Unnecessary Complexity

摘要

Entropy, order, information, computation, emergence, and free energy. These words and phrases should be banned from interdisciplinary discussions of complexity in the history of the universe. Free energy should be banned because it has a precise meaning in physics, while there is no cognate concept in biology or in any of the strictly human sciences. Entropy, information, and computation, because they have technical usages in physics and very different meanings outside of that field. And order and emergence, because no one knows what they mean.