Self-organization of Complex, Intelligent Systems:
The ECCO Paradigm for Transdisciplinary Integration
I am presently director of the Evolution, Complexity and Cognition (ECCO) group (http://ecco.vub.ac.be). This research group grew out of the international Principia Cybernetica Project and the Center Leo Apostel at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (with which it remains affiliated). ECCO aims at transdisciplinary integration, i.e. at the development of a unified conceptual framework that can be applied to problems in all the scientific disciplines, from the natural sciences to the humanities. As our name implies, we find the foundations for this framework at the point where the three approaches of complexity, evolution, and cognition meet.
The emerging science of complex systems extends the tradition of general systems theory, which sought to unify science by uncovering the principles common to the holistic organization of all systems, from atoms and molecules to mind and society. However, the classical systems approach failed because it was still too reductionist: it considered systems as well-defined, static structures. These assumptions simply do not work for complex, adaptive systems, such as societies, minds, or markets.
To truly understand systems, you need to understand how they developed some form of organization out of an initially messy and ill-defined mass of components. This happens through the spontaneous process of self-organization. We see self-organization as the mutual adaptation and co-evolution of the system’s initially autonomous components, the “agents”. Agents can be molecules, cells, organisms or organizations. Through their interactions, agents develop a network of increasingly synergetic relationships that coordinate their activities. Through continuing evolution based on variation and natural selection, this system becomes ever more complex, more adaptive, and more synergetic.
This coordination between the agents pools their resources, material as well as informational, so that the group as a whole can act more effectively and intelligently than each agent individually: this is the origin of collective intelligence. Moreover, the system further increases its knowledge and intelligence by interacting with its environment, since it learns from these interactions so as to become ever more effective in anticipating phenomena and choosing appropriate actions. Thus, the network of relationships between the agents starts to behave like a neural network, capable of increasingly sophisticated cognitive processes.
The integration of these three perspectives—cognition, systems or complexity, and evolution or self-organization—points us to a wholly new philosophy of nature, mind and society. It sees the essential building blocks of the universe as actions and interactions, rather than as pieces of matter or energy. Their most important product is intelligent organization, which can be found at all levels, from molecules to global society. For us, this deep metaphysical perspective is at the same time a starting point for concrete, scientific research with plenty of practical applications.
Our most important results to date are twofold: 1) a coherent and comprehensive philosophy or worldview, including ontology, metaphysics, epistemology, futurology, axiology/ethics, and praxeology, based on these ideas; 2) a collection of methods and technologies to support collective intelligence via the Internet, which applies this philosophy to support the self-organizing interaction between people who together develop complex knowledge systems (such as Wikipedia).
