COMPLEXITY

This is a podcast by and for the curious — and yet, in over three years, we have pointed curiosity at nearly every topic but itself. What is it, anyway? Are there worse and better frames for understanding how desire and wonder, exploration and discovery play out in both the brain and in society? How is scientific research like an amble through the woods? What juicy insights bubble up where neuroscientists, historians, philosophers, and mathematicians meet to answer questions like these? And how long of a path must we traverse to get there?

In this episode, we talk with SFI External Professor Dani Bassett, physicist and neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, and their birth twin Perry Zurn, philosopher at American University in Washington, DC. You might consider each one of two lenses in a stereoscopic inquiry. Their new MIT Press book Curious Minds: The Power of Connection bridges quantity and quality to recast curiosity as a phenomenon of networks — as a kind of “edgework” (generative, drawing new associations) instead of “acquistion” (of individuals collecting facts). The brain, after all, is made of networked neurons, and society’s a kind of super-brain of networked people, so why not think in terms of links?  Their research offers a taxonomy of kinds of curiosity — three different ways that people move through knowledge networks. Traveling across a web of related ideas, rupturing and mending, weaving, percolating, synthesizing, we embody and perform the objects of their academic study. We hope you find this lively and self-referential conversation offers you a helpful map as you draw your distinct connectome through the world of what is and what could be known...

Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage.

Lastly, we have a bevy of summer programs coming up! Join us June 19-23 for Collective Intelligence: Foundations + Radical Ideas, a first-ever event open to both academics and professionals, with sessions on adaptive matter, animal groups, brains, AI, teams, and more.  Space is limited!  Apps close February 1st.

OR Apply to participate in the Complex Systems Summer School.

OR the Graduate Workshop on Complexity in Social Science.

OR the Complexity GAINS UK program for PhD students.

(OR check our open listings for a staff or research job!)

Thank you for listening…

EDITORIAL CORRECTION: We mention a review of Cormac McCarthy's latest novels in this discussion. The correct link is to James Wood’s piece in The New Yorker, not Michael Gorra’s in NYRB. 

Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.

Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

Follow us on social media:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Mentioned & Related Links:

Curious Minds: The Power of Connection

by Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett (MIT Press, 2022)

Curiosity as filling, compressing, and reconfiguring knowledge networks

by Shubhankar P. Patankar, Dale Zhou, Christopher W. Lynn, Jason Z. Kim, Mathieu Ouellet, Harang Ju, Perry Zurn, David M. Lydon-Staley, Dani S. Bassett

Murray Gell-Mann on information overload (from A Crude Look At The Whole) [Video]

The Arrival of the Fittest: How Nature Innovates by SFI External Professor Andreas Wagner

Complexity 99: Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I.

Complexity 80: Mingzhen Lu on The Evolution of Root Systems & Biogeochemical Cycling

Busybody, Hunter, Dancer: Three Historical Models of Curiosity

by Perry Zurn

Hunters, busybodies and the knowledge network building associated with deprivation curiosity

by David M. Lydon-Staley, Dale Zhou, Ann Sizemore Blevins, Perry Zurn & Danielle S. Bassett

Complexity 29: On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer

The Dimensions of Experience: A Natural History of Consciousness by Andrew P. Smith

Complexity 68: W. Brian Arthur on Economics in Nouns and Verbs (Part 1)

Complexity 90: Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome

Complexity 94: David Wolpert & Farita Tasnim on The Thermodynamics of Communication

Complexity 35: Scaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West (Part 1)

Complexity 87: Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale Intelligence

The extent and drivers of gender imbalance in neuroscience reference lists

by Jordan D. Dworkin, Kristin A. Linn, Erin G. Teich, Perry Zurn, Russell T. Shinohara & Danielle S. Bassett

Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice by Cleo Wölfle Hazard

The Sounds of Life by Karen Bakker

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Dirk Brockmann’s interactive explorables

Nicky Case’s interactive explorables

The Thing From The Future (speculative futurism card game by Stuart Candy & Jeff Watson at Situation Lab)

Bayo Akomolafe (re: networks, the nonhuman turn, and questioning the rhetoric of individuals as “designers”)

LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models

by Christoph Schuhmann, Romain Beaumont, Richard Vencu, Cade Gordon, Ross Wightman, Mehdi Cherti, Theo Coombes, Aarush Katta, Clayton Mullis, Mitchell Wortsman, Patrick Schramowski, Srivatsa Kundurthy, Katherine Crowson, Ludwig Schmidt, Robert Kaczmarczyk, Jenia Jitsev

Complexity 86: Dmitri Tymoczko on The Shape of Music: Mathematical Order in Western Tonality

Dani & Perry on SFI External Professor Sean Carroll’s MINDSCAPE Podcast

Humans have an unusually long childhood — and an unusually long elderhood past the age of reproductive activity. Why do we spend so much time playing and exploring, caregiving and reflecting, learning and transmitting? What were the evolutionary circumstances that led to our unique life history among the primates? What use is the undisciplined child brain with its tendencies to drift, scatter, and explore in a world that adults understand in such very different terms? And what can we transpose from the study of human cognition as a developmental, stage-      wise process to the refinement and application of machine learning technologies?

Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.

This week we talk to SFI External Professor Alison Gopnik, Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California Berkeley, author of numerous books on psych, cognitive science, childhood development. She writes a column at The Wall Street Journal, alternating with Robert Sapolsky. Slate said that Gopnik is “where to go if you want to get into the head of a baby.” In our conversation we discuss the tension between exploration and exploitation, the curious evolutionary origins of human cognition, the value of old age, and she provides a sober counterpoint about life in the age of large language machine learning models.

Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us at santafe.edu/engage.

Lastly, we have a bevy of summer programs coming up! Join us June 19-23 for Collective Intelligence: Foundations + Radical Ideas, a first-ever event open to both academics and professionals, with sessions on adaptive matter, animal groups, brains, AI, teams, and more.  Space is limited! Apps close February 1st.

OR Apply to participate in the Complex Systems Summer School.

OR the Graduate Workshop on Complexity in Social Science.

OR the Complexity GAINS UK program for PhD students.

Thank you for listening!

Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.

Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

Follow us on social media:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Mentioned & Related Links:

Alison Gopnik at Wikipedia

Alison Gopnik’s Google Scholar page

Explanation as Orgasm
by Alison Gopnik

Twitter thread for Gopnik’s latest SFI Seminar on machine learning and child development

Changes in cognitive flexibility and hypothesis search across human life history from childhood to adolescence to adulthood
by Gopnik et al.

Pretense, Counterfactuals, and Bayesian Causal Models: Why What Is Not Real Really Matters
by Deena Weisberg & Alison Gopnik

Childhood as a solution to explore–exploit tensions
by Alison Gopnik

The Origins of Common Sense in Humans and Machines
by Kevin A Smith, Eliza Kosoy, Alison Gopnik, Deepak Pathak, Alan Fern, Joshua B Tenenbaum, & Tomer Ullman

What Does “Mind-Wandering” Mean to the Folk? An Empirical Investigation
by Zachary C. Irving, Aaron Glasser, Alison Gopnik, Verity Pinter, Chandra Sripada

Models of Human Scientific Discovery
by Robert Goldstone, Alison Gopnik, Paul Thagard, Tomer Ullman

Love Lets Us Learn: Psychological Science Makes the Case for Policies That Help Children
by Alison Gopnik at APS

Our Favorite New Things Are the Old Ones
by Alison Gopnik at The Wall Street Journal

An exchange of letters on the role of noise in collective intelligence
by Daniel Kahneman, David Krakauer, Olivier Sibony, Cass Sunstein, & David Wolpert#DEVOBIAS2018 on SFI Twitter

Coarse-graining as a downward causation mechanism
by Jessica Flack

Complexity 90: Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome

Complexity 15: R. Maria del-Rio Chanona on Modeling Labor Markets & Tech Unemployment

Learning through the grapevine and the impact of the breadth and depth of social networks
by Matthew Jackson, Suraj Malladi, & David McAdams

The coming battle for the COVID-19 narrative
by Wendy Carlin & Sam Bowles

Complexity 83: Eric Beinhocker & Diane Coyle on Rethinking Economics for A Sustainable & Prosperous World

Complexity 97: Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic on the forces slowing innovation at scale (citing Chu & Evans)

What does it mean to think? What are the traits of thinking systems that we could use to identify them? Different environmental variables call for different strategies in individual and collective cognition — what defines the threshold at which so-called “solid” brains transition into “liquids”? And how might we apply these and related lessons from ecology and evolution to help steward a diverse and thriving future with technology, and keep the biosphere afloat?

Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.

This week on the show we talk to SFI External Professor Ricard Solé of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Website, Twitter, Google Scholar) about liquid and solid brains, the scaling of cognition, criticality, contagions, and terraforming our own planet with synthetic bio.

Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us, including our upcoming program for Undergraduate Complexity Research, our new SFI Press book Ex Machina by John H. Miller, and an open postdoctoral fellowship in Belief Dynamics — at santafe.edu/engage.

Lastly, join us June 19-23 for Collective Intelligence: Foundations + Radical Ideas, a first-ever event open to both academics and professionals, with sessions on adaptive matter, animal groups, brains, AI, teams, and more.  Space is limited! Apps close February 1st. Learn more on our website.

Thank you for listening!

Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.

Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

Follow us on social media:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Referenced & Related Works

Liquid and Solid Brains: Mapping the Cognition Space
SFI Seminar by Ricard Solé

John Hopfield (re: biology as computation)

Synthetic transitions: towards a new synthesis
by Ricard Solé

Complexity 93 - Kate Adamala on Synthetic Biology, Origins of Life, and Bioethics

The Multiple Paths to Multiple Life
by Chris Kempes and David Krakauer

Simon Conway Morris (re: macroevolutionary trends)

Scale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolution
by Jaewon Shin et al.

Smarter Parts Make Collective Systems Too Stubborn
by Jordana Cepelewicz at Quanta Magazine

Complexity 90 - Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome

Will Ratcliff (re: yeasts and emergent multi-cellularity)

Complexity 29 - On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 3)

Synthetic criticality in cellular brains
by Ricard Solé et al.

Tom Ray (re: artificial life)

Complexity and fragility in ecological networks
by Ricard Solé and José Montoya

Ecological Networks and Their Fragility
by José Montoya, Stuart Pimm, and Ricard Solé

The small world of human language
by Ramon Ferrer i Cancho and Ricard Solé

Macroscopic patterns of interacting contagions are indistinguishable from social reinforcement
by Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, Sam Scarpino, and Jean-Gabriel Young

Complexity 56 - J. Doyne Farmer on The Complexity Economics Revolution

Complexity 66 - Katherine Collins on Better Investing Through Biomimicry

Chris Langton (re: criticality)

Jim Crutchfield (re: the edge of chaos)

Per Bak (re: self-organized criticality)

Complexity 10 - Melanie Moses on Metabolic Scaling in Biology & Computation

Complexity 3 - Sabine Hauert on Swarming Across Scales

Niles Eldredge (re: punctuated equilibria)

Terraforming the biosphere: can bioengineering save us?
SFI Seminar by Ricard Solé

Ecological complexity and the biosphere: the next 30 years
by Ricard Solé and Simon Levin

Ecological firewalls for synthetic biology
by Blai Vidiella and Ricard Solé

Rachel Armstrong (re: synthetic biology for CO2 fixing in concrete)

Stewardship of global collective behavior
by Joseph Bak-Coleman et al.

Complexity 64 - Reconstructing Ancient Superhighways with Stefani Crabtree and Devin White

Complexity 5 - Jennifer Dunne on Food Webs & ArchaeoEcology

In his foundational 1972 paper “More Is Different,” physicist Phil Anderson made the case that reducing the objects of scientific study to their smallest components does not allow researchers to predict the behaviors of those systems upon reconstruction. Another way of putting this is that different disciplines reveal different truths at different scales. Contrary to long-held convictions that there would one day be one great unifying theory to explain it all, fundamental research in this century looks more like a bouquet of complementary approaches. This pluralistic thinking hearkens back to the work of 19th century psychologist William James and looks forward into the growing popularity of evidence-based approaches that cultivate diversity in team-building, governance, and ecological systems. Context-dependent theory and practice calls for choirs of voices…so how do we encourage this? New systems must emerge to handle the complexity of digital society…what might they look like?

Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.

