Systems Theory Quotes

“This interconnection or accommodation of all created things to each other, and each to all the others, brings it about that each simple substance has relations that express all the others, and consequently, that each simple substance is a perpetual, living mirror of the universe.”
― Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, G. W. Leibniz's Monadology: An Edition for Students

“Whereas traditional reductionism sought to find the commonality underlying diversity in reference to a shared substance, such as material atoms, contemporary systems theory seeks to find common features in terms of shared aspects of organization.”
― Ervin Laszlo, The Systems View of the World: A Holistic Vision for Our Time

“One must keep one's eyes and ears open, one must know how to match up the facts, see similarity where others see total difference, remember that certain events occur at various levels or, to put it another way, many incidents are aspects of the same, single occurrence. And that the world is a great big net, it is a whole, where no single thing exists separately; every scrap of the world, every last tiny piece, is bound up with the rest by a complex Cosmos of correspondences, hard for the ordinary mind to penetrate.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“Among the most accessible of writers on this subject is the systems theorist Ervin Laszlo. Many of his seminal ideas, articulated with the average reader in mind, come together in his description of the ‘Akashic field’, the interactive realm of quantum fluctuations, culminating in a supercoherent state empowering all structures in creation, whether atoms, organisms, or galaxies. Laszlo goes on to raise a crucial question, central to the deliberations of this book. ‘Could it be that our consciousness is linked with other consciousnesses through an inter-connecting Akashic field, much as galaxies are linked in the cosmos quanta in the microworld, and organisms in the world of the living?’ The link with contemporary brain studies is informatively reviewed by Wallace.”
― Diarmuid O'Murchu, Ancestral Grace: Meeting God in Our Human Story

“So the next time you peer into the open window of a Web browser, you might ask yourself: where does "the network" end? Does it cease with the virtual worlds, images, and minds of the Internet, or with the silicon-electronic matrix of computing devices, or with the electrical grid that powers the show with energies extracted from waterflow and toxic atom? Perhaps the network extends further—to the Jacquard looms and American war machines that loosened the historical dynamic that eventually stuck a magic toxic tablet in your hands, to the billionfold packet-switching meshwork of human neurons that shape and submit to information space, to the capital flows that animate the quick hands of young Filipinas who wire up semiconductors for dollars a day. As you contemplate these widening networks, they may alter the granularity and elasticity of the self that senses them, as well as changing the resilience and tenderness of the threads binding that self to the mutant edge of matter and history. I suspect there is no end to such links, and that this immanent infinity, with its impossible ethical call, makes up the real World Wide Web.”
― Erik Davis

“GPT surpasses all ... when it comes to conversation, research, and writing. ... creating an algo[rithm] that sells stocks based on a large training set of materials, correlations to past crises, and commonsense heuristics aimed at not being the last one out of a burning barn is trivial. The danger ... is not in the single system but in the resonance of millions of similar systems doing the same thing at the same time. No science fiction is needed.”
― James Rickards, MoneyGPT: AI and the Threat to the Global Economy

“... A bank run never involves just one bank, however large. ... Bank runs are not about capital ratios and liquidity. They're about confidence and psychology.”
― James Rickards, MoneyGPT: AI and the Threat to the Global Economy