People From Budapest

"Independent of biological need fulfillment and the reproductive needs of the species, cultures] satisfy not bodily needs, but values. Values define cultural man's need for rationality, meaningfulness in emotional experience, richness of imagination, and depth of faith. All cultures respond to such supra-biological values. But in what form they do so depends on the specific kind of values people happen to have."

"There is nothing supernatural about the process of self-organization to states of higher entropy; it is a general property of systems, regardless of their materials and origin. It does not violate the Second Law of thermodynamics since the decrease in entropy within an open system is always offset by the increase of entropy in its surroundings."

"Systems at each level of integration function as wholes with respect to their parts and parts with respect to higher level wholes."

"Opposed to atomism and behaviorism, the systems view of man links him again with the world he lives in, for he is seen as emerging in that world and reflecting its general character."

"Now "cybernetics" is the term coined by Wiener to denote "steersmanship" or the science of control. Although current engineering usage restricts it to the study of flows in closed systems, it can be taken in a wider context, as the study of processes interrelating systems with inputs and outputs, and their structural-dynamic structure. It is in this wider sense that "cybernetics" will be used here, to wit, as system-cybernetics, understanding by "system" an ordered whole in relation to its relevant environment (hence one actually or potentially open)."

"The systems view is the emerging contemporary view of organized complexity, one step beyond the Newtonian view of organized simplicity, and two steps beyond the classical world views of divinely ordered or imaginatively envisaged complexity."

"Early scientific thinking was holistic, but speculative -- the modern scientific temper reacted by being empirical, but atomistic. Neither is free from error, the former because it replaces factual inquiry with faith and insight, and the latter because it sacrifices coherence at the altar of facticity. We witness today another shift in ways of thinking: the shift toward rigorous but holistic theories. This means thinking in terms of facts and events in the context of wholes, forming integrated sets with their own properties and relationships,"

"In the contemporary systems view man is not a sui generis phenomenon that can be studied without regard to other things. He is a natural entity, and an inhabitant of several interrelated worlds. By origin he is a biological organism. By work and play he is a social role carrier. And by conscious personality he is a Janus-faced link integrating and coordinating the biological and the social worlds. Man is, in the final analysis, a coordinating interface system in the multilevel hierarchy of nature."

"Even the brain, that most delicate and complex of all known organs, is not merely a lot of neurons added together. While a genius must have more of the gray matter than a sparrow, the idiot may have just as much as the genius. The difference between them must be explained in terms of how those substances are organized."

"Systems philosophy first must find out the "nature of the beast" This is the question of what is meant by "system", and how systems are realized in reality in various levels of observation. In Laslo's terms, this is the methodology and theory of natural systems. Secondly, there is epistemology, i.e. the methodology and theory of cognitive systems."

"Each system has a specific structure made up of certain maintained relationships among its parts, and manifests irreducible characteristics of its own."

"Yet while they exist, regardless of how long, each system has a specific structure made up of certain maintained relationships among its parts, and manifests irreducible characteristics of its own."

"General systems theory is the scientific exploration of "wholes" and "wholeness" which, not so long ago, were considered metaphysical notions transcending the boundaries of science. Hierarchic structure, stability, teleology, differentiation, approach to and maintenance of steady states, goal-directedness — these are a few of such general system properties."

"Imagine a universe made up not of things in space and in time, but of patterned flows extending throughout its reaches. What flows is a mysterious, nonindividualized something we call energy. It flows along pathways structured by the metric of integral space-time. It flows smoothly, without crinks or wrinkles, over vast stretches of this cosmic matrix, and it becomes contorted in some regions."

"A system in one perspective is a subsystem in another. But the systems view always treats systems as integrated wholes of their subsidiary components and never as the mechanistic aggregate of parts in isolable causal relations."

