I’d like to discuss some of the issues surrounding creating definitions for ideas because as we shall see across three examples this process can have dramatic effects on valid perspectives about reality.  The observation I would like to call attention to with respects to how we form definitions generally acknowledges two vying propensities; one which I shall refer to as drawing from the ‘common experience’ the second I shall refer to as ‘categorical qualification’.  At a glance, we need to draw from the common experience in order to have any way of distinguishing one concept from the next and what we typically do (possibly quite simultaneously) involves recognition about what necessary qualities the subject must have in order to belong in the category adduced.  The examples I intend to bring forth will help to clarify what I mean in a more concrete way.  
	Suppose we want to define ‘life’.  It just so happens that this definition has come under a considerable amount of scrutiny as of late.  Scientists have a hard time narrowing down exactly what qualities things which fall under this category should have.  Common experience suggests that viruses do not count as life, for instance, but how this gets handled once we start to try to make a categorical conception, or rubric, that captures these nuances, scientists disagree.  Some say all life needs to have carbon origins for us to consider it life, some say a single cell at least forms an aspect of the necessity involved therein.  Others prefer sparse definitions that leave much to the imagination and perhaps include more than intended.  An example of one such set of categorical qualifications admits any structure that both, first, reproduces and, second, evolves.  
	Perhaps you can start to see how the tension about what gets counted as life at first arrises from two competing ideological positions, one attached to those who prefer to hone our collective notion arising from the common experience and an other attached to those who prefer to allow the manner in which they have initially qualified the subject to lead them forward.  To the credit of those who admonish the common experience model, how should we ever have had a notion of what life consists of in any which way if at some point some authority didn’t take our young hand and explain that one cannot pull the dog’s tail, for instance, because it lives whereas the rock doesn’t and therefore makes the rock an acceptable subject for kicking.  However, almost as soon as the distinction arises, a vague and ever narrowing sense of what qualities life need have to belong to the category thereof begin to emerge.  To the credit of those who render categorical qualifications, the urge towards issuing a sparse yet comprehensive set of qualities proves very enticing. When categorical enthusiasts say a living thing needs to have the ability to evolve, for instance, that terminology does in fact arise from arduous first hand observations, or, in other words, many common experiences.  Naturally, when we denote the notion of what belongs to evolution we do not necessarily include all of the elements of those observations but differentiate in order to make limited/specific but also vague/general categories within the aspects of the observed phenomena. In other words we have definitions for the words included as categorical qualities of other definitions and this should come as no surprise.  To put it mildly, the definition for life regards the qualities of the qualities it includes but also insofar as those qualities of qualities get considered so do they split infinitely down the line with respects to inclusion and exclusion within the principle.  Ergo, I prefer concise definitions that do not try to mitigate the about what parcels get included from subsequent qualities of the qualities observed because this process simply leads us back from categorical qualification to common experience at the limit of the recorded set of inclusivity and exclusivity dynamics.  However, I also regard the contradiction that I’ll point to when I define life concisely as a thing which reproduces and evolves not only insofar as I include viruses by dint of my ostensible omissions but more importantly that I also include a robot that can copy itself so long as environmental factors ever cause it to reproduce a mutated copy because by bringing up these ‘other’ elements (viruses and robots) for consideration under the domain of the definition ‘life’ I have done the very thing I swore off; namely identifying aspects housed in the qualifications of qualifications of definitions interesting me.  I have, however, cleverly included the exteriorized elements at the fringe of these definitional paradigms by ostensibly using the method of defining I have regaled against to support the same conclusion I reach when I articulate that one should approach these matters from a categorical qualification standpoint so as not to allow authoritative and prejudicial perspectives to cloud one’s judgement about what may or may not get included under the umbrella of a term (with ‘life’ as the example here).  
