Compelxification (per What is Intelligence - What is Life)
The process whereby things become more complex over time; I argue that this characterizes the evolution of life, intelligence, and technology, and occurs because existing stable components can sometimes combine (or “compose”) to form larger dynamically stable wholes, which can themselves serve as components for further composition.
Link to originalDarwinan evolution vs symbiotic revolution
Classical darwinism (mutation + selection = branching) only fine-tunes within an existing space but doesn’t explain why life gets more complex over time.
Symbiogenesis = merging of replicators. The composite is more complex than its parts (emergence, composition adds information), opening a new design space.
This happens at every scale (chemistry → cells → multicellularity → societies; abstraction layers).
In bff, complexity doesn’t come from random mutation; it comes from smaller replicators fusing into larger ones that can host yet more sub-replicators.
Cooperation of parts to become more dynamically stable gives evolution an arrow through time (→ complexification).
A complex replicator can only form by combining simpler replicators that already exist and are already stable.
You can’t merge things that don’t persist long enough to encounter each other. So there’s a necessary temporal ordering: simple first, complex later.
If complex replicators are made of simpler ones that merged, then the components are earlier versions of the composite.
When a sub-replicator succeeds, it makes copies of itself. When two replicators merge, both might contain the same sub-components (which themselves replicated). So evolved code accumulates multiple copies of successful sub-replicators, variants (copies that later diverged), and nested redundancy (a sub-replicator copied itself, then that whole region got copied again at a higher level; this is why genomes are so compressible).