"Values are goals which behavior strives to realize. Any activity that is oriented towards an end is a value-oriented action. To the ancient Greeks, their culture was guided by an attainment of ‘the good life.’ In the early days of Christianity, the ‘good life’ was shifted from this lifetime into the next. Newtonian science and the modern era brought values under rational scrutiny, and a desire for empirical order. Modern capitalism introduced the value of ‘good’ as more production per capita, and ‘better’ as even more production. There is nothing in the sphere of culture which would exempt us from the realm of values—no facts floating around, ready to be grasped without valuations and expectations"

"Among Kalman's early work was the development of what is now called the Kalman filter for detection of signals in noise. This revolutionized the field of estimation, by providing a recursive approach to the filtering problem. Before the advent of the Kalman filter, most mathematical work was based on Norbert Wiener's ideas, but the 'Wiener filtering' had proved difficult to apply. Kalman's approach, based on the use of state space techniques and a recursive least-squares algorithm, opened up many new theoretical and practical possibilities. The impact of Kalman filtering on all areas of applied mathematics, engineering, and sciences has been tremendous. It is impossible to even begin to enumerate its practical applications. Just as examples of their diversity, one may mention the guidance of the Apollo spacecraft and of commercial airplanes, uses in seismic data processing, nuclear power plant instrumentation, and demographic models, as well as applications in econometrics."

"[H]is fundamental contributions to modern system theory... provided rigorous mathematical tools for engineering, econometrics, and statistics, and in particular for his invention of the "Kalman filter,"… was critical to achieving the Moon landings and creating the Global Positioning System and which has facilitated the use of computers in control and communications technology."

"The creator of modern control and system theory, Kalman theory, which was established in the early 1960s, brought a fundamental reformation to control engineering and since then laid the foundation for the rapid progress of modern control theory."

"::(1) The general form of the solution (see Fig. 1)."

"::(ii) Conditions which guarantee a priori the existence, physical realizability, and stability of the optimal filter."

":(1) The theoretical aspect. Here interest centers on:"

"At present, a nonspecialist might well regard the Wiener-Kolmogorov theory of filtering and prediction [1, 2] as "classical' — in short, a field where the techniques are well established and only minor improvements and generalizations can be expected. That this is not really so can be seen convincingly from recent results of Shinbrot [3], Stceg [4], Pugachev [5, 6], and Parzen [7]. Using a variety of methods, these investigators have solved some long-stauding problems in nonstationary filtering and prediction theory. We present here a unified account of our own independent researches during the past two years (which overlap with much of the work [3-71 just mentioned), as well as numerous new results. We, too, use time-domain methods, and obtain major improvements and generalizations of the conventional Wiener theory. In particular, our methods apply without modification to multivariate problems."

"One should clearly distinguish between two aspects of the estimation problem:"

"::(iii) Characterization of the general results in terms of some simple quantities, such as signal-to-noise ratio, information rate, bandwidth, etc"

"I would like to comment briefly on Professor Zadeh's presentation. His proposals could be severely, ferociously, even brutally criticized from a technical point of view. This would be out of place here. But a blunt question remains: Is professor Zadeh presenting important ideas or is he indulging in wishful thinking? No doubt Professor Zadeh's enthusiasm for fuzziness has been reinforced by the prevailing climate in the U.S.-one of unprecedented permissiveness. 'Fuzzification, is a kind of scientific permissiveness; it tends to result in socially appealing slogans unaccompanied by the discipline of hard scientific work and patient observation."

"I have been aware from the outset (end of January 1959, the birthdate of the second paper in the citation) that the deep analysis of something which is now called were of major importance. But even with this immodesty I did not quite anticipate all the reactions to this work. Up to now there have been some 1000 related publications, at least two Citation Classics, etc. There is something to be explained. To look for an explanation, let me suggest a historical analogy, at the risk of further immodesty. I am thinking of Newton, and specifically his most spectacular achievement, the law of Gravitation. Newton received very ample "recognition" (as it is called today) for this work. it astounded - really floored - all his contemporaries. But I am quite sure, having studied the matter and having added something to it, that nobody then (1700) really understood what Newton's contribution was. Indeed, it seemed an absolute miracle to his contemporaries that someone, an Englishman, actually a human being, in some magic and un-understandable way, could harness mathematics, an impractical and eternal something, and so use mathematics as to discover with it something fundamental about the universe."

