Self-organization

Individual fish self-organize into schools

Self-Organization explains how distributed systems with independently acting parts and no central controller or designer can spontaneously form highly complex, organized systems.

This is an important topic that is a necessary prerequisite to the full understanding of creation, evolution, fractals, societies, economics, the universe, and pretty much everything. It shows that complexity is inevitable rather than unlikely. Complex order is an intrinsic part of the universe, not something unique to intelligent beings. Unfortunately, our current education curriculums rarely introduce this topic to anyone that isn't in a college science program. And even then, its fundamental role in the understanding of nearly everything is not sufficiently emphasized.

Related Concepts

Self-Similarity, self-correction, generating equation, recursion, and feedback loops are key related topics, and more can be found on those pages.

Other related subjects that don't have their own wiki pages yet include Chaos Theory, Complexity Theory, Emergence, Systems Theory, and Game Theory.

Self-Organization Overview

Self-Organization Tutorial

Cosmic Complexification

These concepts are key to a modern understanding of the intersection between science and religion.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was the first to propose this model of natural theology, where god is seen as the self-organizing process that drives the universe towards greater and greater levels of organization, against the tide of entropy.

Bobby Azarian's The Romance of Reality is the book with the most thorough scientific analysis of this perspective, combining theories like Universal Darwinism, Information Theory, Cybernetics, and consciousness research. These authors are all contributing to this view as well.

The Romance of Reality - A Unifying Theory of Everything

This video lecture from the Faraday Institute also makes the case in detail: The Concept of Emergence in the Dialogue Between Science and Theology

Ineffable Complexity

Our lack of a theoretical framework for understanding complexity has always meant that these concepts were ineffable. There was no language to describe the way that large groups of independent agents self-organize into meta-entities with their own unique properties and behaviors. The concept of "spirit" was created to describe these phenomenon with allegory. The science of complexity theory now gives us the tools to describe them literally, allowing us to finally eff the ineffable.

Self-Organized Music

This music didn't organize itself--someone had to do a Google search and copy a link. However, this was all part of the universe's complexification conversation with itself, just trying to get its shit together. Best to just dance a cosmic dance and have a laugh.

Pierre Vervloesem - Self-Organization

Fernando Garrido - Self Organization (Original Mix)

Organized Konfusion - Let's Organize