Quotes About Complexity

Humans are so fascinating, aren't we? If ten of us are each given our own piano, we'll play eleven different tunes.

a totally dried noose for one is to another an integrated text adept at the cards that ruin whimsy...

it is entirely illogical to consider biology in dichotomous terms of genes and environment—all of biology is based on the continuous interaction of both.

Cephalopods are an island of mental complexity in the sea of invertebrate animals. Because our most recent common ancestor was so simple and lies so far back, cephalopods are an independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behavior. If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over.

What is the point of building a large nervous system if your life is over in a year or two? The machinery of intelligence is expensive, both to build and to run.

Cephalopods are evolution's only experiment in big brains outside of the vertebrates.

if you focus on the large fossils, you miss most of the life that is present

With an influx of sensory information comes a need for complex internal processing. When more is known, decisions become more complicated.

the Garden of Ediacara.

To describe the world is always to simplify its texture, to coarsen the weave: to lose the particular in general.

Every theoretical explanation is a reduction of intuition.

There's no simple aritmetic for life's distribution of happiness and sorrow, no such thing as a standard share.

Deep within every blind, absolute love grows a hatred toward the beloved, who now holds the only existing key to happiness

Kõik algab ja lõpeb inimesega, kes katuselt alla kukub. Kuid vahepeal on nüüd terve rida seoseid, milles võibolla iialgi selgust ei saa.

Wie so oft erhebt sich die Frage, weshalb Männer in ihrer Persönlichkeit oft diffus sind, wie es sein kann, daß sie an einem Obduktionstisch, in einer Küche, hinter einem Hundeschlitten virtuose Equilibristen sein können, während sie, wenn sie einem Fremden die Hand geben müssen, in infantiler Unbeholfenheit versinken.

Das ist eine der anstrengenderen Seiten von Moritz, die er mit dem Alter entwickelt hat - die Mischung aus Perfidie und Sentimentalität.

Tell us, they'll say to me. So we will understand and be able to resolve things. They'll be mistaken. It's only the things you don't understand that you can resolve. There will be no resolution.

Europeans need easy explanations; they will always choose a simple lie over a contradictory truth.

Bertrand Russell wrote that pure mathematics is the field in which we don't know what we're talking about or to what extent what we say is true or false.

De satte kurs mot kyrkan, arm i arm. En lång fräknig kvinna, i vars underliv säd från tre olika män förgäves försökte hålla sams. Och en gaselliknande flicka med en funktionspromille på 1,2 som höll sig upprätt och någorlunda klar enbart på grund av väninnans stöd, B-vitaminerna och sin nyfikenhet.

Actually I think Art lies in both directions - the broad strokes, big picture but on the other hand the minute examination of the apparently mundane. Seeing the whole world in a grain of sand, that kind of thing.

Logic doesn't work in human relations, I guess," he told Ella. "I try to understand myself as I tried to understand the bosses in my muckraking days. I 'got' them, but not myself. I don't know anything about myself.

He was a stylist, not a thinker. He spent time trying to say things in as complicated a way as possible.

History has all too often been guilty of favouring the viewpoint of autocratic rulers in describing their glorious victories, when there is so much else that needs to be said.