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Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex

quantamagazine.org

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Re: Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex

#101

Post by haswell »

analog31 wrote: post #99
haswell wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're describing anti-science sentiment, which is problematic and dangerous. But this is also whataboutism. I'm describing unfounded beliefs many people hold about science based mostly on a lack of philosophical understanding, which is orthogonal to anti-science sentiment and still important to examine. I don't see a reason for there to be tension between the two.

I may have overreacted. I'm a scientist, and I'm surrounded by scientists. When I hear about "supremacy of science" it's usually being presented as a straw man. I don't know any scientists who believe it, beyond the temporary phase in everybody's education where they get caught up in the "master of the universe" feeling.

That’s understandable, especially in the current climate. I’ve definitely encountered the straw men from the anti-science types too, and it’s incredibly frustrating.

As a layperson, I often come in contact with people who believe in science but fall into what is essentially scientific absolutism and see philosophy as irrelevant. I was one of those people in my 20s before I went down some rabbit holes that set me straight. Many of the people around me did not.

The scientists I know are not the absolutist types. I sometimes forget there are more scientists here than the average internet community.

Re: Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex

#102

Post by aradox66 »

kens wrote: post #78

Coincidentally, I'm reading Walker's book "Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence" on the same topic. (Walker is one of the researchers in the article.) Summary: I don't like the book. The book was motivating me to write an article "Books I don't like", but I'll comment here instead :-) The book describes "Assembly Theory", a theory of how life can arise in the universe. The idea is that you can qua…

I felt similar reading that book. She seems very clear that she wants to develop paradigmatic physics, and wants Assembly Theory to be paradigmatic, but there's not a lot of meat on the bone.

Re: Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex

#103

Post by andrewflnr »

titzer wrote: post #85
EncomLab wrote: post #51

"Complexity" is a hugely problematic term when used in this way - remember that entropy and complexity are related, but they are not interchangeable. A complex system can have lower entropy than a simpler system, and conversely, a system can have high entropy but be relatively simple. By mingling these terms without specifying objective reference points, it all just comes out as word salad. This paper just reads like…

> a system can have high entropy but be relatively simple. Good examples of these are anything that Kolmogorov-compresses well. For example, by almost any measure the output of a pseudo random number generator has high entropy. Yet it has low information density (low complexity), as the program that generates the sequence, plus its state, is really small.

I think a better example is just hot gas. Heat up a tube of gas, and its entropy will increase, with no effect on its complexity. Still not terribly compressible either though.

Re: Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex

#104

Post by gsf_emergency »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #48
gsf_emergency wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The abstract heresy innuendo'd here seems to be about an increase in global (aka universal) "complexity"* (Think: no heat death!) Related to another heresy understated by qmag just this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43665831 In that case, qmag didn't (dare to?) shout loud enough that the para-particles are globally ?distinguishable.. That's like a very restricted version of TFA's claim though.. Another t…

> "correlated" or "anticorrelated" with complexity. Also the value of entropy has different signs in thermodynamics and computer science for example. Not helpful either...

It's because thermo count states and CS use probabilities.. strange swap, I know, pple assume the opposite..

Re: Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex

#105

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

prabhu-yu wrote: post #40
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"to reproduce and populate its genes" feels like a better fit for the purpose of an organism. If you subscribe to the big bang theory (and the idea that the purpose of a system is what it does), then the universe's purpose is to walk a path from low entropy to high entropy. Of what use is life, in such an endeavor? Well, life tends to seek out bits of stuck energy (food/fuel) and release it (metabolism/economy)--movi…

Can life evolve to slow down the process of increasing entropy? For ex: Sun is throwing energy in space. What if life tries to store it and use it only when it needs? Has the sunlight gone into space (without being captured by fossilized life), it would have thinly spread out in universe(high entropy, low energy density). But plants and humans (solar cells) capturing it to create fossil fules or create some infrastru…

Certainly. If you look at the various steps in cellular respiration (happens in animals, starts with glucose and ends up with ATP) you'll see that it takes many of them to gradually release that energy such that it can be made use of at a rate that jives with the cell's needs. There's so much complexity that has gone into controlling this rate. It would've been much simpler to just burn it all at once and explode.

