Complexity, Patterns And, Energy

I would like to bring together two topics that I have been writing about here. Patterns and complexity are not two separate subjects but are actually one and the same thing. The number of patterns that are manifested by any given system is a numerical quantification of the absolute complexity of that system. This means that grasping the underlying patterns that are to be found everywhere will also enable us to put a number on complexity, with all the advantages that will bring.

I have found that complexity is a lot like energy in that it cannot be created or destroyed but only transformed. In fact, when we transform energy in any way, we are also transforming complexity. This must be true since energy is manifested as either motion or potential motion and motion rearranges reality and thus, complexity. Energy, patterns and complexity are three manifestations of the same thing.

It is important to remember that we view complexity through our own lenses. We have words such as "random" and "chaos", when in absolute reality there is no such thing. Randomness and chaos, as seen by us, are the result of our incomplete knowledge and limited vision.

Work is required to transform complexity, just as it is to transform energy. But we can never increase or decrease either. We can concentrate or disperse complexity. When we concentrate it, we get what is known as intricacy. My definition of intricacy is the concentration of complexity.

I have also reasoned that complexity must operate like hot and cold when two systems are brought into contact. Indeed this should not surprise us since heat is energy and energy is a different facet of complexity. Since the sun is giving off energy in the form of radiation, we know that it's internal complexity, the total number of patterns manifested by it's innards, must be decreasing. The energy released by the sun comes from leftover energy when smaller atoms are crunched together into larger ones. This reduces the complexity because the larger atom has only one trajectory which contains information, instead of the previous two or more.

The molecules concentrated in our bodies increases the complexity there, but at the expense of complexity elsewhere. The molecules of food are broken down, thus reducing their complexity so that the complexity can be applied elsewhere. Our bodies are highly intricate but a birth must make the inanimate world somewhat more disperse. (Let's refer to the opposite of intricacy as "dispersity").

Remember that complexity, like energy, can be transformed or concentrated but cannot be created or destroyed. Likewise the total number of patterns manifested by the universe always stays the same, although in continuous flux as we move through time.

To understand how complexity is like energy in that it can only be transformed but never change in quantity, remember that two identical cars are only slightly more complex than one car. Repetition lowers complexity. Human beings are complex but more human beings in the world does not increase the world's complexity in proportion to the numbers because human beings have so much in common.

Living things are very complex, so what if every thing that is alive died? Would that decrease complexity? The answer is no, at least at the most basic level of inanimate reality, because the movement of the living things while they were alive would drastically rearrange the atoms in the world and thus increase complexity.

However we look at it, complexity just cannot be created or destroyed but only transformed. When a living thing is born, it concentrates complexity as intricacy and when it dies, the intricacy is dispersed. But the overall complexity, the total number of underlying patterns that are manifested, always remains the same, at least depending on what we look at as random.

When we learn we are not really increasing complexity, at least at the universal level, because we are only mirroring what we see in the world around us in our minds and remember that repetition decreases complexity. When we make or build something we are not really increasing absolute complexity either because we are only mirroring the complexity in our minds, which in turn is only a mirror of the complexity around us.

Technology is just copies of what we have seen in nature. The complexity of a new model of car is merely a reflection of the complexity in the designer's mind from which it arose. We cannot create complexity and more than we can create energy because the two are the same thing. Complexity can be concentrated into intricacy but never increased or decreased. Remember that the total complexity of any technology or building also actually includes our nature and the purpose in the larger scheme of society that it will be used for.

We seem to be increasing complexity by building a city where there was once a wilderness. But that is only from our point of view. The very act of imposing order reduces complexity, such as cutting trees and planting crops in less-complex rows. There is the apparent complexity as seen by us but also an absolute complexity that we can transform but cannot change. Yet we cannot reduce complexity by imposing order on nature because in doing so, we increase our experience and thus complexity always balances out.

When you think about this, it is really amazing. I spent hours trying to think of ways to either increase or decrease absolute complexity, to no avail. It operates by the same rules as energy because the two are one and the same.

There is no better illustration of how my theory of complexity operates than the structure and life processes of living things.

The bodies and structures of all living things on earth are composed of cells. Have you ever wondered why? My rules of complexity can explain it.

The cellular structure of living things drastically lowers their complexity in comparison to what it would be if living things consisted of one large cell. All life begins with a seed of some type, and the finished product might be thousands or millions of times the size of the original seed.

