Emergent Quotes & Sayings

The suburban mind cannot comprehend the emergent complexity of a New York sidewalk. — Robin Sloan

The very nature of materiality is an entanglement. Matter itself is always already open to, or rather entangled with, the "Other." The intra-actively emergent "parts" of phenomena are coconstituted. Not only subjects but also objects are permeated through and through with their entangled kin; the other is not just in one's skin, but in one's bones, in one's belly, in one's heart, in one's nucleus, in one's past and future. This is as true for electrons as it is for brittlestars as it is for the differentially constituted human . . . What is on the other side of the agential cut is not separate from us--agential separability is not individuation. Ethics is therefore not about right response to a radically exterior/ized other, but about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part. — Karen Barad

Darwin's "strange inversion of reasoning" and Turing's equally revolutionary inversion were aspects of a single discovery: competence without comprehension. Comprehension, far from being a Godlike talent from which all design must flow, is an emergent effect of systems of uncomprehending competence: natural selection on the one hand, and mindless computation on the other. These twin ideas have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, but they still provoke dismay and disbelief in some quarters, which I have tried to dispel in this chapter. Creationists are not going to find commented code in the inner workings of organisms, and Cartesians are not going to find an immaterial res cogitans "where all the understanding happens". — Daniel C. Dennett

Consciousness is an emergent, contingent, and impermanent phenomenon. It has no magical capacity to break free from the field of events out of which it springs. — Stephen Batchelor

Most adult emotions are emergent properties. They are subjective mental states that represent the convergence of more primitive — Anonymous

The nature of emergent technology is, as Kevin Kelly once said, right out of control. It's an element of human evolution that's completely out of control. It's sort of driving itself, and I don't see it ceasing to do that. — William Gibson

By listening with active openness, they help other people to articulate their own values more clearly and so to bring a richer vision of value into the relationship. "Under the relational conception of power, what is truly for the good of anyone or all of the relational partners is not a preconceived good. The true good is not a function of controlling or dominating influence. The true good is an emergent from deeply mutual relationships."6 — C. Robert Mesle

In general the Star Maker, once he had ordained the basic principles of a cosmos and created its initial state, was content to watch the issue; but sometimes he chose to interfere, either by infringing the natural laws that he himself had ordained, or by introducing new emergent formative principles, or by influencing the minds of the creatures by direct revelation. This according to my dream, was sometimes done to improve a cosmical design; but, more often, interference was included in his original plan. — Olaf Stapledon

We are the hands and eyes and ears, the sensitive probing feelers through which the emergent, intelligent universe comes to know its own form and purpose. We bring the thunderbolt of meaning and significance to unconscious matter, blank paper, the night sky. We are already divine magicians, already supergods. Why shouldn't we use all our brilliance to leap in as many single bounds as it takes to a world beyond ours, threatened by overpopulation, mass species extinction, environmental degradation, hunger, and exploitation? Superman and his pals would figure a way out of any stupid cul-de-sac we could find ourselves in - and we made Superman, after all. All it takes is that one magic word. — Grant Morrison

Materialism and consumerism are merely emergent properties of our neurobiology given free rein in a free market. — Piers Steel

The best strategy is a balance between having a deliberate one, and a flexible, or emergent strategy. — Clayton Christensen

All right," he said. "Since you asked, Webmind is an emergent quantum-computational system based on a stable null-sigma condensate that resists decoherence thanks to constructive feedback loops." He turned to the blackboard, scooped up a piece of chalk, and began writing rapidly. "See," he said, "using Dirac notation, if we let Webmind's default conscious state be represented by a bra of phi and a ket of psi, then this would be the einselected basis." His chalk flew across the board again. "Now, we can get the vector basis of the total combined Webmind alpha-state consciousness ... — Robert J. Sawyer

There is an emergent enlightenment appearing today, unique to no particular culture or ethnicity. Anyone who chooses to be, is its conduit. — Marianne Williamson

