Hi Cliff, Sorry about the delay... I've been out sailing watching the America's Cup racing --- just a pity my team keeps losing to the damn Swiss! :(
Anyway: Cliff Stabbert wrote:
SL> This seems to be problematic to me. For example, a random string SL> generated by coin flips is not compressible at all so would you SL> say that it's alive? No, although it does take something living to flip the coins; but presumably it's non-random (physically predictable by observing externals) from the moment the coin has been flipped. The decision to call heads or tails however is not at all as *easily* physically predictable, perhaps that's what I'm getting at. But I understand your point about compressibility (expanded below).
Well I could always build a machine to flip coins... Or pulls lottery balls out of a spinning drum for that matter. Is such a thing predictable, at least in theory? I have read about this sort of thing before but to be perfectly honest I don't recall the details... perhaps the Heisenberg principle makes it impossible even in theory. You would need to ask a quantum physicist I suppose.
Well it's hard to say actually. An ant is less complex than a human,more and more quickly: the tides are more predictable than the behaviour of an ant, the ants are more predictable than a wolf, the wolves are more predictable than a human in 800 B.C., and the human in 800 B.C. is more predictable than the human in 2003 A.D. In that sense, Singularity Theory seems to be a statement of the development of life's (Kolmogorov?) complexity over time.
but an ant really only makes sense in the context of the nest that it
belongs to and, if I remember correctly, the total neural mass of some
ants nests is about the same as that of a human brain. Also whales
have much larger brains than humans and so are perhaps more complex
in some physical sense at least.
A lot of people in complexity believed that there was an evolutionary
pressure driving system to become more complex. As far as I know there
aren't any particularly good results in this direction -- though I don't
exactly follow it much.
Cheers
Shane
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