Quotes about complexity
page 4

“Political society wants things simple. Political scientists know them to be complex… One could argue that, in part, the leftist impulse is so conspicuous among the educated and well-to-do precisely because they are exposed to more information, and are accordingly forced to choose between living with the strains of complexity, or lapsing into simplism.”

Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927–2003) American politician

"The Schism in Black America" Public Interest (27), 1972.
Attributed

Education, Parting

“Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, The Quest for Peace and Justice (1964)
Context: Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live. So much of modern life can be summarized in that arresting dictum of the poet Thoreau: "Improved means to an unimproved end". This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern man. If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual "lag" must be eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul. When the "without" of man's nature subjugates the "within", dark storm clouds begin to form in the world.

Religion, Art, Literature, Problem

“Suffering from an evident complex of moral inferiority, a lot of journalists are interested in teaching the Pope how to do the Pope. Suffering from an evident complex of moral superiority, a lot of priests are interested in teaching journalists how to do journalism. But the worst of all are the journalist-priests.”

Leon Bertoletti (1971)

Complexes http://www.hicsuntleones.co.uk/2009/03/complexes.html, Hic Sunt Leones, 22/03/2009

Suffering

“Now, consciousness. That’s a fun thing, isn’t it? Product of an arms race between predators and prey. If you watch a cat creeping up on a mouse, you’ll be able to impute to the cat intentions that are most easily explained by the cat having a theory of mind concerning the mouse—an internal simulation of the mouse’s likely behavior when it notices the predator. Which way to run, for example. And the cat will use its theory of mind to optimize its attack strategy. Meanwhile, prey species that are complex enough to have a theory of mind are at a defensive advantage if they can anticipate a predator’s actions. Eventually this very mammalian arms race gave us a species of social ape that used its theory of mind to facilitate signaling—so the tribe could work collectively—and then reflexively, to simulate the individual’s own inner states. Put the two things together, signaling and introspective simulation, and you’ve got human-level consciousness, with language thrown in as a bonus—signaling that transmits information about internal states, not just crude signals such as ‘predator here’ or ‘food there.”

Charles Stross book Accelerando

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 9 (“Survivor”), p. 397

Food, Way, Behavior, Cats

“In the next five years, molecular Darwinism—the idea that Darwinian processes can produce complex molecular structures at the subcellular level—will be dead. When that happens, evolutionary biology will experience a crisis of confidence because evolutionary biology hinges on the evolution of the right molecules. I therefore foresee a Taliban-style collapse of Darwinism in the next ten years. Intelligent design will of course profit greatly from this.”

William A. Dembski (1960) American intelligent design advocate

" Measure of Design: A Conversation About the Past, Present & Future of Darwinism & Design http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=17-06-060-i#ixzz2elFILC9O|The" Touchstone, volume 17, issue 6, pages 60-65, at page 64 (July/August 2004). 2000s

Confidence, Intelligence, Idea, Dead

“Ki is a very complex word… and even more difficult to translate to westerners.”

Koichi Tohei (1920–2011) Japanese aikidoka

Aikido: The Co-Ordination of Mind and Body for Self-Defence (1966), as quoted in "What is Ki?" at Brisbane Aikido Republic http://www.aikidorepublic.com/aikiphysics/what-is-ki

“Meaning… is to be regarded as a complex of contextual relations, and phonetics, grammar, lexicography, and semantics each handles its own components of the complex in its appropriate context.”

John Rupert Firth (1890–1960) English linguist

Source: "The Technique of Semantics." 1935, p. 54

“Just observe what you are. What you are is the fact: the fact that you are jealous, anxious, envious, brutal, demanding, violent. That is what you are. Look at it, be aware; don’t shape it, don’t guide it, don’t deny it, don’t have opinions about it. By looking at it without condemnation, without judgement, without comparison, you observe; out of that observation, out of that awareness comes affection. Now, go still further. And you can do this in one flash. It can only be done in one flash — not first from the outside and then working further and deeper and deeper and deeper; it does not work that way, it is all done with one sweep, from the outermost to the most inward, to the innermost depth. Out of this, in this, there is attention — attention to the whistle of that train, the noise, the coughing, the way you are jerking your legs about; attention whereby you listen to what is said, you find out what is true and what is false in what is being said, and you do not set up the speaker as an authority. So this attention comes out of this extraordinarily complex existence of contradiction, misery and utter despair. And when the mind is attentive, it can then give focus, which then is quite a different thing; then it can concentrate but that concentration is not the concentration of exclusion. Then the mind can give attention to whatever it is doing, and that attention becomes much more efficient, much more vital, because you are taking everything in.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

Vol. XIV, p. 301
Posthumous publications, The Collected Works

Jerk, Way, Falseness, Training

“Joni's genius is that she creates chords that are ambiguous, chords that have two or more different roots. …Joni's music is as close to impressionist visual art as anything I've heard. …harmonic complexity born out of her strict insistence that the music not be anchored in a single harmonic interpretation.”

Daniel Levitin (1957) American psychologist

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

Art, Music

“As I said, I am grateful that you do take notes, but I do wish that you take them accurately and not misrepresent my rather complex theories and reasoning. After all, I am a philosopher and a student, and my thoughts may be complex. If at any time you don't follow me, please interrupt and I will explain further. I have to smile when some of the defendants say in court that they never read my books or works, because it is a reflection on their inabilities to follow a philosophic trend of thought, which to the common man is much too deep and profound. It is difficult for one to express important opinions and theories scientifically and at the same time use simple construction. However, I have always tried to be as lucid as possible and I never strived to make my work or writings beyond the comprehension of the normally intelligent man.”

Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946) German architect and politician

To Leon Goldensohn, June 8, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004.

Books, Smile, Intelligence, Time

“Organizational theory is one of the most vibrant areas in sociological research. Scholars from many subfields, (medical sociology, political sociology, social movements, education) have felt compelled to study organizational theory because of the obviously important role that complex organizations play in their empirical research. But scholars who do not do organizational theory are often struck at how arcane the debates are within organizational theory. They also think most of organizational theory is about firms and thus, the theory does not seem to have much application to other kinds of social arenas.”

Neil Fligstein (1951) American sociologist

Source: Organizations: Theoretical Debates and the Scope of Organizational Theory, 2001, p. 1

Education, Thinking, Study

“Now verse is more valuable than prose … for the simple reasons that its rhythms are faster and more highly organized than are those of prose, and so lend themselves to a greater complexity and compression of relationship, and that the intensity of this convention renders possible a greater intensity of other desirable conventions, such as poetic language and devices of rhetoric.”

Yvor Winters (1900–1968) American poet and literary critic

The Morality of Poetry
Primitivism and Decadence : A Study of American Experimental Poetry (1937)

“I am Ra. The Law of One, though beyond the limitations of name, as you call vibratory sound complexes, may be approximated by stating that all things are one, that there is no polarity, no right or wrong, no disharmony, but only identity. All is one, and that one is love/light, light/love, the Infinite Creator.”

