the considered context. However, the better approximations one needs and/or the broader the context is, more complex the models can become, especially when the number of facts considered as important increases. This can mean that two models or theories can be useful or correct when considered in different contexts but lose their applicability when considered in another context.

Having a repository of models to choose from is usually a helpful thing, especially in understanding more about the object studied. The appropriate usage of a model depends also on understanding its range of applicability within a context or across contexts, the advantages, and disadvantages of using the model. Knowing when to use a model is as important as knowing when not to use it, while understanding the measure of the error associated with a model can make us aware of the risks associated with a model and decisions made based on it.

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Collective Intelligence: Swarm Intelligence (Quotes)

"The best and noblest bees are generated and bred out of the Lion, and the Kings and Princes of them do derive their pedigree and descent from the brain of the Lion, being the most excellent part of his body: it is no wonder therefore if they proceeding and coming from so generous a flock, do assail the greatest beasts, and being endures with Lion-like courage, do fear nothing." (Thomas Moffett, "Theatre of Insects", 1634)

"[….] a great number of […] living and thinking Particles could not possibly by their mutual contract and pressing and striking compose one greater individual Animal, with one Mind and Understanding, and a Vital Consension of the whole Body: anymore than a swarm of Bees, or a crowd of Men and Women can be conceived to make up one particular Living Creature compounded and constituted of the aggregate of them all."(Richard Bentley, "The folly and unreasonableness of atheism", 1699)

"Hence, following the comparison to a bee swarm, it is a whole stuck to a tree branch, by means of the action of many bees which must act in concert to hold on; some others become attached to the initial ones, and so on; all concur in forming a fairly solid body, yet each one has a particular action, apart from the others; if one of them gives way or acts too vigorously, the entire mass will be disturbed: when they all conspire to stick close, to mutually embrace, in the order of required proportions, they will comprise a whole which shall endure until they disturb one another." (Théophile de Bordeu," Recherches anatomiques sur la position des glandes et sur leur action", 1751)

"One could, following these authors, compare man to a flock of cranes which fly together, in a particular order, without mutually assisting or depending on one another. The Physicians or Philosophers who have studied and carefully observed man, have noticed this sympathy in all animal movements – this constant and necessary agreement in the interaction of the various parts, however disparate or distant from one another; they have also noticed the disturbance of the whole that results from the sensory disagreement of a single part. A famous physician [M. de Bordeu] and an illustrious physicist [M. de Maupertuis] likewise compared man, from this luminous and philosophical point of view, to a swarm of bees which strive together to hang to a tree branch. One can see them pressing and sustaining one another, forming a kind of whole, in which each living part contributes in its way, by the correspondence and direction of its movements, to sustain this kind of life of the whole body, if we may refer in this way to a mere connection of actions." (Ménuret de Chambaud, "Observation", Encyclopédie XI [by Diderot 318b-319a], cca. 1751 and 1772)

"Have you ever seen a swarm of bees leaving their hive? [...] The world, or the general mass of matter, is the great hive [...]. Have you seen them fly away and form a long cluster of little winged animals, hanging off the end of the branch of a tree, all clinging on to each other by their feet? [...] This cluster is a being, an individual, some sort of animal [...]. If one of these bees decides to pinch somehow the bee it is clinging onto, do you know what will happen? […] this one will pinch the next one; [...] as many pinching sensations will arise throughout the cluster as there are little animals in it; […] the whole cluster will stir, move and change position and shape […] someone who’d never seen the formation of a cluster like that would be tempted to think it was a single animal with five or six hundred heads and a thousand or twelve hundred wings [...]" (Denis Diderot," Rêve de D’Alembert", 1769)

"If we wish to form a mental representation of what is going on among the molecules in calm air, we cannot do better than observe a swarm of bees, when every individual bee is flying furiously, first in one direction, and then in another, while the swarm, as a whole, either remains at rest, or sails slowly through the air." (James C Maxwell, "Molecules", Nature, 1873)

