Afleveringen

  • Guests:

    Melanie Moses, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Professor of Computer Science and Associate Professor of Biology at University of New MexicoHyejin Youn, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Associate Professor at Institute of Northwestern University

    Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes

    Producer: Katherine Moncure

    Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano

    Follow us on:
    Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn • Bluesky

    More info:

    SFI programs: Education

    Complexity Explorer:

    Fractals and Scaling

    Fractals and Scaling: Toward a Theory of Urban Scaling

    Introduction to Complexity: Ant Foraging and Task Allocation

    Books: Scale by Geoffrey WestComplexity: a Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell

    Talks:

    Toward a Scientific Theory of Cities by Hyejin Youn

    Papers & Articles:

    “Synergy in ant foraging strategies: memory and communication alone and in combination,” in GECCO’13: Proceedings of the 15th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation (July 6, 2013), doi.org/10.1145/2463372.2463389“In vivo, in silico, in machina: Ants and Robots balance memory and communication to collectively exploit information,” in Proceedings of the European Conference on Complex Systems 2012“What makes individual I’s a Collective We; coordination mechanisms & costs” in arXiv (November 20, 2023), doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2306.02113“How does innovation push its boundaries?” in 43 Visions for Complexity, Exploring Complexity: Volume 3 (January 2017), doi.org/10.1142/9789813206854_0043
  • Guests:

    Brian Enquist, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of ArizonaPablo Marquet, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Professor at Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity, Pontificia Universidad CatĂłlica de Chile

    Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes

    Producer: Katherine Moncure

    Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano

    Other music: Craig Smith, Justkiddink, MaestroALF, ComputerHotline, James Ro Davidson, SoundEnsemble, Trundlefly, Geoff Bremner, Newagesgroup, Oddmonoliths, Thepla

    Follow us on:
    Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn • Bluesky

    More info:

    SFI programs: Education

    Complexity Explorer: Origins of Life: Astrobiology & General Theories for Life - Scaling with Pablo Marquet

    Books:

    Scale by Geoffrey WestScaling Biodiversity (Ecological Reviews) edited by David Storch, Pablo Marquet , James Brown How Landscapes Change: Human Disturbance and Ecosystem Fragmentation in the Americas (Ecological Studies Book 162) edited by Gay A. Bradshaw and Pablo A. Marquet

    Talks:

    Better Forecasting our Ecological Future: Taming Big Data with Big Theory, Brian Enquist

    Papers & Articles:

    “More than 17,000 tree species are at risk from rapid global change,” in Nature Communications (January 2, 2024), doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-44321-9“Metastatic cells exploit their stoichiometric niche in the network of cancer ecosystems,” in Science Advances (December 13, 2023), doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adi79“Environmental heterogeneity as a driver of terrestrial biodiversity on a global scale” in PPG: Earth and Environment (August 11, 2023), doi.org/10.1177/03091333231189045“The number of tree species on Earth,” PNAS (Jan 31, 2022), doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2115329119“Globally important plant functional traits for coping with climate change,” in Frontiers of Biogeography (October 2, 2021), doi.org/10.21425/F5FBG53774“Scaling from Traits to Ecosystems: Developing a General Trait Driver Theory via Integrating Trait-Based and Metabolic Scaling Theories,” Advances in Ecological Research (May 4, 2015), doi.org/10.1016/bs.aecr.2015.02.001“A general quantitative theory of forest structure and dynamics,” PNAS (April 28, 2009), doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0812294106
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  • Guests:

    Ricard SolĂŠ, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Head of the Complex Systems Lab at Universitat Pompeu FabraSara Walker, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Associate Director of the ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems

    Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes

    Producer: Katherine Moncure

    Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano

    Other music: Matucha, Kijjaz, Klankbeeld, Aesterial-Arts, Dijifishmusic, Greenvwbeetle, Odilon Marcenaro, Jobro, Benboncan, Bone666138, Aiwha, Josh Berry, Rubenvvuuren, and Miksmusic

    Follow us on: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn • Bluesky

    SFI programs:

