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 Performance in Public Transportation Systems by Carlos Gershenson Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I. Complexity Ep. 99 Simon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of Epistemology Complexity Ep. 72 David Wolpert on The No Free Lunch Theorems and Why They Undermine The Scientific Method Complexity Ep. 45 The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility by Stewart Brand Michael Lachmann Stuart Kauffman Andreas Wagner Cosma Shalizi Nassim Taleb Does Free Will Violate The Laws of Physics? Big Think interviews Sean Carroll

And now for something completely different! Last October, The Santa Fe Institute held its third InterPlanetary Festival at SITE Santa Fe, celebrating the immensely long time horizon, deep scientific and philosophical questions, psychological challenges, and engineering problems involved in humankind’s Great Work to extend its understanding and presence into outer space. For our third edition, we turned our attention to visionary projects living generations will likely not live to see completed — interstellar travel, off-world cities, radical new ways of understanding spacetime — as an invitation to engage in science as not merely interesting but deeply fun. For our first panel, we decided to inquire: What is time, really? How has science fiction changed the way we track and measure, speak about, and live in time? And how do physics and complex systems science pose and answer these most fundamental questions? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. In this week’s episode, we share the Complex Conceptions of Time panel from InterPlanetary Festival 2022, moderated by SFI President David Krakauer and featuring an all-star trinity of panelists: science journalist James Gleick, sci-fi author and SFI Miller Scholar Ted Chiang, and physicist and SFI Professor David Wolpert. In this hour, we play with and dissect some favorite metaphors for time, unroll the history of time’s mathematization, review time travel in science fiction, and examine the arguments between free will and determinism. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com — as well as the extensive, interactive web-based “Voyager Golden Record Liner Notes” with links to not only all of the panels from IPFest 2022 but also copious additional resources, including contributor bios, peer-reviewed publications, science fiction and nonfiction science writing, and more… If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. If you’d like some HD virtual backgrounds of the SFI campus to use on video calls and a chance to win a signed copy of one of our books from the SFI Press, help us improve our science communication by completing a survey about our various scicomm channels. Thanks for your time! Lastly, we have a bevy of summer programs coming up! Join us June 19-23 for Collective Intelligence: Foundations + Radical Ideas, a first-ever event open to both academics and professionals, with sessions on adaptive matter, animal groups, brains, AI, teams, and more. Space is limited! The application deadline has been extended to March 1st. OR apply to the Graduate Workshop on Complexity in Social Science. OR the Complexity GAINS UK program for PhD students. (OR check our open listings for a staff or research job!) Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Episode cover art by Michael Garfield with the help of Midjourney. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn (SOME) Mentioned & Related Links: David Krakauer Mathematical languages shape our understanding of time in physics by Nicolas Gisin Does Time Really Flow? New Clues Come From a Century-Old Approach to Math by Natalie Wolchover The Principle of Least Action Path Integral Formulation Closed Timelike Curve The Time Machine by H. G. Wells Kip Thorne James Gleick Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman The Physicist and The Philosopher by Jimena Canales Ted Chiang “Story of Your Life” Arrival Exhalation Russian Doll (TV series) “The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate” David Wolpert Complexity 94 - David Wolpert & Farita Tasnim on The Thermodynamics of Communication Complexity 45 - David Wolpert on The No Free Lunch Theorems and Why They Undermine The Scientific Method A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain Intuitionist Mathematics

There are maps, and there are territories, and humans frequently confuse the two. No matter how insistently this point has been made by cognitive neuroscience, epistemology, economics, and a score of other disciplines, one common human error is to act as if we know what we should measure, and that what we measure is what matters. But what we value doesn’t even always have a metric. And even reasonable proxies can distort our understanding of and behavior in the world we want to navigate. Even carefully collected biometric data can occlude the other factors that determine health, or can oversimplify a nuanced conversation on the plural and contextual dimensions of health, transforming goals like functional fitness into something easier to quantify but far less useful. This philosophical conundrum magnifies when we consider governance at scales beyond those at which Homo sapiens evolved to grasp intuitively: What should we count to wisely operate a nation-state? How do we practice social science in a way that can inform new, smarter species of political economy? And how can we escape the seductive but false clarity of systems that rain information but do not enhance collective wisdom? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on the show we talk to SFI External Professor Paul Smaldino at UC Merced and University of Utah Professor of Philosophy C. Thi Nguyen. In this episode we talk about value capture and legibility, viewpoint diversity, issues that plague big governments, and expert identification problems…and map the challenges “ahead of us” as SFI continues as the hub of a five-year international research collaboration into emergent political economies. (Find links to all previous episodes in this sub-series in the notes below.) Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. If you’d like some HD virtual backgrounds of the SFI campus to use on video calls and a chance to win a signed copy of one of our books from the SFI Press, help us improve our science communication by completing a survey about our various scicomm channels. Thanks for your time! Lastly, we have a bevy of summer programs coming up! Join us June 19-23 for Collective Intelligence: Foundations + Radical Ideas, a first-ever event open to both academics and professionals, with sessions on adaptive matter, animal groups, brains, AI, teams, and more. Space is limited! The application deadline has been extended to March 1st. OR apply to the Graduate Workshop on Complexity in Social Science. OR the Complex ity GAINS UK program for PhD students. (OR check our open listings for a staff or research job!) Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn Mentioned & Related Links: Transparency Is Surveillance by C. Thi Nguyen The Seductions of Clarity by C. Thi Nguyen The Natural Selection of Bad Science by Paul Smaldino and Richard McElreath Maintaining transient diversity is a general principle for improving collective problem solving by Paul Smaldino, Cody Moser, Alejandro 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 Rutt Slowed Canonical Progress in Large Fields of Science by Johan Chu and James Evans The Coming Battle for the COVID-19 Narrative by Wendy Carlin and Samuel Bowles Peter Turchin In The Country of The Blind by Michael Flynn 82 - David Krakauer on Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibility (EPE 01) 83 - Eric Beinhocker & Diane Coyle on Rethinking Economics for A Sustainable & Prosperous World (EPE 02) 84 - Ricardo Hausmann & J. Doyne Farmer on Evolving Technologies & Market Ecologies (EPE 03) 91 - Steven Teles & Rajiv Sethi on Jailbreaking The Captured Economy (EPE 04) 97 - Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society (EPE 05)

