I agree with Bateson, that a coral reef is more complex than a human being - in all senses of the term.
It is a tough question because I believe it is impossible for us to know everything about the universe and compare different phenomena or life forms to one another based on what we can know.
I would guess it's the idea that everything in a chaos is potentially influencing everything else, making evolution unpredictable and, yes, complex . I suspect that the normally working human brain flirts with chaos but there must be some minimal trade-off whereby some level of order would be necessary for survival. Which would indeed makes humans less complex than chaos. On the other hand, humans seem to be at least potentially capable of spreading to the whole universe, given enough time to do it. Would that more likely increase the overall complexity of the universe or decrease it? We did it on Earth and it's at least arguable that overall complexity decreased due to the disparition of most of wildlife but the universe may be essentially empty of life so a spreading humanity would increase its overall complexity. Brute chaos surely couldn't do that on its own. EB
Earth is a more multifarious entity and ongoing set of elaborate affairs / systems than the human being. But the strength of the former's epistemological complexity proceeds not much further than the latter, its social organizations, and its collective output. There's also the circularity of that bipedal primate being the only known source where such conceptions and evaluations can even be generated. Which is to say, "what gets the crown for cognitive sophistication" is rigged beforehand by whatever can concoct such questions to begin with (plus the contingent circumstance of no competitors for it). But the human is subsumed under the blue planet as a whole when it comes to miscellaneous intricacy ranging from structural arrangements, patterns, to types of activity. ~
Disagree. If the world were reduced to a stone age population, and stone age technologies by some great cataclysm, how long would it take people to build an i-phone. I couldn't do it. The question is too general. The base for identifying the symbols used in the question can only come from the dictionary. The dictionary then would have to indicate that there would be some points of common reference involving complexity between the words universe and humans for an interpretation to occur. More than likely the points would be arbitrary, and not necessarily informative. That's probably the main cause of the question, "Could you be more specific?"
Try it this way. Make a list of human complexities. Make a list of universe complexities. Evaluate them for commonality. The problem is the general nature of the question. Humans have uncountable complexities, and so does the universe. Both sets of complexities are uncountable. So without subsets of points of complexity they can't be compared. You might be able to compare a hydrogen atom with an oxygen atom for complexity. After that the comparisons start to get hairy.
That is a little like saying an engine is more complicated than an automobile. The engine is part of the automobile.
As the example of the coral reef indicated, the question of complexity in a "thing" partly hinges on the conception of a "thing". Is a planet a "thing"? Does that include its biosphere? Is a species a "thing"? A colonial organism? Including parasites and commensals and diseases? Is "anything" we name a "thing"? Anything we could name if we wanted to? Is a Mandelbrot Set a "thing"? By some definitions it is the most complex "object" possible. That seems unreasonable to me. A coral reef apparently incorporates what Bateson called - iirc - fourth order biological patterns: patterns of patterns of patterns of patterns, in time and space, starting from cells as unitary. That would make it at least the equal of a single human being including the human being's mind in isolation (without a library or internet connection, say). But there are coral reefs right now that include in their patterns entire communities of human beings, who tell stories about it back on land - -
I believe so because that which occurs in the mind is so much more than simply, "The brain" or "D.N.A."Humans can draw, "impossible pictures," we have already acheived the impossible.
Really? What is this "so much more"? If they are impossible how can they draw them? Uh, if we achieved it (whatever that is) then by definition it is not impossible.
I think that says more about the limited scope of your understanding and/or your imagination than it does about the human mind.
The fact is that we still don't completely know how complex humans are. We don't even fully understand how the human body works and why it works differently in different people.