Carla Rueckert

Session 4 http://www.lawofone.info/results.php?s=4#20 Quotations as Ra

Love, Law, Light

“Five hundred years ago, when faced with an eclipse, many of us would have believed it was the work of an angry god. But as we've unearthed the language of the Code, we've discovered that the apparent mysteries of our world can be understood without invoking the supernatural. And this for me is what's so remarkable. That despite the incredible complexity of the world we live in, it can all, ultimately, be explained by numbers. Just like the orbit of the planets, life too follows a pattern. And it can all be reduced to cause and effect. In the end, even the flip of a coin is determined by how fast it's spinning and how long it takes to hit the ground. The ultimate symbol of chance isn't random at all. It only appears that way. When we don't understand the Code, the only way we can make sense of our world is to make up stories. But the truth is far more extraordinary. Everything has mathematics at its heart. When everything is stripped away all that remains is the Code.”

Marcus du Sautoy (1965) British professor of mathematics

Conclusion in BBC's The Code, episode 3.

Life, God, Truth, World

“Ever since the Industrial Revolution, Western society has benefited from science, logic, and reductionism over intuition and holism. Psychologically and politically we would much rather assume that the cause of a problem is “out there,” rather than “in here.” It’s almost irresistible to blame something or someone else, to shift responsibility away from ourselves, and to look for the control knob, the product, the pill, the technical fix that will make a problem go away.
Serious problems have been solved by focusing on external agents — preventing smallpox, increasing food production, moving large weights and many people rapidly over long distances. Because they are embedded in larger systems, however, some of our “solutions” have created further problems. And some problems, those most rooted in the internal structure of complex systems, the real messes, have refused to go away.
Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless.
That is because they are intrinsically systems problems-undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it.”

Donella Meadows (1941–2001) American environmental scientist, teacher, and writer

Pages 3-4.
Thinking in systems: A Primer (2008)

Wisdom, Hunger, War, People

“The more complexity, the more unpredictability and therefore the more uncontrollability. You cannot control what you cannot predict.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Speech at the Libertopia Festival, San Diego, CA (August 30, 2013)

“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.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

Prologue, p. 16
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

Life, Way, History, Future

“I believe C++ instills fear in programmers, fear that the interaction of some details causes unpredictable results. Its unmanageable complexity has spawned more fear-preventing tools than any other language, but the solution should have been to create and use a language that does not overload the whole goddamn human brain with irrelevant details.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: Checking for Errors Before Run Time http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/41997404227dcc12 (Usenet article). Usenet articles, C++

Fear

“And C was good at something I like to call manipulexity, that is the manipulation of complex things. While shell was good at something else which I call whipuptitude, the aptitude for whipping things up.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

Public Talks, "Present Continuous - Future Perfect"

“A number of proposals have been advanced in recent years for the development of ‘general systems theory’ which, abstracting from properties peculiar to physical, biological, or social systems, would be applicable to all of them. We might well feel that, while the goal is laudable, systems of such diverse kinds could hardly be expected to have any nontrivial properties in common. Metaphor and analogy can be helpful, or they can be misleading. All depends on whether the similarities the metaphor captures are significant or superficial.
It may not be entirely vain, however, to search for common properties among diverse kinds of complex systems… The ideas of feedback and information provide a frame of reference for viewing a wide range of situations, just as do the ideas of evolution, of relativism, of axiomatic method, and of operationalism… hierarchic systems have some common properties that are independent of their specific content…”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

H.A. Simon (1962) "The Architecture of complexity." in: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. Vol 106, pp. 467-468. as cited in: "James Grier Miller (1916-)" at isss.org retrieved Nov 16, 2012.
1960s-1970s

Feeling, Search, Idea, Help

“I feel myself tied to life. To the immensity and complexity of life. Each painting is an impulse towards life.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

short quotes, 29 August 1972; pp. 92-93
1970's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970 - 1972)

Life, Feeling, Painting

“In order to constitute a complex system, the elements have to interact, and this interaction must be dynamic.”

Paul Cilliers (1956–2011) South African philosopher

Source: Complexity and Postmodernism (1998), p. 3; as cited in: Richard Andrews, ‎Erik Borg, ‎Stephen Boyd Davis (2012), The SAGE Handbook of Digital Dissertations and Theses, p. 129

“From Pythagoras to Boethius, when pure mathematics consisted of arithmetic and geometry while applied mathematics consisted of music and astronomy, mathematics could be characterized as the deductive study of 'such abstractions as quantities and their consequences, namely figures and so forth' (Acquinas ca. 1260). But since the emergence of abstract algebra it has become increasingly difficult to formulate a definition to cover the whole of the rich, complex and expanding domain of mathematics.”

George Frederick James Temple (1901–1992) British mathematician

100 Years of Mathematics: a Personal Viewpoint (1981)

Music, Mathematics, Study

“Things appear very complex but underneath they are quite simple. People complicate things by super-imposing their own viewpoints and advantages. If you remove all that is superfluous, most problems have very simple solutions.”

Koichi Tohei (1920–2011) Japanese aikidoka

26
Ki Sayings (2003)

People, Problem, Appearance

“Q: Radiohead fans tend to be extremely devoted to the band - they seem to connect with your music and ideals. What do you see as the major aspects of your music which people connect with so well?
A: To be really truthful I don't see it myself. When we play something new, we don't know how people will react. If I show an idea to the rest of the band I'm terrified if they will respond or not. They are the same. It always amazes me how complex this remains. There was a time when we could make the correct moves and the required response. And that was the time when the shine started to fade. Do people connect with our ideals? I dont know, surely encouraging people to make informed decisions is more useful? ignorance is the biggest problem isnt it? we are no purer than anyone else, no smarter. Equally we are not little rag dolls you play with but say nothing and go back in the box when you're finished with us.”

Thom Yorke (1968) English musician, philanthropist and singer-songwriter

source http://www.spinwithagrin.com/answer.asp?show=all

People, Truth, Music, Idea

“Chopin's mazurkas stand apart from the rest of the considerable production inspired by folk music which reaches into all forms of Romantic music; they cannot conveniently be classified with any of the other manifestations. They are not arrangements of popular folk tunes, … He uses only fragments of melody, Polish formulas, typical national rhythms, and he combines them in his own way with great originality. From early on, Chopin's mazurkas are much more elaborate than the few modest pieces employing mazurka rhythms by Chopin's Polish predecessors, and they soon became the occasion for some of the most complex and pretentious of Chopin's forms.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 7 : Chopin: From the Miniature Genre to the Sublime Style

Music, Way

“An important point is that the p-adic field, or respectively the real or complex field, corresponding to a prime ideal, plays exactly the role, in arithmetic, that the field of power series in the neighborhood of a point plays in the theory of functions: that is why one calls it a local field.”