"Let me say quite categorically that there is no such thing as a fuzzy concept... We do talk about fuzzy things but they are not scientific concepts. Some people in the past have discovered certain interesting things, formulated their findings in a non-fuzzy way, and therefore we have progressed in science."

":(2) The computational aspect. The classical (more accurately, old-fashioned) view is that a mathematical problem is solved if the solution is expressed by a formula. It is not a trivial matter, however, to substitute numbers in a formula. The current literature on the Wiener problem is full of semi-rigorously derived formulas which turn out to be unusable for practical computation when the order of the system becomes even moderately large..."

"A of the Riccati type is derived for the covariance matrix of the optimal filtering error. The solution of this 'variance equation' completely specifies the optimal filter for either finite or infinite smoothing intervals and stationary or non-stationary statistics. The variance equation is closely related to the Hamiltonian (canonical) differential equations of the calculus of variations. Analytic solutions are available in some cases. The significance of the variance equation is illustrated by examples which duplicate, simplify, or extend earlier results in this field. The duality principle relating stochastic estimation and deterministic control problems plays an important role in the proof of theoretical results. In several examples, the estimation problem and its dual are discussed side-by-side. Properties of the variance equation are of great interest in the theory of s. Some aspects of this are considered briefly."

"The battle... is for the minds of men; the outcome... does not depend on numbers of missiles, but on the question of which system can raise life higher, give more happiness... and raise the great undeveloped masses out of their misery. ...Now there are two parties: democracy and communism. Why not embark on a noble competition by showing which... can create a better, freer, happier life?"

"The great hope of mankind is still the United Nations."

"I am not dreaming of a Utopia, only of a world in which problems are not resolved by force but by intelligence, good will and equity; a world in which killing, no matter the reason, and the destruction of a fellow man's life or home, is a crime; a world in which our youth in which our youth will not have to spend their years studying organized manslaughter, in which neither force nor megatons nor poison gases will decide a nation's standing but the sum of its knowledge, its ethics, the gifts it makes to mankind, the happiness it gives to men, the measure in which it lifts human life."

"Out children came into this world with "clean and empty minds." What they learn... is markedly different from... children of the pre-War world. Today's adults look... through glasses of pre-War and pre-scientific values. They think... all the world needs a little bit of patching... The result... we get deeper... into trouble. The modern scientific revolution had made all human s age faster... as a consequence we have a hypocritical world... Our youth rejects this anachronism wholesale. ...They find everything a lie. The great political parties... out for profit and power, the military for domination, fattening itself with their young bodies... churches preaching love but raising no voice against the slaughter of undeveloped people... driving the world toward overpopulation... resisting family planning... always on the side of power. And they see while half of the children of the world go to sleep hungry... we spend hundreds of billions to raise our stack of nuclear bombs and missiles... They see... most political leaders... mindful only of... re-election... keeping power... with arguments which should be rejected by the simplest logic, refuting the great ideals on which our country was built."

"[T]here is only one medicine that will be effective against drug use: a livible, a restoration of faith in life—its dignity, value and longevity. Police raids and jail terms are not the answer."

"[B]rutalizing wars and military life... are capable of turning decent fellows into ers who can shoot women and children down in cold blood."

"The primary aim of science is to find... new truth. The search is the more successful the more it is directed towards... truth for its own sake, regardless of... possible use or application. ...If everything given to us by research were to be taken away, civilization would collapse and we would stand naked, searching for caves again."

"Even pure truth, which has no application... elevates life."

