On 02 Oct 2012, at 05:57, Stephen P. King wrote:
On 10/1/2012 1:00 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Physiological realities are mechanistic. Biologists and doctors are
mechanists. Even if you claim that "the whole is greater than the
sum
of its parts" that does not mean that if yoyu replace the parts the
whole will stop working.
Yes. Anti-mechanist often refer to "the whole is bigger than the
parts", but nowhere else than in computer and engineering is it
more true that the whole is bigger than the part, if only because
the whole put some specific structure on the relation between parts.
We might simplify this by saying that the whole *structural
complexity* grows like an exponential (or more) when the whole
cardinality grows linearly.
H Bruno,
Could you source some further discussions of this idea?
I thought it was common sense. With a coffee machine, you can do
coffee. But you can't do coffee with any parts of that machine.
From my own study of Cantor's tower of infinities, I have found the
opposite, complexity goes to zero as the cardinals lose the ability
to be named.
?
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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