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(Can you please give us a citation or personal definition of complexity?)
 
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What comes into my mind are two of four theses in John Searle’s book ‘Mind: a brief introduction’.  
What comes into my mind are two of four theses in John Searle’s book ‘Mind: a brief introduction’.  
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##  Conscious states, with their subjective, first-person ontology, are real phenomena in the real world. We cannot do an eliminative reduction of consciousness, showing that it is just an illusion. Nor can we reduce consciousness to its neurobiological basis, because such a third-person reduction would leave out the first-person ontology of consciousness.  
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#  Conscious states, with their subjective, first-person ontology, are real phenomena in the real world. We cannot do an eliminative reduction of consciousness, showing that it is just an illusion. Nor can we reduce consciousness to its neurobiological basis, because such a third-person reduction would leave out the first-person ontology of consciousness.  
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##  Conscious states are entirely caused by lower level neurobiological processes in the brain. Conscious states are thus causally reducible to neurobiological processes. They have absolutely no life of their own, independent of the neurobiology. Causally speaking, they are not something “over and above” neurobiological processes.  
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#  Conscious states are entirely caused by lower level neurobiological processes in the brain. Conscious states are thus causally reducible to neurobiological processes. They have absolutely no life of their own, independent of the neurobiology. Causally speaking, they are not something “over and above” neurobiological processes.  
Source: John R. Searle, Oxford university press; Mind: a brief introduction, 2004
Source: John R. Searle, Oxford university press; Mind: a brief introduction, 2004
I am here citing Searle because in my opinion a correct description of the world includes a ‘weak’ form of dualism, we simply cannot deal without it. With this weak dualism I do not mean the dualism described by Descartes with res extensa and res cogitans. Moreover I am talking about the comprehension that temporarily we do not have the measurement categories to create a theoretical continuum between first-person descriptions of phenomena of consciousness and third-person descriptions of neuronal processes delivered by neurosciences. At this moment we have the situation of incommensurability and it is not clear to which extent we will be able to overcome this in theory.  
I am here citing Searle because in my opinion a correct description of the world includes a ‘weak’ form of dualism, we simply cannot deal without it. With this weak dualism I do not mean the dualism described by Descartes with res extensa and res cogitans. Moreover I am talking about the comprehension that temporarily we do not have the measurement categories to create a theoretical continuum between first-person descriptions of phenomena of consciousness and third-person descriptions of neuronal processes delivered by neurosciences. At this moment we have the situation of incommensurability and it is not clear to which extent we will be able to overcome this in theory.  
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===Can you provide us with a personal view on the emergence of complexity?===
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In my opinion complexity arises from us being psychic entities provided with the capability to remember and expect things from our surroundings. On the level of perception do we have primary stimuli that are interconnected on the level of memory.
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Complexity is there from the beginning as the stimuli are embedded into a conceptual complexity, a stimulus is a phenomenon with a potential future.
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For me perception is a complex phenomenon.
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===As a passionate musician, where in music do you face complexity?===
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For me a highly complex situation is the practice of difficult/complex passages within a piece of music. When preparing for a concert you know that every single note played must be perfect. One starts practicing in details with the goal to play the whole at the end of the day. During this process one realizes that there is too much information for the brain to deal with. My approach to this complexity is defining points in the piece that act as triggers. Those triggers are memorized until I know them by heart and am able to play them perfectly correct. In between those triggers many unconscious processes happen at the same time. You can imagine this process as proceeding on a ladder, trigger after trigger.
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===What we learned from this interview===
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For Mr. Veress as a teacher complexity in his occupational field arises from the accumulation of many tasks, all of them of simple nature. Additionally he as a teacher is a psychic entity interacting with his students also being psychic entities. Humans as thinking creatures are often non-predictable. This is where he sees complexity emerging, thinking creatures being part of a variable organizational structure.
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Asked of a universal principle to deal with complexity he suggested to reduce complexity to simple circumstances.
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In his leisure time he deals with the famous body-mind problem. There we have on one hand scientific facts about the brain and its development and the communication within complex processes delivered by neurobiology. On the other hand we have the subjective way of describing processes occurring in our mind. The latter leads to a description in the first form singular where we have the means of language to describe processes of the mind. For him there exists a gap between the science of neurobiology and the subjective way of describing phenomena of our minds.
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Latest revision as of 11:38, 9 October 2014

iGEM ETH Zurich 2014