Quotes

From Gell-Mann, Murray. The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex. St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995. Print.

• Even when the classical approximation is justified and quantum-mechanical indeterminacy is correspondingly ignored, there remains the widespread phenomenon of chaos, in which the outcome of a dynamical process is so sensitive to initial conditions that a miniscule change in the situation at the beginning of the process results in a large difference at the end. P. 25

• A child learning a language does indeed make use of grammatical information, acquired over the years from examples of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. But instead of constructing a look-up table, a child somehow compresses this experience into a set of rules, an internal grammar, which works even for new sentences that had never been encountered before.But is the information obtained from the outside world, for example from a parent who speaks the language in question, sufficient to construct such an internal grammar? That question has been answered in the negative by Noam Chomsky and his followers, who conclude that the child must come already equipped at birth with a great deal of information applicable to the grammar of any natural human language. The only plausible source of such information is a biologically evolved innate proclivity to speak languages with certain general grammatical features, shared by all natural human languages. The grammar of each individual and which also contains additional features, not biologically programmed. Many of those vary from language to language, although some are probably universal like the innate ones. The additional features are what the child has to learn. P.53

• First of all, it is true that mathematics is not really a science at all, if a science is understood to be a discipline devoted to the description of nature and its laws. Mathematics is more concerned with proving the logical consequences of certain sets of assumptions. For this reason, it can be omitted altogether from the list of sciences (as it was from Nobel’s will) and treated as an interesting subject in its own right (pure mathematics) as well as an extremely useful tool for science (applied mathematics). P.108

• For describing the universe, a more general interpretation of quantum mechanics is clearly necessary, since no external experimenter or apparatus exists and there is no opportunity for repetition, for observing many copies of the universe. P.137

• Contemplating patterns of human thought, we can, in a crude fashion, identify superstition with one kind of error and denial with the other. Superstitions typically involves seeing order where in fact there is none, and denial amounts to rejecting evidence of regularities, sometimes even ones that are staring us in the face. Through introspection and also by observation of other human beings, each of us can detect an association of both sorts of error with fear. P.276

From his TED talk, see video below:

• Three principles — the conformability of nature to herself, the applicability of the criterion of simplicity, and the "unreasonable effectiveness" of certain parts of mathematics in describing physical reality — are thus consequences of the underlying law of the elementary particles and their interactions. Those three principles need not be assumed as separate metaphysical postulates. Instead, they are emergent properties of the fundamental laws of physics.

• You don't need something more to get something more. That's what emergence means. Life can emerge from physics and chemistry plus a lot of accidents. The human mind can arise from neurobiology and a lot of accidents, the way the chemical bond arises from physics and certain accidents. Doesn't diminish the importance of these subjects to know they follow from more fundamental things plus accidents.