What is Self-Ordering?

Key mechanisms include "tags" and "flows", "catalysts" and "active models".
 

• Tags allow organisms to send signals and recognize signals sent by others.
• Your immune system recognizes foreign substances, because they have labels (binding sites) differing from those it sees as you.
• Predators evolve elaborate systems to recognize their prey.
• It takes two to tango -- complex systems involve agents that emit and respond to tags.
• Flows of information and organisms assure that entities that can interact to create new order or value collide.
• Boundaries or membranes filter out extraneous flows, to create environments in which only certain kinds of reactions can occur.
• Catalysts provide active, temporary binding sites that facilitate reactions and interactions that might not otherwise occur.
• Active models provide representations of the external world that guide an organism, based on its internal structure, to seek valuable interactions and avoid harmful ones.
• Such models may be composed of building blocks -- composites of mechanims previously assembled at lower levels of a complex hierarchy.

"Emergent Self-Ordering" on the net differs from "top down" laws and regulations insofar as the tags, flows and boundaries that create order originate primarily with private actors.

The net provides major new opportunities for self-ordering:

• It reduces transaction costs, thereby increasing the ability of private parties to enter into contracts and establish valuable, order-creating relationships.
• It facilitates flows of information and communication across geographic and organizational boundaries.
• It allows various software filters to create membranes that exclude harmful material and attract and concentrate valuable interactions.
• Because it is an open system, new catalysts can emerge without a need for central planning.
• It connects people and groups that can develop, use and evolve diverse active models.