Information and Self-Organization

Dear Colleagues,

The process of “self-organization” invokes a property that is far from equilibrium, and refers to open and complex systems that acquire spatio-temporal or functional structures without specific ordering instructions from the outside. In domains such as physics, chemistry or biology, the phrase, “far from equilibrium,” refers to systems that are “far from thermal equilibrium,” while in other disciplines, the term refers to the property of being “away from the resting state.” Such systems are “complex” in the sense that they are composed of many interacting components, parts, elements, etc., and “open” in the sense that they exchange with their environment matter, energy, and information. Here, “information” may imply Shannon information, as a measure of the capacity of a channel through which a message passes, pragmatic information, as the impact of a message on recipients, or semantic information, as the meaning conveyed by a message. This Special Issue aims to deal with the different ways processes of self-organization are linked with the various forms of information. A prominent example is the concept of information adaptation, whereby Shannon information and semantic information condition each other. A study of such links has consequences on a number of research domains, ranging from physics and chemistry, through the life sciences and cognitive science, including human behavior and action, to our understanding of society, economics, and the dynamics of cities and urbanization.

Prof. Dr. Hermann Haken
Prof. Dr. Juval Portugali
Guest Editors

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