Observing the Universal Self-organizing Process at Scale

(Chapter 1)

The human body as a self-organizing, living system

Let’s start by observing our body’s network to see how the self-organizing process is capable of performing the most complex tasks with minimum effort.

As soon as one thinks of a word to be spoken, four million neurons and cells synchronize in order to deliver that single word to the listener. And while the human body is performing this complex task, it is also regulating its oxygen levels, sugar levels, enzymes, temperature, heartbeat, and more. Acknowledging the simultaneous performance of multiple systems within the human body network without conscious effort allows us to observe the deep simplicity of nonlinear systems as they are self-organizing, living systems and their capability of performing complex tasks with minimum effort. This deep simplicity is inherent throughout the whole universe and so we can observe it not only in our body but in other inhabitants of our green planet and throughout our solar system.

Observing the vast, creative universe

We can observe this deep simplicity within animal networks as well. When bees are needing to move their hive to a new location, they go through this nonlinear self-organizing process. First they send 50 or so expert navigator bees to scout for a new location. These investigator bees then return to the original hive and dance to communicate where each is suggesting the hive might move. The direction of the dance points to the new potential location, the duration of the dance correlates to its distance, and the rate of wing movement describes its quality. The investigators then examine that information more closely and this process happens repeatedly until eventually they all synchronize with the suitable location, and a decision is made. 

In plant and fungal networks, we can find this deep simplicity in their cooperation. Plant networks share food and nutrients with each other through their root systems and shared fungal networks through a nonlinear, self-organizing, cooperative process, which creates oxygen for fungi and animals. In the 2019 documentary Fantastic Fungi, we see that fungal systems are a major part of how plants communicate with one another. The vast, nonlinear mycelial networks help the living systems they are a part of by communicating needs and warnings of danger or scarce resources to seemingly separate parts of the interconnected systems. For example, if one area is lacking a nutrient that the trees in that area need, this need is communicated via the networks of mycelium often over great distances so that the plants and fungi that are in areas where this nutrient is more available are able to transport that nutrient via their root and mycelial networks to the area in need. In this way these systems of separate biological kingdoms are self-organizing via nonlinear communication and the cooperative synchronization of the network’s members’ assets (expertise, intelligence, and resources) in order to perform with higher efficiency and deep simplicity, creating a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

At the planetary scale, we can observe this deep simplicity in how Earth uses its different capabilities to make a habitable planet. For instance, storms in Africa’s Sahara Desert can bring minerals to the Amazon Rainforest. The wind that carries minerals across the ocean creates a static charge in the clouds above the Amazon that forms lightning, and this acts as a catalyst for chemical reactions between nitrogen, oxygen, and other minerals that provide nutritional rain for the plants below. Those plants then convert photons received from the sun into sugars, which ultimately provide protein and oxygen that serves as nutrients to the other inhabitants of Earth. 

At the solar level, according to current knowledge, there are 100 billion galaxies, each with 200 billion stars; and one of those stars is our Sun. Our Sun is made of around 98 percent helium and hydrogen, the two simplest elements on the Periodic Table. From these simple elements comes a capability of creating a unique gravitational field that gathers the celestial bodies that we know as our solar system. This gravitational field arranged our solar system in such a way that placed our Earth in a position where it is capable of creating and sustaining life as we know it. 

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Now that we have observed the deep simplicity of this amazing process happening at multiple levels of our universe, we will investigate the nonlinear networks that are the organizational pattern of the self-organizing systems. Next we will explore how by studying nonlinear networks, we can obtain the essential behaviors of the self-organizing process.