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Typically, self-organization is defined as the evolution of a system into an organized form in the absence of external pressures.

However, in general, self-organization is a not a force that can be applied very naturally during a design process. In fact, one may argue that the notions of design and self-organization are contradictory: the former approach often assumes a methodical step-by-step planning process with predictable outcomes, whereas the latter involves nondeterministic spontaneous dynamics with emergent features.

-Mikhail Prokopenko -- Advances in Applied Self-organizing Systems

Wild systems are highly complex, cannot be intellectually mastered—that is to say they're too complex to master simply in intellectual or mathematical terms—and they are self-managing and self-organizing. Language is a self-organizing phenomenon. Descriptive linguistics come after the fact, an effort to describe what has already happened. So if you define the wild as self-managing, self-organizing, and self-propagating, all natural human languages are wild systems. The imagination, we can say, for similar reasons, is wild.

-Gary Snyder (American Poet, winner of Pulitzer Prize for Poetry)

Gary Snyder, The Art of Poetry No. 74 The Paris Review
Interviewed by Eliot Weinberger http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1323/the-art-of-poetry-no-74-gary-snyder

Three basic mechanisms by which self-organization in nature works: "decentralized control, distributed problem-solving and multiple interactions" -Peter Miller //The Smart Swarm//

"Whether we are talking about molecules cooperating to form cells or organisms cooperating to form ecosystems or buyers and sellers cooperating to form markets and economies, we will find grounds to believe that Darwinism is not enough, that natural selection cannot be the sole source of the order we see in the world. In crafting the living world, selection has always acted on systems that exhibit spontaneous order." - Stuart Kauffman "At Home in the Universe- The Search for the Laws of Self_organization and Complexity"

"The British cybernetician W. Ross Ashby proposed what he called “the principle of selforganization”. He noted that a dynamical system, independently of its type or composition, always tends to evolve towards a state of equilibrium, or what would now be called an attractor. This reduces the uncertainty we have about the system’s state, and therefore the system’s statistical entropy. This is equivalent to self-organization. The resulting equilibrium can be interpreted as a state where the different parts of the system are mutually adapted. Another cybernetician, Heinz von Foerster, formulated the principle of "order from noise". He noted that, paradoxically, the larger the random perturbations ("noise") that affect a system, the more quickly it will self-organize (produce “order”). The idea is very simple: the more widely a system is made to move through its state space, the more quickly it will end up in an attractor. If it would just stay in place, no attractor would be reached and no selforganization could take place. Prigogine proposed the related principle of "order through fluctuations". Non-linear systems have in general several attractors. When a system resides in between attractors, it will be in general a chance variation, called "fluctuation" in thermodynamics, that will push it either into the one or the other of the attractors." -Francis Heylighen The Science of Self-Organization and Adaptivity

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/heyl.html


 * Heylighen F. (2001): "[|The Science of Self-organization and Adaptivity]", in: L. D. Kiel, (ed.) Knowledge Management, Organizational Intelligence and Learning, and Complexity, in: //The Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems// ((EOLSS), (Eolss Publishers, Oxford). -- an extensive, non-technical review of the basic concepts and principles developed in theories of self-organization, such as order from noise, attractors, entropy, fitness landscapes, bifurcations, feedback, closure, etc.