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Template:Conway and complexity: Difference between revisions
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The JC has encountered [[Reductionist|reductionists]] who see [[complexity]] as an [[emergent]] property of even a simple [[algorithm]] of Turing Machine. | The JC has encountered [[Reductionist|reductionists]] who see [[complexity]] as an [[emergent]] property of even a simple [[algorithm]] of Turing Machine. | ||
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, itself being just an implementation of {{br|Darwin’s Dangerous Idea}}, after all. | On this view, [[fractal]]s, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map polynomial mapping], 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, itself being just an implementation of {{br|Darwin’s Dangerous Idea}}, after all. | ||
This is [[reductionism]], only viewed from the wrong end of the telescope. Rather than taking the rich tapestry of modern life and boiling it down to basic rules of cause and effect, as [[reductionist|reductionists]] normally do, this gambit starts with those basic rules, and scales them up. What prevents us from getting from one end of this spectrum to the other, say the reductionists, is only an absence of sufficient [[data]] to reverse engineer the algorithm (from the rich tapestry end) and a want of processing power to generate modern life (from the basic algorithm end). The universe is nonetheless fully determined at all levels of abstraction. | This is [[reductionism]], only viewed from the wrong end of the telescope. Rather than taking the rich tapestry of modern life and boiling it down to basic rules of cause and effect, as [[reductionist|reductionists]] normally do, this gambit starts with those basic rules, and scales them up. What prevents us from getting from one end of this spectrum to the other, say the reductionists, is only an absence of sufficient [[data]] to reverse engineer the algorithm (from the rich tapestry end) and a want of processing power to generate modern life (from the basic algorithm end). The universe is nonetheless fully determined at all levels of abstraction. | ||
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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. | 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. | ||