Gregory Bateson Quotes

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 believe all complicated phenomena can be explained by simpler scientific principles.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.

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

When a system is in turbulence, the turbulence is not just out there in the environment, but is a part of the organization or organism that you are looking at.

It is impossible, in principle, to explain any pattern by invoking a single quantity.

Closed systems run down and get more chaotic over time. Always get better by being 'open' to outside energy and templates of better ways to function.

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

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.

Reductionism is not the right viewpoint for everything, and it certainly won't explain the relationship between the brain and the mind. This is because of a feature known as emergence. When you put together large numbers of pieces and parts, the whole can become something greater than the sum.

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

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

Not one example of significant self-generation or self-organization can be found in the entire realm of nature.... Without causation, nothing happens and without organization by an intelligent being, systems tend to lower and lower levels of complexity.

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.

Simple molecules combine to make powerful chemicals. Simple cells combine to make powerful life-forms. Simple electronics combine to make powerful computers. Logically, all things are created by a combination of simpler, less capable components. Therefore, a supreme being must be in our future, not our origin. What if "God" is the consciousness that will be created when enough of us are connected by the Internet?!!