On Self-Organizing Systems and Their Environments - Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition - page 13

(or II¢) which is characterized by having only one side of different mag-
netism pointing to the outside. If this population is put into my box and I
go on shaking, clearly, those cubes with the single different pole pointing to
the outside will tend, with overwhelming probability, to mate with members
of the other family, until my cubes have almost all paired up. Since the con-
ditional probabilities of finding a member of family II, given the locus of a
member of family I, has very much increased, the entropy of the system has
gone down, hence we have more order after the shaking than before. It is
easy to show* that in this case the amount of order in our system went up
from zero to

1

R • = ,

()

log en

2

if one started out with a population density of n cubes per unit volume.
I grant you, that this increase in orderliness is not impressive at all, par-
ticularly if the population density is high. All right then, let's take a popu-
lation made up entirely of members belonging to family IVB, which is
characterized by opposite polarity of the two pairs of those three sides
which join in two opposite corners. I put these cubes into my box and you
shake it. After some time we open the box and, instead of seeing a heap of
cubes piled up somewhere in the box (Fig. 5), you may not believe your
eyes, but an incredibly ordered structure will emerge, which, I fancy, may
pass the grade to be displayed in an exhibition of surrealistic art (Fig. 6).
If I would have left you ignorant with respect to my magnetic-surface
trick and you would ask me, what is it that put these cubes into this remark-
able order, I would keep a straight face and would answer: The shaking, of
course—and some little demons in the box.
With this example, I hope, I have sufficiently illustrated the principle I
called “order from noise,” because no order was fed to the system, just
cheap undirected energy; however, thanks to the little demons in the box,
in the long run only those components of the noise were selected which
contributed to the increase of order in the system. The occurrence of a
mutation e.g. would be a pertinent analogy in the case of gametes being the
systems of consideration.
Hence, I would name two mechanisms as important clues to the under-
standing of self-organizing systems, one we may call the “order from order”
principle as Schrodinger suggested, and the other one the “order from
noise” principle, both of which require the co-operation of our demons who
are created along with the elements of our system, being manifest in some
of the intrinsic structural properties of these elements.
I may be accused of having presented an almost trivial case in the attempt
to develop my order from noise principle. I agree. However, I am convinced

* See Appendix.