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Self-organization in Science
and Society: an introduction
What is STS?
• Usually we think about science having
impact on society: eg cars and sex in
1950s
• But society has an impact on science: eg
the global warming “debate” was largely
the creation of oil company funding (cf.
http://www.ucsusa.org/publications/catalys
t/exxon-exposed.html
• The impact can also be good (as we will
soon see)
• Nature is also in this dielectic: so…
What is STS?
The trielectic:
What isn’t selforganization?
What is selforganization?
Top-down: someone in
charge organizes stuff
Bottom-up: the stuff organizes
itself:
Military—general, commander Biological evolution
Corporation—CEO
Catholic church—Pope
Flocks and swarms: bees, birds,
whales, wolves, etc.
Suburban layout—architect
Automotive design—designer Crowdsourcing: WWW, Wikipedia,
Computer chip--engineer
Open Source, etc.
Fine art—artist
Orchestra-conductor
Subsumption architecture (robotics),
Molecular self-assembly (nano),
Why do dictatorships love linear order?
Why do dictatorships love linear order?
Why do democracies accept disorder?
What about in-between?
top-down
bottom-up
•This spectrum exists for many other systems: eg human nervous system combines
centralization (brain vs peripheral ns) with self-organization (neural nets)
•Note that thinking about social structures can help us think about natural structures
How disorganized can self-organization be?
Toss a handful of
particles in the air:
“self-organized” but
without order. Trival
case
Sand waves from
wind action: a
quasi-ordered
emergent pattern.
Significant case.
Salt crystal forms
from evaporating
water. Completely
ordered. Trivial
case.
Self-organization tends to be a more salient description when
describing systems between total order and total disorder
Top-down tools
Bottom-up tools
Tool
Linear
Non-linear
Spatial analysis
Euclidean geometry
Fractal geometry
Dynamics
Newtonian mechanics
Chaos theory
Collective behavior
Statistics
Complexity theory
Top-down tools
Bottom-up tools
Tool
Linear
Non-linear
Communication
Shannon-weaver (classical
information theory)
Network theory (scale-free
topologies)
Optimization
Operations research (linear
programming etc.)
Fitness landscape, genetic
algorithms
Artificial Intelligence
GOFAI (Expert systems, high
level symbol manipulation)
Neuromimetics,
subsumption architecture,
etc.
Most theories of self-organizing systems fall under the
rubric of “Complexity Theory.”
But what is the distinction between Complexity Theory
and Theorizing Things that are Complicated?
Which is more complex?
• A gas made of 15 million molecules
randomly crashing about?
OR
• A school made of 15 fish gracefully
swirling though water?
Emergence is global behavior of a system resulting from
collective interactions of loosely coupled components.
Temperature: an emergent property of swarms of
molecules. But temperature is based on the average
velocity of molecules (E=3kT/2). Linear relation, you can
use statistics.
Flocking: an emergent property of swarms of animals
(birds, ants, fish, etc.). Flock movements are not well
characterized by averages or statistics. They are
nonlinear, adaptive, anticipative, have memory. They
have synergy: the whole is greater than the parts.
“Complicated” just means there is so much going on
we can’t keep track of it
Complexity: synergistic emergent behavior; often
adaptive (hence “complex adaptive systems”).
But we can go even deeper
• At the heart of self-organization lies recursion
• Recursion is also at the heart of many social
ideals: democracy, freedom, egalitarianism.
• Therefore it should be no surprise that some of
the founders of self-organization in science
were also activists for self-organization in
society.