Quotes About Self-organization

Again and again, we have told ourselves that there is a top–down description of the world, and a top–down prescription by which we should live.

We should be exploring consciousness at the neural level and higher, where the arrow of causal analysis points up toward such principles as emergence and self-organization.

For all we know, we are the only shot the universe has at intelligent self-organization. Therefore, we need to take it seriously.

Open some space, and Spirit will certainly show up. Allow the magic of self-organization to work for you, and the complex adaptive system that we are will find its own power.

The majority of reductive scientists, when they experience this fundamental aspect of reality, experience one overriding emotion: fear. Self-organization leads to an inescapable conclusion: there is more going on than mechanical reductionism perceives or can explain.

Such self-organization always begins the same way, or as researchers Scott Camazine et al. put it, "At a critical density a pattern arises within the system.

At such a moment, the molecules have combined into a system that is self-organized. A phase change occurs. Something more than the sum of the parts has come into being. And . . . it just happens. Like water turning into ice. And you can't predict what the system will look like after the phase change. For

There is no linear additive process that, if all the parts are taken together, can be understood to create the total system that occurs at the moment of self-organization; it is not a quantity that comes into being. It is not predictable in its shape or subsequent behavior or its subsequent qualities. There is a nonlinear quality that comes into being at the moment of synchronicity.

The whole, tightly coupled system, at the moment of self-organization, begins to act upon its microscopic parts to stimulate further, often much more complex, synchronizations. A continuous stream of information begins flowing back and forth, extremely rapidly, between the macroscopic, ordered whole to the smaller microscopic subunits and back again (interoceptive) so that the self-organizing structure is stabilized, its newly acquired dynamic equilibrium actively maintained.

intelligence emerges as an aspect of self-organization in living systems. Always. What is actually true is that once self-organization occurs the capacity for analysis, innovation, and response all occur contemporaneously.

Hopfield's insight was that self-organized criticality might be intimately linked to synchronization in pulse-coupled oscillator systems. The tantalizing possibility of a relationship between those two areas spawned dozens of papers exploring the possible ties.

Yet the biosphere constructs itself, evolves, and has persisted for 3.8 billion years.

If you stop and think through what it means to grow, the process is astonishing. Each part of the body has to change its shape and size to match every other part. There's no central blueprint for the construction of an adult human. Each cell has to decide for itself, using nothing more than chemical signals and its own network of genes, RNA molecules, and proteins.

Ants brilliantly self-organized to evolve remarkably robust and hugely successful and sophisticated physical and social structures, but it took them millions of years to do so. Furthermore, they accomplished this more than 50 million years ago and have barely evolved beyond it since.

In the Network Era—that age we have just entered—dense communication is creating artificial worlds ripe for emergent coevolution, spontaneous self-organization, and win-win cooperation. In this Era, openness wins, central control is lost, and stability is a state of perpetual almost-falling ensured by constant error.

You think we started with a bunch of prehistoric ooze, and some of it just happened to turn into Bella Abzug?" They shook their heads. "There were some dead ends along the way, hence natural selectivity. But for my money, the rest is God in a Darwin costume. So if you can wrap your brain around self-organization, then evolution is intelligent design. The Lord is even greater!…But I'm not sure.

Bifurcation occurs when the environment of a potentially chaotic system destabilizes due to stress over time, or to some inciting disturbance, explosive or catastrophic. When perturbation occurs, an attractor draws the trajectories of the disturbance and, at the point of transition, the system bifurcates and is propelled to a new order of self-organization, or else it disintegrates.

Such a leader knows how to empower groups to self-organize. When it's done right, a governance structure by consensus naturally emerges, as happened both with Linux and Wikipedia. "What astonishes so many people is that the open source model actually works," Torvalds said. "People know who has been active and who they can trust, and it just happens.

It is also very legitimate to criticize the scientists and philosophers who drew unnecessarily pessimistic conclusions based on an incomplete picture that neglected the positive effects of self-organization in far-from-equilibrium systems.

The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

I have to work hard and organize myself so that I'm present and not a slacker.

The great thing about being a novelist is that you organize your own day.

I learned in my Ph.D. the discipline I needed to be successful. Most boxers are not that disciplined. They have talent, but the self-organization - the ability to schedule yourself and your priorities - is lacking. My studies were about the control of training on both the psychological and the physical side.

Nicolis, G., & Prigogine, I. (1977). Self-organization in non-equilibrium systems: From dissipative structures to order through fluctuations. New York: Wiley.