One interesting research group tackling this question is ex-computer engineer, currently biologist Prof. Micahel Levine's group.
They built xenobots (biological robots) from frog cells which are not evolutionarily programmed to do tasks which they accomplished. Their research in part deals with emergence of agency at multi-cellular level. And they want to get at the fundamental signatures of what makes some collection of agents into a new single agent at an higher level.
They built xenobots (biological robots) from frog cells which are not evolutionarily programmed to do tasks which they accomplished. Their research in part deals with emergence of agency at multi-cellular level. And they want to get at the fundamental signatures of what makes some collection of agents into a new single agent at an higher level.
Checkout, https://youtu.be/XheAMrS8Q1c
And a new research paper (inhavent had the time to read yet) on this question of how coherent higher order agents emerge from underlying sub-agents.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.0268...