Terence McKenna Quotes

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.

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

The beauty of compounding iterative algorithms - evolution, fractals, organic growth, art - derives from their irreducibility.

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

I think we give human beings too much credit. We're primates, you know.

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

It's so hard to figure out what's going on in biological systems. You just can't see them.

We, as extremely complex creatures, desperately need to know this story of how the universe creates complexity and why complexity means vulnerability and fragility.

Since natural selection requires a function to select, an irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would have to arise as an integrated unit for natural selection to have anything to act on.

Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.

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

A rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the air above, and similarly a work of art is the product of strange activities in the human mind.

Life is nanotechnology that works.

The fact that natural selection and evolution crafted essentially carbon and water into a mechanism that can think and be conscious means there's nothing in physics that says you cannot do that to a greater degree.

Jesus man! You don't look for acid! Acid finds you when it thinks you're ready.

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

I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience.

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.

It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn.

So their combinations with themselves and with each other give rise to endless complexities, which anyone who is to give a likely account of reality must survey.

Everything is born from change. ...there is nothing nature loves more that to alter what exists and make new things like it. All that exists is the seed of what will emerge from it. You think the only seeds are the one that make plants and children? Go deeper.

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.

That order generated without design can far outstrip plans men consciously contrive.

One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.