André Weil (1906–1998) French mathematician

as translated by Martin H. Krieger "A 1940 letter of André Weil on analogy in mathematics." http://www.ams.org/notices/200503/fea-weil.pdf Notices of the AMS 52, no. 3 (2005) pp. 334–341, quote on p. 340

“It wasn’t so long ago that complexity thinking was synonymous with bottom-up computer simulation. However, in the past 5-10 years we have seen other threads emerge from this mathematically focused starting point that acknowledge the profound philosophical implications of complexity.”

Gerald Midgley (1960) New Zealand acaedmic

Kurt A. Richardson and Gerald Midgley (2007) " Systems theory and complexity: Part 4 http://kurtrichardson.com/publications/richardson_midgley.pdf" in: E:CO Issue Vol. 9 Nos. 1-2 2007 pp. xx–xx.

Mathematics, Thinking, Past

“Complexity has always been difficult to resolve and to understand. Evolutionary biologists were among the first scientists to recognize this problem, when they dug their way toward new theories about evolution. They discovered that matter does not lack purpose.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 129

Way, Understanding, Problem

“Symbols in general, and their main group,—words and concepts—in particular, perform a skeletal role for the socio-psychic content. … Consequently, the nature of ideologies is generally degressive, skeletal, with all the related features… So, beginning with the simplest example, the word not only secures the living content of experience, but also hampers the future development of experience by its conservatism. In science and philosophy, the customary but obsolete terminology is often a serious obstacle to progress, preventing the mastery of new material, and distorting the meaning of new facts which it cannot express fully and precisely. But this contradiction appears even more vividly in the development of more complicated complexes.”

Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928) Physician, philosopher, writer

Source: Essays in tektology, 1980, p. 195, as cited in: Arran Gare, " Aleksandr Bogdanov and systems theory http://aaltowebstudio.cloudapp.net/tangentialpoints/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2014/05/Arren-Gare-2000-Aleksandr-Bogdanov-and-Systems-Theory.pdf." Democracy & Nature 6.3 (2000): 341-359.

Nature, Appearance, Science, Future

“Women are complex, of course not more so than men, but in a different way that men cannot understand.”

Remy de Gourmont (1858–1915) French writer

A Virgin Heart (trans. 1922)

Women, Men, Way, Understanding

“That is all there is to it. No doubts, no discussion of earlier affairs, no to-ing and fro-ing, no physical experiment beyond a kiss, none of the complex voodoo which is thought necessary in even the most perfunctory modern novel to clap two ninnies together.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

Kiss

“We assert that it is possible to describe analytically any human function which can be reasonably defined in objective terms and we specifically include in such functions "thinking" insofar as that term is definable. If by "thinking" one means being able to do arithmetic, or play a good game of chess, or learn from experience, or make optimal decisions in exceedingly complex situations, then we assert that thinking can be described analytically. And there are two important corollaries: if It can be described analytically, it can be simulated; and if it can be simulated, it can be performed mechanically.”

Robert E. Machol (1917–1998) American systems engineer

Source: Information and Decision Processes (1960), p. viii-ix

Game, Optimism, Thinking, Decision

“Imaginary numbers are not imaginary and the theory of complex numbers is no more complex than the theory of real numbers. Complex numbers are as intuitive for an electronics engineer as -100 is for the average person with an overdrawn bank account.”

Mordechai Ben-Ari (1948) Israeli computer scientist

Source: Just a Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science (2005), Chapter 3, “Words Scientists Don’t Use: At Least Not the Way You Do” (p. 56)

Personality

“The Idea of the Priest is not, therefore, a primal force; it is an accidental complex of various forces, among which there is no essential connection. Their temporary union is due simply to the fact that they have happened to come into conflict in actual life, and have been compelled to compromise and join hands. The living, absolute Idea, which strove to make itself all-powerful, and changed the external form of life while remaining itself unchanged—this elemental Idea has died and passed away together with its Prophets. Nothing remains but its effects—the superficial impress that it has been able to leave on the complex form of life. It is this form of life, already outworn, that the Priests strive to perpetuate, for the sake of the Prophetic impress that it bears.”

Ahad Ha'am (1856–1927) Hebrew essayist and thinker

Source: Selected Essays (1904), "Priest and Prophet" (1893), p. 132

Life, Idea, Change

“Public officers, whose character and conduct remain open to debate and free discussion in the press, find their remedies for false accusations in actions under libel laws providing for redress and punishment, and not in proceedings to restrain the publication of newspapers and periodicals. The general principle that the constitutional guaranty of the liberty of the press gives immunity from previous restraints has been approved in many decisions under the provisions of state constitutions. The importance of this immunity has not lessened. While reckless assaults upon public men, and efforts to bring obloquy upon those who are endeavoring faithfully to discharge official duties, exert a baleful influence and deserve the severest condemnation in public opinion, it cannot be said that this abuse is greater, and it is believed to be less, than that which characterized the period in which our institutions took shape. Meanwhile, the administration of government has become more complex, the opportunities for malfeasance and corruption have multiplied, crime has grown to most serious proportions, and the danger of its protection by unfaithful officials and of the impairment of the fundamental security of life and property by criminal alliances and official neglect, emphasizes the primary need of a vigilant and courageous press, especially in great cities. The fact that the liberty of the press may be abused by miscreant purveyors of scandal does not make any the less necessary the immunity of the press from previous restraint in dealing with official misconduct. Subsequent punishment for such abuses as may exist is the appropriate remedy consistent with constitutional privilege.”

Charles Evans Hughes (1862–1948) American judge

Near v. Minnesota, 283 U.S. 697 (1931).
Judicial opinions

Life, Men, Unfaithfulness, Law

“Love reduces the complexity of living.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

June 1932 Henry and June
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Love

“It is in a cotton mill, however, that the perfection of automatic industry is to be seen; it is there that the elemental powers have been made to animate millions of complex organs, infusing into forms of wood, iron, and brass an intelligent agency.”

Andrew Ure (1778–1857) Scottish doctor and chemist

Source: The Philosophy of Manufactures, 1835, p. 2

Intelligence, Animals, Perfection

“CONSIDERABLE attention has recently been devoted to understanding behavior in large organizational systems. Although some of this work has been based on research, it has more typically been general theorizing with little support from research data. Our interest in examining complex organizations is to study more systematically and empirically their internal functioning in relation to the demands of the external environment on the organization and the ability of the organization to cope effectively with these demands, contributing to a theory of the functioning of large organizations based on empirical research.”

Paul R. Lawrence (1922–2011) American business theorist

Source: "Differentiation and integration in complex organizations," 1967, p. 2

Behavior, Understanding, Support, Study

“Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups. The aggregate relations among individuals and groups, among individuals within groups, and among groups forms a network of astonishing complexity.”

