COMPLEXITY

Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome

Aug 19, 2022

01:22:35

Creator website

Episode guests

Caleb Scharf

Highlights

AI Chapters

Episode notes

Is There a Way to Turn Pollution Into a Resource?

02:11

Deep Fakes and Machine Learying Approaches

04:34

The Endo Symbiosis of Cellular Structures

04:22

Introduction

5min

How Long Have You Been a Scientist?

3min

What's the Data Om?

3min

The Quantification of Information

6min

What's the Jugger?

4min

The Question of Meaning in Information

2min

The Data Shakespeare

5min

The Problem of Time Binding in Complex Systems Research

5min

The Singularity Has Already Happened

5min

10.

The History of Punch Cards

5min

11.

Is the Data Om a Symbiotic Relationship?

3min

12.

The Biophysical Scaling Principle

5min

13.

I'm Getting Old and I Need to Get Someplace, Right?

2min

14.

The Endo Symbiosis of Cellular Structures

4min

15.

The Evolution of Syntax

6min

16.

Resuscitation Is a Thing, and It's All Experimentation

4min

17.

The Evolution of Robustness

3min

18.

Is There a Way to Turn Pollution Into a Resource?

2min

19.

Deep Fakes and Machine Learying Approaches

5min

20.

What Does Life Do to a Planet?

5min

21.

Complexities by the Santa Fe Institute

2min

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.

Thank you for listening!

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Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

Mentioned and related resources:

Caleb’s Personal Website, Research Publications, and Popular Writings

Caleb’s Twitter

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