Thanks again for your kind comment. I read your article “The Ultimate Potential of Self-Organizing Systems” and I see clear parallels between your thoughts about self-organizing systems and my discussion of the difference between living and mechanical systems. My description draws on the work of Stephen Talbott. He is a well-known technical writer who is now investigating the growth and evolution of living organisms. His surprising finding is that “The life and death of cells appears to be governed … by the developing form of the whole in which they participate.” He further explains this as follows, “The functioning of a machine results from the way the assembly of its preexisting parts was intentionally coordinated by an outside agent in the past. By contrast, the performance of an organism is at every moment an internal coordinating activity through which the ever-changing and maturing parts must be continuously integrated and re-integrated into the developing whole. If the organism were a machine, it would be a different machine at every point in its development — different not merely in the way a computer program’s activity differs from moment to moment, but also different (to use a remarkably inapt expression) in its “hardware”, just as a butterfly differs from its worm-like larva.” This was a part of what I was trying to say in my article — this “internal coordinating activity” is the active agency which enables the organism to grow, repair itself, and thrive. And it is this that constitutes the life of the organism. If you are interested, you might want to visit the web site for his evolving book, Evolution As It Was Meant to Be. I think his ideas can be extended beyond biological organisms to social organisms. In this case, humans would act as the self-organizing intelligence — the fractal parts of a larger whole.