ABSTRACT

Computational systems (software) differ from material systems or living systems due to not having the materiality that usually grounds natural self-organizing systems. Nevertheless, in many computational systems (for example, intelligent systems) learning and adaptive abilities suggest that some sort of Self-Organization is possible. In normal software systems, the code structure is fixed, and even though data can change in time, the data structure is also fixed. But the situation can be different in adaptive and learning systems, where the whole data structure can adapt and change in time. In some situations even the code structure can change, giving the system the ability of self-production, which seems to be a mark of Self-Organization. This chapter presents an analysis of this kind of computational system in particular, and the author argues that Self-Organization is possible in computational systems.