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Yvain comments on My main problem with utilitarianism - Less Wrong
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Can you explain that a little better?
It seems to me like if you define complexity in any formal way, you'll end up tiling the universe with either random noise, fractals, or some other extremely uninteresting system with lots and lots of variables.
I always thought that our love of complexity is a side-effect of the godshatter, ie there's no one thing that will interest us. Solve everything else, and the desire for complexity disappears. You might convince me otherwise by defining "complexity" more rigorously.
Could complexity-advocates reply to this point specifically? Either to say why they don't actually want this or to admit that they do. I'm confused.
Living systems do produce complex, high-entropy states, as a matter of fact. Yes, that leads to universal heat death faster if they keep on, but - so what?
Someone whose name escapes me has argued that this is why living systems exist - the universe tends towards maximum entropy, and we're the most efficient way of getting there. Let's see how much energy we can waste today!
There's a few of us. My pages on the topic:
http://originoflife.net/gods_utility_function/ http://originoflife.net/bright_light/
See also:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Life/Signed_Articles/John_Whitfield
The main recent breakthrough of our understanding in this areas is down to Dewar - and the basic idea goes back at least to Lotka, from 1922.