The concept of complexity is still being muddled here. A robot built by humans, even if it had ridiculous memory and speed etc, would not be in any way more complex than the humans that built it. It might be BETTER at certain things, but would not be more complex, in the sense of the molecules which constitute it.
Adrian- of your examples up there, I agree with them except for the acorn- in the sense of a creator being more complex than created, I think this is incorrect. An acorn is the SAME complexity, in my view, as the tree, in that it has quite complex interactions of biological molecules etc, and holds the exact instructions to "create" a new tree. But the problem, as you say, lies in the fact that we have not established a hierarchy of complexity, or a measuring stick by which to relate things.
So how many levels of complexity are there? To me, all of life is at the same "complexity" in relation to the universe itself (obviously there are internal levels of complex structures, but the actual components of all life are, at the most basic level, universally complex). So, maybe in this vein complexity could be simply ordered into two levels: living, and non-living. Living, of course, being higher "complexity" than non-living. If this is the case, than a creator, even if it did not create life and was only there to "jump-start" the universe, would HAVE to have be more complex than the unliving universe, since it would have been part of the "living" level of a hierarchy of complexity. It follows, then, that a creator which created life would, of necessity, have been more complex than it, in some sense. Even now, if we humans were to build a simple cell in a lab, we are more complex, in the hierarchy of living things, than that cell. How would it be possible to "create" something more complex than the creator if it is impossible to even properly conceive of a greater complexity than life (other than god, but by definition humans would be hard-pressed to create "Him").
Adrian- of your examples up there, I agree with them except for the acorn- in the sense of a creator being more complex than created, I think this is incorrect. An acorn is the SAME complexity, in my view, as the tree, in that it has quite complex interactions of biological molecules etc, and holds the exact instructions to "create" a new tree. But the problem, as you say, lies in the fact that we have not established a hierarchy of complexity, or a measuring stick by which to relate things.
So how many levels of complexity are there? To me, all of life is at the same "complexity" in relation to the universe itself (obviously there are internal levels of complex structures, but the actual components of all life are, at the most basic level, universally complex). So, maybe in this vein complexity could be simply ordered into two levels: living, and non-living. Living, of course, being higher "complexity" than non-living. If this is the case, than a creator, even if it did not create life and was only there to "jump-start" the universe, would HAVE to have be more complex than the unliving universe, since it would have been part of the "living" level of a hierarchy of complexity. It follows, then, that a creator which created life would, of necessity, have been more complex than it, in some sense. Even now, if we humans were to build a simple cell in a lab, we are more complex, in the hierarchy of living things, than that cell. How would it be possible to "create" something more complex than the creator if it is impossible to even properly conceive of a greater complexity than life (other than god, but by definition humans would be hard-pressed to create "Him").