On Self-Organizing Systems and Their Environments - Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition - page 11

energy has been taken from the environment, it will affect the activities of
the external demon who may be confronted with a problem when he
attempts to supply the system with choice-entropy he must gather from an
energetically depleted environment.
In concluding the brief exposition of my demonology, a simple diagram
may illustrate the double linkage between the internal and the external
demon which makes them entropically ( H ) and energetically ( E )
interdependent.
For anyone who wants to approach this subject from the point of view of
a physicist, and who is conditioned to think in terms of thermodynamics
and statistical mechanics, it is impossible not to refer to the beautiful little
monograph by Erwin Schrodinger What is Life . 5 Those of you who are
familiar with this topic may remember that Schrodinger admires particu-
larly two remarkable features of living organisms. One is the incredible high
order of the genes, the “hereditary code-scripts” as he calls them, and the
other one is the marvelous stability of these organized units whose delicate
structures remain almost untouched despite their exposure to thermal agi-
tation by being immersed—e.g. in the case of mammals—into a thermostat,
set to about 310°K.
In the course of his absorbing discussion, Schrodinger draws our atten-
tion to two different basic “mechanisms” by which orderly events can be
produced: “The statistical mechanism which produces order from disorder
and the...[other] one producing 'order from order'.”
While the former mechanism, the “order from disorder” principle is
merely referring to “statistical laws” or, as Schrodinger puts it, to “the mag-
nificent order of exact physical law coming forth from atomic and molecu-
lar disorder,” the latter mechanism, the “order from order” principle is,
again in his words: “the real clue to the understanding of life.” Already
earlier in his topic Schrodinger develops this principle very clearly and
states: “What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy.” I think my
demons would agree with this, and I do too.
However, by reading recently through Schrodinger's booklet I wondered
how it could happen that his keen eyes escaped what I would consider a
“second clue” to the understanding of life, or—if it is fair to say—of self-
organizing systems. Although the principle I have in mind may, at first glance,
be mistaken for Schrodinger's “order from disorder” principle, it has in fact
nothing in common with it. Hence, in order to stress the difference between
the two, I shall call the principle I am going to introduce to you presently the
“order from noise” principle. Thus, in my restaurant self-organizing systems
do not only feed upon order, they will also find noise on the menu.
Let me briefly explain what I mean by saying that a self-organizing system
feeds upon noise by using an almost trivial, but nevertheless amusing
example.
Assume I get myself a large sheet of permanent magnetic material which
is strongly magnetized perpendicular to the surface, and I cut from this
sheet a large number of little squares (Fig. 3 a ). These little squares I glue