Human beings are generally adept at making judgements concerning distance, weight and, temperature. In my view, that is because we are accustomed to measuring and quantifying these.
When people make poor decisions, it is very often because we have misjudged complexity. Even when we make a misjudgement concerning time, it is usually complexity that we have actually misjudged. We measure time more often than all other quantities combined and so are closely familiar with it. It is not so much that we have underestimated the time as that we have underestimated the complexity involved.
Whenever any type of life decision is made, it inevitably involves an assessment of complexity. So, wouldn't it be better to be able to express this with concrete numbers instead of vague terms such as "more complex", "very complex" or, "relatively simple". This would make us much more proficient at assessing all manner of consequences and ramifications while making decisions.
It is my feeling that we underestimate complexity more than we overestimate it when making difficult decisions. Underestimation of complexity is comparable to looking at a scene on a computer monitor with fewer pixels than is necessary to completely render it. Sometimes we make a situation more complex than it really is by worrying about it.
We especially underestimate complexity in our relationships with others. It is good, when dealing with inanimate matter, to be able to break everything down into simple formulae. But this does not work as well in the world of people. Our minds are much better at handling complexity than our emotions.
There are so many ways that we understate complexity in handling life and the world around us. We tend to zig-zag through history instead of moving in a more efficient straight line. This is because every new system or ideology we come up with tends to be a reaction against what came before. We distort the situation with our emotions and move too far in the opposite direction until a reaction forms against that and the process repeats.
The primary reason for this zig-zag through history is oversimplification, in other words poor handling of complexity. We tend to take what would be good advice at one point in time and harden it into dogma. We oversimplify by taking advice that should be written in sand and making into ideology written in stone. One way to improve the situation is to get a better grasp of complexity.
Another way that we sometimes destructively oversimplify in times of conflict or competition is to group everyone into one of two pigeon holes. Those that are for us and those that against us. The situation is most likely far more complex with some that are with us and some that are against us but a vast range of people or nations somewhere in between.
Simplistic pigeon-holing is, of course, another form of understating and poor handling of complexity. Anyone who lives in a country other than the one in which they were born is familiar with how people tend to think that all people from the old country are much more alike than they actually are and that the move from one country to another is tantamount to the stepping from one simple pigeon-hole into another. Students have long been pigeon-holed as either primarily academic, athletic or, vocational. It is so much easier to think of people in broad groups rather than as individuals, but this invites misjudgement of complexity.
We would get much better at evaluating complexity, and would thus make better decisions, if we got used to quantifying it. Measurement of complexity requires some creativity since it is not something that we can just place a ruler against or place on a scale.
For example, one day I got to thinking how we could measure how much people are alike as opposed to how much they are different. The solution that I came up with was to count the number of words in the dictionary, eliminate redundancies and then divide the world's population by that number. That would give us a "Sameness Ratio", we would be that number of times more the same than different.
Quantification of complexity would also enable us to add new categories to the record books. For example, what is the world's greatest coincidence? We cannot, at present, evaluate this question in any other than subjective terms. Putting numbers on complexity would certainly lead us to discover patterns in reality that we had not noticed before.
Let's have a look at how we think in terms of patterns. We have a certain "pattern vocabulary", patterns that we are familiar with, and this affects all that we do.
On my cosmology blog, I explained that to really understand the universe, we have to understand that we see it not only because of what it is, but also what we are. This concept also applies to how we interact with the world around us. We see the world the way we do not only because of what it is but because of what we are.
We are composed of organs, which accomplish various tasks. We have internal organs like the stomach, intestines, kidneys, liver, heart, lungs, brain, etc. And also external organs like the legs, arms and, eyes. Our own structures are the most fundamental source of patterns for our pattern vocabulary.
Have you ever noticed that we invariably tend to organize everything in ways closely resembling that of our bodies? It is not that there is not other ways of organizing things, it is just that we do not readily see any other way because we are bound to see the world as we do not only because of what it is, but also because of what we are. Let's suppose that we had all of the same capabilities that we do, but that we consisted of an "imaginary homogenous medium" without the internal structure organized into various organs.
