Concept
Self-organization
Overview
Self-organization, also called spontaneous order in the social sciences, is a process where some form of overall order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system. The process can be spontaneous when sufficient energy is available, not needing control by any external agent. It is often triggered by seemingly random fluctuations, amplified by positive feedback. The resulting organization is wholly decentralized, distributed over all the components of the system. As such, the organization is typically robust and able to survive or self-repair substantial perturbation. Chaos theory discusses self-organization in terms of islands of predictability in a sea of chaotic unpredictability.
Self-organization is a phenomenon that occurs across various fields, including physics, chemistry, biology, collective behavior, ecology, communication networks, robotics, artificial intelligence, linguistics, social science, urbanism, philosophy, and engineering. Examples of self-organization include crystallization, thermal convection of fluids, chemical oscillation, animal swarming, neural circuits, and black markets.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
[The theory of] _Pre-established Harmony_ may proceed in two different ways. It regards every organised being as generated by one of like kind, either as an _educt_ or a _product_. The system which regards generations as mere educts is called the theory of _individual preformation_ or the theory of _evolution_: that which regards them as products is entitled the system of _epigenesis_. This latter may also be…
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
States what Self-organization is; the author is tied to Self-organization in the knowledge graph.
Such an event, as has been shown in No. A, does not concern substance (for substance does not thus originate), but its condition or state. It is therefore only change, and not origin from nothing. If this origin be regarded as the effect of a foreign cause, it is termed creation, which cannot be admitted as an event among phenomena, because the very possibility of it would annihilate the unity of experience. If…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
States what Self-organization is; the author is tied to Self-organization in the knowledge graph.
What is termed confusion in a being, is nothing more than its passage into a new class, a new mode of existence; which necessarily carries with it a new series of action, a new chain of motion, different from that of which this being found itself susceptible in the preceding rank it occupied. That which is called order, in Nature, is a mode of existence, or a disposition of its particles, strictly _necessary_. In…
Paul Henri Thiry Holbach, The System of Nature, or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World. Volume 1
States what Self-organization is.
Philosophers who discussed Self-organization
Related ideas
- Artificial intelligence
- Friedrich Hayek
- Anarchism
- Second law of thermodynamics
- Philosophy
- Immanuel Kant
- Problem solving
- Classical physics
- Loop quantum gravity
- Discourse on the Method
- Sociology
- Mathematics
- Autonomy
- Cybernetics
- Natural selection
- Niklas Luhmann
- Thomas Aquinas
- Linguistics
- Physics
- Ilya Prigogine
- Princeton University
- Quantum mechanics
- Quantum gravity
- René Descartes
Place in the tradition
Part of Meaning of life.