Women. ;-) Unless you are one, in which case it would be men.

The brain cannot be isolated. It, too, exists only in relationships. This question to me seems misleading, as though a thing exists. This thing of which we're all a part is the most complex. It is unending, all-inclusive, and ever-changing. We are made of change moving through change. Intimate experience of this renders isolation, hierarchy, and superlatives invalid. Any time I see something marvelously complex (or any other adjective), I say to myself, "Wow, look at us!" This practice also expands the sense of identity, making it consistent with Systems and revokes feelings of jealousy.

This has disturbed me for a long time as well. It has always seemed to me that the initial plasma state following the Big Bang (and I'm not sure if I entirely agree with that explanation, either) would already have the universe at its highest level of entopy, uniform and at the same temperature. The fact that this uniformity dissolved (in seeming defiance to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics) in favor of stars and galaxies, etc. is bothersome enough. Then I take in all the self-organization which occured and is constantly repeated and I either begin to see the hand of God or get a splitting headache or both.

I believe complexity is the outcome of measurement, and is basically arbitrary.

In this context, I can't help but think of what Gleick refers to as the Shoreline problem. The length of the shoreline of an island is a function of the length of the yardstick you use - the smaller the yardstick, the more little nooks and crannies you can measure.

In the same way, in many cases complexity is largely an outcome of scaling. Ignoring relationships reduces complexity, and which relationships we deem to be important is fairly arbitrary. If you throw a handful of sand onto a steel tray and decide that the total of relationships formed by a straight line drawn between any two grains is important to your measurement, then that's pretty goddamend complex.

The question of what relationships ARE important tends to be constrained by what we can call control parameters. That is, what are the relationships which seem definitive to the dynamics of the system? Those are the ones we want to pay special attention to, and good modeling often boils down to the search for good control parameters.

Another way of saying that is, how much information can we ignore and still make accurate predictions? In the case of the brain, it seems that the state space of the significant relationships relative to the predictions we are interested in making are vast - ergo it appears to be an object of enormous complexity. But what if the only prediction we were interested in regarding the brain was its macroscopic structural integrity? Suddenly all that complexity goes away. We can take it for granted that most people will think the interesting behavior of the brain that is worth modeling/predicting is its cognitive behavior, but all that means is that in some cases most humans agree on what behavior is worth measuring.

In the words of Emo Philips, I used to think that the brain was the most fascinating thing there is. Then I realized, well, look who's telling me that.

Shit!!

Great one... pointing out the limits of my thinking!

If I'm gonna suppose that strings are the most complex thing, then what about the space between them, the pure nothingness - THAT has to be the most complex thing by my reductionistic definition.

Excellent!

Rgds,

Paul Bard.

Unaltered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of
this IMPORTANT information is ENCOURAGED.

(I bet I'm the only person here who gets this)

Tim

thats why i cant imagine that life goes on forever!
geeze! its like the story of the draggon fly that can never make it back under the water.

Right, nothing/everything, is a linguistic construct.

Thanks for the link - I tend to laugh out loud when I'm reminded of Goedel's theorems, so I expect I'll have a lot of fun reading Chaitin.

I like Lewis Carroll on irreducibility (in Sylvie and Bruno):
Mein Herr: "We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to a mile!” [...] “we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”

Perhaps all the various ways to connect between Nothingness, and the Universe ?

The least arbitrary measure of complexity that I know about is Kolmogorov Complexity (KC for the rest of this post). Roughly, it says that something is "complicated" to the degree that the smallest program (or Turing Machine or whatever) that generates it is large.

BOOK: "An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications"
homepages.cwi.nl/~paulv/kolmogorov.html

So the digital expression for "pi to a jillion digits" (ie 3.14159265... (but finite)) is "not so complicated" because it can be generated by relatively short programs. "True randomness" could basically only be generated by hardcoding each random symbol in the generating program and so (under this formalism) is extremely complex.

In practice KC gives rise to an intractably large search space. And in theory the "perfect KC calculator" is uncomputable. Mostly KC used as a theoretical tool about which boundary proofs can be constructed (as in "this complexity measure is almost as good as KC but is tractable").

If you want to smash your head against some math:
www.idsia.ch/~juergen/loconet/node2.html

Almost every case where I've seen someone try to practically apply KC (like get quantitative about it), they end up approximating it with compression programs.