    Complexity Explorer: Origins of LifeEducation

    Books & Films:

    Frankenstein, directed by James Whale, based on book by Mary ShelleyThe Computer and the Brain, by John von NeumannSigns of life: How complexity pervades biology by Ricard V. SolĂŠ and Brian C. Goodwin

    Talks:

    Liquid and Solid Brains: Mapping the Cognition Space by Ricard SolĂŠEvolving Brains: Solid, Liquid and Synthetic by Ricard SolĂŠA Universal Theory of Life: Math, Art & Information by Sara Walker

    Papers & Articles:

    “Assembly theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution” in Nature (October 4, 2023) doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06600-9“Time is an object” in Aeon, May 19, 2023“The Algorithmic Origins of Life” in Journal of the Royal Society Interface (February 6, 2013) doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2012.0869“Evolution of Brains and Computers: The Roads Not Taken” in Entropy (May 9, 2022), doi.org/10.3390/e24050665“Unicellular–multicellular evolutionary branching driven by resource limitations” (June 2, 2022) doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2022.0018
  • Guests:

    Vijay Balasubramanian, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Cathy and Marc Lasry Professor of Physics at the University of PennsylvaniaGeoffrey West, Shannan Distinguished Professor and Past President, Santa Fe Institute

    Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes

    Producer: Katherine Moncure

    Podcast theme music: Mitch Mignano

    Other Music: Blue Dot Sessions, Pink House Music, Eardeer, and Craig Smith.

    Follow us on: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn • Bluesky

    SFI programs:

    Complexity Global School Complexity Explorer: Fractals & ScalingEducation

    Books & Stories:

    Tell Me Why by Arkady LeokumScale by Geoffrey West“Funes, the Memorious” by Jorge Luis Borges

    Talks:

    How the Brain Makes You: Collective Intelligence and Computation by Neural Circuits by Vijay BalasubramanianThe Future of the Planet: Life, Growth and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies by Geoffrey WestEnergy, Scaling & The Future of Life on Earth by Geoffrey WestComplex Time Working Group: “What is Sleep?” with Geoffrey West, Van Savage, Alex Herman

    Papers:

    “Brain Power” in PNAS (August 2, 2021) doi.org/10.1073/pnas.210702211“The Physical Effects of Learning” preprint published in biorxiv“Unraveling why we sleep: Quantitative analysis reveals abrupt transition from neural reorganization to repair in early development” in Science Advances (September 18, 2020) DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aba0398“The Scales That Limit: The Physical Boundaries of Evolution” in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution (August 7, 2019) doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2019.00242
  • Episode Title and Show Notes:

    106 - Michael Garfield & David Krakauer on Evolution, Information, and Jurassic Park

    Welcome to Complexity, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I'm Michael Garfield, producer of this show and host for the last 105 episodes. Since October, 2019, we have brought 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. Today I step down and depart from SFI with one final appearance as the guest of this episode. Our guest host is SFI President David Krakauer, he and I will braid together with nine other conversations from the archives in a retrospective masterclass on how this podcast traced the contours of complexity. We'll look back on episodes with David, Brian Arthur, Geoffrey West, Doyne Farmer, Deborah Gordon, Tyler Marghetis, Simon DeDeo, Caleb Scharf, and Alison Gopnik to thread some of the show's key themes through into windmills and white whales, SFI pursues, and my own life's persistent greatest questions.

    We'll ask about the implications of a world transformed by science and technology by deeper understanding and prediction and the ever-present knock-on consequences. 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 SFI at Santa fe.edu/engage. Thank you each and all for listening. It's been a pleasure and an honor to take you offroad with us over these last years.

