Is Complexity a Driving Principle for Complexity?

This is great because this gets to a question that I was able to explore a little bit with Melanie Moses way back in episode 10, talking about when evolutionary conditions favor a liquid brain like a colonial organism. When you can actually scale individual organisms up to something the size of a human being or an elephant without it breaking apart,. And how that is related to when we had Deborah Gordon on the show, and she was talking about the cognition of ant colonies. It's like the inherent pace of the environment and the pace at which a system has to adapt to it.

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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.

Lastly, join us June 19-23 for Collective Intelligence: Foundations + Radical Ideas, a first-ever event open to both academics and professionals, with sessions on adaptive matter, animal groups, brains, AI, teams, and more. Space is limited! Apps close February 1st. Learn more on our website.

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Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

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