Arjun Khemani

Jess

Moritz Wallawitsch

Brett Hall

Martha Sharpe

Tom Howard

Chauncey St. John

Logan Chipkin

David Kedmey

Aaron Stupple

Valeria S.

Isabel

Junaid Dawud

Naval

 Yeah, it's interesting because it's sort of the same thing,

 it's everywhere the same, but it's the same thing in a different way.

 Obviously, the noisiness of a blank screen of white snow in a television,

 in one sense it's functionally the same as a sphere,

 but it's coming out from a different direction.

 Like the sphere is the ultimate compactification where there's no information left,

 and the white noise screen is the ultimate expansion

 where it's just all a torrent of energy everywhere that really has no pattern.

 It's just roiling everywhere under the surface.

 The complexity is encoded in simplicity, but it's a different kind of complexity

 that's encoded in that simplicity. It's a complexity across many forms, not just one form.

 And it's a complexity across abstract forms, not concrete forms.

 I would argue this is actually an explanation not of 

 complexity itself, but of our human parsing of complexity.

 Because all of these different systems and predictable things existed, right?

 You're describing the discovery process. And I think it's right on.

 I had a course, The Philosophy of Light, once taught 

 two different professors of psychology and philosophy.

 And they basically made a case that every major human discovery and breakthrough has 

 been a series of sprawling complexity that eventually collapses into one simple realization.

 And then that process begins new all over again.

 And just to add to this because it got lost in a reply comment before

 I think it speaks to the quote for the simplicity on this side of complexity

 I wouldn't give you a fig but for the simplicity on the 

 side of complexity for that I would give you anything I have

 By Oliver Wendell Holmes and it's really the bell curve meme, right?

 You know when you don't really understand 

 something it seems very simple you start to learn about it

 It gets very very complex and then when you truly 

 understand it it collapses back into something simple

 And that's where the meme is so meta because it's 

 simply and elegantly captures that fundamental truth

 I'd take it further than that. I don't think it's just human parsing of complexity.

 It's the computability of complexity. Because humans are universal explainers

 and universal computers, then yes, to that extent,

 if it becomes possible for us to compute

 and predict the next step without running the universe

 as a computer, then it is computationally reducible.

 But it's not just humans. Any other universal explainer or any other computer,

 universal computer, would have the same understanding of complexity and non-complexity.

 But if you had omniscient knowledge, would you still see 

 things as this oscillation between simplicity and complexity?

 Or would you understand the underlying constraints and so 

 that simplicity would be apparent through your understanding?

 Like in other words, do you need to go through that framework to understand or 

 is that specifically from the vantage of approaching without perfect knowledge?

 If you're omniscient, you already know everything, 

 are the universe, so yes, none of this stuff applies.

 No abstractions, no computational reducibility, computational irreducibility, universe explained, none of that matters, but

 it's not really possible to know everything unless you are the entire universe.

 And so, if you're at that point, you know, what's 

 there to discuss? That's just God by another name.

 Agreed. I think going back to one of the earlier points around how to measure 

 complexity, I suppose what I'm arguing is that the measure of complexity is 

 ultimately subjective based on the vantage of how much knowledge you have. Can you 

 really measure complexity if with perfect knowledge everything is perfectly simple?

 Yeah, if you end up finding out that you are the 

 entirety of the fractal consciousness, you can just chill.

 Well, this is where Deutsch's work is kind of interesting because normally you might

 think that, okay, as I increase my level of knowledge, then things that before were complex

 become simple for me. But I don't think that's quite what he says.

 He basically points out that there is a jump to universality and once you've hit universality,

 you've hit maximal explanatory capability. Now that 

 that anything that can be understood, you can understand.

 You may need pencil and paper and computer to help you out.

 You may need a larger working memory, but 

 in theory there is nothing that is out there

 in the laws of physics that you're not capable of understanding.

 So beyond human knowledge, adding more and more, I would say, compute power to the human

 brain would not let you necessarily understand anything that you couldn't have understood

 before. I'm mangling this explanation, but to the people who read Deutsch, it makes sense, but

 there are a lot of assumptions or there's a lot of embedded knowledge underlying what

 I'm saying. If you haven't read it, I highly, highly 

 recommend The Beginning of Infinity. It's kind of a mind-blower book.

 I think the measurement of complexity is subjective, but so too are all measurements.

 You have to pick a point, you know, that 

 you're starting from or a time that you're starting

 from and an end point. So it's a little bit like Naval's last comment.

 With perfect knowledge, well, you're just God.

 You don't really need to measure anything anymore.

 And to the extent that I'm just casually throwing around 

 terms like universal explainer and computational irreducibility,

 they actually have precise definitions. I'm using Deutsch's definition of universal explainer,

 and I'm using Stephen Wolfram's definition of computational irreducibility,

 and I'm pretty sure I've mangled the definitions of complexity and chaos in there.

 the idea that that's beautiful, is a refutation of the idea that this is evolutionarily explained,

 or can be evolutionarily explained. If, after 

 we found lava coming out of the volcano repulsive,

 then the evolutionary explanation would say, well, that's because it's dangerous and it's hot

 But on the evolutionary explanation that we find it beautiful,

 then you hear that explanation, oh, it's caused new land is forming.

 on this, an evolutionary explanation that explains all beauty in terms of explanation

 doesn't explain anything, precisely because of that.

