“nonlinear interactions almost always make the behavior of the aggregate more complicated than would be predicted by summing or averaging.”

— John H. Holland

Source: Hidden Order - How Adaptation Builds Complexity (1995), Ch 1. Basic Elements, p. 23

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John H. Holland 19

US university professor 1929–2015

John H. Holland (1929–2015) US university professor

Source: Hidden Order - How Adaptation Builds Complexity (1995), Ch 1. Basic Elements, p. 31

“There are progressive degrees of synergy, called synergy-of-synergies, which are complexes of behavior aggregates holistically unpredicted by the separate behaviors of any of their subcomplex components. Any subcomplex aggregate is only a component aggregation of an even greater event aggregation whose comprehensive behaviors are never predicted by the component aggregates alone. There is a synergetic progression in Universe—a hierarchy of total complex behaviors entirely unpredicted by their successive subcomplexes' behaviors. It is manifest that Universe is the maximum synergy-of-synergies, being utterly unpredicted by any of its parts.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

150.01 http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s01/p5000.html
1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), "Synergy" onwards

“There's a reason for poetry… Poetry is a very nonlinear use of language, where the meaning is more than just the sum of the parts. And science requires that it be nothing more than the sum of the parts. And just the fact that there's stuff to explain out there that's more than the sum of the parts means that the traditional approach, just characterizing the parts and the relations, is not going to be adequate for capturing the essence of many systems that you would like to be able to do. That's not to say that there isn't a way to do it in a more scientific way than poetry, but I just like the feeling that culturally there's going to be more of something like poetry in the future of science.”

Christopher Langton (1949) American computer scientist

Christopher Langton, as quoted by John Horgan, The End of Science (1996) p. 201.

“What this book is about is a kind of analysis that is characteristic of a large part of the social sciences, especially the more theoretical part. That kind of analysis explores the relation between the behavior of individuals who compromise some social aggregate, and the characteristics of the aggregate.These situations, in which people's behavior or people's choices depend on the behavior or choices of other people, are the ones that usually don't permit any simple summation or extrapolation of the aggregates. To make that connection we usually have to look at the system of interaction between individuals and their environment, that is, between individuals and other individuals or between individuals and the collectivity.”

Thomas C. Schelling (1921–2016) American economist

Micromotives and Microbehavior (1978).

“Not what we would, but what we must
Makes up the sum of living;
Heaven is both more and less than just
In taking and in giving.”

Richard Henry Stoddard (1825–1903) American poet

The Country Life.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“It will make it more complicated and costly than today for all of us. This is the essence of Brexit.”

Donald Tusk (1957) Polish politician, current President of the European Council

Brexit means drifting apart but we don't want to build a wall - Tusk https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-43314976 BBC News (7 March 2018)
2011, 2018

“Intervening variables are essential to psychological analysis because without them our description of economic behavior would remain incomplete, our understanding of behavior limited, and our predictions of future behavior incorrect.”

George Katona (1901–1981) American psychologist

George Katona (1951). Psychological Analysis of Economic Behavior. McGraw-Hill, New York. p. 31

“I maintain that learned orienting interactions, coupled with some mode of behavior that allowed for an independent recursive expansion of the domain of interactions of the organism, such as social life… and/or tool making and use, must have offered a selective basis for the evolution of the orienting behavior that in hominids led to our present-day languages.”

Humberto Maturana (1928) Chilean biologist and philosopher

Source: Biology of Cognition (1970), p. 31.

“Synergy means behavior of integral, aggregate, whole systems unpredicted by behaviors of any of their components or subassemblies of their components taken separately from the whole.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

102.00 http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s01/p0100.html
1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), "Synergy" onwards

“It starts at the bottom, viewing an organism as a large population of simple machines, and works upwards synthetically from there — constructing large aggregates of simple, rule-governed objects which interact with one another nonlinearly in the support of life-like, global dynamics. The ‘key' concept in AL is emergent behavior.”

Christopher Langton (1949) American computer scientist

Source: Artificial Life (1989), p.2

“nonlinear interactions almost always make the behavior of the aggregate more complicated than would be predicted by summing or averaging.”

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John H. Holland 19

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