Our main source of psychic energy in the future will depend on our ability to understand this symbol of evolution in an acceptable context of interpretation. Only in the context of an emergent universe will the human project come to an integral understanding of itself. We must, however, come to experience the universe in its psychic as well as in its physical aspect. We need to experience the sequence of evolutionary transformations as moments of grace, and also as celebration moments in our new experience of the sacred. — Thomas Berry

I don't really do themes. I might accidentally, but themes are an emergent phenomena of the writing of the book, of just trying to get a story out there. — Iain Banks

An individual's demarcations as a being, not his trespass of them, create his identity and preserve his illusion of being something special and not a freak of chance, a product of blind mutations. Transcending all illusions and their emergent activities - having absolute control of what we are and not what we need to be so that we may survive the most unsavory facts of life and death - would untether us from the moorings of our self-limited selves. — Thomas Ligotti

Given AC as a rival to naturalism, there is an additional burden of proof for a naturalist ontology that quantifies over sui generis emergent properties such as those constitutive of consciousness. After — William Lane Craig

Three principles - the conformability of nature to herself, the applicability of the criterion of simplicity, and the "unreasonable effectiveness" of certain parts of mathematics in describing physical reality - are thus consequences of the underlying law of the elementary particles and their interactions. Those three principles need not be assumed as separate metaphysical postulates. Instead, they are emergent properties of the fundamental laws of physics. — Murray Gell-Mann

As they seek authenticity, Emerging Evangelicals seek freedom - from loneliness, convention, unwanted authority, dominant paradigms, the prevailing social climate, and impersonal bureaucracies. Ironically, in this sense, their preferred narrative and their desired subjectivity are just as modern as what they seek to distance themselves from: the conservative Christian subculture, including its born-again narrative of awakening and transformation. — James S Bielo

Resilience, timing, adaptation - these are the three pillars upon which the emergent properties of interacting systems rest. When the systems are the economy and the environment, understanding of the relationships among these concepts is crucial. This volume does a better job of explaining how to manage both money and nature to ensure humanity's long-term future than any other work I know of. Read and reflect. — John L. Casti

No identity is fully chosen by the individual, just as no identity is fully determined by forces external to the individual. This endless interplay between constraint and choice means that identities are necessarily dynamic, emergent, and contextual rather than static, predetermined, and immutable. — Julie Tetel Andresen

Whether you see the world as emergent or, deteriorating. We have long known that some people favor innovation and look positively toward the future while others are frightened of change and want to halt innovation. — Michael Crichton

As states subsist in part by keeping their weaknesses from being known, so is it the quiet of families to have their chancery and their parliament within doors, and to compose and determine all emergent differences there. — John Donne

Cancer is the emergent property of the accumulated errors in an ordered system. It's the consequences of random events. — Steven Popkes

Science is not there for you to cherry pick ... You can decide whether or not to believe in it but that doesn't change the reality of an emergent scientific truth. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Your network is your destiny, a reality backed up by many studies in the newly emergent fields of social networking and social contagion theory. We are the people we interact with. — Keith Ferrazzi

That mix of order and anarchy is what we now call emergent behavior. — Steven Johnson

I thought of my own self fifteen years ago, and how much I've changed in the same period. The me who exists today and the me who existed then, if put side by side, would look more than vaguely similar. But we are a completely different collection of molecules, with different hairlines and waistlines, and, it sometimes seems, little in common besides our names. What binds that me to this me, and allows me to maintain the illusion that there is continuity from moment to moment and year to year, is some relatively stable but gradually evolving thing at the nucleus of my being. Call it a soul, or a self, or an emergent by-product of a neural network, but whatever you want to call it, that element of continuity is entirely dependent on memory. — Joshua Foer

In an improv group and a successful work team, the members play off one another, each person's contributions providing the spark for the next. Together, the improvisational team creates a novel emergent product, one that's more responsive to the changing environment. — R. Keith Sawyer

