Quotations
Nothing pleases people more than to go on thinking what they have always thought,
and at the same time imagine that they are thinking something new and daring:
it combines the advantage of security and the delight of adventure.
Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words.
Hence there is no way of giving us an under- standing of any society,
including our own, except through the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resources.
A story is a lie you see, it requires that facts are marshaled, summarised, distorted to fit a thesis.
- Eric Arthur Blair (1903 – 1950) known by his pen name George Orwell
In a very important sense, then, from the perspective of material engagement, cognition has no location.
The active mind cannot be contained.
Cognition is not a “within” property; it is a “between” property.
- Lambros Malafouris How Things Shape the Mind MIT Press 2013 p85
The facts are absolutely clear.
There is no question that in virtually all circumstances in which people are doing things in order to get rewards, extrinsic tangible rewards undermine intrinsic motivation.
- New Scientist 9th April 2011. pp 40-43
...Complexity is looking at interacting elements and asking how they form patterns and how the patterns unfold.
It’s important to point out that the patterns may never be finished. They’re open-ended.
In standard science this hit some things that most scientists have a negative reaction to.
Science doesn’t like perpetual novelty.
Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language,
while in fact language remains the master of man.
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
Just because you can look back and connect the dots does not mean that you can look forward with the same certainty.
There are simply hundreds of points in human systems that are changing dynamically,
which does not allow us to use retrospective coherence to predict future risks and / or opportunities.
- Max Boisot (1943-2011)
Words are events, they do things, change things.
They transform both speaker and hearer;
they feed energy back and forth and amplify it.
You know, people just don't see what their mind tells them isn't there.