COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

Guests: Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano Additional sound credits: Digifish music; “Determination of Azimuth,” written by Heather Graham, staged at the Baltimore Rock Opera Society Follow us on: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn • Bluesky More info: Apply for the 2024 Complexity Global School at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia SFI programs: Education Origins of Life: Introduction| Chris Kempesfull playlistOrigins of LifeVideos: Asteroids, Agnostic Biosignatures, & Experimental Rock Opera with Dr. Heather GrahamHeather Graham on Katherine JohnsonPapers & Articles: doi.org/10.1111/maps.14111doi.org/10.1101/2023.11.06.565904doi.org/10.1101/2023.10.29.564608hou.usra.edu/meetings/lifeonmars2019/pdf/5047.pdfDetecting life on Earth and the limits of analogychemrxiv.org/engage/api-gateway/chemrxiv/assets/orp/resource/item/60c751e59abda27c1af8dce4/original/identifying-molecules-as-biosignatures-with-assembly-theory-and-mass-spectrometry.pdfdoi.org/10.3390/life11060498link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11538-021-00877-5

Guests: Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano Additional sound credits: Digifishmusic, Trundlefly, Greenvwbeetle, Miksmusic, Brewlabboffin Follow us on: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn • Bluesky More info: SFI programs: Education Complexity Explorer: Origins of Life: The Multiple Origins of Life - Part 1 | David KrakauerOrigins of Life: The Multiple Origins of Life - Part 2 | David KrakauerOrigins of Life: The Multiple Origins of Life - Part 3 | David KrakauerOrigins of Life: The Multiple Origins of Life - Part 4 | David KrakauerComplexity Explorer Lecture: David Krakauer • What is Complexity?Books: Talks: The Many Worlds of Quantum MechanicsPapers & Articles: doi.org/10.1007/s00239-021-10016-2

Guests: 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 Talks: Toward a Scientific Theory of CitiesPapers & Articles: GECCO’13: Proceedings of the 15th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation doi.org/10.1145/2463372.2463389In vivo, in silico, in machina: Ants and Robots balance memory and communication to collectively exploit informationProceedings of the European Conference on Complex Systems 2012arXiv doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2306.0211343 Visions for Complexity, Exploring Complexity: Volume 3doi.org/10.1142/9789813206854_0043

Guests: 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: ScaleScaling BiodiversityHow Landscapes Change: Human Disturbance and Ecosystem Fragmentation in the AmericasTalks: Better Forecasting our Ecological Future: Taming Big Data with Big TheoryPapers & Articles: Nature Communicationsdoi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-44321-9Science Advances: 10.1126/sciadv.adi79PPG: Earth and Environmentdoi.org/10.1177/03091333231189045PNASdoi.org/10.1073/pnas.2115329119Frontiers of Biogeography doi.org/10.21425/F5FBG53774Advances in Ecological Researchdoi.org/10.1016/bs.aecr.2015.02.001PNASdoi.org/10.1073/pnas.0812294106

Guests: Ricard SoléSara WalkerHosts: 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: Origins of LifeEducationBooks & Films: FrankensteinThe Computer and the BrainSigns of lifeTalks: Liquid and Solid Brains: Mapping the Cognition Space Evolving Brains: Solid, Liquid and SyntheticA Universal Theory of Life: Math, Art & InformationPapers & Articles: Naturedoi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06600-9Time is an objectAeon, Journal of the Royal Society Interface doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2012.0869doi.org/10.3390/e24050665doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2022.0018

Guests: Vijay BalasubramanianGeoffrey WestHosts: 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 Fractals & ScalingEducationBooks & Stories: Tell Me WhyScaleTalks: How the Brain Makes You: Collective Intelligence and Computation by Neural CircuitsThe Future of the Planet: Life, Growth and Death in Organisms, Cities and CompaniesEnergy, Scaling & The Future of Life on EarthComplex Time Working Group: “What is Sleep?” Papers: PNASdoi.org/10.1073/pnas.210702211biorxivScience Advances DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aba0398Frontiers in Ecology and Evolutiondoi.org/10.3389/fevo.2019.00242

Trailer for Complexity: Physics of Life, from the Santa Fe Institute

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...

