I think it was Paul Halmos who said that, for a book to be about something, it must NOT be about a great many other things. Howard Bloom seems unable to follow this prescription. The God Problem contains many interesting facts, most of them completely unrelated to its main quest of explaining how a universe can create complexity. In Bloom’s chatty, verbose, and peripatetic peregrinations, the very first sentence which sheds any light on the book’s nominal topic occurs on page 431.
Bloom’s choice of writing the entire book in the 2nd-person-as-substitute-for-1st-person (“you are Jewish”) is odd, at best confusing and at worst irritating. The book is repetitive. Like the movie The Hobbit, it could have been made half as long and twice as good with some decent editing.
What makes this especially frustrating is that Bloom does, occasionally, as if by accident, touch on some important and difficult topics, like the difference between “information” and “meaning”. But he seems unable to stay focused on them long enough to make much progress. He also seems unaware of much previous work.
I suppose I should mention that the book contains 4 false statements. I leave it to the interested reader to find the 4.
Using the Mandelbrot set as a model for how complexity arises has some merits, but also some drawbacks. Yes it’s a simple iterated rule that creates immense amounts of detail. But it doesn’t create any meaning, or even information: the Kolmogorov complexity of the whole thing is no greater than that of the equation generating it. If you want to explain the complexity of, say, a eukaryotic genome, you have to look elsewhere.
The kind of complexity we are interested in requires both nonlinearity (gain, chaos, solitons) and entropy creation (non-equilibrium thermodynamics, metabolism). But Bloom is prevented from understanding any of this by his insistence that the law of entropy is simply wrong. Life and evolution climb upstream against a constant flow of degradation; how they manage to do that is one of the key components of the answer Bloom purports to seek, but refuses to see.
Shannon entropy is not the best measure for attacking this problem; this has been well-known for some time. The state of maximum entropy, total randomness, is dead because it has no structure. The state of minimum entropy, a perfect crystal close to absolute zero, is dead because it has no variety. Life, and all complexity generation, has to exist in between order and chaos. Bloom spends so much time flogging Shannon’s dead horse that he is unable to say much about what alternative he prefers. He seems unaware of Fisher Information, and makes little or no use of Kolmogorov complexity. We could use a workable theory of meaning. Bloom is probably right that any such theory has to be receiver-dependent, but he fails to actually propose one. This makes his contribution eerily parallel to, and about as useless as, the creationist information theory of Dr. Werner Gitt (In the Beginning was Information).
This book bills itself as a rocket to new heights of understanding, but in the end it feels more like a bunch of firecrackers going off on the ground: lots of little pyrotechnics, but no real progress.
Energy and Time 