Frank Herbert Quotes

I don't believe you can reduce the world to a mathematical formula. I start with the world, assume it's complicated, and ask where can I get help from a whole range of disciplines.

Modern physics has taught us that the nature of any system cannot be discovered by dividing it into its component parts and studying each part by itself... We must keep our attention fixed on the whole and on the interconnection between the parts. The same is true of our intellectual life. It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts.

Reductionism is merciless.

We have to pay close attention to what we see, and be ready to work with the unexpected according to the basic principles of systems biology and medicine.

I believe that our very survival depends upon us becoming better systems thinkers.

I have always had a tendency to keep enlarging problems which I personally think is the way the world works... that seeing anything one dimensionally on the kinds of political, sort of big issues of human progress is going to be a distorted view of things, which is why over my career I have gone seemingly from subject to subject to subject.

I admire people who can spend every aspect of their life in one discipline and really go all the way. I feel the only way I could achieve some type of excellence is if I connect to other people, other disciplines.

The world is much more interesting than any one discipline.

Art and science work in quite different ways: agreed. But, bad as it may sound, I have to admit that I cannot get along as an artist without the use of one or two sciences. ... In my view, the great and complicated things that go on in the world cannot be adequately recognized by people who do not use every possible aid to understanding.

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.’

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.

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

When a decision is made to cope with the symptoms of a problem, it is generally assumed that the corrective measures will solve the problem itself. They seldom do. Engineers cannot seem to get this through their heads. These countermeasures are all based on too narrow a definition of what is wrong. Human measures and countermeasures proceed from limited scientific truth and judgment. A true solution can never come about in this way.

To 'see both sides' of a problem is the surest way to prevent its complete solution. Because there are always more than two sides.

The more we study the major problems of our time, the more we come to realise that they cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are interconnected and interdependent.

Do not imagine that these most difficult problems can be thoroughly understood by any one of us.

Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.

Let us keep the discoveries and indisputable measurements of physics. But ... A more complete study of the movements of the world will oblige us, little by little, to turn it upside down; in other words, to discover that if things hold and hold together, it is only by reason of complexity, from above.

The systems perspective tells us that we must look beyond individual mistakes or bad luck to understand important problems.

Unfortunately, simplistic framing of problems leads to simplistic answers.

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

Large companies are very good at solving extremely complex problems in a globally optimal way.

You are the cutting edge of a thirteen billion year old process of defining novelty. Your acts matter. Your thoughts matter. Your purpose? To add to the complexity. Your enemy? Disorder, entropy, stupidity, and tastelessness.

Life is not found in atoms or molecules or genes as such, but in organization; not in symbiosis but in synthesis.