thanks, chris.

i don't think i've heard of stuart kauffman before, but i checked your link to his latest book, and it sounds like he would be worth checking out when i, and others i imagine, get a chance.

have you been listening to the IN conversation between ken wilber and rupert sheldrake? they're talkiing about the same sort of thing. for my part, i'd recommend you check out wilber's 'sex, ecology and spirituality', and sheldrake's new edition of 'a new science of life', when it comes out later this year.

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Yes, it's very interesting stuff - the conversation and SES.  I agree with the basic sentiment that there are two arrows of time.  I think of it more as a grand version of genetic crossover - things come together for a while and then break apart into constituent components, only to reorganize later under different conditions, yielding something completely different.

I think self-organization is the creative tool driving evolutionary emergence.  It has the perfect quality of taking things that get very complex and turning them into things that are altogether new.  The notion of a physical state change is the best metaphor I know of for how self-organization works.  A container of water, for example, is cooled until such a point that the free-floating molecules of h2o slam into an organized pattern, and the end result - ice - is completely different from water. 

Kauffman, in At Home In The Universe, describes his years of experiments looking for insights into how and why this happens.  He comes away with some basic conditions that have to be true and wide range of examples of self-organization happening.  It's fascinating stuff because it has such a unified feel to it - it is at work at levels of existence.  I've actually spent time with Kauffman, and he harbors no real certainty as to what is happening.  He is, however, fairly convinced (as am I) that self-organization is co-pilot in driving the Cosmos (or Kosmos) forward. 

hi chris,

you lost me with the 'two arrows of time'. what are they?

also, i understand self-organization to come from Spirit-in-action. i don't see how it could be understood any other way, but it's not clear to me that you would agree with this.

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Sorry - I was talking about the two arrows of time (from SES) as the drive toward entropy and the drive toward evolutionary emergence.  The evolutionary emergence side, I believe, is funded in large part by self-organization.

For a detailed account of what I mean by self-organization, check out this FAQ:
http://psoup.math.wisc.edu/archive/sosfaq.html

Highlights:
8. What is self-organisation ?

The evolution of a system into an organised form in the absence of external constraints. A move from a large region of state space to a persistent smaller one, under the control of the system itself.

9. Can things self-organise ?

Yes, any system that takes a form that is not imposed from outside (by walls, machines or forces) can be said to self-organise. The term is usually employed however in a more restricted sense by excluding physical laws (reductionist explanations), and suggesting that the properties that emerge are not explicable from a purely reductionist viewpoint.