Taking consciousness as a primitive rather than as an emergent property of the physical brain, Chalmers's search for a nonreductive ontology of consciousness led him to what he calls panprotopsychism. The proto reflects the possibility that the intrinsic properties of the basic entities of the physical world may be not quite mental, but that collectively they are able to constitute the mental (it is in this sense of proto that physics is "protochemical"). In this view, mind is much more fundamental to the universe than we ordinarily imagine. Panprotopsychism has the virtue of integrating mental events into the physical world. "We need psychophysical laws connecting physical processes to subjective experience," Chalmers says. "Certain aspects of quantum mechanics lend themselves very nicely to this. — Jeffrey M. Schwartz

To transcend means to "go beyond," but this need not compel us to an ornate dualist view that regards transcendent levels of reality (e.g., the spiritual level) to be not of this world. We can "go beyond" the "ordinary" powers of the material world through the power of patterns. Rather than a materialist, I would prefer to consider myself a "patternist." It's through the emergent powers of the pattern that we transcend. — Ray Kurzweil

While political and cultural factors are important as explanations for differences in national technology policy and industrial practices, emergent trends in science, engineering and management are leading to new paradigms for high-technology innovation in both Japan and the United States. — Lewis M. Branscomb

Dialogue with Catholics and other nonevangelical Christians offered some correction to the Church Growth movement's fixation on cultural accommodation and baptism rates. However - save for those few who converted - evangelicals attracted to other Christian traditions have made those traditions their own. They assemble do-it-yourself liturgies from a hodgepodge of monastic prayers and mystics' visions. They lionize medieval dissenters - Celtic monks, or renegade Franciscans - but don't understand their broader Catholic context. Without quite realizing what they have done, evangelicals often use these ancient teachings and practices to confirm, rather than challenge, their own assumptions. History becomes a sidekick to one's twenty-first-century journey with Jesus. — Molly Worthen

Errors of reductionism and biodeterminism take over in such silly statements as "Intelligence is 60 percent genetic and 40 percent environmental." A 60 percent (or whatever) "heritability" for intelligence means no such thing. We shall not get this issue straight until we realize that the "interactionism" we all accept does not permit such statements as "Trait x is 29 percent environmental and 71 percent genetic." When causative factors (more than two, by the way) interact so complexly, and throughout growth, to produce an intricate adult being, we cannot, in principle, parse that being's behavior into quantitative percentages of remote root causes. The adult being is an emergent entity who must be understood at his own level and in his own totality. The truly salient issues are malleability and flexibility, not fallacious parsing by percentages. A trait may be 90 percent heritable, yet entirely malleable. — Stephen Jay Gould

The creativity and adaptability of life expresses itself through the spontaneous emergence of novelty at critical points of instability. Every human organization contains both designed and emergent structures. The challenge is to find the right balance between the creativity of emergence and the stability of design. — Fritjof Capra

If I have so far argued that Foucault is a kind of closet liberal and thus deeply modern, I need to be equally critical of evangelical (and especially American) Christianity's modernity and its appropriation of Enlightenment notions of the autonomous self. Indeed, many otherwise orthodox Christians, who recoil at the notion of theological liberalism, have unwittingly adopted notions of freedom and autonomy that are liberal to the core. Averse to hierarchies and control, contemporary evangelicalism thrives on autonomy: the autonomy of the nondenominational church, at a macrocosmic level, and the autonomy of the individual Christian, at the microcosmic level. And it does not seem to me that the emerging church has changed much on this score; indeed, some elements of emergent spirituality are intensifications of this affirmation of autonomy and a laissez-faire attitude with respect to institutions. — James K.A. Smith

We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it's so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth (such as an intelligence agency or a community of scientists) or to produce good public policy (such as a legislature or advisory board). — Jonathan Haidt

I wondered if what one normally calls "normal" was itself a sort of dullness, a deadening of sense and spirit, if not, indeed, a very closure of their doors. For myself, now, liberated, released, emergent from the dark night and abyss, there was an intoxication of light and love and health. — Oliver Sacks

Love is a spiritual practice that matures us as we try and try again to leave behind our isolation, expose our vulnerabilities, and make commitments to care truly for one another. — Nanette Sawyer

