Complex System

1:A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.
~ ?, Gall's Law,

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1:Any complex system is sport for a hacker; ~ Cory Doctorow,

2:complex system: good design requires consideration of the ~ Donald A Norman,

3:a substantially more complex system of knowledge, procedural strategies, and intuition. ~ Anonymous,

4:We have a complex system of government. You have to teach it to every generation. ~ Sandra Day O Connor,

5:One good way to understand a complex system is to disturb it and then see what happens. ~ Michael Pollan,

6:The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work. ~ Kevin Kelly,

7:A COMPLEX SYSTEM THAT WORKS IS INVARIABLY FOUND TO HAVE EVOLVED FROM A SIMPLE SYSTEM THAT WORKED. A ~ John Gall,

8:A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.
~ ?, Gall's Law,

9:Consciousness, like a complex system of software, has thousands of levels of nested, self-accessing subroutines ~ Frederick Lenz,

10:Approach making changes to a complex system with extreme caution: what you get may be the opposite of what you expect. ~ Josh Kaufman,

11:No complex system is ever truly stable; it is always, as long as it maintains its structure, metastable. ~ Erich Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe,

12:A complex system, contrary to what people believe, does not require complicated systems and regulations and intricate policies. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,

13:A rough rule in life is that an organization foolish in one way in dealing with a complex system is all too likely to be foolish in another. ~ Charlie Munger,

14:The human body is the most complex system ever created. The more we learn about it, the more appreciation we have about what a rich system it is. ~ Bill Gates,

15:This web of life, the most complex system we know of in the universe, breaks no law of physics, yet is partially lawless, ceaselessly creative. ~ Stuart A Kauffman,

16:It's a pretty widely-accepted notion that the atmosphere is a ridiculously complex system, and the best we can do with our models is a rough approximation. ~ Jamais Cascio,

17:Everyone in a complex system has a slightly different interpretation. The more interpretations we gather, the easier it becomes to gain a sense of the whole. ~ Margaret J Wheatley,

18:The World is a very complex system. It is easy to have too simple a view of it, and it is easy to do harm and to make things worse under the impulse to do good and make things better. ~ Kenneth E Boulding,

19:She was in the zone, a human copressor for a complex system that used machines as a nervous system to wire together the intelligence of a global crowd of people she loved with all her heart. ~ Cory Doctorow,

20:We don't live in a capitalist totality. Capitalism couldn't survive as a totality anyway. We live in this complex system and we already live communism and anarchism in a million forms everyday. ~ David Graeber,

21:Many individuals and organization units contribute to every large decision, and the very problem of centralization and decentralization is a problem of arranging the complex system into an effective scheme. ~ Herbert Simon,

22:You could not have evolved a complex system like a city or an organism - with an enormous number of components - without the emergence of laws that constrain their behavior in order for them to be resilient. ~ Geoffrey West,

23:Under Confucianism, the use of precisely measured court music, prescribed steps, actions, and phrases all added up to an extremely complex system of rituals, each used for a particular purpose at a particular time. ~ Benjamin Hoff,

24:I always liked to be fairly simple because you could get more players ready to play quickly. If you lose players to free agency, injuries, etc., it is easier to get young players ready to play in a less complex system. ~ Tony Dungy,

25:most economists, like doctors, are reluctant to make predictions, and those who make them are seldom accurate. The economy, like the human body, is a highly complex system whose workings are not thoroughly understood. ~ Alice Rivlin,

26:A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. ~ John Gall,

27:loss of bone density and degradation of the health of the bones also causes aging, diabetes, and, for males, loss of fertility and sexual function. We just cannot isolate any causal relationship in a complex system. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,

28:The internet is the most complex system that humans have ever invented. And with every internet enabled operation that we've seen so far, all of these offensive operations, we see knock on effects. We see unintended consequences. ~ Edward Snowden,

29:A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system ~ John Gall,

30:If there is no fate and our interactions depend on such a complex system of chance encounters, what potentially important connections do we fail to make? What life changing relationships or passionate and lasting love affairs are lost to chance? ~ Simon Pegg,

31:It is clear to all that the animal organism is a highly complex system consisting of an almost infinite series of parts connected both with one another and, as a total complex, with the surrounding world, with which it is in a state of equilibrium. ~ Ivan Pavlov,

32:You can never do merely one thing. The law applies to any action that changes something in a complex system. The point is that an action taken to alleviate a problem will trigger several effects, some of which may offset or even negate the one intended. ~ Garrett Hardin,

33:Have you ever heard of the law of unintended consequences?” He shook his head. “It basically says that any intervention in a complex system may or may not have the intended result, but will inevitably create unanticipated and often undesirable outcomes. ~ Michael R Hicks,

