📒🅷Victor Hugo - Collected Quotes

"A stand can be made against invasion by an army; no stand can be made against invasion by an idea." (Victor Hugo, "The History of a Crime", 1851–1852)

"Great blunders are often made, like large ropes, of a multitude of fibers. Take the cable thread by thread, take separately all the little determining motives, you break them one after another, and you say: that is all! Wind them and twist them together, they become an enormity." (Victor Hugo, "Les Misérables", 1862)

"Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing." (Victor Hugo, "Les Misérables", 1862)

"Philosophy is the microscope of thought. Everything desires to flee from it, but nothing escapes it." (Victor Hugo, "Les Misérables", 1862)

"The greatest blunders, like the thickest ropes, are often compounded of a multitude of strands. Take the rope apart, separate it into the small threads that compose it, and you can break them one by one. You think, That is all there was! But twist them all together and you have something tremendous." (Victor Hugo, "Les Misérables", 1862)

"[...] the small is great, the great is small; all is in equilibrium in necessity […]" (Victor Hugo, "Les Misérables", 1862)

"The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man." (Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, 1862)

"Who then understands the reciprocal flux and reflux of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abysses of being, and the avalanches of creation?" (Victor Hugo, "Saint Denis", 1862) 

"In Science, all tends to stir, to change, to form fresh surfaces. All denies, destroys, creates, replaces all. What was ground yesterday is put into the hopper again today. The colossal machine, Science, never rests. It is never satisfied; it is insatiable for improvement, of which the absolute knows nothing." (Victor Hugo, "William Shakespeare", 1864)

"Science seeks perpetual motion. She has found it: it is Science herself." (Victor Hugo, "William Shakespeare", 1864)


"Science has but the right to put a visa on facts; she should verify and distinguish." (Victor Hugo, "William Shakespeare", 1864)

"Science is ignorant, and has no right to laugh: a savant who laughs at the possible, is very near being an idiot." (Victor Hugo, "William Shakespeare", 1864)

"The unexpected ought always to be expected by Science. Her duty is to stop it in its course and search it, rejecting the chimerical, establishing the real." (Victor Hugo, "William Shakespeare", 1864)

"The mission of Science is to study and sound everything." (Victor Hugo, "William Shakespeare", 1864)

"An ant weighs upon the earth; a star can well weigh upon the universe." (Victor Hugo, "The Toilers of the Sea", 1866)

"Arithmetic, like the sea, is an undulation without any possible end." (Victor Hugo, "The Toilers of the Sea", 1866)

"Chance, if such a thing exists, is far-seeing." (Victor Hugo, "The Toilers of the Sea", 1866)

"Every fact is a logarithm; one added term ramifies it until it is thoroughly transformed. In the general aspect of things, the great lines of creation take shape and arrange themselves into groups; beneath lies the unfathomable." (Victor Hugo, "The Toilers of the Sea", 1866)

"One microscopic glittering point; then another; and another, and still another; they are scarcely perceptible, yet they are enormous. This light is a focus; this focus, a star; this star, a sun; this sun, a universe; this universe, nothing. Every number is zero in the presence of the infinite." (Victor Hugo, "The Toilers of the Sea", 1874)

"Phenomena may well be suspected of anything, are capable of anything. Hypothesis proclaims the infinite; that is what gives hypothesis its greatness. Beneath the surface fact it seeks the real fact. It asks creation for her thoughts, and then for her second thoughts. The great scientific discoverers are those who hold nature suspect." (Victor Hugo, "The Toilers of the Sea", 1874)

"Nature eludes calculation. Number is a grim pullulation. Nature is the thing that cannot be numbered." (Victor Hugo, "The Toilers of the Sea", 1874)

"To put everything in balance is good, to put everything in harmony is better." (Victor Hugo, "Ninety-Three", 1874)

"For true poetry, complete poetry, consists in the harmony of contraries. Hence, it is time to say aloud - and it is here above all that exceptions prove the rule - that everything that exists in nature exists in art." (Victor Hugo, "Dramas", 1896)

"Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing." (Victor Hugo, "Things of the Infinite: Intellectual Autobiography", 1907)

📒 🆅Jules Verne - Collected Quotes

"Either my calculation is correct, or there is no truth in figures." (Jules Verne, "A Journey to the Center of the Earth", 1864)

"How do you attack the unknown, or defend yourself from it?" (Jules Verne, "A Journey to the Center of the Earth", 1864)

"I was caught up in the happiness of those who go on journeys, a feeling of hope mixed with a sense of freedom." (Jules Verne, "A Journey to the Center of the Earth", 1864)

"In the cause of science men are expected to suffer." (Jules Verne, "A Journey to the Center of the Earth", 1864)