	  Now, we have a problematic aspect to review.  I have claimed on numerous occasions prior to this that a definition that includes everything doesn’t actually define anything.  Now, while I have expanded the definition of life considerably, at this point, it doesn’t include things like rocks, stars, and glaciers. However I have run across this issue with defining ‘consciousness’.  If we can acknowledge that the impression left by an imprint bearing other forms the necessary conditions for any object to have whatever limited consciousness it has, then everything has it.  Of course, perhaps I should regard the common experience people once again and realize that very real human lives probably lie at stake when I conflate consciousness of the rock on the ground with the difference between an awake or an asleep human considering that the later distinction has some considerable real world priority whereas the former at this juncture seems remarkably problematic.  So, although I’d like to define consciousness in a limited sense as what I intuitively recognize as it: namely; observation, my results seem way too off the mark to justify the sparsity of my definition.  So it seems, getting to Soyboy’s point about definitions regarding the two orders of observation, that someone couldn’t handle this dilemma otherwise than to disregard the conceivable consciousness of things other than living ones because of the value of life.  I would retort that another acceptable move here would have involved invoking the terms sapience and salience to stand in for the colloquial usage of ‘consciousness’ to determine if you can describe someone as awake or not.  If you solve things my way, you do not need to disregard the conceivable consciousness of everything while simultaneously respecting the care to life that the common experience definition makers uphold. Still, the problem with respects to the meaninglessness of the definition of ‘consciousness’ if it applies to everything seems relevant, but, only if one does not harbor’s an approach that starts with consciousness and everything and goes into the specifics from there, dividing, categorizing, summoning up a variety of things which set the two apart, etc.  The first thing that strikes my gaze involves the idea that we have a physicalistic bent in the first term ‘everything’ and a mentalist bent in the second term ‘consciousness’.  But, slyly, I have made the property of a thing into its equal opposite other and set them up dichotomously when in fact at first they related in terms of one acting as the quality of another.  So it seems that a definition must mean something more than another singular term and this shouldn’t come as a surprise either and to avoid the circumstance of creating a meaningless chain of single word definitions instigated the move to make the quality the dichotomous pair of the subject ‘everything’.  This slyness to which I referred really amounts to the basic process anyone undergoes naturally when confronted with a singular abstract universal: they bifurcate it.  
	So when Soyboy suggests the two definitions for complexity which seem to preserve the same relationship of caring between them as the two definitions for observation, i.e., between ostensibly living, conscious, complex stuff and seemingly non-living, non-conscious, simple stuff, I wonder if one of them cannot gain traction for the manner of looking into reality I have laid out thus far.  
	Some things I’ve said about complexity include firstly that it can perhaps find its articulation in multiplying the number of variables by the number of connection each variable on average has and construing that as a rate over time.  I’ve also said that a working definition might postulate that complexity denotes a certain multitude of individual complexes each of which contain a multitude of individual variables somehow in communication / reference back to / with themselves.  This ‘themselves’ becomes a tricky issue.  A circular loop whereby individual member A is said to communicate/relate with B, B with C, and C again with A can hardly be said to be complex.  It’s hardly an individual complex even.  Complexity has something to do with escaping the origin of communication / relation but nevertheless reintegrating with that very origin at some point which actually defeats or circumscribes the limit of its complex nature.  In short, the condition for complexity’s existence (that it eventually denote its genesis) is also the conditional standard by which we measure its limit.
	In a further articulation of complexity I have suggested that, to put it in a relatively simple fashion: For every ’N' elements of ‘it’, there arises exactly ’N’ factorial multiplied by two plus ’N’ interpretations of ‘it’.  The mathematical formula for this takes this form: f(n)=2N!+N  I can explain the reason for this most easily by reference to a simple example.  When N=3 I must calculate for the variables we shall name ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’.  What I desire to capture involves interpretations of all the elements taken individually and together and using a method that accounts for which element arises first in a particular combination i.e. the combination’s ‘directionality’.  So, to elaborate this for the mathematical layman, for N=3, we count A once, B once, and C once to represent the interpretations of the individual terms (this is the +N part of the formula) to get the number three.  Then we account for all of the two part combinations and all of the three part combinations (if ’N’ were a higher number we would count the four and five, etc, part combinations as well), i.e. ‘A with B’, ‘B with C’, and ‘C with A’ but also ‘ABC’, ‘BCA’, ‘CAB’ to get the number six.  The simple method of adducing this number involves using the factorial method represented by the symbol ‘!’.  This symbol articulates that for any number ‘X’, ‘X’ equals one times two times three times four add infinitum until one reaches the X integer in question.  Notice that for the example where ’N’ equals three, one times two times three equals six which amounts to precisely the number of combinations that we counted above.  However, interpretation does not merely call for one to count the combinations of the variables, but also account for which of these variables factors first, second, third etc.  I.e. we do not merely have ‘ABC’, for instance, we also have the inverse ‘CBA’ and we have precisely one inverse for each counted combination (one can find this represented in the formula by the multiplier two).  So, then, if one wants the complexity coefficient of ‘it’ one must simply plug in the numbers to the formula.  I.e. for N=3  f(3)=2(1x2x3)+3=15.  The number here only behaves as a guide to interpretation technically speaking, what interpretation aims to accomplish involves articulating all of the possible inner dimensions that the mathematical model provides.  That means giving an account of each individual and each string of variables (word or terms) where order represents primacy or weight given to each term in subsequent order.
	I suppose I’ll catch up on what I’m missing in the texts you recommended me…