Secrets of superorganisms

In Stanislaw Lem's science fiction novel, The Invincible, humans land on a remote planet which at first seems uninhabited till they discover a bizarre form of "life" — tiny self-replicating insect-like automatons left behind by aliens.

Individually or in small groups, the miniscule machines are harmless and only capable of performing a few simple actions. However, when bothered or threatened they can instantly organise themselves into huge swarms and display extremely intricate behaviour, including soaring at high speed to release deadly radiation that can destroy intruders.

It was one of the first stories that exploited the concept of nano robots, artificial swarm intelligence and the idea of superorganisms — a collection of agents which can act in concert to produce phenomena governed by the collective. Yet these ideas are neither new nor limited to machines in the realm of science fiction because several highly social organisms right here on Earth such as ants, termites, wasps and bees have been exhibiting similar characteristics for many millions of years.

Termite mounds for example often have elaborate galleries, chimneys and elongated flutes in order to control air flow to manage temperature and humidity inside, even though a single termite by itself has no idea of how to build a nest. Meaning, forget about visualising design from scratch, worker termites who are blind can't even see the overall finished product they end up with! If that's an example of swarm intelligence at work, ants go one better. Not only do they have an extensive caste system but can find the shortest route to a food source, farm other insects such as aphids to collect the honeydew they secrete, and enslave rival ant colonies to take care of the nest. Yet, again, an individual ant is a very simple creature with a simple brain which is neither capable of feeding efficiently nor surviving by itself for long.

So astonishing is this shared or group intelligence emerging from the collaboration and cooperation of many individuals that even today scientists are trying hard to come to terms with it. They call it emergent phenomenon; the development of new and complex properties which arise spontaneously during the process of self-organisation. But it's still not fully understood. In fact, 150 years ago, it baffled Darwin so completely that in Origin of Species he called it the "one special difficulty, which at first appeared to me insuperable and actually fatal to my theory".

At the same time, emergent phenomena or the notion that the whole is not the sum of its parts interested philosophers for it might explain the origin of life, mind, consciousness, spirituality and ultimately the Divine.

For, if we substitute Lem's tiny machines with chemical molecules that interacted with one another in the primordial soup from which life is said to have arisen on Earth, then life can be seen as the property of swarm intelligence of a superorganism — an emergent phenomenon that arose from highly organised but ultimately simple inanimate matter.

Similarly, consciousness, psyche or a sense of self can also be viewed as the emergent property of brain cells. Individually, such neurons can do little by themselves except fire from time to time and carry electrochemical impulses. But when interconnectivity of their structure approaches a critical level of complexity, they begin to behave like a superorganism exhibiting unique new properties which can accomplish mental feats that only full-blown minds are able to. Or as American polymath Douglas Hofstadter puts it: "The soul is the hum of its parts".

How difficult is it after this to imagine the kind of a superorganism the collective complexity of sentient beings like us could generate over time — such as the Gaia hypothesis which proposes that all organisms and their inorganic surroundings on Earth are closely integrated to form a single self-regulating system? Its emergent properties could, indeed, be godlike.