When Can We Call a System Self-Organizing?

We do not attempt to provide yet another definition of self-organization, but explore the conditions under which we can model a system as self-organizing. These involve the dynamics of entropy, and the purpose, aspects, and description level chosen by an observer. We show how, changing the level or “graining” of description, the same system can appear self-organizing or self-disorganizing. We discuss ontological issues we face when studying self-organizing systems, and analyse when designing and controlling artificial self-organizing systems is useful. We conclude that self-organization is a way of observing systems, not an absolute class of systems.

• Publication year

  2003

• Venue

  European Conference on Artificial Life

• Publication date

  2003-03-10

• Fields of study

  Physics, Philosophy, Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1007/978-3-540-39432-7_65arXiv nlin/0303020
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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