Emergent Behavior Quotes

Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered

Life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation -- it is part of the equation.

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

Homunculi are bogeymen only if they duplicate entire the talents they are rung in to explain. If one can get a team or committee of relatively ignorant, narrow-minded, blind homunculi to produce the intelligent behaviour of the whole, this is progress.

In play, the child is always behaving beyond his age, above his usual everyday behaviour; in play he is, as it were, a head above himself. Play contains in a concentrated form, as in the focus of a magnifying glass, all developmental tendencies; it is as if the child tries to jump above his usual level.

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.

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

I think the next [21st] century will be the century of complexity. We have already discovered the basic laws that govern matter and understand all the normal situations. We don't know how the laws fit together, and what happens under extreme conditions. But I expect we will find a complete unified theory sometime this century. The is no limit to the complexity that we can build using those basic laws.

Nature doesn't feel compelled to stick to a mathematically precise algorithm; in fact, nature probably can't stick to an algorithm.

A little-known truth: Every aspect of the world is fundamentally unpredictable. Computer scientists have long since proved this.

Globalization is a bottom-up phenomenon with all actions initiated by milions of individuals, the sum total of which is globalization. No one is in charge, and no one can anticipate what the sum of all the individual initiatives will be before the result manifest. A global economy can only be the result of spontaneous order.

Chaos, if it does not harden into a pattern of disorder, may be more fruitful than a regularity too easily accepted and a success too easily achieved.

Economics is concerned with what emerges, not what anyone intended.

Information is just simply bootstrapping itself to higher and higher levels of self-reflection and self-coordination using whatever means are necessary.

Most new movements start this way: hundreds or thousands of individuals and groups, working in different fields and different locations, start thinking about change using a common language, without necessarily recognizing those shared values. You just start following your own vector, propelled along by people in your immediate vicinity. And then one day, you look up and realize that all those individual trajectories have turned into a wave.

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

That order generated without design can far outstrip plans men consciously contrive.

Good order results spontaneously when things are let alone

It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.

Sinnes are not knowne till they bee acted.

I've probably overused this analogy of a flock of birds moving around an object in flight, but, in reality, it's so simple, real time communication of individuals that allow for this super organism type of organism to happen.

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.

When systems come to be far from points of equilibrium, they reach bifurcation points, wherein multiple, as opposed to unique, solutions, to instability become possible.

Can true function arise from basic dysfunction?

Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism.