Quotes About Self-organization

what else are parallel structures than an area where a different life can be lived, a life that is in harmony with its own aims and which in turn structures itself in harmony with those aims? . . .What else are those initial attempts at social self-organization than the efforts of a certain part of society…to rid itself of the self-sustaining aspects of totalitarianism and, thus, to extricate itself radically from its involvement in the…totalitarian system?

Examples of such self-reorganization abound in Order Out of Chaos. Heat moving evenly through a liquid suddenly, at a certain threshold, converts into a convection current that radically reorganizes the liquid, and millions of molecules, as if on cue, suddenly form themselves into hexagonal cells.

One of the key controversies surrounding this concept has to do with Prigogine's insistence that order and organization can actually arise "spontaneously" out of disorder and chaos through a process of "self-organization." To grasp this extremely powerful idea, we first need to make a distinction between systems that are in "equilibrium," systems that are "near equilibrium," and systems that are "far from equilibrium.

Peering succeeds because it leverages self-organization—a style of production that works more effectively than hierarchical management for certain tasks.

Lazy people should observe a colony of ants and learn from their diligence. Prov. 6.7 No one is there to organize them or tell them what to do. They have no commander or ruler giving them daily orders.

Living systems are actually very close to this edge-of-chaos phase transition, where things are much looser and more fluid. And natural selection is not the antagonist of self-organization.

Life offers us this great gift of self-organization, how we can be held in the basin of shared meaning and, within that, exercise individual freedom. It is such a shame to waste it on fear and doubt. Or to seek to contain and control it.

Emergence is when micro-level complex systems that are far from equilibrium (thus allowing for the amplification of random events) self-organize (creative, self-generated, adaptability-seeking behavior) into new structures, with new properties that previously did not exist, to form a new level of organization on the macro level.

When adversity threatens to paralyze us, we need to reassert control by finding a new direction in which to invest psychic energy, a direction that lies outside the reach of external forces. When every aspiration is frustrated, a person still must seek a meaningful goal around which to organize the self. Then, even though that person is objectively a slave, subjectively he is free.

1 Attachment and Reflective Function: Their Role in Self-Organization