This is a podcast by and for the curious — and yet, in over three years, we have pointed curiosity at nearly every topic but itself. What is it, anyway? Are there worse and better frames for understanding how desire and wonder, exploration and discovery play out in both the brain and in society? How is scientific research like an amble through the woods? What juicy insights bubble up where neuroscientists, historians, philosophers, and mathematicians meet to answer questions like these? And how long of a path must we traverse to get there? In this episode, we talk with SFI External Professor Dani Bassett, physicist and neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, and their birth twin Perry Zurn, philosopher at American University in Washington, DC. You might consider each one of two lenses in a stereoscopic inquiry. Their new MIT Press book Curious Minds: The Power of Connection bridges quantity and quality to recast curiosity as a phenomenon of networks — as a kind of “edgework” (generative, drawing new associations) instead of “acquistion” (of individuals collecting facts). The brain, after all, is made of networked neurons, and society’s a kind of super-brain of networked people, so why not think in terms of links? Their research offers a taxonomy of kinds of curiosity — three different ways that people move through knowledge networks. Traveling across a web of related ideas, rupturing and mending, weaving, percolating, synthesizing, we embody and perform the objects of their academic study. We hope you find this lively and self-referential conversation offers you a helpful map as you draw your distinct connectome through the world of what is and what could be known... Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. Lastly, we have a bevy of summer programs coming up! Join us June 19-23 for Collective Intelligence: Foundations + Radical Ideas, a first-ever event open to both academics and professionals, with sessions on adaptive matter, animal groups, brains, AI, teams, and more. Space is limited! Apps close February 1st. OR Apply to participate in the Complex Systems Summer School. OR the Graduate Workshop on Complexity in Social Science. OR the Complexity GAINS UK program for PhD students. (OR check our open listings for a staff or research job!) Thank you for listening… EDITORIAL CORRECTION: We mention a review of Cormac McCarthy's latest novels in this discussion. The correct link is to James Wood’s piece in The New Yorker, not Michael Gorra’s in NYRB. Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn Mentioned & Related Links: Curious Minds: The Power of Connection by Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett (MIT Press, 2022) Curiosity as filling, compressing, and reconfiguring knowledge networks by Shubhankar P. Patankar, Dale Zhou, Christopher W. Lynn, Jason Z. Kim, Mathieu Ouellet, Harang Ju, Perry Zurn, David M. Lydon-Staley, Dani S. Bassett Murray Gell-Mann on information overload (from A Crude Look At The Whole) [Video] The Arrival of the Fittest: How Nature Innovates by SFI External Professor Andreas Wagner Complexity 99: Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I. Complexity 80: Mingzhen Lu on The Evolution of Root Systems & Biogeochemical Cycling Busybody, Hunter, Dancer: Three Historical Models of Curiosity by Perry Zurn Hunters, busybodies and the knowledge network building associated with deprivation curiosity by David M. Lydon-Staley, Dale Zhou, Ann Sizemore Blevins, Perry Zurn & Danielle S. Bassett Complexity 29: On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer The Dimensions of Experience: A Natural History of Consciousness by Andrew P. Smith Complexity 68: W. Brian Arthur on Economics in Nouns and Verbs (Part 1) Complexity 90: Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome Complexity 94: David Wolpert & Farita Tasnim on The Thermodynamics of Communication Complexity 35: Scaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West (Part 1) Complexity 87: Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale Intelligence The extent and drivers of gender imbalance in neuroscience reference lists by Jordan D. Dworkin, Kristin A. Linn, Erin G. Teich, Perry Zurn, Russell T. Shinohara & Danielle S. Bassett Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice by Cleo Wölfle Hazard The Sounds of Life by Karen Bakker Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer Dirk Brockmann’s interactive explorables Nicky Case’s interactive explorables The Thing From The Future (speculative futurism card game by Stuart Candy & Jeff Watson at Situation Lab) Bayo Akomolafe (re: networks, the nonhuman turn, and questioning the rhetoric of individuals as “designers”) LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models by Christoph Schuhmann, Romain Beaumont, Richard Vencu, Cade Gordon, Ross Wightman, Mehdi Cherti, Theo Coombes, Aarush Katta, Clayton Mullis, Mitchell Wortsman, Patrick Schramowski, Srivatsa Kundurthy, Katherine Crowson, Ludwig Schmidt, Robert Kaczmarczyk, Jenia Jitsev Complexity 86: Dmitri Tymoczko on The Shape of Music: Mathematical Order in Western Tonality Dani & Perry on SFI External Professor Sean Carroll’s MINDSCAPE Podcast

Humans have an unusually long childhood — and an unusually long elderhood past the age of reproductive activity. Why do we spend so much time playing and exploring, caregiving and reflecting, learning and transmitting? What were the evolutionary circumstances that led to our unique life history among the primates? What use is the undisciplined child brain with its tendencies to drift, scatter, and explore in a world that adults understand in such very different terms? And what can we transpose from the study of human cognition as a developmental, stage- wise process to the refinement and application of machine learning technologies? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week we talk to SFI External Professor Alison Gopnik, Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California Berkeley, author of numerous books on psych, cognitive science, childhood development. She writes a column at The Wall Street Journal, alternating with Robert Sapolsky. Slate said that Gopnik is “where to go if you want to get into the head of a baby.” In our conversation we discuss the tension between exploration and exploitation, the curious evolutionary origins of human cognition, the value of old age, and she provides a sober counterpoint about life in the age of large language machine learning models. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us at santafe.edu/engage. Lastly, we have a bevy of summer programs coming up! Join us June 19-23 for Collective Intelligence: Foundations + Radical Ideas, a first-ever event open to both academics and professionals, with sessions on adaptive matter, animal groups, brains, AI, teams, and more. Space is limited! Apps close February 1st. OR Apply to participate in the Complex Systems Summer School. OR the Graduate Workshop on Complexity in Social Science. OR the Complexity GAINS UK program for PhD students. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn Mentioned & Related Links: Alison Gopnik at Wikipedia Alison Gopnik’s Google Scholar page Explanation as Orgasm by Alison Gopnik Twitter thread for Gopnik’s latest SFI Seminar on machine learning and child development Changes in cognitive flexibility and hypothesis search across human life history from childhood to adolescence to adulthood by Gopnik et al. Pretense, Counterfactuals, and Bayesian Causal Models: Why What Is Not Real Really Matters by Deena Weisberg & Alison Gopnik Childhood as a solution to explore–exploit tensions by Alison Gopnik The Origins of Common Sense in Humans and Machines by Kevin A Smith, Eliza Kosoy, Alison Gopnik, Deepak Pathak, Alan Fern, Joshua B Tenenbaum, & Tomer Ullman What Does “Mind-Wandering” Mean to the Folk? An Empirical Investigation by Zachary C. Irving, Aaron Glasser, Alison Gopnik, Verity Pinter, Chandra Sripada Models of Human Scientific Discovery by Robert Goldstone, Alison Gopnik, Paul Thagard, Tomer Ullman Love Lets Us Learn: Psychological Science Makes the Case for Policies That Help Children by Alison Gopnik at APS Our Favorite New Things Are the Old Ones by Alison Gopnik at The Wall Street Journal An exchange of letters on the role of noise in collective intelligence by Daniel Kahneman, David Krakauer, Olivier Sibony, Cass Sunstein, & David Wolpert#DEVOBIAS2018 on SFI Twitter Coarse-graining as a downward causation mechanism by Jessica Flack Complexity 90: Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome Complexity 15: R. Maria del-Rio Chanona on Modeling Labor Markets & Tech Unemployment Learning through the grapevine and the impact of the breadth and depth of social networks by Matthew Jackson, Suraj Malladi, & David McAdams The coming battle for the COVID-19 narrative by Wendy Carlin & Sam Bowles Complexity 83: Eric Beinhocker & Diane Coyle on Rethinking Economics for A Sustainable & Prosperous World Complexity 97: Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society Derek Thompson at The Atlantic on the forces slowing innovation at scale (citing Chu & Evans)

