Together or Separately: Dilemmas of Group Work in Professional Creativity

The main purpose of the paper is to provide a concise account of the advantages and disadvantages of group work in the activity of professional artists cooperating in various creative teams. The analyzed data comes from three different sources: the authors’ own experience gained through their work as part of various focus groups, other authors’ research results found in the publications on creatology, and the authors’ own investigative work. The aspects of teamwork (group mind) as well as limitations and drawbacks of team work in groups (group thinking) are discussed in the first part of the paper. The second part describes select results of research conducted over the last few years among Polish female artists and film and theatre directors working on joint projects in creative teams. The study examined the determinants of the women’s creative careers. The final section includes a number of conclusions that aim to answer the question posed in the title of the paper.

An emergent group mind across a swarm of robots: Collective cognition and distributed sensing via a shared wireless neural network

We pose the “trained-at-runtime heterogeneous swarm response problem,” in which a swarm of robots must do the following three things: (1) Learn to differentiate between multiple classes of environmental feature patterns (where the feature patterns are distributively sensed across all robots in the swarm). (2) Perform the particular collective behavior that is the appropriate response to the feature pattern that the swarm recognizes in the environment at runtime (where a collective behavior is defined by a mapping of robot actions to robots). (3) The data required for both (1) and (2) is uploaded to the swarm after it has been deployed, i.e., also at runtime (the data required for (1) is the specific environmental feature patterns that the swarm should learn to differentiate between, and the data required for (2) is the mapping from feature classes to swarm behaviors). To solve this problem, we propose a new form of emergent distributed neural network that we call an “artificial group mind.” The group mind transforms a robotic swarm into a single meta-computer that can be programmed at runtime. In particular, the swarm-spanning artificial neural network emerges as each robot maintains a slice of neurons and forms wireless neural connections between its neurons and those on nearby robots. The nearby robots are discovered at runtime. Experiments on real swarms containing up to 316 robots demonstrate that the group mind enables collective decision-making based on distributed sensor data, and solves the trained-at-runtime heterogeneous swarm response problem. The group mind is a new tool that can be used to create more complex emergent swarm behaviors. The group mind also enables swarm behaviors to be a function of global patterns observed across the environment—where the patterns are orders of magnitude larger than the robots themselves.

The Emergence of Persons Great and Small

This chapter turns specifically to the question of personhood, offering an emergent ontology of human persons at both the biological and psychological levels. These “individuals” prove to be internally composite and externally open to further combination. The discussion then moves to consider these “external” combinations. In somatic terms, this involves discussion of biology’s history of determining the biological “individual,” and the discussion of “superorganisms” that blur the distinction between parts and wholes. Various theories of “group mind” are evaluated in order to consider the relevance of the presence of group cognition in identifying the emergence of “persons” at higher levels of complexity. The hypothesis is presented that Sin should be understood as a mythological person—a superorganism with a group mind—supervening on the transgressions of individual human persons and sinful social systems.