Thanks Mike, Let me just take this statement while appreciating and largely agreeing with the rest:
MS: ""complexity" in the technical sense is that a system that is complex has so very many parts, so very many relationships between parts and so many possible state transitions that it is intrinsically, provably not predictable, not, in any conventional sense, fully understandable." >From a structural perspective I don't see how this defines anything that can't be defined better using a less loaded word. I worked my way through, enjoyably, Murray Gell-Mann's Jaguarundi book and enjoyed his joke in title. What was a Jaguar become a little Jaguarundi. That for me showed his understanding that it was a matter of competency and the steady development, through discipline and a growing virtuosity in what were previously unsolvable problems. Robots and Computers are projections of the human body and as a result are a version of our evolving social competency. What was impossible in Mahler and Wagner, to earlier musicians, became ordinary and then Shoenberg became impossible until Boulez and Glen Gould. Then Mozart's simplicities became complex because people played them badly due to forgetting and focussing on the more dense harmonic structures of dodecaphony. I don't think we should mix the external world with the problems of our human competencies or lack thereof. I think we should remember that "good fences make good neighbors" and tell the scientists that the complex territory of the educator has science in it but is a poor descriptor of the external world by the very nature of the system it springs from. The mind. REH -----Original Message----- From: futurework-boun...@lists.uwaterloo.ca [mailto:futurework-boun...@lists.uwaterloo.ca] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Saturday, September 14, 2013 3:43 PM To: futurework@lists.uwaterloo.ca Subject: Re: [Futurework] Joe Stiglitz is a SOCIOLIST Ray wrote: > Complexity is not a description of a state of nature but speaks to the > competence of the human mind observing it. Nothing is complex if you > understand it, comprehend its structure and know how to use it. "Complexity" is now a technical term. If you use it in the quotidian sense meaning "complicated and not easy for me to understand" in a context where the technical sense might be understood, you now have to use some semantic flag to indicate that intended meaning. The nature of "complexity" in the technical sense is that a system that is complex has so very many parts, so very many relationships between parts and so many possible state transitions that it is intrinsically, provably not predictable, not, in any conventional sense, fully understandable. Admittedly, the human brain is the most complex thing -- in the technical sense -- that we have to study and we have, as yet, no understanding of how (what we cavalierly call) mind or consciousness is engendered by it. So we can't strictly rule out the possibility that, at least in some cases where the right observations can be made, a mind can gain some menaingful grasp of a complex (technical sense) system that may seem, from a computational standpoint, nearly miraculous. That is the reason why I find it incorrect to scornfully dismiss a whole raft of stuff that falls under the heading of "spiritual" or "mystic", even though I regard the vast majority of such stuff as, at best, gratifying wanking and at worst, fraudulent or self-deceptive bogosity. - Mike -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ mspen...@tallships.ca /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list Futurework@lists.uwaterloo.ca https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list Futurework@lists.uwaterloo.ca https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
