Quotes About Aggregates

The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles. Instead, at each levle of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behavior requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as any other.

And in the context of the five aggregates, sa?k?r? refers specifically to all the mental factors that arise in different combinations with each moment of consciousness, except feeling and perception, which were singled out as aggregates because of their unique importance.

I think the Huffington Post has been inventive and presents what it aggregates well.

Trying to understand major economic events by looking only at data on changes in economic aggregates, such as gross domestic product, wage rates, interest rates, and tax rates, runs the risk of missing the underlying motivations for change. Doing so is like trying to understand a religious awakening by looking at the cost of printing religious tracts.

It is true self, since all conceptual elaboration in terms of self and non-self is totally stilled. It is true happiness, since [even] the aggregates of mental nature and their causes are reversed. It is permanence, since the cycle of existence and the state beyond pain are realized as one.

The linear size of a neuron varies widely from one nerve cell to the other, since some of these cells are contained in closely integrated large aggregates and have, therefore, very short axons, while others conduct pulses between rather remote parts of the body and may, therefore, have linear extensions comparable to those of the entire human body.

Newton's laws aren't fundamental, they are emergent; that is, they are what happens when quantum matter aggregates into macroscopic fluids and objects. It is a collective organizational phenomenon.

The aggregates that we pick up in the human plane will be washed away, and we will become pure spirit, pure light, pure love, and pure ecstasy.

Breathing mindfully, you are already finding a refuge in your breath, and you become aware of what's going on in your body, your feelings, your perceptions, your mental formations, and your consciousness. In Buddhism, these are known as the five skandhas ("aggregates"), or elements, that make up what we call a person.

A cluster of municipalities with charming provincial enmities, their own internal fights, and people out to get one another aggregates to a quite benign and stable state.

We see chemistry, how the atoms are arranged in the molecules, how the disease changes the arrangement. Perhaps we will find which drug disentangles the aggregates that make a brain senile. Many of us are interested in such things.

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.

There is a terrible similarity between the principles of Fascism and those of contemporary physics. Fascism has rejected the concept of a separate individuality, the concept of 'a man', and operates only with vast aggregates. Contemporary physics speaks of the greater or lesser probability of occurrences within this or that aggregate of individual particles. And are not the terrible mechanics of Fascism founded on the principle of quantum politics, of political probability?

We've seen that even in the simplest situations nonlinearities can interfere with a linear approach to aggregates. That point holds in general: nonlinear interactions almost always make the behavior of the aggregate more complicated than would be predicted by summing or averaging.