34:The Founders were not democrats and socialists..., but conservatives who had a healthy distrust of political passions and who devised a complex system designed to frustrate the schemes of social redeemers and others convinced of their own invincible virtue. ~ David Horowitz,

35:The key lever in a complex system is learning; the key methods are conversation, discovery, and experimentation.14 In a complicated case, you have distinct times for diagnosing the problem, coming up with the solution, and then implementing that solution. ~ Jennifer Garvey Berger,

36:A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”—John Gall ~ Timothy Ferriss,

37:Finally, as the digestive canal is a complex system, a series of separate chemical laboratories, I cut the connections between them in order to investigate the course of phenomena in each particular laboratory; thus I resolved the digestive canal into several separate parts. ~ Ivan Pavlov,

38:Recognize that most of our interactions with products are actually interactions with a complex system: good design requires consideration of the entire system to ensure that the requirements, intentions, and desires at each stage are faithfully understood and respected at all the other stages. ~ Donald A Norman,

39:There are thousands of names for them, in every culture—mana, psychic energy, totem, juju, chi, bioethereal power, the Force, the soul. It’s an incredibly complex system of interweaving energy that influences good old Mother Earth around us, but it all boils down to a fairly simple concept: Shit happens. ~ Jim Butcher,

40:The whirligig featured a drummer, a trumpet player, a clarinetist, and a man with a trombone. It was a leap beyond the spouting whale, with more figures, a six-bladed propeller, and a much more complex system of rods and pivots that made the instruments dip and rise as if the musicians were marching. ~ Paul Fleischman,

41:What seems interesting to me is to reproduce in the figurative representation of an object the whole complex system of impressions we receive in the normal course of everyday life, the way this affects our feelings and the shape it takes in our memory; and it is to this that I have always applied myself. ~ Jean Dubuffet,

42:...intelligence nowadays is all about application: it is the ability 'to take in a complex system and learn its rules on the fly'. For young people, this ability is second nature. Any fool knows that, if you need a new and unfamiliar VCR programmed in a hurry, you commandeer any small passing child to do it. ~ Lynne Truss,

43:There is a growing recognition that the death penalty simply can't work. It's a complex system that arbitrarily selects defendants for death and creates more stress and appeals, even as it is plagued by serious error. Each new exoneration reminds us of the unacceptable possibility of wrongful execution. ~ Robert Cecil Martin,

44:And in my moments of greatest fear I feel, physically feel, as if tiny trains were travelling through my soul, pulled along on a string, and that my guts had become a complex system of glass and ivory wheels, tiny multicoloured discs, rusty clock hands – everything spins madly, like some aimless clockwork mechanism. ~ M rio de S Carneiro,

45:It turns out, as shown by Karsenty and others who have since embarked on the line of research, that the reverse is also largely true: loss of bone density and degradation of the health of the bones also causes aging, diabetes, and, for males, loss of fertility and sexual function. We just cannot isolate any causal relationship in a complex system. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,

46:The first seven years of the Joshua tree's life, it's just a vertical stem. No branches," she told me while we were hiking. "It takes years before it blossoms. And every branching stem stops growing after it blossoms, so you've got this complex system of dead areas and new growth."
I used to think about that, sometimes, when I wondered what parts of her might still be alive. ~ Karen M McManus,

47:Implicit in the activist conception of government is the assumption that you can take the good things in a complex system for granted, and just improve the things that are not so good. What is lacking in this conception is any sense that a society, an institution, or even a single human being, is an intricate system of fragile inter-relationships, whose complexities are little understood and easily destabilized. ~ Thomas Sowell,

48:critical point analysis.11 (Critical point analysis is a technique derived from the fact that in any highly complex system there is a specific, critical point at which the smallest input will result in the greatest change. For instance, the great gears of a windmill can be halted by lightly touching the right escape mechanism, and it is possible to paralyze a giant locomotive if you know exactly where to put your finger.) ~ David R Hawkins,

49:My mitochondria comprise a very large proportion of me. I cannot do the calculation, but I suppose there is almost as much of them in sheer dry bulk as there is the rest of me. Looked at in this way, I could be taken for a very large, motile colony of respiring bacteria, operating a complex system of nuclei, microtubules, and neurons for the pleasure and sustenance of their families, and running, at the moment, a typewriter. ~ Lewis Thomas,

50:The real thing we tried to look at is what happens to a society when the state is absent. At that point, the state had really withdrawn from Lagos; the city was left to its own devices, both in terms of money and services. That, by definition, created an unbelievable proliferation of independent agency: each citizen needed to take, in any day, maybe 400 or 500 independent decisions on how to survive that extremely complex system. ~ Rem Koolhaas,