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

    📚Reading & Videos:

    The Lost World
    by Michael Crichton

    Jurassic Park
    by Michael Crichton

    The Evolution of Syntactic Communication
    by Martin Nowak, Joshua Plotkin, and Vincent Jansen

    InterPlanetary Festival 2018 + SFI Science Explainer Animations
    by SFI

    Complexity Economics
    by SFI Press

    Supertheories and Consilience from Alchemy to Electromagnetism
    by Simon DeDeo (2019 SFI Seminar)

    How To Live in The Future, Part 4: The Future is Exapted/Remixed
    by Michael Garfield

    Artists Misusing Technology
    by NXT Museum

    The Collapse of Artificial Intelligence
    by Melanie Mitchell (2019 SFI Symposium Talk)

    The Debate Over Understanding in AI's Large Language Models
    by Melanie Mitchell & David Krakauer

    Welcome To Jurassic Park
    by Tink Zorg
    (re: COVID-19 and the collapse of supply chains)

    Smarter Parts Make Collective Systems Too Stubborn
    by Jordana Cepelewicz at Quanta Magazine
    (re: Albert Kao)

    Coarse-graining as a downward causation mechanism
    by Jessica Flack

    Argument Making In The Wild
    by Simon DeDeo
    (SFI Seminar re: egregores)

    The Collective Computation of Reality in Nature and Society
    by Jessica Flack (SFI Community Lecture re: “hourglass emergence”)

    Interaction-based evolution: how natural selection and nonrandom mutation work together
    by Adi Livnat

    In The Country of The Blind (_Afterword: An Introduction to Cliology)
    by Michael Flynn

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

    Murray Gell-Mann - Information overload. A crude look at the whole (180/200)
    (re: the challenges of funding truly innovative research)

    The work of art in the age of biocybernetic reproduction
    by W.J.T. Mitchell

    Ken Wilber

    Intelligence as a planetary scale process
    by Adam Frank, David Grinspoon, and Sara Walker

    Light & Magic (documentary series)
    on Disney+

    Palantir Analytics
    The Lord of The Rings
    by J.R.R. Tolkien

    Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
    by Douglas Rushkoff

    Michael Levin

    Robustness of variance and autocorrelation as indicators of critical slowing down
    by Vasilis Dakos, Egbert H van Nes, Paolo D’Odorico, Marten Scheffer

    The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone
    by Cosma Shalizi

    🎧Podcasts:

    Complexity Podcast

    001 - David Krakauer on The Landscape of 21st Century Science

    009 - Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-making

    012 - Matthew Jackson on Social and Economic Networks

    013 - W. Brian Arthur (Part 1) on The History of Complexity Economics

    016 - Andy Dobson on Disease Ecology & Conservation Strategy

    036 - Geoffrey West on Scaling, Open-Ended Growth, and Accelerating Crisis/Innovation Cycles: Transcendence or Collapse?

    056 - J. Doyne Farmer on The Complexity Economics Revolution

    060 - Andrea Wulf on The Invention of Nature, Part 1: Humboldt’s Naturegemälde

    065 - Deborah Gordon on Ant Colonies as Distributed Computers

    067 - Tyler Marghetis on Breakdowns & Breakthroughs: Critical Transitions in Jazz & Mathematics

    072 - Simon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of Epistemology

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

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

    92 - Miguel Fuentes & Marco Buongiorno Nardelli on Music, Emergence, and Society

    099 - Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I.

    Future Fossils Podcast

    194 - Simon Conway Morris on Convergent Evolution & Creative Mass Extinctions
    190 - Lauren Seyler on Dark Microbiology & Right Relations in Science

    165 - Kevin Kelly on Time, Memory, Change, and Vanishing Asia

    125 - Stuart Kauffman on Physics, Life, and The Adjacent Possible

    Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano

    Other music by Michael Garfield

  • One way of looking at the world reveals it as an interference pattern of dynamic, ever-changing links — relationships that grow and break in nested groups of multilayer networks. Identity can be defined by informational exchange between one cluster of relationships and any other. A kind of music starts to make itself apparent in the avalanche of data and new analytical approaches that a century of innovation has availed us. But just as with new music genres, it requires a trained ear to attune to unfamiliar order…what can we learn from network science and related general, abstract mathematical approaches to discovering this order in a flood of numbers?

    Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and in every episode we 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 External Professor, UCLA mathematician Mason Porter (UCLA Website, Twitter, Google Scholar, Wikipedia), about his research on community detection in networks and the topology of data — going deep into a varied toolkit of approaches that help scientists disclose deep structures in the massive data-sets produced by modern life.

    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.

    I know it comes as a surprise, but this is our penultimate episode. Please stay tuned for one more show in May when SFI President David Krakauer and I will reflect on major themes and highlights from the last three-and-a-half years, and look forward to what I’ll be doing next! It’s been an honor and a pleasure to bring complex systems science to you in this way, and hope we stay in touch. I won’t be hard to find.

    Thank you for listening.

    Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

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

    Mentioned & Related Media:

    Bounded Confidence Models of Opinion Dynamics on Networks
    SFI Seminar by Mason Porter (live Twitter coverage & YouTube stream recording)

    Communities in Networks
    by Mason Porter, Jukka-Pekka Onnela, & Peter Mucha

    Social Structure of Facebook Networks
    by Amanda Traud, Peter Mucha, & Mason Porter

    Critical Truths About Power Laws
    by Michael Stumpf & Mason Porter

    The topology of data
    by Mason Porter, Michelle Feng, & Eleni Katifori

    Complex networks with complex weights
    by Lucas BĂśttcher & Mason A. Porter

    A Bounded-Confidence Model of Opinion Dynamics on Hypergraphs
    by Abigail Hicock, Yacoub Kureh, Heather Z. Brooks, Michelle Feng, & Mason Porter

    A multilayer network model of the coevolution of the spread of a disease and competing opinions
    by Kaiyan Peng, Zheng Lu, Vanessa Lin, Michael Lindstrom, Christian Parkinson, Chuntian Wang, Andrea Bertozzi, & Mason Porter

    Social network analysis for social neuroscientists
    Elisa C Baek, Mason A Porter, & Carolyn Parkinson

    Community structure in social and biological networks
    by Michelle Girvan & Mark Newman

    The information theory of individuality
    by David Krakauer, Nils Bertschinger, Eckehard Olbrich, Jessica C Flack, Nihat Ay

    Social capital I: measurement and associations with economic mobility
    by Raj Chetty, Matthew O. Jackson, Theresa Kuchler, Johannes Stroebel, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert B. Fluegge, Sara Gong, Federico Gonzalez, Armelle Grondin, Matthew Jacob, Drew Johnston, Martin Koenen, Eduardo Laguna-Muggenburg, Florian Mudekereza, Tom Rutter, Nicolaj Thor, Wilbur Townsend, Ruby Zhang, Mike Bailey, Pablo BarberĂĄ, Monica Bhole & Nils Wernerfelt

    Hierarchical structure and the prediction of missing links in networks
    by Aaron Clauset, Cristopher Moore, M.E.J. Newman

    Gregory Bateson (Wikipedia)

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

    “Why Do We Sleep?”
    by Van Savage & Geoffrey West at Aeon Magazine

    Complexity Ep. 4 - Luis Bettencourt on The Science of Cities

    Complexity Ep. 12 - Matthew Jackson on Social & Economic Networks

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

    Complexity Ep. 100 - Dani Bassett & Perry Zurn on The Neuroscience & Philosophy of Curious Minds

  • For centuries, Medieval life in Europe meant a world determined and prescribed by church and royalty. The social sphere was very much a pyramid, and everybody had to answer to and fit within the schemes of those on top. And then, on wings of reason, Modern selves emerged to scrutinize these systems and at great cost swap them for others that more evenly distribute power and authority. Cosmic forces preordained one’s role within a transcendental order…but then, across quick decades of upheaval, philosophy and politics started celebrating self-determination and free will. Art and science blossomed as they wove together. Nothing was ever the same.

