How did the concept of self-organisation come about?
Our understanding of the world has benefited greatly from the reductionist strategy that models systems as the simple sum of their parts, but it has long been recognized that under some circumstances, the parts may interact in complex ways that simple reductionism cannot illuminate. For example, ripples a streambed arise when flowing water causes sand grains to bump against one another. The little piles of sand change the way the water flows, which changes the way the sand grains move, and so on. The interesting point here is that one cannot easily pinpoint causes for the specific ripples that develop, because causation is diffusely distributed over the countless tiny interactions between the elements of the system. Furthermore, because of the feedback loops involved, imperceptibly tiny differences in the starting state can have enormous consequences in the development of the system, making it essentially impossible to predict in any specific way how the ripples will form, just by look