Re: Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex

#106

Post by cryptonector »

bubblyworld wrote: post #41
hliyan wrote: post #38

Tried reading the paper [1]. I understand the authors are academics, which is why I'm surprised the paper reads like a layman's attempt at a contributing to a "theory of everything", or at best, an inquiry written by a 18th century European philosopher of science. - "identification of conceptual equivalencies among disparate phenomena were foundational to developing previous laws of nature" - what exactly is a "conce…

I think speculative science always starts out as philosophy. This is as true now as it was in the 18th century. If you look at any thinker on the edge of human understanding you'll find something similar (e.g. I was reading Michael Levin's stuff on bioelectricity recently and it also has a heavy dose of philosophy). I don't really have an issue with any of the points you raised - why do they bother you? The interesti…

> I don't really have an issue with any of the points you raised - why do they bother you?

Idk about GP, but bad science writing ("identification of conceptual equivalencies ...") does bother me. It's sloppy, and tends to hide possibly invalid shortcuts taken by the authors by being an impenetrable fog of words. That sort of thing is a very good indicator of bunk, and it tends to peg my BS meter. Which isn't to say that there is no place for that sort of language in a scientific paper, but that one should preface the use of it with an admission of hand-waving for some purpose.

Re: Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex

#107

Post by visarga »

hliyan wrote: post #38

Tried reading the paper [1]. I understand the authors are academics, which is why I'm surprised the paper reads like a layman's attempt at a contributing to a "theory of everything", or at best, an inquiry written by a 18th century European philosopher of science. - "identification of conceptual equivalencies among disparate phenomena were foundational to developing previous laws of nature" - what exactly is a "conce…

I think you should try to get the intent instead of stumbling on surface level. The core idea is that recursion explains emergence.

A distributed system can still achieve centralized outcomes as a result of centralizing constraints acting on it. For example, matter under gravity forces leads to celestial bodies, particles under EM forces lead to stable chemical molecules, genes and species under the constraint of replication lead to evolution, language under constraint of usage leads to the evolution of culture, and brains under the constraint of serial action lead to centralized semantics and behavior. In neural nets we have the loss function as a centralizing constraint, moving weights towards achieving a certain functional outcome.

Ok, so what is the relation between centralizing constraints and recursion? Recursion is how distributed activity generates constraints. Every action becomes a future constraint. I think this approach shows great promise. We can link recursive incompressibility and undecidability to explanatory gaps. You can't know a recursive process unless you walk the full path of recursion, you have to be it to know it. There is no shorter description of a recursive process than its full history.

So what looks like constraints when seen top-down, looks like search seen bottom-up. Particles search for minimal energy, genes for survival, markets search for profit, and our actions for goal maximization. Search acts on all levels, but since constraints are emergent, search is also open-ended.

Re: Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex

#108

Post by bubblyworld »

cryptonector wrote: post #106
bubblyworld wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think speculative science always starts out as philosophy. This is as true now as it was in the 18th century. If you look at any thinker on the edge of human understanding you'll find something similar (e.g. I was reading Michael Levin's stuff on bioelectricity recently and it also has a heavy dose of philosophy). I don't really have an issue with any of the points you raised - why do they bother you? The interesti…

> I don't really have an issue with any of the points you raised - why do they bother you? Idk about GP, but bad science writing ("identification of conceptual equivalencies ...") does bother me. It's sloppy, and tends to hide possibly invalid shortcuts taken by the authors by being an impenetrable fog of words. That sort of thing is a very good indicator of bunk, and it tends to peg my BS meter. Which isn't to say t…

Right, I agree with you in general but in this particular case it seems fine to me. OP refers to the first two paragraphs of the introdution, so the authors clearly aren't hiding anything. It's a very far cry from an actual crank paper like the sort you see on vixra. But yeah, this stuff is subjective, I probably just have a higher tolerance for fluff.

Re: Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex

#109

Post by Mzxr »

visarga wrote: post #107
hliyan wrote: post #38

Tried reading the paper [1]. I understand the authors are academics, which is why I'm surprised the paper reads like a layman's attempt at a contributing to a "theory of everything", or at best, an inquiry written by a 18th century European philosopher of science. - "identification of conceptual equivalencies among disparate phenomena were foundational to developing previous laws of nature" - what exactly is a "conce…

I think you should try to get the intent instead of stumbling on surface level. The core idea is that recursion explains emergence. A distributed system can still achieve centralized outcomes as a result of centralizing constraints acting on it. For example, matter under gravity forces leads to celestial bodies, particles under EM forces lead to stable chemical molecules, genes and species under the constraint of rep…

Your comment reminded me of this article. It suggested that we experience time because the underlying processes of the universe are recursive. And since our computational capacity is limited, we as observers can only perceive the future by progressively unfolding it. If recursion explains emergence, could it follow that everything tends to grow more complex over time?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41782534

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