the consolations of complexity

[abzorba]

Below is an example of a motor / sensory homunculus a drawing which
depicts human body parts in sizes proportional t o the amount of
processing space dedicated to them in the human brain.

http://thinkettes.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/motor-sensory-homunculus.html


It's intriguing to see how big things, such as the hips, have far less
space dedicated to them in the brain than does a little finger. Of
course we all intuitively know that small things can be a lot more
important than large ones.


The idea made me think about the common melancholic thought that we
are such small and insignificant creatures on a tiny planet that is
completely lost in space, in a universe where we are less than a speck
of dust. But, here is where we might take comfort in this thesis: the
"consolation of complexity".


Suppose that we were inspired by the depiction of this homunculus to
draw a comparable one, one in which objects in the universe, here on
Earth and elsewhere, planets, flowers, bugs, suns, clouds, light and
even space itself were depicted in sizes proportional to their
complexity. We could find that a small flower was larger than the sun
itself. That space itself, being simple, would be compressed to hardly
more than infinitesimal measure of how we perceive it, and that the
Earth itself, with all its life forms, would be, if drawn in such a
way, countless trillions of times larger than all the rest of the
universe put together (except for any other parts which have life).
I am not a mathematician myself but I know that they have formulas
which can provide complexity coefficients for different things.


For example, Sudoku puzzles can be given scores to designate how
difficult they are to solve. Such values are not determined by
trialling them on humans, but by ascertaining how many logical levels
down one must proceed to complete the puzzle. Similarly, it would not
be difficult to provide a complexity value for an organism, based on
how many discrete processes occur within it, how many steps are taken
in chemical reactions, how many sub-elements within the organism need
to coordinate with numbers of other sub-elements, how much
architecture there is, how many connections. With such a schemata a
single human brain would be larger than an entire galaxy. So in this
way we would receive an image of our REAL status in the universe. We
would sit as cosmic giants watching the tiny pin point stars, and
during the day, the radiant coin that is our sun.


Hey, that's how it looks right now, doesn't it?


myles [the universe in a grain of sand] paulsen