What about the way we organize knowledge? We organize it as a virtual mirror image of the organ structure of our bodies. There is not just "knowledge", it is organized into categories such as science, history, philosophy, religion, technology, and so on. If we were not organized the way we are, we would not organize our knowledge the way we do.
We cannot help it because these are the patterns that we are familiar with. If we were structured differently, we would be familiar with a different set of patterns and would organize our knowledge differently, although we cannot now imagine how that would be.
Consider how we divide up labor (labour). We assign workers different tasks that are organized in a way that, like knowledge, mirrors the way that our bodies are structured. If we did not have this organ structure, but consisted of some "imaginary homogenous medium", the way we organize work would be completely different. Although, we cannot imagine what it might be simply because it is outside our pattern vocabulary.
How about the rooms in a house? This also bears a very close resemblence to the structure of the organs in our bodies. It is not that there are not other possibilities for the layout of a house, it is just that we are constrained by our pattern vocabulary from imagining those possibilities.
The same thing with the various departments in stores. We see and organize our sorroundings the way we do because of what we are, and we inevitably try to shape those sorroundings into extensions of ourselves. It is not that there are no other ways, it is just that we are unable to see those other ways.
Even when designing vehicles, we cannot get away from how we are organized. Cars and trucks, like their makers, are organized into components which accomplish various tasks. It is said that anyone who creates something inevitably leaves a part of themselves in the creation, the concept of limited pattern vocabulary explains why.
The economy is composed of various industries, and governments of different ministries, that work together, much like the workers doing different tasks within those industries, in the same way that the organs of our bodies do. The leader of some enterprise is even referred to as "the head", and the center as "the heart". It would be much different if we consisted of an imaginary homogenous medium, but we cannot imagine that reality because of how we are structured in this reality.
We are fortunate that our bodies are as complex as they are, even though complexity means more things to go wrong. If we were simpler, even with the same level of intelligence, we would have an even more limited pattern vocabulary than we do.
In all that we do, it is not that there are not other ways to do it, it is just that we cannot see those other ways because of the patterns that we are familiar with. Just as a radio is tuned in to a certain wavelength, we are "tuned in" to a certain selection of patterns and any patterns outside this selection go unnoticed.
The entire set of patterns is determined by the nature of matter. The primary value of art and sports is that it "transmits" patterns that can then be adapted by us to other uses. The patterns that are outside our pattern vocabulary are not completely beyond our reach because all possible patterns can be broken down into the fundamental four that I refer to as "primes", for "primary", as described in "The Most Basic Pattern".
Have you ever noticed something about life concerning difficulty and complexity? Life can be made easier, but only at the expense of becoming more complex. If we could put an actual measurement on difficulty and complexity, we would have noticed this previously. But we can only express such things in vague and subjective terms.
Ancient people had a much simpler life, but at the expense of being more difficult. The natural state of life is difficulty without complexity. Making use of the mind is tantamount to replacing difficulty with complexity. Difficulty is represented by the body, while complexity is represented by the mind.
It is technology that makes life so much easier, but the price is complexity. It must be designed and maintained, and requires skill to use.
Tools are the first and most obvious step in substituting complexity for difficulty. Tools make all manner of manual work much easier. But the tools themselves must, in most cases, be carefully made and their use requires skill, which is complexity. Tools are the simplest and most widespread example of exchanging difficulty for complexity.
My reasoning is that if difficulty and complexity can be readily interchanged, it can only mean that the two must be different manifestations of the same thing. In the patterns blog, we already established that energy and complexity must be different forms of the same thing, since neither can be created or destroyed, but only changed in form. Since energy overcomes some difficulty, we should not be surprised that difficulty is a part of the interchange also.
One way that I have thought of to put a measurement on the complexity of a society is the total number of different occupations that the people work at.
The point is that there must be a difficulty plus complexity sum which remains constant, at least on a large scale, for all of human life. We cannot access or express this sum because we cannot attach numbers to entities like difficulty and complexity, but can only express them in the usual vague and subjective terms.
