I believe that humans have not yet created any system more complicated than our own bodies. In turn, I think the same claim holds for our own brains too.
We are in for a series of revelations that will deeply alter the way we understand the microscopic intricacies that hold us upright and posting on internet forums.
Not anywhere near. I’m just an interested observer, but the nearest is ‘synthetic life’ which takes existing cells and removes/reworks/replaces the existing dna.
Even the cell membrane is fantastically complex. Keeping out the bad stuff and letting the good stuff in. While keeping the good stuff in and letting the bad stuff out.
We build things with factories where the factory is orders of magnitude more complicated than the thing being built. Life build things via self replication at a microscopic level. Seems like a fundamentally different approach
Complexity is a bit subjective. Society is ostensibly more complex than us, because it includes us. Of course, so far society is more often less than the sum of our parts, than the other way around. Growth is hard.
I disagree with that. A whole can be less complex then its constituent parts. This is the entire point of abstraction, you can hide irrelevant complexity.
Abstraction is a way to break down a system to fit in our minds & simulations, including for the purpose of designing it, but it's not what a system truly is, and it's not how it behaves. It's a compromise, like for example your calculator has 8 digits, and shows E if you need more, but this doesn't mean math in the universe is limited to 8 digits.
You can't just decide the fact society is made of humans is an irrelevant detail and model them with little rational balls, or whatever you came up with. Because the balls wouldn't do what we do. And I completely disagree it doesn't matter what the human body does. The human body matters to society a great deal, actually. Say, pollution in cities is absorbed by your human body, and affects health, even mental health, and how long you live. This affects social dynamics immensely or doesn't it? We've had entire social movements based on our understanding of the human body, how we categorize in various ways the human body, and violence done against the human body, choices about the human body, how we treat it medically and so on and so on. Countless examples.
Of course you can successfully model specific narrow events, do a representative sample and try to approximately guess, say the outcome of elections. Doesn't always work, but in this very simple example, you can abstract things. But you need to still abstract with deep understanding of what is abstractable for that specific point in space and time.
This approach fails miserably if you need to predict how society will evolve over time, and more fine-grained detail. Say, just 2 years ago society was largely ignorant of the AI revolution bubbling up based on work by Google & subsequently OpenAI. This is something society did, irreducibly, based on the people in it, and their bodies and neurons. And no basic statistics model that abstract us away would have predicted this.
The person you're responding to is saying the abstraction is not the system, much like the map is not the territory, just a metaphor that is easier to work with.
Depends how we define "system" maybe? If we include all human activity as part of one system then maybe the complexity does approach it. Conversely should we include all the sub-quantum in our assessment of the human body? Where to draw the lines?
i dont a human can create a system this complicated... i dont think we can even map it out. if it's done, it'd be done by AI and it'd be a black box. we couldn't create an autonomous car, we need ai to come up with million rules and parameters. same story here just order of magnitudes more complex.
Can't do it intentionally, but evolution can do it unintentionally.
Nature solved this problem of radical open-ended exploration through evolution. It takes a lot of time but in a single run evolution created all species and life on earth. Evolutionary methods also created AlphaGo, AlphaTensor and AlphaFold - three AIs that surpass all humans put together in specific fields.
Basically learning from massive search and problem solving outcomes - that's how you solve hard problems. And if you think about it, that's how science works too - so many papers, many contradicting each other or trying completely different approaches adds up to evolution in the space of scientific ideas. Any one human alone can't do it, but all of us over a long enough time can do so much more, diversity and open-endedness are key.
Don't forget that having a GNN (or perhaps Sheaf NN) model the system can allow decomposition such that an analytical expression can be extracted to explain the dynamics of the model quite well. This was shown via Cranmer et al, and continues to be a good way to find explanatory models that both interpolate as well as the NN and extrapolate past the provided data.
By what measure of complexity, and what definition of “object”?
Arguably the totality of all lifeforms on earth, which are all physically connected to each other by their common genealogical graph (and by Earth as their environment), is more complex, because it contains all the brains.
Comparing a brain to anything which encompasses a brain, is tautological. In debate ("arguably", as you say), this is the equivalent of "infinity plus 1", which is a fallacy. So obviously the GP could not have been referencing anything which contains a brain as an "object".
A larger composite (which contains a brain) can not qualify by the very nature of the proposition put forth. At least in adult debate (where "infinity plus 1" is seen as fallacious). Larger composites that do not contain a brain are fine by me, though I'm not the person you originally responded to.
The wheel does not need to contain the ball bearing in order to still be a circle, or even a wheel. It just can't be a functional part of a wheel-axle system without it.
Just as one can abstract out the brain from the body and talk about the complexity of the body (less the brain). Such a comparison is fine by me.
But society and the terrestrial ecosystem don't exist without functioning brains in them. And a genealogical relationship doesn't exist at all as a physical object, just as a conceptualized object (such as a graph). And conceptualized objects, such as graphs, typically aren't that complex (though can probably get there if someone dedicates the computational resources to do so).
The totality of all life on earth need not contain the human brain to be a complex object. So I still don't see the difference here.
>But society and the terrestrial ecosystem don't exist without functioning brains in them.
1) Original reply didn't say anything about society, only life an it's physical interactions.