Clay Shirky (1964) American technology writer

Source: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008), p. 14

“Most of the more complex emotions are common to the higher animals and ourselves. Every one has seen how jealous a dog is of his master's affection, if lavished on any other creature; and I have observed the same fact with monkeys. This shews that animals not only love, but have the desire to be loved.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume I, chapter II: "Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and the Lower Animals", pages 41-42 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=54&itemID=F937.1&viewtype=image The Descent of Man (1871)

Love, Dogs, Animals

“Within sociology there have been several system theories, differing from one another in the extent to which, for example, human agency, creativity, and entrepreneurship are assumed to play a role in system formation and reformation; conflict and struggle are taken into account; power and stratification are part and parcel of the theory; structural change and transformation – and more generally, historically developments – are taken into account and explained. What the various system theories have in common is a systematic concern with complex and varied interconnections and interdependencies of social life. Complexity has been a central concept for many working in the systems perspective. The tradition is characterized to a great extent by a burning ambition and hope to provide a unifying language and conceptual framework for all the social sciences.”

Tom R. Burns (1937) American sociologist

Source: Systems theories (2006), p. 1.

Life, Hope, Science, Change

“Today every child knows what Merz is. But what is 'i'? I is the middle vowel of the alphabet and the designation for the consequence of Merz in relation to an intensive apprehension of the art form. For the shaping of the work of art Merz uses large ready-made complexes that count as material, to shorten as much as possible the path leading from the intuition to the actualization (Sichtbarmachung) of the artistic idea, so as to avoid heat loss through friction. i defines this path as o (i setzt diesen Weg = null). Idea, material, and work of art are the same. i apprehends the work of art in nature. Here the artistic shaping is the recognition of rhythm and expression in a part of nature. Thus, no loss through friction i. e., no disturbing distraction during creation occurs here.”

Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) German artist

1920s
Source: the article 'i ein Manifest' (or 'i-manifest'), Kurt Schwitters, in Merz 2. 1923; as quoted in Kurt Schwitters Merzbau: The Cathedral of Erotic Misery, by Elizabeth Burns Gamard, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2000, p. 116

Art, Idea, Nature, Loss

“Is a virus a living organism? What is a gene, and how does the original genetic constitution of a living organism express itself in the developed characteristics of the adult? Do complex protein molecules "know how" to reduplicate their pattern, and is this an essential clue to the problem of reproduction of living creatures? All these are certainly complex problems, but they are not problems of disorganized complexity, to which statistical methods hold the key. They are all problems which involve dealing simultaneously with a sizable number of factors which are interrelated into an organic whole. They are all, in the language here proposed, problems of organized complexity.”

Warren Weaver (1894–1978) American mathematician

Source: Science and Complexity, 1948, p. 537

Problem

“As we see the threat changing, evolving becoming a more complex threat, we need to make sure that our police and security and intelligence agencies have the powers they need. I mean longer prison sentences for people convicted of terrorist offences. I mean making it easier for the authorities to deport foreign terrorist suspects back to their own countries. And I mean doing more to restrict the freedom and the movements of terrorist suspects when we have enough evidence to know they are a threat, but not enough evidence to prosecute them in full in court. And if our human rights laws stop us from doing it, we will change the laws so we can do it.”

Theresa May (1956) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech on the election trail after the June 2017 London Bridge attack (7 June 2017). http://www.bbc.com/news/election-2017-40181444 2010s, 2017

People, Law, Intelligence, Freedom

“In sum, the processes of evolution create initially comparatively simple dynamical systems on particular levels of organisation. The processes then lead to the progressive complexification of the existing systems and, ultimately, to the creation of simpler systems on the next higher organisational level, where complexification begins anew. Thus evolution moves from the simpler to the more complex, and from the lower to the higher level of organisation”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Laszlo (1991) The Age of Bifurcation: Understanding the Changing World. Philadelphia: Gordon & Breach. p. 112; As cited in: K.L. Dennis (2003, p. 69).

“When an equation…clearly leads to two negative or imaginary roots, [Diophantus] retraces his steps and shows by how by altering the equation, he can get a new one that has rational roots. …Diophantus is a pure algebraist; and since algebra in his time did not recognize irrational, negative, and complex numbers, he rejected equations with such solutions.”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

Source: Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (1972), p. 143.

Time

“Whilst the distinction of ‘society’ and ‘individual’ has colloquial (and political) meaning, those inclined to the analysis of complex systems are more likely to ask which groups or societies are real individuals, exhibiting functional or behavioral integrity, as self-reproducing wholes. In pursuing this line of investigation, it is far more relevant to discriminate between types of groups than between groups and individuals, or even wholes and parts. It is especially helpful to distinguish feature groups from unit groups.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"Kinds of Killing" https://web.archive.org/web/20121111032625/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/1008/kinds-of-killing (2011) (original emphasis)

Behavior, Help, Parting

“Economics is harder than physics; luckily it is not quite as hard as sociology. Why is economics such a hard subject? Part of the answer has to do with complexity. The economy cannot be put in a box. […] Another reason economics is hard is that the critical sociologist is right: it involves human beings, who do not behave in simple, mechanical ways.”

Paul Krugman book Peddling Prosperity

Preface
Peddling Prosperity (1994)

Way, Parting, Box

“Much of philosophy concerns man's search for holistic concepts which will help him see a meaningful pattern in the complexity with which his perceptual world confronts him. What is new is the rapidly growing intensity of the quest, and the modern context of the search. Plato's Republic is from a world quite different from that of Boguslaw's. The New Utopians.”

Richard F. Ericson (1919–1993) American academic

Source: Organizational cybernetics and human values (1969), p. 1

World, Search, Help

“The trends that produced Schumann’s early piano works started out not so much from Weber’s refined brilliance as from Schubert’s more intimate and deeply soul-searching idiom. His creative imagination took him well beyond the harmonic sequences known until his time. He looked at the fugues and canons of earlier composers and discovered in them a Romantic principle. In the interweaving of the voices, the essence of counterpoint found its parallel in the mysterious relationships between the human psyche and exterior phenomena, which Schumann felt impelled to express. Schubert’s broad melodic lyricism has often been contrasted with Schumann’s terse, often quickly repeated motifs, and by comparison Schumann is often erroneously seen as short-winded. Yet it is precisely with these short melodic formulae that he shone his searchlight into the previously unplumbed depths of the human psyche. With them, in a complex canonic web, he wove a dense tissue of sound capable of taking in and reflecting back all the poetical character present. His actual melodies rarely have an arioso form; his harmonic system combines subtle chromatic progressions, suspensions, a rapid alternation of minor and major, and point d’orgue. The shape of Schumann’s scores is characterized by contrapuntal lines, and can at first seem opaque or confused. His music is frequently marked by martial dotted rhythms or dance-like triple time signatures. He loves to veil accented beats of the bar by teasingly intertwining two simultaneous voices in independent motion. This highly inde-pendent instrumental style is perfectly attuned to his own particular compositional idiom. After a period in which the piano had indulged in sensuous beauty of sound and brilliant coloration, in Schumann it again became a tool for conveying poetic monologues in musical terms.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

Love, Beauty, Music, Color

“We see that each surface is really a pair of surfaces, so that, where they appear to merge, there are really four surfaces. Continuing this process for another circuit, we see that there are really eight surfaces etc and we finally conclude that there is an infinite complex of surfaces, each extremely close to one or the other of two merging surfaces.”

