> If things are expanding then they have to get more complex, they encompass > more.
Aside from intuition, what evidence do you have to back this statement up? I've seen no justification for this statement so far. Biological systems naturally make use of objects across vastly different scales to increase functionality with a much less significant increase in complexity. Think of how early cells incorporated mitochondria whole hog to produce a new species. Also, I think talking about minimum bits of information is not the best view onto the complexity problem. It doesn't account for structure at all. Instead, why don't we talk about Gregory Chaitin's [1] notion of a minimal program. An interesting biological parallel to compressing computer programs can be found in looking at bacteria DNA. For bacteria near undersea vents where it's very hot and genetic code transcriptions can easily go awry due to thermal conditions, the bacteria's genetic code as evolved into a compressed form that reuses chunks of itself to express the same features that would normally be spread out in a larger sequence of DNA. wes [1] http://www.umcs.maine.edu/~chaitin/ _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
