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 between t and t1 [sic], someone swings a baseball bat at my head. What happens when it impacts? If there's enough force behind the swing, I'll die. Why is that? Well, when the bat hits my skull, it transfers a significant amount of kinetic energy through my skull and into my brain, which (among other things) randomizes  large swaths of my neural network, destroying the correlations that were previously in place, and making it impossible for the network to perform the kind of computation that it must perform to support the rest of my body. This is (I take it) relatively uncontroversial. However, it seems like we also want to say that my brain was more complex when it was capable of supporting both life and significant information processing than it was after it was randomized—we want to say that normal living human systems are more complex than corpses. But now we've got a problem: in randomizing the state of my brain, we've increased the Shannon entropy of the associated message encoding its state. A decrease in complexity here is associated with an increase in Shannon entropy. That looks like trouble, unless a system with minimal Shannon entropy is a system with maximal complexity (that is, unless the strict inverse correlation between entropy and complexity holds). But that's absurd: a system represented by a string of identical characters is certainly not going to be more complex than a system represented by a string of characters in which multiple nuanced patterns are manifest. The correlation condition between entropy and complexity fails.

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