ABSTRACT
The Fourth Appalachian Conference on Behavioral Neurodynamics centered on the theme: Learning as Self-Organization. When told of this theme, one colleague dismissed it as an appeal to a new fad called ‘self-organization’ despite the fact that the theme has been around for more than 30 years. In fact, the term is applied to two distinct processes: 1) autopoiesis, which is more aptly described as the self-maintenance of structure despite the replacement of its parts; and 2) its other formal meaning as described by one of its originators Ilya Prigogine, in the keynote address for Appalachian II. In this second sense, the use of the term ‘self-organization’ describes turbulence more often called chaos, the development of stabilities far from equilibrium.
