No system of balance functions automatically.

 

No system of balance functions automatically.
--
Chapter VII, Some Implications Of The Third Image, p. 210

 

Kenneth Waltz

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A leader has to know how the system functions - not just the system of government but the whole social and economic system, including business, the unions, and the universities.

 

Jean Chretien

 

Everybody assumes that the earth naturally is in radiative balance, and yet we don’t even know that from an observational point of view. It could be that the earth is constantly out of radiative balance. We know it certainly is locally, because that is what drives the weather. Weather is a complex, fluid system that is forced by heat inequalities around the earth; that is what drives it. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were substantial imbalances in the earth’s radiative budget and yet everybody starts out assuming that it is in balance. My personal opinion is that the modelers who believe this are mostly physicists rather thanscientists and they not as familiar with the climate system complexities that we atmospheric types tend to focus on. All of these assumptions about the Earth being in radiative balance are made by modelers, but I don’t think anybody had demonstrated them. They are just assumptions.

 

Roy Spencer

 

We all possess, in our unconscious minds, a kind of servant who performs certain automatic functions. When I learn to type or drive a car or learn a foreign language, I have to do it painfully and consciously; then, suddenly, my robot takes over and does it automatically; in fact, he does it far more quickly and efficiently than "I" could. The main trouble with this mechanical valet is that he often takes over functions I would prefer to keep for myself -- for example, when I am tired I eat "automatically," and so do not enjoy my food. In fact, this is the reason that so much of our experience seems oddly "unreal"; the robot has taken it over. When I am feeling low, I may live for whole days in a "robotic" state, so that experience flows off me like water off a duck's back. And because I am not receiving any "feedback" of pleasure or interest from my activities, I become duller than ever, and experience becomes progressively less interesting. (This is, of course, the mechanism of depression and nervous breakdown.) And this is also why explorers deliberately seek out hardship and danger -- to cheat the robot and "feel the life in them more intensely."

 

Colin Wilson

 

The dominant system of power in the west has been Platonist — a system which functions on highly developed levels of structure and law. This is the school of pure rationality and fear of the undefined — fear of doubt. The minority system has been Socratic or humanist. It is interested in doubt and not overwhelmed by the Platonist-Hobbesian desperate need to tie things down.

 

John Ralston Saul

 

One might almost say that the plant is the framework, the foundation of the animal, and that to form the animal it sufficed to cover this foundation with a system of organs fitted to establish relations consists forms with the world outside. It follows of the succession substance of the animal form two quite distinct classes. One class in a continual into its own assimilation molecules that the functions and of excretion; through these functions the animal incessantly transsurrounding bodies, later to reject these molecules when they have become heterogeneous to it. Through this first class of functions the animal exists only within itself; through the other class it exists outside; it is an inhabitant of the world, and not, like the plant, of the place which saw its birth. The animal feels and perceives its surroundings, reflects its sensations, moves of its own will under their influence, and, as a rule, can communicate by its voice its desires and its fears, its pleasures or its pains. I call organic life the sum of the functions of the former class, for all organised creatures, plants or animals, possess them to a more or less marked degree, and organised structure is the sole condition necessary to their exercise. The combined functions of the second class form the ' animal' life named because it is the exclusive attribute of the animal kingdom.

 

Marie Francois Xavier Bichat