#cybernetics

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. ↗

— Robert Wright

#technology #nature

Big whirls have little whirls, That feed on their velocity; And little whirls have lesser whirls, And so on to viscosity. ↗

— Lewis Fry Richardson

#science #systems #science

An ocean traveler has even more vividly the impression that the ocean is made of waves than that it is made of water. ↗

— Arthur Stanley Eddington

#science #systems #science

The map is not the territory. ↗

— Alfred Korzybski

#metaphysics #philosophy #metaphysics

Management, a science? Of course not, it's just a waste-paper basket full of recipes which provided the dish of the day during a few years of plenty and economic growth. Now the recipes are inappropriate and the companies which persist in following them will disappear. ↗

— Leon Courville

#management #society #science

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. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#cybernetics #science #art

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. ↗

— Stuart A. Kauffman

#emergence #science #systems #life

IF YOU WANT TO CREATE A CHANGE, you must challenge not only the models of Unreality, but the paradigms that underwrite them. ↗

— Stafford Beer

#cybernetics #models #paradigms #science #change

The level of intelligence has been tremendously increased, because people are thinking and communicating in terms of screens, and not in lettered books. Much of the real action is taking place in what is called cyberspace. People have learned how to boot up, activate, and transmit their brains. Essentially, there’s a universe inside your brain. The number of connections possible inside your brain is limitless. And as people have learned to have more managerial and direct creative access to their brains, they have also developed matrices or networks of people that communicate electronically. There are direct brain/computer link-ups. You can just jack yourself in and pilot your brain around in cyberspace-electronic space. ↗

— Timothy Leary

#communication #cybernetics #cyberspace #intelligence #internet

The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own. And if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious. ↗

— John Stuart Mill

#science #systems #imagination