Quotes About Complexity

On the other side, if Im playing a good guy, then he has some problems too. Thats what makes people interesting, in life and in fiction.

Humans are alive, therefore life must be complex.

I can never give a 'yes' or a 'no.' I don't believe everything in life can be settled by a monosyllable.

It's little quirks like this that could make life difficult for a chess machine.

Actually it seems to me that one can hardly say anything either bad enough or good enough about life.

If you cross-section anyone's life from one angle and then another, what constitutes goodness looks different each time. It's not an absolute.

I'd be a liar if I said I had a normal family.

Every man is a moon and has a [dark] side which he turns toward nobody; you have to slip around behind if you want to see it. -Mark Twain From introduction to The Amateur.

Stereotypes lose their power when the world is found to be more complex than the stereotype would suggest. When we learn that individuals do not fit the group stereotype, then it begins to fall apart.

I always feel as if describing how I feel and think about myself is too complicated—it's as if I can hear the whole conversation in advance, and I know all of the twists and turns it will take before they happen, so why bother? The effort just isn't worth it.

If there is one takeaway in distilling down the complexity of the DMN and the TPN, it boils down to the fact that the toggle switches between them are off in those with ADHD.

Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?

Facing four hundred million man-years of calculations, with a resulting railroad car full of strategy tables, enough to fill a Rolodex five miles long, I tried to simplify the problem. I

In modern industrialized countries, networks grew to a complexity that has proved bewildering to the Paleolithic mind we inherited. Our instincts still desire the tiny, united band-networks that prevailed during the hundreds of millennia preceding the dawn of history. Our instincts remain unprepared for civilization.

The cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind. This is the cardinal tenet of scientific understanding: Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution.

THE GREATEST CHALLENGE today, not just in cell biology and ecology but in all of science, is the accurate and complete description of complex systems.

We are all genetic chimeras, at once saints and sinners, champions of the truth and hypocrites – not because humanity has failed to reach some foreordained religious or ideological ideal, but because of the way our species originated across millions of years of biological evolution.

To express this increasingly complex subject as succinctly as possible, the ancestors of our species developed the brain power to connect with other minds and to conceive unlimited time, distance, and potential outcomes. This infinite reach of imagination, put quite simply, is what made us great.

And as to the wonders of modern technology, bear in mind that a sidewalk weed and a protozoan are each more complex than any device yet invented by humanity.

except for behaving like apes much of the time and suffering genetically limited life spans, we are godlike.

The ultimate explanation is why we have two hands and ten fingers to start with, and why are we prone with them to do thus and so and not something else.

The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.

Human nature is deeper and broader than the artificial contrivance of any existing culture.

Because of the distinctive adaptive challenges we face as a species, we require a way to inject controlled doses of chaos into our lives.