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Self-Organization

bactra.org · 2,693 words · saved by 1 readers

Something is self-organizing if, left to itself, it tends to become more organized. This is an unusual, indeed quite counter-intuitive property: we expect that, left to themselves, things get messy, and that when we encounter a very high degree of order, or an increase in order, something, someone, or at least some peculiar thing, is responsible. (This is the heart of the Argument from Design.) But we now know of many instances where this expectation is simply wrong, of things which can start in a highly random state and, without being shaped from the outside, become more and more organized. Thus self-organization, which I find to be one of the most interesting concepts in modern science --- if also one of the most nebulous, because the ideas of organization, pattern, order and so forth are, as used normally, quite vague. Self-organization is not just something I find interesting, it's also my research topic. More exactly, I did my Ph.D. dissertation on quantitative measures of self-or

Self-Organization Notebooks Self-Organization Last update : 21 Apr 2025 21:17 First version : 7 July 1997 Something is self-organizing if, left to itself, it tends to become more organized. This is an unusual, indeed quite counter-intuitive property: we expect that, left to themselves, things get messy, and that when we encounter a very high degree of order, or an increase in order, something, someone, or at least some peculiar thing, is responsible. (This is the heart of the Argument from Design.) But we now know of many instances where this expectation is simply wrong, of things which can st

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