Look around! The world we inhabit is filled with complex organizations. If we go outside, we usually see a great variety of plants and animals. Inside we are often near dozens of complex appliances, tools, and other artifacts. The computer I’m writing this on, and the cell phone you may be reading this on, are amazingly complex things. We ourselves are highly complex organizations or cells, which are themselves highly complex organizations of proteins and other molecules. We take all this for granted. Yet from the point of view of a reductionist science, there is really no good reason why there should be any organized entities at all (except, of course, if there weren’t, there would be no scientists, no science). I would like to suggest that we not take the presence of all this organization for granted.
In my previous article here, “The Evolution of Information,” I suggested that much of the organization we see around us came into existence due to some form of information. Genetic information, in the case of plants and for the most part, animals. Neural information, in the case of the buildings, machines, artworks, and a great variety of other artifacts that fill our modern world. And what should we call the novel forms of organization being generated by artificial intelligence? The post-biological?
There is a close relationship between information and organization. Information, when stored, is always a highly complex organization of such things as the adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine molecules in DNA; as words in books; as notes in music; as 1s and 0s in computer code, and many others. And as already explored, information can generate highly complex organizations such as each one of us.
Self-Organization
But not all organized things are based on information. There are a range of things around us where the organization is either completely, or in part, based on self-organization. At the large scale, this includes such things as the galaxy, solar system and planet in which we live.
Just what self-organization is and the variety of forms of self-organization is beyond the scope of this article. Here, I will just say that in self organization there is no central plan behind the thing organized – as there is in those things where the organization is mediated by some form of information.
A forest is a good example of an arrangement that comes about through self-organization. The structure of each individual species is based on genetic information, but there is no central plan to the forest ecosystem. It is the rather harmonious result of the endless conflict of the various organisms as they struggle to come into existence and survive. The philosopher Heraclitus wrote: “Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony.” A forest ecosystem shows there is at least some truth to that statement.
The Internet is a rather different example of something that has largely come about through self-organization. While there is a large-scale organization of the Internet designed by humans, the individual sites that make up the Internet are not a part of a plan. Each site was planned by someone, but there was no plan that directed the planning or coordination of sites. The sites that matter to people survive. To a significant extent, the Internet is the result of self-organization.
The key thing that drives all forms of self organization is some form of what I will call “preferences.” Through gravity, all matter has a “preference” to move toward other matter. This is the key driver of the formation of galaxies, stars and planets.
Through electromagnetic energy, some matter has a positive charge that gives it a preference for matter with a negative charge and an “aversion” for matter with a similar charge. This “preference” is responsible for a great variety of organizations, including the organizations of the organic molecules that ultimately gave rise to life and the emergence of genetic information. In the example of the Internet above, people’s preference for certain sites has helped shape its organizational content.
A Typology of Organization
Given that we live in a highly organized world and we are surrounded by highly organized, novel entities, it surprises me how little attention the concept of organization has received from either science or philosophy.
The very simple idea of a basic typology of forms of organization, is something I have never encountered (though I’m sure it’s out there somewhere). But here is my take on such a typology: there are two basic forms of organization, self-organization and organization based on a plan of some kind (which I call algorithmic organization). Within algorithmic organization, a kind of basic division can be made between those entities where the organizing principle is internal to the entity being organized and those where the organization principle is external to the entity. The first is characteristic of organisms, the second of most artifacts created by humans. (Perhaps the organizations created by artificial intelligence are a third form of algorithmic organization.) I’m sure one could add a great deal of detail to this flesh out this simple typology, but that is beyond the scope here.
Relevance to Spiritual Naturalism
So how is this relevant to spiritual naturalism? It is relevant to spirituality of all types, because a central idea in much spirituality is some form of morality, and morality is dependent on an ability to govern one’s life. To govern one’s life is to give a certain form, direction and organization to the activities of that life. This ability to organize our life based on some moral ideal is perhaps the most highly evolved of all forms of information. It is a potential we are born with, but only through understanding and effort can we come to fully realize the potential.
Of lesser relevance is the fact that the Judeo-Christian creation myth would make all organization, including galaxies, a form of organization based on information. The information in this case being in God’s mind. If a person has no understanding of the world’s ability to self-organize, it is not surprising that they might imagine the world organized based on the analogy of how a human organizes things, which is to say, based on a plan. Without an understanding of self-organization, the attractiveness of the Judeo-Christian creation is understandable. But when we understand the evolution of information and the principles of self-organization, then we can give a detailed explanation of why the world had no need of an intelligent design or designer to bring forth this marvelously organized cosmos we inhabit. And to account for the fact of our moral will, for we can show that the moral will is connected to the processes of Nature via the long history of information’s evolution and the self-organizing Universe from which information emerged.
Understanding all that is a lot more complicated than accepting some chapters of the Bible. But it is worth the effort. It shows that the Universe itself is God-like in its creationality.
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Thanks Thomas interesting topic and thoughtful article. Another similar distinction I find useful is between hierarchical and ‘heterarchical’ organisation; the first relies on some centralising organ or brain to do the organising, the latter has intelligence distributed throughout all the individual organs which co-ordinate peer-to-peer between themselves. One of the major organisational changes in human history was the switch from small, relatively heterarchical societies to large hierarchical societies with the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years ago. Religions at that point also changed from ones in which the sacred was distributed throughout nature, in ancestors, animals, and trees for example to worship of powerful gods reigning from above like kings. I think SN is a form of spirituality based on more heterarchical, democratic, open and pluralistic models of organisation and thought where ideas can always be questioned and modes of ritual, worship, meditation and prayer etc can evolve and change, as all forms of organisation do in nature.