Quotes About Complexity

Whenever the whole is different from the sum of the parts—whenever there's cooperation or competition going on—the governing equations must be nonlinear.

However, [Edmund G. Gress] wrote, " we must not simplify to such an extent that life and movement are gone. That is where those persons go wrong who claim that type was made to read, and nothing else matters but the setting up of a paragraph in a legible type so that it can be easily read. We do not read everything that appears in print, but do read that which appears interesting.

We are deciphering how all known objects—from atoms to galaxies, from cells to brains, from people to society—are interrelated. For the more we examine nature, the more everything seems related to everything else.

T]he details of a culture should not be reduced down to straightforward patterns or sequences because the details—the intricacies of human lives—are the point. Often we seek to understand people in their own right, and on their own terms rather than from an external perspective.

Emergent properties can seem magical because they do not seem to arise from the component parts of a structure. [...] Thought [...] seems to be an emergent property of the organization of neurons in brains. [...] "Emergent properties" arise from a particular arrangement of components—they do not appear within the component parts themselves.

We need not assume our universe is in essence "computational," "alive," or even "hierarchically dissipative," only that these computational, organic, and thermodynamic analogies may serve to advance our understanding of processes far more complex than our models.

We are deciphering how all known objects - form atoms to galaxies, from cells to brains, from people to society - are interrelated. For the more we examine nature, the more everything seems related to everything else.

the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are.

That mix of order and anarchy is what we now call emergent behavior.

It was not Gilda and a racquet being used reflexively to some purpose. It was not Gilda using a racquet. It was one thing, maybe you could call it a Gilda-racquet-court-net-game-situation-two-other-players-wind-sunshine object. But there was only one thing there. To seperate us out would be to miss the reality.

Our tax code is so long it makes War and Peace seem breezy.

There has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers.

It would be like trying to make love to your wife, knowing she was simultaneously making love to six other people!

I don't know Stallman well. I know him well enough to know he is a hard man to like." (And that was in the preface of Stallman's own book!)

to absorb, explore, and expand the intricacies of those bewitching systems;

A story with a single ending seems to us a bare and diminished thing, like a tree with a single branch; and each ending seems to us an expression of something that is buried deep within the tale and can be brought to light in that way and no other.

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.

I think we're living in a world where society is very difficult.

The human mind is both genius and pathetic, brilliant and idiotic.

No one individual had one one-thousandth of the knowledge necessary to fully understand it all.

Instead of appreciating complexity, people tend to affiliate with one or another social dogma.

To achieve complete understanding necessitates understanding increasingly more and more, and the combination of everything you need to understand to achieve complete understanding quickly becomes more than you can bear without, well, exploding.

Historical events never have simple or obvious implications. Some people thrived by using the very instruments intended to dispossess them.

Recognize, though, that graphs and equations provide an economical and effective way of expressing things that torture the tongue.