"Science, great, mighty and in the end unerring [...] science has fallen into many errors - errors which have been fortunate and useful rather than otherwise, for they have been the stepping stones to truth." (Jules Verne, "A Journey to the Center of the Earth", 1864)

"The Great Architect of the universe built it of good firm stuff." (Jules Verne, "A Journey to the Center of the Earth", 1864)

"When science has sent forth her fiat - it is only to hear and obey." (Jules Verne, "A Journey to the Center of the Earth", 1864)

"Thanks to the courage and devotion of three men, this project of sending a bullet to the moon, once seen as a futile enterprise, had already produced concrete results, with incalculable consequences. The voyagers, imprisoned in their new satellite, had not reached their destination, but at least they had become part of the lunar world; they were in orbit around the celebrity of the night, and, for the first time, the human eye could penetrate all her mysteries." (Jules Verne, "From the Earth to the Moon", 1865)

"There was the class of superstitious people; they are not content simply to ignore what is true, they also believe what is not true." (Jules Verne, "From the Earth to the Moon", 1865)

"They did unto others what they would not have others do unto them, an immoral principle that is the basic premise of the art of war." (Jules Verne, "From the Earth to the Moon", 1865)

"They were only planning to send a projectile to the moon, a rather brutal way

of opening negotiations, even with a satellite, but one much in favor among

civilized nations." (Jules Verne, "From the Earth to the Moon", 1865)

"All things are simple […] when you know how to do them." (Jules Verne, "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", 1870)

"Look at that sea! Who can say it isn’t actually alive! It expresses its anger and its tenderness! Yesterday it went to sleep as we did, and now like us it is awakening after a peaceful night." (Jules Verne, "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", 1870)

"The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the planet. Its breath is pure and healthful. It’s an immense wilderness where a man never feels lonely, for he feels life astir on every side. The sea fosters a wondrous, supernatural existence." (Jules Verne, "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", 1870)

"This planet doesn’t need new continents, it needs new men." (Jules Verne, "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", 1870)

"We cannot prevent equilibrium from producing its effects. We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones." (Jules Verne, "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", 1870)

"You are going to tour the land of marvels. Astonishment, amazement will

become your everyday state of mind. You won’t get bored with the spectacles

I will provide for you. I’m going on another tour of the submarine world." (Jules Verne, "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", 1870)

"Above them Phileas Fogg moved in majestic indifference. He was following his own rational orbit around the world, without bothering at all about the asteroids gravitating around him." (Jules Verne, "Around the World in Eighty Days", 1873)

"Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them." (Jules Verne, "The Fur Country", 1873)

"Civilization never recedes; the law of necessity ever forces it onwards." (Jules Verne, "The Mysterious Island", 1875)

"When a journey begins badly it rarely ends well." (Jules Verne, "The Floating Island", 1895)

🪷On Mind: Mental Models L

"[…] the mind orders nothing by its own motions, but lies merely receptive under the impressions of bodies, reflecting empty images in a mirror in place of reality." (Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, "The Consolation of Philosophy", cca. 524)

"The likeness of a visible thing is that in virtue of which sight sees. And the likeness of an intellectively cognized thing, an intelligible species, is the form in virtue of which intellect cognizes. […] That which is intellectively cognized first is the thing of which the intelligible species is a likeness." (Thomas Aquinas, "Quaestiones disputatae de veritate", cca. 1256-1259)

"One who doesn't perceive the essence and quiddity of a thing, but only its image, can't know the thing. For one who has seen only a picture of Hercules doesn't know Hercules. A human being, however, perceives nothing of a thing, except only its image, that is, a species received through the senses, which is an image of the thing and not the thing itself. For not the stone but a species of the stone is in the soul." (Thomas Aquinas, "Summa Theologiae", cca. 1266-1273)

"[…] one ought to say that one may perceive the image of a thing in two ways. In one way, as the object of cognition. In this way it is true that one perceiving only the thing's image does not cognize the thing; for example, someone seeing the image of Hercules painted on a wall does not thereby either see or cognize Hercules. In another way, as the basis [ratio] of cognizing, and in this way the claim is not true. For through only a species perceived of a thing the thing is truly cognized - as a stone is truly seen through its sensible species alone, received in the eye, and is truly intellectively cognized through its intelligible species alone, received in intellect." (Thomas Aquinas, "Summa Theologiae", cca. 1266-1273)

"Phantasms don't have the same manner of existing that the human intellect has [...] and so they cannot through their own power make an impression on the possible intellect. But through the power of the agent intellect, a kind of likeness results in the possible intellect as a result of agent intellect's turning toward the phantasms […] And this is how intelligible species are said to be abstracted from phantasms. It's not that some form that is numerically the same is first in phantasms and then produced in the possible intellect."(Thomas Aquinas, "Summa Theologiae", cca. 1266-1273)