51:Monogamy operates differently at different levels of differentiation. I didn’t know this until I saw it with my clients. We think of monogamy as an ironclad agreement containing no ifs, ands, or buts. But it is really a complex system with rules and dynamics of its own. Differentiation changes monogamy by returning genital ownership to each partner. Emotional Siamese twins act as if their partner’s genitals are communal property. ~ David Schnarch,

52:One example of an amazingly complicated complex system that is nonetheless “adaptive” is seen in what is called the paradox of New York City. Consider: millions live with only a few days of food stocked in restaurants and markets and even homes. Yet every day enough replacement food is distributed and made available to make the whole thing work—all without any centralized control or master plan. ~ Tyler Volk, Metapatterns - Across Space, Time, and Mind,

53:Basically, for any complex to be sustainable needs to have a balance between two factors: resilience and efficiency. These two factors can be calculated from the structure of the network that is involved in a complex system. A resilient, efficient system needs to be diverse and interconnected. On the other hand, diversity and interconnectivity decrease efficiency. Therefore, the key is an appropriate balance between efficiency and resilience. ~ Bernard Lietaer,

54:Mother Nature is not a living being, but she is a biogeophysical, rationally functioning, complex system of oceans, atmosphere, forests, rivers, soils, plants, and animals that has evolved on Planet Earth since the first hints of life emerged. She has survived the worst of times and thrived in the best of them for nearly four billion years by learning to absorb endless shocks, climate changes, surprises, and even an asteroid or two. That alone makes Mother Nature an important mentor. ~ Thomas L Friedman,

55:A powerful AI system tasked with ensuring your safety might imprison you at home. If you asked for happiness, it might hook you up to a life support and ceaselessly stimulate your brain's pleasure centers. If you don't provide the AI with a very big library of preferred behaviors or an ironclad means for it to deduce what behavior you prefer, you'll be stuck with whatever it comes up with. And since it's a highly complex system, you may never understand it well enough to make sure you've got it right. ~ James Barrat,

56:Brad Werner, a complex-systems researcher (which sounds like a job that would be hard to monitor for a supervisor—“Oy, Werner, are you researching that complex system or are you dickin’ around on your phone?”) speaking at last year’s American Geophysical Union (which must surely use pornography on the invitation to have any hope of luring trade), said that our planet is fucked. He researched our complex system—the earth, I suppose, is a complex system—and concluded that we, the people who live on it, are fucked. I’m not even joking: His ~ Russell Brand,

57:If you have a truly complex system," he says, "then the exact patterns are not repeatable. And yet there are themes that are recognizable. In history, for example, you can talk about 'revolutions,' even though one revolution might be quite different from another. So we assign metaphors. It turns out that an awful lot of policy-making has to do with finding the appropriate metaphor. Conversely, bad policy-making almost always involves finding inappropriate metaphors. For example, it may not be appropriate to think about a drug 'war,' with guns and assaults. ~ M Mitchell Waldrop,

58:No revolution can ever succeed as a factor of liberation unless the MEANS used to further it be identical in spirit and tendency with the PURPOSES to be achieved. Revolution is the negation of the existing, a violent protest against man's inhumanity to man with all the thousand and one slaveries it involves. It is the destroyer of dominant values upon which a complex system of injustice, oppression, and wrong has been built up by ignorance and brutality. It is the herald of NEW VALUES, ushering in a transformation of the basic relations of man to man, and of man to society. ~ Emma Goldman,

59:We have also obtained a glimpse of another crucial idea about languages and program design. This is the approach of statified design, the notion that a complex system should be structured as a sequence of levels that are described using a sequence of languages. Each level is constructed by combining parts that are regarded as primitive at that level, and the parts constructed at each level are used as primitives at the next level. The language used at each level of a stratified design has primitives, means of combination, and means of abstraction appropriate to that level of detail. ~ Hal Abelson,

60:Modern states with democratic forms of government dispense with hereditary leviathans, but they have not found a way to dispense with inequalities of wealth and power backed up by an enormously complex system of criminal justice. Yet for 30,000 years after takeoff, life went on without kings, queens, prime ministers, presidents, parliaments, congresses, cabinets, governors, mayors, police officers, sheriffs, marshals, generals, lawyers, bailiffs, judges, district attorneys, court clerks, patrol cars, paddy wagons, jails, and penitentiaries. How did our ancestors manage to leave home without them? ~ John Zerzan,

61:Of special interest are ecosystems whose evolution may be observed within long periods of time. The biomass, i.e. the mass of all life in the system, increases, usually also the primary production from direct photosynthesis (plants) as well. But these two factors do not increase at the same ratio. With the formation of a complex system of trophic levels the energy derived from the same primary production may be handed on from level to level, even if only to a relatively small extent. The total system’s efficiency of energy utilization increases and so does the total energy stored in the system. ~ Erich Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe,