What does it mean to think? What are the traits of thinking systems that we could use to identify them? Different environmental variables call for different strategies in individual and collective cognition — what defines the threshold at which so-called “solid” brains transition into “liquids”? And how might we apply these and related lessons from ecology and evolution to help steward a diverse and thriving future with technology, and keep the biosphere afloat? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on the show we talk to SFI External Professor Ricard Solé of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Website, Twitter, Google Scholar) about liquid and solid brains, the scaling of cognition, criticality, contagions, and terraforming our own planet with synthetic bio. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us, including our upcoming program for Undergraduate Complexity Research, our new SFI Press book Ex Machina by John H. Miller, and an open postdoctoral fellowship in Belief Dynamics — at santafe.edu/engage. Lastly, join us June 19-23 for Collective Intelligence: Foundations + Radical Ideas, a first-ever event open to both academics and professionals, with sessions on adaptive matter, animal groups, brains, AI, teams, and more. Space is limited! Apps close February 1st. Learn more on our website. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn Referenced & Related Works Liquid and Solid Brains: Mapping the Cognition Space SFI Seminar by Ricard Solé John Hopfield (re: biology as computation) Synthetic transitions: towards a new synthesis by Ricard Solé Complexity 93 - Kate Adamala on Synthetic Biology, Origins of Life, and Bioethics The Multiple Paths to Multiple Life by Chris Kempes and David Krakauer Simon Conway Morris (re: macroevolutionary trends) Scale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolution by Jaewon Shin et al. Smarter Parts Make Collective Systems Too Stubborn by Jordana Cepelewicz at Quanta Magazine Complexity 90 - Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome Will Ratcliff (re: yeasts and emergent multi-cellularity) Complexity 29 - On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 3) Synthetic criticality in cellular brains by Ricard Solé et al. Tom Ray (re: artificial life) Complexity and fragility in ecological networks by Ricard Solé and José Montoya Ecological Networks and Their Fragility by José Montoya, Stuart Pimm, and Ricard Solé The small world of human language by Ramon Ferrer i Cancho and Ricard Solé Macroscopic patterns of interacting contagions are indistinguishable from social reinforcement by Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, Sam Scarpino, and Jean-Gabriel Young Complexity 56 - J. Doyne Farmer on The Complexity Economics Revolution Complexity 66 - Katherine Collins on Better Investing Through Biomimicry Chris Langton (re: criticality) Jim Crutchfield (re: the edge of chaos) Per Bak (re: self-organized criticality) Complexity 10 - Melanie Moses on Metabolic Scaling in Biology & Computation Complexity 3 - Sabine Hauert on Swarming Across Scales Niles Eldredge (re: punctuated equilibria) Terraforming the biosphere: can bioengineering save us? SFI Seminar by Ricard Solé Ecological complexity and the biosphere: the next 30 years by Ricard Solé and Simon Levin Ecological firewalls for synthetic biology by Blai Vidiella and Ricard Solé Rachel Armstrong (re: synthetic biology for CO2 fixing in concrete) Stewardship of global collective behavior by Joseph Bak-Coleman et al. Complexity 64 - Reconstructing Ancient Superhighways with Stefani Crabtree and Devin White Complexity 5 - Jennifer Dunne on Food Webs & ArchaeoEcology