    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 engage with returning guest, New York Times best-selling author of seven books and SFI Miller Scholar Andrea Wulf, about her latest lovingly-detailed long work, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and The Invention of The Self. In this episode we explore the conditions for an 18th century revolution in philosophy, science, literature, and lifestyle springing from Jena, Germany. Over just a few years, an extraordinary confluence of history-making figures such as Goethe, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, and Novalis helped rewrite what was possible for human thought and action. Admist a landscape of political revolt, this braid of brilliant friends and enemies and lovers altered what it means to be a self and how the modern self relates to everything it isn’t, inspiring later British and American Romantic movements. Arguing for art and the imagination in the work of science and infusing art with reason, Jena’s rebels of the mind lived bold, iconoclastic lives that seem 200 years ahead in retrospect. We stand to learn a great deal from a careful look at Jena and the first Romantics…maybe even how to replicate their great successes and avoid their self-implosion in the face of social turbulence.

    If you value our research and communication efforts, Please subscribe to Complexity Podcast wherever you prefer to listen, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and/or consider making a donation at santafe.edu/podcastgive. You can find numerous other ways to engage with us at santafe.edu/engage — in particular, you may wish to celebrate ten years of free online courses at Complexity Explorer with SFI Professor Cris Moore’s Computation in Complex Systems, starting March 28th. Learn more in the show notes…and thank you for listening!

    Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

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

    Related Reading & Listening:

    Episode 60 - Andrea Wulf on The Invention of Nature, Part 1: Humboldt's Naturegemälde

    Episode 61 - Andrea Wulf on The Invention of Nature, Part 2: Humboldt's Dangerous Idea

    The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World
    by Andrea Wulf

    Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and The Invention of The Self
    by Andrea Wulf

    Common As Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership
    by Lewis Hyde

    Episode 37 - The Art & Science of Resilience in the Wake of Trauma with Laurence Gonzales

    “Nature” (1844)
    by Ralph Waldo Emerson

    Chopin’s Preludes

    Finnegans Wake
    by James Joyce

    InterPlanetary Voyager (Interactive Golden Record Liner Notes)
    by SFI’s InterPlanetary Festival

    Blue Planet (BBC)
    with David Attenborough

  • How do we get a handle on complex systems thinking? What are the implications of this science for philosophy, and where does philosophical tradition foreshadow findings from the scientific frontier?

    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.

    In this episode we speak with Carlos Gershenson (UNAM website, Google Scholar, Wikipedia, Twitter), SFI Sabbatical Visitor and professor of computer science at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where he leads the Self-organizing Systems Lab, among many other titles you can find in our show notes. For the next hour, we’ll discuss his decades of research and writing on a vast array of core complex systems concepts and their intersections with both Western and Eastern philosophical traditions — a first for this podcast.

    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.

    For HD virtual backgrounds of the SFI campus to use on video calls and a chance to win a signed copy of one of our books from the SFI Press, please help us improve our scicomm by completing a survey linked in the show notes.

    Or just a copy of the recently resurfaced SFI Press Archival Volume Complexity, Entropy, and The Physics of Information.

    There’s still time to apply for the Complexity GAINS UK program for PhD students – apps close March 15th.

    Or come work for us! We are on the lookout for a new Digital Media Specialist, an Applied Complexity Fellow in Sustainability, a Research Assistant in Emergent Political Economies, and a Payroll, Accounts Payable & Receivable Specialist.

    You can also 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:

    Carlos publishes the Complexity Digest Newsletter.

    His SFI Seminars to date:
    A Brief History of Balance
    Emergence, (Self)Organization, and Complexity
    Criticality: A Balance Between Robustness and Adaptability
    Festina lente (the slower-is-faster effect)
    Antifragility: Dynamical Balance

    W. Ross Ashby & The Law of Requisite Variety

    Hyperobjects
    by Timothy Morton

    How can we think the complex?
    by Carlos Gershenson and Francis Heylighen

    The Implications of Interactions for Science and Philosophy
    by Carlos Gershenson

    Complexity and Philosophy
    by Francis Heylighen, Paul Cilliers, Carlos Gershenson

    Heterogeneity extends criticality
    by Fernanda SĂĄnchez-Puig, Octavio Zapata, Omar K, Pineda, Gerardo IĂąiguez, and Carlos Gershenson

    When Can we Call a System Self-organizing?
    by Carlos Gershenson and Francis Heylighen