"At the other far extreme, we find many systems ordered as a patchwork of parallel operations, very much as in the neural network of a brain or in a colony of ants. Action in these systems proceeds in a messy cascade of interdependent events. Instead of the discrete ticks of cause and effect that run a clock, a thousand clock springs try to simultaneously run a parallel system. Since there is no chain of command, the particular action of any single spring diffuses into the whole, making it easier for the sum of the whole to overwhelm the parts of the whole. What emerges from the collective is not a series of critical individual actions but a multitude of simultaneous actions whose collective pattern is far more important. This is the swarm model." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)

"Light a fire, build up the steam, turn on a switch, and a linear system awakens. It’s ready to serve you. If it stalls, restart it. Simple collective systems can be awakened simply. But complex swarm systems with rich hierarchies take time to boot up. The more complex, the longer it takes to warm up. Each hierarchical layer has to settle down; lateral causes have to slosh around and come to rest; a million autonomous agents have to acquaint themselves. I think this will be the hardest lesson for humans to learn: that organic complexity will entail organic time." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)

"Swarm systems generate novelty for three reasons: (1) They are 'sensitive to initial conditions' - a scientific shorthand for saying that the size of the effect is not proportional to the size of the cause - so they can make a surprising mountain out of a molehill. (2) They hide countless novel possibilities in the exponential combinations of many interlinked individuals. (3) They don’t reckon individuals, so therefore individual variation and imperfection can be allowed. In swarm systems with heritability, individual variation and imperfection will lead to perpetual novelty, or what we call evolution." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)

"The internet model has many lessons for the new economy but perhaps the most important is its embrace of dumb swarm power. The aim of swarm power is superior performance in a turbulent environment. When things happen fast and furious, they tend to route around central control. By interlinking many simple parts into a loose confederation, control devolves from the center to the lowest or outermost points, which collectively keep things on course. A successful system, though, requires more than simply relinquishing control completely to the networked mob." (Kevin Kelly, "New Rules for the New Economy: 10 radical strategies for a connected world", 1998)

"Dumb parts, properly connected into a swarm, yield smart results." (Kevin Kelly, "New Rules for the New Economy", 1999)

"It is, however, fair to say that very few applications of swarm intelligence have been developed. One of the main reasons for this relative lack of success resides in the fact that swarm-intelligent systems are hard to 'program', because the paths to problem solving are not predefined but emergent in these systems and result from interactions among individuals and between individuals and their environment as much as from the behaviors of the individuals themselves. Therefore, using a swarm-intelligent system to solve a problem requires a thorough knowledge not only of what individual behaviors must be implemented but also of what interactions are needed to produce such or such global behavior." (Eric Bonabeau et al, "Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems", 1999)

"[…] when software systems become so intractable that they can no longer be controlled, swarm intelligence offers an alternative way of designing an ‘intelligent’ systems, in which autonomy, emergence, and distributed functioning replace control, preprogramming, and centralization." (Eric Bonabeau et al, "Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems", 1999)

"Agent subroutines may pass information back and forth, but subroutines are not changed as a result of the interaction, as people are. In real social interaction, information is exchanged, but also something else, perhaps more important: individuals exchange rules, tips, beliefs about how to process the information. Thus a social interaction typically results in a change in the thinking processes - not just the contents - of the participants." (James F Kennedy et al, "Swarm Intelligence", 2001)

"Just what valuable insights do ants, bees, and other social insects hold? Consider termites. Individually, they have meager intelligence. And they work with no supervision. Yet collectively they build mounds that are engineering marvels, able to maintain ambient temperature and comfortable levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide even as the nest grows. Indeed, for social insects teamwork is largely self-organized, coordinated primarily through the interactions of individual colony members. Together they can solve difficult problems (like choosing the shortest route to a food source from myriad possible pathways) even though each interaction might be very simple (one ant merely following the trail left by another). The collective behavior that emerges from a group of social insects has been dubbed 'swarm intelligence'." (Eric Bonabeau & Christopher Meyer, Swarm Intelligence: A Whole New Way to Think About Business, Harvard Business Review, 2001)