Look at any randomly selected piece of your world. Encoded deep in the biology of every cell in every blade of grass, in every insect's wing, in every bacterium cell, is the history of the third planet from the Sun in a Solar System making its way lethargically around a galaxy called the Milky Way. Its shape, form, function, colour, smell, taste, molecular structure, arrangement of atoms, sequence of bases, and possibilities for the future are all absolutely unique. There is nowhere else in the observable Universe where you will see precisely that little clump of emergent, living complexity. It is wonderful. — Brian Cox

[With Photosynth,] all of those photos become linked together, and they make something emergent that's greater than the sum of the parts. — Blaise Aguera Y Arcas

For the emergent process, as noted by the geneticist Theodore Dobzhansky, is neither random nor determined but creative. Just as in human order, creativity is neither a rational deductive process nor the irrational wandering of the undisciplined mind but the emergence of beauty as mysterious as the blossoming of a field of daisies out of the dark Earth. — Thomas Berry

In 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, Grant, aged thirty-nine, with four children at home and scarcely a penny in the bank, had made no mark on the world and looked unlikely to do so, for all the boom conditions of mid-century America. His Plymouth Rock ancestry, his specialist education, his military rank, which together must have ensured him a sheltered corner in the life of the Old World, counted for nothing in the New. He lacked the essential quality to be what Jacques Barzun has called a "booster," one of those bustling, bonhomous, penny-counting, chance-grabbing optimists who, whether in the frenetic commercial activity of the Atlantic coast, in the emergent industries of New England and Pennsylvania or on the westward-moving frontier, were to make America's fortune. Grant, in his introspective and undemonstrative style, was a gentleman, and was crippled by the quality. — John Keegan

Everyone chatters about their imaginary friends. Some are ascribing agency, motivation, and intelligence to patterns of societal forces that are the emergent properties of distributed interactions. Others are writing - or filming - fiction. — Manu Saadia

In such a view, time is not emergent. It is, in fact, the only aspect of reality that cannot emerge from a more fundamental background. We register its reality, always and everywhere, by recognizing the differential character of change: some things change relative to other things. However, the kinds of things that there are also change, and so do the ways in which they change. That is what time is: the transformation of transformation. — Roberto Mangabeira Unger

I helped lift a sixty-five-year-old woman out of the bloody machine that had just torn four fingers off her hand, and I still hear her cries - "Jesus and Mary, I won't be able to work again!"
The factory. Long live the factory! Today, even as new factories are being built, the civilization that made the factory into a cathedral is dying. And somewhere, right now, other young men and women are driving through the night into the heart of the emergent Third Wave civilization. Our task from here on will be to join, as it were, their quest for tomorrow. — Alvin Toffler

Pritchard tutted. "Justice? Justice is even more problematic than truth. It's an emergent property of a very complicated system. — M.R. Carey

I can't hear God's voice for my kids, but I can watch and listen and pray and adjust and try not to screw up whatever He has planned for their lives. And although I can't make them listen to God, or even want to, I can plant enough seeds to swing the world in their favor. That said, as I navigate my day surrounded by the parents of gifted children (did you notice there aren't any average kids anymore - only Gifted and Disposable), here's where I get confused: if a person believes in gifts but not in God, then where - as they stand in daily admiration of their child's emergent uniqueness, their heart swelling with pride and joy and, yes, gratitude - where, then, do they send the thank-you note? — Heather Choate Davis

Emergent properties result from interactions between individual parts, so it follows that a top down analytical approach that begins with the whole and dissects it into its constituent parts is bound to miss precisely those emergent properties — Manuel De Landa

We human beings constitute and reconstitute ourselves through cultural traditions, which we experience as our own development in a historical time that spans the generations. To investigate the life-world as horizon and ground of all experience therefore requires investigating none other than generativity - the processes of becoming, of making and remaking, that occur over the generations and within which any individual genesis is always already situated. ... Individual subjectivity is intersubjectively and culturally embodied, embedded, and emergent. — Evan Thompson

Hierarchical organization in biological systems thus is characterized by an exquisite array of delicately and intricately interlocked order, steadily increasing in level and complexity and thereby giving rise neogenetically to emergent properties. — Clifford Grobstein

