Emergence

• Over time, systems become more complex and organization emerges whether on purpose or by accident.
  • Systems becoming complex, also makes the supersystems containing them more complex.
• Order is the antithesis of entropy — it pertains to structure within the system.

Organization and Self-Organization §

• Organization pertains to a state where the system has achieved a configuration by which its components operate at a stable, homeostatic level such that an inflow of energy does not increase internal energy.

  • Levels of organization are defined based on the scale of components and their interactions and based on a suitable criteria chosen for the purpose of analyzing the system.
  • Adaptation pertains to the capacity of an individual system to respond to an environmental shift by reallocating internal resources to the responding mechanism.
  • A system fits if its traits, compositions, and behaviors match well with the attributes of a particular environment.
    • It is a matter of flows enabling and sustaining various sorts of complex organization.
    • It includes a system sustainably persisting in its environment in the long-term (for how much time “long-term” amounts to).

• Organization within systems necessitates the following:

  • Boundaries between component subsystems and one which permit inflows and outflows.
  • Subsystems have different personalities which have ample room to interact with one another.
  • Energy that travels through the system via a source
  • A sink through which waste travels to the environment.

• Organization obeys the following principles:

  • Energy Partitioning: Energyis never just energy, but some form of energy, and different forms of energy drive different sorts of work processes. Energy also transforms depending on which components it interacts with.
  • Energy Transfer: Components that receive energy can interact with other components and transfer some of that energy to those components, either in a transformed or similar form. Typically such transfer goes from source to sink.
  • Cycling: A dynamic process bends back to its source and thereby initiates an iteration. This process can act like an engine to power other processes within the system. Cyclical combinations and recombinations are a dominant feature of dynamic systems.
    • Catalysis critically transforms organizational probability by making some combinations more favorable than others, so that in a given energetic flow, those combinations are favored and drive a cycle. Catalysts can even be a part of positive feedback loops that create more catalysts.
    • While interdependent mutual production extends organization to a new level, unless reinforced by some type of redundancy, such cycles are as vulnerable as their weakest link.
    • Hypercycles are auto-catalytic cycles with components that can also replicate.
  • Chance: Within an unorganized system, randomness plays a major role in the dynamics. Thus, stochastic processes drive the system from an unorganized to organized state. Systems can even organize to mitigate the effects of randomness.
  • Concentration and Diffusion: Components naturally move from a point of high concentration to low concentration. To maintain a concentration of these components together requires physical work or a boundary.
  • Dissociation: Interactions between components not only form but also breakdown. Components are not only created but also destroyed and reused.

• Organization also has higher-order principles that help drive evolution and emergence.

  • Cooperation and Competition: Some structures can be organized to form either amplifying structures (cooperation) or disruptive structures (competition).
    • Cooperation can be thought of as the tendency for components to form strong, non-disruptable connections between themselves
    • Competition is when two or more assemblies try to obtain another component, either one that is freely in circulation or that is weakly bound to another assembly
  • Forced Moves : In some cases, there are only a few ways combinations can be made that make the system stable which constrains how the system can be organized. This is an ideal when it comes to making the system more predictable.
  • Path Dependency: The history of a system’s development at each step can alter the range of expectations for its future development

• Self-assembly is just another form of self-organization . It occurs when energy is available and component personalities permit only a single configuration

Emergence §

• Emergence is characterized by a new form or level of organization with new properties and new functionality.

• New organizations and levels of organization are made possible because the emergent entities have new properties not seen in the assembly of components prior to the initial auto-organization and selection process.

  • As long as energy flow provides more available energy to do work in the system, then more complexity will emerge

• When components at one level of organization interact with one another and form assemblies, these new entities can display an aggregate personality that is not entirely predictable from simply knowing the personalities of the components taken independently. In a similar vein, emergent functionalities may also give the system new properties.

• Cooperative and Competitive processes may themselves give rise to emergent systems.

• Supervenience refers to the way systemic layers of greater complexity, often with distinctive properties of their own, emerge in dependence on a prior level of less complexity. This gives us an ecosystem

Links §

• Mobus and Kalton - Ch. 10
• Complex Systems