Re: Inconsistency, etc.

[Howard Pattee <***>]

Howard wrote: I am in full concordance with Rosen, although I may prefer slightly 
different expressions. I also treat von Neumann?s and Chaitin?s concepts of complexity as 
complementary to this one.

Tim replied: Those two are indeed concepts of complexity entirely different from, and
inequivalent to, the concept of Rosennean complexity. This discussion list
is about Rosennean complexity.

HP: In my opinion, it was also Rosen?s view that to fully understand complexity requires 
more than just discussing his model. In any case, I have found that to fully grasp 
Rosen?s concept of complexity one should also understand how it relates to other 
complementary concepts. I think you might find that Von Neumann?s views are not so 
entirely different that they are uninstructive. It is important to understand that formal 
inequivalence does not mean conceptual irrelevance. Quite the contrary, complementary 
models must be conceptually relatable, otherwise they are useless.

For example, Rosen describes von Neumann?s concept of complexity (AS, p. 331) to contrast 
it with his own, and I find such contrasts illuminating. Rosen then uses complexity to 
define his concept of error:

Rosen: ?However, we have also seen that such non-reducible, non-conjugate encodings must 
therefore bifurcate from one another. It is exactly the appearance of such bifurcations 
which we showed in the preceding chapter to be the essence of error.?

It was instructive to me to find that von Neumann, for whom error was a basic issue, 
defined one type of error consistent with Rosen, as a property of differing descriptions 
of systems and not of systems themselves. In my opinion, his other concept of error also 
relates fundamentally to Rosen?s formalisms, but if you prefer, I will not discuss it on 
this list.

Howard