Roberto @sirius contributed a thoughtful and eloquent piece on January
23rd. He recognizes the tendency of many of us to seek connections
between the physical (inanimate) world and the human in our attempts to
understand and explain self-organization. Borrowing from the hard
sciences has helped me understand complex adaptive behavior in humankind
just a little better than I did before, if only by providing another
metaphor that applies very well. I have been doing a lot of this
force-fitting in the last year or two, and frankly sometimes it feels like
trying to place a square peg into a round hole (is that the idiomatic
expression?). If nothing else, I've learned more about physics,
chemistry, and biology than I ever knew (that was easy!).
I'm not fully certain of what Roberto has to say, but I did connect with
the distinction between human and inanimate systems. He writes of
cognition and language as constituting social systems. Evolutionarily
speaking, these characteristics must be emergent, that is, from our
lengthy process of self-organization. More importantly, however, they
enable us to continue to evolve. Coincident with cognition and language
we have choice. And we have the conscious awareness of choice, something
that sets us apart from other self-organizing systems (we are aware of).
It is a marvelous trait of humanity that we can choose to self-organize
and how we will self-organize, and that we can consciously do this,
observe it, reflect on it, and learn from it. I think we cannot choose
NOT to self-organize. That is, it is an inevitable process always in
progress. The process can be quite disconcerting, and we can try to
minimize chaos and the anxiety it produces through instituting structures
and mechanisms to decrease uncertainty and increase perceptions of
stability, but, in the end, we continue to self-organize, like it or not.
-- Joe Hays hays@volpe1.dot.gov