[OSList] Self Organizing vs. Physics & Entropy... Who wins?

[John Watkins]

Lucas,

This is a great question you raise!  It seems that our universe operates by several intriguing principles.  In general, it seems to be true that overall entropy increases (but I think the final conclusions on that one are still not available to us).  But the strange and really cool thing is, it does so by increasing order in some sub-systems.  So, the big bang happens, and if entropy were the total picture, we would never have had any matter at all.  All that energy would merely have dissipated into all that expanding space.  But something happened that caused the swirls of chaotic energy to begin to coalesce into sub atomic particles, then particles, then atoms, then molecules, then stars and eventually planets and life and us.  It seems that inherent in chaos is the emergence of patterns that result in orders, and orders then recursively develop themselves into complexity.  One of the coolest things is the way that established patterns become autopoietic, that is, they take in energy, sort the energy into that which helps them recreate themselves at a higher level of organization, and then they excrete the rest of the energy back into the broader system.  That is one definition of entropy, but the intriguing thing is that the excreted energy does not just go all random; it actually gets used in the emergence of other new orders.  So.  Classical thermodynamics does explain all this, but it does so without recourse to complexity theory.  Complexity theory helps us understand how new orders emerge from open systems in far from equilibrium states.  I take Open Space to be one of those sorts of far from equilibrium states settings for the emergence of new orders.

John

On Feb 11, 2014, at 8:19 PM, Lucas Cioffi wrote:

> Hi All, 
> 
> I read that "Open Space works because self-organization works."  But I remember from physics class that disorder (entropy) in the Universe is always increasing, so when the order of something increases (such as during OS), the order of something else must decrease.
> 
> Paraphrased from Wikipedia: 
> "The second law of thermodynamics states that in general the total entropy of any system (the disorder, randomness, or our lack of information about it) will not decrease other than by increasing the entropy of some other system."
> 
> So when participants organize themselves during Open Space does something else become disorganized?  Or is it that all the disorder created (by consuming the muffins, coffee, fuel, paper, electricity, etc) always outweighed by the order created by the self-organization?
> 
> For what it's worth, below is an interesting thread I found from the list archives from a few years ago that mentions entropy...
> 
> Lucas Cioffi
> Charlottesville, VA
> 
> 
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: John Watkins <johnw536 at mac.com>
> Date: Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 12:25 AM
> Subject: Re: [OSList] Designing an OS way
> To: Artur Silva <arturfsilva at yahoo.com>, World wide Open Space Technology email list <oslist at lists.openspacetech.org>
> Cc: "76066.515 at compuserve.com" <76066.515 at compuserve.com>
> 
> 
> Artur,
> 
> The term "open systems" comes from thermodynamics, especially from Prigogine and Stengers, who also refer to them as "dissipative" systems.  It does not mean open to change; it means open in the sense of importing "energy" from outside itself and excreting "energy" back into the surrounding system.  Such systems are most often self-organizing and self-recreating (autopoiesis).  They "sort" energy into that which will help them recreate themselves and that which will not, and they dissipate the rest, creating, paradoxically, internally order and externally more entropy.  Bureaucracies are actually great examples of open systems in this regard.
> 
> John
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