COMPLEXITY

Ricard Solé on Liquid and Solid Brains and Terraforming The Biosphere

Dec 22, 2022

01:13:09

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Highlights

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Episode notes

What Motivated You to Become a Scientist?

01:40

The Transition Into Multi-Cellularity in Yeasts

03:11

Ecological Firewalls for Synthetic Biology

05:56

Introduction

4min

What Motivated You to Become a Scientist?

2min

The Difference Between Biology and Physics

5min

The Importance of Convergence and Evolutionary Processes

4min

The Evolution of Humanity and the Evolution of the Human Brain

3min

The Transition Into Multi-Cellularity in Yeasts

3min

Parasites Are Inevitable

2min

Ecological Networks and Their Frailty

4min

Compartments in Ecological Networks

2min

10.

The Small World of Human Language

5min

11.

The Rich Get Richer in the Real Economy

4min

12.

The Concept of Criticality and the Phase Transition Between Liquid and Solid Brains

3min

13.

Is Complexity a Driving Principle for Complexity?

5min

14.

Is There an Inherent Obstacle to That in Evolution?

4min

15.

Is It Possible to Have a Third State Cognitive Architecture?

5min

16.

Ecological Firewalls for Synthetic Biology

6min

17.

Are We Really Responsible for the Extinction of the Network?

2min

18.

Ecological Firewall

2min

19.

Biofilms in the Future?

4min

20.

Is There a Way to Induce Ecological Firewalls?

4min

21.

Complexity - A Call to Arms

2min

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.

Thank you for listening!

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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