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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

#81

Post by analog31 »

haswell wrote: post #63
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 think speculative science always starts out as philosophy. This is as true now as it was in the 18th century. Indeed, and Natural Philosophy was the precursor to what we now call Science. I still think the old name better fit what we’re doing because it admits that the work is still a philosophical endeavor. This is not to question the validity of what we now call science, but it’s common these days to believe in…

Tell me about the supremacy of science after the government restores the NIH, NOAA, etc. In fact most people in the world believe in the supremacy of their religious faiths.

Re: Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex

#82

Post by andrewflnr »

Amateur speculation, but informed by professionals: I think this tendency toward complexity is situational, not fundamental. Specifically, it's a product of this stage of the universe having lots of available energy. More complex structures are favored when/because they can consume more energy and increase entropy more effectively. The complexity will probably start fading when the hydrogen-fusion party dies. The second law will continue on its way.

Re: Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex

#83

Post by titzer »

This theory is absurd. They're unjustifiably generalizing from a single system--biological evolution on Earth[1]. There are literally no other places in our solar system even that are rapidly evolving to more complexity. Lots of dead rocks, hot and cold, and a bunch of boiling gas balls. Incidentally, none of these are turning into Cybertron. As it turns out, the chemistry that we know to be necessary for self-replicating things just doesn't work there. (Maybe there are other chemistries that will work, we don't know). So this specific chemistry and this specific set of conditions to kick off and indeed allow self-replication to continue are pretty damn important to understanding how it works.

A "new force of nature"? It's just so pretentious. Some interesting biases of a selection process driven by copious excess energy doesn't make for a new force of nature. Otherwise we'd be positing all kinds of absurdities that are not directly explained by particle physics are woo woo a new force of nature--fashion choices (hey, copy, select, mutate there too).

[1] And no, I don't think that the computer simulations of evolution they carry out are any additional evidence. So you made a computer program with a copy/select/mutate loop in it. Big deal. I can make a computer simulation about anything.

Re: Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex

#84

Post by afpx »

Pretty cool. I often wondered if the universe was evolving similar to natural selection via a reinforcement learning process. Wave function collapses to the value that maximizes some objective function.

How would you test for it though? I've seen enough residual data from RL processes to almost see semblences of patterns that could be extracted and re-applied at a macro scale.

Re: Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex

#85

Post by titzer »

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.

Re: Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex

#86

Post by DemocracyFTW2 »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #50
DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #14

The law of increasing complexity holds at least for the software that I write, so yeah—plausible...

Software complexity can decrease though. Very, very unlikely, but there is the possibility of the 12 year old kid from the internet that does a better job than you despite your hard work and long professinal career.

I'm absolutely positive that software complexity can decrease and in so far my post was not entirely serious. I have multiple instances at my hand where re-writing existing libraries with a better focus on simplicity, patterns better suited for the job, more stringent APIs and so on all contribute to produce new versions of software that are ~about as capable as the old version but internally much simpler. However I feel that when I just go on building on and on without tearing down entire edifices of code once in a while, software tends to become inscrutable, hard to maintain and hard to extend.

Re: Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex

#87

Post by perrygeo »

Gualdrapo wrote: post #4

I remember reading somewhere that maybe the purpose of life is to increase entropy in the universe. If that is true and we haven't found any sound evidence of life elsewhere, I don't know.

POSIWID. Life on earth's primary "purpose" if observed from space would be to dissipate low-entropy solar radiation, using it to build temporary structures out of carbon.

It is puzzling why life isn't more common. Perhaps dissipative self-organizing structures are everywhere - stars, solar systems and galaxies themselves maintain their order by dissipating energy. They just don't look like "life" to us.

Re: Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex

#88

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

mr_toad wrote: post #59
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entropy is always increasing in a closed system, but locally it can decrease, if energy is supplied from the outside. Us evolving on Earth comes at the expense of increased entropy of the Sun.

> Entropy is always increasing in a closed system Only if that system isn’t already in thermodynamic equilibrium. A closed system that reaches thermodynamic equilibrium has maximum entropy. Why the universe as a whole didn’t start out in thermodynamic equilibrium, i.e doesn’t have maximum entropy is something we don’t understand.

If it were so, there would be no one to ask that question.
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