I would like to question whether the intuitive concept of complexity makes sense. In what ways is human civilization more complex than a puddle of water? Aliens watching us through their telescopes may observe our effects on the planet and find them fairly simple and predictable in terms of the ways we affect the atmosphere as we climb our tech tree, or even in terms of how we will affect the solar system in the sci-fi future. At the same time, a scientist looking at a dozen molecules of water might find their movement highly complex and explainable by beautiful abstractions. I propose that the real reason we find people more complex than water is because we happen to care about people.
It’s not that there’s some true essence of complexity, which humans are failing to reach due to provincial interests. It’s that we define the word “complexity” the way we do because of those provincial interests and pragmatic concerns, and there’s no true essence at all.
If aliens use the word “xlorp,” and say that humans and puddles of water are about equally xlorp, and suppose we translate “xlorp” as “complex”, then what’s happening is not that aliens have a different perspective on the true essence of complexity, it’s that humans and aliens are using the word complexity to refer to different things.
That seems to be a rather general response that doesn’t feel very relevant to my point. Anyway, if you agree that the human intuition of complexity depends on “provincial interests” I was trying to point out, then you should also agree that OP doesn’t reflect those interests in his complexity measure, right?
Also, some concepts are more natural than others. If we agree that the intuitive complexity is not very natural, we may still want to model it for some purposes, but it also makes sense to abandon it in favor of a more natural concept.
I would like to question whether the intuitive concept of complexity makes sense. In what ways is human civilization more complex than a puddle of water? Aliens watching us through their telescopes may observe our effects on the planet and find them fairly simple and predictable in terms of the ways we affect the atmosphere as we climb our tech tree, or even in terms of how we will affect the solar system in the sci-fi future. At the same time, a scientist looking at a dozen molecules of water might find their movement highly complex and explainable by beautiful abstractions. I propose that the real reason we find people more complex than water is because we happen to care about people.
It’s not that there’s some true essence of complexity, which humans are failing to reach due to provincial interests. It’s that we define the word “complexity” the way we do because of those provincial interests and pragmatic concerns, and there’s no true essence at all.
If aliens use the word “xlorp,” and say that humans and puddles of water are about equally xlorp, and suppose we translate “xlorp” as “complex”, then what’s happening is not that aliens have a different perspective on the true essence of complexity, it’s that humans and aliens are using the word complexity to refer to different things.
That seems to be a rather general response that doesn’t feel very relevant to my point. Anyway, if you agree that the human intuition of complexity depends on “provincial interests” I was trying to point out, then you should also agree that OP doesn’t reflect those interests in his complexity measure, right?
Also, some concepts are more natural than others. If we agree that the intuitive complexity is not very natural, we may still want to model it for some purposes, but it also makes sense to abandon it in favor of a more natural concept.