Quotes About Complexity

To rely on a single model is hubris.

Systems that produce complexity consist of diverse rule-following entities whose behaviors are interdependent. Those entities interact over a contact structure or network. In addition, the entities often adapt.

Physics becomes chemistry, chemistry becomes biology, biology becomes psychology, and so on. Or, put another way: cells emerge from the interactions of atoms, organs emerge from the interactions of cells, and societies emerge from the interactions of people. Each level of emergence produces higher order functionalities.

All organisms can make the most basic distinctions--between food and not-food, danger and safety, light and dark, same-species and not-same. But only people can use language to make the highly complex categorizations of, say, animals or physical forces, or however many different kinds of quarks there are now, putting them in separate piles and naming the piles. It's how we proceed; it's how we communicate. Organization into categories is, at bottom, human.

You're my favorite complication.

If you put Durant's brains in a thimble full of water they'd look like a ship lost in the middle of the sea.

You're a difficult woman, Sabetha. But then, difficult women are the only ones worth falling in love with.

This web of lies was growing so convoluted, so branching, and so delicate that a moth's fart might knock it to pieces—

That beauty has a bitch streak as wide as ten rivers.

Maybe some of both.

Life is complex. Each one of us must make his own path through life. There are no self-help manuals, no formulas, no easy answers. The right road for one is the wrong road for another...The journey of life is not paved in blacktop; it is not brightly lit, and it has no road signs. It is a rocky path through the wilderness.

The human heart is a strange vessel. Love and hatred can exist side by side.

The first thing to say about Finnegans Wake is that it is, in an important sense, unreadable.

Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.

Those swirls in the cream mixing into the coffee? That's us. Ephemeral patterns of complexity, riding a wave of increasing entropy from simple beginnings to a simple end. We should enjoy the ride.

If everything in the universe evolves toward increasing disorder, it must have started out in an exquisitely ordered arrangement. This whole chain of logic, purporting to explain why you can't turn an omelet into an egg, apparently rests on a deep assumption about the very beginning of the universe. It was in a state of very low entropy, very high order. Why did our part of the universe pass though a period of such low entropy?

Nothingness, after all, is simpler than any one particular existing thing ever could be; there is only one nothing, and many kinds of something.

We talk about "awe and wonder," but those are two different words. I am in awe of the universe: its scope, its complexity, its depth, its meticulous precision. But my primary feeling is wonder. Awe has connotations of reverence: "this fills me with awe and I am not worthy." Wonder has connotations of curiosity: "this fills me with wonder and I am going to figure it out." I will take wonder over awe every day.

Our goal over the next few chapters is to address the origin of complex structures—including, but not limited to, living creatures—in the context of the big picture. The universe is a set of quantum fields obeying equations that don't even distinguish between past and future, much less embody any long-term goals. How in the world did something as organized as a human being ever come to be?

There is a wide gap between admitting that we don't know everything about how the mind works and remembering that whatever it does, it needs to be compatible with the laws of nature.

In 1965, physicist Richard Feynman opined, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics," and the sentiment is equally applicable today.

the real world, people are not completely rational, they don't have common knowledge, they misinterpret one another, and they certainly don't start with the same priors

As I've said previously as home secretary, dealing with immigration isn't just a single issue and a single measure and a single step that you take. You've got to keep working at that over time.

People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know.