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/catalyst/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 self-organization?

Top-down: someone in charge organizes stuff

Military—general, commanderCorporation—CEOCatholic church—Pope

Suburban layout—architectAutomotive design—designerComputer chip--engineer

Fine art—artistOrchestra-conductor

What is self-organization?

Bottom-up: the stuff organizes itself:

Biological evolution

Flocks and swarms: bees, birds,whales, wolves, etc.

Crowdsourcing: WWW, Wikipedia, Open Source, etc.

Subsumption architecture (robotics),Molecular self-assembly (nano),

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.

Self-organization tends to be a more salient description when describing systems between total order and total disorder

Salt crystal forms from evaporating water. Completely ordered. Trivial case.

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.