Terence McKenna Quotes

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

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

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

Reductionism is merciless.

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

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

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.

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

When systems come to be far from points of equilibrium, they reach bifurcation points, wherein multiple, as opposed to unique, solutions, to instability become possible.

When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large scientific method in most cases fails. One need only think of the weather, in which case the prediction even for a few days ahead is impossible.

You want to favor systems that benefit from error, disorder, variability and things like that. You want to favor these systems and unfortunately, when - there's something I call the Soviet Illusion. The more the government becomes intrusive, the more things have to follow a script, and it can't handle this kind of system.

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.

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.

It is the last lesson of modern science, that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the highest complexity.

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.

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.

Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification.

If you look at any leaf on any tree branch, it's similar to but not exactly a repetition of the previous branch. So the new science of complexity or showing how an architecture can be produced just as quickly, cheaply and efficiently by using computer production methods to get the slight variation, the self-similarity.

Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized.

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.

It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.

The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.

I think the next century will be the century of complexity.

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