"The attention will tend toward the species either in such a way that it would not pass beyond so as to attend to the object, or in such a way that it would pass beyond. If in the first way, then the thing will not be seen in itself but only its image will be seen as if it were the thing itself." (Peter J Olivi, "Quaestiones in secundum librum Sententiarum", cca. 1280- 1282)

"No prior assimilation through a species is required before an act of intellectively cognizing. Rather, the assimilation suffices that comes about through the act of intellectively cognizing, which is [itself] a likeness of the thing cognized." (William Ockham," Expositio in librum Perihermenias", cca. 1321-1324)

"Such an image or fictum was postulated for no other reason than to supposit for a thing in such a way that both a proposition might be composed out of it and it might be common to things. For these are denied of things." (William Ockham, "Expositio in librum Perihermenias", cca, 1321-1324)

"The thing represented needs to be cognized in advance - otherwise the representative would never lead to a cognition of the thing represented as to something similar." (William Ockham, "Expositio in librum Perihermenias", cca. 1321-1324)

"Within image theory, it is suggested that important components of decision-making processes are the different 'images' that a person may use to evaluate choice options. Images may represent a person's principles, goals, or plans. Decision options may then match or not match these images and be adopted, rejected, considered further, depending on circumstances." (Deborah J Terry & Michael A Hogg, "Attitudes, Behavior, and Social Context: The Role of Norms and Group Membership", 1999) 

🪷On Mind: Mental Models XLIX

"For imagination is different from either perceiving or discursive thinking, though it is not found without sensation, or judgement without it. That this activity is not the same kind of thinking as judgement is obvious. For imagining lies within our own power whenever we wish (e.g. we can call up a picture, as in the practice of mnemonics by the use of mental images), but in forming opinions we are not free: we cannot escape the alternative of falsehood or truth." (Aristotle, "De Anima", cca. 350 BC)

"Since it seems that there is nothing outside and separate in existence from sensible spatial magnitudes, the objects of thought are in the sensible forms, viz. both the abstract objects and all the states and affections of sensible things. Hence no one can learn or understand anything in the absence of sense, and when the mind is actively aware of anything it is necessarily aware of it along with an image; for images are like sensuous contents except in that they contain no matter. Imagination is different from assertion and denial; for what is true or false involves a synthesis of thoughts. In what will the primary thoughts differ from images? Must we not say that neither these nor even our other thoughts are images, though they necessarily involve them?" (Aristotle, "De Anima", cca. 350 BC)

"Thinking is different from perceiving and is held to be in part imagination, in part judgement: we must therefore first mark off the sphere of imagination and then speak of judgement. If then imagination is that in virtue of which an image arises for us, excluding metaphorical uses of the term, is it a single faculty or disposition relative to images, in virtue of which we discriminate and are either in error or not? The faculties in virtue of which we do this are sense, opinion, knowledge, thought." (Aristotle, "De Anima", cca. 350 BC)

"As regards the question, therefore, what memory or remembering is, it has now been shown that it is the having of an image, related as a likeness to that of which it is an image; and as to the question of which of the faculties within us memory is a function, it has been shown that it is a function of the primary faculty of sense-perception, i.e. of that faculty whereby we perceive time."  (Aristotle," De Memoria et Reminiscentia" ["On Memory and Recollection"], 4th century BC)

"But since we have, in our work on the soul, treated of imagination, and the faculty of imagination is identical with that of sense-perception, though the being of a faculty of imagination is different from that of a faculty of sense-perception; and since imagination is the movement set up by a sensory faculty when actually discharging its function, while a dream appears to be an image (for which occurs in sleep - whether simply or in some particular way - is what we call a dream): it manifestly follows that dreaming is an activity of the faculty of sense-perception, but belongs to this faculty qua imaginative." (Aristotle, On Dreams, 4th century BC)

"For according to the arguments from the existence of the sciences there will be Forms of all things of which there are sciences, and according to the argument that there is one attribute common to many things there will be Forms even of negations, and according to the argument that there is an object for thought even when the thing has perished, there will be Forms of perishable things; for we can have an image of these." (Aristotle, "Metaphysics", 4th century BC)

"All that is required between cognizer and cognized is a likeness in terms of representation, not a likeness in terms of an agreement in nature. For it's plain that the form of a stone in the soul is of a far higher nature than the form of a stone in matter. But that form, insofar as it represents the stone, is to that extent the principle leading to its cognition." (Thomas Aquinas, "Quaestiones disputatae de veritate", cca. 1256-1259) 

"Imagery is not past but present. It rests with what we call our mental processes to place these images in a temporal order." (George H Mead, 1929)

