Out of Context: On Self-organization (Definitions)

"The phenomenon of self-organization is not limited to living matter but occurs also in certain chemical systems [...]" (Fritjof Capra, "The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Turning Culture", 1982)

"Self-organization refers to the spontaneous formation of patterns and pattern change in open, nonequilibrium systems." (J A Scott Kelso, "Dynamic Patterns : The Self-organization of Brain and Behavior", 1995)

"[…] self-organization is the spontaneous emergence of new structures and new forms of behavior in open systems far from equilibrium, characterized by internal feedback loops and described mathematically by nonlinear equations." (Fritjof  Capra, "The web of life: a new scientific understanding of living  systems", 1996)

"Self-organization is seen as the process by which systems of many components tend to reach a particular state, a set of cycling states, or a small volume of their state space (attractor basins), with no external interference." (Luis M Rocha, "Syntactic Autonomy", Proceedings of the Joint Conference on the Science and Technology of Intelligent Systems, 1998)

"Self-organization can be defined as the spontaneous creation of a globally coherent pattern out of local interactions." (Francis Heylighen, "The science of self-organization and adaptivity", 2001)

"Self-organization is a process typically occurring within complex systems where a system is continuously fed by energy, which is transformed into a new system state or operational mode by a dissipation of energy and/or information." (Jirí Kroc & Peter M A Sloot, "Complex Systems Modeling by Cellular Automata", Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence, 2009)

"Self-organization is a process that increases the order of a system as a result of local interactions among low-level, simple components, without the guidance of an outside source." (Linge Bai, "Chemotaxis-based Spatial Self-organization Algorithms", 2014)

"Self-organization is a dynamical process by which a system spontaneously forms nontrivial macroscopic structures and/or behaviors over time." (Hiroki Sayama, "Introduction to the Modeling and Analysis of Complex Systems", 2015)