Self-organization, writ large

Imagine that nature is self-organizing all the way down: the processes and entities at any given scale are self-organized, autonomous systems; furthermore, the constituent parts of these self-organized, autonomous systems are themselves self-organized, autonomous systems. This is a view that people interested in self-organization and complexity, including ecological psychologists, would find congenial, and one can easily imagine that it encompasses scales of nature from chemical reactions to Gaia. In this essay I use non-well-founded set theory, also known as hyperset theory (Aczel, 1988; Barwise & Etchemendy, 1987; Barwise & Moss, 1996), to show how such a view of nature could be correct. I also show that this congenial view of nature as self-organized, autonomous systems at multiple scales has consequences for our understanding of affordances.