This interchangeability between difficulty and complexity only applies on a large scale. For example, upon retirement life usually gets both less complex and less difficult. So, when someone's life becomes both less complex and less difficult due to retirement, we can be sure that there must be a corresponding increase in both somewhere else.
I have really been doing some thinking lately about how complexity relates to the structures of living things, and there is a conclusion that I think we can safely arrive at. When a system arises that interacts with it's surrounding environment, and is completely dependent on that environment, it cannot logically be more complex than that environment.
This can only mean that while plants are far more intricate than the natural environment, intricacy is concentrated complexity but not more complexity, they cannot be more complex in structure than the sum total of the complexity of the natural environment in which they live.
A good example of intricacy is a watch and an engine. The watch is far more intricate than the engine, because it contains more complexity per unit of material, but is not more complex than the engine. Complexity can be defined as the number of levels in a system, or as the minimum volume of information required to construct that system.
Plants are certainly complex in their structures. But remember that all of the information necessary to construct a plant is contained in the seed of the plant. Most of the structure of the plant is repetition of the basic cells, and recall that repetition is not complexity. For example, six identical cars are only one level of complexity more complex than one such car and that is only because we require another piece of information to express how many cars there are.
Let's consider what is meant by the sum total of the environment in which plants live. This would include the patterns in the wind that affects the plant, the energy from the sun on which the plant depends, the composition and density of the air, the soil and it's nutrients, the plant's interactions with insects such as bees, interactions with birds and animals, the change between day and night, the changes of the seasons, impurities in the air and soil, variations in water, variations in temperature, the force of falling rain and, cloud cover.
Just consider what sense it would make for plants to be more complex than the natural environment in which they live. It would make no sense whatsover. Therefore I feel safe in concluding that plants, while extremely intricate in structure, can never have a meaningful complexity greater than that of the sum total of the complexity of their natural environment.
But then what about humans and animals? Maybe plants cannot be more complex than the totality of their environment. But humans, particularly our brains, are far more complex than the environment in which we live. How can we explain that?
The answer lies in something that humans and animals have that plants don't, with regard to complexity. We have what is known as free will. My conclusion is that for a living thing to be more complex in structure than it's natural environment, it must be able to exercise free will. To exercise free will, a living thing must be able to move or to move things, or both. Free will makes up for the complexity gap between being and environment so that a more complex system, such as a human, can operate in a less complex sorrounding environment.
You may notice that the smaller a living thing is, such as an insect, generally the less intellect and free will it requires to operate in it's environment. This is simply because it's environment is more limited, and thus less complex. The various species of plants do, as a whole, manifest a kind of collective free will by trial and error in "deciding" where to grow. This is because the species, on the whole, matches the complexity of a larger-scale environment while a single plant matches the complexity of the local-scale environment, which is less complex. In this way, evergreens "choose" to live in high latitudes rather than in the tropics, while palm trees make the opposite choice.
The fact that we are more complex than our surrounding environment can be seen in two ways that I described in the posting "True And False, Words And Numbers", on this blog. Because the surrounding environment cannot match our complexity, we see "truth possibilities". Some of these truth possibilities turn out to be true, others to be false. If we were equal in complexity to the environment in which we live, there would be no truth possibilities because everything that we could conceive of would have to be true. Thus, free will would be meaningless and unnecessary.
Likewise, there is not enough complexity in the sorrounding environment for everything that we could conceive of to exist. This is why we use both words and numbers to communicate. If we were equal in complexity to our environment, words to differentiate what actually exists from what could possibly exist but doesn't would be unnecessary because everything could be described with numbers. The difference between words and numbers is that numbers are continuous, but words aren't. That is why there are new words as time goes on, but no new numbers.
Let's add another manifestation of the difference in the level of complexity between us and our natural environment. Life is about dealing with two levels of complexity and the dynamic tension between the two. The result is the opposites that we refer to as construction and destruction. Construction is to make something, destruction is to destroy it. Construction represents the higher level of our complexity while destruction represents the lower complexity level of the natural environment.
When we make or build something from materials which are available in the sorrounding environment, we are imparting our level of complexity onto that of the environment. The skills involved in making and using something is part of the complexity imparted onto it.
