Template:Conway and complexity
The JC has encountered 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 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 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.
Hmm. So however long you run Conway’s life game, it does not seem to arrive at rice pudding and income tax. Reductionists say “Ah, but that is just because the rules aren’t quite right, or we haven’t quite got the right initial configuration”. But then, they would say that.
The idea that complexity is merely an emergent probability of a simple algorithm is quite the piece of eliminative reductionism. Eliminative in that it eliminates complexity as discrete state. It converts all complex systems to no more than an insufficiently mapped understood simple systems.
This is like saying — maybe it is saying —an analog signal is just an insufficiently granular digital signal. That digital code isn't just a handy way of representing the analog universe but that, if you did deep enough, binary code is all there is. This is a deep implications.
This undermines the powerful distinction between simple, complicated and complex systems — 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.