Studies in the area of swarms (murmurations, schooling fish, etc.) consistently suggest that not only is there a cognitive boost in company, but, beyond even the plausible case in which the embodied intelligence with which we are all so intimately familiar is itself only the most salient and visceral experience of a natural bias towards algorithmic complexity and autonomously self-propagating referential order in information and energy processing (aka physics), there is a real sense in which improved and refined decision-making in collaborative systems represents an ontological identity.
Intelligence can be inferred as being agnostic of, if anchored in, the instances which sustain it.
This means there is no sense in which intelligence or perhaps even sentience and life can be isolated or alienated from the broader self-organisational form and flow of which it represents a component microcosm.
Theological reflections are out of scope, perhaps, but notions that there could be a unified field of self-assembling information processing gives pause for thought. This, however, represents a global field like “the cloud of unknowing” in medieval mysticism for which the unity precisely is the conspicuous absence of binding definition.
Daedelus Kite 