Making Sense of What Looks Like Illogicality/Inefficiency

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The proof is all the things/systems which seem so inefficient, unbelievably stupid, unnecessarily complicated, etc.

They are ( the ingenious balance-restoring/sanity-saving ?) ) reactions to thousands of years of humans improving efficiency, speeding up processes, and simplifying things in all directions.

( They are the, probably involuntary, creation of humanity/universal laws in the face of greater speed, increased efficiency, and too small a space; a labyrinth to compensate).

It makes much less sense, is far more tortuous and convoluted, to think that so much of human society/systems/civilisation is inefficient, wasteful, and unnecessarily complicated. Why would it be?

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Maybe they are.

We evolved in the Stone Age and now we live in modernity. Technology has advanced very rapidly and it seems most people got left way behind.

I think you miss how it works in that it is a paradox and it is simultaneously both things; highly evolved ORDER/chaos/ENTROPY.

It is highly efficient- but ask what it does? And is that what we want it to do?

Its a great system for doing what it does- half of which is dystopia.

It has its own inherant rules and logic and order all of which are amazingly complicated and highly evolved- to a certain limit.

Beyond that limit or from perspective above it, its as much entropy as it is order, and as much chaos as it is sense.

Its EMERGENT order, not RATIONAL order, the difference being that any fool systems theorist could make a better system from scratch. But nobodies ever going to implement it unless theres also a revolution.

Help! Help! I'm being browbeaten by Compost!



just hitting the quote button so that this becomes permanent.

I am having diffficulty, from what I've read about the Stone Age/Paleolithic, thinking of anything then which was apparently quite as wasteful of space or resources, as inefficient, and unnecessarily complicated, as 57 varieties of shampoo in one shop, 125g pieces of meat wrapped in individual plastic packets, and traffic jams/gridlock, amongst many other things.

I think that when the first ( "clever" ?) person said that it would be simpler to catch a few female goats and breed them next to the seasonal camping grounds rather than go out and catch them individually each time the system as a whole "reacted" by introducing a complication somewhere else.

I don't understand what you mean by ?


I think that is what I meant by Yin and Yang; two symmetrical forces flowing smoothly from one into the other. When we exert a pressure in one direction ( to speed up, to simplify, for instance) it is followed/matched by the opposite, ( slowing down, making more complex).

are a classic case in point. "Fast" food another.

What I liked was realising that the "inefficiency, stupidity, unnecessary complication, etc" ( as I have tended to see it) is as much part of the process as the "simplification, speeding up etc" etc, and that it is not something to be eradicated; trying to eradicate just creates more of it.

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Different hair care products are appropriate for different kinds of hair.

If I can spin a thesis out of it, my master's research will probably be on how to improve traffic flow.

Meat slices in individual packages is just dumb.



Technological development has outpaced evolution by leaps and bounds.



There is no evidence whatever that suggests there is any such thing as 'conservation of complexity', and if there were there would be no way to measure it.

Ah!! !

I haven't used shampoo in at least 15 years, and don't miss it, and my hair looks fine. One of those unnecessary complications which I shed.


How do you measure this?

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Seriously? Do you have dreadlocks or something?

I can't go a day without washing my hair.

(Or do you just use soap?)



There are many ways you might measure technological progress. For example, in the early nineties, the best ANNs were about on par with a the brain of a leech. It seems that in the next hundred years or so, they will catch up with human brains in neuron mass, number of interconnects, and ability. Or at least in less time than it took for nature to advance from leech to primate.

Neither soap nor dreadlocks; I have perfectly normal, if now greying/silvering hair, ( I am almost 45) . Shampoo is a very modern invention. People didn't used to use it. They used to comb, brush, and/or oil their hair, and/or wash/rinse it in warm or cold water. That is what I do. And most people can, once their scalp has got over the dependency-stimulation effects of frequent shampooing.

About the vast numbers of products I think that the numbers grow because supermarkets replace the forests and fields of nature, with which we engage increasingly rarely, if at all. Instead of going out gathering berries and roots and herbs in the wild now people go and gather lots of differently hued plastic-coated products in great big hangars. The more variety there is the more like nature it is. For hunting people go to work, and track results, in teams. ( Which is why meat sells in plastic packets perhaps, because it is gathered not hunted, it must be a fruit, thus peelable! joke! )

Certain technologies may have progressed in complexity over the last 50 years faster than some living organisms have done, but certain species of living organisms are capable of changes/adaptations in much shorter periods, in the case of bacteria just a few days sometimes will lead to the appearance of a significantly different group of characteristics.

