Self-organizing systems

In the fifteenth century, if you had asked an average historian to say which was the country that in his opinion was better able to conquer and militarily colonize the rest of the world and take the economic lead, without any doubt he would have answered without hesitation that It was China.

However, Europe was the real conqueror, which was technologically very backward with respect to China. China did not have the right ideologies. Innovation was forbidden in China by the canonical texts of Confucius. China could not become a self-organizing system.

To understand the problem of self-organization, you have to think of a highway. While driving in relatively quiet hours, the other vehicles hardly affect us. But during peak hours, traffic gets heavier and we begin to react and interact with other drivers. The "total traffic" pattern begins to "lead" us. Traffic has become a self-organizing system. The isolated links are driven by the global pattern.

If a machine malfunctions, finding the problem is relatively easy. A link in the cause-effect chain was broken. The link is found and repaired. However, when a self-organizing system of extreme complexity such as the human organism is malfunctioning, a doctor can diagnose that the cause is a certain element of the system, but in reality the cause of any disturbance of our health is always multiple, because a living organism is constituted by an overwhelming amount of feedback loops.

Some of these ties deal with the transmutation of food into energy, others with muscle contraction, some others with the regulation of body temperature, others with the movements of neurotransmitters, others with dilation of the iris of the eye in the dark, while others accelerate the heart in the presence of the beloved woman. What terrible complexity!

And they all interact with each other, generating new elements that return to interact with each other.

If we do not exploit, it is because we are a self-organizing system. When one of these links becomes congested, a "disease" appears.