Henry Cloud Quotes

Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form; but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them.

I'm interested in complexity, in the mathematical sense, as well as the idiomatic sense. The idea of emergence - that it's possible for complex patterns to arise out of many simple interactions - is fascinating.

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

Orderliness by itself is not sufficient to account for the nature of organized systems in general or for those created by man in particular. Mere orderliness leads to increasing impoverishment and finally to the lowest possible level of structure, no longer clearly distinguishable from chaos, which is the absence of order. A counterprinciple is needed, to which orderliness is secondary. It must supply what is to be ordered.

We should be exploring consciousness at the neural level and higher, where the arrow of causal analysis points up toward such principles as emergence and self-organization.

The minute those two little particles inside a woman's womb have joined together, billions of decisions have been made. A thing like that has to come from entropy.

The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered.

We, as extremely complex creatures, desperately need to know this story of how the universe creates complexity and why complexity means vulnerability and fragility.

We could not, for example, arrive at a principle like that of entropy without introducing some additional principle, such as randomness, to this topography.

There is a strong tendency in explanatory prose to invoke quantities of tension, energy, and whatnot to explain the genesis of pattern. I believe that all such explanations are inappropriate or wrong.

Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases.

The world is deterministic, but it's chaotic and emergent.

'Entropy' broadly means tending towards chaos constantly.

You're an entropic chaos factor

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

Entropy and optimism: the twin forces that make the world go around.

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

Things fall apart, so they can fall together at a higher level of order.

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

Entropy shakes its angry fist at you for being clever enough to organize the world. (p 2)

Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, which are repeated without end.

There’s so much distance between the fundamental rules and the final phenomenon, that it’s almost unbelievable that the final variety of phenomenon can come from such a steady operation of such simple rules.

Disorder can play a critical role in giving birth to new, higher forms of order.

Wherever groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced, simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos.

Nature, when left to universal laws, tends to produce regularity out of chaos.