Biology Reference
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would prevent us from describing the system composed of engineer and his
machine as a self-organized system? Or, from describing an urban landscape
as an ecosystem? Levin tries to avoid this problem by down-playing his own
agency, by emphasizing the randomness of the processes underlying the design
of his office (he is not really in charge). But this is just to sidestep the issue
of whether or not the agency, or intentional design, can be brought into our
concept of a self-organized system, in whatever form that concept takes. To
bring the engineer into the system, to put Levin in his office with his agency and
intentionality intact, would, I suggest, be to confound the entire tradition which
takes human agency and intentionality as a priori unnatural and, accordingly,
which pits natural against artificial design. Yet to put this exclusion of agency
and intentionality so baldly is to make its absurdity self-evident and to invite us
to explicitly challenge the entire tradition on which it rests.
So here is my first proposal: Let us drop intentionality (after all, this too,
like free will, may turn out to be an illusion) and focus instead on agency - an
attribute we clearly share with many, if not all, other organisms, and that is, both
scientifically and philosophically, surely problem enough. And let us think of
the machines we create simultaneously as extensions of ourselves (in so far as
they enhance our functionality) and, at the same time, as effects our agency has
on our environment. In other words, let us try thinking of ourselves in the same
terms as we think of other organisms - organisms that shape their environment
by their activities and, also, that build entities extending their functionality and
can accordingly be thought of as extensions of themselves. Consider, e.g., beaver
dams, bird nests, or any of Scott Turner's wonderful examples of the tunnels built
by earthworms that serve as accessory kidneys, the bubble gills built by aquatic
beetles, the horn-shaped burrows of crickets that amplify song, or homeostatic
termite mounds. And now think of all these systems as self-organizing systems.
In other words, think of a system that is shaped by the combined activities of
all the individual components - activities that are generated inside individual
components, but with effects manifested externally to themselves, but all the
while remaining inside the composite self that defines the larger system. The
modifications engendered by these activities need not be random (and in general,
will not be random), nor be aimed at the coherence or survival of the system.
It is just that those modifications that do enhance the survival of the system
will, by definition, persist. This may lead us to think of everything as a self-
organizing system, but doing so need not be bad - as long as it comes with
the understanding that the most interesting kinds of self-organizing systems are
those that require the participation and interaction of many different kinds of
selves.
It seems to me that including the kinds of organization resulting from the
complex activities and interactivities of collectivities of different kinds of agents
in the concept of self-organization does in fact offer some hope of elucidating
