Seth Lloyd Quotes

Merely by existing and evolving in time - by existing - any physical system registers information, and by evolving in time it transforms or processes that information.

All physical systems can be thought of as registering and processing information, and how one wishes to define computation will determine your view of what computation consists of.

The computing world is very good at things that we are not. It is very good at memory.

The body itself is an information processor. Memory resides not just in brains but in every cell. No wonder genetics bloomed along with information theory. DNA is the quintessential information molecule, the most advanced message processor at the cellular level - an alphabet and a code, 6 billion bits to form a human being.

There are considerable advantages to using many degrees of freedom to store information, stability and controllability being perhaps the most important.

One's head is finite. You pour more and more things into it - surnames, chronologies, affiliations - and it packs them away in its tunnels, and eventually you find that you have a book about something that you publish.

Most of the people who claim to be doing systems biology are really studying simple and complex molecular machines and how they function, and that is an aspect of systems biology; but it isn't. It's the networks that really capture and store and transmit and integrate and modulate and finally end up executing the biological information as it is.

If you go back to the first single-cell form of life, it clearly possessed the capacity to receive, to utilize, to store, to transform, and to transmit information.

You can't put rubbish into a computer and get something good out.

You can never do merely one thing. The law applies to any action that changes something in a complex system. The point is that an action taken to alleviate a problem will trigger several effects, some of which may offset or even negate the one intended.

Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing ‘patterns of change’ rather than static ‘snapshots.’

We all have so much access to the information on the Internet and in books, but we don't necessarily get that information in a usable way so that we can turn information into action.

I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind. “At these times, I use the Pensieve. One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one’s mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one’s leisure. It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form.

To find out what happens to a system when you interfere with it you have to interfere with it (not just passively observe it).

The condition that gives birth to a rule is not the same as the condition to which the rule gives birth.

Systems don't change easily. Systems try to maintain themselves, and seek equilibrium. To change a system, you need to shake it up, disrupt the equilibrium. That often requires conflict.

A system is a set of things people, cells, molecules, or whatever interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time... The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior.

Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.

Unlike an inexorable, Newtonian "great machine", the economy is not a closed system.

Every decoding is another encoding.

There are three kinds of brains. The one understands things unassisted, the other understands things when shown by others, the third understands neither alone nor with the explanations of others.

When understanding would be too difficult, I become trusting.

To some physicists chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being.

A computer is a machine for constructing mappings from input to output.