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- Jul 2022
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there's a lot of discussion about complex systems you know we've been discussing complex systems and i just want to make a couple of points here because uh 01:31:28 commonly some it is not uncommon that someone will say a complex system well that just means that it's liable to fall apart at any moment you know it's just too complex it's going to crash uh but and that that obviously can 01:31:41 happen you know systems can collapse quite quite true but obviously life would not be doing very well if the if if the evolution builds complexity 01:31:53 in species and you know in organisms and ecosystems if life would be have a rough go of it if it was so fragile that uh complexity became a 01:32:07 burden and and uh you know come and then you know you reach a certain level of complexity and then you fall apart that's not really i don't think i mean that can happen but that's but but complex useful complexity 01:32:19 doesn't make you fall apart it actually just does the opposite it serves what we've been talking about all along and that's problem solving so we are anticipatory organisms we are problem 01:32:31 solving organisms it's our nature most of what the human brain does is to solve problems of one kind or another social problems physical problems whatever and maneuver in the world you 01:32:43 know in a useful way and complexity is what allows that there's a number of studies that i cite here that show that as an organism even as a robot you know 01:32:56 faces uh more difficult pressures from its environment it complexifies and complexifies by complexity then it's it's it implies 01:33:08 a greater number of parts coordinating or cooperating in some way uh to you know solve this new challenge and obviously as a human we're very complex we have 01:33:22 we have complex needs we have we can think not just what's going to happen in the next millisecond but what's going to happen we can think about what's going to happen in 100 years i mean part of this project is to think about what might be 01:33:36 happening over the next hundred years or even a thousand years so as an organism complexifies it become it at least potentially becomes a better adapted to solving more complex 01:33:49 problems so you could and from that sense you could almost ex equate complexity with problem-solving capacity you know at least in a uh you know in a 01:34:01 general sense and then i talked about well that just reminds me of in the free energy calculations that we um have gone over in various papers it's like accuracy is the modeling imperative and 01:34:14 then complexity is tolerated to the extent it facilitates accurate modeling so if you get the one parameter model and you got 99 and it's adequate and it's good then you're good to go and you're gonna go for simplicity 01:34:26 but then what you're saying is actually the um appearance and the hallmark of complexity in the world it means that that organism has the need to solve problems at a given 01:34:40 level of counterfactual depth or inference skill or temporal depth temporal thickness
While complex systems these days has connotations of being more fragile or more challenging to fix, In evolutionary biology, complexity has evolved in organisms to make them more adaptable, more fit. Human beings are complex organisms. Most of our brain is dedicated to solving one type of problem or another, we anticipate the world and problem solving involves choosing the best option based on anticipation and our models.
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