Comment by deltaonefour

There's no formal theory behind complexity. There's qualitative and scientific studies but I have seen any strict mathematical formalism around it that fully fleshes out that system A is more complex then system B definitively.

I remember reading that currently there is a movement take intuition of of complexity and transform it into a formalism. If you squint it looks like it's possible, however this isn't always true.

For example the term "life" can't really be formalized because the intuition encompasses a set of things that are over complicated and even blurry at times. It's a loaded word that spawns philosophical debates and nobody realizes they're debating about a poorly defined arbitrary concept. It could be that "complexity" is the same thing... personally it doesn't look that way to me, but I'm not sure.