In his foundational 1972 paper “More Is Different,” physicist Phil Anderson made the case that reducing the objects of scientific study to their smallest components does not allow researchers to predict the behaviors of those systems upon reconstruction. Another way of putting this is that different disciplines reveal different truths at different scales. Contrary to long-held convictions that there would one day be one great unifying theory to explain it all, fundamental research in this century looks more like a bouquet of complementary approaches. This pluralistic thinking hearkens back to the work of 19th century psychologist William James and looks forward into the growing popularity of evidence-based approaches that cultivate diversity in team-building, governance, and ecological systems. Context-dependent theory and practice calls for choirs of voices…so how do we encourage this? New systems must emerge to handle the complexity of digital society…what might they look like? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on the show we dip back into our sub-series on SFI’s Emergent Political Economies research theme with a trialogue featuring Microsoft Research Lead Glen Weyl (founder of RadicalXChange and founder-chair of The Plurality Institute), and SFI Resident Professor Cristopher Moore (author of over 150 papers at the intersection of physics and computer science). In our conversation we discuss the case for a radically pluralistic approach, explore the links between plurality and quantum mechanics, and outline potential technological solutions to the “sense-making” problems of the 21st century. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us, including our upcoming program for Undergraduate Complexity Research, our new SFI Press book Ex Machina by John H. Miller, and an open postdoctoral fellowship in Belief Dynamics — at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn Referenced & Related Works Why I Am A Pluralist by Glen Weyl Reflecting on A Possible Quadratic Wormhole between Quantum Mechanics and Plurality by Michael Freedman, Michal Fabinger, Glen Weyl Decentralized Society: Finding Web3's Soul by Glen Weyl, Puja Ohlhaver, Vitalik Buterin AI is an Ideology, Not a Technology by Glen Weyl & Jaron Lanier How Civic Technology Can Help Stop a Pandemic by Jaron Lanier & Glen Weyl A Flexible Design for Funding Public Goods by Vitalik Buterin, Zöe Hitzig, Glen Weyl Equality of Power and Fair Public Decision-making by Nicole Immorlica, Benjamin Plautt, Glen Weyl Scale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolution by Jaeweon Shin, Michael Holton Price, David Wolpert, Hajime Shimao, Brendan Tracey & Timothy Kohler Toward a Connected Society by Danielle Allen The role of directionality, heterogeneity and correlations in epidemic risk and spread by Antoine Allard, Cris Moore, Samuel Scarpino, Benjamin Althouse, and Laurent Hébert-Dufresne The Generals’ Scuttlebutt: Byzantine-Resilient Gossip Protocols by Sandro Coretti, Aggelos Kiayias, Cristopher Moore, Alexander Russell Effective Resistance for Pandemics: Mobility Network Sparsification for High-Fidelity Epidemic Simulation by Alexander Mercier, Samuel Scarpino, and Cris Moore How Accurate are Rebuttable Presumptions of Pretrial Dangerousness? A Natural Experiment from New Mexico by Cris Moore, Elise Ferguson, Paul Guerin The Uncertainty Principle: In an age of profound disagreements, mathematics shows us how to pursue truth together by Cris Moore & John Kaag On Becoming Aware: A pragmatics of experiencing by Nathalie Depraz, Francisco Varela, and Pierre Vermersch The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform The World by David Deutsch [Twitter thread on chess] by Vitalik Buterin Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr. The End of History and The Last Man by Francis Fukuyama Enabling the Individual: Simmel, Dewey and “The Need for a Philosophy of Education” by H. Koenig Encyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti of The Holy Father Francis on Fraternity and Social Friendship by Pope Francis What can we know about that which we cannot even imagine? by David Wolpert J.C.R. Licklider (1, 2) Allison Duettman (re: existential hope) Evan Miyazono (re: Protocol Labs research) Intangible Capital (“an open access scientific journal that publishes theoretical or empirical peer-reviewed articles, which contribute to advance the understanding of phenomena related with all aspects of management and organizational behavior, approached from the perspectives of intellectual capital, strategic management, human resource management, applied psychology, education, IT, supply chain management, accounting…”) Polis (“a real-time system for gathering, analyzing and understanding what large groups of people think in their own words, enabled by advanced statistics and machine learning”) Related Complexity Podcast Episodes 7 - Rajiv Sethi on Stereotypes, Crime, and The Pursuit of Justice 51 - Cris Moore on Algorithmic Justice & The Physics of Inference 55 - James Evans on Social Computing and Diversity by Design 68 - W. Brian Arthur on Economics in Nouns and Verbs (Part 1) 69 - W. Brian Arthur (Part 2) on "Prim Dreams of Order vs. Messy Vitality" in Economics, Math, and Physics 82 - David Krakauer on Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibility (EPE 01) 83 - Eric Beinhocker & Diane Coyle on Rethinking Economics for A Sustainable & Prosperous World (EPE 02) 84 - Ricardo Hausmann & J. Doyne Farmer on Evolving Technologies & Market Ecologies (EPE 03) 91 - Steven Teles & Rajiv Sethi on Jailbreaking The Captured Economy (EPE 04)

What makes us human? Over the last several decades, the once-vast island of human exceptionalism has lost significant ground to wave upon wave of research revealing cognition, emotion, problem-solving, and tool-use in other organisms. But there remains a clear sense that humans stand apart — evidenced by our unique capacity to overrun the planet and remake it in our image. What is unique about the human mind, and how might we engage this question rigorously through the lens of neuroscience? How are our gifts of simulation and imagination different from those of other animals? And what, if anything, can we know of the “curiosity” of even larger systems in which we’re embedded — the social superorganisms, ecosystems, technospheres within which we exist like neurons in the brain? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week we conclude a two-part conversation with SFI External Professor John Krakauer, Professor of Neurology and Director of the Center for the Study of Motor Learning and Brain Repair at Johns Hopkins. In this episode, we talk about the nature of curiosity and learning, and whether the difference between the cognitive capacities and inner lifeworld of humans and other animals constitutes a matter of degree or one of kind… Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com . If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. Please also note that we are now accepting applications for an open postdoc fellowship, next summer’s undergraduate research program, and the next cohort of Complexity Explorer’s course in the digital humanities. We welcome your submissions! Lastly, for more from John Krakauer, check out our new six-minute time-lapse of notes from the 2022 InterPlanetary Festival panel discussions on intelligence and the limits to human performance in space… Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn Referenced in this episode: Prospective Learning: Back to the Future by The Future Learning Collective (Joshua Vogelstein, et al.) The Learning Salon: Toward a new participatory science by Ida Momennejad, John Krakauer, Claire Sun, Eva Yezerets, Kanaka Rajan, Joshua Vogelstein, Brad Wyble Artificial Intelligence Hits the Barrier of Meaning by Melanie Mitchell at The New York Times Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren by John Maynard Keynes The Intelligent Life of the City Raccoon by Jude Isabella at Nautilus Magazine The maintenance of vocal learning by gene-culture interaction: the cultural trap hypothesis by R. F. Lachlan and P. J. B. Slater Mindscape Podcast 87 - Karl Friston on Brains, Predictions, and Free Energy by Sean Carroll The Apportionment of Human Diversity by Richard Lewontin From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution by Simon Conway Morris I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hoftstadter Coarse-graining as a downward causation mechanism by Jessica Flack Daniel Dennett Susan Blackmore Related Episodes: Complexity 9 - Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-making Complexity 12 - Matthew Jackson on Social & Economic Networks Complexity 21 - Melanie Mitchell on Artificial Intelligence: What We Still Don't Know Complexity 31 - Embracing Complexity for Systemic Interventions with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 5) Complexity 52 - Mark Moffett on Canopy Biology & The Human Swarm Complexity 55 - James Evans on Social Computing and Diversity by Design Complexity 87 - Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale Intelligence Complexity 90 - Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome Complexity 95 - John Krakauer Part 1: Taking Multiple Perspectives on The Brain

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

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

What does it mean to be alive? Our origins are the horizon of our understanding, and as with the physical horizon, our approach brings us no closer. The more we learn, the more mysterious it all becomes. What if we’re asking the wrong questions? Maybe life did not begin at all, but rather coalesced piecemeal, a set of properties contingent and convergent, plural, more than once? Maybe the origin of life is happening right now, just over the horizon, forming something new anew. Let’s get into the weeds and see if we can find a continuity between biology and physics. Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week we speak with Kate Adamala, synthetic biologist and professor at the University of Minnesota, about her research to produce synthetic minimal cells that are not technically alive but can perform myriad biological processes. Along the way the distant past and future meet. Can we build life? Or can we grow machines? Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. Note that applications are now open for our Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships! If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn Referenced in this episode: Nonenzymatic Template-Directed RNA Synthesis Inside Model Protocells Engineering genetic circuit interactions within and between synthetic minimal cells Competition between model protocells driven by an encapsulated catalyst Synthetic cells in biomedical applications Parasites, infections and inoculation in synthetic minimal cells Build-a-Cell: Engineering a Synthetic Cell Community The Andromeda Strain and the Meaning of Life: Monolith Monologues Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale Intelligence What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly Matthew Jackson on Social & Economic Networks Scott Page Mind Children by Hans Moravec The Multiple Paths to Multiple Life Michael Lachmann Terraforming the Biosphere by Ricard Solé Scaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West (Part 1) Red Queen