When the thing that we have made is destroyed, it is returning to it's former level of complexity. Of course, it is true that complexity can never be lost or destroyed at a universal level. On our level, involving complexity that is meaningful to us, the object would have returned to the complexity of the natural environment.
It is clear that birth is construction, while death represents destruction by a returning of the atoms of the body to their former level of complexity in the natural environment. If our complexity was the same, or less, than that of the natural environment, there would be no such thing as technology. We could never learn anything because we could never conceive of anything that was not true. This means that free will would be unnecessary and of no use, and we would logically live like plants.
Complexity is the level of information that is stored within some system, in how the system is put together and how it operates. There are two fundamental levels of complexity on earth, that of living things with free will and that of the surrounding environment. We saw how plants, while being far more intricate than the surrounding environment, are no more complex overall than that environment. This is why plants, while living things, do not require the free will that other living beings have.
For our purposes here, I define a plant as a living thing with no free will and without getting into the biology of whether mushrooms, fungus and, lichens are technically plants.
A living thing must have some type of separation from the surrounding environment, such as skin or cell walls, and cannot be less complex than the sum total of the surrounding environment. The most efficient living thing will be greater in intricacy, which is the concentration of complexity, but equal in complexity to that of it's surrounding environment. This is why plants comprise by far the vast majority of living things on earth, above that of single cells.
(By the way, this is also a creation issue that I covered on the blog about creation. It simply does not make sense for plant life to evolve into animals when plants are by far the most efficient of the two).
A living thing that is more complex than the surrounding environment will see truth possibilities that cannot all be true, because there will not be enough complexity for all to be true, so it will have to have the free will necessary to decide which are true and which are not. Having free will makes no sense unless the living thing also has senses to receive information, as well as the ability to move and possibly to move things. There must be more than one way of doing things for free will to make sense. It is easy to see that complexity in living things is very high-maintenance.
A living thing that is much more complex than the surrounding environment will have more capacity to learn about that environment, but will also have a greater capacity to make mistakes because a higher proportion of the truth possibilities that it sees will have to be false simply because there is not enough complexity available in the environment for all to be true.
The two basic levels of complexity on earth, the higher level of beings with free will and the lower level of the surrounding environment are manifested in another way, as construction and destruction. When we impose our complexity on the surrounding environment in some way, we engage in construction by adding information to it so that it is brought closer to our level of complexity. When that complexity is effectively eliminated in some way, it results in the process of destruction by bringing the environment back to it's effective original level of complexity.
So much about life-truth possibilities, use of words, health, aging, diet and, labor (labour) result from the difference in complexity between ourselves and the surrounding environment. The purpose of all work is to bridge this complexity gap.
I have established how work and complexity is interchangeable, meaning that they must be the same thing. We can make life easier for us, primarily through technology and organization, but only at the expense of making it more complex. Labor (labour) is required of any being that is more complex than their environment, but none is required of plants because they are equal in complexity (although far greater in intricacy) than the surrounding environment.
In the environment of inanimate matter, there is quantity but not quality. Quality make sense only for living things. In geometric terms, quantity is simply a slope or a straight line. But quality shows as a peak formed by more than one line because it is more complex than simple quantity. Plants are not more complex than the sum total of their environments, but manifest this peak pattern due to their greater intricacy. This peak of quality is the optimum living conditions of living things. I defined life, on the patterns and complexity blog, as a manifestation of this peak factor which is not found in inanimate matter.
Organization is information, and thus complexity. Whenever we organize elements of the environment around us, we bring it closer to our own complexity level in order to approach our peak of quality. A less complex being, relative to the surrounding environment, would organize less while a more complex being would organize more. We can see this in how much of the organization that we impose on the environment is meaningless to animals and insects.
If we could bring the complexity level of the surrounding environment up to our level, by construction and organization, there would be no more truth possibilities that would not be true and thus no more need for more knowledge. This is theoretically impossible, because to do so we would have to be "smarter than ourselves", but it means that we can define paradise in terms of complexity as bringing the surrounding environment up to our level of complexity by construction and organization so that we can effectively live like plants, with no need for work or benefit from more knowledge.
