Hi Gregg, thanks for sharing this. I was also happy to see Shaffer mentioned and some of your new work as well. Much of your phrasing and sources is incidentally helpful for me at this point. You have done so much thinking and work on this since last I studied it. I have so much to reply, but maybe I had better wait and just mention a few.

Something about your periodic table that intrigues me is the wording and concepts, and how these fit into the overall paper (part/whole/group complexity). This is a big thing for me... hailing back to the Greek Sorites dilemma and of course Spinoza. For example, is any species a non-essential part of all species, or is every species essential to the system in which we define the system by its species? Said another way, how many individuals does it take to make a species of individuals? Or how many unique things does it take to make one unique thing? Don't we just need one?

The idea of behavioral complexity has much promise. I like periodic tables. If I may though, what might be fundamental during the identification of extant phenomena other than what has never been noticed before? To extend your consciousness model a tad, is not the recognition of a familiar thing latent with respect to the novel detection of an unknown (before knowledge there is knowing, and after knowing there is knowledge)? So my question is, if we define things by what they typically do, maybe we are limiting what they would otherwise do. Evolution seems so much more like the latter. Maybe what we see is what we need to see.

So if I may just mention as food for thought, perhaps (as folks like Susie Vrobel suggest), things only appear complex because our level of detail is too obscuring of the elements of a convenient whole. At another level, nothing is simpler - yet we don't seem to "know" anything other than that something is here. Perhaps the fractal nature of things is not their developmental character, but our inability to see them as essential at some other level of understanding - not a part of a whole, but whose omission or removal in Lorenz' sense would completely change our idea of the whole?

Perhaps I am going outside your request a bit and your article, sorry if so! It's something I saw in the ToK early on, how we can see it arranged in different ways where mind is not aware of life and culture is not aware of matter. What we think so valuable as a heap of things is often our incapacity to see how valuable every individual thing is.
--Lonny

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