Edward Norton Lorenz (1917–2008) American mathematician and meteorologist

Lorenz (1963) "Deterministic nonperiodic flow", in: J. Atmos. Sci. 20, 130–141. cited in: T.N. Palmer (2008) " Edward Norton Lorenz. 23 May 1917 −− 16 April 2008 http://rsbm.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/55/139.full.pdf" in: Biogr. Mems Fell. R. Soc. 2009 55, 139-155

Appearance

“[About Ada] For none of the evidence we have so far can inspire confidence that this language has avoided any of the problems that have afflicted other complex language projects of the past. […] It is not too late! I believe that by careful pruning of the ADA language, it is still possible to select a very powerful subset that would be reliable and efficient in implementation and safe and economic in use.”

C. A. R. Hoare (1934) British computer scientist

The Emperor's Old Clothes

Confidence, Problem, Affliction, Past

“The principle of bounded rationality [is] the capacity of the human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared with the size of the problems whose solution is required for objectively rational behavior in the real world — or even for a reasonable approximation to such objective rationality.”

Herbert A. Simon book Administrative Behavior

Variant: The principle of bounded rationality [is] the capacity of the human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared with the size of the problems whose solution is required for objectively rational behavior in the real world — or even for a reasonable approximation to such objective rationality.
Source: 1940s-1950s, Administrative Behavior, 1947, p. 198.

World, Behavior, Problem

“Although the behavior that emerges is complex, the rules that guide it are necessarily simple. In fact, it is their simplicity that creates the freedom to behave in complicated adaptive, and surprising ways.”

Shona Brown (1960) businessperson

Source: Competing on the Edge, 1998, p. 18

Way, Behavior, Freedom

“But how does it come about, step by step, that some complex Systems actually function? This question, to which we as students of General Systemantics attach the highest importance, has not yet yielded to intensive modern methods of investigation and analysis. As of this writing, only a limited and partial breakthrough can be reported, as follows: A COMPLEX SYSTEM THAT WORKS IS INVARIABLY FOUND TO HAVE EVOLVED FROM A SIMPLE SYSTEM THAT WORKED”

John Gall (1925–2014) American physician

Source: Systemantics: the underground text of systems lore, 1986, p. 65 cited in "Quotes from Systemantics – Funny, But Scary Too" Posted on agileadvice.com March 3, 2006 by Mishkin Berteig. This quote was mentioned in General systemantics (1975, p. 71)

Question

““Prosthetic Morality Enforcement. The idea is that by analogy, if a part of your body is deficient or missing, you can use a prosthetic limb or artificial organ. Well, our ability to make moral judgements is hard-wired, but it’s been so far outrun by the demands of complex civilization that it can’t keep up. For example…have you ever wondered why discussions in chat rooms or instant messaging turn nasty so easily? Or wander off topic? It’s because the behavioural cues we use to trigger socially acceptable responses aren’t there in a non-face-to-face environment. If you can’t see the other primate, your ethical reasoning is impaired because you can’t build a complete mental image of them—a cognitive frame. It’s why identity theft and online fraud are such a problem: There’s no inhibition against robbery if the victim is faceless. So we need some kind of prosthetic framework to restore our ability to interact with people on the net as if they’re human beings we’re dealing with in person.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 26, “Liz: It’s Complicated” (pp. 287-288)

People, Idea, Fraud, Problem

“Making drawings to indicate the many elements in any human situation is something which has characterized SSM from the start. Its rationale lies in the fact that the complexity of human affairs is always a complexity of multiple interacting relationships; and pictures are a better medium than linear prose for expressing relationships. Pictures can be taken in as a whole and help to encourage holistic rather than reductionist thinking about a situation.”

Peter Checkland (1930) British management scientist

Source: Systems thinking, systems practice: includes a 30-year retrospective, 1999, p. 16

Thinking, Help, Drawing

“The description of the evolutionary trajectory of dynamical systems as irreversible, periodically chaotic, and strongly nonlinear fits certain features of the historical development of human societies. But the description of evolutionary processes, whether in nature or in history, has additional elements. These elements include such factors as the convergence of existing systems on progressively higher organizational levels, the increasingly efficient exploitation by systems of the sources of free energy in their environment, and the complexification of systems structure in states progressively further removed from thermodynamic equilibrium.
General evolution theory, based on the integration of the relevant tenets of general system theory, cybernetics, information and communication theory, chaos theory, dynamical systems theory, and nonequilibrium thermodynamics, can convey a sound understanding of the laws and dynamics that govern the evolution of complex systems in the various realms of investigation…. The basic notions of this new discipline can be developed to give an adequate account of the dynamical evolution of human societies as well. Such an account could furnish the basis of a system of knowledge better able to orient human beings and societies in their rapidly changing milieu.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

E. Laszlo et al. (1993) pp. xvii- xix; as cited in: Alexander Laszlo and Stanley Krippner (1992) " Systems Theories: Their Origins, Foundations, and Development http://archive.syntonyquest.org/elcTree/resourcesPDFs/SystemsTheory.pdf" In: J.S. Jordan (Ed.), Systems Theories and A Priori Aspects of Perception. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 1998. Ch. 3, pp. 47-74.

Law, History, Communication, Understanding

“Enterprise Engineering is based on the belief that an enterprise, as any other complex system can be designed or improved in an orderly fashion thus giving a better overall result than ad hoc organisation and design.”

Peter Bernus (1949) Hungarian-Australian computer scientist

Peter Bernus, Laszlo Nemes, and R. Morris (1994) " Possibilities and limitations of reusing enterprise models http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.50.1736&rep=rep1&type=pdf." IFAC Workshop, Proceedings from Intelligent Manufacturing Systems.

Fashion

“Paintings are complex puzzles in the twilight world between abstraction and figuration. I use the medium in a simple, unsophisticated way to express what I don't see expressed anywhere else.”

Stefan Szczesny (1951) German painter and sculptor

Mustique (2002)

World, Way, Painting

“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

Behavior, Universe, Success, Parting

“In America the architect has a direct and continuing relationship with technology. Perhaps this is why he does not ask more from technology than it can offer. In our country [Russia] it is still impossible to have such urban complexes as are found in Paris, Chicago, or Berlin. It is through technology that we can build a bridge to all the most recent achievements, which is what made it possible for our country to pass directly from the hoe to the tractor without having to travel the long path of historical development. That is why we want to introduce the most modern methods of building and construction into our country — and why we see the works and designs of both the 'formalists' and the 'constructivists' as a radical experiment in the manipulation of construction.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

Quote from: 'Basic Premises'
1926 - 1941, Rußland: Die Rekonstruktion der Architektur in der Sowjetunion' (1929)

Travel, Country

“Basic ingredients of the decision-making focus include, then: (1) a process approach; (2) a conception of tensions as inherent in the process; and (3), a renewed concern with the role and workings of man's enlarged cortex seen as a complex adaptive subsystem operating within an interaction matrix characterized by uncertainty, conflict, and other dissociative (as well as associative) processes underlying the structuring and restructuring of the larger psychosocial system.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Sociology and modern systems theory (1967), p. 499.

