[FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

[glen ☣]

Yeah, but you're relying on the ambiguity of the concept.  A system that is only complex for very short spans of time, or under very special conditions wouldn't fit with _most_ people's concept of "complex".  To boot, unadulterated oscillation wouldn't satisfy it either.  And, as has been said earlier in the thread, allowing any an all physical systems to be called "complex" when they're placed under special circumstances defeats the purpose of the concept.

So, I agree with Russ' _gist_ in that the 3rd requirement is necessary for at least a large band of types of complexity. But I would relax his 3rd requirement from symbolic information to a more objective characterization of a boundary, with distinct sides/regions.  Then you could make it even more specific and close a region; so you get something akin to an agent, with an inside vs outside.  And whether one calls transduction across that boundary "information" or not becomes a discussion of the properties of the boundary (what it is and isn't closed under).

Of course, whether such a boundary has an ontological status of its own, or whether it's identified/attributed by onlookers is another question.

On 05/25/2017 09:08 PM, Stephen Guerin wrote:
> Practically any physical system that transacts forms of energy can have
> critical regimes of phase transitions and would all qualify as complex
> systems.


-- 
☣ glen