    Temporal, Structural, and Functional Heterogeneities Extend Criticality and Antifragility in Random Boolean Networks
    by Amahury Jafet LĂłpez-DĂ­az, Fernanda SĂĄnchez-Puig, and Carlos Gershenson

    When slower is faster
    by Carlos Gershenson, Dirk Helbing

    Self-organization leads to supraoptimal performance in public transportation systems
    by Carlos Gershenson

    Dynamics of ranking
    by Gerardo IĂąiguez, Carlos Pineda, Carlos Gershenson, & Albert-LĂĄszlĂł BarabĂĄsi

    Self-Organizing Traffic Lights
    by Carlos Gershenson

    Dynamic competition and resource partitioning during the early life of two widespread, abundant and ecologically similar fishes
    by A. D. Nunn, L. H. Vickers, K. Mazik, J. D. Bolland, G. Peirson, S. N. Axford, A. Henshaw & I. G. Cowx

    Towards a general theory of balance
    by Carlos Gershenson

    A Calculus for Self-Reference
    by Francisco Varela

    On Some Mental Effects of The Earthquake
    by William James

    Self-Organization Leads to Supraoptimal Performance in Public Transportation Systems
    by Carlos Gershenson

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

    Simon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of Epistemology
    Complexity Ep. 72

    David Wolpert on The No Free Lunch Theorems and Why They Undermine The Scientific Method
    Complexity Ep. 45

    The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility
    by Stewart Brand

    Michael Lachmann

    Stuart Kauffman

    Andreas Wagner

    Cosma Shalizi

    Nassim Taleb

    Does Free Will Violate The Laws of Physics?
    Big Think interviews Sean Carroll

  • And now for something completely different! Last October, The Santa Fe Institute held its third InterPlanetary Festival at SITE Santa Fe, celebrating the immensely long time horizon, deep scientific and philosophical questions, psychological challenges, and engineering problems involved in humankind’s Great Work to extend its understanding and presence into outer space. For our third edition, we turned our attention to visionary projects living generations will likely not live to see completed — interstellar travel, off-world cities, radical new ways of understanding spacetime — as an invitation to engage in science as not merely interesting but deeply fun. For our first panel, we decided to inquire: What is time, really? How has science fiction changed the way we track and measure, speak about, and live in time? And how do physics and complex systems science pose and answer these most fundamental questions?

    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.

    In this week’s episode, we share the Complex Conceptions of Time panel from InterPlanetary Festival 2022, moderated by SFI President David Krakauer and featuring an all-star trinity of panelists: science journalist James Gleick, sci-fi author and SFI Miller Scholar Ted Chiang, and physicist and SFI Professor David Wolpert. In this hour, we play with and dissect some favorite metaphors for time, unroll the history of time’s mathematization, review time travel in science fiction, and examine the arguments between free will and determinism.

    Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com — as well as the extensive, interactive web-based “Voyager Golden Record Liner Notes” with links to not only all of the panels from IPFest 2022 but also copious additional resources, including contributor bios, peer-reviewed publications, science fiction and nonfiction science writing, and more…

    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.

    If you’d like some HD virtual backgrounds of the SFI campus to use on video calls and a chance to win a signed copy of one of our books from the SFI Press, help us improve our science communication by completing a survey about our various scicomm channels. Thanks for your time!

    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! The application deadline has been extended to March 1st.

    OR apply to 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!)

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

    Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

    Episode cover art by Michael Garfield with the help of Midjourney.