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,...

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 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...

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...

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 Jim...

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...

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...

What does it mean to think? What are the traits of thinking systems that we could use to identify them? Different environmental variables call for different strategies in individual and collective cognition — what defines the threshold at which so-called “solid” brains transition into “liquids”? And how might we apply these and related lessons from ecology and evolution to help steward a diverse and thriving future with technology, and keep the biosphere afloat? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on the show we talk to SFI External Professor Ricard Solé of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Website, Twitter, Google Scholar) about liquid and solid brains, the scaling of cognition, criticality, contagions, and terraforming our own planet with synthetic bio. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us, including our upcoming program for Undergraduate Complexity Research, our new SFI Press book Ex Machina by John H. Miller, and an open postdoctoral fellowship in Belief Dynamics — at santafe.edu/engage. Lastly, join us June 19-23 for Collective Intelligence: Foundations + Radical Ideas, a first-ever event open to both academics and professionals, with sessions on adaptive matter, animal groups, brains, AI, teams, and more. Space is limited! Apps close February 1st. Learn more on our website. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn Referenced & Related Works Liquid and Solid Brains: Mapping the Cognition Space SFI Seminar by Ricard Solé John Hopfield (re: biology as computation) Synthetic transitions: towards a new synthesis by Ricard Solé Complexity 93 - Kate Adamala on Synthetic Biology, Origins of Life, and Bioethics The Multiple Paths to Multiple Life by Chris Kempes and David Krakauer Simon Conway Morris (re: macroevolutionary trends) Scale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolution by Jaewon Shin et al. Smarter Parts Make Collective Systems Too Stubborn by Jordana Cepelewicz at Quanta Magazine Complexity 90 - Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome Will Ratcliff (re: yeasts and emergent multi-cellularity) Complexity 29 - On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 3) Synthetic criticality in cellular brains by Ricard Solé et al. Tom Ray (re: artificial life) Complexity and fragility in ecological networks by Ricard Solé and José Montoya Ecological Networks and Their Fragility by José Montoya, Stuart Pimm, and Ricard Solé The small world of human language by Ramon Ferrer i Cancho and Ricard Solé Macroscopic patterns of interacting contagions are indistinguishable from social reinforcement by Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, Sam Scarpino, and Jean-Gabriel Young Complexity 56 - J. Doyne Farmer on The Complexity Economics Revolution Complexity 66 - Katherine Collins on Better Investing Through Biomimicry Chris Langton (re: criticality) Jim Crutchfield (re: the edge of chaos) Per Bak (re: self-organized criticality) Complexity 10 - Melanie Moses on Metabolic Scaling in Biology & Computation Complexity 3 - Sabine Hauert on Swarming Across Scales Niles Eldredge (re: punctuated equilibria) Terraforming the biosphere: can bioengineering save us? SFI Seminar by Ricard Solé Ecological...

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...

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...

