The Origin of the Demon

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Think about a genome, it's like a string, and each of the bits is an information-bearing degree of freedom. So for every bit that is transmitted over many generations reliably, something has to inspect it and say, stay that way. And so you get this really weird result, which is that organismal complexity, agent complexity is upper-bounded by the complexity of natural selection itself. That's this problem of the origin of the demon. Okay. I'm going to make you a little bit more technical now, and you told me, Sean, whether you will tell us, please be technical first, and we'll fix it later.

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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