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

    (SOME) Mentioned & Related Links:

    David Krakauer
    Mathematical languages shape our understanding of time in physics
    by Nicolas Gisin
    Does Time Really Flow? New Clues Come From a Century-Old Approach to Math
    by Natalie Wolchover
    The Principle of Least Action
    Path Integral Formulation
    Closed Timelike Curve
    The Time Machine
    by H. G. Wells
    Kip Thorne

    James Gleick
    Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
    The Physicist and The Philosopher
    by Jimena Canales

    Ted Chiang
    “Story of Your Life”
    Arrival
    Exhalation
    Russian Doll (TV series)
    “The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate”

    David Wolpert
    Complexity 94 - David Wolpert & Farita Tasnim on The Thermodynamics of Communication
    Complexity 45 - David Wolpert on The No Free Lunch Theorems and Why They Undermine The Scientific Method
    A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain
    Intuitionist Mathematics

  • There are maps, and there are territories, and humans frequently confuse the two. No matter how insistently this point has been made by cognitive neuroscience, epistemology, economics, and a score of other disciplines, one common human error is to act as if we know what we should measure, and that what we measure is what matters. But what we value doesn’t even always have a metric. And even reasonable proxies can distort our understanding of and behavior in the world we want to navigate. Even carefully collected biometric data can occlude the other factors that determine health, or can oversimplify a nuanced conversation on the plural and contextual dimensions of health, transforming goals like functional fitness into something easier to quantify but far less useful. This philosophical conundrum magnifies when we consider governance at scales beyond those at which Homo sapiens evolved to grasp intuitively: What should we count to wisely operate a nation-state? How do we practice social science in a way that can inform new, smarter species of political economy? And how can we escape the seductive but false clarity of systems that rain information but do not enhance collective wisdom?

    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 Paul Smaldino at UC Merced and University of Utah Professor of Philosophy C. Thi Nguyen. In this episode we talk about value capture and legibility, viewpoint diversity, issues that plague big governments, and expert identification problems…and map the challenges “ahead of us” as SFI continues as the hub of a five-year international research collaboration into emergent political economies. (Find links to all previous episodes in this sub-series in the notes below.)

    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.

    If you’d like some HD virtual backgrounds of the SFI campus to use on video calls and a chance to win a signed copy of one of our books from the SFI Press, help us improve our science communication by completing a survey about our various scicomm channels. Thanks for your time!

    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! The application deadline has been extended to March 1st.

    OR apply to the Graduate Workshop on Complexity in Social Science.

    OR the Complex ity GAINS UK program for PhD students.

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

    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:

    Transparency Is Surveillance
    by C. Thi Nguyen

    The Seductions of Clarity
    by C. Thi Nguyen

    The Natural Selection of Bad Science
    by Paul Smaldino and Richard McElreath

    Maintaining transient diversity is a general principle for improving collective problem solving
    by Paul Smaldino, Cody Moser, Alejandro PĂŠrez Velilla, Mikkel Werling

    The Division of Cognitive Labor
    by Philip Kitcher

    The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in The Natural Sciences
    by Eugene Wigner

    On Crashing The Barrier of Meaning in A.I.
    by Melanie Mitchell

    Seeing Like A State
    by James C. Scott

    Jim Rutt

    Slowed Canonical Progress in Large Fields of Science
    by Johan Chu and James Evans

    The Coming Battle for the COVID-19 Narrative
    by Wendy Carlin and Samuel Bowles

    Peter Turchin

    In The Country of The Blind
    by Michael Flynn

    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)

    97 - Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society (EPE 05)

  • 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 WĂślfle 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 SolĂŠ 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 SolĂŠ

    John Hopfield (re: biology as computation)

    Synthetic transitions: towards a new synthesis
    by Ricard SolĂŠ

    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 SolĂŠ et al.

    Tom Ray (re: artificial life)

    Complexity and fragility in ecological networks
    by Ricard SolĂŠ and JosĂŠ Montoya

    Ecological Networks and Their Fragility
    by JosĂŠ Montoya, Stuart Pimm, and Ricard SolĂŠ

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

    Macroscopic patterns of interacting contagions are indistinguishable from social reinforcement
    by Laurent HĂŠbert-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 SolĂŠ

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

    Ecological firewalls for synthetic biology
    by Blai Vidiella and Ricard SolĂŠ

    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, ZĂśe 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 HĂŠbert-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 EsbjĂśrn-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 VitĂĄnyi

  • 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 SolĂŠ

    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 CĂĄrdenas IvĂĄn GonzĂĄlez, 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 CĂĄrdenas, GastĂłn 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