One way to frame the science of complexity is as a revelation of the hidden order under seemingly separate phenomena — a teasing-out of music from the noise of history and nature. This effort follows centuries of work to find the rules that structure language, music, and society. How strictly analogous are the patterns governing a symphony and those that describe a social transformation? Math and music are old friends, but new statistical and computational techniques afford the possibility of going even deeper. What fundamental insights — and what sounds — emerge by bringing physicists, composers, social scientists, data artists, and biologists together? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity, we sit with two of SFI’s External Professors — Miguel Fuentes at the Argentine Society for Philosophical Analysis and the Institute of Complex Systems of Valparaiso, and Marco Buongiorno Nardelli at the University of North Texas — for a discussion that roams from their working group on the complexity of music, to fundamental questions about the nature of emergence, to how we might bring all of these ideas together to think about social transformation as a kind of music in its own right. A show that spend so much time exploring sense and nonsense would hardly be complete without technical errors, so please accept our apologies for losing some of Miguel’s backstory to a recording glitch. For this reason, be extra sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. Note that applications are now open for our Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships! If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn Referenced in this episode: An ‘integrated mess of music lovers in science’ on the 2020 Music & Complexity SFI Working Group (with YouTube playlist of talks) Expanding our understanding of musical complexity on the 2022 Music & Complexity SFI Working Group Topology of Networks in Generalized Musical Spaces by Marco Buongiorno Nardelli Tonal harmony and the topology of dynamical score networks by Marco Buongiorno Nardelli a computer-aided data-driven composition environment for the sonification and dramatization of scientific data streams by Marco Buongiorno Nardelli Machines that listen: towards a machine listening model based on perceptual descriptors by Marco Buongiorno Nardelli, Mitsuko Aramaki, Sølvi Ystad, and Richard Kronland-Martinet Does network complexity help organize Babel’s library? by Juan Pablo Cárdenas Iván González, Gerardo Vidal, and Miguel Fuentes Complexity and the Emergence of Physical Properties by Miguel Fuentes The Structure of Online Information Behind Social Crises by Juan Pablo Cárdenas, Gastón Olivares, Gerardo Vidal, Carolina Urbina and Miguel Fuentes 88 - Aviv Bergman on The Evolution of Robustness and Integrating The Disciplines Complexity Podcast 86 - Dmitri Tymoczko on The Shape of Music: Mathematical Order in Western Tonality Complexity Podcast 81 - C. Brandon Ogbunu on Epistasis & The Primacy of Context in Complex Systems Complexity Podcast 67 - Tyler Marghetis on Breakdowns & Breakthroughs: Critical Transitions in Jazz & Mathematics Complexity Podcast 36 - Geoffrey West on Scaling, Open-Ended Growth, and Accelerating Crisis/Innovation Cycles: Transcendence or Collapse? (Part 2) Complexity Podcast 27 - COVID-19 & Complex Time in Biology & Economics with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 2) Complexity Podcast Ignorance, Failure, Uncertainty, and the Optimism of Science by Stuart Firestein (SFI Community Lecture) SFI’s Operating Principles by Cormac McCarthy

As the old nut goes, “To the victor goes the spoils.” But if each round of play consolidates the spoils into fewer hands, eventually it comes to pass that wealthy special interests twist the rules so much it undermines the game itself. When economic power overtakes the processes of democratic governance, growth stagnates, and the rift between the rich and poor becomes abyssal. Desperate times and desperate measures jeopardize the fabric of society. How might nonpartisan approaches to this wicked problem help us walk the system back into a healthy balance? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity we speak with Steven Teles, political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and SFI External Professor Rajiv Sethi, Professor of Economics at Barnard College, Columbia University about how self-serving economic actors intervene in regulation to stifle innovation, increase inequality, and contribute to the conditions in which violence can flourish. Referencing Teles’ aisle-crossing book The Captured Economy with co-author Brink Lindsey, we link the problem of regulatory capture in its myriad forms to Sethi’s work on race, inequality, and crime, which we discussed in Episode 7 (Rajiv Sethi on Crime, Stereotypes, and The Pursuit of Justice). At the interface between the left and right, public and private, our guests shed light on the forces that divide — and may help reunite — the USA and other modern nations. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. Note that applications are now open for our Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships! Tell a friend. And if you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn More on the Emergent Political Economies SFI Research Theme: SFI launches new research theme on emergent political economies Complexity 82 - David Krakauer on Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibility (EPE 01) Complexity 83 - Eric Beinhocker & Diane Coyle on Rethinking Economics for A Sustainable & Prosperous World (EPE 02) Complexity 84 - Ricardo Hausmann & J. Doyne Farmer on Evolving Technologies & Market Ecologies (EPE 03) Referenced in (or related to) this episode: The Captured Economy: How The Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles Shadows of Doubt: Stereotypes, Crime, and the Pursuit of Justice by Brendan O’Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi Complexity 19 - David B. Kinney on the Philosophy of Science Common as Air by Lewis Hyde Signalling architectures can prevent cancer evolution by Leonardo Oña & Michael Lachmann Scaling of urban income inequality in the USA by Elisa Heinrich Mora, Cate Heine, Jacob J. Jackson, Geoffrey B. West, Vicky Chuqiao Yang and Christopher P. Kempes Crime and Punishment in a Divided Society by Rajiv Sethi Rajiv Sethi discusses gun violence, critical race theory, and bezzles on The Glenn Loury Show (video) (audio-only podcast link) The Gun Deal by Rajiv Sethi (Substack) Rajiv Sethi reviews Boldrin/Levine’s Against Intellectual Monopoly Steven Teles and Brink Lindsey on EconTalk with Russ Roberts Is Nothing Sacred? Rajiv Sethi on Salman Rushdie (Substack) Rajiv Sethi with Bari Weiss and David French on gun violence Rajiv Sethi on James Tobin’s Hirsch Lecture on Functional Inefficiency in Finance (Substack)

