Motor behavior is fast morphogenesis
Why would motor behavior and morphogenesis both be described by collective intelligence theory? The answer is that motor behavior and morphogenesis are the same process, just on different timescales.
When we observe a process of development, what we’re doing is categorizing a transformation from one form to another form. That is, what we see is an object that looks one way, and then over time something happens and it looks a different way. For example, a baby looks one way, and an adult human looks another way. Development is the process by which the form of the object changes from baby form to adult form.
The same thing happens in motor behavior, just a lot more quickly. When you stretch your arm out, you go from a form where your arm isn’t stretched out to one where your arm is stretched out. You looked one way, and then, after some process, you looked another way. Motor behavior is the name we give to that process in this context.
Development and motor behavior aren’t natural kinds. They’re ways of categorizing the processes by which an object goes from one form to another—from looking one way to looking another way. Sometimes, the process of transformation happens relatively slowly, taking hours, days, months, or even years. Additionally, the form achieved by this process is sometimes relatively stable, remaining relatively constant for hours, days, months, or even years. An example is a human infant becoming a human adult: it takes years, and the human adult form remains relatively constant for years as well.
In other cases, the process of transformation happens relatively quickly, and the form achieved by the process goes away relatively quickly. For example, when you stretch out your arm, this happens in a second or two, and you’ll lower your arm a few seconds.
When the transformation process is relatively slow and the form achieved is relatively stable, we usually call the process development. When the transformation process is relatively quick and the form achieved is relatively unstable, we usually call the process motor behavior. They are, however, the same process in terms of the essential abstract features—collective intelligence, economic organization, etc.—only differing in terms of how we categorize them relative to a timescale.
The essential analogy between motor behavior and morphogenesis was observed by Esther Thelen and Linda Smith many years ago. Eliminating the distinction between these two areas of study will help us produce a general theory of the construction of novel forms.