This week on the show we dip back into our sub-series on SFI’s Emergent Political Economies research theme with a trialogue featuring Microsoft Research Lead Glen Weyl (founder of RadicalXChange and founder-chair of The Plurality Institute), and SFI Resident Professor Cristopher Moore (author of over 150 papers at the intersection of physics and computer science). In our conversation we discuss the case for a radically pluralistic approach, explore the links between plurality and quantum mechanics, and outline potential technological solutions to the “sense-making” problems of the 21st century.

Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us, including our upcoming program for Undergraduate Complexity Research, our new SFI Press book Ex Machina by John H. Miller, and an open postdoctoral fellowship in Belief Dynamics — at santafe.edu/engage.

Thank you for listening!

Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.

Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

Follow us on social media:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Referenced & Related Works

Why I Am A Pluralist
by Glen Weyl

Reflecting on A Possible Quadratic Wormhole between Quantum Mechanics and Plurality
by Michael Freedman, Michal Fabinger, Glen Weyl

Decentralized Society: Finding Web3's Soul
by Glen Weyl, Puja Ohlhaver, Vitalik Buterin

AI is an Ideology, Not a Technology
by Glen Weyl & Jaron Lanier

How Civic Technology Can Help Stop a Pandemic
by Jaron Lanier & Glen Weyl

A Flexible Design for Funding Public Goods
by Vitalik Buterin, Zöe Hitzig, Glen Weyl

Equality of Power and Fair Public Decision-making
by Nicole Immorlica, Benjamin Plautt, Glen Weyl

Scale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolution
by Jaeweon Shin, Michael Holton Price, David Wolpert, Hajime Shimao, Brendan Tracey & Timothy Kohler 

Toward a Connected Society
by Danielle Allen

The role of directionality, heterogeneity and correlations in epidemic risk and spread
by Antoine Allard, Cris Moore, Samuel Scarpino, Benjamin Althouse, and Laurent Hébert-Dufresne

The Generals’ Scuttlebutt: Byzantine-Resilient Gossip Protocols
by Sandro Coretti, Aggelos Kiayias, Cristopher Moore, Alexander Russell

Effective Resistance for Pandemics: Mobility Network Sparsification for High-Fidelity Epidemic Simulation
by Alexander Mercier, Samuel Scarpino, and Cris Moore

How Accurate are Rebuttable Presumptions of Pretrial Dangerousness? A Natural Experiment from New Mexico
by Cris Moore, Elise Ferguson, Paul Guerin

The Uncertainty Principle: In an age of profound disagreements, mathematics shows us how to pursue truth together
by Cris Moore & John Kaag

On Becoming Aware: A pragmatics of experiencing
by Nathalie Depraz, Francisco Varela, and Pierre Vermersch

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform The World
by David Deutsch

[Twitter thread on chess]
by Vitalik Buterin

Letter from Birmingham Jail
by Martin Luther King, Jr.

The End of History and The Last Man
by Francis Fukuyama

Enabling the Individual: Simmel, Dewey and “The Need for a Philosophy of Education”
by H. Koenig

Encyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti of The Holy Father Francis on Fraternity and Social Friendship
by Pope Francis

What can we know about that which we cannot even imagine?
by David Wolpert

J.C.R. Licklider (1, 2)

Allison Duettman (re: existential hope)

Evan Miyazono (re: Protocol Labs research)

Intangible Capital (“an open access scientific journal that publishes theoretical or empirical peer-reviewed articles, which contribute to advance the understanding of phenomena related with all aspects of management and organizational behavior, approached from the perspectives of intellectual capital, strategic management, human resource management, applied psychology, education, IT, supply chain management, accounting…”)

Polis (“a real-time system for gathering, analyzing and understanding what large groups of people think in their own words, enabled by advanced statistics and machine learning”)

Related Complexity Podcast Episodes

7 - Rajiv Sethi on Stereotypes, Crime, and The Pursuit of Justice

51 - Cris Moore on Algorithmic Justice & The Physics of Inference

55 - James Evans on Social Computing and Diversity by Design

68 - W. Brian Arthur on Economics in Nouns and Verbs (Part 1)

69 - W. Brian Arthur (Part 2) on "Prim Dreams of Order vs. Messy Vitality" in Economics, Math, and Physics

