Walter Rudolf Hess Quotes

In a broad systems sense, an organism's environment is indistinguishable from the organism itself.

The feature of living matter that most demands explanation is that it is almost unimaginably complicated in directions that convey a powerful illusion of deliberate design.

It's about the connecting force from form to form. It's the toe bone connecting to the shoulder bone. It's the bacterial kick of life force, something growing out of nothing, forming itself out of something else. Form never stops. And form is always environmental.

Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form; but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them.

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

The more we understand what happens in living cells, the more incredibly powerful you realize things can be when they work from the bottom up, by interaction of one molecule and another.

When a system is in turbulence, the turbulence is not just out there in the environment, but is a part of the organization or organism that you are looking at.

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.

There are living systems; there is no'living matter'.

The phenomenon of emergence takes place at critical points of instability that arise from fluctuations in the environment, amplified by feedback loops. Emergence results in the creation of novelty, and this novelty is often qualitatively different from the phenomenon out of which it emerged.

I, and all the complex things around me, exist only because many things were assembled in a very precise way. The 'emergent' properties are not magical. They are really there and eventually they may start re-arranging the environments that generated them. But they don't exist 'in' the bits and pieces that made them; they emerge from the arrangement of those bits and pieces in very precise ways. And that is also true of the emergent entities known as "you" and "me".

To describe an animal as a physico-chemical system of extreme complexityis no doubt perfectly correct, except that it misses out on the animalness of the animal.

Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.

A self that is very robust, that has many, many levels of organization, from simple to complex, and that functions as a sort of witness to what is going on in our organisms.

We get to the point then with modern science where you could almost say that modern science is the art of describing those systems so crude in their structure that they are not subject to temporal variables.

The Gaian process is more than a process. It is s self-reflecting entelechy of some sort.

Organisms are not billiard balls, propelled by simple and measurable external forces to predictable new positions on life's pool table. Sufficiently complex systems have greater richness. Organisms have a history that constrains their future in myriad, subtle ways.

The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much.

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.

On one planet [earth], and possibly only one planet in the entire universe, molecules that would normally make nothing more complicated than a chunk of rock, gather themselves together into chunks of rock-sized matter of such staggering complexity that they are capable of running, jumping, swimming, flying, seeing, hearing, capturing and eating other such animated chunks of complexity; capable in some cases of thinking and feeling, and falling in love with yet other chunks of complex matter.

Living things have no inertia, and tend to no equilibrium.

There are living systems; there is no living "matter." No substance, no single molecule, extracted and isolated from a living being possess, of its own, the aforementioned paradoxical properties. They are present in living systems only; that is to say, nowhere below the level of the cell.

To a physicist life looks nothing short of a miracle. It's just amazing what living things can do.

What popped up more than that was the realization that I made as an adult that the world is this incredibly complex, layered, and mysterious place and if you stop and think about it the human cell is literally more complex than a fleet of 747s.