Sabine Hossenfelder on Complexity

 I only got as far as the first eight minutes, ...

My comment:

I think one way to structure your argument might be to consider what it is we mean by a mechanism. Mechanisms are typically something we abstract from phenomena, and the mechanisms we see in the world are therefore fundamentally grounded in our knowledge of the way the phenomena are related. Experiments are our attempts to expand and consolidate that knowledge. So for example the Antikythera mechanism is a nice example of a clockwork rock. There are a lot of things about the  Antikythera mechanism that we don't consider relevant to its operation qua mechanism. For example, the composition of the minerals in which it is encrusted. But a really advanced analysis of the encrustacion might actually take into account the knowledge we have about how bronze and other metals corrode in sea water. These are also mechanisms abstracted from experiments in a chemical laboratory. We might even want to include the sort of chemistry that we find in marine microbiology and analyse it as being partly a product of microbial metabolic processes. These metabolic processes are also mechanisms abstracted in biochemical laboratories. So all of this science is carried out within a framework of other scientific knowledge and human knowledge as a whole is the growth of this structure of interrelated scientific knowledge which holds within it the means to use technology to make other mechansims like PCR analysers which we use in the laboratory to further elaborate this whole structure of scientific knowledge. As far as the child goes, well, maybe that child will be brought up in an environment where he or she will become an astronomer like Eudoxus of Cnidus and one day make a bronze instrument to test a model of the solar system by predicting solar and lunar eclipses. Now what is the more complex of these objects? In the end they are all part of one organic whole system and the structural integrity of that whole is presupposed by the knowledge we have about its parts. So when you ask for ways to quantify this idea of complexity, what sort of answer are you expecting? The idea of trying to explain the whole by reducing it to three types of quark just doesn't do anything for me.

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