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Suzi Travis's avatar

This is amazing!

(I may have gotten a little too into mapping this out in my head...)

I noticed the arbitrariness of just multiplying the three values together too. I had a similar thought to Mike: multiplying assumes the factors are independent in some sense, right? Which I’m not sure would strictly hold here.

I wonder if you could turn your three factors into features and fit a simple statistical model based on human-labeled data? That way, you could let the model calculate the weights for AC, SS, and EF — instead of relying on an arbitrary multiplication. What do you think? Would that work?

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Jim Owens's avatar

Fascinating. I can’t be any help with the math, but here is a question that occurs to me. From a book at hand I will pull a complex thought:

“On the one hand, we can understand how the bodily changes, and the bodily feeling or experience, could be bound together as one thing: a whole bodily state.”

Suppose I rearrange the words of this sentence at random.

“together how bodily and understand or changes whole experience one, the bodily could, bound On the be hand bodily thing a, : feeling can one the as state we.”

Unsurprisingly, the Emergent Structural Complexity for both is almost identical (100.42 vs 99.13). (Surprisingly, they are not exactly the same.) But the second collection of words is either much less complex than the first, or much more complex — depending on how we want to think of complexity.

I think what we are really trying to measure here is meaning. It’s a tall order.

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