A process by which new macroscopic non-equilibrium organised structures emerge without specification from outside due to the collective interactions among a large assemblage of simple microscopic objects. Thus, these new spatial and temporal patterns arise as a result of some internal regulation in response to changing external conditions that do not specify what should be changed, and not through the external imposition of a particular form of organisation. The simplest form of self-organization is a phase transition between two stable states. Then there is self-organized criticality (SOC). Dynamical systems with many degrees of freedom naturally self-organize into a critical state in which the same events that brought that critical state into being can occur in all sizes, with the sizes being distributed according to a power-law. First appearing in 1988, SOC is portrayed as the only holistic mathematical theory of self-organization in complex systems in, for example, physics, biology and economics. Moreover, it represents a universal theory in the sense it predicts that the global properties of complex systems are independent of the microscopic details of their structure, and is therefore consistent with the “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” approach to complex systems. Stated simply, SOC holds that complexity is criticality. In other words, SOC is nature’s way of driving a system toward a state of maximum complexity.
See Activity-dependent organization, Bridge law (or principle), Circular (or non-linear) causality, Complex system, Complexity, Constraint, Dissipative system, Dynamical systems approaches, Dynamic systems theory (development and evolution), Emergence, Entropy, Organization, Pattern formation, Phase transition (or shift), Transition, Second law of thermodynamics, Self-organization, Symmetry breaking (and preservation), Theory of Everything (ToE)