2) Sure it does. Plenty of life forms without brains exist, and their sum is more complex than the human brain. The human brain itself is a composite of brainless life.
>And a genealogical relationship doesn't exist at all as a physical object, just as a conceptualized object (such as a graph). And conceptualized objects, such as graphs, typically aren't that complex (though can probably get there if someone dedicates the computational resources to do so).
That isn't because of what conceptual objects are, it's because of how they are used. The purpose of most conceptual objects is simplification. One can produce arbitrarily complex conceptual objects, we just don't normally because... why?
We can even throw out all of these semantics if you want and go with a much narrower version of the original statement: "The brain is the most complex physical system", and even that isn't necessarily true. The bacterial ecosystems that compose the digestive system have more interacting cells, with less defined interactions, than the brain. Maybe you meant "most complex computational system"? That's potentially true, depending on your definition of complexity.
FYI: I am not the OP who originally said that the "human brain is the most complex object in the known universe".
I'm not interested in discussing complexity, just the foundations of productive (and polite!) discussion and debate. So we'll go our separate ways here. I would probably agree with you with respect to the brain not being the most complex physical system.
If we take the argument from first principles I'm not so sure it leads to your destination. Are atoms more or less complex than the things they comprise? And is that complexity not encapsulated by the emergent system that forms from that atomic substrate?
I'm frustrated that people are talking to me as if I want to discuss the complexity of things, when I thought I made it quite clear in multiple comments in this thread that that is not what I'm talking about at all.
When you are arguing, or even discussing, with someone it's an asshole behavior to tell them "what you are discussing has no foundation, or is irrelevant to me, so I'm going to discuss this other thing instead." Maybe just politely opt out of the argument at all with an "I disagree".
This is the point I've been making. An asshole, or at least childish, way of arguing is to respond to someone who said "this thing is most complex", with "well I disagree, because two of this thing is more complex than just one of that thing". It's like a kid saying "infinity plus one" to one-up the other kid.
One can have a philosophical conversation of the salience of various perspectives without telling the other person "your perspective is unimportant compared to mine, because it doesn't meet my personal threshold of salience". Yes, no duh, people do not find the same perspectives salient. If you're talking about policy, then salience can be ranked, if you're talking about personal opinion, then salience can't be ranked.
You have this kind of philosophical discussion, politely, by acknowledging the other person's point and indicating that you want to talk about something adjacent. Not by telling the other person they're overlooking your point (and in the very act of saying that demonstrating that you are overlooking their point.
You literally said that "the brain is the most complex object in the known universe", which is an incorrect statement. If you didn't wanna discuss complexity, maybe you should've phrased things in a way that doesn't discuss complexity, but rather actually says what you want to say. The brain is obviously not the most complex thing in the universe, and I can't even imagine why the hell would you think it is.
But nah, it's much easier to insult people for not understanding you, rather than try and make your point clear.
What us more complex? A cpu or a cpu inside a box? Adding a less complex object layer on top of an already complex object technically increases it's complexity. However, it is a silly argument to make.
A smartphone is more complex than a screw because it contains screws. This is a fine comparison to make because it is the one you, the stater, stated.
If you instead stated that a screw is the most complex tool humans make, then anyone who said "two screws! (in a smartphone)" as a counterpoint is not debating in good faith.
Gonna have to agree that at the very least, the immune system is way up there! After reading Philipp Dettmer's book "Immune" (recommended), I couldn't help but think, "Wow, the API and protocols that this thing has..."
This - the immune system is fiercely complex, and as I understand it there's reason to believe we don't yet know all the types of cell that are in it. I could be wrong about that - I'm not an immunologist - but seem to recall reading such in the last few years.
> The research group behind the current study previously showed11 that NHEJ <non-homologous end-joining, an error-prone mechanism of double-strand DNA break (DSB) repair> is essential for NSPC <neural stem/progenitor cells> differentiation, which implies a role for NHEJ-mediated DSB repair during normal brain development. It is possible that subpopulations of cells in the brain display the same types of rearrangements, and that some are positively selected. Similar studies in vivo and in other tissues are needed to test this hypothesis.
> We show that genome-wide maps of endogenous DSBs are highly correlated between experimental replicates up to 10 kilobases (kb) resolution, and that DSBs are non-uniformly distributed along the genome, in all three cell differentiation stages analyzed.
...
> Our datasets and analytical tools represent a valuable resource for exploring genome fragility during human neurogenesis and investigating how this might contribute to the pathogenesis of NDDs. <neurodevelopmental disorders>
If the rules that govern intelligence are simple (and intuition tells me they are), then the immune system is certainly a complicated and prickly beast.
immune system cells actually share a lot of the same receptor systems as neurons do, and these systems end up influencing each other to significant degree, both ways.
Counterpoint to what assumption? To the idea that the brain is complex? Or was it a cryptic way to imply that there might be other sentience with more-advanced “brains”?
I was pointing out the potential limitations or challenges inherent in using one's own cognitive abilities to understand and evaluate the world, including the brain's ability to comprehend itself. But i loved how this open up a discussion
Biological systems are unnecessarily complex systems. This why the key to understanding ourselves won’t happen by studying biology, rather by creating AGI.
We are in for a series of revelations that will deeply alter the way we understand the microscopic intricacies that hold us upright and posting on internet forums.
Exciting things happening in the field!