Chances are you’re listening to this on an advanced computer that fits in your pocket, but is really just one tentacle tip of a giant, planet-spanning architecture for the gathering and processing of data. A common sentiment among the smartphone-enabled human population is that we not only don’t own our data, but our data owns us — or, at least, the pressure of responsibility to keep providing data to the Internet and its devices (and the wider project of human knowledge construction) implicates us in the evolution of a vast, mysterious, largely ineffable self-organizing system that has grabbed the reins of our economies and cultures. This is, in some sense, hardly new: since humankind first started writing down our memories to pass them down through time, we have participated in the “dataome” — a structure and a process that transcends, and transforms, our individuality. Fast-forward to the modern era, when the rapidly-evolving aggregation of all human knowledge tips the scales in favor of the dataome’s emergent agency and its demands on us… Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity, we talk to Caleb Scharf, Director of Astrobiology at Columbia University, about his book, The Ascent of Information: Books, Bits, Genes, and LIfe’s Unending Algorithm. In this episode, we talk about the interplay of information, energy, and matter; the nature of the dataome and its relationship to humans and our artifacts; the past and future evolution of the biosphere and technosphere; the role of lies in the emergent informational metabolisms of the Internet; and what this psychoactive frame suggests about the search for hypothetical intelligences we may yet find in outer space. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. Note that applications are now open for our Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships! Tell a friend. And if you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn Mentioned and related resources: Caleb’s Personal Website, Research Publications, and Popular Writings Caleb’s Twitter We Are The Aliens by Caleb Scharf at Scientific American We Are Our Data, Our Data Are Us by Caleb Scharf at The Los Angeles Times Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence? by Caleb Scharf at Nautilus Where Do Minds Belong? by Caleb Scharf at Aeon Autopoiesis (Wikipedia) The physical limits of communication by Michael Lachmann, M. E. J. Newman, Cristopher Moore The Extended Phenotype by Richard Dawkins “Time Binding” (c/o Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics) (Wikipedia) The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone by Cosma Shalizi Argument-making in the wild SFI Seminar by Simon DeDeo Coarse-graining as a downward causation mechanism by Jessica Flack If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking? by Kathleen McAuliffe at Discover Magazine When and Why Did Human Brains Decrease in Size? A New Change-Point Analysis and Insights From Brain Evolution in Ants by Jeremy DeSilva, James Traniello, Alexander Claxton, & Luke Fannin Complexity 35 - Scaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West (Part 1) The Collapse of Networks SFI Symposium Presentation by Raissa D'Souza Jevons Paradox (Wikipedia) What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly The Glass Cage by Nicholas Carr The evolution of language by Martin Nowak and David Krakauer Complexity 70 - Lauren F. Klein on Data Feminism (Part 1) Complexity 87 - Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale Intelligence Simulation hypothesis (Wikipedia) Complexity 88 - Aviv Bergman on The Evolution of Robustness and Integrating The Disciplines Building a dinosaur from a chicken by Jack Horner at TED Complexity 80 - Mingzhen Lu on The Evolution of Root Systems & Biogeochemical Cycling Why Animals Lie: How Dishonesty and Belief Can Coexist in a Signaling System by Jonathan T. Rowell, Stephen P. Ellner, & H. Kern Reeve The evolution of lying in well-mixed populations by Valerio Capraro, Matjaž Perc & Daniele Vilone Complexity 42 - Carl Bergstrom & Jevin West on Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World

Human beings are distinctly weird. We live for a very long time after we stop reproducing, move completely differently than all of our closest relatives, lack the power of chimpanzees and other primates but completely outdo most other terrestrial mammals in a contest of endurance. If we think about bodies as hypotheses about the stable features of their ancestral environments, what do the features of our unusual physiology say about what humans ARE, where we come from, the details of our origin story as a profoundly successful species? And what can we learn by telescoping that story forward to explain some of the most persistent puzzles and paradoxes about our health, the way we age, our need for physical exercise, and our nearly ubiquitous aversion to habits that are good for us? 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 sprint into the paleoanthropology, biomechanics, and physiology of exercise with Harvard evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman, author of several books including Exercised, The Story of the Human Body, and The Evolution of the Human Head. In our rapid-fire discussion we explore how millions of years as hunter-gatherers equipped hominids with a unique package of adaptations for endurance running, why exercise is so good for us but so generally undesirable, and how physical activity in old age helped shape us into the strongly intergenerational social apes we are today. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. Note that applications are now open for our 2023 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships! Tell a friend. And if you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn Mentioned papers and other resources: SFI Colloquium & Twitter thread on Daniel Lieberman’s “Active Grandparent Hypothesis” The evolution of human fatigue resistance by Frank E. Marino, Benjamin E. Sibson, Daniel E. Lieberman "What beer and running taught me about the scientific process" Seminar by SFI Journalism Fellow Christie Aschwanden Endurance running and the evolution of Homo by Dennis Bramble & Daniel Lieberman in Nature SFI Professor David Wolpert & the thermodynamics of computation Complexity 64 - Reconstructing Ancient Superhighways with Stefani Crabtree and Devin White 3100: Run and Become (Documentary Film) Why run unless something is chasing you? by Daniel Lieberman at The Harvard Gazette Hate Working Out? Blame Evolution by Daniel LIeberman at The New York Times The Aging of Wolff’s “Law”: Ontogeny and Responses to Mechanical Loading in Cortical Bone by Osbjorn Pearson & DanielL Lieberman Effects of footwear cushioning on leg and longitudinal arch stiffness during running by Nicholas B.Holowkaab, Stephen M.Gillinovac, EmmanuelVirot, Daniel E.Lieberman

