Re: OfF’s 1.0 flowmantic partners feel a sense of duty to fulfill the promise of orgies-for-free ASAP

Alternative title:

More re: the arc of the moral universe seems to portend orgies-for-free

(The below won’t make (much) sense if you haven’t read the previous posts.)

Re: order-for-free

From 1995 book At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, by a MacArthur Fellow (i.e., a “genius grant” recipient) (my emphases):

[T]here are compelling reasons to believe that whenever a collection of chemicals contains enough different kinds of molecules, a metabolism will crystallize from the broth. If this argument is correct, metabolic networks need not be built one component at a time; they can spring full-grown from a primordial soup. Order for free, I call it.

. . . I believe that this order for free, which has undergirded the origin of life itself, has also undergirded the order in organisms as they have evolved and has even undergirded the very capacity to evolve itself.

Re: complexity

From a white paper (.pdf) published by the Washington Center for Complexity & Public Policy:

Complexity science represents a growing body of interdisciplinary knowledge about the structure, behavior and dynamics of change in a specific category of complex systems known as complex adaptive systems — open evolutionary systems in which the components are strongly interrelated, self-organizing and dynamic. Rain forests, businesses, societies, our immune systems, the World Wide Web, and the rapidly globalizing world economy can be thought of as complex adaptive systems. Each of these systems evolves in relationship to the larger environment in which it operates. To survive, the system as a whole must adapt to change.

For a lengthier preview, see the Wikipedia entry titled “Complex Adaptive System”.

More re: complexity is a type of order

Title of the 1992 book by a MacArthur Fellow (a colleague of said Fellow):

Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity

Re: complexity via networks of adaptive agents

From 2012 book Signals and Boundaries: Building Blocks for Complex Adaptive Systems, published by MIT Press:

Re: a network of adaptive agents [e.g., people] clustered at the boundary between order and chaos

From the 2008 book by the MacArthur Fellow who hypothesized order-for-free:

I can now summarize over forty years of work on random Boolean networks . . .

Briefly, these networks exhibit three regimes of behavior: ordered, chaotic, and critical, i.e., poised at the boundary or edge between order and chaos. . . .

Re: adaptation at said boundary

Title of a 1992 book:

Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

From said 2008 book:

[T]he most complex, but organized, behavior should occur in critical networks. In the more ordered networks the behavior would be more “frozen” and less complex.

Re: said clustering of agents takes shape “for free” via “self-organized criticality”

From How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality:

[C]omplex behavior in nature reflects the tendency of large systems with many components to evolve into a poised, “critical” state . . . The evolution to this very delicate state occurs without design from any outside agent. The state is established solely because of the dynamical interactions among individual elements of the system: the critical state is self-organized.