Ponder this: Octopi are extremely intelligent. Possibly the most intelligent invertebrates. They seem to have self-awareness, and can pass the mirror test. They don’t have a single brain, but multiple ganglia that are networked. The “main brain” of an octopus does things like executive function, and vision processing, but doesn’t know how to control it’s legs. It sends messages to the ganglia in the legs basically saying “I wanna go over there, and grab that” and the ganglia in the legs do the work of motor coordination and such.
This is possibly relevant in that it shows a rudimentary example of a distributed set of “minds” working together in the same animal to achieve a goal.
In humans, there’s also the phenomenon of reflexes. When you touch a hot stove, and reflexively pull your hand back, it’s your spinal cord doing the thinking separately from the brain. The spinal cord gets the pain signal and starts pulling your hand back before it even transmits that pain signal to your brain. And then your brain sorts out the perceptions later. That’s distributed “thinking” in a way isn’t it?
I’m sure there’s more examples.
I’m a bit of a control freak, so I’d probably not choose to spawn copies of myself. I think I’d rather write agents that are about as intelligent as bugs and have them basically act as autonomous sensors, instead of distributing my cognitive abilities across any significant distance.
