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aeraeber's picture

Complexity Without Intelligence

Submitted by aeraeber on Sun, 01/31/2010 - 10:01pm.

Simple is a relative term, in that, to a college student, multiplication is a simple concept, but to a 3rd grader, it is immensely complicated. On the other hand, salt dissolving in water seems like a simple interaction to most people, but to a chemist, it is a complicated process, based on a complex system of rules. Some things that seem simple on the surface are complicated once you learn more about them, but at the same time some interactions are much simpler than they originally seemed once you learn their rules.

I don’t think there always has to be something complicated behind simple rules for “simple things interacting in simple ways.” Certainly complicated things like the human brain are capable of creating systems with simple rules, but such interactions can occur without human involvement as well. Life has changed and evolved based on novel and complicated results of simple interactions, molecules interacting to form proteins, cells interacting to form tissues and organs, and so forth. Certainly there are people who would say that life is the result of a complicated force, of intelligent design, but I am not one of them. Any set of simple rules can create surprising, complex outcomes; intelligence isn’t needed to find the “right” set of simple rules.  Whether or not a pattern or a complicated outcome results seems more based on chance than anything else. In the “game of life” simulation, some of the time randomly occupying 50% of the locations with life resulted in all of the life dying out, other time it didn’t. Which outcome occurred did not have any particular pattern.  Maybe the outcome would change if the rules were changed. Maybe some sets of rules are more likely to produce complex outcomes. Nevertheless, the fact that simple interactions can produce complex results seems to be something that happens without the intervention of intelligence

 

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