The growth of complexity in the universe [1] or perhaps of the universe , from the Big Bang to us, is summarized in a recent paper that questions “Is Big History a Big Computation?” [2].
The scrutiny of Gell-Mann’s [3] on the key concept of complexity, following the question about the fate of the universe and humanity, apparently since its dawn, has recently led diverse fields and even disciplines, from Fundamental Physics and Cosmology to Computational Complexity, related to Linguistics and therefore to Anthropology, to converge about more precisely measuring and modeling this complexity ladder for a complexity of “Big History” or what might be therefore called ‘Big Complexity’.
This may require finding a way to integrate a diversity of ladders, not easily reducible to one another, into what would become a comprehensive or universal ladder. A hint at the difficulty, but also at the promise, which is the very endeavor of our “Comprehensive Universe” series [4], is reflected through works ranging from “Artificial Cosmogenesis” [5] – in tune with humanity’s novel capacity to discover planets, and probably soon even detect habitable ones, whether ‘already’ inhabited [6] or not – to Deacon’s “Teleodynamic” processes and systems [7] and to the issue of the gap between natural and formal languages.
From this biological and more precisely anthropological standpoint we should ultimately venture forth into paleontological, pre-historical and historical venues and up to the question of civilization(s) emergence, development and extinction [8] and wonder to what extent the advent of our 21st century-type civilization, and hopefully next ones, is predictable and relates to models of cognition, toward such civilization of knowledge and culture, still in progress [9].
This will be considered through following blog posts, pages and references, where we plan to present a model of complexity, in the wake of results such as those mentioned above (references below) meant at accounting for, and predicting the complexity ladder that not only effectively develops a universe with life and intelligence, but up to knowledge about ourselves.
[1] E. J. Chaisson, The Rise of Complexity in Nature, icdst.org/pdfs/files/a303893f44b0bc54800be02381db1ebb.pdf
[2] J-P Delahaye & C. Vidal, Organized Complexity: is Big History a Big Computation, https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.07111
[3] M. Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex, Part XIII of Design of the Modern Inquiring System. Published by W. H. Freeman, New York, 1994, ISBN 0 7167 2725 0
[4] P. Journeau, A General Epistemology to Model the Future, https://journeau.net/2016/08/25/first-blog-post/
[5] C. Vidal, Artificial Cosmogenesis: A New Kind of Cosmology, https://arxiv.org/abs/1205.1407
[6] Knowing that unless Hyperspace becomes a reality it may take tenths of thousands of years to reach them when we still discover only thousands of years old extinct civilizations on Earth.
[7] T. Deacon & S. Koutroufinis, Complexity and Dynamical Depth, www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/5/3/404/pdf
[8] cf. P. Valéry’s famous “We civilizations now know ourselves mortal” in “La Crise de l’Esprit”(1919)
[9] P. Journeau, Imaging Medical Imaging, Medical Imaging 2015: PACS and Imaging Informatics: Next Generation and Innovations, edited by Tessa S. Cook, Jianguo Zhang, Proc. of SPIE Vol. 9418, 941808, doi: 10.1117/12.2084490
Comprehensive Universe 