Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 6
Self-Organization: A Common Principle
of Information Processing by Distributed
Dynamic Systems
A new science was born in the last several decades - physics
of nonequilibrium processes, the development of which has
led to the origin of such new notions as self-organization and
dissipative structures used now everywhere in a wide range
of disciplines from cosmology, chemistry and biology to
ecology and social sciences.
I. Prigogine “
The End of Certainty
”
6.1 Self-Organization and Its Features in Various Dynamic
Systems
The concept or rather the term “self-organization” has been widely used in
recent years to describe and explain similar phenomena in physical, chemical,
biological, and even economic and sociological systems. All these phenomena
have in common that, seemingly contrary to conventional thermodynamic laws,
complex ordered structures emerge in a distributed dynamic system consisting
of simple parts. The properties of the resulting structures are fundamentally
different from the properties of the individual elements of the system. Most
surprisingly, self-organization in the system emerges spontaneously from a
homogeneous state.
Convincing and consistent examples of self-organization were found in physical
systems. The concept of self-organization was further extended to chemical phe-
nomena, in which the term “self-assembly” was also widely used. In biology, self-
organization became a central concept over the past half century in describing the
dynamics of biological systems, from intracellular processes to the evolution of
ecosystems. Today, examples of self-organization can be found in sociology,
economics, and even among purely mathematical objects.
At the same time, as the idea of self-organization, as it is understood by the
physicists, was being adopted in other natural social sciences, it was becoming
increasingly ill defined. Even when self-organization processes really occur in the
system, attempts to explain them in physical and statistical terms are not always
