Cybernetics & Human Knowing - Thesaurus pilot project
Edited by M&T Thellefsen

Self organizing systems

Definition

A system which changes its basic structure as a function of its experience and environment.

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Articles:

 

Definitions:

Principia Cybernetica
Encyclopedia Autopoietica

Principia Cybernetica (web)
The concept of self-organizing system has changed over time. In the early days it was defined as:

A system which changes its basic structure as a function of its experience and environment.

Later it became:

Only organisms and their environment taken together organize themselves.(Von Foerster)

A self-organizing system is not an organism that changes its structure as a function of its experience and environment but rather the system consisting of the organism and environment taken together. (Ashby)

Encyclopedia Autopoietica
Any of the class of systems exhibiting the feature of self-organization.

The notion of self-organizing system is correspondingly vague outside a specific referential context

Those systems which due to certain initial and limiting conditions arise spontaneously as specific states or as sequences of states.(Hejl)

An apparent synonym for dissipative structures of which autopoietic systems i considered to be a relative stable subset. (Jantsch)

 

International Encyclopedia of Systems & Cybernetics
no def.