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Francis Heylighen Quotes
born 1960
Francis Paul Heylighen (born 1960) is a Belgian cyberneticist, best known for his contributions to the evolutionary-cybernetic worldview developed in the Principia Cybernetica Project, the modelling of the Internet as a Global brain, and the theories of memetics and self-organization.
Also known as: Heylighen, Francis
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[S]elf-organization [is] the appearance of structure or pattern without an external agent imposing it.
The science of self-organization and adaptivity (2001)
W. Ross Ashby is one of the founding fathers of both cybernetics and systems theory. He developed such fundamental ideas as the homeostat, the law of requisite variety, the principle of self-organization, and the principle of regulatory models.
This is a general characteristic of self-organizing systems: they are robust or resilient. This means that they are relatively insensitive to perturbations or errors, and have a strong capacity to restore themselves, unlike most human designed systems.
In that sense, a self-organizing system is intrinsically adaptive: it maintains its basic organization in spite of continuing changes in its environment. As noted, perturbations may even make the system more robust, by helping it to discover a more stable organization.
Complexity and Self-Organization (2008)
(Systems science) does not aim to find the one true representation for a given type of systems (e.g. physical, chemical or biological systems), but to formulate general principles about how different representations of different systems can be constructed so as to be effective in problem-solving.