Self-organization: the Unfinished Revolution

Life is held together on its various levels — cells, organs (e.g., the brain or immune system), organisms, societies and ecosystems — by general mechanisms of organization, mechanisms that also information technology will eventually have to exploit in order to overcome its complexity barrier. There are good reasons to believe that organization in all its forms can be understood by a common set of general concepts and principles. For various reasons, this topic has slipped through the academic cracks and we don’t have a science of organization, in spite of many isolated relevant efforts and activities. The methodology of physics is very appropriate to take up the challenge. Recent decades have seen a change in perspective on the origin of structure in this world, from hetero-organization to self-organization, but this revolution is unfinished, both in terms of its conceptual development and due to its failure to invade the fields of information technology and molecular biology. The time is ripe to start a new intellectual venture. Due to its great scientific and commercial importance and due to its neglect in classical academic fields, the science of organization is an ideal opportunity for an institute like FIAS. What is Organization? Organic systems consist of hierarchies of parts that are functionally coordinated with each other and with the environment. Coordination is achieved by proper design and by a network of interactions, integrating the array of parts into one organic whole. The essence of organization is alignment under a hierarchy of goals. The fundamental goal of life is self-preservation. In the course of evolution, development and learning, however, this fundamental goal is broken down into a rich hierarchy of supportive sub-goals, many of which have taken on a significance of their own. A perfect example of organic behavior is wound healing: I cut my finger, and over the course of minutes, hours and days I can observe my skin and tissues to react in multiple purposeful ways to close the wound, fend off infection and recreate a healthy structure. Important organic structures are living cells, animals and plants, societies of animals including the human society, and ecosystems. Even the biosphere as a whole has been discussed under the auspices of the organic. On several fronts the time has come for a serious attempt to understand the nature of organic structure. Relevant domains are molecular biology, the evolutionary-developmental complex, and the neuro-, cognitive and social sciences. In addition, it would be interesting to clarify the relation of our information technology to organismic structure, perhaps with the prospect of turning dumb automata into electronic organisms. At the confluence of ideas on goal-free self-organizing physical systems, goal-oriented living structures and algorithmically controlled computers lies a research area, perhaps to be called organic computing (see www.organic-computing.org), whose time has come.