Various quotes relating to the theme of enzymind.com: complexity, creativity, chaos, natures organizing principles.

Anyone feel free to add as long as you keep within the above bounds (or the spirit of them). Most recent at the top.

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2007-09-04 08:58:17

Quotations from creativity researcher Howard Gruber

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2007-09-01 19:05:17

“I always say to myself: What is the most important thing we can think about at this extraordinary moment?” -Buckminster Fuller

“I always start with the Universe.” -Buckminster Fuller

"Real wealth is knowing what to do with energy.” -Buckminster Fuller

 

On being a 'trim tab':

In the February 1972 issue of Playboy, Fuller said:

Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary - the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, call me Trim Tab. -Buckminster Fuller

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2007-03-21 16:11:32

“You need the willingness to fail all the time,” he said. “You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don’t work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work.” John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies

(mark found this one)

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2007-02-19 14:12:07

creativity quotes

some favs:

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.--Herman Melville

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.--Charles Mingus

The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.--Arthur Koestler [editorial note: damn the cobblers! onward!]

Yes, of course [this age] is materialistic, but the only way to counteract it is to create spiritual things. Don't worry yourself about the materialism too much. Create and stir other people to create!--Robert Frost

 

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2007-01-15 16:41:02

'In the first place, I think there's going to be more and more merging of art and science. Scientists are already studying the creative proess, and I think the whole line between art and science will break down and that scientists, I hope, will become more creative and writers more scientific.' -William Burroughs from Third Mind.

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2006-11-01 16:54:38

'Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.' Albert Einstein

 

 

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2006-10-24

"Our view of Nature has changed in the last twenty years -- we have come to recognize nonlinear dynamical processes, chaotic and self-organising proces boses, in a vast range of natural systems, and to realize that these play an essential part in the evolution of the universe. But we do not need to go far afield for examples -- to the aggregation of slime-fungi or the motions of Pluto -- we have a natural laboratory, a microcosm, in our own heads. It is in this sense, finally, that migraine is enthralling; for it shows us, in the form of a hallucinatory display, not only an elemental activity of the cerebral cortex, but an entire self-organising system, a universal behavior, at work. It shows us not only the secrets of neuronal organisation, but the creative heart of Nature itself." -from the book "Migrate"

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2006-10-14

from literary analysis of duna and foundations using chaos theory:

'one of chaos theories fundamental insights is precisely that the structure of the whole is mirrored in the structure of the parts; this is another way to describe the fractal images's self-similarity." p7

'...-that is, while science science can investigate only what if first imaginges, this crucial visionary step is often taken by te artist, not the scientist, that science follows the path that art has already blased and mapped for the culture as a whole."

'Phase spaceis a qualitative mathematical abstraction of relality, "a way of tunruing numbers into pictures" to create a "map" that represents how a system transforms over time.' p24

"the fundamental assumption of chaos theory, by contrast[to newtonian theory],is that the individual unit does not matter. What does matter are recursive symmetries between different levels of the system. Chaos looks for scaling factors." p33

'for chaos theory investigates specifically the nonlinear dynamics of negative feedback loops [in contrast to positive feedback loops].' p34

 

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"In order to gain access to the subdominant visual, perceptual R-mode of the brain, it is necessary to present the brain with a job that the verbal, analytic L-mode will turn down." -Betty Edwards [editorial note: this is done by abstraction of the visual scene(?)]

"Having two modes of thought so segregated is advantageous, depending on the extent to which the corpus callosum mediates the ideational, as well as the sensory-motor gap between the two sides of the brain. Put differently, possession of two independent problem-solving organs increases the prospects of a successful solution to a novel situation although it has the hazard of conflict in the event of different solutions."

"Creativity has not only made the human race unique in nature; what is more important for the individual, it gives value and purpose to human existence. Creativity requires more than technical skills and logical thought; it also needs the cultivation and collaboration of the appositional (right hemispheric specific processes) mind."

---Dr. Joseph Bogen and Glenda Bogen

 

Koestler (1964) quotes Pasteur: "Chance only favours invention for minds which are prepared for discoveries by patient study and persevering efforts"

“We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.”

