Socialization is necessary for an intelligent system, because to effectively achieve its goals by cooperating with the other systems in the society, the system must get social knowledge about the common beliefs, goals, and actions, so as to be able to predict the effect of its communication activities. Similarly, it should behave in a predictable way for the others to cooperate with.
In this process, the fundamental difficulty is, due to the difference in nature (innate parameters) and nurture (individual experience), the intelligent systems in a society are always different from each other, in their beliefs, goals, and actions, and when the systems are complex enough, they cannot accurately predict the behavior of other systems, even the future behavior of itself. Under this condition, social knowledge is basically statistical and revisible (like the other beliefs), and the predictions can be wrong. Even so, it still make sense for a system to acquire social knowledge, as well as to behave accordingly, as far as it is consistent with its pursuing of other goals.
Socialization is an important part of learning and self-organization. For a human being, a large amount of his/her knowledge come from social experience, rather than personal sensorimotor experience. Socialization also allows personal experience to be normalized to become understandable by the others, summarized to become applicable to novel situations, and recorded to become transmissible from generation to generation.
Though living in a society is not a precondition for intelligence, social experience consists of a major part of experience for advanced intelligent systems. If an intelligent system only gets its knowledge from its own sensorimotor mechanism, its capability will be highly restricted.
Language learning not only makes communication possible, but also provides a common vocabulary to summarize common experience in the society, which provides a common world view, or ontology, by which the environment is described in an objective manner. Using this vocabulary, common experience is summarized into common knowledge, which are not bounded to sensorimotor mechanism, but is expressed as if the world can be expressed as it is, independent of the specific observer.
As repeatedly mentioned in the previous chapters, in an intelligent system the meaning of a term and the truth-value of a statement are fundamentally subjective, determined by the system's experience. Therefore there is no such a thing as the "true meaning" or "correct truth-value" in the absolute sense of the phrases. When socialization is taken into consideration, the above claim still holds, though now we can talk about "true meaning" or "correct truth-value" in a relative sense, with respect to the present common knowledge of the society. With social experience playing a larger and larger role in a system's knowledge, its subjective concepts and beliefs move closer to the objective concepts and beliefs of the society.
It is crucial to understand that here "objective" means "from an average person's point of view", with respect to a certain society at a certain moment, rather than "as the world really is". The "objective concepts and beliefs" are still restricted by the society's cognitive capability and common experience, and are adjusted from time to time when the society as a whole gets more experience and becomes more capable cognitively. Given this situation, whenever there is a conflict between personal belief and common knowledge, an intelligent system does not always follow the latter. Instead, the common knowledge is considered as part of social experience, which are summarized together with personal experience. Consequently, if the personal opinion has high confidence, the system will keep it, and reject the common knowledge. The same is true for the meaning of concepts — when there is enough reason, an intelligent system may use a term in an idiosyncratic way. Though common knowledge summarizes a wider range of experience from many systems, so is more general and stable, it is not always more proper than personal experience when the decision making in an individual system is under consideration. Of course, whenever the common knowledge is violated or ignored, the system must pay the price, since there will be more problems in communication and cooperation.
For a number of systems to form a society, their goals must be compatible to a certain extent. During the communication and cooperation processes, some goals will be encouraged and strengthened, while some other goals are discouraged and weakened, all depending on the impact of the goal's realization on other systems. Consequently, for a system to stay in the society, it has to more or less adjust its goals, according to the expectation of the other systems.
Socialization also introduces new goals to a system. To cooperate effectively and efficiently, in a society each system may need to play some role in the social structure or organization, and carry certain responsibility associated with the role. Consequently, the system needs to pursue some goals, which mainly come from the need of the society, rather than from the personal need of the system. In this situation, the goal alienation phenomenon introduced in Section 4.2 may have special significance.
The influence of socialization on actions is similar. On one hand, the system's actions are regulated during the socialization process, in terms of their preconditions and consequences. On the other hand, cooperation and social organization makes many new actions possible, which are not available for an individual system.
During socialization, a type of knowledge the system learns is moral and ethical knowledge, as well as other social skills. Consequently, the system's beliefs about its own goals and actions are no longer based on personal preference, but also have to take social conventions into consideration.