We can observe this often graceful “swarming” of human beings in their secular movement through an airport terminal or in the sacred circumambulatory movement of Islamic worshippers seven times around the Kaaba in Mecca during the celebration of Hajj. These movements, whether sacred or secular, are self-organizing. As those who engage in something called “agent-based modeling” (Wilensky and Rand, 2015) have noted, no choreographer or dictator is coordinating this movement. Each person (“agent’) is navigating in coordination with those agents who are moving (or living) next to them.
Emergence
Furthermore, it seems that surprising reconfigurations of a system often occur as this self-organizing system becomes more complex (often when an additional element is added to the system). Called Emergence, this reconfiguration is represented in the simple (but surprising) emergence of water from the combination of two gases (hydrogen and oxygen), as well as in the profound reconfiguration of various lifeless chemicals, some hot water and other yet-unknown elements to produce something that we call life.
Rock and Page offer the following summary of this radical emergent reconfiguration of complex systems (Rock and Page, pg. 78):
“Emergence is possible because agents in complex systems effectively organize themselves rather than being controlled by some central authority. An example is our immune system, which consists of agents throughout our body that identify, communicate about, and respond to threats to our physical dynamic stability.
The discovery of self-organizing behavior seems to contradict the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that systems tend toward disorder, or entropy. . . . A self-organizing system can readily respond to its environment, adapting if possible. According to complexity theorists, this adaptation generally leads to increased complexity in the system.”
An important point is being offered here by Rock and Page. It is not only that complex systems tend to be self-organizing (the “neighborhood effect”) and adaptive, but also that the adaptivity of a system tends to increase its complexity.
Tagging, internal models and building blocks
Rock and Page (Rock and Page, 2009, p. 79) turn to the writing of John Holland in identifying the key characteristics of self-organizing system:
- Tagging—recognizing, naming, or labeling entities. . .
- Internal models—simplified representations of the environment. . . .
- Building blocks—components that can be recombined to make new components . . .
I propose that Polystasis operates as a self-organizing system and that Emotions provide the tagging function that enables us to quickly anticipate that something is about to be good or bad, strong or weak, or active or passive (Osgood’s sematic categories). Our somatic and psychosocial templates provide us with internal models that help guide our actions in response to environmental conditions, while our dynamic polystatic-based feedback process enables us to quickly and frequently recombing the components based on altering baselines and shifting anticipations.
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