HeyJaredThe Self-Organizing Universe - Francis Heylighen
Research on the emergence and evolution of complex systems—and in particular mind, life, and society. Making sense of complexity and confusion by showing how everything eventually fits together.
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- Sep 8, 2026
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Integrating Worldviews: a Tool for Making Sense of Life (opens the original)
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A year ago, as former director of the Center Leo Apostel (CLEA), I gave a presentation at a VUB symposium celebrating the 100th anniversary of Apostel’s birth. In the talk, I introduced Apostel’s worldview program, and summarized my own contributions, in collaboration with my CLEA colleagues, towards realizing this program by developing a “Third Story of the Universe”. The video of the talk is here: The following is a polished version of the transcript, which can be read as a stand-alone article
Cooling your house even without air-conditioning (opens the original)
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This summer, Europe suffered a record-breaking heatwave, resulting in many additional heat-related deaths. This triggered a debate about why so few European buildings have air-conditioning. There are many reasons for this, of which the most obvious one is that until recent climate change, air-conditioning was simply not necessary in a European climate that is mostly cool. While it is clear that this is going to change, installing air-conditioning in all buildings will be expensive and take time.
Evolution and the Complexity of Value (opens the original)
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I just finished a chapter (reference below) for a book on “AI and Human Values”. This paper elaborates on a talk I gave on this topic, and some Substack posts I wrote earlier on sentience in Chatbots. Below is a non-technical summary of the paper, generated with the help of ChatGPT. Why Superintelligence Cannot Maximize Just One ThingA familiar thought experiment proposed by the philosopher Nick Bostrom asks us to imagine an extremely i
Complexity Science and Contemplation (opens the original)
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I recently had a conversation with Joshua Sunter for the Complexity Science and Contemplative Studies Consortium about the connections between complexity science, consciousness, meditation, cybernetics and spirituality. That allowed me to introduce much of my general philosophy of science, life, mind, and metaphysics.The full interview can be viewed on YouTube:For those who prefer to read, the following summary, generated with the help of AI, reviews the main
Collective Thinking: Lessons from the Noosphere Lab (opens the original)
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We tend to imagine thinking as something that happens inside an individual mind.A person encounters a problem, recalls relevant knowledge, explores possible solutions, combines ideas, and eventually reaches a conclusion. Intelligence, on this view, is the capacity of an autonomous individual to solve problems.Yet many of the most impressive achievements of intelligence are not the product of any individual mind. No single person created science, mathematics, language, Wikipedia, the Internet, or
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