The tendency of modern science is to reduce all natural phenomena to the action of matter, and to explain the complex by the simple. But this tendency has its dangers; it may lead us to forget that the simple is always an abstraction, and that the real world is infinitely complex.
The ridiculously complex Campaign for North Africa boasts 1,500 hours and recommends you play with 10 people.
3w ago
The boundary between living and non-living matter is not a sharp line but a broad zone of increasing complexity, and to ask where life begins is like asking where a forest begins as one walks from open country into woodland.
The promise of AI is that it will turn businesses into software so that they can evolve over millions of tiny iterations. Beautiful, ideal, complex things can only emerge as the result of tremendous trial and error over time. You cannot build perfection, only discover it.
3mo ago
The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would have remained unchanged since the earliest days; no evolution, no mankind, nothing.
When you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole.
They are what that the German microbiologist and botanist Heinrich Anton de Bary was studying when he coined the word symbiosis, which is the technology evolution invented for unselfing.
6mo ago
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
6mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
