Feedback Loops Quotes & Sayings

When Europe dominated, there were no or few feedback loops. Or, to put it another way, there were few, if any, consequences for its behaviour towards the non-western world: relations were simply too unequal. — Martin Jacques

We should not try to design a better world. We should make better feedback loops. — Tim Harford

David Eagleman describes how you can take a male stickleback fish and have a female fish trespass on its territory. The male gets confused, because it wants to mate with the female, but it also wants to defend its territory. As a result, the male stickleback fish will simultaneously attack the female while initiating courtship behavior. The male is driven into a frenzy, trying to woo and kill the female at the same time. This works for mice as well. Put an electrode in front of a piece of cheese. If the mouse gets too close, the electrode will shock it. One feedback loop tells the mouse to eat the cheese, but another one tells the mouse to stay away and avoid being shocked. By adjusting the location of the electrode, you can get the mouse to oscillate, torn between two conflicting feedback loops. — Michio Kaku

By cultivating rich social networks, by cultivating weak ties, not just close ties but the weak ties, by becoming connectors and by connecting others so that they connect us, we create a world in which these self-amplifying feedback loops feed on top of each other. — Jason Silva

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

Exercise has a direct brain connection, when you consider what it actually does. What we tend to overlook are the feedback loops that connect the brain to every cell in the body. Therefore when you throw a ball, run on a treadmill, or jog along the shore, billions of cells are "seeing" the outside world. The chemicals transmitted form the brain are acting the way sense organs do, making contact with the outside world and offering stimulation from that world.
This is why the jump from being sedentary to doing a minimal amount of exercise - such as walking, light gardening, and climbing the stairs instead of taking the elevator - is so healthy. Your cells want to be part of the world. — Deepak Chopra

Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains - cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I. — Peter Watts

Maintaining boundaries is hard. That's why I strongly prefer the physical separation of work and home. — Karen Finerman

The plumbing and pluvial dynamics of the Amazon, the largest freshwater system on Earth, are still far from understood. This is partly because it is a semi-open system. Moisture flows in and out unpredictably. A lot of nonlinear feedback loops and 'remote influences' - continental, transcontinental, oceanic, meteorological - come into play. — Alex Shoumatoff

Consciousness amplifies the weak signals that, like cobwebs spun between trees, web Narratives together. Moreover, it amplifies them selectively and in that way creates feedback loops that steer the Narratives. — Neal Stephenson

This automatic feedback is another reason extreme athletes have found flow so frequently, but what if we're interested in pulling this trigger without help from the laws of physics? No mystery here. Tighten feedback loops. Put mechanisms in place so attention doesn't have to wander. Ask for more input. How much input? Well, forget quarterly reviews. Think daily reviews. Studies have found that in professions with less direct feedback loops - stock analysis, psychiatry, and medicine - even the best get worse over time. — Steven Kotler

The orbs create feedback loops that can influence either personal of employee behavior. — David Rose

Symptoms of illness and distress, plus your feelings about them, can be viewed as messengers coming to tell you something important about your body or about your mind. In the old days, if a king didn't like the message he was given, he would sometimes have the messenger killed. This is tantamount to suppressing your symptoms or your feelings because they are unwanted. Killing the messenger and denying the message or raging against it are not intelligent ways of approaching healing. The one thing we don't want to do is to ignore or rupture the essential connections that can complete relevant feedback loops and restore self-regulation and balance. Our real challenge when we have symptoms is to see if we can listen to their message and really hear them and take them to heart, that is, make the connection fully. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

That's the great thing about plankton. It pretty much keeps to itself. — Gene Hackman

Consciousness is the process of creating a model of the world using multiple feedback loops in various parameters (e.g., in temperature, space, time, and in relation to others), in order to accomplish a goal (e.g., find mates, food, shelter). I call this the "space-time theory of consciousness, — Michio Kaku

They could not make a deep and powerful connection to the larger world until they were able to connect to themselves. And, in an example of the kind of feedback loops that characterize all living systems, they were not able to connect to themselves until they were in authentic relationship with others. — Helen LaKelly Hunt

Find something you enjoy and love and you're passionate about. And then dedicate all you've got to make it a success. And if you have those two things, I think with your passion and dedication, there is nothing that you cannot accomplish. — Anousheh Ansari

The phenomenon of emergence takes place at critical points of instability that arise from fluctuations in the environment, amplified by feedback loops. — Fritjof Capra

The global climate is a complex interactive system, with all kinds of nonlinear feedback loops. — Alex Shoumatoff

If you neglect your personal space and allow chaos and clutter to creep in, it will affect you, and perhaps encourage further neglect. Positive feedback loops should improve your life, not detract from it. You can't prime yourself directly, but you can create environments conducive to the mental states you wish to achieve. — David McRaney

I wasn't willing to be a victim. I only wanted to survive, and I only wanted to get through. — Charisma Carpenter

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

It's very painful for us to feel we deserve a life. That's the toughest thing. That we deserve to have a life. That can take a lifetime. — Dustin Hoffman

The world in which we live has an increasing number of feedback loops, causing events to be the cause of more events (say, people buy a book because other people bought it), thus generating snowballs and arbitrary and unpredictable planet-wide winner-take-all effects. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb