Out Of Control

An ecosystem is more like a conference than a community -- indefinite, pluralistic, tolerant, and in constant flux.

No one has been more wrong about computerization than George Orwell in 1984. So far, nearly everything about the actual possibility-space which computers have created indicates they are the end of authority and not its beginning.

What little time left is in this century is rehearsal time for the chief psychological chore of the 21st century: letting go, with dignity.

Organisms are self-causing agencies. Every self is a tautology: self-evident, self-referential, self-centered, and self-created.

The work of managing a natural environment is inescapably a work of local knowledge.

When everything happens at once, wide and fast moving problems simply route around any central authority. Therefore overall governance must arise from the most humble interdependent acts done locally in parallel, and not from a central command.

Life is in the business of making its environment agreeable for life.

Evolution is a technological, mathematical, informational, and biological process rolled into one. It could almost be said to be a law of physics, a principle that reigns over all created multitudes, whether they have genes or not.

The capacity to evolve must be evolved itself. Evolution has been, and will keep on, exploring the space of possible evolutions. Organisms, memes, the whole ball of wax are only evolution's way to keep evolving.

Life is a verb not a noun.

In turbulence is the preservation of the world.

Life is a transforming flood that fills up empty containers and then spills out of them on its way to fill up more. The shape and number of vessels submerged by the flood doesn't make a bit of difference.

The hardest lesson for humans to learn: that organic complexity will entail organic time.

The great secret which life has kept from us is that once born, life is immortal. Once launched, it cannot be eradicated.

Memory is a reenactment of perception, indistinguishable from the original act of knowing.

We should not be surprised that life, having subjugated the bulk of inert matter on Earth, would go on to subjugate technology, and bring it also under its reign of constant evolution.

Telling the future is what organisms are for.

We cannot import evolution and learning without exporting control.

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.

The world of our own making has become so complicated that we must turn to the world of the born to understand how to manage it.

A mind cannot possibly consider anything beyond what it can measure or calculate; without a body it can only consider itself. Without the interruptions of hellos from the eye, ear, tongue, nose, and finger, the evolving mind huddles in the corner picking its navel.

Life never falls, but never gets out of falling. It is poised in a persistent state of almost-fell.

Any highly evolved form is beautiful.

A network nurtures small failures in order that large failures don't happen as often.

"It works, why worry?" is life's deepest philosophy.

The great irony of god games is that letting go is the only way to win.

There is nothing to be found in a beehive that is not submerged in a bee. And yet you can search a bee forever with cyclotron and fluoroscope, and you will never find a hive.

There's nothing more addictive than being a god.

What humans can't engineer, evolution can.

The nature of life is to delight in all possible loopholes. Every creature is in some way hacking a living by reinterpreting the rules.

We don't have a word for learning and teaching at the same time, but our schooling would improve if we did.

The "I" of a vivisystem is a ghost. Like the transient form of a whirlpool held upright by a million spinning atoms of water, it can be scattered with a fingertip.

A company cannot be a learning company without also being a teaching company.

The central act of the coming era is to connect everything to everything.

To err is human; to manage error is system.

We can only get smart things from stupid things.