On order and disorder
The starting point of the science of order and disorder is the discovery of the crucial role and properties of the quantity known as entropy. This is a very deep notion, with ramifications into almost all fields of the physical sciences as well as the life sciences and the social sciences. A discussion in the context of the physical sciences is available on the Physics of information page.
Entropy first appeared during the study of thermodynamics, in the middle of the 19th century and was used to describe the global distribution of energy among large numbers of independent degrees of freedom. When energy was distributed uniformly, entropy was high, when it was distributed non-uniformly it was low. The lowest possible entropy corresponds to all available energy being placed into a single degree of freedom.
One of the most fundamental results of thermodynamics is the principle known as the Second Law. It states that the entropy can never decrease in isolated systems. Many different but equivalent statements exist for this famous Second Law, and one of the ways that it has been summarized is that disorder can never decrease in an isolated system; in other words systems which are left to themselves never tend to greater order and internal organization, but to the contrary, tend to become more disordered. Available energy will tend toward a state where it is distributed uniformly over all available degrees of freedom.
This discovery confirmed deep seated human intuitions and widespread observations of order melting into chaos in the absence of outside intervention. However, its scientific formulation seemed, at first, to leave no room for some of the most common objects of our everyday experience: living beings. These seemed to be almost infinitely improbable islands of organized matter in a sea of disorder and chaos.
It was only a century later that mechanisms started to be studied that were capable of generating order more or less spontaneously. The starting point was to notice one crucial detail of the Second Law: the word “isolated”. In other words systems may interact with the outside world in such ways as to make their internal energy bunch up preferentially in a minority of the available degrees of freedom. Indeed the work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy and that of Nobel prize winner Ilya Prigogine showed that open systems, which exchange energy and/or matter with the rest of the world, can exhibit spontaneous self-organizing behavior. For a short introduction see, for instance, von Bertalanffy’s Science article “The theory of open systems in physics and biology“.
Several different types of open systems have been studied where order and disorder mix in complex ways. Most prominently there are the deterministic dynamical systems studied by chaos theory such as the Lorenz attractor. Then there are continuous phase transitions in the vicinity of which matter exhibits spontaneous self-organization. More recently we have had fascinating work coming from the field of complex systems research, most notably, from the study of organized complexity or emergence.
I believe that the latter phenomenon has the greatest potential for deep and surprising new results and it is the one I am most interested in. It is the most general approach we have to understanding the interplay between order and disorder and I believe that the first two phenomena (chaos and phase transitions) may eventually be seen as special cases of the third (organized complexity or emergence). In effect, organized complexity refers to phenomena occurring in systems composed of large numbers of interacting agents, whereby organized, or collective, behavior emerges spontaneously by virtue of the interactions among agents only, and without the need for any external guiding hand or force.
[However, note that these systems are open, so they interact with the external world. Whether the interaction leading to self organization is the result of what we anthropomorphically call a "will" makes little difference to the physics. The difference is only in our minds. What matters is that the system interacted with the outside world and this led to a decrease in its entropy. The fact that we are dealing with open systems means that the difference between self-organization and guided organization is in the eye of the beholder: it is psychological. However, note also that not all sciences are psychology-independent. Physics should be. Political science cannot be.]
Among the remarkable scientific results published in this field in the last two decades are Steven Wolfram’s “New Kind of Science” and Stuart Kauffman’s “Origins of Order” among many others. I believe these show beyond a shadow of a doubt that emergence is a far more powerful mechanism of organization and order than previously imagined, and that it must be placed alongside authority (in political theory) and natural selection (in theoretical biology) as one of the main drivers behind the evolution of our species, our society and our world.
For a discussion of work on the detailed mechanisms of ordered complexity see the page on Networks.
Organized complexity is also the conceptual contact point with the political theory of anti-authoritarianism discussed on the Politics page. As also remarked on the Politics page, this possibility, while not even imagined until recently, has started to gain increasing prominence and attraction in scientific and intellectual circles as well as in the broader civil society in many developed and developing nations.
These ideas may also be used to build a bottom up model of Karl Popper’s (and now George Soros’s) Open Society as opposed to an Authority Based Society. An Open Society would rely on emergent order, whereas an Authority Based Society would rely on imposed order.