There is a beauty in paradox when it comes to talking about things of ultimate concern. Paradox works against our tendency to stay superficial in our faith, or to rest on easy answers or categorical thinking. It breaks apart our categories by showing the inadequacy of them and by pointing to a reality larger than us, the reality of gloria, of light, of beyond-the-beyond. I like to call it paradoxology - the glory of paradox, paradox-doxology - which takes us somewhere we wouldn't be capable of going if we thought we had everything all wrapped up, if we thought we had attained full comprehension. The commitment to embracing the paradox and resisting the impulse to categorize people (ourselves included) is one of the ways we follow Jesus into that larger mysterious reality of light and love. — Nanette Sawyer

Our sense of self, formulated in large part by the untold number of cross-related connections that we make with our physical, social, and family environments, is reliant upon fitting into our social fabric. The educational environment, family relationships, peer groups, books, television, films, music, along with an assortment of other cultural events shape our emergent persona. Our successes and failures interacting in the world leave their collective imprint upon the wet clay of our forming brains. We are sentimental creatures who cling to past memories. We are inquisitive critters who venture forth from our protective dens to explore new territory. We are perceptive organisms equipped with five basic senses. We are sentient beings who can consciously organize our sense impressions into guiding ideas and useful principles. Our survival responses form a central cord of our emotions. We are receptive, compassionate beings that respond with both body and mind to global stimuli. — Kilroy J. Oldster

What we see taking place in the church today is the reduction of God to an idol. — Peter Rollins

The military profession, especially is the long-established great powers, is deeply pessimistic about the likelihood that people and countries will behave well under stress. Professional officers are trained to think in terms of emergent threats, and this [climate change] is as big a threat as you are going to find. Never mind what the pundits are telling the public about the perils of climate change; what are the military strategists telling their governments. This will tell us a great deal about the probable shape of the future, although it may not tell any anything that we want to hear. — Gwynne Dyer

The emergent movement is creating a mushiness to the thinking patterns in Christianity today. It's like we really can't stand for anything. — Eric Ludy

Absolute consciousness is manifest here in every circumstance of daily life because it is everywhere full and perfect. Consciousness is said to be the cause of all things because it is everywhere emergent as each manifest entity. — Abhinavagupta

When the corporation's investment capital becomes impatient for growth, good money becomes bad money because it triggers a subsequent cascade of inevitable incorrect decisions. Innovators who seek funding for the disruptive innovations that could ultimately fuel the company's growth with a high probability of success now find that their trial balloons get shot down because they can't get big enough fast enough. Managers of most disruptive businesses can't credibly project that the business will become very big very fast, because new-market disruptions need to compete against nonconsumption and must follow an emergent strategy process. Compelling them to project big numbers forces them to declare a strategy that confidently crams the innovation into a large, existing, and obvious market whose size can be statistically substantiated. This means competing against consumption. — Clayton M Christensen

Education is a self-organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon. — Sugata Mitra

When a caterpillar spins its cocoon, it goes through a transformative process and then emerges as a butterfly. Similarly, when we go through a practice of meditation and prayer, we loosen our egoic grip on a sense of self that is separate from the Whole and become vehicles of the emergent evolutionary paradigm of love, peace , compassion, wisdom, harmony and oneness that seeks expression on the planet. — Michael Beckwith

The behavior of temperature and heat and so forth can certainly be understood in terms of atoms: That's the subject known as "statistical mechanics." But it can equally well be understood without knowing anything whatsoever about atoms: That's the phenomenological approach we've been discussing, known as "thermodynamics." It is a common occurrence in physics that in complex, macroscopic systems, regular patterns emerge dynamically from underlying microscopic rules. Despite the way it is sometimes portrayed, there is no competition between fundamental physics and the study of emergent phenomena; both are fascinating and crucially important to our understanding of nature. — Sean Carroll

The concept of an independent spiritual realm does not augment, for me, the magic of the mystical dimension, whereas to think of this dimension as emergent from our minds makes it all the more wondrous to be a human. — Ursula Goodenough

