Self-organization in Science and Society: an introduction

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Self-organization in Science and Society an
introduction
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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

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What is STS?

• The trielectic

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What isnt self-organization? Top-down someone
in charge organizes stuff Militarygeneral,
commander CorporationCEO Catholic
churchPope Suburban layoutarchitect Automotive
designdesigner Computer chip--engineer Fine
artartist Orchestra-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),


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Why do dictatorships love linear order?
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Why do democracies accept disorder?
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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

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How disorganized can self-organization be?
Salt crystal forms from evaporating water.
Completely ordered. Trivial case.

• 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
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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

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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.

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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?

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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
(E3kT/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 cant keep track of it Complexity
synergistic emergent behavior often adaptive
(hence complex adaptive systems).
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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.