Quotes About Complexity

Evolution across the universe was nothing but the endless proliferation of automatic, organized complexity, a vast arid Turing machine full of self-replicating machinery forever unaware of its own existence. And we—we were the flukes and the fossils. We

Hey, chaotic trajectories are just as deterministic as any other kind.

Nowadays it seemed like half the technical data on the planet were being stored genetically. Try sequencing a lung fluke and it was even money whether the base pairs you read would code for protein or the technical specs on the Denver sewer system.

and besides, positing universe as program didn't seem to answer the Big Questions so much as kick them down the road another order of magnitude.

If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't.

THE HUMAN BRAIN WERE SO SIMPLE THAT WE COULD UNDERSTAND IT, WE WOULD BE SO SIMPLE THAT WE COULDN'T. —Emerson M. Pugh

The AIs claimed to have worked it out, then announced they couldn't explain it to us. Gödel was right after all: No system can fully understand itself.

We're the goddamned Kalashnikovs of thinking meat.

when a lemur makes a human, it doesn't matter how many lemur chains and lemur rules and lemur constraints she imposes. She's simply, computationally incapable of seeing all the angles that her smarter creation can take in at a glance.

Plato to Descartes to Dawkins to Rhanda. Souls and zombie agents and qualia. Kolmogorov complexity. Consciousness as Divine Spark. Consciousness as electromagnetic field. Consciousness as functional cluster.

It's the Hitler within us that's our problem," said the media expert Peter Boenisch. "Germans are pigheaded. The fascination of Hitler is a reaction to the complexity of the world, so complicated and so insoluble for the lower strata. There is no outlet for frustration.

Alakalar?m?z?n yüz bin ?ekline isim bulam?yoruz ve "sevmek" deyip ç?k?yoruz. Onun için ne kadar suistimale u?ruyor bu kelime.

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.

T]here is now a void at the heart of everything. But then there is so much more of everything now!

The combination of random branching and orderly underlying lattice creates the exquisite complexity of the snowflake, poised on the brink of chaos and minutely sensitive to tiny variations in the temperature and humidity of the air.

In quantum theory, words are blunt tools.

The more you want to explain about a black swan event like the storming of the Bastille," wrote the sociologist Duncan Watts, "the broader you have to draw the boundaries around what you consider to be the event itself.

Most things in life involve skill and luck, in varying proportions. The mix may be almost all luck and a little skill, or almost all skill and a little luck, or it could be one of a thousand other possible variations. That complexity makes it hard to figure out what to chalk up to skill and what to

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

The visible world, I think, is abstract and mysterious enough.

One of the endlessly alluring aspects of mathematics is that its thorniest paradoxes have a way of blooming into beautiful theories.

America, thou half-brother of the world; With something good and bad of every land.

Plato argued that good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will always find a way around law. By pretending that procedure will get rid of corruption, we have succeeded only in humiliating honest people and provided a cover of darkness and complexity for the bad people. There is a scandal here, but it's not the result of venal bureaucrats. (1994) p. 99

Human nature turns out to be more complicated than the idea that people will get along if only the rules are clear enough. Uncertainty, the ultimate evil that modern law seeks to eradicate, generally fosters cooperation, not the opposite.