connections Citations

Nothing ever begins.
There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs.
The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and to the tales that preceded that: though as the narrator’s voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making.
Thus the pagan will

be sanctified, the tragic become laughable; great lovers will stoop to sentiment, and demons dwindle to clockwork toys.
Nothing is fixed. In and out the shuttle goes, fact and fiction, mind and matter woven into patterns that may have only this in common: that hidden amongst them is a filigree which will with time become a world.
It must be arbitrary then, the place at which we chose to

embark.
Somewhere between a past half forgotten and a future as yet only glimpsed.

General Systems Theory is a name which has come into use to describe a level of theoretical model-building which lies somewhere between the highly generalized constructions of pure mathematics and the specific theories of the specialized disciplines. Mathematics attempts to organize highly general relationships into a coherent system, a system however which does not have any necessary connections

with the "real" world around us. It studies all thinkable relationships abstracted from any concrete situation or body of empirical knowledge.

We must be careful, however, not to let the process of acquiring new ideas interfere with the detailed knowledge that our vehicle has assiduously collected and carefully stored in many associative connections during its lifetime. We know that this may happen in humans who are overly dedicated to the development of ideas. They tend to connect many individual cases into general categories ad then

use the categories as if they were things, losing the potential for categorizing in other ways by remembering each instance.

The brain is encased in the head, the part of the body which in most walking, flying or swimming animals is the leading end of the moving body (with few exceptions: starfish, cuttlefish, humans, penguins when they are not swimming). The obvious risks which this localization entails are apparently compensated by the advantage of direct short connections with the sense organs localized in or on top

of the head (olfaction, taste, vision, audition, vestibular sense), which together with the brain could be seen as something like the cockpit of the animal, or the pilot if one prefers.

I believe that the world is totally connected: that is to say, that there are no events anywhere in the universe which are not tied to every other event in the universe. …It is… an essential part of the methodology of science to divide the world for any experiment into… relevant and… irrelevant. We make a cut. We put the experiment… into a box. …the moment we do that, we do violence to

the connections …I get a set of answers which I try to decode in this context. …I am certainly not going to get the world right, because the basic assumption that I have made about the world is a lie. …it is bound to give me only an approximation to what goes inside the fence. Therefore, when we practice science (and this is true of all our experience) we are always decoding a part of nature

which is not complete. We simply cannot get out of our own finiteness.