Mathematical Symbols And Words

This posting has been moved to the compound posting, "The Theory Of Complexity", August 2017.

We are more complex than our inanimate surroundings, but how much more complex? This is a difficult question to answer because we cannot readily quantify, or put a number on, complexity. But if it is true that, as physicists tell us, everything is really numbers, then there must somehow be a way to quantify just how complex we are with regard to our inanimate surroundings.

There are a number of possible starting points to measure this complexity that I have written about already.

We know that the more complex a system is, the more likely it is that something will go wrong. A medical textbook is basically a catalog of all that can possibly go wrong with the human body. The ailments and injuries in a medical textbook thus represent the difference in complexity between our bodies and our inanimate surroundings.

We can see how our brains must be more complex than our bodies because we can recognize each other. If our brains were no more complex than our bodies, we would be able to tell another human being but would not be able to tell one person from another.

In my complexity theory, the free will of living things only makes sense if the living thing has the capacity to be either right or wrong in it's conclusions about it's surroundings. It can only be right or wrong about it's surroundings if it is more complex than those surroundings. There is not enough information in the surroundings that are of lower complexity for everything that the being with free will can conceive of to exist. Therefore the conclusions of the being about it's surroundings can be either correct or wrong.

But that would not be the case if a living thing were not more complex than it's surroundings. Such a living thing would not be able to conceive of anything that could not exist in it's surroundings, therefore free will would be meaningless. That is why, in my complexity theory, plants do not have free will. It would make no sense because plants are no more complex than their inanimate surroundings. Plants are certainly more intricate, meaning more complexity per mass, but contain no more intrinsic information than their inanimate environment.

This greater intricacy, but not more complexity, is why plants can die but do not need to think. It also explains why plants are typically much more able to recover, and go on living, from damage than humans and other beings with free will are able to recover from injuries. The plants require more intricacy, but no more overall complexity, than the surrounding inanimate environment, while the humans and other beings require both more intricacy and more complexity. Plants thus have the advantage of lower requirements.

But this means that we, and other beings with free will, must be more complex than plants. Since we are more complex than our inanimate surroundings, that means that it is continuously trying to break us down to it's level. That means that we require food to sustain us. Free will is of no use unless we can act on it with motion, but motion further requires food for energy.

One way that we can see how we are more complex than our surrounding inanimate environment, and plants more intricate although not more complex, is in the basic patterns involved, particularly the peak. The meaningful peak pattern is generally missing in the universe of inanimate matter, but is predominant in living things. Inanimate matter tends to form a slope, the more the better. There is no peak factor in a star, for example, the more matter is available the larger and more radiant the star will be. But living things operate by having a peak, or optimum, temperature, percentage of oxygen, and so on. Humans have optimums of work, sleep and, food. It is not just the simple slope, the more the better, of inanimate matter. A peak is more complex in that it involves multiple slopes.

We use plants for food, either directly or indirectly through meat. But my complexity theory also establishes that energy and information is really the same thing. We cannot add information to anything without applying energy to it and we cannot apply energy to anything without adding information to it. Another way we can see that energy and information is really the same thing is how we can, through technology, make our lives physically easier but only at the expense of making them more complex. We can never, on a large scale, make our lives both physically easier and also less complex. This shows, again, that energy and information is really the same thing.

However, that apparently presents a problem for us. We require plants for food, to maintain our higher level of complexity over our inanimate surroundings, but yet those plants are themselves no more complex than our inanimate environment.

Yet that provides us with a possibly way to see numerically just how much more complex we are than our surrounding environment. The fact that plants are no more complex than the surrounding inanimate environment is why no one species of plant will provide us with the necessary nutrition for optimum health. We require a balanced diet that encompasses a number of different plants.

We could thus state that we are X times as complex as our surrounding environment with X being the number of different plants that are required, either directly or indirectly through meat, to maintain us in optimum health.

MATHEMATICAL SYMBOLS AND WORDS

Everything is really numbers, ultimately expressible as mathematics. We also use words to describe the world and the universe around us. The difference between words and numbers is that numbers are how everything in the universe actually operates, while words describe how we see the universe.

To describe something with mathematics we must completely understand it's operation, such as a calendar or periodic table. But we can describe something with words without completely understanding it.

If we were of the same complexity as our surrounding inanimate environment, then there should be the same number of words as there are of mathematical symbols. In fact, there should be no difference between the two. But that is not the case, there are many more words than mathematical symbols.

With words we are seeing our own complexity reflected back at us, but with numbers and mathematics we are not. Words describe how things affect us and there must thus be more words than mathematical symbols because we are more complex than our inanimate surroundings.

In fact, just as with the number of different plants that are required for us to have a balanced diet we can put a measurement on our complexity, relative to the surrounding inanimate matter, by the ratio of words to mathematical symbols that we use.

To begin with, only about ten thousand words are in common use. Furthermore, different words can mean essentially the same thing such as "red", "rouge" and, "scarlet". But if we eliminate such redundancies then the ratio of words to mathematical symbols should be approximately equal to the number of plants required to provide a balanced diet, which should be equal to our complexity relative to our inanimate environment.

But keep in mind here that I am referring to the number of mathematical symbols in use, not the percentage of data that is expressed as numbers as opposed to words. I also believe that we can take a measurement on how we are progressing from what we know now to all that we can practically know by what percentage of our data is in the form of numbers, rather than words. The percentage of numbers in our data has greatly increased since centuries past. But there are still many more words used than numbers. This is because, to describe something with numbers we must completely understand it, but that is not the case with words. We should thus theoretically arrive at a day where everything can be expressed as numbers because we will know all that we can practically know.

I am sure that we can measure complexity, which would be a great advantage. It just requires some creative ways of measurement because it is not something that can be measured with a ruler or a scale.