{"quotes":[{"text":"Children are turning themselves into monsters and, quite frankly, it is your fault. You initiated the creation of this technology, then you allowed it to slip through your fingers.”Miriam’s jaw tightened. “I disagree, but now is the least optimal time imaginable for assigning blame. People are dying, and I will not stand around debating semantics with you while they are.","author":"G.S. Jennsen","tags":["ai","artificial-intelligence","cybernetics","cyberpunk","science-fiction","scifi","space-exploration","space-opera","space-travel","spaceships"],"id":1605,"author_id":"G.S.+Jennsen"},{"text":"Pick up a pinecone and count the spiral rows of scales. You may find eight spirals winding up to the left and 13 spirals winding up to the right, or 13 left and 21 right spirals, or other pairs of numbers. The striking fact is that these pairs of numbers are adjacent numbers in the famous Fibonacci series: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21... Here, each term is the sum of the previous two terms. The phenomenon is well known and called phyllotaxis. Many are the efforts of biologists to understand why pinecones, sunflowers, and many other plants exhibit this remarkable pattern. Organisms do the strangest things, but all these odd things need not reflect selection or historical accident. Some of the best efforts to understand phyllotaxis appeal to a form of self-organization. Paul Green, at Stanford, has argued persuasively that the Fibonacci series is just what one would expects as the simplest self-repeating pattern that can be generated by the particular growth processes in the growing tips of the tissues that form sunflowers, pinecones, and so forth. Like a snowflake and its sixfold symmetry, the pinecone and its phyllotaxis may be part of order for free.","author":"Stuart A. Kauffman","tags":["cybernetics","emergence","science","systems"],"id":71276,"author_id":"Stuart+A.+Kauffman"},{"text":"I shall act always so as to increase the total number of choices.","author":"Heinz von Foerster","tags":["choice","cognition","cybernetics","disorder"],"id":74755,"author_id":"Heinz+von+Foerster"},{"text":"The world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.","author":"Norbert Wiener","tags":["cybernetics","intelligence","robots"],"id":76143,"author_id":"Norbert+Wiener"},{"text":"It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.","author":"Albert Einstein","tags":["art","cybernetics","science"],"id":107404,"author_id":"Albert+Einstein"},{"text":"If biologists have ignored self-organization, it is not because self-ordering is not pervasive and profound. It is because we biologists have yet to understand how to think about systems governed simultaneously by two sources of order, Yet who seeing the snowflake, who seeing simple lipid molecules cast adrift in water forming themselves into cell-like hollow lipid vesicles, who seeing the potential for the crystallization of life in swarms of reacting molecules, who seeing the stunning order for free in networks linking tens upon tens of thousands of variables, can fail to entertain a central thought: if ever we are to attain a final theory in biology, we will surely, surely have to understand the commingling of self-organization and selection. We will have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all.","author":"Stuart A. Kauffman","tags":["cybernetics","emergence","science","systems"],"id":144987,"author_id":"Stuart+A.+Kauffman"},{"text":"An ocean traveler has even more vividly the impression that the ocean is made of waves than that it is made of water.","author":"Arthur Stanley Eddington","tags":["cybernetics","science","systems"],"id":148406,"author_id":"Arthur+Stanley+Eddington"},{"text":"Your brain may give birth to any technology, but other brains will decide whether the technology thrives. The number of possible technologies is infinite, and only a few pass this test of affinity with human nature.","author":"Robert Wright","tags":["cybernetics","technology"],"id":154980,"author_id":"Robert+Wright"},{"text":"The essential fact which emerges ... Is that the three smallest and most active reservoirs ( of carbon in the global carbon cycle), the atmosphere, the plants and the soil, are all of roughly the same size. This means that large human disturbance of any one of these reservoirs will have large effects on all three. We cannot hope either to understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.","author":"Freeman Dyson","tags":["cybernetics","science","systems"],"id":155379,"author_id":"Freeman+Dyson"},{"text":"IF YOU WANT TO CREATE A CHANGE, you must challenge not only the models of Unreality, but the paradigms that underwrite them.","author":"Stafford Beer","tags":["change","cybernetics","models","paradigms","science"],"id":198256,"author_id":"Stafford+Beer"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":25,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}