I hadn’t heard of this before. I find it interesting because since reading Dawkins on the origin of “life” vs “replication” and clay crystals I implicitly minimized the distinction. Via Metamagenic in a comment at GNXP.
December 26, 2010
The difference between self-organization and self-ordering
Posted by teageegeepea under Uncategorized[11] Comments
Entitled to an Opinion 
December 27, 2010 at 11:48 am
Good to see you expanding the literacies in this space (to neurosci/anatomy).
December 27, 2010 at 12:35 pm
I am mostly familiar with the concept of self-organized systems through the outdoor adventure writer Laurence Gonzales (his book Deep Survival is rad). But it’s hard to learn complex subjects from journalists. I find your distinction here helpful, and not just because I am gay for distinctions (okay mostly not for that reason).
Are there self-ordered but not self-organizing human systems? Or does the presence of agents always ensure passing of information? Is the passing of information through the system what makes it self-organizing?
December 27, 2010 at 2:17 pm
with humans and other agent-based system I think one also has to add tran/nontransparency at various systemic levels notably including indidividual agents, subpopulations, the whole system, and external systems with regards to self-organizing.
December 27, 2010 at 9:07 pm
What do you mean by “transparency” in this context?
December 27, 2010 at 5:33 pm
The paper is a mental masturbation. The authors seem to be crypto-creationist kooks. The core of the argument is to redefine organization as something outside of the physical world: “Organization requires purposeful selection from among real options. Organization is fundamentally algorithmic, goal-oriented, and formal” (this paper) and “both prescriptive information and formal organization are abstract, conceptual, non physical entities” (Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2009, 10, 247-291).
Little wonder then that “self-organization has not been demonstrated to exist”. This is from some “Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc.” (formerly The Origin-of-Life Foundation, Inc.). Its Gene Emergence Project is described like this: “The primary interest of The Gene Emergence Project is to investigate the derivation of functional monomeric sequencing at the rigid covalent-bond level. This must occur prior to any selection for phenotypic fitness”.
Needless to say, this is meaningless gibberish.
December 27, 2010 at 8:00 pm
I’m not too familiar with the researchers or their affiliations, and most of the paper is above my head. Googling I found this blog post linking them to Intelligent Design proponents.
December 28, 2010 at 2:51 am
The paper seemed like word salad when I first glanced at it; realizing that they authors are creationists at least makes it make some sense. Still godawful though; filled with bald assertions of what it ought to be trying to prove.
December 27, 2010 at 9:06 pm
The paper does appear to be an attempt to entrench intelligent design.
I don’t think it is an effective attack on evolution and natural selection because those have nothing to say about abiogenesis.
It might be useful, however, to draw a distinction between self-ordered and self-organized behavior … although one wonders if it really is useful.
December 28, 2010 at 5:48 am
I didn’t read the paper and I’m just going on my hazy recollection and off-the-cuff idea of what those two word mean. Having said that I think there is a clear useful distinction between self-ordered and self-organized behavior, with orginazation involving the (at least theatrical if it’s determined) agency mechanism and ordering involving rules embedded nontransparently in the agents, the system, or the geography.
December 28, 2010 at 12:24 pm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparency
?
December 28, 2010 at 1:50 pm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramaturgical_action
(backstage-frontstage)/backstage = external transparency fraction, where 1=complete external transparency for a given audience.
With internal transparency we have to replace backstage and frontstage with something else I can’t articulate acceptably right now (maybe something like asymptotic best model of agent and agent’s ability to model self, given obfuscating intermediaries such as self-deception and agent’s computational limits).