Decision

“This is a difficult goal to present to teachers, coming as it does at a time when education is under attack from many quarters. But our society is changing rapidly and the difficulties of foreseeing what kinds of skills future generations will require are increasing. Although we have so far depended on the rational, left half of the human brain to plan our children's future and to solve the problems they might encounter on the way to that future, the onslaught of profound change is shaking our confidence in technological thinking and in the old methdods of education. Without abandoning training in tradtional verbal and computational skills, concerned teachers are looking for teaching techniques that will enchance children's intuitive and creative powers, thus preparing students to meet new challenges with flexibility, inventiveness, and imagination and with the ability to grasp complex arrays of interconnected ideas and facts, to perceive underlying patterns of events, and to see old problems in new ways.”

Betty Edwards (1926) American artist

Source: The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (1979), p.196

Children, Education, Way, Confidence

“I write as clearly as I am able to. I sometimes tackle ideas and notions that are relatively complex, and it is very difficult to be sure that I am conveying them in the best way. Anyone who goes beyond cliche phrases and cliche ideas will have this trouble.”

R. A. Lafferty (1914–2002) American writer

Interview in Alien Critic (August 1973)

Way, Idea

“The emergence of computer technology in World War II and its rapidly growing power in the second half of this century made it possible to deal with increasingly complex problems, some of which began to resemble the notion of organized complexity. Initially, it was the common belief of many scientists that the level of complexity we can handle is basically a matter of the level of computational power at our disposal. Later, in the early 1960s, this naive belief was replaced with a more realistic outlook.”

George Klir (1932–2016) American computer scientist

Source: Fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic (1995), p. 2.

War, World, Problem

“Americans are good people. They have no aggressions against us and they like us as we like them. They must know I don't hate them. I love them.… I hear it is a complex society inside. Many Americans don't know about the outside world. The majority have no concern and no information about other people. They could not even find Africa on a map. I think Americans are good, but America will be taken over and destroyed from the inside by the Zionist lobby. The Americans do not see this. They are getting decadent. Zionists will use this to destroy them.”

Muammar Gaddafi (1942–2011) Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist

The Pittsburgh Press (3 August 1986) "Gadhafi, the man the world loves to hate" by Marie Colvin (UPI)

Love, Hate, People, World

“Furthermore, we are instructed, when we do come across instances of temple destruction, as in the case of Aurangzeb, we have to be circumspect in inferring what has happened and why…. the early monuments – like the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque in Delhi – had to be built in ‘great haste’, we are instructed…Proclamation of political power, alone! And what about the religion which insists that religious faith is all, that the political cannot be separated from the religious? And the name: the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque, the Might of Islam mosque? Of course, that must be taken to be mere genuflection! And notice: ‘available materials were assembled and incorporated’, they ‘clearly came from Hindu sources’ – may be the materials were just lying about; may be the temples had crumbled on their own earlier; may be the Hindus voluntarily broke their temples and donated the materials? No? After all, there is no proof they didn’t! And so, the word ‘plundered’ is repeatedly put within quotation marks!
In fact, there is more. The use of such materials – from Hindu temples – for constructing Islamic mosques is part of ‘a process of architectural definition and accommodation by local workmen essential to the further development of a South Asian architecture for Islamic use’. The primary responsibility thus becomes that of those ‘local workmen’ and their ‘accommodation’. Hence, features in the Qutb complex come to ‘demonstrate a creative response by architects and carvers to a new programme’. A mosque that has clearly used materials, including pillars, from Hindu temples, in which undeniably ‘in the fabric of the central dome, a lintel carved with Hindu deities has been turned around so that its images face into the rubble wall’ comes ‘not to fix the rule’. ‘Rather, it stands in contrast to the rapid exploration of collaborative and creative possibilities – architectural, decorative, and synthetic – found in less fortified contexts.’ Conclusions to the contrary have been ‘misevaluations’. We are making the error of ‘seeing salvaged pieces’ – what a good word that, ‘salvaged ’: the pieces were not obtained by breaking down temples; they were lying as rubble and would inevitably have disintegrated with the passage of time; instead they were ‘salvaged ’, and given the honour of becoming part of new, pious buildings – ‘seeing salvaged pieces where healthy collaborative creativity was producing new forms’.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

Faith, Religion, Error, Lying

“Theories
Are the things and neither idealism
nor religions, nor histories
nor slogans.
The complexity of things themselves, that's what
theories are... The thing exists without showing itself,
entirely, it
does nor appear, theory is the
thing.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

CF 63; p. 111
Karel Appel, a gesture of colour' (1992/2009)

Religion, History, Appearance

“One reason nature pleases us is its endless use of a few simple principles: the cube-square law; fractals; spirals; the way that waves, wheels, trig functions, and harmonic oscillators are alike; the importance of ratios between small primes; bilateral symmetry; Fibonacci series, golden sections, quantization, strange attractors, path-dependency, all the things that show up in places where you don’t expect them…these rules work with and against each other ceaselessly at all levels, so that out of their intrinsic simplicity comes the rich complexity of the world around us. That tension—between the simple rules that describe the world and the complex world we see—is itself both simple in execution and immensely complex in effect. Thus exactly the levels, mixtures, and relations of complexity that seem to be hardwired into the pleasure centers of the human brain—or are they, perhaps, intrinsic to intelligence and perception, pleasant to anything that can see, think, create?—are the ones found in the world around us.”

John Barnes book Mother of Storms

Source: Mother of Storms (1994), pp. 470-471

Pleasure, World, Law, Way

“Time is at once an agony of the Present, a long torment of the Past and the terrible prospect of countless Futures. Time is also a complex of subtly intersecting realities, of unguessable consequences and undiscoverable causes, of profound tensions and dependencies.”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Prologue (p. 463)
The Dragon in the Sword (1986)

Reality, Time, Past, Future

“The writer is of service to humankind only insofar as the writer uses the word even against his or her own loyalties, trusts the state of being, as it is revealed, to hold somewhere in its complexity filaments of the cord of truth, able to be bound together, here and there, in art: trusts the state of being to yield somewhere fragmentary phrases of truth, which is the final word of words, never changed by our stumbling efforts to spell it out and write it down, never changed by lies, by semantic sophistry, by the dirtying of the word for the purposes of racism, sexism, prejudice, domination, the glorification of destruction, the curses and the praise-songs.”

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer

Writing and Being (1991)

Truth, Art, Effort, Change

“Power and influence have been the center of—this is not necessarily an argument in favor of keeping it, but power and influence have been the center of the field of the study of politics from the beginning. And what’s more, they are the central elements in all of our lives, our daily lives and our family lives, this interview going on—and they’re enormously complex.”

