Mental models in (and of) individuals and collectives - WebSystemer.no

In Towards a theory of superminds, I describe a theory of collective intelligence based on the active inference framework pioneered by Karl Friston. As required by active inference, that theory implies that all collectives (such as teams and organizations) operate on the basis of an implicit collective model of the world -- which provides them with the ability to make sense of observations and to predict outcomes of alternative courses of action ("policies" in Friston-speak). If we buy into the theorem that any Markov blanket (causally atomic subsystem) can always be described as performing some form of approximate active inference, this isn't polemical at all. Yet, as I've come to understand, there is something deeply counterintuitive in the conclusion. The fact that needs to be explained is that, unlike people, animals, unicellular beings, and even artificial agents, collectives are composed of clearly distinct and autonomous constituents -- and yet are capable of acting as collectives. This collective action can be as simple as the coherent motion of a flock of birds, or as complex as the financial markets incorporating sophisticated information about expectations of the future into asset prices (or for that matter, a corporation acting out a complex business strategy and production structure); the salient point is that the constituents are autonomous (and, at least for the examples involving humans, will tell you they follow their own free will), and yet the collective can be very accurately described as an agent in its own right. It turns out that fully resolving this apparent contradiction requires gaining a thorough understanding of what these models are, which I will attempt to do in this post.