I'm drawn to the Jewish notion of the soul, nephesh, which is not something preexistent but emergent - forming in and through physicality and relational experience. This suggests that we need our bodies to claim our souls. The body is where every virtue lives or dies, but more: our bodies are access points to mystery. And in some way that barely makes sense to me, I'm sure that we have to have feet planted on the ground, literally and metaphysically, to reach towards what is beyond and above us. — Krista Tippett

We don't legislate emergent technologies into existence. We almost never do. They just emerge, dragged forth by Adam Smith's invisible hand. Then we have to see what people are actually going to do with them, and try to legislate to take account of that. — William Gibson

Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Your body, which is bonding millions of molecules every second, depends on transformation. Breathing and digestion harness transformation. Food and air aren't just shuffled about but, rather, undergo the exact chemical bonding needed to keep you alive. The sugar extracted from an orange travels to the brain and fuels a thought. The emergent property in this case is the newness of the thought; no molecules in the history of the universe ever combined to produce that exact thought. — Deepak Chopra

Every system tries to get people to conform to support that system. That goes for communism, socialism, free enterprise, or any other civilization. If they don't demand loyalty, they can't keep their civilization together. So what they do is they teach things that would support an established system. We do not advocate an established system. TVP talks of an emergent system into state of change. So that we always prepare people for the next changes coming ahead. So that people will not cling to the past. — Jacque Fresco

We read about the name Jesus was given at his birth; Immanuel, meaning "God with us". This God wasn't content with dwelling in fiction, this God wasn't content living with the seraphim and this God wasn't content with bulls and goats anymore. This God wanted to dwell with you, with all of your mess, with all of your failures with all the dirtiness that is you; he wanted to sit with you. Here's the amazing thing, God doesn't care if you're a catholic, a Lutheran, Post modern or Emergent; he wants to sit with you. — Ricky Maye

Our experience in fooling around with the genes of mice has taught us that many of the traits that interest us are not definite products of specific mutations but emergent phenomena arising from extremely complex interactions between genes, environment, and life experience. — Gary Wolf

The concept of emergent gameplay is really exciting. That's when players are really crafting their own experience. So if you're clever and creative, you can do things that even developers of the game didn't know were possible. — Warren Spector

Our real beliefs are generally not to be found at the level of ego. — Peter Rollins

Not ordinarily do men achieve this balance of opposites. The idealists are not usually realistic, and the realists are not usually idealistic. The militant are not generally known to be passive, nor the passive to be militant. Seldom are the humble self-assertive, or the self assertive humble ... truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis that reconciles the two. — Martin Luther King Jr.

My problem with the Emergent Church is not the questions they are bringing up, but the answers they are giving. They are making Christianity milky. They are making it so you can no longer define anything. There is no sound judgment allowed. — Eric Ludy

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

One gets the sense that, for Deleuze, the cinema of the movement-image has been fully realized while that of the time-image is emergent. Comparatively speaking, there are few "pure" examples of films where direct images of time predominate. Mixed or hybrid examples are more common. — D. N. Rodowick

In Edmund Gosse, Agnes Smedley, Geoffrey Wolff, we have a set of memoirists whose work records a steadily changing idea of the emergent self. But for each of them a flash of insight illuminating that idea grew out of the struggle to clarify one's own formative experience; and in each case the strength and beauty of the writing lie in the power of concentration with which this insight is pursued, and made to become the the writer's organizing principle. That principle at work is what makes a memoir literature rather than testament. — Vivian Gornick

We are one of many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no perfect image except Life, and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time. — Loren Eiseley

I think a lot of things will be self-correcting, even in America. After all, human societies are essentially self-organizing emergent systems. The catch is, how much disorder will we have to endure while this re-self-organizing process occurs. — James Howard Kunstler

