Individuation Through Integration: A PID-Based Study of Androids and Insect Societies

Takashi Ikegami, Suzune Baba, Takahide Yoshida, Hiroki Kojima

Keywords: Partial Information Decomposition (PID), Multimodal Integration, Collective Intelligence, Humanoid Robot, Ecological Alignment

TL;DR: "We show how individual agency emerges from collectives—androids and bee colonies—through multimodal synergy and a new concept called ecological alignment.

Abstract: This paper explores how individual agency and self-recognition can emerge from collective dynamics through the lens of Community First Theory (CFT), which holds that structured collectives precede and scaffold the formation of individuality. We present two case studies: (1) a humanoid android (Alter3) equipped with multimodal sensors and large language models that achieves self-modeling through coordinated module interaction, and (2) honeybee colonies in a planar artificial hive, where the opening of a foraging door triggers the spontaneous emergence of behavioral roles such as foragers, dancers, and observers. Using Partial Information Decomposition (PID), we quantify the informational structure of both systems, showing that key components contribute not just uniquely or redundantly, but synergistically to global behavior. We interpret this synergy as a functional marker of individuation. Furthermore, we propose the concept of ecological alignment—a top-down constraint imposed by the collective environment that channels the behavior of individual modules or agents—bridging embodied AI and social insects under a unified framework of collective intelligence.

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Submission Number: 7