Quotes About Complexity

Any conversation with Smith turned up at least one bit of human behavior which could not be justified logically, at least in terms that Smith could understand, and attempts to do so were endlessly time-consuming.

Was there any basis for preferring any one sufficient hypothesis over another? When you simply did not understand a thing: No! And Jubal readily admitted to himself that a long lifetime had left him completely and totally not understanding the basic problems of the Universe.

That old saw about "To understand all is to forgive all" is a lot of tripe. Some things, the more you understand the more you loathe them. My

But I could if I took the time and sweat to learn the language of electronics; it's not miraculous—just complex. Teleportation is simple, once you learn the language—it's the language that is difficult.

Manuel, when faced with a problem you do not understand, do any part of it you do understand, then look at it again.

The more complicated the law the more opportunity for scoundrels.

If a direct, uncomplicated, simple relationship offers us happiness, we won't accept it. It is "too simple," "too dull." We are trained to respect only what is inflated, hyperintense, high-pressured, big and complicated.

Proverbs in many languages point out these three levels of consciousness. One story, for instance, relates that the simple man comes home in the evening wondering what's for dinner, the complex man comes home pondering the imponderables of fate, and the enlightened man comes home wondering what's for dinner.

while our Empress was cold on the outside, she was at the same time wildly passionate on the inside, and in this way very, very Russian.

Reading is a privileged pleasure because each of us enjoys it, quite complexly, in ways not replicable by anyone else. But there is enough structural common ground in the text itself so that we can talk to each other, even sometimes persuade each other, about what we read: and that many-voiced conversation, with which, thankfully, we shall never have done, is one of the most gratifying responses to literary creation, second only to reading itself.

Existence is larger than any model that is not itself the exact size of existence....

There is no complete theory of anything.

A labyrinth -- that's Joyce's metaphor, too. Somebody could write a good Ph.D. dissertation on the metaphor of the labyrinth in James Joyce, Philip K. Dick, and Robert Anton Wilson. We all regard the universe as a maze that we're running around in and trying to figure out.

And that reminded me--as everything in the universe does--of Finnegans Wake. Now, I'm sure in an educated audience like this, you're all thoroughly familiar with Finnegans Wake, and I don't have to explain its deep structure or its polylinguistic meanings.

And so on, ad infinitum. To account for our perception of our perception — our ability to perceive that we perceive — we have three heads, and to account for that, four heads, and to account for our ability to carry this analysis onward forever, we have infinite heads . . . A

Imagine a billiard table without players. Nobody hits any balls. No earthquake shakes the room. No magnet exists, hidden under the table. Yet suddenly Ball A at one end of the table turns clockwise and Ball B at the other end of the table turns counterclockwise.

The same super-synergy appears in Dr. Bohm's attempts to describe his implicate order in words. However clear his math, his words begin to sound Chinese when he says the implicate order does not consist of mind'' but that it has mind-like qualities.

Yeah. I don't believe in monistic conspiracy theories where you pick out one group and blame everything on them, but I do tend to believe that conspiracy plays a larger role in human history than conventional historians admit.

1. People who meet Mr. A when he has the Oral Submissive self predominant, will remember him as that sort of person. People who meet him when he has the Semantic/rational self predominant remember him as another sort of person. Etc.

If you think you know what the hell is going on, you're probably full of shit.

Obviously, the faster we process information, the more rich and complex our models or glosses — our reality-tunnels — will become.

To understand any idea or a person or a thing you have to see it from multiple, contradictory angles. The right wing view of things is justifiably true from a certain perspective. Justifiably untrue from others. And vice versa. The only way to understand this complex thing called reality is to understand it from all the available perspectives. See it from as many angles as possible and you might start to glimpse the actual shape of the thing.

I am merely suggesting, playfully at times, maybe seriously at other times, that Universe is a bit more complicated than anybody's models; and that using several reality-tunnels — as in Po or quantum mechanics — may show a great many interesting correlations and details and exciting and beautiful aspects that we will never see if we look always and only through one monotonous reality-tunnel which we have made into an Idol.

If this begins to sound like nonsense, that is inevitable on this level. As Lewis Morgan notes, in books on linguistics there always comes a point at which the prose itself becomes wildly incomprehensible, disintegrating into nonsense.