Excerpt from pages 154-156 of the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster by Bobby Henderson
Life, Kolgoromov Complexity, and Delicious Spaghetti
Nick Moran
To begin, let us look at the forms of life we can see on this planet. They all exhibit a certain degree of complexity that is not found in nonliving matter. A dog is much more complex than a rock. To express this, we can use the concept of Kolgoromov complexity. Living things possess high Kolgoromov complexity, because their DNA is decidedly uncompressible. As an example, consider the string of bits 10101010. This string has very low Kolgoromov complexity because it can be compressed to "write 10 four times." On the other hand, the string 0100101 is uncompressible in the same sense that DNA is. It has very high Kolgoromov complexity. That string was generated by me tapping the "0" and "1 " keys on my keyboard. If I had a keyboard with only ACGT, I could similarly write random DNA. If we put that DNA into a cell, and tried to make a living organism out of it, I very much doubt we would get anything living, much less good at living. Therefore, the uncompressible complexity we observe in living things is also nonrandom. It has been created for a purpose: the purpose of building living things. So, if the DNA has been created, then there must be a creator. Some choose to posit the Christian God, other choose intelligent aliens with amazing technology. The problem is that both of these choices also must have extremely high Kolgoromov complexity. My chances of randomly hammering out the code to a divine being on my four-key keyboard are even less than that of coming up with a living animal. These are really just restatements of the same problem; we still don't know where the complexity came from. We could posit an endless string of gods each of whom created the one before it, thus accounting for the extremely high complexity of a god. However, this string just results in higher and higher degrees of complexity and gets us nowhere. What we need is a way to get high complexity from low complexity. If you'll indulge me a brief tangent, I would like to discuss the prop- enlightenment Institute * * 155 erties of spaghetti. Imagine a box of uncooked spaghetti. It's essentially a series of straight lines. A box of two hundred pieces of spaghetti has very low Kolgoromov complexity. You could easily compress the data contained in those two hundred pieces. Now imagine a plate of cooked spaghetti, complete with sauce and, if you like, meatballs. Imagine the process of untangling this mass. It would take hours to take each individual piece of spaghetti, clean off the sauce, and put it in its own separate place and pick out the meatballs. This plate of spaghetti, all tangled up and covered with delicious sauce has very high complexity. Spaghetti has the astounding property of being able to go from very low to very high complexity. Now, let's return to our search for a creator. Clearly gods and superintelligent aliens don't help us in our problem. A spaghetti god, however, could. It is reasonable that something of low complexity might come into existence on its own. We don't look at a rock in the woods and feel the need for a designer. So, low-complexity, uncooked spaghetti does not require a creator, it is quite capable of arising through random, natural processes. Then, when cooked via the infusion of energy, it can come to have a high complexity. Consider the difference between uncooked and slightly cooked spaghetti. Slightly cooked spaghetti has slightly higher complexity than uncooked. There is a continuous spectrum from low to high as the spaghetti is cooked. The more the spaghetti is cooked, the more energy has been infused. In order to create a Flying Spaghetti Monster capable of creating life, which would have an extremely high level of complexity, we would need an extremely high amount of energy to do the cooking. There is only one place where we might find the required amount of energy: the universe immediately following the Big Bang. Temperatures of 100 billion degrees Kelvin would certainly be sufficient to generate the high Kolgoromov complexity of spaghetti with the power to create life. Thus, we have found a solution to the question of where the Kolgoromov complexity of life comes from. Uncooked spaghetti arose naturally (quite possibly because of its low Kolgoromov complexity) during 156** The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster the first instants of the universe. It was then cooked by the extremely high temperatures, causing it to rapidly gain complexity to the point of being able to create life. Further increases in complexity granted it the ability to fly, and monster status. There will likely be some neo-Darwinian, Ivy League, science elitist who will come up with some other object that can rise in complexity when cooked. In order to prove that the true form of the creator is that of a Flying Spaghetti Monster, I will employ a version of the famed cosmological argument:
