Quotes About Complexity

Well, it seems that this process you call consciousness is somewhat more complex than you perhaps gave it credit for at first," Orolo said. "One must be able to take in givens from sparse dustings of probability waves in a vacuum—" "I.e., see stuff." "Yes, and perform the trick of integrating those givens into seemingly persistent objects that can be held in consciousness.

Everything from the brim of this hat to the hem of her dress was too complex for Daniel's eye to comprehend—he was like an illiterate savage staring at the first page of an illuminated Bible—but

Neal Stephenson

Any information system of sufficient complexity will inevitably become infected with viruses—viruses generated from within itself.

The ineffable talent for finding patterns in chaos cannot do its thing unless he immerses himself in the chaos first.

Well, that's good. I don't think human-written code exists anymore. It's code written by code written by code—turtles all the way down.

But at last I came to understand that I was making it too complicated. For you, this is no mingling at all; for you the Book of Revelation, the ramblings of Hermes Trismegistus, and Principia Mathematica are all signatures torn from the same immense Book.

Neal Stephenson

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo," Enoch said.

Our policies concerning free speech, telecommunications, and cryptography have evolved from a series of simple, rational decisions. But they are today so complex that no one can understand them, even in one single country, to say nothing of all countries taken together.

All fine and simple in principle. The details very complicated, of course.

he had arrived at the conclusion that political stability anywhere was an illusion that only a simpleton would believe in. That

that he lived in a universe whose complexity defied algorithmic simulation.

The difference between stupid and intelligent people—and this is true whether or not they are well-educated—is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations—in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.

My eyes skimmed over the legalese and bureaucratese (two languages I had never mastered), until I found something descriptive to

Captain considered it, and shrugged. It seems right, he said. It is not precisely what El wanted; but enthroned as he is in his Palace, viewing the Land from a high seat, he does not see its complexity. This Land was made wrong. All of his efforts to make it right only spread the wrongness about it new ways. It is left to souls like me to decide what to do about it; and though I cannot see all the answers, I can guess that adding more wrongness will not help matters.

Some things by their nature cannot be mapped.

promiscuous reference frames.

In layperson's terms: if it has to be dunked in liquid helium to work, I don't understand it. If it's in a rack with fans blowing on it, that's a different story.

and people could only make sense of complicated matters through stories. Likewise

a combinatorial explosion of name cards and introductions...

The universe was a disorderly mess, the only interesting bits being the organized anomalies.

She got lost then in the striations in the iris of Edda's left eye. These were immensely complex, and of all colors, having about them the same balance of order and wildness as exposed tree roots, tendrils of smoke in the wind, tongues of wild flame, the swirling of water where rivers came together.

The question, as always, is whether the organizing principle is added to the gross matter to animate it, as yeast is thrown into beer, or inheres in the relationships among the parts themselves.