"It is not surprising that our language should be incapable of describing the processes occurring within the atoms, for, as has been remarked, it was invented to describe the experiences of daily life, and these consist only of processes involving exceedingly large numbers of atoms. Furthermore, it is very difficult to modify our language so that it will be able to describe these atomic processes, for words can only describe things of which we can form mental pictures, and this ability, too, is a result of daily experience. Fortunately, mathematics is not subject to this limitation, and it has been possible to invent a mathematical scheme - the quantum theory - which seems entirely adequate for the treatment of atomic processes; for visualisation, however, we must content ourselves with two incomplete analogies - the wave picture and the corpuscular picture." (Werner Heisenberg, "On Quantum Physics", 1930)

"The solution of the difficulty is that the two mental pictures which experiment lead us to form - the one of the particles, the other of the waves - are both incomplete and have only the validity of analogies which are accurate only in limiting cases." (Werner Heisenberg,"On Quantum Mechanics", 1930)

🪷On Mind: Mental Models XLVII (Limitations VI)

"Every presentation of philosophy, whether oral or written, is to be taken and can only be taken in the sense of a means. Every system is only an expression or image of reason, and hence only an object of reason, an object which reason - a living power that procreates itself in new thinking beings - distinguishes from itself and posits as an object of criticism. Every system that is not recognized and appropriated as just a means, limits and warps the mind for it sets up the indirect and formal thought in the place of the direct, original and material thought." (Ludwig A Feuerbach, "Towards a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy", 1839) 

"[…] we can only study Nature through our senses - that is […] we can only study the model of Nature that our senses enable our minds to construct; we cannot decide whether that model, consistent though it be, represents truly the real structure of Nature; whether, indeed, there be any Nature as an ultimate reality behind its phenomena." (William C Dampier, "The Recent Development of Physical Science", 1904)

"Most mistakes in philosophy and logic occur because the human mind is apt to take the symbol for the reality." (Albert Einstein, "Cosmic Religion: With Other Opinions and Aphorisms", 1931) 

"The model of the natural world we build in our minds by such a process will forever be inadequate, just a little cathedral in the mountains. Still it is better than no model at all." (Timothy Ferris, "The Red Limit: The Search for the Edge of the Universe", 1977)

"A person who thinks by images becomes less and less capable of thinking by reasoning, and vice versa. The intellectual process based on images is contradictory to the intellectual process of reasoning that is related to the word. There are two different ways of dealing with an object. They involve not only different approaches, but even more important, opposing mental attitudes. This is not a matter of complementary processes, such as analysis and synthesis or logic and dialectic. These processes lack any qualitative common denominator." (Jacques Ellul, "The Humiliation of the Word", 1981) 

"Whenever I have talked about mental models, audiences have readily grasped that a layout of concrete objects can be represented by an internal spatial array, that a syllogism can be represented by a model of individuals and identities between them, and that a physical process can be represented by a three-dimensional dynamic model. Many people, however, have been puzzled by the representation of abstract discourse; they cannot understand how terms denoting abstract entities, properties or relations can be similarly encoded, and therefore they argue that these terms can have only 'verbal' or propositional representations." (Philip Johnson-Laird,"Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference and Consciousness", 1983)

"Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life." (Winfried G Sebald, "The Rings of Saturn", 1995) 

"Faced with the overwhelming complexity of the real world, time pressure, and limited cognitive capabilities, we are forced to fall back on rote procedures, habits, rules of thumb, and simple mental models to make decisions. Though we sometimes strive to make the best decisions we can, bounded rationality means we often systematically fall short, limiting our ability to learn from experience." (John D Sterman, "Business Dynamics: Systems thinking and modeling for a complex world", 2000)

"The robustness of the misperceptions of feedback and the poor performance they cause are due to two basic and related deficiencies in our mental model. First, our cognitive maps of the causal structure of systems are vastly simplified compared to the complexity of the systems themselves. Second, we are unable to infer correctly the dynamics of all but the simplest causal maps. Both are direct consequences of bounded rationality, that is, the many limitations of attention, memory, recall, information processing capability, and time that constrain human decision making." (John D Sterman, "Business Dynamics: Systems thinking and modeling for a complex world", 2000)

"A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed. Once you adopt a new view of the world (or any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed." (Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow", 2011)

On Intelligence: On Swarms (-1899)

"The best and noblest bees are generated and bred out of the Lion, and the Kings and Princes of them do derive their pedigree and descent from the brain of the Lion, being the most excellent part of his body: it is no wonder therefore if they proceeding and coming from so generous a flock, do assail the greatest beasts, and being endures with Lion-like courage, do fear nothing." (Thomas Moffett, "Theatre of Insects", 1634)

"[….] a great number of […] living and thinking Particles could not possibly by their mutual contract and pressing and striking compose one greater individual Animal, with one Mind and Understanding, and a Vital Consension of the whole Body: anymore than a swarm of Bees, or a crowd of Men and Women can be conceived to make up one particular Living Creature compounded and constituted of the aggregate of them all." (Richard Bentley, "The folly and unreasonableness of atheism", 1699)