62:Billy nods and turns to the window. He knows he will never see Faison again, but how can he know? How does anyone ever know anything—the past is a fog that breathes out ghost after ghost, the present a freeway thunder run at 90 mph, which makes the future the ultimate black hole of futile speculation. And yet he knows, at least he thinks he knows, he feels it seeded in the purest certainty of his grief as he finds his seat belt and snaps it shut, that snick like the final lock of a vast and complex system. He’s in. Bound for the war. Good-bye, good-bye, good night, I love you all. He sits back, closes his eyes, and tries to think about nothing as the limo takes them away. ~ Ben Fountain,

63:Basically, what I'm saying is not at all new to Eastern philosophy. It's never seen the world as anything else but a complex system. But it's a world view that, decade by decade, is becoming more important in the West-both in science and in the culture at large. Very, very slowly, there's been a gradual shift from an exploitative view of nature-man versus nature-to an approach that stresses the mutual accomodation of man and nature. What has happened is that we're beginning to lose our innocence, or naivete, about how the world works. As we begin to understand complex systems, we begin to understand that we're part of an ever-changing, interlocking, nonlinear, kaleidoscopic world. ~ M Mitchell Waldrop,

64:But unlike most physicists, Marcus eventually learned Lorenz's lesson, that a deterministic system can produce much more than just periodic behavior. He knew to look for wild disorder, and he knew that islands of structure could appear within the disorder. So he brought to the problem of the Great Red Spot an understanding that a complex system can give rise to turbulence and coherence at the same time. He could work within an emerging discipline that was creating its own tradition of using the computer as an experimental tool. And he was willing to think of himself as a new kind of scientist: not primarily an astronomer, not a fluid dynamicist, not an applied mathematician, but a specialist in chaos. ~ James Gleick,

65:A complex system, contrary to what people believe, does not require complicated systems and regulations and intricate policies. The simpler, the better. Complications lead to multiplicative chains of unanticipated effects. Because of opacity, an intervention leads to unforeseen consequences, followed by apologies about the “unforeseen” aspect of the consequences, then to another intervention to correct the secondary effects, leading to an explosive series of branching “unforeseen” responses, each one worse than the preceding one. Yet simplicity has been difficult to implement in modern life because it is against the spirit of a certain brand of people who seek sophistication so they can justify their profession. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,

66:The living cell is the most complex system of its size known to mankind. Its host of specialized molecules, many found nowhere else but within living material, are themselves already enormously complex. They execute a dance of exquisite fidelity, orchestrated with breathtaking precision. Vastly more elaborate than the most complicated ballet, the dance of life encompasses countless molecular performers in synergetic coordination. Yet this is a dance with no sign of a choreographer. No intelligent supervisor, no mystic force, no conscious controlling agency swings the molecules into place at the right time, chooses the appropriate players, closes the links, uncouples the partners, moves them on. The dance of life is spontaneous, self-sustaining, and self-creating. ~ Paul Davies,

67:We know that relatively minor sea-level rises could set off major ice-sheet breakups, and it has been suggested by Stephen Oppenheimer that the tremendous earthquakes caused by isostatic rebalancing at the end of the Ice Age could have stirred up 'mountain-topping superwaves' in the northern regions of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Other than Oppenheimer's own investigations, however, my impression is that while many brilliant individual scientists have studied individual post-glacial phenomena in great depth, very little has yet been done to investigate all these phenomena together as part of a complex system or to consider the effects on the earth and its human population of multiple, interacting cataclysms -- floods, lands subsiding into the sea, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions -- all occurring at the same time. ~ Graham Hancock,

68:Underpinning everything... are the laws of physics. These remarkably ingenious laws are able to permit matter to self-organize to the point where consciousness emerges in the cosmos—mind from matter—and the most striking product of the human mind is mathematics. This is the baffling thing. Mathematics is... produced by the human mind. Yet if we ask where mathematics works best, it is in areas like particle physics and astrophysics, areas of fundamental science that are very, very far removed from everyday affairs. ...at the opposite end of spectrum of complexity from the human brain. ...a product of the most complex system we know in nature, the human brain, finds a consonance with the underlying, simplest and most fundamental level, the basic building blocks that make up the world. ~ Paul Davies, Are We Alone?: Philosophical Implications of the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life (1995).,

