Scott Adams Quotes

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.

This spontaneous emergence of order at critical points of instability, which is often referred to simply as "emergence," is one of the hallmarks of life. It has been recognized as the dynamic origin of development, learning, and evolution. In other words, creativity-the generation of new forms-is a key property of all living systems.

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.

And so from that, I've always been fascinated with the idea that complexity can come out of such simplicity.

A self that is very robust, that has many, many levels of organization, from simple to complex, and that functions as a sort of witness to what is going on in our organisms.

I, and all the complex things around me, exist only because many things were assembled in a very precise way. The 'emergent' properties are not magical. They are really there and eventually they may start re-arranging the environments that generated them. But they don't exist 'in' the bits and pieces that made them; they emerge from the arrangement of those bits and pieces in very precise ways. And that is also true of the emergent entities known as "you" and "me".

I have been interested in phenomena involving complexity, diversity and evolution since I was a young boy.

I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.

Amazingly when you add life and consciousness to the equation you can actually explain some of the biggest puzzles of science.

If the process of life is about moving toward increased complexity and organization, a sort of sublime unfolding of greater and greater self-organizing systems, then we're actually doing pretty well.

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.

A brain is a society of very small, simple modules that cannot be said to be thinking, that are not smart in themselves. But when you have a network of them together, out of that arises a kind of smartness.

Consciousness, for me, is a manifestation of complexity in biology. It's an emergent property.

A view of nature as dense and nonlinear is at the core of our contemporary science. Process and order emerge subtly.

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.

The more we understand what happens in living cells, the more incredibly powerful you realize things can be when they work from the bottom up, by interaction of one molecule and another.

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

Life is nanotechnology that works.

Deep down, there is in the substance of the cosmos a primordial disposition, sui generis, for self-arrangement and self-involution.

Swarms are one very simple way of keeping ourselves ahead of the machines.

In little localized pockets, the universe is capable of building some beautiful complexity.

Chaos is hard to create, even on the Internet.

We get to the point then with modern science where you could almost say that modern science is the art of describing those systems so crude in their structure that they are not subject to temporal variables.

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

We don't have a "consciousness meter" that'll tell us exactly how conscious something is. I think we might get there eventually.