From Neural and Social Cooperation to the Global Emergence of Cognition

Abstract

The recent article (Turalska et al., 2012) discusses the emergence of intelligence via criticality as a consequence of locality breakdown. Herein, we use criticality for the foundation of a novel generation of game theory making the local interaction between players yield long-range effects. We first establish that criticality is not confined to the Ising-like structure of the sociological model of (Turalska et al., 2012), called the decision making model (DMM), through the study of the emergence of altruism using the altruism-selfishness model (ASM). Both models generate criticality, one by imitation of opinion (DMM) and the other by imitation of behavior (ASM). The dynamics of a sociological network 𝒮 influences the behavioral network ℱ through two game theoretic paradigms: (i) the value of altruism; (ii) the benefit of rapid consensus. In (i), the network 𝒮 debates the moral issue of altruism by means of the DMM, while at the level ℱ the individuals operate according to the ASM. The individuals of the level 𝒮, through a weak influence on the individuals of the level ℱ, exert a societal control on ℱ, fitting the principle of complexity management and complexity matching. In (ii), the benefit to society is the rapid attainment of consensus in the 𝒮 level. The agents of the level ℱ operate according to the prisoner’s dilemma prescription, with the defectors acting as DMM contrarians at the level 𝒮. The contrarians, acting as the inhibitory links of neural networks, exert on society the same beneficial effect of maintaining the criticality-induced resilience that they generate in neural networks. The conflict between personal and social benefit makes the networks evolve toward criticality. Finally, we show that the theory of this article is compatible with recent discoveries in the burgeoning field of social neuroscience.

Self‐Organized Temporal Criticality: Bottom‐Up Resilience versus Top‐Down Vulnerability

“…Herein individuals make decision using DMM. The individuals of the social network aiming at increasing their payoff make the control parameter , for individual , evolve towards criticality, thereby creating an intelligent group mind [34], perhaps connected to the intelligent unconscious of Gigerenzer [33], leading the individuals to fast but essentially wise decisions. As we shall see, the time evolution of is slow, because it depends on the payoffs of the individual at earlier time, corresponding to the slow thinking mechanism discussed by Kahneman [29].…”

Criticality triggers the emergence of collective intelligence in groups

“…the ability to make decisions leading to high values of the group fitness) emerges just at the critical transition. Literature [64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73][74] ascribes the emergence of collective intelligence to high values of mutual information and to an increase of information flow among the members of the group. However, in this study we are not interested in determining the level of mutual information among the members of the group, which is a points already sufficiently investigated in the literature.…”

“…In particular, we focus on the behavior of the system at criticality, where a phase transition and a significant amount of information exchange occur, and study how these conditions are related to the emergence of collective intelligence of the group. Recent investigations, indeed, suggest, that criticality and large amounts of information flow are the conditions leading to the emergence of collective intelligence [64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73][74].…”

Nonergodic complexity management

“…The list of practical applications is not limited to networks of neurophysiological interest. We believe that the emergence of cognition occurs at criticality [52]. Criticality generates temporal complexity [41,50,51] and consequently the analysis of the transfer of information from a sociological (psychological) network to another requires the adoption of the theoretical and numerical prescriptions afforded by this article.…”