69:But talent only functions when it’s supported by a tough, unyielding physical and mental focus. All it takes is one screw in your brain to come loose and fall off, or some connection in your body to break down, and your concentration vanishes, like the dew at dawn. A simple toothache, or stiff shoulders, and you can’t play the piano well. It’s true. I’ve actually experienced it. A single cavity, one aching shoulder, and the beautiful vision and sound I hoped to convey goes out the window. The human body’s that fragile. It’s a complex system that can be damaged by something very trivial, and in most cases once it’s damaged, it can’t easily be restored. A cavity or stiff shoulder you can get over, but there are a lot of things you can’t get past. If talent’s the foundation you rely on, and yet it’s so unreliable that you have no idea what’s going to happen to it the next minute, what meaning does it have? ~ Haruki Murakami,

70:The tradition has been to think that aging causes bone weakness (bones lose density, become more brittle), as if there was a one-way relationship possibly brought about by hormones (females start experiencing osteoporosis after menopause). It turns out, as shown by Karsenty and others who have since embarked on the line of research, that the reverse is also largely true: loss of bone density and degradation of the health of the bones also causes aging, diabetes, and, for males, loss of fertility and sexual function. We just cannot isolate any causal relationship in a complex system. Further, the story of the bones and the associated misunderstanding of interconnectedness illustrates how lack of stress (here, bones under a weight-bearing load) can cause aging, and how depriving stress-hungry antifragile systems of stressors brings a great deal of fragility which we will transport to political systems in Book II ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,

71:The mystery of life begins with the intricate web of interactions, integrating the millions of molecules within each organism. The enigma of the society starts with the convoluted structure of the social network. The unpredictability of economic processes is rooted in the unknown interaction map behind the mythical market. Therefore, networks are the prerequisite for describing any complex system, indicating that complexity theory must inevitably stand on the shoulders of network theory. It is tempting to step in the footsteps of some of my predecessors and predict whether and when we will tame complexity. If nothing else, such a prediction could serve as a benchmark to be disproven. Looking back at the speed with which we disentangled the networks around us after the discovery of scale-free networks, one thing is sure: Once we stumble across the right vision of complexity, it will take little to bring it to fruition. When that will happen is one of the mysteries that keeps many of us going. ~ Albert L szl Barab si,

72:The system begins to display something other than synchronicity, it begins to act as a unit, to have behaviors. And just as a study of the parts of a self-organized whole cannot give an idea of the larger whole’s nature, so too the study of the smaller parts’ behaviors cannot give an idea of the larger system’s behavior. As Camazine et al. note, “an emergent property cannot be understood simply by examining in isolation the properties of the system’s components. . . . Emergence refers to a process by which a system of interacting subunits acquires qualitatively new properties that cannot be understood as a simple addition of their individual contributions.”6 Or as systems researcher Yaneer Bar-Yam puts it, “A complex system is formed out of many components whose behavior is emergent, that is, the behavior of the system cannot be simply inferred from the behavior of its components. . . . Emergent properties cannot be studied by physically taking a system apart and looking at the parts (reductionism). ~ Stephen Harrod Buhner,

73:Instead, in our world, nature's contribution to development comes not by providing a finely detailed sketch of a finished product, but by providing a complex system of self-regulating recipes. Those recipes provide for many different things-from the construction of enzymes and structural proteins to the construction of motors, transporters, receptors, and regulatory proteins-and thus there is no single, easily characterizable genetic contribution to the mind. In the ongoing, everyday functioning of the brain, genes supervise the construction of neurotransmitters, the metabolism of glucose, and the maintenance of synapses. In early development, they help to lay down a rough draft, guiding the specialization and migration of cells as well as the initial pattern of wiring. In synaptic strengthening, genes are a vital participant in a mechanism by which experience can alter the wiring of the brain (thereby influencing the way that an organism interprets and responds to the environment). There are at least as many different genetic contributions to the mind and brain as there are genes; each contributes by regulating a different process. ~ Gary F Marcus,

74:From his earliest years Cincinnatus, by some strange and happy chance comprehending his danger, carefully managed to conceal a certain peculiarity. He was impervious to the rays of others, and therefore produced when off his guard a bizarre impression, as of a lone dark obstacle in the world of souls transparent to one other; he learned however to feign translucence, employing a complex system of optical illusions, as it were--but he had only to forget himself, to allow a momentary lapse in self control, in the manipulation of cunningly illuminated facets and angles at which he turned his soul, and immediately there was alarm. In the midst of the excitement of a game his coevals would suddenly forsake him, as if they had sensed that his lucid gaze and the azure of his temples were but a crafty deception and that actually Cincinnatus was opaque. Sometimes, in the midst of sudden silence, the teacher, in a chagrined perplexity, would gather up all the reserves of skin around his eyes, gaze at him for a long while and finally say: "What is wrong with you, Cincinnatus?" Then Cincinnatus would take hold of himself, and, clutching his own self to his breast, would remove that self to a safe place. ~ Vladimir Nabokov,

