Chaos as a Source of Order

James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis with their Daisyworld experiment proved that physical processes spontaneously form ordered patterns and behave in an idiosyncratically order-creating way. Ilya Prigogine showed that in open systems dissipation becomes a source of order. Dissipative structures not only maintain themselves in a stable state far from equilibrium, but may even evolve. When the flow of energy and matter through them increases, the input and output may intensify, and the self-reinforcing loops may cross the thresholds of stability. The system may go through new instabilities and transform into new structures of increased complexity.

Seemingly contradictory, experiments show that self-regulation becomes more and more stable as the model’s complexity increases, and that new structures and new forms of behavior occur only when the system is far from equilibrium.

This observation drawn from simple chemical processes gains in power when put into the context of the functioning of the human mind. We can describe the human being as a dissipative structure, organizationally closed and environmentally open, a cognitive self-organizing system that maintains its stability and it distances from equilibrium while increasing its complexity. The state of crisis determines the shift toward evolution, where crystallization of patterns and processes takes place.

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