Self-organizing systems

"Such a system is “self-organizing” in the sense that it changes from “parts separated” to “parts joined.”"

"Every isolated determinate dynamic system, obeying unchanging laws, will ultimately develop some sort of organisms that are adapted to their environments."

"This is a general characteristic of self-organizing systems: they are robust or resilient. This means that they are relatively insensitive to perturbations or errors, and have a strong capacity to restore themselves, unlike most human designed systems."

"In that sense, a self-organizing system is intrinsically adaptive: it maintains its basic organization in spite of continuing changes in its environment. As noted, perturbations may even make the system more robust, by helping it to discover a more stable organization."

"Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism."

"We have seen that the formation and maintenance of self-organizing systems are compatible with the laws of physical chemistry.”"

"A self–organizing system acts autonomously, as if the interconnecting components had a single mind. And as these components spontaneously march to the beat of their own drummer, they organize, adapt, and evolve toward a greater complexity than one would ever expect by just looking at the parts by themselves."

"Falling between order and chaos, the moment of complexity is the point at which self-organizing systems emerge to create new patterns of coherence and structures of behaviour."