From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Sat Apr 26 2003 - 11:43:49 MDT
A. Sandberg stated:
<<I was hardly first with that idea - it is inherent in the early
extropian writings and the work of Ilya Priogogine. Open systems can use
free energy to decrease their own entropy, and certain kinds of systems
have an internal dynamics that also increases their complexity (which is
still a somewhat vague term even after more than a decade of debate in
the alife and complexity community).>>
I remember reading Prigognine's small tome, which is hiding in plain site in
my bookshelf now. He might have been able to do the science of
thermodynamics, but explaining was not his particular forte'.
<<My preliminary answer would be that in a finite region there can only be
a finite amount of complexity. But this could very well be an
exponential function of the number of available states. >>
Yes, back to Plato. If the Universe is infinite, so is available knowledge
then; platonic forms and all that. Getting back to the original query by Jef;
we need to ask if its easier to develop complexity, then it is to use energy
to travel? There may or may not be theoretical limits to
knowledge/complexity, but there are surely practical limits, if only
temporary. There are limits to travel speed, and the energy expended, but one
goal may be more achievable then the other. Right, now, in the very early
Interplanetary Epoch, we don't know.
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