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Comment by j2kun | Hacker News Reader

How deep do you go? Do you talk about P and NP? Or deeper, like interactive proofs or complexity-based definitions of randomness?

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Philosophy generally has its own language for talking about these kinds of problems, and generally its own starting points. Gilles Deleuze laid a lot of the groundwork for using ideas from chaos theory to work on philosophical problems during his life (starting with some of his work in the 1960-70s). Some links:

- http://www.protevi.com/john/DG/PDF/Remarks_on_Complexity_The...

- http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/jipt.2010.0004

It could perhaps be useful to do similar work with computational complexity theory.

What is being discussed in those links is commonly called complex systems theory[0] which is a mathematical/scientific/philosophical field concerned with how complexity (in the natural language sense of the world) arises from what appear to be simple natural laws. For example, how chaotic dynamics arise from deterministic systems, how biology arises from chemistry, or how consciousness arises from neural activity. It is connected to chaos theory, nonlinear dynamics and systems theory.

It is completely different to computational complexity[1] which is what is being discussed in Aaronson's article.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity_theory

My mistake, I meant it as a basis for incorporating computational complexity. The original article posted shows how computational complexity is applicable to non-linear systems, which I think are philosophically more interesting. Deleuze's work would provide some good groundwork for seeing how those kinds of ideas can be applied in a philosophical context.

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