The Role of Noise in Maintaining Complex Life

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I know that dissipation and friction are everywhere in the macroscopic world, but you're giving the sales pitch for us making them positive contributions to our persistence rather than merely annoyances. Well, I guess this relates to what I was going to ask next, which is about the... You already alluded to the fact that you don't always have an emergent theory lying around, right? When you have some collection of stuff, you may or may not be lucky enough to have a simple way of describing it just in terms of macroscopically observable features. And number two, I know that you've written and spoken on the role of noise in maintaining things like that, which is

Complexity scientists have been able to make an impressive amount of progress despite the fact that there is not universal agreement about what "complexity" actually is. We know it when we see it, perhaps, but there are a number of aspects to the phenomenon, and different researchers will naturally focus on their favorites. Today's guest, David Krakauer, is president of the Santa Fe Institute and a longtime researcher in complexity. He points the finger at the concept of agency. A ball rolling down a hill just mindlessly obeys equations of motion, but a complex system gathers information and uses it to adapt. We talk about what that means and how to think about the current state of complexity science.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/10/242-david-krakauer-on-complexity-agency-and-information/

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David Krakauer received his D.Phil. in evolutionary biology from Oxford University. He is currently President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. Previously he was at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he was the founding director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and the Co-director of the Center for Complexity and Collective Computation. He was included in Wired magazine's list of "50 People Who Will Change the World."

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