Complexity

Biology does not produce complexity the way we produce complexity. Let me give you an example. When I want to create a complex thing, an artifact, I find a lot of things and I bring them together and I assemble them. I find a bunch of parts and I put them together in just the right way. I have a plan, and I have a goal in mind, a telos, an end, a purpose. If I'm lucky, and my logic is correct, I'll get that function out in the end. (See nomic and entailment net)

When living things produce complexity, they don't put things together. My body was generated by starting from something that was already together. A fertilized ovum. A single cell. But it was undifferentated. It did not have hands and feet and eyes and so on. What happen is, over time, that system, by virtue of processes that involve morphodynamic processes (self-organizing processes) and involve evolution-like processes (selection-like processes), the embryo progressively differentiated . Complexity is produced in biology by beginning from undifferentiated whole system that are already functioning, already complete in that sense, that then progressively differentiate. (See fork)