"[…] swarm intelligence is becoming a valuable tool for optimizing the operations of various businesses. Whether similar gains will be made in helping companies better organize themselves and develop more effective strategies remains to be seen. At the very least, though, the field provides a fresh new framework for solving such problems, and it questions the wisdom of certain assumptions regarding the need for employee supervision through command-and-control management. In the future, some companies could build their entire businesses from the ground up using the principles of swarm intelligence, integrating the approach throughout their operations, organization, and strategy. The result: the ultimate self-organizing enterprise that could adapt quickly - and instinctively - to fast-changing markets." (Eric Bonabeau & Christopher Meyer, "Swarm Intelligence: A Whole New Way to Think About Business", Harvard Business Review, 2001)

"Through self-organization, the behavior of the group emerges from the collective interactions of all the individuals. In fact, a major recurring theme in swarm intelligence (and of complexity science in general) is that even if individuals follow simple rules, the resulting group behavior can be surprisingly complex - and remarkably effective. And, to a large extent, flexibility and robustness result from self-organization." (Eric Bonabeau & Christopher Meyer, "Swarm Intelligence: A Whole New Way to Think About Business", Harvard Business Review, 2001)

"Many ants, all obeying simple rules, create the order that we see in an ant colony. This is an example of what has come to be known as swarm intelligence: behaviour or design that emerges out of simple responses by many individuals. Understanding how this happens is important in designing systems of components that have to coordinate their behaviour to achieve a desired result. Knowledge of the way order emerges in an ant colony, for instance, has been applied to create the so-called ant sort algorithm, which is used in contexts where items need to be sorted constantly, without any knowledge of the overall best plan." (David G Green, "The Serendipity Machine: A voyage of discovery through the unexpected world of computers", 2004)

"The most familiar example of swarm intelligence is the human brain. Memory, perception and thought all arise out of the nett actions of billions of individual neurons. As we saw earlier, artificial neural networks (ANNs) try to mimic this idea. Signals from the outside world enter via an input layer of neurons. These pass the signal through a series of hidden layers, until the result emerges from an output layer. Each neuron modifies the signal in some simple way. It might, for instance, convert the inputs by plugging them into a polynomial, or some other simple function. Also, the network can learn by modifying the strength of the connections between neurons in different layers." (David G Green, "The Serendipity Machine: A voyage of discovery through the unexpected world of computers", 2004)

"It is not only a metaphor to transform the Internet to a superbrain with self-organizing features of learning and adapting. Information retrieval is already realized by neural networks adapting to the information preferences of a human user with synaptic plasticity. In sociobiology, we can learn from populations of ants and termites how to organize traffic and information processing by swarm intelligence. From a technical point of view, we need intelligent programs distributed in the nets. There are already more or less intelligent virtual organisms {'agents'), learning, self-organizing and adapting to our individual preferences of information, to select our e-mails, to prepare economic transactions or to defend the attacks of hostile computer viruses, like the immune system of our body." (Klaus Mainzer, "Complexity Management in the Age of Globalization", 2006)

"Swarm Intelligence can be defined more precisely as: Any attempt to design algorithms or distributed problem-solving methods inspired by the collective behavior of the social insect colonies or other animal societies. The main properties of such systems are flexibility, robustness, decentralization and self-organization." ("Swarm Intelligence in Data Mining", Ed. Ajith Abraham et al, 2006)

"How is it that an ant colony can organize itself to carry out the complex tasks of food gathering and nest building and at the same time exhibit an enormous degree of resilience if disrupted and forced to adapt to changing situations? Natural systems are able not only to survive, but also to adapt and become better suited to their environment, in effect optimizing their behavior over time. They seemingly exhibit collective intelligence, or swarm intelligence as it is called, even without the existence of or the direction provided by a central authority." (Michael J North & Charles M Macal, "Managing Business Complexity: Discovering Strategic Solutions with Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation", 2007)

