"[…] that all science is merely a game can be easily discarded as a piece of wisdom too easily come by. But it is legitimate to enquire whether science is not liable to indulge in play within the closed precincts of its own method. Thus, for instance, the scientist’s continuous penchant for systems tends in the direction of play." (Johan Huizinga, "Homo Ludens", 1938)
"That a system is open means, not simply that it engages in interchanges with the environment, but that this interchange is an essential factor underlying the system's viability, its reproductive ability or continuity, and its ability to change. [...] Openness is an essential factor underlying a system's viability, continuity, and its ability to change." (Walter F Buckley, "Sociology and modern systems theory", 1967)
"When it comes to very highly organized systems, such as a living cell, the task of modeling by approximation to simple, continuous and smoothly varying quantities is hopeless. It is for this reason that attempts by sociologists and economists to imitate physicists and describe their subject matter by simple mathematical equations is rarely convincing." (Paul C W Davies, "The Cosmic Blueprint: New Discoveries in Nature’s Creative Ability to Order the Universe", 1987)
"Because the individual parts of a complex adaptive system are continually revising their ('conditioned') rules for interaction, each part is embedded in perpetually novel surroundings (the changing behavior of the other parts). As a result, the aggregate behavior of the system is usually far from optimal, if indeed optimality can even be defined for the system as a whole. For this reason, standard theories in physics, economics, and elsewhere, are of little help because they concentrate on optimal end-points, whereas complex adaptive systems 'never get there'. They continue to evolve, and they steadily exhibit new forms of emergent behavior." (John H Holland, "Complex Adaptive Systems", Daedalus Vol. 121 (1), 1992)
"By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modification of a precursor, system, because any precursors to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional." (Michael Behe, "Darwin’s Black Box", 1996)
"Cybernetics is a science of purposeful behavior. It helps us explain behavior as the continuous action of someone (or thing) in the process, as we see it, of maintaining certain conditions near a goal state, or purpose." (Jeff Dooley, "Thoughts on the Question: What is Cybernetics", 1995)
"Probably the first clear insight into the deep nature of control […] was that it is not about pulling levers to produce intended and inexorable results. This notion of control applies only to trivial machines. It never applies to a total system that includes any kind of probabilistic element - from the weather, to people; from markets, to the political economy. No: the characteristic of a non-trivial system that is under control, is that despite dealing with variables too many to count, too uncertain to express, and too difficult even to understand, something can be done to generate a predictable goal. Wiener found just the word he wanted in the operation of the long ships of ancient Greece. At sea, the long ships battled with rain, wind and tides - matters in no way predictable. However, if the man operating the rudder kept his eye on a distant lighthouse, he could manipulate the tiller, adjusting continuously in real-time towards the light. This is the function of steersmanship. As far back as Homer, the Greek word for steersman was kubernetes, which transliterates into English as cybernetes." (Stafford Beer, "What is cybernetics?", Kybernetes, 2002)
"Strange attractors, unlike regular ones, are geometrically very complicated, as revealed by the evolution of a small phase-space volume. For instance, if the attractor is a limit cycle, a small two-dimensional volume does not change too much its shape: in a direction it maintains its size, while in the other it shrinks till becoming a 'very thin strand' with an almost constant length. In chaotic systems, instead, the dynamics continuously stretches and folds an initial small volume transforming it into a thinner and thinner 'ribbon' with an exponentially increasing length." (Massimo Cencini et al, "Chaos: From Simple Models to Complex Systems", 2010)
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