No episode playing
Far-reaching conversations with a worldwide network of scientists and mathematicians, philosophers and artists developing new frameworks to explain our universe's deepest mysteries. Join host Michael Garfield at the Santa Fe Institute each week to learn about your world and the people who have dedicated their lives to exploring its emergent order: their stories, research, and insights…
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
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
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
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 Böttcher & 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 Barberá, 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
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 Sánchez-Puig, Octavio Zapata, Omar K, Pineda, Gerardo Iñiguez, 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 López-Díaz, Fernanda Sánchez-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 Iñiguez, Carlos Pineda, Carlos Gershenson, & Albert-László Barabási
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
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 Pérez 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
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
In The Country of The Blind
by Michael Flynn
82 - David Krakauer on Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibility (EPE 01)
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 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
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’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 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)
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
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
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)
82 - David Krakauer on Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibility (EPE 01)
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)
Amanda is a wife. A mother. A blogger. A Christian.
A charming, beautiful, bubbly, young woman who lives life to the fullest.
But Amanda is dying, with a secret she doesn’t want anyone to know.
She starts a blog detailing her cancer journey, and becomes an inspiration, touching and
captivating her local community as well as followers all over the world.
Until one day investigative producer Nancy gets an anonymous tip telling her to look at Amanda’s
blog, setting Nancy on an unimaginable road to uncover Amanda’s secret.
Award winning journalist Charlie Webster explores this unbelievable and bizarre, but
all-too-real tale, of a woman from San Jose, California whose secret ripped a family apart and
left a community in shock.
Scamanda is the true story of a woman whose own words held the key to her secret.
New episodes every Monday.
Follow Scamanda on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Amanda’s blog posts are read by actor Kendall Horn.
