The correct tense is "is learning". They've been studying this for years. This is not news to the AI/cog sci community, to the point that it's insulting to claim that it is.

Yes and no. I am aware of the status of the field (well, AI less so). I myself am a psychologist working on the self-organization of behavior. Yes, we have been using examples like termites and ants for years. But we are far from the mainstream. For example, in Pinker's How the Mind Works, he dismisses self-organization as "fairy dust".

Some aspects of our work have been trickling into the mainstream. But if you don't assume that the mechanisms of mind are computations on representations, then it is very difficult to get a job without compromising your principles.

And perhaps you could argue that the mainstream thinks this system of computations is the result of self-organization on some lower level. And I wouldn't disagree. But for the majority of the field that is just lip service. Their research goals are to uncover the algorithms that the mind is running. There's no self-organization at that level.

Of course there are always exceptions. But if anyone is still reading this and is interested I can provide literature staking out the relevant positions.

Take a look at Marvin Minsky's The Society of Mind. Consciousness as an emergent property of the communication between simple agents is a large arm of cognitive science.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Society-Mind-Marvin-Minsky/dp/0671...

I am aware of Minsky's work, see my other reply. I was too flippant in my comment. Perhaps I should have said intelligent behavior, rather than intelligent structures, is self-organized.

But, I don't think any approach to consciousness can be considered a large arm of cognitive science. Most cognitive scientists don't want to touch consciousness with a ten-foot pole. But of course you're right that connectionism lives on.

Let me try to explain the kind of self-organization I have in mind. Consider the fundamental question "how is behavior organized"? The behaviorists pointed to organization in the environment. Cognitivists point to organization of internal representations. Connectionists and similar approaches point to organization of neural structures. Yes, something intelligent emerges from simple, perhaps self-organized, components in this scheme. But they are unwilling to take self-organization to the level of behavior.

In my opinion, a true self-organizational approach to behavior is to say that behavior emerges from the interaction between organism and environment. This is the level at which we need to accept self-organization. It is far from the mainstream. The mainstream approach to vision, for example, starts with the retinal image and asks what can be inferred from it. Yes, maybe they say that this inference engine is itself a self-organized structure. But it still reifies an input-process-output view of cognition. The sensory system receives input, constructs a model of the world. The "higher cognitive" centers formulate plans from this model. The action system instantiates these plans.

To bring it back to the ants: The ants demonstrate what can be done without explicit planning. Modern cognitive science studies explicit planning, even if they agree that this capability emerges from simple components.

As I said in the other post, I could provide literature if you are interested in any of these specific debates.