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[S]elf-organization [is] the appearance of structure or pattern without an external agent imposing it.

— Francis Heylighen The science of self-organization and adaptivity (2001)

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More quotes by Francis Heylighen

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.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Francis Heylighen (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.