Collective computation II

Continuing this post, some quotes from the presentation. You can also see her article here.

"Of course if you take a step back you can maybe argue a kind of Russian doll approach to complexity where you say the higher levels include all the lower levels, that they're more complex for that reason alone. [...] The point here is that our view of higher levels being more complex is just wrong, and that it's complexity all the way down" (29:22).

"If our goal is to understand how biological systems perform computations we need not just this mathematical understanding, which is very important, but we also need an understanding of mechanics because biological computation is instantiated in material. We need to understand how the material affects the computation" (46:53).

"I made the provocative statement that the complex system's mantra, the sort of Santa Fe Institute mantra [...] that complexity emerges from interactions of simple components is wrong. And the reason it's wrong is because what happens is complexity at the microscopic scale. [...] Then there's this course-graining which gives us a simplification. [...] The right way to think about micro to macro in complex systems is as this hourglass, where you have complexity at the lower levels and complexity at the higher levels, but at the mezoscopic scale you get this dimension reduction or simplification or information bottleneck, through which the micro is passing, to give you this expansion" (1:16:53).

"In discussing the difference about how computers and humans compute: "We forget about this part, the human part, that makes the computation" (1:20:20).