Example Of This Approach: "An information-based sequence distance and its application to whole mitochondrial genome phylogeny"
bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/c...df

Yeah, I agree......the most complicated thing, now is what is not understood, The Theory of Everything.

I also think we don't understand death........the human mind does not want to go where it cannot comprehend.....
..........defining death, as the absence of existence, the absence of reality.......going into nothingness.

We don't understand the reason for dreaming.

We as a species, certainly don't seem to understand how to control violence.

Do we understand the world.......after........the singularity?

Do we even understand the difference between our own fantasies, including defenses, and reality?

> Roughly, it says that something is "complicated" to the degree that the smallest program (or Turing Machine or whatever) that generates it is large.

Do we really want to say that the Mandelbrot set is not complicated? That seems a little odd.

That can be true, but it's not necessarily true. Many phenomena have a high degree of internal regularity. Crystals, for example, have a simple structure, as do many gases.

Inventive.

I've skimmed through this board and noticed a dichotomy between answers. What should first be considered before any such debated is started is the parameters by which you want to argue (i.e. "rules of engagement"). That is to say, "What is the most complex thing you can think of?" holds a large set of subject-dependent definitions of exactly "what" it means for something to "complex". With this in mind, you will never come to a definitive answer to all this debate-playing and will just be speculating until definition-rules are layed down.

So, if you are defining complexity as the dictionary might define it ~ "characterized by a very complicated or involved arrangement of parts" with the next key term to define being...complicated ~ "difficult to analyze, understand, explain" which we could then in turn set down complexity as meaning "that which is very difficult to analyze, understand, or explain which involves a characterizable arrangment of parts"

Then we can level the playing field and determine such complex "things" and eventually come up with some answer.


BUT....if you take a non-reductionistic approach...as some of you have, and consider the primacy of human pre-reflective (unconscious, lower level brain processesing) perception/experience as the initial mediating interface between any such interpretations of the world we can create through abstraction and objectification of our original experiences, then you have a whole new ball of wax....complexity can no longer be considered a reducable thing, but something that can only be grasped in full....

For example, as I read the text I am typing...sure, someone with a highly nuanced understanding of the underlying biochemistry and biophysical processes of such a behavior might see typing on a laptop as something with imense complexity (from our first definition). However, does this fully capture what I am doing...what is going on in the world? What of the subjective, first hand, immediate apprehension of what I am doing? It must be considered considering it's subsuming, all-encompassing nature to all reflective thought (which is exactly what we are doing here)

I experience myself as typing out this message on a latop in my living room...all of which is completely context dependent and . I do not experience such as the light waves bouncing off my retina, being transduced into neural impluses that are traveling through various axon terminals all over the brain. We - as embodied human beings - created such scientific physical models of experiential processes as a way to make our lives "better" as human-beings-in-the-world. That is what all this complexification - abstraction - of things-in-the-world does. To say that science knows it all and is the "way" to figuring it all out would be a very "malnourished" view of reality. Surely, science - abstraction, induction, and objectification - has its uses as human "tools" to aide our travels....but by no means is it like a teleportation device into the realm of pure reality - the realm "theories of everything", where everything can be known and chance has no existence.

So, what the hell does all that talk of phenomenology and experience mean to the subject at hand? Well, to have a conversation on complexity we immediately introduce reflective, conscious thought. Ergo, we don't even have words to describe our experiences in full and - to me at least - that seems the most incredible, magnificient, deep, and complex "thing" we can ever talk about.


it's a little like asking, can our reductionistic, natural, scientific perspectives ever really capture or fully model things beyond our conscious awareness. Its complexity is that far beyond our primate-evolved cortices.

It can't be done...in the end, this conversation of whats the most complex is just a game...where we make of rules of engagement and cock fight till a victor avails - whether we come to a determinable end or a question that begs another answer or a level of complexity that leads us to a deeper level of complexity.

We just play to play - to experience. (btw, a lot of what I'm saying has roots in Merleau-Ponty's embodied phenomenology...you all might want to check it out)

yeah, I'm god. You probably are too. Welcome to the "Co-creating Reality Through Focused Will and Action" show. So, lets all be god. It'll be really awesome.

your mom.

great question, I'll have to read all of these when i have a little time.

the most compicated thing i can think about is this question.


" Please think of something that you can't think of "

end of story. lol