"Hence, following the comparison to a bee swarm, it is a whole stuck to a tree branch, by means of the action of many bees which must act in concert to hold on; some others become attached to the initial ones, and so on; all concur in forming a fairly solid body, yet each one has a particular action, apart from the others; if one of them gives way or acts too vigorously, the entire mass will be disturbed: when they all conspire to stick close, to mutually embrace, in the order of required proportions, they will comprise a whole which shall endure until they disturb one another." (Théophile de Bordeu," Recherches anatomiques sur la position des glandes et sur leur action", 1751)

"One could, following these authors, compare man to a flock of cranes which fly together, in a particular order, without mutually assisting or depending on one another. The Physicians or Philosophers who have studied and carefully observed man, have noticed this sympathy in all animal movements – this constant and necessary agreement in the interaction of the various parts, however disparate or distant from one another; they have also noticed the disturbance of the whole that results from the sensory disagreement of a single part. A famous physician [M. de Bordeu] and an illustrious physicist [M. de Maupertuis] likewise compared man, from this luminous and philosophical point of view, to a swarm of bees which strive together to hang to a tree branch. One can see them pressing and sustaining one another, forming a kind of whole, in which each living part contributes in its way, by the correspondence and direction of its movements, to sustain this kind of life of the whole body, if we may refer in this way to a mere connection of actions." (Ménuret de Chambaud, "Observation", Encyclopédie XI [by Diderot 318b-319a], cca. 1751 and 1772)

"Have you ever seen a swarm of bees leaving their hive? [...] The world, or the general mass of matter, is the great hive [...]. Have you seen them fly away and form a long cluster of little winged animals, hanging off the end of the branch of a tree, all clinging on to each other by their feet? [...] This cluster is a being, an individual, some sort of animal [...]. If one of these bees decides to pinch somehow the bee it is clinging onto, do you know what will happen? […] this one will pinch the next one; [...] as many pinching sensations will arise throughout the cluster as there are little animals in it; […] the whole cluster will stir, move and change position and shape […] someone who’d never seen the formation of a cluster like that would be tempted to think it was a single animal with five or six hundred heads and a thousand or twelve hundred wings [...]" (Denis Diderot," Rêve de D’Alembert", 1769)

"Men, like bees, want room. When the hive is overflowing, the bees will swarm, and will be likely to take up their abode where they find the best prospect for honey. In matters of this sort, men are very much like bees." (Frederick Douglass, "Composite Nation", [lecture in the Parker Fraternity Course], 1867)

"If we wish to form a mental representation of what is going on among the molecules in calm air, we cannot do better than observe a swarm of bees, when every individual bee is flying furiously, first in one direction, and then in another, while the swarm, as a whole, either remains at rest, or sails slowly through the air." (James C Maxwell, "Molecules", Nature, 1873)

"The swarm of probabilities flying hither and thither, does not settle down on any particular point" (Francis Y Edgeworth, 1887)

On Intelligence: On Swarms (1990-1999)

"[Number theory] produces, without effort, innumerable problems which have a sweet, innocent air about them, tempting flowers; and yet […] number theory swarms with bugs, waiting to bite the tempted flower-lovers who, once bitten, are inspired to excesses of effort!" (Barry Mazur, "Number Theory as Gadfly", The American Mathematical Monthly, Volume 98, 1991)

"A network swarm is all edges and therefore open ended any way you come at it. Indeed, the network is the least structured organization that can be said to have any structure at all. It is capable of infinite rearrangements, and of growing in any direction without altering the basic shape of the thing, which is really no outward shape at all. " (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995) 

"At the other far extreme, we find many systems ordered as a patchwork of parallel operations, very much as in the neural network of a brain or in a colony of ants. Action in these systems proceeds in a messy cascade of interdependent events. Instead of the discrete ticks of cause and effect that run a clock, a thousand clock springs try to simultaneously run a parallel system. Since there is no chain of command, the particular action of any single spring diffuses into the whole, making it easier for the sum of the whole to overwhelm the parts of the whole. What emerges from the collective is not a series of critical individual actions but a multitude of simultaneous actions whose collective pattern is far more important. This is the swarm model." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)

"Because they are redundant and have no central control, swarm systems are inefficient. Resources are allotted higgledy-piggledy, and duplication of effort is always rampant." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995) 

"It is the great irony of life that a mindless act repeated in sequence can only lead to greater depths of absurdity, while a mindless act performed in parallel by a swarm of individuals can, under the proper conditions, lead to all that we find interesting." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)

