Plato Quotes

What I've observed, and I think it's fair to give credit to the psychedelic experience for this, what I've observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of complexity.

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong.

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.

As we get more transparent with data sets about infrastructure and systems management, I have a feeling we'll see big changes in how we think about complexity and our relationship to our actions.

Everything is more complicated than it looks to most people.

The analysis of the thing is not the thing itself.

In order to more fully understand this reality, we must take into account other dimensions of a broader reality.

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

The brain has this amazing level of almost fractal complexity to it. When you start looking at any part of it in detail, you realize that it's much more complex than you thought.

As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.

Understand: any phenomenon in the world is by nature complex. The people you deal with are equally complex. Any action sets off a limitless chain of reactions. It is never so simple as A leads to B. B will lead to C, D and beyond.

The world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being

Reply to Plato: I seen horses I seen cows I haint never yet seen horsiness nor that there bovinity neither.

The great unexplored frontier is complexity ... I am convinced that the nations and people that master the new science of Complexity will become the economic, cultural, and political superpowers of the next century.

Science talks about very simple things, and asks hard questions about them. As soon as things become too complex, science can't deal with them... But it's a complicated matter: Science studies what's at the edge of understanding, and what's at the edge of understanding is usually fairly simple. And it rarely reaches human affairs. Human affairs are way too complicated.

The human mind is so complex and things are so tangled up with each other that, to explain a blade of straw, one would have to take to pieces an entire universe. A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble.

A formula can be very simple, and create a universe of bottomless complexity.

I think the next [21st] century will be the century of complexity. We have already discovered the basic laws that govern matter and understand all the normal situations. We don't know how the laws fit together, and what happens under extreme conditions. But I expect we will find a complete unified theory sometime this century. The is no limit to the complexity that we can build using those basic laws.

In any case, the idea of giving "all" of reality is overly simple and absurd.

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

Existence is larger than any model that is not itself the exact size of existence (which has no size).

The world is too complex for subsumption under any general theory of change.

Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose out of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain. It postulates the difficult to explain, and leaves it at that.

Metaphysics is a cobweb that the mind weaves around things.