The Process of Self-Organization

 

Self-organization grows out of questions asked and answered across an expanding boundary. The boundary starts at (or just after) a kind of nearly coherent singularity. As energy and information cross the boundary, it changes, and subsequently reacts in an ever more complex way with the WIBWI or the ever changing, Implicit Order (the all-inclusive set/ever-educated/complemented by the Explicit (the WI)).

 

In the same way with the formation of new neural tissue arrangements in young minds, new information/energy crosses the threshold of expanding explanations and potential pathways for explanation.

 

Parents (or significant others) react to a child’s observations and utterances by explaining the world to the child based on the configuration of tissue the child has already set down (in reacting to the WIBWI sample) solidifying the way the child sees the world.

 

By the time the child reaches adulthood, their brains have, in this way, mapped out their world. Does the world the child sees when they open their eyes resemble the WIBWI? It is impossible to know, because the WIBWI (just like the WI) depends on the subjectivity of the point of view of the observer (the boundary) and the generalizations they make over time.

 

If the microscopic configurations of the brains in two such children could be watched as they learn to navigate their worlds, and they use the same words with the same meanings, neither would have the identical fractal neural tissue pattern as the other.

 

Imagine two windows in nearly the same cold location. Both of them are exposed to the same freezing weather and both have the same amount of water condensing out on their panes. The truth is that neither pattern of frost that forms (like the neural branches that form in a person’s brain) will take on the same patterns.

• The branching neurons in brain tissue in one person are not identically configured as the branching neurons in brain tissue of another’s brain. Like the differentiation in fingerprints, this is not the case, even in identical twins.
• Not only are the configurations of neural tissue that convey the same meanings not identical from person to person, they look nothing like the meanings they convey.

 

What we can glean from the above facts is that thoughts and ideas and meanings of the mind are virtual. That is, the symbolic language used to set the meanings to memory (the neural patterns) are different from the understood meaning of the memories themselves. And that what we think of as the world of physical reality need not be understood from person to person in an identical way (even though individuals might agree on meanings attributed to that world).

 

In this way, there may be a very complex boundary that comprises the mind. And all we can say about that boundary is that it may be symbolic or representative of the real world (if such a world exists objectively). The Implicit Order, or WIBWI, consists of potential pathways to explanation and, as it is added to, it gets more and more complex. This complexity may force the increase in the statistics of distribution, resulting in more virtual space and so the symbolic boundary appears to expand. One way to look at this expanding symbolic boundary of meaning is as an analog of simpler boundaries, and what the energy equation says they are capable of in the physical universe.

 

But wait, the boundary of the brain may have smaller energies interacting across it, but it too is a member of the real physical universe (exists) and a real boundary. The WIBWI does not exist in an explicit sense until a boundary co-encounters and co-reacts to it.

 

So what have we learned by observing a parent or society as they imprint meaning on a child’s brain? We know that the meaning as it grows by way of neural tissue configuration is unique to each person, or being. We start with a blank slate where there are no differences, no boundaries for information/energy to cross. But because there is no such thing as zero energy, because there is always error (no matter how small), there will be a boundary across which a change occurs.

 

That boundary can be thought of as symbolic, but it does interact, somehow, with that potential and the implied real world of WIBWI. As the boundary becomes more complex, questions are asked and answered, a process called recursion. This is the process by which self-organization occurs.

 

Once we have a neural tissue configuration for any given explanation, then the potential statistical pathways to new configurations populate the Incoming Potential.

 

The Incoming can be thought to take the form of small to large potential boundary configurations which I call SNIPPETS. Early in this process, the snippets are small and of short self-experienced duration, but as the process proceeds, the neural tissue acts as if it limits or filters out some of these potential snippets.

 

Next, we’ll look at this process in the universe, assuming a distribution out of the singularity starting with lots of smaller snippets and a few larger snippets. As the process proceeds larger and larger snippets become available. These larger snippets also are of longer self-experienced duration.

 

As the expanding boundary becomes more complex, there is a delay between asking and answering, between action and reaction. The delay is due to the time required for the complex boundary to process the incoming. I suggest that these larger and more complex snippet pathways can be thought to fit like puzzle pieces on the growing boundary (which filtered them out). This self-organization of self-experienced sampling on an expanding boundary may be what makes awareness possible.