Quotes About Complexity

Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help.

However difficult it is to study nonlinear systems, such systems probably determine the most important features of choice. As one chaos theorist remarked, "nonlinear systems" may be about as extensive as "non-elephant biology."2

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from doubletalk.

The paradox of artificial intelligence is that any system simple enough to be understandable is not complicated enough to behave intelligently, and any system complicated enough to behave intelligently is not simple enough to understand. The path to artificial intelligence, suggested Turing, is to construct a machine with the curiosity of a child, and let intelligence evolve.

Life, which evolved into ever more complex structures, was nature's substitute for directly bred computers," he wrote. "Yet it was more than a substitute: it was a road—a winding road, yet one which despite all errors and hazards, arrived at last at its destination.

Web 2.0 is our code word for the analog increasingly supervening upon the digital—reversing how digital logic was embedded in analog components, sixty years ago. Search engines and social networks are just the beginning—the Precambrian phase. "If the only demerit of the digital expansion system were its greater logical complexity, nature would not, for this reason alone, have rejected it," von Neumann admitted in 1948.

It is characteristic of objects of low complexity that it is easier to talk about the object than produce it and easier to predict its properties than to build it.

But in the complicated parts of formal logic it is always one order of magnitude harder to tell what an object can do than to produce the object.

Once you get into the problem... you see that it's complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That's where most people stop, and the solutions tend to work for a while. But the really great person will keep going, find the underlying problem, and come up with an elegant solution that works on every level.

Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating ten more.

Changeable women are more enduring than monotonous ones. They are sometimes murdered but seldom deserted.

Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of organized life.

The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist.

TOPSY: My power is in my . . . EVERYBODY: madness! TOPSY: And my colored contradictions

Lovely female shapes are terrible complicators of the difficulties and dangers of this earthly life, especially for their owners.

Language is a poor thing. You fill your lungs with wind and shake a little slit in your throat, and make mouths, and that shakes the air; and the air shakes a pair of little drums in my head—a very complicated arrangement, with lots of bones behind—and my brain seizes your meaning in the rough. What a roundabout way, and what a waste of time.

Sixty-some years ago, biochemical organisms began to assemble digital computers. Now digital computers are beginning to assemble biochemical organisms. Viewed from a distance, this looks like part of a life cycle. But which part? Are biochemical organisms the larval phase of digital computers? Or are digital computers the larval phase of biochemical organisms?

A successful interpretive language both tolerates ambiguity and takes advantage of it. "A language which has maximum compression would actually be completely unsuited to conveying information beyond a certain degree of complexity, because you could never find out whether a text is right or wrong," von Neumann explained

The question of whether something is feasible in a type belongs to a higher logical type. It is characteristic of objects of low complexity that it is easier to talk about the object than produce it and easier to predict its properties than to build it. But in the complicated parts of formal logic it is always one order of magnitude harder to tell what an object can do than to produce the object.

Software was born. Numerical codes would be granted full control—including the power to modify themselves.1

The truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas – complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemmas, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse.

Morality starts as a simple concept and becomes complicated.

There are endless unknowns, and no forecast of a century can be either complete or utterly correct.

Intelligent design itself does not have any content.