What is Complexity? - The philosophy of complexity per se with application to some examples in evolution

Bruce Edmonds

No 7, Discussion Papers from Manchester Metropolitan University, Centre for Policy Modelling

Abstract: It is argued that complexity has only a limited use as a paradigm against reductionist approaches and that it has a much richer potential as a comparable property. What can complexity be usefully said to be a property of is discussed. It is argued that it is unlikely to have any useful value as applied to “real” object or systems. Further that even relativising it to an observer has problems. It is proposed that complexity can be only usefully applied to constructions within a given language. It is argued that complexity is usefully differentiated from the concepts of size, ignorance, variety, minimum description length and order. A definition of complexity is proposed which can be summarised as follows: “That property of a language expression which makes it difficult to formulate its overall behaviour even when given almost complete information about its atomic components and their inter- relations.”. Some of the consequences of this definition are discussed. It is shown that this definition encompasses several existing varieties of complexity measures and is then applied to some examples pertaining to the evolution of “complex” systems including: “What is the complexity that has evolved in organisms and has it increased?”.

Date: 1995-05-19
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.fmb.mmu.ac.uk:80/~bruce/evolcomp/evolcomp.txt (text/plain)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.fmb.mmu.ac.uk:80 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wuk:mcpmdp:007

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Manchester Metropolitan University, Centre for Policy Modelling Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by WoPEc Project ().