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.
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Mentioned and related resources:
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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
