The Importance of Symmetry Breaking

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The word is fraught. So rather than trying to define it, let me ask how you think about the idea of emergence. And I'm very indebted to Phil Anderson here and Bob Loflin. It's one of those terms that for some reason attracts a lot of bullshitty commentary. For me, broken symmetry is the physical precondition for the possibility of writing uneffective theories. If that effective theory is dynamically sufficient, that is what we mean by emergence. The complex world is full of them. And it's built up from them. That's why I think it's an interesting scientific problem, as opposed to just another inevitable one.

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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