Complex Systems Quotes

“There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless conquistadors. Indeed, we know of one highly advanced form of intelligence that evolved without this defect. They're called women.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The Syntellect Hypothesis which is the main focus of this book, as its title suggests, refers to a phase transition of a complex intelligent system to self-awareness of a living, conscious superorganism when intellectual synergy of its components reaches threshold complexity to become one supermind. This metamorphosis is associated with emergence of higher-order self-awareness and dimensionality of a new consciousness structure. As a bio-species merging with its advanced technology, human-machine civilization is now on the verge of the Syntellect Emergence, becoming one Global Mind.”
― Alex M. Vikoulov, The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution

“We deceive ourselves if we believe we can hold on to old models as ideologies whimper off to a shallow grave in prolonged agony of people, institutions and cultures.”
― Said Elias Dawlabani, MEMEnomics: The Next Generation Economic System

“Emergence of ever more complex structures seems to be programmed into the nature of our evolving cosmos.”
― Alex M. Vikoulov, The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution

“The repetitions were never quite exact. There was pattern, with disturbances. An orderly disorder.”
― James Glieck

“On a philosophical level, it struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you can’t say what it’s going to do next.”
― J. Doyne Farmer

“Implicitly, the mission of many twentieth-century scientists — biologists, neurologists, economists — has been to break their universes down into the simplest atoms that will obey scientific rules.”
― James Glieck

“The computer will still be unable to predict whether Princeton, New Jersey, will have sun or rain on a day one month away. At noon the spaces between the sensors will hide fluctuations that the computer will not know about, tiny deviations from the average. By 12:01, those fluctuations will already have created small errors one foot away. Soon the errors will have multiplied to the ten-foot scale, and so on up to the size of the globe.”
― James Glieck

“Had he stopped with the Butterfly Effect, an image of predictability giving way to pure randomness, then Lorenz would have produced no more than a piece of very bad news. But Lorenz saw more than randomness embedded in his weather model. He saw a fine geometrical structure, order masquerading as randomness.”
― James Glieck

“That was acceptable, his father told him: you can always try to solve a problem by proving that no solution exists.”
― James Glieck