Ask any martial artist: It’s not just where a person strikes you but your stance that matters. The amplitude and angle of a blow is one thing but how you can absorb and/or deflect it makes the difference. The same is true in any evolutionary system. Most people seem to know “the butterfly effect” where tiny changes lead to large results, but the inverse also works: complex organisms buffer their development against adverse mutations so that tiny changes cannot redirect the growth of limbs and other organs. It takes a lot to shake the pattern of five fingers on a hand, or five toes on a paw. This is robustness: how much change can something soak up before it transforms? The question leads us into a secret garden of cryptic variation: mutations waiting for their moment, pieces sitting in place that might suddenly and radically metamorphose in changing circumstances. It’s why evolution stutters, halts and leaps, and maybe it can help us think about society and mind in ways that deepen comprehension of the tangled and surprising forces playing out at all scales, in society and in ecology. For quests as deep as these, we need to wear new lenses and train inquiries stereoscopically. How can and do the sciences and the humanities inform each other as we keep evolving — not just biologically, but culturally? Can we triangulate the truth by holding theories side by side and looking through them all together? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week, we speak with Aviv Bergman (Google Scholar), External Professor of the Santa Fe Institute and Director of the new Albert Einstein Institute for Advanced Study in the Life Sciences. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. Note that our applications for SFI postdoctoral fellowships open on August 1st! Tell a friend. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn Mentioned Papers: Waddington’s canalization revisited: Developmental stability and evolution Mark L. Siegal & Aviv Bergman Evolutionary capacitance as a general feature of complex gene networks Aviv Bergman & Mark L. Siegal Phenotypic Pliancy and the Breakdown of Epigenetic Polycomb Mechanisms Maryl Lambros, Yehonatan Sella, Aviv Bergman Mammalian Endothermy Optimally Restricts Fungi and Metabolic Costs Aviv Bergman & Arturo Casadevall How on Earth can Aliens Survive? Concept and Case Study Aviv Bergman’s 2022 SFI Seminar Additional Mentioned Podcasts, Videos, & Writing: Melanie Mitchell on Artificial Intelligence: What We Still Don't Know On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 3) Ricardo Hausmann & J. Doyne Farmer on Evolving Technologies & Market Ecologies (EPE 03) Olivia Judson on Major Energy Transitions in Evolutionary History James Evans on Social Computing and Diversity by Design Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-making What Determines The Complexity of Writing Systems? on the work of SFI Fellow Helena Miton Does the Ecology of Somatic Tissue Normally Constrain the Evolution of Cancer? SFI Seminar by External Professor John Pepper Explosive Proofs of Mathematical Truths SFI Seminar by External Professor Simon DeDeo Armchair Science by 2022 SFI Journalism Fellow Dan Falk at Aeon Magazine The coming battle for the COVID-19 narrative Samuel Bowles, Wendy Carlin 10 April 2020 Ignorance, Failure, Uncertainty, and the Optimism of Science Stuart Firestein’s 2022 SFI Community Lecture Smarter Parts Make Collective Systems Too Stubborn Jordana Cepelewicz at Aeon Magazine "Ancestral forms are very different, but as you increase regulatory interactions is decreasing the space of the possible. You can think of bureaucracy..." - SFI President David Krakauer on #DevoBias2018

What is life, and where does it come from? These are two of the deepest, most vexing, and persistent questions in science, and their enduring mystery and allure is complicated by the fact that scientists approach them from a myriad of different angles, hard to reconcile. Whatever else one might identify as universal features of all living systems, most scholars would agree life is a physical phenomenon unfolding in time. And yet current physics is notorious for its inadequacy with respect to time. Life appears to hinge on information transfer — but, again, what do we mean by “information,” and what it is relationship to energy and matter? If humankind can’t settle fundamental issues with these theoretical investigations, we might be missing other kinds of life (and mind) — not just in outer space, but here on Earth, right beneath our noses. But new models that suggest a vastly wider definition of life offer hope that we might — soon! — not only learn to recognize the biospheres and technospheres of other living worlds, but notice other “aliens” at home, and even find our place amidst a living cosmos. 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 speak with SFI External Professor Sara Walker (Twitter, Google Scholar), Deputy Director of The Beyond Center at ASU, where she acts as Associate Professor in half a dozen different programs. In this conversation, we discuss her pioneering research in the origins of life and the profound and diverse implications of Assembly Theory — a new kind of physics she’s developing with chemist Leroy Cronin and a team of SFI and NASA scholars. Sara likes to speculate out loud in public conversation, so strap in for an unusually enthusiastic, animated, and free-roaming conversation at the very bleeding edge of science. And 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. 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 Papers: Intelligence as a planetary scale process by Adam Frank, David Grinspoon & Sara Walker The Algorithmic Origins of Life by Sara Imari Walker & Paul C. W. Davies Beyond prebiotic chemistry: What dynamic network properties allow the emergence of life? by Leroy Cronin & Sara Walker Identifying molecules as biosignatures with assembly theory and mass spectrometry by Stuart Marshall, Cole Mathis, Emma Carrick, Graham Keenan, Geoffrey Cooper, Heather Graham, Matthew Craven, Piotr Gromski, Douglas Moore, Sara Walker & Leroy Cronin Assembly Theory Explains and Quantifies the Emergence of Selection and Evolution by Abhishek Sharma, Dániel Czégel, Michael Lachmann, Christopher Kempes, Sara Walker, Leroy Cronin Quantum Non-Barking Dogs by Sara Imari Walker, Paul C. W. Davies, Prasant Samantray, Yakir Aharonov The Multiple Paths to Multiple Life by Christopher P. Kempes & David C. Krakauer Other Related Videos & Writing: SFI Seminar - Why Black Holes Eat Information by Vijay Balasubramanian Major Transitions in Planetary Evolution by Hikaru Furukawa and Sara Imari Walker 2022 Community Lecture: “Recognizing The Alien in Us” by Sara Walker Sara Walker and Lee Cronin: The Alien Debate on The Lex Fridman Show If Cancer Were Easy, Every Cell Would Do It SFI Press Release on work by Michael Lachmann The Ministry for The Future by Kim Stanley Robinson Re: Wheeler’s delayed choice experiment Wikipedia On the SFI “Exploring Life’s Origins” Research Project Complexity Explorer’s Origins of Life Free Open Online Course Chiara Marletto on Constructor Theory Simon Saunders, Philosopher of Physics at Oxford Related SFI Podcast Episodes: Complexity 2 - The Origins of Life: David Krakauer, Sarah Maurer, and Chris Kempes at InterPlanetary Festival 2019 Complexity 8 - Olivia Judson on Major Energy Transitions in Evolutionary History Complexity 17 - Chris Kempes on The Physical Constraints on Life & Evolution Complexity 40 - The Information Theory of Biology & Origins of Life with Sara Imari Walker (Big Biology Podcast Crossover) Complexity 41 - Natalie Grefenstette on Agnostic Biosignature Detection Complexity 68 - W. Brian Arthur on Economics in Nouns & Verbs (Part 1) Complexity 80 - Mingzhen Lu on The Evolution of Root Systems & Biogeochemical Cycling Alien Crash Site 015 - Cole Mathis Alien Crash Site 019 - Heather Graham Alien Crash Site 020 - Chris Kempes Alien Crash Site 021 - Natalie Grefenstette

