What Science Teaches
Everything alive forms nothing into something by creating an identity for itself. This is the dynamic of self-organization—life’s capacity to create order from chaos, to create growth and potential where there was none. The process of self-organizing is in the term itself: There is a self that gets organized.
Living systems are self-organizing; they exchange information with their environment and use that information to adapt to changed conditions. Information is filtered through their identity, determining what’s relevant and what’s not. All of life possesses the essential freedom to decide what to pay attention to and how to respond to what they just noticed.
Without the filter of identity, there can be no sense making and no living system. With a clear identity, the system develops, adapts, and creates new capacities.
Chaos science adds another dimension to the biological with Strange Attractors.1 These are shapes of mesmerizing beauty that appear on a computer screen as a chaotic system displays its behavior over millions of iterations. Each point on the screen is the sum of a complex equation. It may land far or near to the preceding one, but all behavior is held within a “basin of attraction.” This basin is created from the nature of the equation—it is self-referencing, continually feeding back on itself. One sum feeds immediately into the next; every point is different, based on an equation where each result is new, and then used in the next calculation.2
The order inherent in chaos becomes beautifully visible as a shape or pattern. If each individual moment is charted in two dimensions, it looks like disorder, lines going up and down forever. Adding a third dimension, as is true in life, reveals these astonishing patterns of deep order and harmonious beauty. This is an important discovery that applies to both inanimate and animate systems—their behavior becomes visible as patterns as they interact in a network of connections.
The conditions necessary to create this order are so minimal that complexity scientist Stuart Kauffman termed this “order for free.” A few set of rules that are self-referencing, operating autonomously, unconstrained by any other controls, will instantaneously establish an orderly pattern of behavior.3
The ordering capacity of this Universe restores the original meaning of “awesome.”