"Swarm intelligence can be effective when applied to highly complicated problems with many nonlinear factors, although it is often less effective than the genetic algorithm approach discussed later in this chapter. Swarm intelligence is related to swarm optimization […]. As with swarm intelligence, there is some evidence that at least some of the time swarm optimization can produce solutions that are more robust than genetic algorithms. Robustness here is defined as a solution’s resistance to performance degradation when the underlying variables are changed." (Michael J North & Charles M Macal, "Managing Business Complexity: Discovering Strategic Solutions with Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation", 2007)

"Swarm intelligence is sometimes also referred to as mob intelligence. Swarm intelligence uses large groups of agents to solve complicated problems. Swarm intelligence uses a combination of accumulation, teamwork, and voting to produce solutions. Accumulation occurs when agents contribute parts of a solution to a group. Teamwork occurs when different agents or subgroups of agents accidentally or purposefully work on different parts of a large problem. Voting occurs when agents propose solutions or components of solutions and the other agents vote explicitly by rating the proposal’s quality or vote implicitly by choosing whether to follow the proposal." (Michael J North & Charles M Macal, "Managing Business Complexity: Discovering Strategic Solutions with Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation", 2007)

"Refers to a class of algorithms inspired by the collective behaviour of insect swarms, ant colonies, the flocking behaviour of some bird species, or the herding behaviour of some mammals, such that the behaviour of the whole can be considered as exhibiting a rudimentary form of 'intelligence'." (John Fulcher, "Intelligent Information Systems", 2009)

"The property of a system whereby the collective behaviors of unsophisticated agents interacting locally with their environment cause coherent functional global patterns to emerge." (M L Gavrilova, "Adaptive Algorithms for Intelligent Geometric Computing", 2009) 

"Is a discipline that deals with natural and artificial systems composed of many individuals that coordinate using decentralized control and self-organization. In particular, SI focuses on the collective behaviors that result from the local interactions of the individuals with each other and with their environment." (Elina Pacini et al, "Schedulers Based on Ant Colony Optimization for Parameter Sweep Experiments in Distributed Environments", 2013)

"Swarm intelligence illustrates the complex and holistic way in which the world operates. Order is created from chaos; patterns are revealed; and systems are free to work out their errors and problems at their own level. What natural systems can teach humanity is truly amazing." (Lawrence K Samuels, "Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action", 2013)

"Swarm intelligence (SI) is a branch of computational intelligence that discusses the collective behavior emerging within self-organizing societies of agents. SI was inspired by the observation of the collective behavior in societies in nature such as the movement of birds and fish. The collective behavior of such ecosystems, and their artificial counterpart of SI, is not encoded within the set of rules that determines the movement of each isolated agent, but it emerges through the interaction of multiple agents." (Maximos A Kaliakatsos-Papakostas et al, "Intelligent Music Composition", 2013)

"Ants exhibit a 'neuron-like' behavior insofar as inactive ants have a low propensity to become spontaneously active, but can become excited by other ants with whom they come into contact. [...] Conversely, ants are prone to lapse back into inactivity if their activation is not sufficiently reinforced, and even exhibit a short refractory period (similar to neurons) before they can be reactivated – a mechanism which keeps the swarm from getting permanently 'locked' into an excitatory state." (Georg Theiner & John Sutton, "The collaborative emergence of group cognition", 2014) 

"These nature-inspired algorithms gradually became more and more attractive and popular among the evolutionary computation research community, and together they were named swarm intelligence, which became the little brother of the major four evolutionary computation algorithms." (Yuhui Shi, "Emerging Research on Swarm Intelligence and Algorithm Optimization", Information Science Reference, 2014)

