Willard's communication on "self-organising systems" refers to chaos
theory but not complexity. I find a great deal of power in
distinguishing these. In doing so, self organisation occurs
differently in each distinguished field. While they may ultimately
converge again, my interest in living systems is mainly concerned
with aproaches based in complexity rather than chaos (as I've
distinguished them.)
My operational definition of chaos, incomplete except for purposes of
this conversation, is way of describing non-living systems
mathematically which brings order, pattern or meaning. (These same
techniques may be applied to living systems.)
My operational definition of complexity is a way of describing living
systems that is particular to those systems. That is, it takes into
account the adaptive, learning, actively integrating nature of such
systems. (This may be the equivalent of Maturana and Varela's
"structural coupling" and extend to linguistic systems.)
Self-organising systems in the complexity model organise around
structures that have already integrated and are constantly
integrating. Particularly where independent agents are acting, there
will always be existing organising principles or "attractors" and
there will also be the possibility of creating new "attractors".
In this context "spontaneous" self-organisation is a little
misleading. What other kinds of self-organisation are there? What
is meant to be distinguished by "spontaneous"? I think the
presuppositions of the term indicate that the thinking is not from
complexity, emergence, distributed phenomena and living
self-organisation. It implies, to my listening at least, that there
is something more random and less connected than is the actual case.
Willard asks about the possibility of humans to "self-organize in the
midst of chaos (i.e., everyday life)?". But humans are not "in
the midst of chaos". We are in the midst of a living system that is
integrated and the "chaos" is in our own minds, our own lack of
understanding. There may be chaos in the world, but we do not live
our daily lives "in the midst of it". (And, if the development of
the universe is a constant expansion of frozen accidents, then there
is no chaos in the world. It is then only in our minds.)
What complexity suggests to me is that we can create attractors -
influence the "around which self-organisation will occur" - so that
we have some say about the direction and style of what occurs even
though we will never gain detailed control or prediction.
My theory is that we deal with the "remainder" of human action after
we take out the above considerations and are left with the chaos
approach because we've taken the living, intelligent agents out of
the equation. Then we're left to deal with conflicting paradigms,
disfunctional individual behaviours, statistical groups norms and
phases, etc.
These can be transcended by putting intelligent agents and living
systems *as living systems* back into the structure of things.
-- Michael McMaster Michael@kbddean.demon.co.uk