What is the self-organizing property of matter? Can it explain the formation of life and intelligent life?

Answer 1

Hi Michaelx

Self organising systems are systems which are non-linear, or in a critical state, and are able to exhibit internal organising behaviours. The simplest example is a crystal which organises itself into a complex structure.

These days there's a lot of investigation being done into the behaviour of networks which are in chaotic or critical states. The chief characteristsics of such a network is that the network agents' behaviour is influenced by the behaviour of nearby agents. The system as a whole can exhibit complex behaviours beyond the range of individual agents.

Our bioweb is certainly a critical state system (a simple test is to plot extinction events ranked by number of species as a function of frequency - the signature for a critical state system is a power law distribution). It follows that such a system can evolve self organising behaviour which is totally internally directed, resulting in the intelligent life you see today.

I great accessible introduction to critical state systems is Buchanan's "Ubiquity" -> http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0297643762/qid=1151971226/sr=2-2/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_2/103-7043861-1176618?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
See if your local library has a copy.


Hope this helps!
The Chicken

Answer 2

The "self organizing property of matter" actually boils down to the matter expressing its internal "information" in the environment that it contains.

Frankly, it can't explain the formation of life, let alone intelligent life. If you look at the thermodynamics of the situation, the net entropy of a system has to be at least nondecreasing, and on the whole, has to be increasing. Thus, if the entropy in one area decreases, some area of the system will have to show at least an equal (and on the whole, significantly greater) increase in entropy... For example, you can decrease the entropy of silver ore by smelting out the metallic silver--but the combined entropy of the resulting slag and the system used to produce the heat to refine the ore into free metallic silver will be much higher than the reduction in entropy invovled in getting the purified silver.

Hope that makes sense; it's a really miserable oversimplification, you understand, but it's the best I can do verbally...

Answer 3

Wow! I would have to write a small book to explain this one! This is very, very generalized so bare with me a little.
All matter has mass, even light (yes, you can theoretically weigh light). Mass is attracted to mass (ie-hydrogen bonds naturally with oxygen to make water) As far as explaining the formation of life- well, that's hard to say. Is it one plausible explanation-yes, but, as yet, we do not know. We do know that all the elements needed to make life we can find floating around in space. Most of these elements (heaver elements such as zinc, bromine, and krypton) come from the death of stars (super Novas) the other elements MAKE stars (hydrogen, helium, oxygen, and carbon).
In short, all the matter needed for life are out there, how is becomes "life" is something we don't yet understand.
I would suggest that you visit the NOVA web page and watch (on line) the story they have on string theory. This will explain more than I can here!

Answer 4

I can tell you that little pieces of matter like to stick together, if they're in a perfect vacuum. It's a start... certainly better than just hanging around, if you ask me.

Answer 5

Not sure this "property" has ever been scientifically demonstrated. Try google or wikipedia for "entropy".