Understanding the concept of collective intelligence offers one lens for understanding the decentralized self, as all intelligence may be viewed as a form of collective intelligence (see Falandays et al. 2022). From slime molds and ant colonies, to the human brain, culture, and even evolutionary processes, all can be seen as instances of intelligent problem solving that are emergent from the simple agent behaviors at the lower level of organization (note that this does not at all imply that evolution is a process of “Intelligent Design”, it is not). Understanding the decentralized origins of diverse intelligences around the world provides a rich set of examples to build an intuitive understanding of your own decentralized self.

The metaphor of the body as a multicellular ‘political state’ has a long history across cultures, and was the subject of scientific discourse, particularly in the late 19th and early 20th century rise of biological sciences (see Reynolds 2008). The metaphor draws on human reasoning about the collective agency of human societies to attenuate our understandings of the biological regulation among cellular ‘constituents‘ within an organism. The metaphor invites challenging questions regarding ‘who’, if anyone, is in charge? What kind of ‘governance system’ is a biological organism? The cell state metaphor is one that breaks down rather quickly, but in doing so, may guide us to a more intuitive understanding of the massively decentralized and flexibly coordinated regulatory dynamics of evolving biological systems. 

“It’s a jungle in there!” according to the cognitive scientist David Rosenbaum (2014). Drawing on diverse traditions in psychology, neurobiology, and cognitive sciences, Rosenbaum highlights how the analogy of an evolving ecosystem can help illuminate the decentralized causal dynamics of our brains and minds. As neural networks cooperate and compete for the limited renewable resources of our brain, our mind (the information processing capacities of our brain) becomes better adapted to some aspects of the environment.

If the jungle metaphor is a bit too wild for you, perhaps a garden is more your style. The garden has long been a metaphor for the interaction of agency and decentralized causes within self and society (e.g. see Liu & Hannauer 2011). Seeding and weeding, adapting to seasonal change and sudden shifts of day-to-day weather all provide rich fodder for understanding the complex historical contingencies and causal interdependencies among elements within ourselves and our societies. 

The human brain is a like a society managing common-pool resources, with populations of neurons and neural networks cooperating and competing for limited computational resources.

The human brain is a biological organ, fully dependent on the limited renewable resources afforded to it by the body. The brain is also a population in its own right, a vast ‘society’ of cells that, collectively, influence the behaviors of the human they are in (see e.g. Minsky 1988, Edelman 1993, Rosenbaum 2014, Dennett 2017). 

The complex systems dynamics that emerge because our brain is a population of cells cooperating and competing for resources represent a unique nexus for interdisciplinary learning. 

see also: Internal Family Systems (Schwartz & Sweezy 2019)

Research and perspectives on the neurocognition of religious and mystical-type experiences across cultures and contexts suggest that a common underlying pattern of cultural cognition may help unify our understanding of these unique dimensions of human experiencing (McNamara 2022). This process of decentering involves a shift from the view of self-as-agent, to grappling with the experience of a decentralized self, and finally a re-integration with the self-as-agent within a broader context of social bonds or personal meaning.

Critically, decentering may occur in a vast space of experiential valence (from stronger mystical-type experiences to more everyday meditations on self-understanding). Thus, creating cultural technologies (e.g. therapies and educational curricula) that enable greater contextual control over this agential-decentralized space of experience may be possible and, perhaps, desirable.

Many cross-cultural and scientific perspectives have converged on the insight that every human individual is (and indeed, all multicellular organisms are), simultaneously, a population, of cells, and selves (Fadiman & Gruber 2020). Our multiple selves are intuitively revealed in our everyday language as when one might say something like “I wasn’t my self last night”, or “Part of me wanted to go the party, but part of me just wanted to stay home”. From a scientific perspective, the unified sense of self is emergent from a diversity of processes that may be variously coordinated or not. 

Mental health and well-being is tightly correlated, albeit in complex ways, with our capacities to reason about, and work cooperatively with, our multiple selves. 

The human capacity for decentering, and the scientific foundations for conceptualizing individuals as populations or multiple selves, has led some to suggest or describe the self as an ‘illusion’ (see Hood 2012).

A metaphor to economic currency may be helpful in this realm. Money is a ‘real’ phenomenon, however, absent a cultural narrative, money is also a collective fiction we agree to abide by, money has no ‘real’ value beyond what we agree to perceive it to have. Money, in this sense, is an ‘illusion’ we agree to for the functioning of society. 

In this way, it can be argued that the self, our understanding of ourselves as individuals, is a constructed illusion, for the purposes of functioning within societies. 

If the view that the self is an illusion sounds too strange, or perhaps too disconcerting, perhaps it may be helpful to think about yourself as “context”. The concept of Self-as-Context is a core principle within the tradition of Contextual Behavioral Science and the practice of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) (see Hayes et al. 2020, Godbee & Kangas 2020).

Self-as-context suggests viewing oneself not as the content of our thoughts and feelings, but as a conscious experience of those populations of thoughts and feelings, as a system of interacting parts evolving in relation to the broader environment, and capable of flexible adaptation under certain conditions that we can work to cultivate. Adopting the self-as-context view may help promote cognitive defusion, or the non-attached experiencing of difficult thoughts and feelings. This cognitive defusion may further help develop psychological flexibility, the capacity to persist or change behaviors in relation to valued ways of living. Thus, adopting a self-as-context view is associated with a range of mental and physical health outcomes.

Human societies function as collective brains, with individuals in social networks cooperating and competing to drive adaptive innovations, much like neurons within neural networks. 

This analogy may contradict our intuitive ways of thinking about the origins of human cultural innovations.

Learning and evolution are both concepts for processes of adaptive change. However, learning and evolution may be variously conceptualized by different experts as either fundamentally different in nature, or as having significant conceptual commonalities (while also exhibiting clear differences). 

For those who emphasize the fundamental differences between these concepts, learning may be viewed as a more purposeful, goal-directed process occurring within the lifetime of individuals, with evolution being viewed as a purposeless, undirected process occurring within populations over generations of individuals. We feel this perspective offers an overly narrow view of both learning and evolution.

For us, and many others across the history of science, both learning and evolution can be understood to involve adaptation driven by agency-independent contextual factors (i.e. ‘mindless’ or ‘purposeless’ causal factors such as environmental conditions), as well as influences from the agency of an individual or external agent (i.e. the goals and purposes of agents in the environment; see also, our thinking tool: The Triad). 

If the view of an individual-as-population is adopted, then learning can be conceptualized as a process of intra-indiviudal evolution among the relationships between entities within the ecosystem of the self (e.g. a change in the strength and structure of neural networks or conceptual networks).  

See more on our Learning:Evolution Analogy page within the Understanding Agency project.