'The Neverendng Story' for adults

Guess we aren't any closer to truth!

I have to agree, his questions are never answered

He’s talking in terms of the information required to describe the state of a system. By less complex he means describable with less information. With randomly scattered marbles to describe their state we must individually describe the position of every marble. With a regular structure we can just describe the spacing of the whole lattice with a few parameters. The way that’s usually expressed in information systems is Kolmogorov complexity. I know what you mean, it is counterintuitive because the universe now as a structured system seems more interesting than a random plasma, and regular spacings and structure are interesting, and importantly requires higher order concepts to express. So there’s a sort of conceptual complexity that increases. However more interesting doesn’t map to more information, because it has lower entropy. One goes up and the other goes down.

​@@simonhibbs887 *"He’s talking in terms of the information required to describe the state of a system. By less complex he means describable with less information."* ... Yes, that's why I qualified my comment with, _"If you're only evaluating the final product, then sure, I can see where Laughlin forms his basis,"_ *"With randomly scattered marbles to describe their state we must individually describe the position of every marble. With a regular structure we can just describe the spacing of the whole lattice with a few parameters"* ... Again, that's an _after-the-fact_ assessment (i.e., the "final product"). However, the ease at which you can describe the organized marbles required prework. Something had to organize all the marbles to offer you ease of description, ... and that "organizer" isn't included in the final product. *Example:* You can have a Piet Mondrian painting juxtaposed with paint randomly splattered onto a canvas. Which one has the higher complexity? The "splatter painting," as you say, requires more information to describe and the Mondrian painting has large, single-color areas of paint that are easy to describe. However, the "splatter painting" doesn't include Piet Mondrian's intelligence embedded within its composition. ... It's a *nonphysical property* that's now attached to Mondrian's painting. *"I know what you mean, it is counterintuitive because the universe now as a structured system seems more interesting than a random plasma, and regular spacings and structure are interesting, and importantly requires higher order concepts to express."* ... It also requires an embedded nonphysical mechanism (intelligence) to orchestrate that structured system that's easier to describe. It is a misconception that benign complex structure can emerge without a layer of organization embedded within it. Since we can't shove that mechanism under a microscope or swish it around in a test tube, we simply disregard its existence. ... But then we're right back at the beginning trying to figure out how complexity emerges from chaos. *"However more interesting doesn’t map to more information, because it has lower entropy. One goes up and the other goes down."* ... Intelligence can supplant entropy. Every morning when you make your bed, you return it to a less entopic state. The intelligence that lowers that entropy (you) walks out of the bedroom immediately afterward.

No reasonable person would expect that. So unreasonable.

To be fair it was not originally described that way in the original proposals. It was characterised as a huge explosion and called the Big Bang by Fred Hoyle who didn’t like the idea, but his description and name for it stuck in the media so here we are.