Enormous complexity can emerge from simple processes. Have you ever seen a Mandelbrot or Julia set? Take a Mandelbrot set for instance, all it involves is a simple set of calculations, repeated over and over again, and it can produce practically infinite geometric complexity. Here is the mathematical expression for the calculation:
If these iterations remain bounded, i.e. z does not go to infinity, z is in the Mandelbrot set, if it does not remain bounded, it is not in the set. This one simple expression can produce enormous complexity. Check out the site if you don’t believe me.
This complexity is emergent. In the same way, simple interactions between simple entities such as atoms, molecules, neurons etc. can produce such a level of complexity that is appers mysterious to our finite intelligence.
Its great to have you jump in. Nice “concrete” example of incredibly complex simplicity.
Philogirl,
Nonsense pookie pants! For you to suggest that my mind is so natural that it is supersimple is too easy of a cop out. I saw a man the other day that could add faster than a calculator. The mystery of my thoughts and my mind are hardly simple.
Nonsense hookie shookie pants! Just because you may not understand something doesn’t automatically relegate it to the Mystery Bin where things that are “hardly simple” permanently go (at least I hope). For instance you may view the extra-ordinary complexity of your body to be “hardly simple”, but many could tell you it is the result of some rather “dumb”, that is “simple”, nucleic acid pairings under incredible repetition. The Boolean networks that form the circuits of computers are now imagined to be not all that different than the Boolean on and off switches that govern and make up genes.
There are of course calculators that can vastly calculate faster than that little man you met who can out perform a little Texas Instruments hand-held, as well as Computers that can out perform any human on the planet in chess (on a given day), something nearly unimaginable a few decades ago. (Can you imagine that out-performing something you can buy for $2.50 would one day be a mark of immense human capacity.) These things seem to have been taken out of the Mystery Bin, and placed in the Actuality Simplicity Bin, which isn’t to degrade them, but only to empower them. I think it was Arthur C. Clarke who defined magic as “Any sufficiently advanced technology”, a definition which not only grounds magic in the real, but makes of all real things magic.
Blasphemy!!! Have you any idea of the complexity of the human body. The human eye alone is astounding, all the details that go into making it work. I am thinking right now that I will choose not to insult you…and isn’t it Super amazing that I actually won’t!
The evolutionary algorithm is a very powerful creative force and can build things of unimaginable complexity - it is not supernatural, but perhaps supersimple. The difficulty we have is that, we’re here… 5 billion years into the process and are saying “gee how did this come about?”. But, if we had a rewind button on evolution, and then watched it all on fast-forward - it would be very easy to see organization and complexity arise and how it came about.
Dunamis is not saying it is “simple” as in the workings of our mind or eyes are simple, but as in a complex process can be broken down into simple interactions. This is called reductionism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism) . In the other direction, it is called Emergent Behavior (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergent_behavior) - that is how simple interactions can create complex processes
Have you any idea of the complexity of the human body. The human eye alone is astounding, all the details that go into making it work.
Do you have any idea of the Complexity of the very simple DNA/RNA chains of a single human cell are? Let me give you an idea:
The human genome has about let’s say 80,000 structural genes and if each can be thought of as turned on and turned off, the number of possible states of “gene activity†in the human genome is about 10 to the 24,000th power. I don’t know if you realize how big a number that is. The number of estimated particles in the known universe is only about 10 to the 80th power, - that is every tiny, tiny piece of stuff in the entire universe -, but the human genome could, in principle, be any of 10 to the 24,000th power states. As Stuart Kauffman points out, from whom I draw this data, there have been probably not more than 10 to the 17th power seconds since the Big Bang. If it only took one second to turn a gene on or off, not even one human cell could have explored even a minuscule fraction of its possible states, actually 10 to the negative 23,983rd, even if it had been doing so since the Big Bang. In a single human cell is a complexity that defies the cosmic scale of possibility. Yet, bit by bit, simple on and off switching is the supersimple means of each and every human cell “workingâ€.
That you don’t understand it, that you go “oooh that’s sooo complicatedâ€, “it can’t possibly have a simple way of working” is not exactly a philosophical argument.
Not to you Dunamis- PG has a habit of doing it in general (well, as if to say one picks up habits in a matter of hours), not just in this thread… you can retract your claws now- it was a joke…
A famous neurosurgeon spent 50 years attempting to discover the mind-body connection to no avail. It remains a mystery and one cannot say they have solved it.
I can’t remember his name, but he shouldn’t be hard to find.
On Identity, I agree that our memories have a great deal to do with who we think we are. But our mundane characteristics make up who we are and how we relate to each other, as I read in a book about personal identity, even a man who is using a woman for her body will prefer her over another for some reason, be it the way she stirs his drink or the wave of her hair.
On the mind, I do not see how thoughts are in any way a tangible thing and their freedom and how they are in anyway attached to the brain/body remain as much a mystery to me as anyone else.
Could it be…God? Methinks it certainly a possibility.
A famous neurosurgeon spent 50 years attempting to discover the mind-body connection to no avail. It remains a mystery and one cannot say they have solved it
The reason why he was wasting his time, the reason why it is “still a mystery” is that there is no “mind-body connection”. These are just two irreducible sets of descriptions of the same phenomena. Its not that the connection can’t be found, its that these are just two vocabularies that are not commensuarate. One is a physical reductionist description of lower-scale events, and the other is a prediction and prescription model of attributive intention. Read Davidson’s Anomalous Monism and you may discover that the mystery simply lies in the attempt to reconcile vocabularies, and not discover something mysterious “out there in the universe”.
Have we not returned to the problem of free will once again?
I have no idea what you mean in that “freewill” as actually existing has no bearing on the problem. All that we have is a vocabulary that attributes intentions to objects for predictive and prescriptive purposes. There is no need to “prove” the will to be free, or prove that it is not free. The vocabulary simply has its use. The study of causes seems irrelevant.
But you are saying that what I do is a series of chemical reactions? That I have no control or choice over the matter?
No. You’re not getting it. “What you do” is not actually really, really known. It can only be described in several ways, each of which has its uses. What you do can be described as a series of chemical reactions, which can be useful if we want to discover perhaps the apparently chemical causes of some aspects of your doing. But it can also be described as you intentionally wanting to do “x” or “y”, which is useful both in predicting your behavior within a shared rationality and culture, but is also useful for prescribing what you and others should do, that is controling, or at least influencing your behavior on a particular level of organization. But these two sets of descriptions are not reducible. One is not “right” and the other “wrong”. Each is right to the degree that it is useful. To try to discover the “physical” connection between these two kinds of descriptions (and there are many others), is almost foolish.
