On Self-Organizing Systems
“Beyond serving as an inspiration to engineers, the group behavior of fireflies has broader significance for science as a whole. It represents one of the few tractable instances of a complex, self-organizing system, where millions of interactions occur simultaneously—when everyone changes the state of everyone else. Virtually all the major unsolved problems in science today have this intricate character.
Consider the cascade of biochemical reactions in a single cell and their disruption when the cells turns cancerous; the booms and crashes of the stock market; the emergence of consciousness from the interplay of trillions of neurons in the brain; the origin of life from a meshwork of chemical reactions in the primordial soup.
All these involve enormous numbers of players linked in complex webs.
In every case, astonishing patterns emerge spontaneously.The richness of the world around us is due, in large part, to the miracle of self-organization.
Unfortunately, our minds are bad at grasping these kinds of problems.
We’re accustomed to thinking in terms of centralized control, clear chains of command, the straight forward logic of cause and effect. But in huge, interconnected systems, where every player ultimately affects the other, our standard ways will fall apart. Simple pictures and verbal arguments are too feeble, too myopic.”
Steven Strogatz in “Sync-How order Emerges From Chaos in The Universe, Nature and Daily Life“—(pp.34 paperback edition)
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“[…] we must now recognize that we, our organizations, as indeed the entire cosmos – are all self organizing systems. Not just a little bit, not just in some special part, but from beginning to end, top to bottom. It is all self-organization. The implications of this recognition, should it prove to be valid, are two fold (at least).
First, a large part of what we currently devote a good deal of time and energy to – organizing things – is wasted effort, for our systems, left to their own devices, will take care of that business pretty much all by themselves.
Secondly, our efforts at organization and control are not only of questionable value, but also destructive. By imposing our view of organization on a self-organizing system we essentially throw a spanner in the works, thereby reducing organizational function, and our own levels of performance.”