Talk:Bonini's paradox

Food for thought
I would argue that a complete model of the human brain and thinking processes have not been created not because of any "paradox", but because the brain just isn't fully understood yet. Its not that it can't ever be understood. There are moral and ethical limitations on experimenting with the human brain that have (necessarily) stunted progress, and there are also technological limitations. It's pretty hard to expect engineers to just come up with an accurate and complete artificial model of something that has taken millions of years to evolve. The best that we could hope to achieve in the near future is to clone a brain (but it wouldn't really be a "model" then would it). Creating a complete and accurate model of something implies having a complete and accurate understanding of the subject of the model. Models of aspects of the human brain have been created as far as the modelled aspects are understood (such as neural net software written to behave like their physiological counterparts), but at this stage the human brain is too complex to understand let alone completely model. Stating "As a model of a complex system becomes more complete, it becomes less understandable" is stating the obvious. Of course a complete model of a complex system becomes complex; otherwise the original system being modelled wouldn't be complex, which is nothing paradoxical. You could rephrase the so called "paradox" to read "as a model of a subject becomes more like its subject, the more like its subject the model becomes". Duh! A more interesting (and related) paradox might be centered on the idea of self-replication; "as a model becomes more complete and accurate, it becomes less of a model" (because it becomes the subject in which it was originally intended to model), which has nothing to do with complexity (although perhaps this is what Bonini was originally getting at and his paradox has been merely misunderstood and warped since). It's interesting because at what point would an accurate and complete model of the human brain no longer be a model at all but an actual brain that could be arguably used by a human? The problem with the "paradox" as written in the article is that by definition a "model" isn't required or inteded to be accurate or complete relative to its subject, and anyone trying to model a complex system (such as the human brain) is therefore not intending to replicate that system completely.

Re: "complex models have 'too many parameters to measure, leading to analytically insoluble equations that would exceed the capacity of our computers, but the results would have no meaning for us even if they could be solved" is rediculous. Development of mathematics or a computer program to generate results requires an understanding of the meaning of the results in the first place. Just because a program may churn out terabytes of data that may "seem" useless doesn't mean that anyone with a similar understanding as the person who wrote the program to generate those results wouldn't find the data useful. An example of this is the data churned out by supercomputers analysing weather data. The results may seem useless, but programs have been written to reduce the data and generate synoptic charts, The charts are useful, but they would not be possible without the multitudes of results churned out by the supercomputers. Complex models only have too many parameters to someone who has no use for them. Complex systems that are yet to be solved (Navier-Stokes - []) may be limited by technology, but as technology progresses so will our understanding of how to use it. You don't need to measure what every atom is doing to understand or predict its behaviour, because if you did there would be no faith in the laws of physics and no technological development. --Jared

Valéry reference
The reference to the Valery quotation seems to be incorrect. The aphorism "Ce qui est simple est toujours faux. Ce qui ne l’est pas est inutilisable" cannot be found in the cited lecture. The correct source is: Valéry, Paul: Mauvaises pensées et autres. Collection Blanche, Gallimard, Paris, 1942. An "official" English version is published in: Collected Works of Paul Valéry (translated by Stuart Gilbert), Volume 14, Analects. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1970. "A simple statement is bound to be untrue. One that is not simple cannot be utilized." (p. 466) Schubaa (talk) 20:24, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

Map as wrong example
Re: a map of a scale of 1:1 (the same size as the territory), which is precise but unusable

Wrong. Imagine you have a 1:1 map of a piece of land, say 1 km square, on Mars. It helps you direct and control your remote probe from Earth.

Zezen (talk) 19:52, 31 August 2020 (UTC)