Robert A. Dahl (1915–2014) American political scientist

A Conversation with Robert A. Dahl (2009)

Family, Study

“We do not inhabit a perfected world where natural selection ruthlessly scrutinizes all organic structures and then molds them for optimal utility. Organisms inherit a body form and a style of embryonic development; these impose constraints upon future change and adaptation. In many cases, evolutionary pathways reflect inherited patterns more than current environmental demands. These inheritances constrain, but they also provide opportunity. A potentially minor genetic change […] entails a host of complex, nonadaptive consequences. […] What “play” would evolution have if each structure were built for a restricted purpose and could be used for nothing else? How could humans learn to write if our brain had not evolved for hunting, social cohesion, or whatever, and could not transcend the adaptive boundaries of its original purpose?”

Stephen Jay Gould book Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes

"Hyena Myths and Realities", p. 156
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

World, Optimism, Nature, Learning

“Whatever name you give it; will, or steady purpose, or onepointedness of the mind, you come back to earnestness, sincerity, honesty. (…) We are complex beings, at war within and without. We contradict ourselves all the time, undoing today the work of yesterday. No wonder we are stuck. A little of integrity would make a lot of difference.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Will
Source: I am That, P.119.

War, Time, Sincerity

“Reality is far more complex and messy than many of the grander themes and explanations would have us believe.”

Peter Dicken (1938) British geographer

Source: Global Shift (2003) (Fourth Edition), Chapter 2, A New Geo-Economy, p. 14

Reality

“At the Everyman Cinema there is a season of Satyajit Ray. He watches the Apu trilogy on successive nights in a state of rapt absorption. In Apu's bitter, trapped mother, his engaging, feckless father he recognizes, with a pang of guilt, his own parents. But it is the music above all that grips him, dizzyingly complex interplays between drums and stringed instruments, long arias on the flute whose scale or mode — he does not know enough about music theory to be sure which — catches at his heart, sending him into a mood of sensual melancholy that last long after the film has ended.”

J.M. Coetzee (1940) South African writer

Youth (2002)

Music, Mood, Parent, Success

“Yes,” he said, “intelligence does enable you to deny facts you dislike. But your denial doesn’t matter. A cancer growing in someone’s body will go on growing in spite of denial. And a complex combination of genes that work together to make you intelligent as well as hierarchical will still handicap you whether you acknowledge it or not.”

Octavia E. Butler book Dawn

Part I “Womb” chapter 5 (p. 39)
Dawn (1987)

Intelligence

“Intellectual culture consists, not chiefly, as many are apt to think, in accumulating information, though this is important, but in building up a force of thought which may be turned at will on any subjects on which we are called to pass judgment. This force is manifested in the concentration of the attention, in accurate, penetrating observation, in reducing complex subjects to their elements, in diving beneath the effect to the cause, in detecting the more subtle differences and resemblances of things, in reading the future in the present, and especially in rising from particular facts to general laws or universal truths. … Oone man talks continually about the particular actions of this or another neighbor; whilst another looks beyond the acts to the inward principle from which they spring, and gathers from them larger views of human nature.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Self-Culture (1838)

Truth, Law, Spring, Nature

“What then is the essence of the group process by which are evolved the collective thought and the collective will? It is an acting and reacting, a single and identical process which brings out differences and integrates them into a unity. The complex reciprocal action, the intricate interweavings of the members of the group, is the social process.”

Mary Parker Follett The New State

Source: The New State, 1918, p. 33

“Among recent contributions we may refer in particular to Professor A. G. Greenhill's noteworthy papers… when one remembers that these complex curves reach only especially simple cases of gyroscope motion, one may get some notion of the difficulty of the problem involved.”

Carl Barus (1856–1935) U.S. physicist

Footnote: Greenhill: Applications of Elliptic Functions, Proc. Lond. Math. Soc., 1895, 1896; Engineering, July, 1896.
"The Mathematical Theory of the Top" (April 8, 1898)

Problem

“The counterpart of such devotion to the commands of Jesus Christ is a thoroughgoing opposition to the institutions of culture. To Tolstoy these seem to be founded on a complex foundation of errors, including the acceptance of the inevitability of evil in man's present life, the belief that life is governed by external laws so that men cannot attain blessedness by their own efforts, the fear of death, the identification of true life with personal existence, and, above all, the practice of and belief in violence. Even less than Tertullian does he think that human corruption is resident in human nature; the evil with which men contend is in their culture only.”

H. Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962) American theologian

Source: Christ and Culture (1951), p. 60

Life, Death, Men, Fear

“Then we have computer science. It is true that software cannot exercise its powers of lightness except through the weight of hardware. But it is the software that gives the orders, acting on the outside world and on machines that exist only as functions of software and evolve so that they can work out ever more complex programs. The second industrial revolution, unlike the first, does not present us with such crushing images as rolling mills and molten steel, but with "bits" in a flow of information traveling along circuits in the form of electronic impulses. The iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weightless bits.”

Italo Calvino book Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988) , "Lightness"
English translation: Patrick Creagh (1996).

World, Travel, Exercises, Light

“The fact is that for complex systems like the bacterial flagellum no biologist has or is anywhere close to reconstructing its history in Darwinian terms. Is Darwinian theory therefore falsified? Hardly. I have yet to witness one committed Darwinist concede that any feature of nature might even in principle provide countervailing evidence to Darwinism. In place of such a concession one is instead always treated to an admission of ignorance. Thus it's not that Darwinism has been falsified or disconfirmed, but that we simply don't know enough about the biological system in question and its historical context to determine how the Darwinian mechanism might have produced it.”

William A. Dembski (1960) American intelligent design advocate

Is Intelligent Design Testable — A Response to Eugenie Scott
2011-01-24
The Golden Spiral
http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/2667/Default.aspx
2011-10-23
responding to Eugenie Scott's 2001-01-18 lecture at U.C. Berkeley, "Icons of Creationism: The New Anti-Evolutionism and Science"
2000s

History, Question, Nature

“As educators of linguistically and culturally diverse students we face choices with respect to how we view language and human potential. Is language the means of interpreting our increasingly complex world and mobilizing intellect, imagination, and identity to create new knowledge and act on social realities or is it simply a set of sounds and symbols and the codes that bind them? Can our society benefit from all the intelligence, imagination, and multilingual talent it can get or should schools develop these attributes only among a privileged elite while focusing on English-only basic skills for those constructed as incapable of independent learning?”

Jim Cummins (professor) (1949) professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto

Language and the Human Spirit (2003)

World, Education, School, Imagination

“The passions are a kind of thirst, inexorable and intense, for certain feelings or felt states. To find or invent 'objects' (which are, more strictly speaking, relational structures) whose felt quality satisfies the passions, - that for me is the activity of the artist, an activity which does not cease even in sleep. No wonder the artist is constantly placing and displacing, relating and rupturing relations; his task is to find a complex of qualities whose feeling is just right – veering toward the unknown and chaos, yet ordered and related in order to be apprehended.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

Source: 1940's, Beyond the Aesthetics (1946), pp. 38-39

Feeling, Sleep, Passion

“Classification is thought of by many librarians as either a fearful complication of a very simply act, or an outmoded, almost prehistoric, method of doing a very complex mathematical task.”