82 - David Krakauer on Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibility (EPE 01)

83 - Eric Beinhocker & Diane Coyle on Rethinking Economics for A Sustainable & Prosperous World (EPE 02)

84 - Ricardo Hausmann & J. Doyne Farmer on Evolving Technologies & Market Ecologies (EPE 03)

91 - Steven Teles & Rajiv Sethi on Jailbreaking The Captured Economy (EPE 04)

What makes us human?  Over the last several decades, the once-vast island of human exceptionalism has lost significant ground to wave upon wave of research revealing cognition, emotion, problem-solving, and tool-use in other organisms. But there remains a clear sense that humans stand apart — evidenced by our unique capacity to overrun the planet and remake it in our image. What is unique about the human mind, and how might we engage this question rigorously through the lens of neuroscience? How are our gifts of simulation and imagination different from those of other animals? And what, if anything, can we know of the “curiosity” of even larger systems in which we’re embedded — the social superorganisms, ecosystems, technospheres within which we exist like neurons in the brain?

Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.

This week we conclude a two-part conversation with SFI External Professor John Krakauer, Professor of Neurology and Director of the Center for the Study of Motor Learning and Brain Repair at Johns Hopkins. In this episode, we talk about the nature of curiosity and learning, and whether the difference between the cognitive capacities and inner lifeworld of humans and other animals constitutes a matter of degree or one of kind…

Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com  . If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. Please also note that we are now accepting applications for an open postdoc fellowship, next summer’s undergraduate research program, and the next cohort of Complexity Explorer’s course in the digital humanities. We welcome your submissions!

Lastly, for more from John Krakauer, check out our new six-minute time-lapse of notes from the 2022 InterPlanetary Festival panel discussions on intelligence and the limits to human performance in space…

Thank you for listening!

Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.

Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

Follow us on social media:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Referenced in this episode:

Prospective Learning: Back to the Future
by The Future Learning Collective (Joshua Vogelstein, et al.)

The Learning Salon: Toward a new participatory science
by Ida Momennejad, John Krakauer, Claire Sun, Eva Yezerets, Kanaka Rajan, Joshua Vogelstein, Brad Wyble

Artificial Intelligence Hits the Barrier of Meaning
by Melanie Mitchell at The New York Times

Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren
by John Maynard Keynes

The Intelligent Life of the City Raccoon
by Jude Isabella at Nautilus Magazine

The maintenance of vocal learning by gene-culture interaction: the cultural trap hypothesis
by R. F. Lachlan and P. J. B. Slater

Mindscape Podcast 87 - Karl Friston on Brains, Predictions, and Free Energy
by Sean Carroll

The Apportionment of Human Diversity
by Richard Lewontin

From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution
by Simon Conway Morris

I Am a Strange Loop
by Douglas Hoftstadter

Coarse-graining as a downward causation mechanism
by Jessica Flack

Daniel Dennett

Susan Blackmore

Related Episodes:

Complexity 9 - Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-making

Complexity 12 - Matthew Jackson on Social & Economic Networks

Complexity 21 - Melanie Mitchell on Artificial Intelligence: What We Still Don't Know
Complexity 31 - Embracing Complexity for Systemic Interventions with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 5)

Complexity 52 - Mark Moffett on Canopy Biology & The Human Swarm

Complexity 55 - James Evans on Social Computing and Diversity by Design

Complexity 87 - Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale Intelligence

Complexity 90 - Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome

Complexity 95 - John Krakauer Part 1: Taking Multiple Perspectives on The Brain

The brain is arguably one of the most complex objects known to science. How best to understand it? That is a trick question: brains are organized at many levels and attempts to grasp them all through one approach — be it micro, macro, anatomical, behavioral — are destined to leave out crucial insights. What more, thinking “vertically” across scales, one might miss important angles from another discipline along the “horizontal” axis. For inquiries too big to sit within one field of knowledge, maybe it is time we resurrected the salon: a mode of scientific exploration that levels hierarchies of expertise and optimizes for more complementary and high-dimensional, egalitarian, communal discourse. As with the Jainist philosophic principle anekantavada — how many blind people does it take to grok an elephant? — neuroscience is perhaps best practiced as innately and intensely multiperspectival…

Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.

