Notes on Complexity
Author: Neil TheiseFinished: 2024-10-29
Status: Read
It felt significant to proceed through a big-ideas science book like this and grapple with it the whole way, in light of other reading and thinking I’ve done myself on the wide range of topics it presents. Making a point of taking notes while I read, treating it as an interactive process that makes a permanent mark, has been a major development for 2024. Compare this heap of notes to what remains of, say, my 2003 read-through of The Selfish Gene: a vague sense that it was a great, life-changing book and that genetics is really important.
As typed up on the flight back from Silicon Valley, where I discovered and bought this portable volume at Kepler’s Books.
Not sure I understand this definition of complexity even a little; it’s the “edge of chaos” where stability and chaos “pull in opposite directions”, but it’s actually more unpredictable than chaos?? And how can a computer simulation with the same starting conditions “never be predicted”?? How does a different outcome arise each time?
Argument that there’s no such thing as top-down control, ever: all interactions are local.
Systems need a little randomness to reach into the adjacent possible: consider this for your own life!
Cells move by “aiming” existing Brownian motion, not by moving per se!?
Flight attendant gives a mischievous smile while asking, ラーメンなどは召し上がりますか？
From this perspective, then, are we living beings moving around upon this rock we call Earth? Or are we in fact the Earth itself, whose atoms have self-organized to form these transitory beings that think of themselves as self-sufficient and separate from each other, even though they only ever rose from and will inevitably return to the atomic substance of the planet?
She called me Van-sama and invited me through the galley where all the ladies were working, to use the opposite bathroom.
I’m not convinced that the randomness of quantum fluctuations is, complexity-wise, the same as the randomness of ants not following the same trail… but maybe kind of. I can sort of see how each level “uses” randomness to achieve enough interestingness to build up to the next level.
I’m not convinced of the Copenhagen interpretation and the way it centers consciousness, but I see how consciousness is what makes quantum world splitting “feel” random. It’s just an interpretation after all, solving the Schrödinger equation in another way, right? Still I’m with Tegmark and Carroll on what’s really going on.
I do appreciate the reminder of everything emerging from spacetime itself, as all one vast whole. Zen indeed.
Getting a bit woo with the holarchy argument here, unnecessarily if you ask me. The universe can be purely physical and still a living whole, buddy, without complaining about “western biases”.
Here we get to zen: interdependence, impermanence, and emptiness.
Emptiness for me is about how everything emerges from, and ultimately equates out to, zero.
Idealism: the universe emerges out of a grand whole Consciousness, and out of that emerge our little local consciousnesses. Maybe! Kinda still seems to be shifting the problem to a different level tho.
Thinking again about decoherence, and starting to understand it as a ramp depending on scale, which quite rapidly slams into a maximum where fields appear to reduce to points (thus settling which branch you’re in); but below that scale they can remain wavy. “Randomness is what branching feels like.”
Infinitely throat-clearing ojisan
Thinking again about the mathematical universe hypothesis, in light of Godel’s mathematical platonism: Does each universe comprise both rules (code) and conditions (data)? Like, there can just be some constants defined at the front of the file for conditions, right?
As typed up after landing, at baggage claim and such.
Not sure I like this invocation of Gödel to claim that “intuition” is as important as science and mathematics, or that the Copenhagen interpretation is inescapably true.
Also thinking about the way the world unfolded in real life in the 20th century (Godel’s long escape from Austria) but unfolds online now (Trump’s campaign and MSG rally today)
I don’t know how I feel about this suggestion that because of decoherence, we can’t measure things and do experiments well enough to understand the universe, so we need “metaphysics” instead.
I do appreciate the illustration of how our universe needed a stack of such narrowly complexity-compatible infrastructure. Most mathematical structures probably don’t give rise to much of interest?
Plenty in here about the Eternal tho, which I’m enjoying. Taking it in that light without fuzzy claims about mapping to science, I’m on board.
And as handwritten while waiting for my driving test at the Samezu Licensing Center, where no electronic devices are allowed.
I appreciate the complementary view of science, philosophy, and spirituality including Zen, for personal spiritual purposes.
I don’t buy the idea that “Consciousness” is somehow prior to physical existence, as it doesn’t seem to solve infinite regress problems (which Tegmark does more satisfyingly) and it smells like trying to bend science to confirm ideas you find comforting.