Re: Romana's Extro def, continued (was Re: Stephen Jay Goul

Hara Ra (harara@shamanics.com)
Thu, 16 Jan 1997 02:06:14 -0800


Michael Butler wrote:

> > 2. If so, what is its level of Quality (value) compared to other
> > 'livingsystems'?"
> Romana:
> It's boring.

> So maybe "characteristic of living systems" is too broad.
<snip>
> Information Theory, General Semantics, Chomsky's work, Complexity
> Theory (to name four significant cases, in roughly chronological order)
> all seem to run aground on the "but is it _interesting_ or is it _boring_" thing.
>
Well I see two cases for "boring". First, when what I am looking at
becomes predictable in some simple manner, so viewing it does not add to
my internal model. In this case I have managed to encode within me a
model which adequately describes what I see. Second is when it looks
like noise, and I cannot comprehend a pattern in what I see. This
doesn't mean there is no pattern there, just that I can't create a model
with any useful correlations. The interesting stuff lies between these
extremes.

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| Hara Ra <harara@shamanics.com> |
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