In addition your comparison does not compare systems of similar complexity. Precisely the example of bacteria ( containing as many if not more interdependent processes as your technology example ) shows that at the same scale of complexity natural selection/evolution is as fast, if not faster .

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No.

An individual bacterium is a crude single cell.

http://www.agiri.org/docs/China-BrainProject.pdf

This has many more components than a bacterium, and is a hell of a lot better than its equivalents from twenty years ago.

There is nothing crude about a single cell. A single cell consists of, is at each instant being constructed by, thousands and thousands of individual interdependent chemical processes, ranging from DNA activity, protein synthesis, to oxygen metabolism, lipid creation and use for cell wall activity, and the transport of thousands of molecules in and out of the cell etc etc etc. Biology.

The number of things going on in one single living cell every second is quite extraordinary. As far as I know scientists have not yet managed to make one, ( one which lasts for more than a short period, or can carry out more than one or perhaps two of the hundreds of natural cellular processes, anyway) .
http://www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/reporter/i ... ml?ID=5561

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Not quite sure any longer why the respective rates of technological and natural evolutionary advance/change are under discussion.

Does anyone know what myth or legend I keep thinking of about how attacking/trying to eradicate something just makes it grow back/reappear faster and in greater numbers?

This is why I posted the thread in PPR rather than Science and Technology, because I realise that this has/may have more to do with personal philosophy or even religious beliefs rather than some objective measurable reality.

Fulminating against what I have seen as inefficiency, waste, stupidity, etc, has been very tiring, and alienating, and realising that what has looked like that may instead be automatic systemic compensation for greater efficiency or speed in other areas feels "interesting".

Eastern religion seems to encourage/teach minimalism in activity, I feel this like a spiritual truth about life. Like the funny zen remark; keep going "right" and you will go round in circles. So speeding up processes and simplifying all over the place will also slow you down and complicate things.

Am enjoying the novel sensation of no longer seething about stupid cars in traffic jams/gridlock, billions of useless shampoos, etc, because I no longer perceive them as things that should be done away with; they are what we unavoidably/inevitably pay for the faster simpler things...

... and for a much bigger population, which might be the environmental factor which provokes the next big change. Does anyone know by the way if dense/high population in uni-cellular organisms might have been/is ever a factor in triggering multicellular associations?

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Yes

But I would argue that our most advanced software and hardware easily exceeds a bacterium in complexity (i.e., number of distinct components).

And at any rate, it's developing much much faster than we are.

We're now here:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spi ... 89,00.html

...from ENIAC in the late 40's. Less than a hundred years to advance from a sh***y room-sized pocket calculator to the threshold of general artificial intelligence. I would give it fifty more years tops before it is a reality. Nature did not achieve the same in such time. One or two centuries is only a blink of the eye.



Polio



http://skepdic.com/wishfulthinking.html

Here is an interesting article, which makes clear that even the most powerful computers are not yet as complex as one cell:

"Examining the architecture of cellular computing through a comparative study with a computer".

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articl ... id=1629074

Not a myth, that!



That's just your opinion; it's what I would have thought for the last 20 years too!

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'Not well understood' does not imply 'more complex'.

If we agree on a precise definition of complex (more components, which is literally what complex means), a supercomputing cluster easily exceeds a bacterium.

And besides, single cells do not have generally useful computing capabilities. They do very very specific things only, and would not be very useful for implementing a Turing or lambda calculus machine. (EDIT: mixed up names)



Of course it's my opinion

Who else's opinion would it be?

You are thinking wishfully

Last edited by chever on 02 Sep 2008, 3:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Did you read the whole article?

At several points it is clearly stated that a computer still does not have this or that capacity that a cell does, and that a cell has this or that capability which a computer does not, in particular ( apart from the ability to reproduce in many cases !) something to do with an ability to transform hard into soft drive//data into message/action ? ? ? ( I don't know much about computers. I know more about cells, and actually appreciated finding an article which explained one in terms of the other, even if it was the wrong way round for me! ) This last ( above) difference between the two, deficient in computer technology, is apparently one of the current obstacles in achieving increased complexity in computers.

Not true. Components can simply mean many of the same thing. Complex means something more, to do with levels and varieties of functioning, and it is there that a cell scores over a computer, with at least one more dimension of processing.


And computers don't? Computers still have very narrow functioning patterns compared to cells which are capable of a huge range of activities, ... which you can look up on Wikipedia if you are interested.

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