Quotes About Complexity

I love romantic comedies. I have a deep respect for them. I think they're really difficult to write and write well.

Everything about her seems to be saying, Listen, if you don't look attentively, if you don't go beyond my simplicity to detect the simmering volcano in me, you are not it.

The unspoken conspiracy of all religions—and the Buddhism of Zen Buddhism is not an exception—is their seemingly irresistable inclination to make metaphysical what is not so, and then to organize into complexity what is inherently simple.

If the mind were simple enough for us to understand, we would be too simple to understand it.

Most of the complexity of a human neuron is devoted to maintaining its life-support functions, not its information-processing capabilities. Ultimately, we will be able to port our mental processes to a more suitable computational substrate. Then our minds won't have to stay so small.

As Einstein said, "Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.")

Given that self-improving strong AI cannot be recalled, Yudkowsky points out that we need to "get it right the first time," and that its initial design must have "zero nonrecoverable errors."45

T]here are no hard problems, only problems that are hard to a certain level of intelligence.

To appreciate its apparent complication, it is useful to zoom in on its image (which you can access via the links in this endnote).

it could be simply an accident of fate that our brains are too weak to understand themselves. Think of the lowly giraffe, for instance, whose brain is obviously far below the level required for self-understanding—yet it is remarkably similar to our brain.

However, we have the benefits of the billions of years of evolution that have already taken place, which are responsible for the greatly increased order of complexity in the natural world. We can now benefit from it by using our evolved tools to reverse engineer the products of biological evolution (most importantly, the human brain).

A key aspect of a probabilistic fractal is that it enables the generation of a great deal of apparent complexity, including extensive varying detail, from a relatively small amount of design information. Biology uses this same principle. Genes supply the design information, but the detail in an organism is vastly greater than the genetic design information.

The most complex capability of the human brain—what I would regard as its cutting edge—is our emotional intelligence. Sitting uneasily at the top of our brain's complex and interconnected hierarchy is our ability to perceive and respond appropriately to emotion, to interact in social situations, to have a moral sense, to get the joke, and to respond emotionally to art and music, among other high-level functions.

La futura era GNR (genética, nanotecnología, robótica) no nacerá debido solamente a la explosión exponencial de la computación, sino debido a la interacción y al gran número de sinergias que resultarán de múltiples avances tecnológicos entrelazados entre sí

The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.

Increasing complexity" on its own is not, however, the ultimate goal or end-product of these evolutionary processes. Evolution results in better answers, not necessarily more complicated ones. Sometimes a superior solution is a simpler one.

There are no inherent barriers to our being able to reverse engineer the operating principles of human intelligence and replicate these capabilities in the more powerful computational substrates that will become available in the decades ahead. The human brain is a complex hierarchy of complex systems, but it does not represent a level of complexity beyond what we are already capable of handling.

Se llamaba Mónica y era morena. Y tenía su vida, su novio, todas esas cosas que tiene la gente. Y no era, y esto Sebastián querría dejarlo muy claro, una musa ni una maga, ni una bruja ni un recuerdo, ni nada de esas cosas con las que la literatura suprime a menudo a las mujeres.

My strength is my weakness and weakness is my strength

Wittgenstein dislikes all ornamentation that is not part of the construction, and never find anything simple enough.

and it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.

Chess is the most elaborate waste of human intelligence outside of an advertising agency.

Ironically, it was the completion of the Human Genome Project a decade ago that showed how little the genetic code told us about living organisms (and even less about complex ones such as us).

The truth was that sometimes saving people wasn't simple, sometimes saviors weren't who you expected them to be, all people don't get saved, and not everyone deserved to be saved.