SELF-ORGANIZING SYSTEM

The concept of a self-organizing system has changed over time. In the early days it was defined as a system which changes its basic structure as a function of its experience and environment. The term appears to have been used first by Farley and Clark of Lincoln Laboratory in l954 in their paper in the Transactions of the Institute of Radio Engineers, Professional Group on Information Theory. (Marshall C. Yovits, 1962, Preface) However, it is important to note that an organism does not organize itself independent of its environment. Von Foerster persuasively argued that only organisms and their environments taken together organize themselves. (Von Foerster, 1960). Ashby redefined a self-organizing system to be not an organism that changes its structure as a function of its experience and environment but rather the system consisting of the organism and environment taken together. (Ashby, 1960)