The Difference Between Biology and Physics

John Hopfield: Biological entities might have a lot of things that you can describe in terms of physics, but they have this special character. They take information from the environment, they process it and respond in adaptive ways. When all these starts, when an agent in a prebiotic or early evolution scenario, when is information relevant? And identify the nature of information and is a distinction between information and computation. This is all open questions. John Hopfield: We need to put physics there, we need to make things destabilize - how is this connected with the Iranian virus which seems to be very different than other distant things such as protosils.

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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.

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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