We godless lack that certainty, and we know the world is a complex place that requires compromise and is not ruled by a moral force - virtue is subject to negotiation, and is found in working together with others to find mutually satisfactory solutions. Good is not absolute, it is an emergent property that arises from successful networks of individuals. It is also something that is measured by evidence: we look at the good that people do, not the promises that they make and never keep, or the lies that dovetail nicely into dogma. Competence is a virtue. Intent is meaningless without action. — PZ Myers

We cannot even predict what kinds of emergent properties would appear when animals begin interacting as part of a brain-net. In theory, you could imagine that a combination of brains could provide solutions that individual brains cannot achieve by themselves. — Miguel Nicolelis

I watch for emergent technologies and pay attention to what people say they'll be good for, then see what we actually use them for. It never occurred to me that a tiny telephone with a wireless transceiver would do whatever it is that it's done to us. — William Gibson

I believe that in the process of locating new avenues of creative thought, we will also arrive at an existential conservatism. It is worth asking repeatedly: Where are our deepest roots? We are, it seems, Old World, catarrhine primates, brilliant emergent animals, defined genetically by our unique origins, blessed by our newfound biological genius, and secure in our homeland if we wish to make it so. What does it all mean? This is what it all means: To the extent that we depend on prosthetic devices to keep ourselves and the biosphere alive, we will render everything fragile. To the extent that we banish the rest of life, we will impoverish our own species for all time. And if we should surrender our genetic nature to machine-aided ratiocination, and our ethics and art and our very meaning to a habit of careless discursion in the name of progress, imagining ourselves godlike and absolved from our ancient heritage, we will become nothing. — Edward O. Wilson

Some distant day, anthropologists will consider as a landmark in humankind's evolution - comparable to the capacity for destroying ourselves by nuclear obliteration - the adolescent gene's newly emergent power to dictate nightly TV viewing. — Steve Erickson

As far as life is concerned, there is no such thing as "Nature". There are only homes. Home is that environment to which the individual has become adapted; and almost everything is unnatural outside his range of adaptation. Harmonious equilibrium with nature is an abstract concept with a Platonic beauty but lacking the flesh and blood of life. It fails, in particular, to convey the creative emergent quality of human existence. — Rene Dubos

Organisms are themselves expressions of ... emergent order and agents of higher levels of emergence. — Brian Goodwin

The emergent properties of my computer have existence not because they inhere in the component parts that compose them. They do so because those component materials are related to one another by careful design to work together as a single system in order to produce those properties. The visual, informational, and computational abilities of my computer are new realities, yet not present in the sum total of the inputs of which my computer is constituted. It is only through their systemic relationships that those amazing abilities have being. The novel reality takes existence not through the parts but through their relationships and interactions. Reality is thus significantly constituted through relationality, not merely composition. — Christian Smith

Corporations, in the name of efficiency, suppress variation by "getting all the ducks in line."To optimize productivity, they evolve highly refined and internally consistent operating systems. Payoff - results - as long as the music lasts. But ... all that streamlining and re-engineering limits diversity, suppresses self-organization ... and curtails a bottom up emergent response to disruptive change. — Richard Pascale

It seems like
especially in religious circles and Christian circles, we want to first talk about the things we're opposed to. That means we have to categorize that person. We can call them emergent or neo orthodox or someone who feminizes scripture. There's the category, let's stick them in the category then just blow up the box and him along with it. — William P. Young

The Emergent resides in the people's seats, not the emperor's box. — Nissim Levy

14. Procrastinator's Clock. For those who are chronically late to meetings, there's the Procrastinator's Clock, a downloadable program for your computer, that displays a digital clock that is guaranteed to be up to fifteen minutes fast. How fast? Well, that's the nudge. You are never exactly sure because the clock unpredictably speeds up and slows down. That assures that users can't game the system. We think that this device might help the lawyer of this team (who shall remain nameless) get to Noodles on time for lunch. A physical version of this clock has already been patented by a company called Emergent Technologies. — Richard H. Thaler

From this perspective, the universe can be thought of as an information processor. It takes information regarding how things are now and produces information delineating how things will be at the next now, and the now after that. Our senses become aware of such processing by detecting how the physical environment changes over time. But the physical environment itself is emergent; it arises from the fundamental ingredient, information, and evolves according to the fundamental rules, the laws of physics. — Brian Greene