75:When these accidents affect our customers, we seek to understand why it happened. The root cause is often deemed to be human error, and the all too common management response is to “name, blame, and shame” the person who caused the problem.† And, either subtly or explicitly, management hints that the person guilty of committing the error will be punished. They then create more processes and approvals to prevent the error from happening again. Dr. Sidney Dekker, who codified some of the key elements of safety culture and coined the term just culture, wrote, “Responses to incidents and accidents that are seen as unjust can impede safety investigations, promote fear rather than mindfulness in people who do safety-critical work, make organizations more bureaucratic rather than more careful, and cultivate professional secrecy, evasion, and self-protection.” These issues are especially problematic in the technology value stream—our work is almost always performed within a complex system, and how management chooses to react to failures and accidents leads to a culture of fear, which then makes it unlikely that problems and failure signals are ever reported. The result is that problems remain hidden until a catastrophe occurs. ~ Gene Kim,

76:Throughout history we read of Masters in every conceivable form of human endeavor describing a sensation of suddenly possessing heightened intellectual powers after years of immersion in their field. The great chess Master Bobby Fischer spoke of being able to think beyond the various moves of his pieces on the chessboard; after a while he could see “fields of forces” that allowed him to anticipate the entire direction of the match. For the pianist Glenn Gould, he no longer had to focus on notes or parts of the music he was playing, but instead saw the entire architecture of the piece and could express it. Albert Einstein suddenly was able to realize not just the answer to a problem, but a whole new way of looking at the universe, contained in a visual image he intuited. The inventor Thomas Edison spoke of a vision he had for illuminating an entire city with electric light, this complex system communicated to him through a single image. In all of these instances, these practitioners of various skills described a sensation of seeing more. They were suddenly able to grasp an entire situation through an image or an idea, or a combination of images and ideas. They experienced this power as intuition, or a fingertip feel. ~ Robert Greene,

77:Keep in mind a distinction that is being imported into more and more scientific thinking, that between ‘complicated’ and ‘complex’. ‘Complicated’ means a whole set of simple things working together to produce some effect, like a clock or an automobile: each of the components – brakes, engine, body-shell, steering – contributes to what the car does by doing its own thing, pretty well. There are some interactions, to be sure. When the engine is turning fast, it has a gyroscopic effect that makes the steering behave differently, and the gearbox affects how fast the engine is going at a particular car speed. To see human development as a kind of car assembly process, with the successive genetic blueprints ‘defining’ each new bit as we add them, is to see us as only complicated. A car being driven, however, is a complex system: each action it takes helps determine future actions and is dependent upon previous actions. It changes the rules for itself as it goes. So does a garden. As plants grow, they take nutrients from the soil, and this affects what else can grow there later. But they also rot down, adding nutrients, providing habitat for insects, grubs, hedgehogs … A mature garden has a very different dynamic from that of a new plot on a housing estate. Similarly, we change our own rules as we develop. ~ Terry Pratchett,

78:The great unanswered question is whether there exists some undiscovered organizing principle which complements the known laws of Nature and dictates the overall evolution of the Universe. To be a true addition to what we know of Nature's laws, this principle would need to differ from any laws of gravitation and particle physics that might emerge in final form from some Theory of Everything. It would not be specific to Universes but would govern the evolution of any complex system. True, its general notions ought to be tailored in some way to the notions which characterize the specific things that go on in an evolving universe-the clustering of matter into stars and galaxies, the conversion of matter into radiation-but it would also need to govern the invisible ways in which the gravitational field of the Universe can change. Any such discovery would be profoundly interesting because the Universe appears to be far more orderly than we have any right to expect. It has a tiny entropy level compared with the largest value that we could conceive of it possessing if we were to reorganize the observed matter into other configurations. This implies that the entropy level at the beginning of the expansion of the Universe must have been staggeringly small, which implies that the initial conditions were very special indeed. ~ John D Barrow,

79:In some ways Coleridge committed a form of artistic suicide attempting to solve the complicated mystery he saw in the flocking starlings. In a harrowing self-indictment he later described himself as a 'starling self-encaged, & always in the moult, & my whole note is, tomorrow & tomorrow & tomorrow.' Slowly losing confidence in himself as a poet, he attempted to become an all-knowing philosopher-king. He ignored the simpler images central to his life as a poet and attempted to create an equally complex system of philosophy that would hold it all in place. He eventually produced the Biographia Literaria, an immense tome, impressive in learning, thought and scholarship, but in my heretical opinion as an unrepentant lyric poet, a tragedy of wasted effort and a loss to all of us compared to the vital geniums of his early poetry.

