Complexity Quotes

These computer simulations try only to duplicate the interactions between the cortex and the thalamus. Huge chunks of the brain are therefore missing. Dr. [Dharmendra] Modha understands the enormity of his project. His ambitious research has allowed him to estimate what it would take to create a working model of the entire human brain, and not just a portion or a pale version of it, complete with all parts of the neocortex and connections to the senses. He envisions using not just a single Blue Gene computer [with over a hundred thousand processors and terabytes of RAM] but thousands of them, which would fill up not just a room but an entire city block. The energy consumption would be so great that you would need a thousand-megawatt nuclear power plant to generate all the electricity. And then, to cool off this monstrous computer so it wouldn't melt, you would need to divert a river and send it through the computer circuits.It is remarkable that a gigantic, city-size computer is required to simulate a piece of human tissue that weighs three pounds, fits inside your skull, raises your body temperature by only a few degrees, uses twenty watts of power, and needs only a few hamburgers to keep it going.

~ Michio Kaku

Extreme right-wingers are known for giving God a bad name; extreme left-wingers are known for giving God a weak name. He's not as simple as conservative versus liberal, old versus new. His wings are balanced. God is both and neither.

~ Criss Jami

Any darn fool can make something complex, it takes a genius to make something simple.

~ Pete Seeger

Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.

~ Edsger W. Dijkstra

The assumption is that life doesn't need to be navigated with lessons. You can just do it intuitively. After all, you only need to achieve autonomy from your parents, find a moderately satisfying job, form a relationship, perhaps raise some children, watch the onset of mortality in your parents' generation and eventually in your own, until one day a fatal illness starts gnawing at your innards and you calmly go to the grave, shut the coffin and are done with the self-evident business of life.

~ Alain De Botton

For us to deem a work of architecture elegant, it is hence not enough that it look simple: we must feel that the simplicity it displays has been hard won, that it flows from the resolution of demanding technical or natural predicament. Thus we call the Shaker staircase in Pleasant Hill elegant because we know--without ever having constructed one ourselves--that a staircase is a site complexity, and that combinations of treads, risers and banisters rarely approach the sober intelligibility of the Sharkers' work. We deem a modern Swiss house elegant because we not how seamlessly its windows have been joined to their concrete walls, and how neatly the usual clutter of construction has been resolved away. We admire starkly simple works that we intuit would, without immense effort, have appeared very complicated. (p 209)

~ Alain De Botton

Reality confounds image.

~ Peter Heather

Complexity Thinking is best thought of as a way of continually generating multiple perspectives on issues.

~ Pearl Zhu

The most perplexing yet marvellous phenomena to me so far, is that connecting the dots and seeing patterns of one's life only happens backward and time only happens forward.You can't catch a pattern from the future and you can't catch time from the past. Only by the memories from the past a one tackles the complexity of the present and uncertainty of the future and while everything changes, the mechanism is always the same, and this itself is a pattern.

~ Nader Ibrahim

We may train ourselves to be adaptable as possible, to respond appropriately in each situation, but the ideal of controlling the outcome or steering events as they occur must be relinquished. Chaos rules it all.

~ Mark Twight

The only way to control chaos and complexity is to give up some of that control

~ Gyan Nagpal

Insofar as we appreciate order, it is when we perceive it as being accompanied by complexity, when we feel that a variety of elements has been brought to order--that windows, doors and other details have been knitted into a scheme that manages to be at once regular and intricate. (p184)

~ Alain De Botton

Chaos is complexity viewed through a reductionist filter.

~ Silvia Hartmann

Who values the past lives sentimentally.Who optimizes the present grabs opportunity.Who balances time creates harmony. Who disturbs harmony leads complexity.Who solves complexity opens continuity.

~ Angelica Hopes

Simple is never that simple.

~ Philip Roth

I know that scenario... that You are going to die... bullshit and bullshit I was next to you what did I fucking get?- Simple answers of so complex questions... So simple questions and so complex answers... I never mean that and I never wanted that to happen.

~ Deyth Banger

Chess is a game with simple rules and pieces, a small sixty-four-space board, but there are more possible chess games than there are atoms in the universe.

~ Austin Grossman

Even when the truth is in fact simple, simplicity is still relative.

~ Criss Jami

Beauty is not in complexity but it's in simplicity.

~ Debasish Mridha

Something good happened to my writing when stopped being afraid to do something simple, for the fear that people might think I couldn’t do something more complex. Don’t be confused by the word simple. Simple is not easy, it is clear voiced, and fearlessly elegant.

~ Carrie Newcomer

The Internet is dumb. The Internet, with all its access to brain research, anthropology journals, social studies networks, and biographies and autobiographies, can't begin to map the complexity of our lives, or how we each affect others.

~ Dee Williams

In the Principia Mathematica, Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead attempted to give a rigorous foundation to mathematics using formal logic as their basis. They began with what they considered to be axioms, and used those to derive theorems of increasing complexity. By page 362, they had established enough to prove 1 + 1 = 2.

~ Ted Chiang

A complex world of intrigues and power play among couples hascombined to deny young people the love and attention they trulydeserve, more and more teenagers are leaving home to peer up withbad influence which eventually lands them in jail for the lucky onesand six feet under for the not so lucky.

~ Oche Otorkpa

I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

For the vision of a novelist is both complex and specialised; complex, because behind his characters and apart from them must stand something stable to which he relates them; specialised because since he is a single person with one sensibility the aspects of life in which he can believe with conviction are strictly limited

~ Virginia Woolf

Intelligence augmentation decreases the need for specialization and increases participatory complexity.

~ Jamais Cascio

The universe began in an instant, is expanding, and exhibits design, order, and complexity. Every effect must have a Cause, and design must have a Designer.

~ Ray Comfort

I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface.

~ Jaron Lanier