"Collective intelligence of societies of biological (social animals) or artificial (robots, computer agents) individuals. In artificial intelligence, it gave rise to a computational paradigm based on decentralisation, self-organisation, local interactions, and collective emergent behaviours." (D T Pham & M Castellani, "The Bees Algorithm as a Biologically Inspired Optimisation Method", 2015)

"It is the field of artificial intelligence in which the population is in the form of agents which search in a parallel fashion with multiple initialization points. The swarm intelligence-based algorithms mimic the physical and natural processes for mathematical modeling of the optimization algorithm. They have the properties of information interchange and non-centralized control structure." (Sajad A Rather & P Shanthi Bala, "Analysis of Gravitation-Based Optimization Algorithms for Clustering and Classification", 2020)

"It is the discipline dealing with natural and artificial systems consisting of many individuals who coordinate through decentralized monitoring and self-organization." (Mehmet A Cifci, "Optimizing WSNs for CPS Using Machine Learning Techniques", 2021)

"Human beings suffer from a 'centralized mindset'; they would like to assign the coordination of activities to a central command. But the way social insects form highways and other amazing structures such as bridges, chains, nests (by the way, African fungus-growing termites have invented air conditioning) and can perform complex tasks (nest building, defense, cleaning, brood care, foraging, etc) is very different: they self-organize through direct and indirect interactions." (Eric Bonabeau)

"The most amazing thing about social insect colonies is that there's no individual in charge. If you look at a single ant, you may have the impression that it is behaving, if not randomly, at least not in synchrony with the rest of the colony. You feel that it is doing its own things without paying too much attention to what the others are doing." (Eric Bonabeau)

Collective Intelligence: On Collective Intelligence (Quotes)

"We must therefore establish a form of decision-making in which voters need only ever pronounce on simple propositions, expressing their opinions only with a yes or a no. […] Clearly, if anyone’s vote was self-contradictory (intransitive), it would have to be discounted, and we should therefore establish a form of voting which makes such absurdities impossible." (Nicolas de Condorcet, "On the form of decisions made by plurality vote", 1788)

"Collective wisdom, alas, is no adequate substitute for the intelligence of individuals. Individuals who opposed received opinions have been the source of all progress, both moral and intellectual. They have been unpopular, as was natural." (Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not a Christian", 1927)

"The collective intelligence of any group of people who are thinking as a 'herd' rather than individually is no higher than the intelligence of the stupidest members." (Mary Day Winn, "Adam's Rib", 1931)

"Learning is a property of all living organisms. […] Since organized groups can be looked upon as living entities, they can be expected to exhibit learning […]" (Winfred B. Hirschmann, "Profit from the Learning Curve", Harvard Business Review, 1964)

"A cardinal principle in systems theory is that all parties that have a stake in a system should be represented in its management." (Malcolm S Knowles, "The Adult Learner", 1973)

"Collective intelligence emerges when a group of people work together effectively. Collective intelligence can be additive (each adds his or her part which together form the whole) or it can be synergetic, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." (Trudy and Peter Johnson-Lenz, "Groupware: Orchestrating the Emergence of Collective Intelligence", cca. 1980)

"Cybernetic information theory suggests the possibility of assuming that intelligence is a feature of any feedback system that manifests a capacity for learning." (Paul Hawken et al, "Seven Tomorrows", 1982)

"The concept of organizational learning refers to the capacity of organizational complexes to develop experiential knowledge, instincts, and 'feel' or intuition which are greater than the combined knowledge, skills and instincts of the individuals involved." (Don E. Kash, "Perpetual Innovation", 1989)

"We haven't worked on ways to develop a higher social intelligence […] We need this higher intelligence to operate socially or we're not going to survive. […] If we don't manage things socially, individual high intelligence is not going to make much difference. [...] Ordinary thought in society is incoherent - it is going in all sorts of directions, with thoughts conflicting and canceling each other out. But if people were to think together in a coherent way, it would have tremendous power." (David Bohm, "New Age Journal", 1989)

"Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation. […] Civilization, like intelligence, may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive function. When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by unifying internal or external forces." (Octavia E Butler, "Parable of the Sower", 1993)

"Great leaders reinforce the idea that accomplishment in our society comes from great individual acts. We credit individuals for outcomes that required teams and communities to accomplish." (Peter Block, "Stewardship", 1993)

"We must learn to think together in an integrated, synergistic fashion, rather than in fragmented and competitive ways." (Joanna Macy, Noetic Sciences Bulletin, 1994-1995)

"The leading edge of growth of intelligence is at the cultural and societal level. It is like a mind that is struggling to wake up. This is necessary because the most difficult problems we face are now collective ones. They are caused by complex global interactions and are beyond the scope of individuals to understand and solve. Individual mind, with its isolated viewpoints and narrow interests, is no longer enough." (Jeff Wright, "Basic Beliefs", [email] 1995)

"It [collective intelligence] is a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills. I'll add the following indispensable characteristic to this definition: The basis and goal of collective intelligence is mutual recognition and enrichment of individuals rather than the cult of fetishized or hypostatized communities." (Pierre Levy, "Collective Intelligence", 1999)

The three basic mechanisms of averaging, feedback and division of labor give us a first idea of a how a CMM [Collective Mental Map] can be developed in the most efficient way, that is, how a given number of individuals can achieve a maximum of collective problem-solving competence. A collective mental map is developed basically by superposing a number of individual mental maps. There must be sufficient diversity among these individual maps to cover an as large as possible domain, yet sufficient redundancy so that the overlap between maps is large enough to make the resulting graph fully connected, and so that each preference in the map is the superposition of a number of individual preferences that is large enough to cancel out individual fluctuations. The best way to quickly expand and improve the map and fill in gaps is to use a positive feedback that encourages individuals to use high preference paths discovered by others, yet is not so strong that it discourages the exploration of new paths." (Francis Heylighen, "Collective Intelligence and its Implementation on the Web", 1999)

"With the growing interest in complex adaptive systems, artificial life, swarms and simulated societies, the concept of “collective intelligence” is coming more and more to the fore. The basic idea is that a group of individuals (e. g. people, insects, robots, or software agents) can be smart in a way that none of its members is. Complex, apparently intelligent behavior may emerge from the synergy created by simple interactions between individuals that follow simple rules." (Francis Heylighen, "Collective Intelligence and its Implementation on the Web", 1999)

"Cultures are never merely intellectual constructs. They take form through the collective intelligence and memory, through a commonly held psychology and emotions, through spiritual and artistic communion." (Tariq Ramadan, "Islam and the Arab Awakening", 2012)

"[…] recent researchers in artificial intelligence and computational methods use the term swarm intelligence to name collective and distributed techniques of problem solving without centralized control or provision of a global model. […] the intelligence of the swarm is based fundamentally on communication. […] the member of the multitude do not have to become the same or renounce their creativity in order to communicate and cooperate with each other. They remain different in terms of race, sex, sexuality and so forth. We need to understand, then, is the collective intelligence that can emerge from the communication and cooperation of such varied multiplicity." (Antonio Negri, "Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire", 2004)

"Collective Intelligence (CI) is the capacity of human collectives to engage in intellectual cooperation in order to create, innovate, and invent." (Pierre Levy, "Toward a Self-referential Collective Intelligence", 2009)

"How is it that an ant colony can organize itself to carry out the complex tasks of food gathering and nest building and at the same time exhibit an enormous degree of resilience if disrupted and forced to adapt to changing situations? Natural systems are able not only to survive, but also to adapt and become better suited to their environment, in effect optimizing their behavior over time. They seemingly exhibit collective intelligence, or swarm intelligence as it is called, even without the existence of or the direction provided by a central authority." (Michael J North & Charles M Macal, "Managing Business Complexity: Discovering Strategic Solutions with Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation", 2007)