The name is absent

Figure 57. Three animats in collective misbelief.

Figure 58. Five animats in collective misbelief.

Believing emerges from the imitation of behaviour (i.e. we can perceive beliefs in the
behaviours of the animats, but there is no “belief module” containing them). This is, if one
animat imitates another, it is because he believes in the correct behaviour of the imitated
animat. Of course, as we could just see, beliefs are not always correct. They should not be
always correct, which is why they are beliefs.

6.3. About the Experiments

“There are reasons of the heart, which the heart does not know”

—Blaise Pascal

As we could see in the this chapter, animats in their virtual environment behave as
animals in a natural environment. Of course the analogy is not total, but the main
characteristics of adaptive animal behaviour were able to be reproduced in the BVL, because
of BeCA and I&I.

We say that intelligence emerges in the animats because we, as external observers, can
judge that their behaviour is intelligent because by adapting to their environment they are able
to survive (not always, of course), but they take every opportunity to achieve it. This is for us
intelligence. We say that the animats have emergent cognition, because for external observers,
they know their environment, and what to do in it in order to survive.

We say that social phenomena and structures emerge inanimat societies because we can
perceive social behaviours, such as leadership (given by a high value of *), organization (when
animats perform the same behaviour to obtain a common goal, such as herd hunting),
desocialization (low values of -), and misbelief. We can also see that the behaviour of an
individual might lead or mislead the behaviour of his whole society. These emergent behaviours
were not designed in I&I, but emerge from the properties of the environment and interactions
of the animats.

The developed experiments tried to show and illustrate the capabilities of our BVL, the
intelligence and emergent cognition in BeCA, and the emergence of social phenomena in I&I.
Since we have obtained unexpected results in our experiments, showing emergent properties

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