This week is part one of a two-part conversation with SFI External Professor John Krakauer, Professor of Neurology and Director of the Center for the Study of Motor Learning and Brain Repair at Johns Hopkins . In this episode, we talk about the history of different ways of studying the brain — in animals and humans — and how subjects as complex as brains invite a different way of seeing, one that synthesizes many different ways of seeing…

Thanks for your patience with the recent delays in publication — with InterPlanetary Festival and our Annual Symposium behind us, Complexity will now return to regular biweekly scheduling.

Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com, and stay tuned for part two — in which we talk about how learning is inherently a future-focused exercise, and what that means for education. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us, including an open postdoctoral fellowship in Belief Dynamics — at santafe.edu/engage.

Thank you for listening!

Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.

Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

Follow us on social media:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Referenced in this episode:

Neuroscience Needs Behavior: Correcting a Reductionist Bias
John Krakauer, Asif Ghazanfar, Alex Gomez-Marin, Malcolm MacIver, David Poeppel

Two Views of the Cognitive Brain
David Barack & John Krakauer

On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences
Richard Doyle

Simon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of Epistemology
Complexity Podcast Episode 72

Former SFI Fellow David Kinney, epistemologist (re: disciplines as levels of explanatory granularity)

Coarse-graining as a downward causation mechanism
Jessica Flack

Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives on the Natural World
Sean Esbjörn-Hargens & Michael Zimmerman

Carl Cranor, moral philosopher (re: causation)

The Learning Salon: Toward a new participatory science
Ida Momennejad, John Krakauer, Claire Sun, Eva Yezerets, Kanaka Rajan, Joshua Vogelstein, Brad Wyble

Brain Inspired Podcast
Paul Middlebrooks

eLife Journal

biorXiv

W. Brian Arthur on Economics in Nouns and Verbs (Part 1)
Complexity Podcast Episode 68

W. Brian Arthur (Part 2) on "Prim Dreams of Order vs. Messy Vitality" in Economics, Math, and Physics
Complexity Podcast Episode 69

Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The World
Tyson Yunkaporta

Communication is a physical process. It’s common sense that sending and receiving intelligible messages takes work…but how much work? The question of the relationship between energy, information, and matter is one of the deepest known to science. There appear to be limits to the rate at which communication between two systems can happen…but the search for a fundamental relationship between speed, error, and energy (among other things) promises insights far deeper than merely whether we can keep making faster internet devices. Strap in (and consider slowing down) for a broad and deep discussion on the bounds within which our entire universe must play…

Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.

This week we speak with SFI Professor David Wolpert and MIT Physics PhD student Farita Tasnim, who have worked together over the last year on pioneering research into the nonlinear dynamics of communication channels. In this episode, we explore the history and ongoing evolution of information theory and coding theory, what the field of stochastic thermodynamics has to do with limits to human knowledge, and the role of noise in collective intelligence.

Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us, including a handful of open postdoctoral fellowships — at santafe.edu/engage.

Lastly, this weekend — October 22nd & 23rd — is the return of our InterPlanetary Festival! Join our YouTube livestream for two full days of panel discussions, keynotes, and bleeding edge multimedia performances focusing   space exploration through the lens of complex systems science. The fun begins at 11 A.M. Mountain Time on Saturday and ends 6 P.M. Mountain Time on Sunday. Everything will be recorded and archived at the stream link in case you can’t tune in for the live event. Learn more at interplanetaryfest.org…

Thank you for listening!

Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.

Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

Follow us on social media:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Referenced in this episode:

Nonlinear thermodynamics of communication channels
by Farita Tasnim and David Wolpert (forthcoming at arXiv.org)

Heterogeneity and Efficiency in the Brain
by Vijay Balasubramanian

Noisy Deductive Reasoning: How Humans Construct Math, and How Math Constructs Universes
by David Wolpert & David Kinney

Stochastic Mathematical Systems
by David Wolpert & David Kinney

Twenty-five years of nanoscale thermodynamics
by Chase P. Broedersz & Pierre Ronceray

Ten Questions about The Hard Limits of Human Intelligence
by David Wolpert

What can we know about that which we cannot even imagine?
by David Wolpert

Communication consumes 35 times more energy than computation in the human cortex, but both costs are needed to predict synapse number
by William Levy & Victoria Calvert

