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Complexity (view source)

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{{a|devil|{{image|dancing landscape|jpg|A dancing landscape, yesterday.}}{{subtable|{{complex capsule}}}}}}[[All other things being equal]], a bummer — if you have in mind ''[[risk]]'' — and a boon — if you have in mind ''reward''. A violation of [[Occam’s razor]]; a source of confusion, a time-sink, a material contributor to catastrophic [[normal accident]]s; a ''[[waste]]'' — yet in a [[distributed network]] of autonomous bodies, an ''inevitability''. The more sophisticated the group of individuals, the greater the rate of complexification.
{{a|devil|{{image|dancing landscape|jpg|A dancing landscape, yesterday.}}{{subtable|{{complex capsule}}}}}}[[All other things being equal]], a bummer — if you have in mind ''[[risk]]'' — and a boon — if you have in mind ''reward''. A violation of [[Occam’s razor]]; a source of confusion, a time-sink, a material contributor to catastrophic [[normal accident]]s; a ''[[waste]]'' — yet in a [[distributed network]] of autonomous bodies, an ''inevitability''. The more sophisticated the group of individuals, the greater the rate of complexification.
There are those [[Deterministic|determinists]] who see complexity as just a sort of presently-uncalculatable state of a simple algortithm, like [[Conway’s Game of Life]]. We do not agree.


====Complexity as a bummer====
====Complexity as a bummer====
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{{complex capsule}}
{{complex capsule}}
===[[Complexity]] and [[reductionism]]===
The JC has encountered [[Reductionist|reductionists]] who see [[complexity]] as an [[emergent]] property of an [[algorithm]]. On this view, even something as simple as [[Conway’s Game of Life]] is, if you let it go long enough, [[complex]], as it spawns sub-systems, gliders, glider guns, and these interact with each other in marvellous and unpredictable ways. There is a tacit assumption here that real life — you know, the [[offworld]] — is really just a scaled-up version of the Game of Life, being just an implementation of {{br|Darwin’s Dangerous Idea}}, after all.
This is reductionism viewed from the other end of the telescope. Rather than taking the rich tapestry of modern life and boiling it down to basic rules of cause and effect, we start with those basic rules, and scale them up. What prevents us from getting from one end of this spectrum to the other is only an absence of data (from the rich tapestry end) and a want of processing power (from the initial conditions). The universe is nonetheless fully determined at all levels of abstraction.
This undermines the distinction between [[simple]], [[Complicated system|complicated]] and [[Complex system|complex]] — they are now just points along a continuum, without hard boundaries between them — and undermines the explanatory power of complexity theory. It is really just saying, “well, in this complex system, ''something'' will happen; we don’t know what, but as and when it does we will be able to rationalise it as a function of our rules, by deducing what the missing data must have been.”
Ex-post facto rationalisation to comply with your rules is rather like the work normal scientists do in a research programme, of course. It is a form of narratisation.


{{sa}}
{{sa}}
*[[Conway’s Game of Life]]
*[[Normal distribution]]
*[[Normal distribution]]
*[[Barnacle]]s
*[[Barnacle]]s
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