 It wouldn't matter whether you find a thing repulsive

 or you find a thing beautiful, you can just say,

 well, here's an evolutionary just-so story that explains why it is that it's beautiful.

 attractive to almost any other creature on the planet,

 I would suggest. We find pictures of it 

 beautiful, but you don't want to get too close.

 It's almost impossible to get very close to volcanoes without, or to lava, without wearing

 an entire suit of armour, basically, to reflect the radiant heat.

 So we find pictures of it beautiful, but 

 now why do we find pictures of it beautiful?

 Why do we find landscapes beautiful, all of 

 this other kind of stuff that we find beautiful?

 I think it's tied up intimately with our capacity to explain the world.

 Our capacity to explain the world comes in two forms.

 The capacity to explicitly explain, in other words, to conjure the language into words

 which give you an explanation that you can tell to someone else, but also inexplicit

 explanations. In other words, intuitions. And our intuitions are 

 quite often inexplicit, we can't put them into words, but it's beautiful

 because we just know it is, and I don't know what all the criteria are.

 But here's one explanation, if you want one.

 It can't be about something like, for example, as was suggested,

 that somehow or other, in evolutionary terms,

 it's because land is forming or something like that.

 That would require us to have an instinct, an understanding,

 prior to any explanation, that it forms land.

 But the idea that lava forms land, that's a scientific explanation.

 That took a long time for people to figure out.

 That's not something that primitives would have known.

 A lot of people would have been born and died

 without ever seeing a volcano. And if they did see a 

 volcano going off and they saw lava coming out of it,

 they would have thought, what the hell is that?

 They wouldn't have even added up the fact that it, in fact,

 is the stuff that makes a certain kind of rock,

 let alone that rock formed land and so on and so forth.

 And by the way, lava coming out of volcanoes on land

 doesn't generally create more land. You have to 

 have a divergent plate in the middle of the ocean

 before you get more land. So on and so forth. OK. Put all that aside.

 I think, and here's just a guess, and I could be completely wrong,

 but again I'm avoiding the evolutionary explanation.

 about the difference between warm things and cold things,

 and what's attractive in terms of having a nice,

 you know, here's a nice fire where we sit around and we talk,

 and here's where we cook things, and here's how it's comfortable,

 and those are warm, red, glowing things.

 We all love a fire. Human beings love a fire.

 And I think one of the reasons human beings love a fire

 is we associate it with being social, gathering together, and eating food.

 I think this is taught to us very early on in life.

 We come to understand this both through stories,

 pictures we're shown, and experiences we have, especially those experiences.

 And all of that comes together when we see a picture of something like glowing lava.

 It just reminds us at a very deep level of things from our childhood,

 Now I could be completely wrong about all that,

 but you want an explanation, and that's my hypothesis.

 But there are many such, these are what are called just-so stories,

 so I can make up a story, and it sounds plausible,

 but that does not mean it's the explanation.

 How can we figure out whether it's a good explanation or not?

 Well, we'd need to have a whole bunch of criticisms applied to this,

 and I'm sure you could refute this in some way if we tried hard enough.

 I'll just throw another spanner into the works of this particular discussion about complexity.

 There's a few different technical senses of the word complexity.

 One is related to the idea of computation and 

 whether or not a particular function is tractable.

 Intractable things are more complex, one might think.

 But actually, complexity is relative in this sense, it's relative to a theory of computation.

 After all, classical computers find certain tasks very complex that quantum computers do not.

 So, because it's me, let me not let the 

 moment pass by without quoting a little from the

 beginning of Infinity from chapter 8 where David writes, quote,

 Quantum computation, which is currently believed to be the fully universal form of computation,

 happens to have exactly the same set of computable functions as Turing's classical computation,

 but quantum computation drives a coach and horses through the classical notion of simple

 or elementary operations. It makes some intuitively very complex things simple.

 So what David is saying there, as if any further explanation is needed, is 

 is complex in the classical sense turns out to be simple in the quantum sense.

 So this is really important. In other words, in nature, nothing appears to be simple or complex, 

 but rather simple and complex are terms relative to our understanding, our theory of computation.

 And in fact, David says elsewhere in this particular chapter, he 

 talks about the difference between simple versus complex explanations.

 Certain things are easier to understand than others. And so you have that kind of complexity.

 But is that kind of complexity different to a hundred 

 atoms interacting together? Is that simple or complex?

 Well, it depends. It depends upon your theory of computation. If you can 

 moment to moment how those things are going to behave, well, isn't that simple?

 And maybe you can do that with a quantum computer, but maybe 

 you can't do it with a classical computer. Simple or complex.

 I don't know that it's there in nature. I think it's 

 there in our explanation of our theory of computation..

 Chapter 4, Criteria for Reality, in The Fabric of Reality,

 also contains a vast amount of information about this term

 complex and complexity and simplicity and so on and so forth.