How can an approach that is inherently chaotic be useful for solving essential problems?
A self-organizing system is always in disequilibrium, in order that the system can readily adjust to differences in changes of state. Or said another way, if the system exhibited a stable solution, it would not be able to move to a new solution space when necessary. The consequence of this disequilibrium is twofold. First the level of randomness might lead to excursions in the state of the system that may not be desirable. And second, even in a “good” collective solution, there are often some subsystems that may perform very poorly. These are two different questions and are addressed separately. For physical systems that exhibit emergent properties, we do know that we get stable results either for an average over many realizations or if the system is contains many redundant subsystems. In real life it may not be possible to “run” a system many times in order to observe the reasonable solution. Nor might it be tolerable for individual subsystems to do poorly in a large collective. (Cert
