ABSTRACT
Repeated interactions between animals can generate stable patterns of collective behavior (Couzin, 2009). For example, colonies of eusocial insects can make collective decisions about where to build their nests, and where to forage (Reid et al., 2015; Sasaki et al., 2013; Seeley, 1995; 2010). And people working together develop the skills that are required to fly commercial airplanes, and to navigate modern naval vessels (Hutchins, 1995a; 1995b). In each of these cases, and in many others as well, computational models have provided useful insights about the nature and structure of group-level behavior; and some philosophers have suggested that such models provide a plausible foundation for thinking about collective mentality. But while group structure often impacts individual computations, and shapes individual mentality, it is substantially less clear whether these group-level computations ever yield forms of group-mindedness. By looking to coordination dynamics, we can begin to understand how the strength of informational relations between the components of distributed systems can stabilize collective behavior (Anderson, Richardson, and Chemero, 2012). But it is more difficult to say when such relations yield collective mentality.
