Douglas Hofstadter Quotes

Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.

Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized.

Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered

Life is chaotic and unpredictable. If a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world, it could cause people at the opposite end of the globe to watch a Discovery Channel special on butterflies

You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.

The current understanding was that it was impossible to predict how something would evolve because it was a very turbulent environment full of things interacting with each other.

Most of nature is inherently chaotic. It's not rigidly determined in the old sense. It's not rigidly predictable.

The world is neither running down nor deterministic, and a strict division of order versus chaos is just wrong.

We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.

A view of nature as dense and nonlinear is at the core of our contemporary science. Process and order emerge subtly.

Whenever you have dynamic interactions between 300 million people and the American economy acting in really complex ways, that introduces a degree of almost chaos theory to the system, in a literal sense.

And so from that, I've always been fascinated with the idea that complexity can come out of such simplicity.

They believed that prediction was just a function of keeping track of things. If you knew enough, you could predict anything. That's been cherished scientific belief since Newton.' And?' Chaos theory throws it right out the window.

When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large scientific method in most cases fails. One need only think of the weather, in which case the prediction even for a few days ahead is impossible.

I think the next century will be the century of complexity.

There are only patterns. Patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns, patterns hidden by patterns, patterns within patterns.

There is no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close.

Most of the time-- 99 percent of the time-- you just don't know how and why the threads are looped together, and that's okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes.

At the core of every ordered system, whether a family or a factory, is chaos. But in the whirl of every chaos lies a strange order, waiting to be found.

If you look hard enough, chaos turns into order the way letters turn into words.

Disorder can play a critical role in giving birth to new, higher forms of order.

Orderliness by itself is not sufficient to account for the nature of organized systems in general or for those created by man in particular. Mere orderliness leads to increasing impoverishment and finally to the lowest possible level of structure, no longer clearly distinguishable from chaos, which is the absence of order. A counterprinciple is needed, to which orderliness is secondary. It must supply what is to be ordered.

Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.

To some physicists chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being.

I have been interested in phenomena involving complexity, diversity and evolution since I was a young boy.