Swarm Intelligence

chapter

five

Humans—Actual, Imagined,

and Implied

In painting the background for the particle

swarm, we are developing a perspective of

the individual mind embedded inextricably in

its social context. But it is hard to establish

what exactly is meant by “mind.” It is a word

with no definition, because all attempts to

define it are necessarily circular. The exis-

tence of mind is self-evident and only self-

evident, known only by direct experience

of one’s own mind and inference of other

people’s—or is it through inference that we

know our own minds, too?

In this chapter we introduce some ideas

from the social sciences, focusing as before

on computer simulations ...