When carbon (C), Oxygen (o) and hydrogen (H) atoms bond in a certain way to form sugar, the resulting compound has a sweet taste. The sweetness resides neither in the C, nor in the O, nor in the H; it resides in the pattern that emerges from their interaction. It is an emergent property. Moreover, strictly speaking, is not a property of the chemical bonds. It is a sensory experience that arises when the sugar molecules interact with the chemistry of our taste buds, which in turns causes a set of neurons to fire in a certain way. The experience of sweetness emerges from that neural activity. — Fritjof Capra

Safety is an emergent property of systems, not a component property. — Nancy Leveson

Already many of the surrounding buildings had disappeared beneath the proliferating vegetation. Huge club mosses and calamites blotted out the white rectangular faces, shading the lizards in their window lairs. Beyond the lagoon, the endless tides of silt had begun to accumulate into enormous glittering banks, here and there overtopping the shoreline like the immense tippings of some distant goldmine. The light drummed against his brain, bathing the submerged levels below his consciousness, carrying him downwards to warm pellucid depths, where the nominal realities of time and space ceased to exist. Guided by his dreams, he was moving back into his emergent past, through a succession of ever stranger landscapes centered on the lagoon, each of which seemed to represent one of his own spinal levels. — J.G. Ballard

The illusion of the self isn't that there is no such thing as you. Nor does the illusion of free will mean that you cannot make choices. Instead, the illusion is that the self and free will are not really what they seem to be from your, the "end user's," perspective. The illusion of free will is that free will has infinite scope, rather than being a flexible set of feedback loops between higher-order body maps and emotional and memory-storage systems in the brain. The illusion of the self is that self is a kernel, rather than a distributed, emergent system. — Sandra Blakeslee

I, and all the complex things around me, exist only because many things were assembled in a very precise way. The 'emergent' properties are not magical. They are really there and eventually they may start re-arranging the environments that generated them. But they don't exist 'in' the bits and pieces that made them; they emerge from the arrangement of those bits and pieces in very precise ways. And that is also true of the emergent entities known as "you" and "me". — David Christian

Focusing-Oriented Art Therapy is a major contribution to art therapy literature and practice. Laury Rappaport introduces a contemplative method and philosophy grounded in the body's felt-sense of experience and its innate and largely unrecognized wisdom. This intellectually provocative, yet thoroughly practical text, establishes Rappaport as an emergent leader in the art therapy world and author of a book that every student and art therapist must read in order to appreciate the depth and breadth of our discipline. — Shaun McNiff

Marxism is a Western construction - a conceptualization of human affairs and historical development that is emergent from the historical experiences of European peoples mediated, in turn, through their civilization, their social orders, and their cultures. — Cedric J. Robinson

Neither Bwitists nor Fang felt they could eradicate ritual sin or evil in the world. This incapacity means that men have to celebrate. Good and bad walk together. As Fang frequently enough told missionaries, "We have two hearts, good and bad." Early missionaries, aware of these self-confessed contradictions, evangelized with the promise of "one heartedness" in Christianity. But Fang by and large did not find it there. For many, Christian one heartedness was a constriction of their selves. While "one heartedness" is celebrated in Bwiti, it is a one heartedness which is coagulated out of a flow of many qualities from one state to another. It is goodness achieved in the presence of badness, an aboveness achieved in the presence of belowness. It is an emergent quality energized in the presence of its opposite. — Terence McKenna

An example of such emergent phenomena is the origin of life from non-living chemical compounds in the oldest, lifeless oceans of the earth. Here, aided by the radiation energy received from the sun, countless chemical materials were synthesized and accumulated in such a way that they constituted, as it were, a primeval "soup." In this primeval soup, by infinite variations of lifeless growth and decay of substances during some billions of years, the way of life was ultimately reached, with its metabolism characterized by selective assimilation and dissimilation as end stations of a sluiced and canalized flow of free chemical energy. — R.W. Van Bemmelen