 In this video, we'll be talking about the process of self-organization within complex systems and the dynamic interplay between order and entropy that is thought to be required to enable it. We will firstly discuss different theories for the emergence of organization. In so doing, we will look at the first and second laws of thermodynamics. We will then talk about the rise of self-organization theory during the past century and lay down the basic framework through which this process is understood to take place. Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate, O anything of nothing first create? This short quote from Shakespeare asks probably the oldest and most fundamental question there is to ask. Why and how do we get something instead of nothing? Some form of order instead of just randomness. From the formation of galaxies, to the human body, to the structure of snowflakes or the complex organization within a single biological cell, we live in a world that exhibits extraordinary order of all kinds and on all scales. The real question is why or how do we get things to work together? How do we get global level coordination within a system? And there are two fundamentally different approaches to trying to answer this question. Firstly, this coordination may be imposed by some external entity, or secondly, it may be self-generated internally. For thousands of years, many different societies came to the former conclusion that this organization we see in the world derives from some external divine entity. Religions and spirituality often depict the world in terms of an interplay between supernatural forces of order and chaos. But of course, modern science has always rejected any form of divine intervention, as core to its foundation is the law to the conservation of energy and matter. The first law of thermodynamics is an expression of this fundamental conservation, which states that the total energy of an isolated system remains constant or conserved. Energy and matter can be neither created nor be destroyed but simply transformed from one form to another. The conservation of energy is a fundamental assumption and keystone of the scientific enterprise. If you tell a physicist that you have created a perpetual motion machine that can essentially create energy out of nothing, they will just laugh at you. Because you are no longer playing the game of science, you have broken its most fundamental rule. The second law of thermodynamics states that the total entropy, which may be understood as disorder, will always increase over time in an isolated system. To understand where this comes from, we might think about how if we have some object heated, that the heat will always try to spread out to become evenly distributed within its environment, but the reverse never happens. Heat will not spontaneously reverse this process to become concentrated again. Likewise, whenever rooms are cleaned, they become messy again in the future. People get older as time passes and not younger. All of these are expressions of the second law of thermodynamics, meaning that a system cannot spontaneously increase its order without external intervention that decreases order elsewhere in another system. For many years, the second law of thermodynamics that systems tend toward disorder has generally been accepted. Unfortunately, none of this helps us in answering Shakespeare's question as to why our universe has in fact developed to produce at least some systems with extra ordinary high levels of organization. In fact, the second law of thermodynamics would predict quite the opposite. The term self-organizing was introduced to contemporary science in 1947 by the psychiatrist and engineer W. Ross Ashby. Self-organization as a word and concept was used by those associated with general systems theory in the 1960s, but did not become commonplace in the scientific literature until its adoption by physicists and researchers in the field of complex systems in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1977, the work of Nobel laureate chemist Ilya Prigogin on dissipative structures was one of the first to show that the second law of thermodynamics may not be true for all systems. Prigogin was studying chemical and physical systems far from equilibrium and looking at how small fluctuations could be amplified through feedback loops to create new patterns. For example, when water is heated evenly from below while cooling down evenly at its surface, since warm liquid is lighter than cold liquid, the heated liquid tries to move upwards towards the surface. However, the cool liquid at the surface similarly tries to sink to the bottom. These two opposite movements cannot take place at the same time without some kind of coordination between the two flows of liquid. The liquid tends to self-organize into a pattern of hexagonal cells called convection cells, with an upward flow on one side of the cell and a downward flow on the other side. The theory of self-organization has come to explore a new approach to this age-old question about the emergence of order, unlike religion and spirituality that simply ascribes it to exogenous supernatural phenomena or traditional reductionist science that posits that order can only come by transferring it from some other external system. With self-organization theory, the organization is instead traced back to the interaction between components where nonlinear interactions between elements can become amplified by positive feedback loops to create attractors that can result in new patterns of order emerging. But that this process requires the system to be far from its equilibrium so as to have sufficient entropy or disorder for new random fluctuations and noises to gain traction and take hold as emergent patterns. When the system is far from its equilibrium, it can find a dynamic state between order and chaos that enables it to continue generating novel phenomena and regenerate itself for prolonged periods of time through self-organization. Thus, this new set of theories around self-organization recognizes a complex interplay between order and chaos, whether we use the more scientific terminology of a system being far from equilibrium or the more catchy term of edge of chaos. This new vocabulary has built into it a recognition that self-organization, evolution, and novelty thrive on a dynamic interplay between order and disorder because it is only when there is a sufficiently high enough level of entropy and disorder within the system that a weak fluctuation can be amplified into a new pattern of order, but when the system settles into an equilibrium or stable configuration, this no longer becomes possible. Today, the study of self-organizing systems is a hot topic that is central to understanding the complex systems that make up our world with interest in how to model, design, and manage complex systems coming from many areas such as the social sciences, computer science, business management, robotics, and engineering. The theory and interest in the process of self-organization has arisen in tandem with computing resources. Just as we can't study galaxies without our telescopes or cells without microscopes, we can't study complex systems without computers, whereas before it was very difficult to mathematically model systems with many degrees of freedom, the advent of inexpensive and powerful computers made it possible to construct and explore models composed of many entities, looking at how, out of their local interactions, global patterns of organization can emerge. And this represents one of the few primary methods which we use to study complex systems. In summary, we have been talking about the process of self-organization. We looked at the different theories offered for the emergence of organization and discussed how self-organization theory ascribes this process to the nonlinear interactions between components when the system is in a dynamic state, far from its equilibrium, with this so-called edge-of-chaos state, providing it with a sufficient amount of entropy for some small fluctuation to take hold and become amplified into a new pattern of order.