Field notes

Search

Search IconIcon to open search

Self-organizing systems of vast complexity are the way of the world

Updated Mar 22 2025

We get in trouble when we try to impose external, hierarchical order on ourselves—much like how monoculture fails to thrive, and instead entangled ecosystems are key.

If you think chaos is the only result of a non-hierarchal system, your own body disproves it. Try to get your mind to tell your lungs to breathe, your heart to beat, your stomach to digest, your skin to sweat, your colon to poop. Even if it were possible, functioning that way is chaos. We’ve got it flipped around. From microbes to millions of acres of forests, (eco)systems of vast complexity are self-organizing all around us.

If something as complex as a human body is a self-organizing system, could you not scale it up and infer that all of humanity is a self-organizing system as much as mycelia are? And on and on, ad infinitum?



Further reading