Math and music share their mystery and magic. Three notes, played together, make a chord whose properties could not be predicted from those of the separate notes. In the West, music theory and mathematics have common origins and a rich history of shaping and informing one another’s field of inquiry. And, curiously, Western composition has evolved over several hundred years in much the same way economies and agents in long-running simulations have: becoming measurably more complex; encoding more and more environmental structure. (But then, sometimes collapses happen, and everything gets simpler.) Music theorists, like the alchemists that came before them, are engaged in a centuries-long project of deciphering the invisible geometry of these relationships. What is the hidden grammar that connects The Beatles to Johann Sebastian Bach — and how similar is it to the hidden order disclosed by complex systems science? In other words, what makes for “good” music, and what does it have to do with the coherence of the natural world? 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 speak with mathematician and composer Dmitri Tymozcko at Princeton University, whose work provides a new rigor to the study of the Western canon and illuminates “the shape of music” — a hyperspatial object from which all works of baroque, classical, romantic, modern, jazz, and pop are all low-dimensional projections. In the first conversation for this podcast with MIDI keyboard accompaniment, we follow upon Gottfried Leibniz’s assertion that music is “the unconscious exercise of our mathematical powers.” We explore how melodies and harmonies move through mathematical space in ways quite like the metamorphoses of living systems as they traverse evolutionary fitness landscapes. We examine the application of information theory to chord categorization and functional harmony. And we ask about the nature of randomness, the roles of parsimony and consilience in both art and life. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. You can find the complete show notes for every episode, with transcripts and links to cited works, at complexity.simplecast.com. 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 Mentions and additional resources: All of Tymoczko’s writings mentioned in this conversation can be found on his Princeton.edu website You can explore his interactive music software at MadMusicalScience.com The Geometry of Musical Chords by Dmitri Tymoczko An Information Theoretic Approach to Chord Categorization and Functional Harmony by Nori Jacoby, Naftali Tishby and Dmitri Tymoczko This Mathematical Song of the Emotions by Dmitri Tymoczko The Sound of Philosophy by Dmitri Tymoczko Select Tymoczko Video Lectures: Spacious Spatiality (SEMF) 2022 The Quadruple Hierarchy The Shape of Music (2014) On the 2020 SFI Music & Complexity Working Group (with a link to the entire video playlist of public presentations). On the 2022 SFI Music & Complexity Working Group Foundations and Applications of Humanities Analytics Institute at SFI Short explainer animation on SFI Professor Sidney Redner’s work on “Sleeping Beauties of Science” The evolution of syntactic communication by Martin Nowak, Joshua Plotkin, Vincent Jansen The Majesty of Music and Math (PBS special with SFI’s Cris Moore) The physical limits of communication by Michael Lachmann, Mark Newman, Cristopher Moore Supertheories and Consilience from Alchemy to Electromagnetism SFI Seminar by Simon DeDeo Will brains or algorithms rule the kingdom of science? by David Krakauer at Aeon Magazine Scaling, Mirror Symmetries and Musical Consonances Among the Distances of the Planets of the Solar System by Michael Bank and Nicola Scafetta “The reward system for people who do a really wonderful job of extracting knowledge and understanding and wisdom…is skewed in the wrong way. If left to the so-called free market, it’s mainly skewed toward entertainment or something that’s narrowly utilitarian for some business firm or set of business firms.” – Murray Gell-Mann, A Crude Look at The Whole Part 180/200 (1997) Related Episodes: Complexity 81 - C. Brandon Ogbunu on Epistasis & The Primacy of Context in Complex Systems Complexity 72 - Simon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of Epistemology Complexity 70 - Lauren F. Klein on Data Feminism: Surfacing Invisible Labor Complexity 67 - Tyler Marghetis on Breakdowns & Breakthroughs: Critical Transitions in Jazz & Mathematics Complexity 46 - Helena Miton on Cultural Evolution in Music and Writing Systems Complexity 29 - On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer

We lead our lives largely unaware of the immense effort required to support them. All of us grew up inside the so-called “Grid” — actually one of many interconnected regional power grids that electrify our modern world. The physical infrastructure and the regulatory intricacies required to keep the lights on: both have grown organically, piecemeal, in complex networks that nobody seems to fully understand. And yet, we must. Compared to life 150 years ago, we are all utterly dependent on the power grid, and learning how it operates — how tiny failures cause cascading crises, and how tense webs of collaborators make decisions on the way that electricity is priced and served — matters now more than ever. Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity, we speak with SFI External Professor Seth Blumsack (Google Scholar page), Professor of Energy and Environmental Economics and International Affairs in EME and Director of the Center for Energy Law and Policy at Penn State. In this conversation we explore the arcane yet urgent systems that comprise the power grid and how it’s operated, reminding us that the mundane is ever a deep reservoir of questions. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. You can find the complete show notes for every episode, with transcripts and links to cited works, at complexity.simplecast.com. 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 Mentions and additional resources: Topological Models and Critical Slowing down: Two Approaches to Power System Blackout Risk Analysis by Paul Hines, Eduardo Cotilla-Sanchez, & Seth Blumsack Do topological models provide good information about electricity infrastructure vulnerability? by Paul Hines, Eduardo Cotilla-Sanchez, & Seth Blumsack Can capacity markets be designed by democracy? by Kyungjin Yoo & Seth Blumsack The Political Complexity of Regional Electricity Policy Formation by Kyungjin Yoo & Seth Blumsack The Energy Transition in New Mexico: Insights from a Santa Fe Institute Workshop by Seth Blumsack, Paul Hines, Cristopher Moore, and Jessika E. Trancik EBF 483: Introduction to Electricity Markets by Seth Blumsack What’s behind $15,000 electricity bills in Texas? by Seth Blumsack RTOGov: Exploring Links Between Market Decision-Making Processes and Outcomes by Kate Konschnik Ensuring Consideration of the Public Interest in the Governance and Accountability of Regional Transmission Organizations by Michael H. Dworkin & Rachel Aslin Goldwasser Electricity governance and the Western energy imbalance market in the United States: The necessity of interorganizational collaboration by Stephanie Lenhart, Natalie Nelson-Marsh, Elizabeth J. Wilson, & David Solan Untangling the Wires in Electricity Market Planning, with Kate Konschnik by Resources Radio Matthew Jackson on Social & Economic Networks Complexity Podcast 12 Elizabeth Hobson on Animal Dominance Hierarchies Complexity Podcast 78 The Collective Computation of Reality in Nature and Society Jessica Flack’s 2019 SFI Community Lecture Tyler Marghetis on Breakdowns & Breakthroughs: Critical Transitions in Jazz & Mathematics Complexity Podcast 67 Early-warning signals for critical transitions by Marten Scheffer, Jordi Bascompte, William A. Brock, Victor Brovkin, Stephen R. Carpenter, Vasilis Dakos, Hermann Held, Egbert H. van Nes, Max Rietkerk & George Sugihara Ricardo Hausmann & J. Doyne Farmer on Evolving Technologies & Market Ecologies (EPE 03) Complexity Podcast 84 Anjali Bhatt Tina Eliassi-Rad on Democracies as Complex Systems Complexity Podcast 73 Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-making Complexity Podcast 9 Jessika Trancik Signalling architectures can prevent cancer evolution by Leonardo Oña & Michael Lachmann The Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles with Bryant Walker Smith Complexity Podcast 79 Image Credit: Paul Hines