The importance of the observer in science

The concept of {\em complexity} (as a quantity) has been plagued by numerous contradictory and confusing definitions. By explicitly recognising a role for the observer of a system, an observer that attaches meaning to data about the system, these contradictions can be resolved, and the numerous complexity measures that have been proposed can be seen as cases where different observers are relevant, and/or being proxy measures that loosely scale with complexity, but are easy to compute from the available data. Much of the epistemic confusion in the subject can be squarely placed at science's tradition of removing the observer from the description in order to guarantee {\em objectivity}. Explicitly acknowledging the role of the observer helps untangle other confused subject areas. {\em Emergence} is a topic about which much ink has been spilt, but it can be understand easily as an irreducibility between description space and meaning space. Quantum Mechanics can also be understood as a theory of observation. The success in explaining quantum mechanics, leads one to conjecture that all of physics may be reducible to properties of the observer. And indeed, what are the necessary (as opposed to contingent) properties of an observer? This requires a full theory of consciousness, from which we are a long way from obtaining. However where progress does appear to have been made, e.g. Daniel Dennett's {\em Consciousness Explained}, a recurring theme of self-observation is a crucial ingredient.Comment: In Proceedings The Two Cultures: Reconsidering the division between the Sciences and Humanities, UNSW, July 200

Going Stupid with EcoLab

In 2005, Railsback et al. proposed a very simple model ({\em Stupid Model}) that could be implemented within a couple of hours, and later extended to demonstrate the use of common ABM platform functionality. They provided implementations of the model in several agent based modelling platforms, and compared the platforms for ease of implementation of this simple model, and performance. In this paper, I implement Railsback et al's Stupid Model in the EcoLab simulation platform, a C++ based modelling platform, demonstrating that it is a feasible platform for these sorts of models, and compare the performance of the implementation with Repast, Mason and Swarm versions