"Light a fire, build up the steam, turn on a switch, and a linear system awakens. It’s ready to serve you. If it stalls, restart it. Simple collective systems can be awakened simply. But complex swarm systems with rich hierarchies take time to boot up. The more complex, the longer it takes to warm up. Each hierarchical layer has to settle down; lateral causes have to slosh around and come to rest; a million autonomous agents have to acquaint themselves. I think this will be the hardest lesson for humans to learn: that organic complexity will entail organic time." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)

"It is, however, fair to say that very few applications of swarm intelligence have been developed. One of the main reasons for this relative lack of success resides in the fact that swarm-intelligent systems are hard to 'program', because the paths to problem solving are not predefined but emergent in these systems and result from interactions among individuals and between individuals and their environment as much as from the behaviors of the individuals themselves. Therefore, using a swarm-intelligent system to solve a problem requires a thorough knowledge not only of what individual behaviors must be implemented but also of what interactions are needed to produce such or such global behavior." (Eric Bonabeau et al, "Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems", 1999)

"[…] when software systems become so intractable that they can no longer be controlled, swarm intelligence offers an alternative way of designing an ‘intelligent’ systems, in which autonomy, emergence, and distributed functioning replace control, preprogramming, and centralization." (Eric Bonabeau et al, "Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems", 1999)

On Intelligence: On Swarms (2000-2009)

"The ultimate repository of herd influence is language - a device which not only condenses the opinions of those with whom we share a common vocabulary, but sums up the perceptual approach of swarms who have passed on." (Howard Bloom, "Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century", 2000)

"Agent subroutines may pass information back and forth, but subroutines are not changed as a result of the interaction, as people are. In real social interaction, information is exchanged, but also something else, perhaps more important: individuals exchange rules, tips, beliefs about how to process the information. Thus a social interaction typically results in a change in the thinking processes - not just the contents - of the participants." (James F Kennedy et al, "Swarm Intelligence", 2001)

"Just what valuable insights do ants, bees, and other social insects hold? Consider termites. Individually, they have meager intelligence. And they work with no supervision. Yet collectively they build mounds that are engineering marvels, able to maintain ambient temperature and comfortable levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide even as the nest grows. Indeed, for social insects teamwork is largely self-organized, coordinated primarily through the interactions of individual colony members. Together they can solve difficult problems (like choosing the shortest route to a food source from myriad possible pathways) even though each interaction might be very simple (one ant merely following the trail left by another). The collective behavior that emerges from a group of social insects has been dubbed 'swarm intelligence'." (Eric Bonabeau & Christopher Meyer, Swarm Intelligence: A Whole New Way to Think About Business, Harvard Business Review, 2001)

"Through self-organization, the behavior of the group emerges from the collective interactions of all the individuals. In fact, a major recurring theme in swarm intelligence (and of complexity science in general) is that even if individuals follow simple rules, the resulting group behavior can be surprisingly complex - and remarkably effective. And, to a large extent, flexibility and robustness result from self-organization." (Eric Bonabeau & Christopher Meyer, "Swarm Intelligence: A Whole New Way to Think About Business", Harvard Business Review, 2001)

"[…] swarm intelligence is becoming a valuable tool for optimizing the operations of various businesses. Whether similar gains will be made in helping companies better organize themselves and develop more effective strategies remains to be seen. At the very least, though, the field provides a fresh new framework for solving such problems, and it questions the wisdom of certain assumptions regarding the need for employee supervision through command-and-control management. In the future, some companies could build their entire businesses from the ground up using the principles of swarm intelligence, integrating the approach throughout their operations, organization, and strategy. The result: the ultimate self-organizing enterprise that could adapt quickly - and instinctively - to fast-changing markets." (Eric Bonabeau & Christopher Meyer, "Swarm Intelligence: A Whole New Way to Think About Business", Harvard Business Review, 2001)

"Recent researchers in artificial intelligence and computational methods use the term swarm intelligence to name collective and distributed techniques of problem solving without centralized control or provision of a global model. … the intelligence of the swarm is based fundamentally on communication. […] the member of the multitude do not have to become the same or renounce their creativity in order to communicate and cooperate with each other. They remain different in terms of race, sex, sexuality and so forth. We need to understand, then, is the collective intelligence that can emerge from the communication and cooperation of such varied multiplicity." (Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, "Multitude", 2004)

"Many ants, all obeying simple rules, create the order that we see in an ant colony. This is an example of what has come to be known as swarm intelligence: behaviour or design that emerges out of simple responses by many individuals. Understanding how this happens is important in designing systems of components that have to coordinate their behaviour to achieve a desired result. Knowledge of the way order emerges in an ant colony, for instance, has been applied to create the so-called ant sort algorithm, which is used in contexts where items need to be sorted constantly, without any knowledge of the overall best plan." (David G Green, "The Serendipity Machine: A voyage of discovery through the unexpected world of computers", 2004)