This happens in a parallel fashion to many skilled managers who convince themselves that the organization's vision is their own vision. They suddenly find themselves in positions that are seen as rewards for rather than consummations of their skill; their natural abilities may not translate into the job they have been promoted to, nor may their interest, but because of the pressure of the career path, they may convince themselves into a phantom life under an overarching system that includes everything except their own desires. ~ David Whyte,

80:We can see how our world is, in many ways, becoming more complex, fast-paced, and unpredictable. As a result, the problems we face are getting more complicated as well, and (as in my thought experiment), we need longer and more elaborate sets of instructions for technologies and institutions that can effectively solve them. Or, to put it in terms of complexity theory: the greater complexity of our world requires greater complexity in our technologies and institutions. As the American complexity theorist Yaneer Bar-Yam writes, “We must understand that … human systems exist within an environment that places demands upon them. If the complexity of these demands exceeds the complexity of a system, the system will fail. Thus, those systems that survive must have a complexity sufficiently large to respond to the complexity of environmental demands.”3 The human brain is the ultimate source of the ideas, ingenuity, and sets of instructions we need to cope with this greater complexity. And it is, itself, a vastly complex system. Through a sophisticated set of senses, the brain receives a flood of information about the body’s internal state and its external environment. It interprets this information and commands appropriate responses. Although we think of the brain primarily in terms of its role in conscious thought and decision, it also handles a wide array of routine and unconscious tasks, from guiding motor activity to regulating visceral, endocrine, and somatic functions.4 ~ Thomas Homer Dixon,

81:If we want to solve problems effectively...we must keep in mind not only many features but also the influences among them. Complexity is the label we will give to the existence of many interdependent variables in a given system. The more variables and the greater their interdependence, the greater the system's complexity. Great complexity places high demands on a planner's capacity to gather information, integrate findings, and design effective actions. The links between the variables oblige us to attend to a great many features simultaneously, and that, concomitantly, makes it impossible for us to undertake only one action in a complex system.

A system of variables is "interrelated" if an action that affects or meant to affect one part of the system will also affect other parts of it. Interrelatedness guarantees that an action aimed at one variable will have side effects and long-term repercussions. A large number of variables will make it easy to overlook them.

We might think of complexity could be regarded as an objective attribute of systems. We might even think we could assign a numerical value to it, making it, for instance, the product of the number of features times the number of interrelationships. If a system had ten variables and five links between them, then its "complexity quotient", measured in this way would be fifty. If there are no links, its complexity quotient would be zero. Such attempts to measure the complexity of a system have in fact been made.

Complexity is not an objective factor but a subjective one. Supersignals reduce complexity, collapsing a number of features into one. Consequently, complexity must be understood in terms of a specific individual and his or her supply of supersignals. We learn supersignals from experience, and our supply can differ greatly from another individual's. Therefore there can be no objective measure of complexity. ~ Dietrich D rner,

82:Complex systems are more spontaneous, more disorderly, more alive than that. At the same time, however, their peculiar dynamism is also a far cry from the weirdly unpredictable gyrations known as chaos. In the past two decades, chaos theory has shaken science to its foundations with the realization that very simple dynamical rules can give rise to extraordinarily intricate behavior; witness the endlessly detailed beauty of fractals, or the foaming turbulence of a river. And yet chaos by itself doesn't explain the structure, the coherence, the self-organizing cohesiveness of complex systems. Instead, all these complex systems have somehow acquired the ability to bring order and chaos into a special kind of balance. This balance point—often called the edge of chaos—is were the components of a system never quite lock into place, and yet never quite dissolve into turbulence, either. The edge of chaos is where life has enough stability to sustain itself and enough creativity to deserve the name of life. The edge of chaos is where new ideas and innovative genotypes are forever nibbling away at the edges of the status quo, and where even the most entrenched old guard will eventually be overthrown. The edge of chaos is where centuries of slavery and segregation suddenly give way to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s; where seventy years of Soviet communism suddenly give way to political turmoil and ferment; where eons of evolutionary stability suddenly give way to wholesale species transformation. The edge of chaos is the constantly shifting battle zone between stagnation and anarchy, the one place where a complex system can be spontaneous, adaptive, and alive. Complexity, adaptation, upheavals at the edge of chaos—these common themes are so striking that a growing number of scientists are convinced that there is more here than just a series of nice analogies. The movement's nerve center is a think tank known as the Santa Fe Institute, which was founded in the mid-1980s and which was originally housed in a rented convent in the midst of ~ M Mitchell Waldrop,

