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Everybody agrees that simplicity is good. So more interesting question is: Is there anything desirable in complexity?
One argument that I've got from biology is: The simplest possible system (code, living organism) is fragile. Any change, however minor, is likely to break it. A nice chubby complex system, on the other hand, is likely to be more resilient. You may change it a bit and it's still likely to work somehow.
> A nice chubby complex system, on the other hand, is likely to be more resilient.
You should take a look at tardigrades then (aka water bears), which are approx. 1mm in length, obviously less complex than most living creatures, yet are some of the most resilient animals on earth; highly resistant to extreme temperatures, pressure, radiation, etc.
One way to look at resilience: a relationship between the system and its environment. So when you say resilient, you need to specify, resilient to what? I think a resilient system, is neither too complex, nor too simple, but rather, adapted to its environment.
Resilience of a given species may be related to the diversity inside it, and in such a case (and all else unchanged) complexity may add to it (more characteristics).
On a related(?) path see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exaptation
I haven't meant resilience to the environment. I've meant resilience to change. In biological terms that would be mutation. In programming terms, is whether the program survives if a random person, unfamiliar with the code, modifies it.
Complexity only gives you resilience in the same way monkeys write Shakespeare. So, while not technically wrong, I wouldn't say it holds water. The old adage of "security through obscurity" comes to mind.
That's not complexity but entropy. In terms of entropy you could better Shakespeare by using only one sentence, word or letter for the whole play.
As a boy I inhaled the spirit of Mitchell M. Waldrop "Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos" that for some time it was my life dream, maybe still is, to perform some work connected to said institute.
I'd say it like that: The amount of features you need to sufficiently (in your metric) model a given system defines its complexity. - Something for which a rigid body is enough: probably not so interesting. Autocatalytical reactions?... Something biochemical maybe more.
There will be a never-ending pressure to simplify theories, codebases and anything some other human has done with too many words and too many numbers. By doing so successfully, you make life permanently easier for everyone who comes after you.
A big page full of complicated words to explain Simplicity. The irony.
Whenever people link to this website, I feel compelled to point out that it should really be called the Stanford Encyclopedia of Analytic Philosophy, lest lay people be misled that all philosophy is like this or shares their concerns.
Yes and no. It’s authored by individuals in the broad analytic tradition, but:
1. A lot of people have an idea that “Analytic Philosophy” is a well defined school with some kind of shared theses and well-defined approach. That hasn’t been true for a long time, if it ever was. I’m not saying that there’s zero distinction between so-called analytic philosophy and any number of continental schools of thought, but if you think either side is homogenous, you’re wrong.
2. The SEP includes articles on non-analytic figures and movements by sympathetic authors. Those figures include historical philosophers, continental philosophers and non-Western philosophers.
I am a layman. Whenever I see the divide between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy I find it funny, since there is no continental physics or continental chemistry.
I think this comes from a misunderstanding of what philosophy is. Philosophy is not a science, and can never become one without threatening its current epistemic/ontological role -- objects like falsification, Quine's "best science", proof by contradiction, and argumentation from necessity exist as a substrate for scientific reasoning, and so repositioning them as objects of the science they support would involve circular reasoning[1].
Put another way: to "lift" philosophy into the domain of science would involve defining/formulating the guiding principles of sound/"good" science in their own terms.
(I was educated in the analytic tradition.)
[1]: It's worth noting that this only covers the philosophies of science and mathematics, not things like ethics, aesthetics, existence, &c. I think we can defend investigating the latter subjects as a consequence of science's inability to answer normative questions -- science can only tell us what is, not what ought to be.
>Philosophy is not a science, and can never become one without threatening its current epistemic/ontological role
It's worth noting that there are some who disagree and have some good arguments in support of that[0], and that philosophy as Wissenschaft was prevalent until relatively recently. To me, the continental/analytic distinction is a distinction in the methods of inquiry, if it is a valid distinction at all.
Great points. I guess I should have said that I'm using "science" with a 20th century tinge and from the perspective of analytic thinkers of that period. In that context, I think I'd agree with a description of science as a strict subset of epistemology, specifically the branch of epistemology that dedicates itself to picking out things in the physical world.