"Psalmus Humanus My Lord, Who are You? ... Are you the Universe itself? Or the Law which Ruled it? ... Are you the maker, or did I shape You, That I may share my loneliness and shun my responsibility? God! ...I am calling to You, for I am in trouble, Frightened of myself and my fellow men! ..."

"Science is life-oriented. ...[A]rmies and armaments are death-oriented. Armies are instruments of organized manslaughter... All its tools are the tools of death... instruments of killing. ...[A] society dominated by the military is death-centered, as pointed out by in his famous Moratorium Speech."

"Collective human suffering easily becomes an abstraction... being unable to multiply death or suffering by 100,000. This... is a number, an abstraction. One death is a tragedy. 100,000 deaths are statistics. So it must also seem to men in high offices."

"From on high a human life must look very small, a notion that moved Walt Whitman to sing about the arrogance and audacity of elected government officials. ...Unfortunately, this collective code of morals... [w]e all share... as soon as... we participate in government... when we go to the polls to elect hawks and vote the endless billions for war and... formidable machines for killing and destruction, and then go to church and ask for God's blessing."

"It is probably this dual code of morals which underlies the break in... many leading politicians who begin their political efforts with the desire to improve the lot of their fellow men. Once they reach the top they tend to exchange their individual code of morals for the collective one... to serve abstract ideas, which have little to do with their people's well being, and they make war."

"Between the two world wars, at the heydey of Colonialism, force reigned supreme. ...[I]t was natural for the weaker to lie down before the stronger. ...Gandhi, chasing out of his country... the greatest military power on earth... taught the world that there are higher things than force, higher even than life... [H]e proved that force had lost its suggestive power... information which did not reach the Pentagon or the government: we cannot win in win in Viet Nam because the people are willing to die faster than we can kill them."

"DNA... is the most wonderful thing in the world... Mankind went through epidemics, famine, and...trials, yet nature kept this... intact, because all life depends on it. ...[M]an has found a means to damage it. High energy radiation does so. ...There may ...be survivors after after an atomic war, but those... will be unable to produce a healthy progeny. Their progeny will be beset by abnormalities, monstrosities and diseases... and there will be no way back."

"Szent-Györgyi's offbeat ideas came to Mr. Moss's attention in 1980 when he was promoting his book The Cancer Syndrome. "I was dubious about his work," Mr. Moss said. Then The Saturday Evening Post asked him to interview Szent-Györgyi and "I was just bowled over by him. Linus Pauling said he was the most charming man in science. He had this easy gift of winning people over.""

"I am not religious, but I am a pious man... A religious man has a definite religion. He says "God is there" or "God is there," "God is there." "Your god is not my god, and that's all." But the pious man, he just looks out with awe, and says, "where is God?" And "well, I don't understand it and I would like to know what this creation really means." That is a pious man, who is really touched by the greatness of nature and of the creation."

"[When I joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton] I did this in the hope that by rubbing elbows with those great atomic physicists and mathematicians I would learn something about living matters. But as soon as I revealed that in any living system there are more than two electrons, the physicists would not speak to me. With all their computers they could not say what the third electron might do. The remarkable thing is that it knows exactly what to do. So that little electron knows something that all the wise men of Princeton don't, and this can only he something very simple."

"When I received the Nobel Prize, the only big lump sum of money I have ever seen, I had to do something with it. The easiest way to drop this hot potato was to invest it, to buy shares. I knew that World War II was coming and I was afraid that if I had shares which rise in case of war, I would wish for war. So I asked my agent to buy shares which go down in the event of war. This he did. I lost my money and saved my soul."

"Mi è impossibile cingere i fianchi di una ragazza con il mio braccio destro e serrare il suo sorriso nella mia mano sinistra, per poi tentare di studiare i due oggetti separatamente. Allo stesso modo, non ci è possibile separare la vita dalla materia vivente, allo scopo di studiare la sola materia vivente e le sue reazioni. Inevitabilmente, studiando la materia vivente e le sue reazioni, studiamo la vita stessa."