~Albert Einstein {editorial note: dang! cannot believes that i forgots me an Einstein quote up till a this point}

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."-ae

"The only real valuable thing is intuition." -ae

"The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility." -ae

 

What is a pattern? " a pattern is a data vector serving to describe an anomalously high local density of data points" What is data? data = background_model + pattern + randowm component. -from pattern detection and discovery. hand. 2002

 

 

"The first condition is to work alone, to ignore everybody else, and to mistrust every influence from the outside...The second condition that I think is necessary is to read a great deal in other disciplines, not in one's own discipline, ...so as to develop an interdisciplinary outlook. Reading a lot in the related and surrounding fields, but not in one's own precise field, is necessary. And a third I think in my case has been that I have always had in my head an adversary --that is, a school of thought whose ideas one considers to be wrong." -Piaget on creativity.

 

There is consensus that the next breakthroughs will come from intergrated solution that allow end users to explore their data using graphical metaphors...-jim gray microsoft research

 

Csikszentmihalyi on 'flow': "In our studies, we found that every flow activity...had this in common: It provided a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of transporting the person into a new realtity. It pushed the person to higher leveles of performance, and led to previously undreamed-of states of consciousness. In short, it transformed the self by making it more complex."

Csikszentmihalyi on 'lacking the sense of worry about losing control': "...it is not possible to experience a feeling of control unless one is willing to give up the safety of protective routines. Only when a doubtful outcome is at stake, and one is able to incfluence that outcome, can a person really know whether she is in control."

 

"elegance ought to be left to the tailor and to the cobbler." -L. Boltzman

From complexity (lewin 1992)

"In biological evolution, experience of the past is compressed in the genetic message encoded in DNA. In the case of human societies, the schemata are institutions, customs, traditions, and myths. They are, in effect, kinds of cultural DNA"
-Murray Gell-Man

"the creative princiiple of emergence is a deep mystery in many ways, it's true, and that's a propterty of complex dynamical systems. But ultimately it is intelligible. You can't say that about neo-Darwinism"
-Brian Goodwin

"The edge of chaos is where information gets its foot in the door in the physical world, where it gets the upper hand over energy."
-Chris Langton

He says of the edge of chaos and self-organized criticality, "We're talking about the same kind of phenomenon."-Per Bak

"If Tierra is telling us anything, it's telling us that the dynamics of complex systems can produce patterns we would not have predicted, patterns that we see in nature, and that includes extinction of significant size."
-Tom Ray

"It's clear to me that we have to think of species as being embedded in complex dynamical systems, and this gives you a very different view of the world."-Stuart Pimm

"I'm hostile to all sorts of mystical urges toward greater complexity."-Richard Dawkins

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photography:
You're not a photographer if you need more than one lens. -unk

Let chaos storm!
Let cloud shapes swarm!
I wait for form. (Robert Frost, Pertinax (1949) in Frost 2002)

The classification of the
constituents of a chaos, nothing
less is here essayed. (Herman Melville, Moby Dick chapter 32)

death comes to men in all walks of life
-unk

The fact that 99 percent of humanity does not understand nature is the prime reason for humanity's failure to exercise its option to attain universally sustainable physical success on this planet. The prime barrier to humanity's discovery and comprehension of nature is the obscurity of the mathematical language of science. Fortunately, however, nature is not using the strictly imaginary, awkward, and unrealistic coordinate system adopted by and taught by present-day academic science. (000.125b) -Buckminster Fuller

{I think he was dead-on 100% here. One of the things that I hope is a tangential side product of enzymind is that it may help a wider portion of the population at least see nature, and maybe understand it. I'm hoping with the graphical and visual approach being used here that some of that math language obscurity can be broken down. -psr}

 

Nature doesn't have to have department meetings to decide what to do with those keys, or how to grow a turnip. She knows just what to do. It must be that nature has only one department, one coordinating system. -BF

We have to take Fuller at his word when he claims to be not a genius but an "average healthy human being" who exercised his option to think. He embraced that potential in all of us. -About BF


A man was walking home one dark and foggy night. As he groped his way through the murk he nearly tripped over someone crawling around by a lamp post. "What are you doing?" asked the traveller. "I’m looking for my keys." Replied the other. "Are you sure you lost them here?" asked the first man. "I’m not sure at all," came the reply, "but if I haven’t lost them near this lamp I don’t stand a chance of finding them."

For me it is metaphor of science. ‘Normal science’ in Kuhn’s (1962) terms, consists of looking as assiduously as possible in the lit area, perhaps exploring those edges where the gloom is not quite impenetrable. From time to time someone manages to switch on a new light—a paradigm shift, in Kuhn’s terms—and a new area of exploration is opened up.
Science is about the art of the possible; it does not deny that the keys may lie in the darkness, it simply does not consider that its job consists of feeling around blindly.
-?