The Radical New Reality of Systems Science

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Complex Adaptive Systems 'Make Meaning' to Sustain Their 'Selves'

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• Chaotically turbulent activity can form spontaneous increases in ordering

• Increased organization can emerge unpredictably from less ordered conditions

• That basis of emergent ordering can synergistcally coalesce into self-ordering feedback networks

• These networks can become self-sustaining systems that act adaptively to promote their existence

• From cells to creatures, ecologies to economies, such complex adaptive systems create and maintain their 'selves'

• Such system behavior constitutes some form of purposefully self-directing 'network agency'

• Self-ordering and network agency arising from disorder pose a profoundly new 'way that things happen'

• It emerges in ways that cannot be fully analyzed or explained in mechanically deterministic terms