We have seen that the primary pattern that defines living things, in contrast to inanimate matter, is the peak. A peak is manifested in any situation where there can be either too much or too little of something. The optimum amount is at the peak.
A few obvious examples, with regard to human beings, is food, sleep and, temperature, and also the balance between work and relaxation. This pattern has no meaning in the universe of inanimate matter. In fact, I regard this as the very definition of life as described in "The Definition of Life" on this blog.
Progress, the moving forward of civilization in improvement, can be readily expressed in terms of complexity as a bringing of our surrounding environment, which is at a lower level of complexity than we are, up to our level of complexity.
This complexity, of either ourselves or our native environment, is simply the information contained within it as to how it came to be and how it operates. All death and destruction can also be expressed in terms of complexity, simply as a reverting back to the lower level of the surrounding environment.
In imposing our complexity on the surrounding environment during progress, it must be remembered that we are dependent on this environment. Imposing our complexity must take the nature of our complexity into account. Progress forms a peak and the peak of progress is neither too much or too little.
For example, imposing our complexity on a tree does not necessarily mean that it's wood will be carved into something complex but possibly that it will be arranged so that it is in the most desirable location in the larger scheme of society.
As explained previously, the fact that we are more complex than our surrounding environment brings about truth possibilities. As we look at our environment, there is not enough complexity available for everything that we can conceive of to be true. This opens the possibility that we could believe some things to be true that are, in fact, false or, we may believe some things to be false that are actually true.
In other words, this disparity in complexity means that we can make mistakes. If we were of the same or lesser complexity than our surrounding environment, we could not even conceive of anything that was not true in our surrounding environment and so this would not be an issue. This is where the learning comes in which is necessary to progress, finding out just what is true and false in our surroundings.
We do work or labor (labour) to bring our surroundings up to our level of complexity in order to make progress. We usually define progress as having the maximum of what we want being achieved with the minimum of work. My theory is that when a being of a given level of complexity succeeds in completely imposing it's complexity on it's surrounding environment then labour (labor) will no longer be necessary.
In my complexity theory, plants are equal in complexity to the surrounding environment although they are far greater in intricacy (defined as the concentration of complexity or complexity per unit of matter or given). This is why plants have no need to do any work, all that they require comes right to them.
There are two broad types of labor (labour) that we do, physical and mental. These represent the two different levels of complexity that we are dealing with. If there could be pure physical labour (labor), with no mental component at all, it would be solely of the lower level of complexity of the surrounding environment.
(Let's just alternate the two global spellings of labor and Labour).
I define the difference in the two complexity levels, ours and that of the surrounding environment, as experienced by us while seeking progress to be: total labor = physical labour x mental labour. The total labor required must always remain constant, but as we make progress the mental labour increases as the physical labor diminishes.
This is actually another way of stating my doctrine that we can make life physically easier by use of technology, but only at the expense of making it more complex. We can never, on a large scale, make life both physically easier and simpler.
The real basis of progress is that mental labor can be replicated, while pure physical labour cannot. We can replicate physical labor using machines, but the design of those machines is mental labour. Someone doing the physical labor of planting his crops does not plant the crops of others as well, but someone figuring out how to plant crops figures it out for others as well.
Technology begins with tools, which are synthetic extensions of ourselves and our senses. Tools are the result of using mental labor to make physical labour easier and more efficient. Machines are a kind of complex tool that attempts to replicate physical labor.
Just as machines are complex tools, and a step upward from tools, computer technology is a step upward from writing. Written words can be described as tools to store and replicate information. Computer technology is a step upward from this, and is a kind of complex book which replicates skill rather than just information. Instruction naturally flows from highest to lowest technology, you still have to tell a computer what to do because it is less complex than you.
But everything that we do while making progress must ultimately bear the imprint of the surrounding environment in which we exist. Our universe is one of spatial dimensions that pervade everything about us. We can look at progress, then, in terms of dimensions. One dimensional tools can be combined into multi-dimensional machines. One dimensional books can have their information combined into multi-dimensional computer technology.
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