Siri Hustvedt Quotes

The Web is now philosophical engineering. Physics and the Web are both about the relationship between the small and the large.

I believe all complicated phenomena can be explained by simpler scientific principles.

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

The world has become so complex that the idea of a power in which everything comes together and can be controlled in a centralized way is now erroneous.

Any study of a society shows that every solution creates a new situation which breeds its own new needs and problems, new demands.

Understand: any phenomenon in the world is by nature complex. The people you deal with are equally complex. Any action sets off a limitless chain of reactions. It is never so simple as A leads to B. B will lead to C, D and beyond.

Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge

Everything is deeply intertwingled.

Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal.

We could get together all over the world, all races, hold hands together, and hum to death, and try to move the moon where the sun is, move the sun where the moon is at, and send a little piece of a star down there and burn all our asses up. We could get into the science, and make bombs and all that stuff, but you still ain't gonna hit the supreme force or the power that put all this into motion.

And the whole is greater than the part.

Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has good reason to believe.

In no system which shows mental characteristics can any part have unilateral control over the whole. In other words, the mental characteristics of the system are imminent, not in some part, but in the system as a whole.

One of the key insights of the systems approach has been the realization that the network is a pattern that is common to all life. Wherever we see life, we see networks.

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

Unlike the position that exists in the physical sciences, in economics and other disciplines that deal with essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones.

One of the most insidious and nefarious properties of scientific models is their tendency to take over, and sometimes supplant, reality.

In my judgment an organic machine new to nature never arises, since it always contains an infinity of organs so that it can express, in its own way, the whole universe; indeed, it always contains all past and present times.

Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose out of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain. It postulates the difficult to explain, and leaves it at that.

"True science has no belief," says Dr. Fenwick, in Bulwer-Lytton's 'Strange Story;' "true science knows but three states of mind: denial, conviction, and the vast interval between the two, which is not belief, but the suspension of judgment." Such, perhaps, was true science in Dr. Fenwick's days. But the true science of our modern times proceeds otherwise; it either denies point-blank, without any preliminary investigation, or sits in the interim, between denial and conviction, and, dictionary in hand, invents new Graeco-Latin appellations for non-existing kinds of hysteria!

Let us consider under what disadvantages Science has hitherto labored before we pronounce thus confidently on her progress.

Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts.

Everything is both simpler than we can imagine and more entangled than we can conceive.

Before the 1940s the terms "system" and "systems thinking" had been used by several scientists, but it was Bertalanffy's concepts of an open system and a general systems theory that established systems thinking as a major scientific movement