Thank fuck.

Been aching for the weekend to arrive and finally here it is. Two short, short days of waking up before it's back to walking sleep of day work. The meeting I was minuting this afternoon felt like it would go on forever and hey, maybe it did, maybe I'm just dreaming this while first the pad, then the pen and finally I slump to the meeting room floor.

Either way I want to put an idea I've been pondering out there in the hope of finding some new angles on it. Some time ago we had a lengthy little debate on here about the nature of consciousness which really helped me focus my thoughts on the matter.

I'm fairly happy and quite excited by my current position:

there is no life or death, as traditionally understood,
there is no soul or 'consciousness',
there is just matter / energy in a myriad combinations,
once a system reaches a certain degree of complexity it begins to display characteristics of what we would call consciousness,
our brains are, by far, the most complex thing known to exist,
consciousness is an illusion,

There're a few bits of padding to add here. Firstly I don't see consciousness or life being illusions as a bad thing, I don't think it detracts from the value of either, it's just beneficial to recognise them for what they are in order to make better use of them.

Secondly, my high school Maths teacher told us a lot of random things(1) one of which was to point out the similarity between planets orbiting stars and electrons orbiting nuclei. That's always stuck in my head and when considering this theory of complexity the following occurred, most likely inspired by my early mathematical education:

Throughout the universe complexity ALWAYS seems to be heavily concentrated in one place. By volume the universe is pretty much completely empty, matter / energy is concentrated into structured clumps.

Any measure of complexity applied to our own bodies would be overwhelmed by the dense concentration in our brains, even despite the complex nature of our nervous or circulatory systems for example.

And yes, in the lowly atom pretty much the entire mass is concentrated at the very centre.

Finally, another angle on complex of systems behaving as individuals that has long been a vague interest of mine has been 'crowd behaviour',

eg. large crowds of people, traffic systems, animal swarms and even weather systems,

And of course the peculiar behaviour of various political, religious and economic movements often forms the content of these posts.

So the challenge that immediately presents itself when exploring this idea is to somehow define the level of complexity at which signs of consciousness begin to manifest. This instantly raises the question of how to measure complexity.

Well you won't be surprised to hear that so far I've got three separate bits of information to this end. they are:

First, an even earlier debate on here considered the nature of a fourth spatial dimension and it was during this particular journey of thought that I arrived upon a piece of info both potentially significant and useless at the same time.

Basically i was thinking about equidistant points. The relationship between the number of spatial dimensions in which you're working, D, and the number of equidistant points you can have, x, is as follows:

D = x - 1

So in 2D, ie. on a piece of paper, you can only draw a maximum of three points that are all the same distance from one another.

In 3D it's four, so imagine you could place marbles in mid air and make them float perfectly still. No matter where you put them you could arrange no more than four marbles to be the same distance away from one another.

But what's the significance of equidistant points? Well I was thinking of systems as being a whole bunch of units, people, cells, points, each of which has an effect on all the others.

When considering points the fact that they're all identical gives no reason for the connections between them to vary either, hence in this particular thought experiment, they're all the same length.

This brings me to the second isolated piece of trivia. I began to think further about the connections and their relationship with the points. The connections ARE the system really so their behaviour is more important if anything. How many of them would there be in any given situation for example.

Well if there are x points and they're all connected to every point then that's (x^2).
But they're not connected to themselves so need to knock of one connection for each point, (x^2) - x
And each connection has been counted twice, ie once from the point at each end, ((x^2) - x)/2

So tidying this up a little, the number of connections, y, between a number of points, x, is:

y = (x(x- 1)) / 2

I was hoping this may provide the basis for some method of measuring complexity but after this initial burst I found myself quickly stumped once more. The fact the x - 1 crops up in both the equations above seems mildly significant but I'm not yet sure why.

The only other thing I've been able to think of is that apparently all animals have a limit, proportional to the physical size of their brains, as to how many other of their kin they can form relationships with.

Apparently humans are top of the tree with 150. You can handle knowing 150 people well but beyond that, apparently, the brain just can't handle it properly.

Is this number then the maximum point beyond which we can only perceive a group of individuals as a single entity?

So there you have it. That's where I'm currently at. Ideas? Observations? Suggestions? Help me out, we might just unlock the secret of life, then maybe we can all finally stop stressing about all the bullshit and just kick back together.

It's worth the mental strain I'm convinced, but a strain it most certainly is. That's the thing about complexity...

footnote

(1) even though he was a hardcore, oldschool motherfucker I loved this guy,
he once gave a lad a chance to get out of detention by betting him he couldn't hold his arms out straight with textbooks on either hand until the end of the lesson,
he also told us never to drive through the desert in a Volkswagon, why? because they used to have air cooled engines so there would be no water in the engine to drink if you get stuck, brilliant!