An exchange of letters on the role of noise in collective intelligence
by Daniel Kahneman, David Krakauer, Olivier Sibony, Cass Sunstein, David Wolpert

When Slower Is Faster
by Carlos Gershenson & Dirk Helbing
Additional Resources:

The stochastic thermodynamics of computation
by David Wolpert

Elements of Information Theory, Second Edition (textbook)
by Thomas Cover & Joy Thomas

Computational Complexity: A Modern Approach (textbook)
by Sanjeev Arora & Boaz Barak

An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications (textbook)
by Ming Li & Paul Vitányi

What does it mean to be alive? Our origins are the horizon of our understanding, and as with the physical horizon, our approach brings us no closer. The more we learn, the more mysterious it all becomes. What if we’re asking the wrong questions? Maybe life did not begin at all, but rather coalesced piecemeal, a set of properties contingent and convergent, plural, more than once? Maybe the origin of life is happening right now, just over the horizon, forming something new anew. Let’s get into the weeds and see if we can find a continuity between biology and physics.

Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.

This week we speak with Kate Adamala, synthetic biologist and professor at the University of Minnesota, about her research to produce synthetic minimal cells that are not technically alive but can perform myriad biological processes. Along the way the distant past and future meet. Can we build life? Or can we grow machines?

Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. Note that applications are now open for our Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships! If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage.

Thank you for listening!

Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.

Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

Follow us on social media:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Referenced in this episode:

Nonenzymatic Template-Directed RNA Synthesis Inside Model Protocells

Engineering genetic circuit interactions within and between synthetic minimal cells

Competition between model protocells driven by an encapsulated catalyst

Synthetic cells in biomedical applications

Parasites, infections and inoculation in synthetic minimal cells

Build-a-Cell: Engineering a Synthetic Cell Community

The Andromeda Strain and the Meaning of Life: Monolith Monologues

Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale Intelligence

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Matthew Jackson on Social & Economic Networks

Scott Page

Mind Children by Hans Moravec

The Multiple Paths to Multiple Life

Michael Lachmann

Terraforming the Biosphere by Ricard Solé

Scaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West (Part 1)

Red Queen

One way to frame the science of complexity is as a revelation of the hidden order under seemingly separate phenomena — a teasing-out of music from the noise of history and nature. This effort follows centuries of work to find the rules that structure language, music, and society. How strictly analogous are the patterns governing a symphony and those that describe a social transformation? Math and music are old friends, but new statistical and computational techniques afford the possibility of going even deeper. What fundamental insights — and what sounds — emerge by bringing physicists, composers, social scientists, data artists, and biologists together?

Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.

This week on Complexity, we sit with two of SFI’s External Professors — Miguel Fuentes at the Argentine Society for Philosophical Analysis and the Institute of Complex Systems of Valparaiso, and Marco Buongiorno Nardelli at the University of North Texas — for a discussion that roams from their working group on the complexity of music, to fundamental questions about the nature of emergence, to how we might bring all of these ideas together to think about  social transformation as a kind of music in its own right.

A show that spend so much time exploring sense and nonsense would hardly be complete without technical errors, so please accept our apologies for losing some of Miguel’s backstory to a recording glitch. For this reason, be extra sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com.

Note that applications are now open for our Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships! If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage.

Thank you for listening!

Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.

Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

Follow us on social media:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Referenced in this episode:

An ‘integrated mess of music lovers in science’
on the 2020 Music & Complexity SFI Working Group
(with YouTube playlist of talks)

Expanding our understanding of musical complexity
on the 2022 Music & Complexity SFI Working Group

Topology of Networks in Generalized Musical Spaces
by Marco Buongiorno Nardelli

Tonal harmony and the topology of dynamical score networks
by Marco Buongiorno Nardelli

a computer-aided data-driven composition environment for the sonification and dramatization of scientific data streams
by Marco Buongiorno Nardelli

Machines that listen: towards a machine listening model based on perceptual descriptors
by Marco Buongiorno Nardelli, Mitsuko Aramaki, Sølvi Ystad, and Richard Kronland-Martinet

Does network complexity help organize Babel’s library?
by Juan Pablo Cárdenas Iván González, Gerardo Vidal, and Miguel Fuentes