If the mature living thing had the same complexity per volume as it's seed, that would mean that it's complexity would have to increase by thousands or millions of times and, according to my rule that complexity is like energy in that it cannot be created or destroyed, but only changed in form, that is impossible.

It is the cellular structure of living things that make them no more complex than their seeds, except for the influence of environmental factors. A seed is essentially a packet of information, and the structure of the living thing at maturity can be no more complex than the information contained in the original seed.

According to the rules of complexity that I explained, any number of duplicates are only slightly more complex than one of them. And the complexity of two systems, which share some similarities, is equal to the complexity of one of the systems, plus the complexity of the differences between it and the second system. The only thing that makes any number of an entity more complex than one of the entity is that their arrangement adds to the complexity. Remember that copying complexity does not increase it.

This means that, in living things composed of cells, the original seed must contain the information for the layout of a cell, the differences of the other types of cell from this cell and, the arrangement of the cells. Without the cell structure of living things, this would violate these rules of complexity, and thus living things as we know them would not be possible.


COMPLEXITY AND EVOLUTION

Now, onto some implications of this. If cannot change the complexity of the world around us but can only transform it, this must mean that the motions of inanimate matter must not be able to transform it either.

The development of living things on the earth as described in evolutionary theory requires a temendous increase in the complexity in the world in comparison with the inanimate world before the supposed development of life. The great complexity of living things in evolutionary theory is supposedly provided by the fact that random mutation will make survival to reproductive age either more or less likely. But where did this evolutionary complexity come from in the first place?

Random mutations cannot, on the average, make a system that is more complex than it's sorroundings, more complex still. The average of random mutations can only bring a system, such as a living thing, closer to the complexity level of it's environment.

Remember that complexity operates in a way analogous to hot and cold, average random mutations must bring the complexity of a complex system down to the complexity level of it's sorroundings. This is why a dead body breaks down from intricacy to dispersity.

So if the presence of even the simplest forms of life dramatically increaes the complexity of the world and if the complexity of a given system can be transformed from inside but never increased or decreased, what does that tell us about how life must have originated? The mind-boggling complexity of living things must have been put into the world from outside, since nothing like this complexity existed on the bare earth before living things.

Put simply, life must have been created by God. If we could quantify complexity, we would have seen all of this sooner. The nature of our energy usage shows, in another way, my hypothesis that energy and complexity ultimately comes down to the same thing.

ENERGY USE AND COMPLEXITY

The laws of physics tell us that energy can never be lost or destroyed, but only changed in form. So why can't we keep on reusing energy, why is it lost to us once it is used?

A moving vehicle, for example, plows air aside from in front of it. The energy that it took to move the air, and the vehicle, is then lost to us. Why can't we reuse the energy to move the next vehicle along?

Energy is used to propel a jet aircraft. But once it has been used, it cannot be retrieved and used to propel another jet. Why is this the case if energy can never be lost or destroyed?

We lose the energy that we use, but the surrounding environment never loses it's energy. In nature if energy is not used for one thing then it will be used for something else, if only dissipating the energy as heat. It can never be lost. Why can't it be the same way when it comes to our use of energy?

The answer to this unfortunate dilemma lies in complexity. We are of a higher level of complexity than our inanimate surroundings. That simply means that there is more information encoded within us as to how we came to be. When we make or build things, we are imposing our higher level of complexity on the surrounding reality of lower complexity.

The irrecoverable loss of energy, when the laws of physics state that it supposedly cannot be lost, is the result of the difference in the level of complexity between us and our inanimate surroundings. We use this energy in our technology and skilled work, but we add information to it and this information represents our higher complexity by providing instructions on how the energy is to be used.

After the energy has been used by us, it has not really been lost but it has returned to the lower complexity level of the surrounding inanimate reality so that it is of no further practical use to us. If we are on some elevated platform, and drop something so that it falls to the ground, it is not entirely lost but it is lost to our level. So it is with the energy that we use.

The more difference there is between the levels of complexity, the more easily energy will be lost to us and the more valuable it will be. If we were at the same level of complexity as the surrounding inanimate reality, we would not be losing any energy in this way because all energy would be readily reusable.

A similar example concerns entropy. Because we are on a higher level of complexity then our inanimate surroundings, it is much easier to spill something than it is to put it back into the container. This is because it is easier to drop from a higher to a lower level of complexity then vice versa. This brings us back to how complexity is related to energy because, in exactly the same way, it easier to drop from a high to a low energy state, such as the kinetic energy of altitude, than it is to climb from a low to a high energy state.