I think this might be the inspiration for the ravens in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Memory (3rd book in the Children of Time series).

Minor spoilers:

Basically, the series takes place long after human society terraformed a bunch of planets and collapsed, and the main characters rediscover one of these planets which is populated by evolved ravens that have seemingly created a society but no one can tell if they are sentient or just mimicking everything. The ravens evolved to form pair bonds between two different types: one raven in the pair hyper-focuses on all new information and obsessively catalogs it, while the other raven obsesses over finding patterns in the collected data and preforms the executive functions and decision making. Neither raven in the pair is truly sentient on their own, but together they produce either consciousness or a fake so convincing no one can tell the difference.

They even ask the ravens if they are sentient and they conclude that they aren't, and that no one else is either, because of this exact reason; everyone's just components in a system that is hallucinating it's real.