Quotes About Complexity

faced with so much mystery, most of us find it hard to settle for simple awe.

you must have carbon.23  Arsenic, boron, and silicon are the only other elements on which complex molecules can be based, but arsenic and boron are relatively rare and, where concentrated, poisonous to life, and silicon can hold together no more than about a hundred amino acids. Only carbon yields the chemical bonding stability and bonding complexity that life requires. Given the constraints of physics and chemistry, we now know that physical life must be carbon-based.

El imaginario nos interpela, no es tan primitivo, simple o fantástico como creemos.

Sometimes the thoughts and feelings I had didn't really agree with each other, so I decided I must be lots of different people inside my brain.

Generalizations about the mentalities and behaviour of millions of Germans in the Nazi era are bound to be of limited application – apart, perhaps, from the generalization that, for the great mass of the population, the figurative colours to look for are less likely to be stark black and white than varying and chequered shades of grey.

The anxiety to destroy democracy rather than the keenness to bring the Nazis to power was what triggered the complex developments that led to Hitler's Chancellorship.

Bullets are incompatible with pressurised environments and complex machinery.

Her face had always held too much personality to be merely beautiful.

Was everyone else really as alive as she was?... If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance.

Brain Salad Surgery.

No one knows what women want!

If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't.

Haosul nu este întâmpl?tor: el este o comportare aparent întâmpl?toare, rezultând din reguli foarte precise. Haosul este o form? criptic? de ordine.

El universo es infinitamente rico y complejo y suceden en él todo tipo de cosas maravillosas. Pero no deberíamos confundir los resultados con las causas e imaginar que el propósito del universo es hacer seres humanos.

Inside our skulls are fish, reptile and shrew brains, as well as the highest centers that allow us to integrate information in our unique way; and some of our newer brain components talk to each other via some very ancient structures indeed. Our brains are makeshift structures, opportunistically assembled by Nature over hundreds of millions of years, and in multiple different ecological contexts.

technologies (reflecting new and more complex behaviors) do not tend to be associated with the appearance of new kinds of hominid. It was old kinds of hominid that started to do new things, even though those new things always seem to indicate a step up in cognitive complexity.

How about it, an Iceberg with a warm heart?

To 'see both sides' of a problem is the surest way to prevent its complete solution. Because there are always more than two sides.

Ningún problema es demasiado difícil para ser resuelto por un teórico.

The Sufi saying has it: "God, to the bee, is something which has TWO stings!

It's really funny because the same people who loved me as Stringer Bell were the same people that were watching 'Daddy's Little Girls' literally in tears.

if we make choices using Earth as the central standard, welfare as a common goal, and conscience as the absolute scale, even apparently complex changes may happen more quickly than we imagine.

No matter how significant or life-changing your greatest hit or miss might be, neither even begins to define all of who you are. Each of us is a product of all our experiences and all our interactions with other people. To cite calculus, we are the area under the curve.

Man is brilliant at solving problems; but solving them only makes him the victim of his own childishness and laziness. It is this recognition that has made almost every major philosopher in history a pessimist.