Ants Build Complex Structures With a Few Simple Rules

In this case though, I don't think that resource limits apply that much. Individual ants feed each other, so they can survive quite long periods without food, and they don't grow much beyond carrying capacity. If circumstances change, they can do a "soft landing" by downsizing the colony slowly or even moving the colony.

In fact, colony size seems to be most often limited by burning off excess capital in sexual broods.

Compared with most other insects, ants are actually much worse at building up biomass. But the queen ant's survival is actually safer because the colony manages risk and growth.

Some aspects of our work have been trickling into the mainstream. But if you don't assume that the mechanisms of mind are computations on representations, then it is very difficult to get a job without compromising your principles.

And perhaps you could argue that the mainstream thinks this system of computations is the result of self-organization on some lower level. And I wouldn't disagree. But for the majority of the field that is just lip service. Their research goals are to uncover the algorithms that the mind is running. There's no self-organization at that level.

Of course there are always exceptions. But if anyone is still reading this and is interested I can provide literature staking out the relevant positions.

But, I don't think any approach to consciousness can be considered a large arm of cognitive science. Most cognitive scientists don't want to touch consciousness with a ten-foot pole. But of course you're right that connectionism lives on.

Let me try to explain the kind of self-organization I have in mind. Consider the fundamental question "how is behavior organized"? The behaviorists pointed to organization in the environment. Cognitivists point to organization of internal representations. Connectionists and similar approaches point to organization of neural structures. Yes, something intelligent emerges from simple, perhaps self-organized, components in this scheme. But they are unwilling to take self-organization to the level of behavior.

In my opinion, a true self-organizational approach to behavior is to say that behavior emerges from the interaction between organism and environment. This is the level at which we need to accept self-organization. It is far from the mainstream. The mainstream approach to vision, for example, starts with the retinal image and asks what can be inferred from it. Yes, maybe they say that this inference engine is itself a self-organized structure. But it still reifies an input-process-output view of cognition. The sensory system receives input, constructs a model of the world. The "higher cognitive" centers formulate plans from this model. The action system instantiates these plans.

To bring it back to the ants: The ants demonstrate what can be done without explicit planning. Modern cognitive science studies explicit planning, even if they agree that this capability emerges from simple components.

As I said in the other post, I could provide literature if you are interested in any of these specific debates.

Sure, we can model their collective behaviour using simple rules and randomness. Yet this says little about individuals' motivations. Similarly, one can model parts of an economy. Yet a software agent does not have the inner sense of a person. A visiting alien with no comprehension of humans' subjective perspective might well (wrongly) consider our cities as we tend to see ants' colonies; just an artifact of some basic economic rules.

Though genetic influence is likely more attenuated.