Here’s an almost Tweet-able thought that I had while making dinner yesterday evening. I was listening to a CD lecture from the Teaching Company on “Big History”, and the big professor (David Christian, who is definitely a smart cookie) was repeating one of his usual “big themes” from big history. I.e., that since the Big Bang, new forms of stuff seem to emerge over time that have increasing ability to concentrate energy flows, grow larger, interact, and perpetuate themselves or reproduce themselves. This applies (in something of a procession) to molecules, gas clouds, stars, planets, microbes, plants, animals, humans, tribes, villages, and civilizations. As things increase their abilities to concentrate energy and make their mark on reality, they tend to get more and more complex. <\/p>\n
Ah yes, complexity!!! Another Teaching Company course subject. It makes me wonder . . . is there something fundamental about complexity, something inherent to it that causes things to be more able to gather more energy and do more stuff . . . or is complexity more of a side-show, more of an incidental thing? I tend now to believe the latter. If you had the talents and tools to build a wristwatch from scratch, you would appreciate how complex a wristwatch is. And yet, with those same tools and materials, you could build something else terribly complex that wouldn’t do anything. <\/p>\n
And so, complexity doesn’t necessary bring more functionality. You can have complex things (like works of sculpture art) that can’t accomplish much at all. It’s just that things with increased functionality usually have increased complexity, as a side effect. <\/p>\n
There is an interesting parallel here with the connection between entropy and information. As you concentrate more information into a smaller area, that area gains higher and higher entropy. E.g., you can have a computer memory composed of a 100 x 100 pixel grid with 100,000 boxes that can each be either white or black. If the overall grid is all white or all black, it has low entropy and not much information potential to it; not much of a story can be told by a blank wall. But if you apply some sort of translation code and try to store a sentence on that black and white grid, the overall “mixing up” of black and white spaces increases, and entropy goes up. <\/p>\n