[FRIAM] When is something complex

[Günther Greindl]

Dear Mikhail,

the response is somewhat late but I have had a lot to do :-( :

> I think: 1) There are real things that are ***indescribable entirely***. For example, thoughts and emotions of a thirteen years old
> girl before her first date (I mean completely uncontrollable) :-)

I agree that the human brain is a complex system - probably the most 
complex system we know of at the moment - but this does not mean that it 
is indescribable - maybe we simply do not know yet. (See also last 
paragraph)

>2) Writing them down (in English) would be considered as a
> ***formal description*** of the system (Dostoevsky, Joyce, Proust). 
 >It's ***adequate*** if we: read a book more then once,
> quote from it, think about it much later, look for new books of the author, 
 >formulate our own emotions in the book's terms, etc.

> Is such a system liner / non-linear? 
That is an interesting question - will have to think a bit more :-)


>How about poetry of Brodsky, Tsvetaeva, Rilke ( not all :-)? How about systems "defined" in
> pictures of French Impressionists and Dali and in movies like Matrix Trilogy? Musical compositions? Take Dostoevsky. Is it
> complex? Yes, of course - they still publish new insights and reward them! 

The symbolisms themselves (text, frequency of music) are simple - the 
complexity arises in the human brain (of author and then of viewer) - 
problem therefor reduced to 1) :-)


>3) Large distributed systems like all publications
> about love in English. How about the same publications in the Internet with all references and cross-references?...
> Examples like these are beyond the threshold (L) in Chaitin's incompleteness theorem (no rules without exceptions for a rich
> system). 

The Theorem about L is also only a provability result. It does not say 
that it is impossible to find a description, only impossible to prove it.


>4) I assume that you mean "centralized computability" based on computational models constructed by a person or
> a small connected group. It wouldn't be too complex to cope with real complexity (Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety). More,
> there is only one universal thing: it is reality itself. I don't see how computability is equal to it! (Newton probably thought
> about analytics as universal formalism.)
> 
> Your thoughts?

Actually I was thinking of the universe being the output of a 
computation - if that were the case, it could not be more powerful than 
computation (it would suffer from Gödel itself)-(of course, problems in 
the universe could be intractable _in_ the universe, because we would 
need the whole system (=reality) to perfectly simulate it - here I agree 
with you). But if the universe is the output of a computation, then we 
could compute every finite system -  therefor also the girl's brain.

Kind Regards and sorry for taking so long,
Günther

-- 
Günther Greindl
Department of Philosophy of Science
University of Vienna
guenther.greindl at univie.ac.at
http://www.univie.ac.at/Wissenschaftstheorie/

Blog: http://dao.complexitystudies.org/
Site: http://www.complexitystudies.org