83:Can the trees and flowers which we see all around us at all times have themselves formed such perfect systems as to bring about a phenomenon such as photosynthesis, some parts of which are still not fully understood, in their own bodies? Did plants choose to use carbon dioxide (CO2), of the gases in the air, to produce food? Did they themselves determine the amount of CO2 they would use? Could plants have designed those mechanisms which make up the root system and which enable them to take the materials necessary for photosynthesis from the soil? Did plants bring about a transport system where different types of tubes are used for transporting nutrients and water? As ever, defenders of the theory of evolution searching for an answer
16
The solar energy trapped by the chlorophyll in the leaf, carbon-dioxide in the air, and water in the plant go through various processes and are used to produce glucose and oxygen. These complex processes do not take place in a factory, but in special structures like those in the leaf in the picture, and which measure only one thousandth of a millimeter across.
Sunlight
Chlorophyll
Glucose
6H2O Water
Light
Chlorophyll
Carbon dioxide + Water
Glucose + Oxygen
6CO2 Carbon dioxide
6O2 Oxygen
C6 H12O 6
to the question of how plants emerged have resorted to "chance" as their only re m e d y. They have claimed that from one species of plant which came about by chance, an infinite variety of plants have emerged, again by chance, and that features such as smell, taste, and colour, particular to each species, again came about by chance. But they have been unable to give any scientific proof of these claims. Evolutionists explain moss turning into a strawberry plant, or a poplar, or a rose bush, by saying that conditions brought about by chance differentiated them. Whereas when just one plant cell is observed, a system so complex will be seen as could not have come about by minute changes over time. This complex system and other mechanisms in plants definitively disprove the coincidence scenarios put forward as evolutionist logic. In this situation just one result emerges. ~ Harun Yahya,

84:We see three men standing around a vat of vinegar. Each has dipped his finger into the vinegar and has tasted it. The expression on each man's face shows his individual reaction. Since the painting is allegorical, we are to understand that these are no ordinary vinegar tasters, but are instead representatives of the "Three Teachings" of China, and that the vinegar they are sampling represents the Essence of Life. The three masters are K'ung Fu-tse (Confucius), Buddha, and Lao-tse, author of the oldest existing book of Taoism. The first has a sour look on his face, the second wears a bitter expression, but the third man is smiling.

To Kung Fu-tse (kung FOOdsuh), life seemed rather sour. He believed that the present was out step with the past, and that the government of man on earth was out of harmony with the Way of Heaven, the government of, the universe. Therefore, he emphasized reverence for the Ancestors, as well as for the ancient rituals and ceremonies in which the emperor, as the Son of Heaven, acted as intermediary between limitless heaven and limited earth. Under Confucianism, the use of precisely measured court music, prescribed steps, actions, and phrases all added up to an extremely complex system of rituals, each used for a particular purpose at a particular time. A saying was recorded about K'ung Fu-tse: "If the mat was not straight, the Master would not sit." This ought to give an indication of the extent to which things were carried out under Confucianism.

To Buddha, the second figure in the painting, life on earth was bitter, filled with attachments and desires that led to suffering. The world was seen as a setter of traps, a generator of illusions, a revolving wheel of pain for all creatures. In order to find peace, the Buddhist considered it necessary to transcend "the world of dust" and reach Nirvana, literally a state of "no wind." Although the essentially optimistic attitude of the Chinese altered Buddhism considerably after it was brought in from its native India, the devout Buddhist often saw the way to Nirvana interrupted all the same by the bitter wind of everyday existence.

To Lao-tse (LAOdsuh), the harmony that naturally existed between heaven and earth from the very beginning could be found by anyone at any time, but not by following the rules of the Confucianists. As he stated in his Tao To Ching (DAO DEH JEENG), the "Tao Virtue Book," earth was in essence a reflection of heaven, run by the same laws - not by the laws of men. These laws affected not only the spinning of distant planets, but the activities of the birds in the forest and the fish in the sea. According to Lao-tse, the more man interfered with the natural balance produced and governed by the universal laws, the further away the harmony retreated into the distance. The more forcing, the more trouble. Whether heavy or fight, wet or dry, fast or slow, everything had its own nature already within it, which could not be violated without causing difficulties. When abstract and arbitrary rules were imposed from the outside, struggle was inevitable. Only then did life become sour.

To Lao-tse, the world was not a setter of traps but a teacher of valuable lessons. Its lessons needed to be learned, just as its laws needed to be followed; then all would go well. Rather than turn away from "the world of dust," Lao-tse advised others to "join the dust of the world." What he saw operating behind everything in heaven and earth he called Tao (DAO), "the Way."

A basic principle of Lao-tse's teaching was that this Way of the Universe could not be adequately described in words, and that it would be insulting both to its unlimited power and to the intelligent human mind to attempt to do so. Still, its nature could be understood, and those who cared the most about it, and the life from which it was inseparable, understood it best. ~ Benjamin Hoff,

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