#complexity

If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't. ↗

— Ian Stewart

#science #science

Indeed, "brute force" solutions are often characteristic of advanced cultures, not primitive ones. The Romans and their predecessors spent a long time figuring out how to build arches... and virtually all our buildings today use post-and-lintel construction, precisely what the arch was devised to replace. We have better materials and more money, and given that, arches are usually not worth the extra complexity. ↗

— Henry Spencer

#brute-force #complexity #elegance #engineering #architecture

The assumption is that life doesn't need to be navigated with lessons. You can just do it intuitively. After all, you only need to achieve autonomy from your parents, find a moderately satisfying job, form a relationship, perhaps raise some children, watch the onset of mortality in your parents' generation and eventually in your own, until one day a fatal illness starts gnawing at your innards and you calmly go to the grave, shut the coffin and are done with the self-evident business of life. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#intuition #lessons #life #business

One human could simply withhold its feelings and intentions from another human by failing to audibilize or it could audibilize things that were not real. The other human would be aware only of what it heard and would change its behavior in response to a nonexistent stimulus. They called it 'lying. ↗

— Robert Buettner

#humanity #humanity-complexity #lying #change

Insofar as we appreciate order, it is when we perceive it as being accompanied by complexity, when we feel that a variety of elements has been brought to order--that windows, doors and other details have been knitted into a scheme that manages to be at once regular and intricate. (p184) ↗

— Alain de Botton

#building #chaos #complexity #order #architecture

The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle. ↗

— Michael Denton

#biology #chance #chemical-evolution #coincidence #id

You have a pet theory, one you have been turning over for years, that life itself is a kind of Rube Goldberg device, an extremely complicated machine designed to carry out the extremely simple task of constructing your soul. ↗

— Kevin Brockmeier

#life #rube-goldberg #soul #design

Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it. ↗

— Alan Perlis

#does #follows #precede #simplicity

Everything from airplanes to kitchen blenders and even chopsticks comes with an instruction manual. Children, despite all their complexity, do not. ↗

— Lawrence Kutner

#chopsticks #comes #complexity #despite #even

Simplicities are enormously complex. Consider the sentence "I love you". ↗

— Richard O. Moore

#love #silence #simplicity #love