Jim has a wide-ranging talk with Dennis Waters about his book, Behavior and Culture in One Dimension: Sequences, Affordances, and the Evolution of Complexity...

Jim has a wide-ranging talk with Dennis Waters about his book, Behavior and Culture in One Dimension: Sequences, Affordances, and the Evolution of Complexity. They chat about the challenges of interdisciplinary work in academia, value in understanding sequences, emergent behavior, constraint dynamics, instructive & descriptive sequences, emergent patterns, why "talk is cheap", co-evolution, the Fermi paradox, origins of life, energetic costs, rate independence vs dependence, laws vs rules, self-referentiality, the importance of language & writing, DNA & RNA, open-endedness, coherent pluralism, the Cambrian explosion, the role of interactors, Dennis' view of AGI plausibility, and much more.

Episode Transcript

Behavior and Culture in One Dimension

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Dennis P. Waters received his Ph.D. in 1990 from the Watson Engineering School at Binghamton University, where his advisor was Howard Pattee. Rather than travel the academic road, Waters became a serial entrepreneur, founding and selling several technical publishing businesses. Since retiring from business, Waters has returned to the research project that inspired his Ph.D., how one-dimensional patterns of DNA, language, and computer code orchestrate the behavior of the three-dimensional world in which we live.