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Introduction:

The notion that various social complex systems (e.g. society, family, business company, state, etc) could be regarded as ones exhibiting consistent traits of behaviour of their own - suggesting that they are entities unto themselves, some sort of organisms on their own or even intelligent entities on their own - is not new. I have personally stumbled upon papers of scholars who straightforwardly speak of such systems as if they were already proven to be singular entities.

That kind of assumption has entered the vernacular, as well, long time ago - e.g. "the state wants to..." , "society responds to conflict by...", "the family dynamics seeks balance through...", etc.

Therefore, we could even assume at one point, that such social systems are not only organisms of their own, but even some sort of artificial intelligence entities (as long as we could see them as an artificial product of human activity).

We are generally used to seeing ourselves as conscious entities and we are also good at exploring entities of less complexity than ourselves. But when it comes to entities which consists of us as mere components, we are not ready to mentally process that idea - it sounds as either too abstract or too sci-fi (think of Stanisław Lem's work).

Question:

  • While the average Joe could easily say "The state wants to..." or "Society responds to...", etc, how exactly do we prove (or at least gather some sort of supporting evidence) that a complex social system really exhibits a behaviour of its own?

  • Under what conditions could we regard it as some sort of spontaneously born artificial intelligence?

  • If that were true, how could we predict if that AI would procreate and bring about other social system forms which are also entities unto themselves? How could we possibly become aware if that has already happened?

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