Complexity and the Emergence of Physical Properties
by Miguel Fuentes

The Structure of Online Information Behind Social Crises
by Juan Pablo Cárdenas, Gastón Olivares, Gerardo Vidal, Carolina Urbina and Miguel Fuentes

88 - Aviv Bergman on The Evolution of Robustness and Integrating The Disciplines
Complexity Podcast

86 - Dmitri Tymoczko on The Shape of Music: Mathematical Order in Western Tonality
Complexity Podcast

81 - C. Brandon Ogbunu on Epistasis & The Primacy of Context in Complex Systems
Complexity Podcast

67 - Tyler Marghetis on Breakdowns & Breakthroughs: Critical Transitions in Jazz & Mathematics
Complexity Podcast

36 - Geoffrey West on Scaling, Open-Ended Growth, and Accelerating Crisis/Innovation Cycles: Transcendence or Collapse? (Part 2)
Complexity Podcast

27 - COVID-19 & Complex Time in Biology & Economics with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 2)
Complexity Podcast

Ignorance, Failure, Uncertainty, and the Optimism of Science
by Stuart Firestein (SFI Community Lecture)

SFI’s Operating Principles
by Cormac McCarthy

As the old nut goes, “To the victor goes the spoils.” But if each round of play consolidates the spoils into fewer hands, eventually it comes to pass that wealthy special interests twist the rules so much it undermines the game itself. When economic power overtakes the processes of democratic governance, growth stagnates, and the rift between the rich and poor becomes abyssal. Desperate times and desperate measures jeopardize the fabric of society. How might nonpartisan approaches to this wicked problem help us walk the system back into a healthy balance?

Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.

This week on Complexity we speak with Steven Teles, political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and SFI External Professor Rajiv Sethi, Professor of Economics at Barnard College, Columbia University about how self-serving economic actors intervene in regulation to stifle innovation, increase inequality, and contribute to the conditions in which violence can flourish. Referencing Teles’ aisle-crossing book The Captured Economy with co-author Brink Lindsey, we link the problem of regulatory capture in its myriad forms to Sethi’s work on race, inequality, and crime, which we discussed in Episode 7 (Rajiv Sethi on Crime, Stereotypes, and The Pursuit of Justice). At the interface between the left and right, public and private, our guests shed light on the forces that divide — and may help reunite — the USA and other modern nations.

Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. Note that applications are now open for our Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships! Tell a friend. And if you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage.

Thank you for listening!

Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.

Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

Follow us on social media:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

More on the Emergent Political Economies SFI Research Theme:

SFI launches new research theme on emergent political economies

Complexity 82 - David Krakauer on Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibility (EPE 01)

Complexity 83 - Eric Beinhocker & Diane Coyle on Rethinking Economics for A Sustainable & Prosperous World (EPE 02)

Complexity 84 - Ricardo Hausmann & J. Doyne Farmer on Evolving Technologies & Market Ecologies (EPE 03)

Referenced in (or related to) this episode:

The Captured Economy: How The Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality
by Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles

Shadows of Doubt: Stereotypes, Crime, and the Pursuit of Justice
by Brendan O’Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi

Complexity 19 - David B. Kinney on the Philosophy of Science

Common as Air
by Lewis Hyde

Signalling architectures can prevent cancer evolution
by Leonardo Oña & Michael Lachmann

Scaling of urban income inequality in the USA
by Elisa Heinrich Mora, Cate Heine, Jacob J. Jackson, Geoffrey B. West, Vicky Chuqiao Yang and Christopher P. Kempes

Crime and Punishment in a Divided Society
by Rajiv Sethi

Rajiv Sethi discusses gun violence, critical race theory, and bezzles
on The Glenn Loury Show (video)
(audio-only podcast link)

The Gun Deal by Rajiv Sethi (Substack)

Rajiv Sethi reviews Boldrin/Levine’s Against Intellectual Monopoly

Steven Teles and Brink Lindsey on EconTalk with Russ Roberts

Is Nothing Sacred? Rajiv Sethi on Salman Rushdie (Substack)

Rajiv Sethi with Bari Weiss and David French on gun violence

Rajiv Sethi on James Tobin’s Hirsch Lecture on Functional Inefficiency in Finance (Substack)