"The most familiar example of swarm intelligence is the human brain. Memory, perception and thought all arise out of the nett actions of billions of individual neurons. As we saw earlier, artificial neural networks (ANNs) try to mimic this idea. Signals from the outside world enter via an input layer of neurons. These pass the signal through a series of hidden layers, until the result emerges from an output layer. Each neuron modifies the signal in some simple way. It might, for instance, convert the inputs by plugging them into a polynomial, or some other simple function. Also, the network can learn by modifying the strength of the connections between neurons in different layers." (David G Green, "The Serendipity Machine: A voyage of discovery through the unexpected world of computers", 2004)

"It is not only a metaphor to transform the Internet to a superbrain with self-organizing features of learning and adapting. Information retrieval is already realized by neural networks adapting to the information preferences of a human user with synaptic plasticity. In sociobiology, we can 1 earn from populations of ants and termites how to organize traffic and information processing by swarm intelligence. From a technical point of view, we need intelligent programs distributed in the nets. There are already more or less intelligent virtual organisms {'agents'), learning, self-organizing and adapting to our individual preferences of information, to select our e-mails, to prepare economic transactions or to defend the attacks of hostile computer viruses, like the immune system of our body." (Klaus Mainzer, "Complexity Management in the Age of Globalization", 2006)

"Swarm Intelligence can be defined more precisely as: Any attempt to design algorithms or distributed problem-solving methods inspired by the collective behavior of the social insect colonies or other animal societies. The main properties of such systems are flexibility, robustness, decentralization and self-organization." ("Swarm Intelligence in Data Mining", Ed. Ajith Abraham et al, 2006)

"How is it that an ant colony can organize itself to carry out the complex tasks of food gathering and nest building and at the same time exhibit an enormous degree of resilience if disrupted and forced to adapt to changing situations? Natural systems are able not only to survive, but also to adapt and become better suited to their environment, in effect optimizing their behavior over time. They seemingly exhibit collective intelligence, or swarm intelligence as it is called, even without the existence of or the direction provided by a central authority." (Michael J North & Charles M Macal, "Managing Business Complexity: Discovering Strategic Solutions with Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation", 2007)

"Swarm intelligence can be effective when applied to highly complicated problems with many nonlinear factors, although it is often less effective than the genetic algorithm approach discussed later in this chapter. Swarm intelligence is related to swarm optimization […]. As with swarm intelligence, there is some evidence that at least some of the time swarm optimization can produce solutions that are more robust than genetic algorithms. Robustness here is defined as a solution’s resistance to performance degradation when the underlying variables are changed. (Michael J North & Charles M Macal, Managing Business Complexity: Discovering Strategic Solutions with Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation, 2007)

"Swarm intelligence is sometimes also referred to as mob intelligence. Swarm intelligence uses large groups of agents to solve complicated problems. Swarm intelligence uses a combination of accumulation, teamwork, and voting to produce solutions. Accumulation occurs when agents contribute parts of a solution to a group. Teamwork occurs when different agents or subgroups of agents accidentally or purposefully work on different parts of a large problem. Voting occurs when agents propose solutions or components of solutions and the other agents vote explicitly by rating the proposal’s quality or vote implicitly by choosing whether to follow the proposal." (Michael J North & Charles M Macal, "Managing Business Complexity: Discovering Strategic Solutions with Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation", 2007)

"Refers to a class of algorithms inspired by the collective behaviour of insect swarms, ant colonies, the flocking behaviour of some bird species, or the herding behaviour of some mammals, such that the behaviour of the whole can be considered as exhibiting a rudimentary form of 'intelligence'." (John Fulcher, "Intelligent Information Systems", 2009)

"The property of a system whereby the collective behaviors of unsophisticated agents interacting locally with their environment cause coherent functional global patterns to emerge." (M L Gavrilova, "Adaptive Algorithms for Intelligent Geometric Computing", 2009)

Collective Intelligence II

"Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation. […] Civilization, like intelligence, may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive function. When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by unifying internal or external forces." (Octavia E Butler, "Parable of the Sower", 1993)

"Great leaders reinforce the idea that accomplishment in our society comes from great individual acts. We credit individuals for outcomes that required teams and communities to accomplish." (Peter Block, "Stewardship", 1993)

"We must learn to think together in an integrated, synergistic fashion, rather than in fragmented and competitive ways." (Joanna Macy, Noetic Sciences Bulletin, 1994-1995)

"The leading edge of growth of intelligence is at the cultural and societal level. It is like a mind that is struggling to wake up. This is necessary because the most difficult problems we face are now collective ones. They are caused by complex global interactions and are beyond the scope of individuals to understand and solve. Individual mind, with its isolated viewpoints and narrow interests, is no longer enough." (Jeff Wright, "Basic Beliefs", [email] 1995)

