Many researchers in AI and Cognitive Science believe
that the information processing complexity of a mecha-
nism is reflected in the complexity of a description of its
behavior. In this paper, w e distinguish two types of com-
plexity and demonstrate that neither one can be an
objective property of the underlying physical system. A
shift in the method or granularity of observation can
cause a system's behavioral description to change in
both the number of apparent states and the complexity
class. These examples demonstrate h o w the act of obser-
vation itself can suggest frivolous explanations of physi-
cal phenomena, up to and including computation.
