Emergent Complexity Quotes

A formula can be very simple, and create a universe of bottomless complexity.

I believe the evidence strongly supports common descent. But the root question remains unanswered: What has caused complex systems to form?

I don't know how to stop it, there was never any intent to write a programming language [...] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way.

This is a general law of the universe, overlooked by science, that out of complexity emerges greater complexity. We could almost say that the universe, nature, is a novelty-conserving, or complexity-conserving engine.

Such an emphasis on the immanence of God as Creator in, with, and under the natural processes of the world unveiled by the sciences is certainly in accord with all that the sciences have revealed since those debates of the nineteenth century.

A single thread of self generation ties the cosmos, the bios, and the technos together into one creation. Humans are not the culmination of this trajectory but an intermediary, smack in the middle between the born and the made... The arc of complexity and open-ended creation in the last four billion years is nothing compared to what lies ahead.

You have to watch out with my plays. They're like yeast. You think they're one thing, then all of a sudden subtext gets to working.

Evolution is a process of creating patterns of increasing order....I believe that it's the evolution of patterns that constitutes the ultimate story of our world. Evolution works through indirection: each stage or epoch uses the information-processing methods of the previous epoch to create the next.

My take is that the kind of complexity which says we can always generate complexity from simple interactions following for example rules.

What is unusual about Earth is that language, literally, has become alive. It has infested matter. It is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us.

The universe is a self-organizing, intelligent, creative, trial-and-error learning, participatory, interactive, non-locally interconnected and evolving system.

When you can dump a load of bricks on a corner lot, and let me watch them arrange themselves into a house - when you can empty a handful of springs and wheels and screws on my desk, and let me see them gather themselves together into a watch - it will be easier for me to believe that all these thousands of worlds could have been created, balanced, and set to moving in their separate orbits, all without any directing intelligence at all.

If it takes several billion years to develop the building blocks which you need, like RNA and DNA, and then those can build multicellular life and then multicellular life can be honed with natural selection to a point where it becomes sentient like us, then at some point that sentient being can begin to manipulate the matter around it to build better sentient life.

We have a picture for how complexity arises, because if the universe is computationally capable, maybe we shouldn't be so surprised that things are so entirely out of control.