There is a body of work in cognitive science that suggests that intelligence is what emerges from communication between unintelligent agents. Marvin Minsky's b

There is a body of work in cognitive science that suggests that intelligence is what emerges from communication between unintelligent agents. Marvin Minsky's book "The Society of Mind" is an older but pretty complete treatise of this idea. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind "In a step-by-step process, Minsky constructs a model of human intelligence which is built up from the interactions of simple parts called agents, which are themselves mindless. He describes the postulated interactions as constituting a "society of mind", hence the title." I don't think that consciousness or intelligence is merely binary. There can be and are varying degrees of intelligence that show up all over nature. Dolphins and primates are easy to point to as consciousness that probably is most similar to our own. Dogs, cats, wolves; they all have varying degrees of what we consider intelligence. To take this even further i'll pose this thought-adventure. Is a single ant conscious? Is a single bee conscious? Hive systems at least appear to have a kind of intelligence. There are termite colonies that have reasonably sophisticated air conditioning systems. Are the chemical and physical messages sent back and forth between insect agents all that different from the communication between subsystems in our brains or the individual components of siri's architecture? All of this is very theoretical, but at least a fine thought adventure for a friday morning.