| SELF-ORGANISATION: THE EMERGENCE OF ORDER, ORGANISATION AND MEANING IN NATURE AND SOCIETY |
Günter Küppers
University of Bielefeld
D-33501 Bielefeld PF 100131 - Germany
e-mail:
guenter.kueppers@uni-bielefeld.de
"Self-organisation" has become a generic term which embraces a number of concepts - such as synergetics, autopoiese, dissipative structures, and self-referential systems - which all share the attempt to describe and understand the behaviour of complex, dynamic systems. In physics this involves trying to explain the formation of structures (hydro-dynamic convection) or coherent behaviour of electrons and within laser active materials (cf. Haken 1983, Küppers 1970). Chemistry investigates the formation of spatial and/or temporal structures in chemical reactions (cf. Prigogine 1976). In the overlap between chemistry and biology the point is to study the origin and development of highly complex organic molecules, and to understand the formation of biological information in a pre-biological world (cf. Eigen/Schuster 1977/1978). From neurophysiology to ecology, the ontogenesis and phylogenesis of biological phenomena are investigated in order to understand how complexity develops from simplicity (cf. Maturana 1975). To conclude this list of examples, one can refer to attempts, within the human sciences, to understand the origins and development of language, culture and civilisation (cf. Maturana 1974, Luhmann 1997).
In many areas, the theory of self-organisation is currently presented as an exact, mathematically formulated theory. It draws on many examples from the natural sciences to demonstrate which mechanism is responsible for the development of order: the circular feedback of cause and effect (cf. Küppers 1996). This 'operational closure' is also the mechanism of system-building. It differentiates a system from its environment in terms of its own operations. A system as a dynamic entity can only exist in time if the environment supplies system dynamics with the appropriate resources. Therefore closure and openness are not independent of each other; on the contrary they are related to each other in a way that the structure of the environment and the dynamics of the system are mediated. This ensures that the order of the system is independent of changes in the environment. Systems can survive in changing environments and can maintain their identities in doing so. Adaptation is the achievement of the system and not, as in classical evolutionary theories, the achievement of the environment (cf. von Foerster 1984).
In natural systems self-organisation is an effect far from equilibrium, i.e. a non-equilibrium is decisive for natural self-organisation: non-equilibrium presses for compensation, and this compensation changes the non-equilibrium. This mutual change of non-equilibrium and compensation leads to asteady state, a dynamic equilibrium in which non-equilibrium and compensation condition each other and a state of dynamic order is achieved (cf. Küppers 1997). In the phenomenal domain of the social, the mechanism of self-organisation is again circular causality, i.e. the circular feedback of causes and their effects. Instead of non-equilibrium and compensation, social self-organisation is driven by the mutual relationship of the perception of uncertainty and social interactions which aim to reduce it. Again a steady state is reached if both, the perception of, and the engagement with uncertainty condition each other (cf. Küppers 1997).
The paper presents a model of self-organisation for natural as well as for social systems.
e-mail: hmp@ipvvis.unipv.it