The disappearance of function from ‘self-organizing systems’ - Systems Biology: Philosophical Foundations - page 316

heterogeneous systems over time and the one-shot, order-for-free, kind of self-
organization associated with the kinds of uniform nonlinear dynamical systems
that mathematicians usually study. This, I believe, is the crucial point distin-
guishing organized complexity - the kind of complexity found in organisms and
machines - from the emergent complexity characteristic of thunderstorms. As to
what separates organisms from machines is the fact that the organized complex-
ity of the former, unlike the latter, arose and evolved spontaneously. Machines
may be self-steering, but even after all these years of mechanical ingenuity, it
remains the case that only organisms can be said to be self-organizing in Kant's
sense of the term.
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