"It [collective intelligence] is a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills. I'll add the following indispensable characteristic to this definition: The basis and goal of collective intelligence is mutual recognition and enrichment of individuals rather than the cult of fetishized or hypostatized communities." (Pierre Levy, "Collective Intelligence", 1999)

The three basic mechanisms of averaging, feedback and division of labor give us a first idea of a how a CMM [Collective Mental Map] can be developed in the most efficient way, that is, how a given number of individuals can achieve a maximum of collective problem-solving competence. A collective mental map is developed basically by superposing a number of individual mental maps. There must be sufficient diversity among these individual maps to cover an as large as possible domain, yet sufficient redundancy so that the overlap between maps is large enough to make the resulting graph fully connected, and so that each preference in the map is the superposition of a number of individual preferences that is large enough to cancel out individual fluctuations. The best way to quickly expand and improve the map and fill in gaps is to use a positive feedback that encourages individuals to use high preference paths discovered by others, yet is not so strong that it discourages the exploration of new paths." (Francis Heylighen, "Collective Intelligence and its Implementation on the Web", 1999)

"With the growing interest in complex adaptive systems, artificial life, swarms and simulated societies, the concept of “collective intelligence” is coming more and more to the fore. The basic idea is that a group of individuals (e. g. people, insects, robots, or software agents) can be smart in a way that none of its members is. Complex, apparently intelligent behavior may emerge from the synergy created by simple interactions between individuals that follow simple rules." (Francis Heylighen, "Collective Intelligence and its Implementation on the Web", 1999)

"Cultures are never merely intellectual constructs. They take form through the collective intelligence and memory, through a commonly held psychology and emotions, through spiritual and artistic communion." (Tariq Ramadan, "Islam and the Arab Awakening", 2012)

"[…] recent researchers in artificial intelligence and computational methods use the term swarm intelligence to name collective and distributed techniques of problem solving without centralized control or provision of a global model. […] the intelligence of the swarm is based fundamentally on communication. […] the member of the multitude do not have to become the same or renounce their creativity in order to communicate and cooperate with each other. They remain different in terms of race, sex, sexuality and so forth. We need to understand, then, is the collective intelligence that can emerge from the communication and cooperation of such varied multiplicity." (Antonio Negri, "Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire", 2004)

"Collective Intelligence (CI) is the capacity of human collectives to engage in intellectual cooperation in order to create, innovate, and invent." (Pierre Levy, "Toward a Self-referential Collective Intelligence", 2009)

Collective Intelligence I

"We must therefore establish a form of decision-making in which voters need only ever pronounce on simple propositions, expressing their opinions only with a yes or a no. […] Clearly, if anyone’s vote was self-contradictory (intransitive), it would have to be discounted, and we should therefore establish a form of voting which makes such absurdities impossible." (Nicolas de Condorcet, "On the form of decisions made by plurality vote", 1788)

"Collective wisdom, alas, is no adequate substitute for the intelligence of individuals. Individuals who opposed received opinions have been the source of all progress, both moral and intellectual. They have been unpopular, as was natural." (Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not a Christian", 1927)

"The collective intelligence of any group of people who are thinking as a 'herd' rather than individually is no higher than the intelligence of the stupidest members. (Mary Day Winn, Adam's Rib, 1931)

"Learning is a property of all living organisms. […] Since organized groups can be looked upon as living entities, they can be expected to exhibit learning […]" (Winfred B. Hirschmann, "Profit from the Learning Curve", Harvard Business Review, 1964)

"A cardinal principle in systems theory is that all parties that have a stake in a system should be represented in its management." (Malcolm S Knowles, "The Adult Learner", 1973)

"Collective intelligence emerges when a group of people work together effectively. Collective intelligence can be additive (each adds his or her part which together form the whole) or it can be synergetic, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." (Trudy and Peter Johnson-Lenz, "Groupware: Orchestrating the Emergence of Collective Intelligence", cca. 1980)

"Cybernetic information theory suggests the possibility of assuming that intelligence is a feature of any feedback system that manifests a capacity for learning." (Paul Hawken et al, "Seven Tomorrows", 1982)

"The concept of organizational learning refers to the capacity of organizational complexes to develop experiential knowledge, instincts, and 'feel' or intuition which are greater than the combined knowledge, skills and instincts of the individuals involved." (Don E. Kash, "Perpetual Innovation", 1989)

"We haven't worked on ways to develop a higher social intelligence […] We need this higher intelligence to operate socially or we're not going to survive. […] If we don't manage things socially, individual high intelligence is not going to make much difference. [...] Ordinary thought in society is incoherent - it is going in all sorts of directions, with thoughts conflicting and canceling each other out. But if people were to think together in a coherent way, it would have tremendous power." (David Bohm, "New Age Journal", 1989)