Per your link: I wonder what the author of that page thinks of the Gettier problems and whether they constitute "false knowledge."
> I think we can defend investigating the latter subjects as a consequence of science's inability to answer normative questions -- science can only tell us what is, not what ought to be.
Honestly I always felt thiswas a smokescreen. Science can totally explore philosophical and moral questions once axioms have been laid out. Science is illegitimate to lay down these axioms, but so are philosophy, spirituality, religion, or any other justifications.
Studying what is does not forbid to study morality, its ramifications, justifications and consequences as moral systems do exist, as human constructs. Can you deduce humanism from purely utilitarian axioms? Does it lead to similar systems? How about when one adds bounded rationality? These are scientifically answerable questions as well as questions that I would consider philosophical.
The fact that modern academic philosophy feels unbound to scientific rigor in fields when it does not have to be so is totally unjustified IMO. And I think that one can obtain much more interesting debates if we keep the tested epistemological tools of science to infer complex normative consequences from common axioms.
> Science is illegitimate to lay down these axioms, but so are philosophy, spirituality, religion, or any other justifications.
Where do you we propose that we get our moral axioms from, then? I don't mean that as a dismissal, just to observe that rejecting "any other justifications" seems to leave us incapable of producing real/universal moral axioms. That spells trouble for domains like science, which are generally in the business of distinguishing the real things in the world from the fake ones.
> Can you deduce humanism from purely utilitarian axioms? Does it lead to similar systems? How about when one adds bounded rationality? These are scientifically answerable questions as well as questions that I would consider philosophical.
I agree that they're philosophical, but I don't think they're scientific as posed: "deduce" suggests a sort of logical proof, one that we'd probably accept a priori (i.e., without needing to experiment or develop any sort of knowledge of the world). Similarly, "similar" in what sense? I don't think science has (so far) given us good answers to the problems of universals/categories/platonic forms, and I think that doing any sort of moral science would require that we first tackle that.
> The fact that modern academic philosophy feels unbound to scientific rigor in fields when it does not have to be so is totally unjustified IMO.
I think it's worth noting that scientific rigor is not the only sort of rigor out there -- philosophers, especially analyticists, pride themselves on developing clear definitions and using formal logical systems for argumentation. The vast majority of philosophers would not accept gut feeling as a substitute for sound argumentation, nor would they shy away from scientific results as inductive evidence for a claim. I think that is the sort of rigor we should demand from philosophy, not that of science.
Our moral axioms are totally arbitrary and subjective. We do not chose moral axioms that are correct, we chose those that we like. Science car merely explore the consequences of those choices and point possible contradictions but not make that choice for you.
In the same way that science can tell you how to create chocolate or vanilla aromas but can't tell you which one tastes better.
> "deduce" suggests a sort of logical proof, one that we'd probably accept a priori
Indeed, there is a lot of work to do to translate the tools of logic into the domain of morality, define the conditions and limitations of the methodology, and possibly at some point do experiments or observation to check if the model matches reality.
Thing is, we can totally approach these questions scientifically and the fact that philosophers do not focus on making the tools to unleash the full power of science over these questions is hard to justify.
> Our moral axioms are totally arbitrary and subjective.
I don't agree with this, but I'll go with it for the sake of argument. So: if we think that moral axioms are subjective, where does science enter into it? How could we even begin to do science, the field most invested in picking out real things in the world, on a set of axioms that we concede don't map to any objective truth?
> Indeed, there is a lot of work to do to translate the tools of logic into the domain of morality, define the conditions and limitations of the methodology, and possibly at some point do experiments or observation to check if the model matches reality.
Reasonable. But what epistemic principle tells us that affirming or disaffirming observations are important at all? How can we derive that principle, if it indeed exists? If we're modeling some system of morally relevant actions, what metric are we using, and where did we get it from? You mention "reality," but we haven't overcome the tension between subjective moral axioms and an objective, scientific, decision procedure for moral choice.
Bernard Williams said it would be similar if we divided cars into two classes: 4 wheel drive, and made in Japan.
This is just due to the circumstances of the history of philosophy. The birthplace of analytic philosophy was the UK, and "continental" was a convenient way to refer to all the other (western) philosophical traditions analytic philosophy set out to contrast itself with, since they had been developed in continental Europe.