The brain is arguably one of the most complex objects known to science. How best to understand it? That is a trick question: brains are organized at many levels and attempts to grasp them all through one approach — be it micro, macro, anatomical, behavioral — are destined to leave out crucial insights. What more, thinking “vertically” across scales, one might miss important angles from another discipline along the “horizontal” axis. For inquiries too big to sit within one field of knowledge, maybe it is time we resurrected the salon: a mode of scientific exploration that levels hierarchies of expertise and optimizes for more complementary and high-dimensional, egalitarian, communal discourse. As with the Jainist philosophic principle anekantavada — how many blind people does it take to grok an elephant? — neuroscience is perhaps best practiced as innately and intensely multiperspectival… Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week is part one of a two-part conversation with SFI External Professor John Krakauer, Professor of Neurology and Director of the Center for the Study of Motor Learning and Brain Repair at Johns Hopkins . In this episode, we talk about the history of different ways of studying the brain — in animals and humans — and how subjects as complex as brains invite a different way of seeing, one that synthesizes many different ways of seeing… Thanks for your patience with the recent delays in publication — with InterPlanetary Festival and our Annual Symposium behind us, Complexity will now return to regular biweekly scheduling. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com, and stay tuned for part two — in which we talk about how learning is inherently a future-focused exercise, and what that means for education. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us, including an open postdoctoral fellowship in Belief Dynamics — at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn Referenced in this episode: Neuroscience Needs Behavior: Correcting a Reductionist Bias John Krakauer, Asif Ghazanfar, Alex Gomez-Marin, Malcolm MacIver, David Poeppel Two Views of the Cognitive Brain David Barack & John Krakauer On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences Richard Doyle Simon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of Epistemology Complexity Podcast Episode 72 Former SFI Fellow David Kinney, epistemologist (re: disciplines as levels of explanatory granularity) Coarse-graining as a downward causation mechanism Jessica Flack Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives on the Natural World Sean Esbjörn-Hargens & Michael Zimmerman Carl Cranor, moral philosopher (re: causation) The Learning Salon: Toward a new participatory science Ida Momennejad, John Krakauer, Claire Sun, Eva Yezerets, Kanaka Rajan, Joshua Vogelstein, Brad Wyble Brain Inspired Podcast Paul Middlebrooks eLife Journal biorXiv W. Brian Arthur on Economics in Nouns and Verbs (Part 1) Complexity Podcast Episode 68 W. Brian Arthur (Part 2) on "Prim Dreams of Order vs. Messy Vitality" in Economics, Math, and Physics Complexity Podcast Episode 69 Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The World Tyson Yunkaporta

Communication is a physical process. It’s common sense that sending and receiving intelligible messages takes work…but how much work? The question of the relationship between energy, information, and matter is one of the deepest known to science. There appear to be limits to the rate at which communication between two systems can happen…but the search for a fundamental relationship between speed, error, and energy (among other things) promises insights far deeper than merely whether we can keep making faster internet devices. Strap in (and consider slowing down) for a broad and deep discussion on the bounds within which our entire universe must play… Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week we speak with SFI Professor David Wolpert and MIT Physics PhD student Farita Tasnim, who have worked together over the last year on pioneering research into the nonlinear dynamics of communication channels. In this episode, we explore the history and ongoing evolution of information theory and coding theory, what the field of stochastic thermodynamics has to do with limits to human knowledge, and the role of noise in collective intelligence. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us, including a handful of open postdoctoral fellowships — at santafe.edu/engage. Lastly, this weekend — October 22nd & 23rd — is the return of our InterPlanetary Festival! Join our YouTube livestream for two full days of panel discussions, keynotes, and bleeding edge multimedia performances focusing space exploration through the lens of complex systems science. The fun begins at 11 A.M. Mountain Time on Saturday and ends 6 P.M. Mountain Time on Sunday. Everything will be recorded and archived at the stream link in case you can’t tune in for the live event. Learn more at interplanetaryfest.org… Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn Referenced in this episode: Nonlinear thermodynamics of communication channels by Farita Tasnim and David Wolpert (forthcoming at arXiv.org) Heterogeneity and Efficiency in the Brain by Vijay Balasubramanian Noisy Deductive Reasoning: How Humans Construct Math, and How Math Constructs Universes by David Wolpert & David Kinney Stochastic Mathematical Systems by David Wolpert & David Kinney Twenty-five years of nanoscale thermodynamics by Chase P. Broedersz & Pierre Ronceray Ten Questions about The Hard Limits of Human Intelligence by David Wolpert What can we know about that which we cannot even imagine? by David Wolpert Communication consumes 35 times more energy than computation in the human cortex, but both costs are needed to predict synapse number by William Levy & Victoria Calvert An exchange of letters on the role of noise in collective intelligence by Daniel Kahneman, David Krakauer, Olivier Sibony, Cass Sunstein, David Wolpert When Slower Is Faster by Carlos Gershenson & Dirk Helbing Additional Resources: The stochastic thermodynamics of computation by David Wolpert Elements of Information Theory, Second Edition (textbook) by Thomas Cover & Joy Thomas Computational Complexity: A Modern Approach (textbook) by Sanjeev Arora & Boaz Barak An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications (textbook) by Ming Li & Paul Vitányi