Douglas John Foskett (1918–2004)

Source: The Classification Research Group 1952—1962 (1962), p. 138

Fear, Mathematics

“Finally, it should be clear by now that a nation can be no stronger abroad than she is at home. Only an America which practices what it preaches about equal rights and social justice will be respected by those whose choice affects our future. Only an America which has fully educated its citizens is fully capable of tackling the complex problems and perceiving the hidden dangers of the world in which we live. And only an America which is growing and prospering economically can sustain the worldwide defenses of freedom, while demonstrating to all concerned the opportunities of our system and society.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, Remarks Prepared for Delivery at the Trade Mart in Dallas

World, Education, Justice, Home

“Included in the problems of systems engineering are those of complexity and of choice. Of all the available facts about a system or the needs for a system, which are of most significance for the present circumstances and for their probable future course? How much information is needed and how should it be used to make a satisfactory decision, considering the time and resources available and the purpose to which these data are to be applied? Since most of the means of understanding which we as individuals use, or which are used by the automatic decision-making processes which we employ, are serial processes, we are continually faced with choices of how to divide the jobs to be done and to select an order or an arrangement for systematically handling the abundance of data which are available.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), Systems Engineering Methods (1967), p. 1

Understanding, Problem, Decision, Time

“What Kant regarded as a unique (Copernican) turn to transcendental reflection becomes in Hegel a general mechanism for turning consciousness back upon itself. This mechanism has been switched on and off time and time again in the development of spirit. As the subject becomes conscious of itself, it destroys one form of consciousness after another. This process epitomizes the subjective experience that what initially appears to the subject as a being in itself can become content only in the forms imparted to it by the subject. The transcendental philosopher’s experience is thus, according to Hegel, reenacted naively whenever an in-itself becomes a for-the-subject. What Hegel calls “Dialectical” is the reconstruction of this recurrent experience and of its assimilation by the subject, which gives rise to ever more complex structures. … Hegel, it should be noted, exposes himself to a criticism. … Reconstructing successive forms of consciousness is one thing. Proving the necessity of their succession is quite another.”

Jürgen Habermas (1929) German sociologist and philosopher

Source: Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (1983), p. 5

Appearance, Time, Success

“The labyrinth is conceived as a network of constructs, each of which is essentially an abstraction and, as such, can be picked up and laid down over many, many different events in order to bring them into focus and clothe them with personal meaning. Moreover, the constructs are subject to continual revision, although the complex interdependent relationship between constructs in the system often makes it precarious for the person to revise one construct without taking into account the disruptive effect upon major segments of the system.”

George Kelly (psychologist) (1905–1967) American psychologist and therapist

George A. Kelly, "Man's construction of his alternatives." Assessment of human motives (1958): 33-64.

Personality, Clothes

“There's no particular complex that I have about acting in a Hollywood movie if offered. Some would say there's a lot here in our industry for us to go there and suck up to them. I don't consider it sucking up. If I am offered a blink and you miss appearance in a Hollywood film starring Brando, De Niro, Pacino or Nicholson, where I just have to go and hand a suitcase to them, I would simply do it out of sheer veneration for these great and renowned artists. And yes, despite all my success and fame in our industry and nation. There's no vanity I harbour in my mind in order to do that.”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

Quotable quotes by Amitabh Bachchan.

Star, Appearance, Success

“In brief, one can view organizing essentially as either an economic, behavioral, adaptive, mathematical, or decisional entity. In the aggregate most of these theories are concerned with structure, behavior, and strategy under conditions of change and complexity brought about by technology, environment, and human behavior.”

George R. Terry (1909–1979)

Source: Principles of Management, 1960, p. 314 (6th ed. 1971)

Behavior, Mathematics, Change

“The general systems movement has taken up the task of helping scientists unravel complexity, technologists to master it, and others to learn to live with it.”

Gerald M. Weinberg (1933–2018) American computer scientist

Source: Introduction to General Systems Thinking, 1975, p. 3; Quote in: Dieter Spath, Walter Ganz (2008) The Future of Services: Trends and Perspectives. p. 226

Learning, Help

“We don't know what organization is. …We do know that complex adaptive systems have to be nonlinear and capable of storing information. …We know a little bit about what distinguishes an adaptive complex system from a nonadaptive system, such as turbulent fluid flow.”

J. Doyne Farmer (1952) American physicist and entrepreneur (b.1952)

The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (1995)

“When you are into mathematics, you have been so high on the scale of complexity of reasoning that you are living in some kind of altered reality. You think everybody on the street is able to understand complicated reasoning […]. And you get very frustrated, when you discover that's not the case.”

Cédric Villani (1973) French mathematician

"Mathematics: Beauty vs Utility - Numberphile". youtube.com. January 19, 2017. Retrieved September 16, 2018.

Mathematics, Understanding, Thinking, Reality

“In industrial marketing settings, the relationship between buyer and seller is frequently long term, close and involving a complex pattern of interaction between and within each company. The marketers' and buyers' task in this case may have more to do with maintaining these relationships than with making a straightforward sale or purchase.”

Håkan Håkansson

H. Hakansson (1982), International Marketing and Purchasing of Industrial Goods: An Interaction Approach. London: John Wiley and Sons, p. 14; as cited in : Christian Homburg (2001, 16)

“I ordered up a cup of tea in the morning. We were staying at this magnificent hotel called the Gateway of India – a Taj complex looking over The Gateway of India, which is this beautiful old monument that sits right down on the peninsula of Mumbai. I opened up the screens and I looked down and there were 50 to 60 people all wearing perfect white standing underneath my window. And they were laughing. I thought ‘what are they doing’. One person started laughing and then another person would start, and the next one would start laughing and it was - now I realise – a laughing meditation. It’s very very hard to be unhappy when you are laughing. It’s the truth. That was the start of their day. It was 5.30 in the morning, the sun was just creeping through the Taj complex and over the Gateway of India, I was hearing this laughing meditation and all the whiles in the background I knew that this was actually my time that I was going to arrive as a cricketer. I knew it in my heart. I knew it from the moment I set sights on India.”

Matthew Hayden (1971) Australian cricketer

When asked about his favourite memory of India, quoted on The Courier Mail, "The day 50 people laughed at Matthew Hayden" http://www.couriermail.com.au/entertainment/hayden-joins-indian-team/news-story/a88c1a51e63ddd3d9731820f4dc74cf1, March 20, 2016.

People, Truth, Beauty, Time

“Treatment of the apparently whimsical fluctuations of the stock quotations as truly non stationary processes requires a model of such complexity that its practical value is likely to be limited. An additional complication, not encompassed by most stock market models, arises from the manifestation of the market as a nonzero sum game.”

Richard Arnold Epstein (1927) American physicist

Source: The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic (Revised Edition) 1977, Chapter Nine, Weighted Statistical Logic And Statistical Games, p. 295

Game

Quotes about complexity page 4

Quotes about complexity
page 4