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/Support Mindscape on Patreon.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."Web siteSanta Fe Institute web pageWikipediaGoogle ScholarSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Episode Title and Show Notes:106 - Michael Garfield & David Krakauer on Evolution, Information, and Jurassic ParkWelcome to Complexity, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I'm Michael Garfield, producer of this show and host for the last 105 episodes. Since October, 2019, we have brought 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. Today I step down and depart from SFI with one final appearance as the guest of this episode. Our guest host is SFI President David Krakauer, he and I will braid together with nine other conversations from the archives in a retrospective masterclass on how this podcast traced the contours of complexity. We'll look back on episodes with David, Brian Arthur, Geoffrey West, Doyne Farmer, Deborah Gordon, Tyler Marghetis, Simon DeDeo, Caleb Scharf, and Alison Gopnik to thread some of the show's key themes through into windmills and white whales, SFI pursues, and my own life's persistent greatest questions.We'll ask about the implications of a world transformed by science and technology by deeper understanding and prediction and the ever-present knock-on consequences. 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 SFI at Santa fe.edu/engage. Thank you each and all for listening. It's been a pleasure and an honor to take you offroad with us over these last years.Follow SFI on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn📚Reading & Videos:The Lost Worldby Michael CrichtonJurassic Parkby Michael CrichtonThe Evolution of Syntactic Communicationby Martin Nowak, Joshua Plotkin, and Vincent JansenInterPlanetary Festival 2018 + SFI Science Explainer Animationsby SFIComplexity Economicsby SFI PressSupertheories and Consilience from Alchemy to Electromagnetismby Simon DeDeo (2019 SFI Seminar)How To Live in The Future, Part 4: The Future is Exapted/Remixedby Michael GarfieldArtists Misusing Technologyby NXT MuseumThe Collapse of Artificial Intelligenceby Melanie Mitchell (2019 SFI Symposium Talk)The Debate Over Understanding in AI's Large Language Modelsby Melanie Mitchell & David KrakauerWelcome To Jurassic Parkby Tink Zorg(re: COVID-19 and the collapse of supply chains)Smarter Parts Make Collective Systems Too Stubbornby Jordana Cepelewicz at Quanta Magazine(re: Albert Kao)Coarse-graining as a downward causation mechanismby Jessica FlackArgument Making In The Wildby Simon DeDeo(SFI Seminar re: egregores)The Collective Computation of Reality in Nature and Societyby Jessica Flack (SFI Community Lecture re: “hourglass emergence”)Interaction-based evolution: how natural selection and nonrandom mutation work togetherby Adi LivnatIn The Country of The Blind (_Afterword: An Introduction to Cliology)by Michael FlynnAn exchange of letters on the role of noise in collective intelligenceby Daniel Kahneman, David Krakauer, Olivier Sibony, Cass Sunstein, David WolpertMurray Gell-Mann - Information overload. A crude look at the whole (180/200)(re: the challenges of funding truly innovative research)The work of art in the age of biocybernetic reproductionby W.J.T. MitchellKen WilberIntelligence as a planetary scale processby Adam Frank, David Grinspoon, and Sara WalkerLight & Magic (documentary series)on Disney+Palantir AnalyticsThe Lord of The Ringsby J.R.R. TolkienPresent Shock: When Everything Happens Nowby Douglas RushkoffMichael LevinRobustness of variance and autocorrelation as indicators of critical slowing downby Vasilis Dakos, Egbert H van Nes, Paolo D’Odorico, Marten SchefferThe Singularity in Our Past Light-Coneby Cosma Shalizi🎧Podcasts: Complexity Podcast001 - David Krakauer on The Landscape of 21st Century Science009 - Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-making012 - Matthew Jackson on Social and Economic Networks013 - W. Brian Arthur (Part 1) on The History of Complexity Economics016 - Andy Dobson on Disease Ecology & Conservation Strategy036 - Geoffrey West on Scaling, Open-Ended Growth, and Accelerating Crisis/Innovation Cycles: Transcendence or Collapse?056 - J. Doyne Farmer on The Complexity Economics Revolution060 - Andrea Wulf on The Invention of Nature, Part 1: Humboldt’s Naturegemälde065 - Deborah Gordon on Ant Colonies as Distributed Computers067 - Tyler Marghetis on Breakdowns & Breakthroughs: Critical Transitions in Jazz & Mathematics072 - Simon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of Epistemology087 - Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale Intelligence090 - Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome92 - Miguel Fuentes & Marco Buongiorno Nardelli on Music, Emergence, and Society099 - Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I. Future Fossils Podcast194 - Simon Conway Morris on Convergent Evolution & Creative Mass Extinctions190 - Lauren Seyler on Dark Microbiology & Right Relations in Science165 - Kevin Kelly on Time, Memory, Change, and Vanishing Asia125 - Stuart Kauffman on Physics, Life, and The Adjacent Possible Podcast theme music by Mitch MignanoOther music by Michael Garfield

What is complexity science, and why should you care about it? Well, complexity science is all about understanding the systems that are all around us — systems like the economy, your body, cities, companies, and the environment. To properly understand how these systems work, and how they fail, you need to understand complexity science. Because complexity science provides us with the underlying principles that govern these systems. In today's episode, we speak to David Krakauer, President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. He explains the underlying principles of complex systems and what they have in common — even if they all seem completely unrelated. He also talks through the history of complexity science and provides his top three takeaways on how you can start to think about complex systems.   Connect: Simplifying Complexity on Twitter Sean Brady on Twitter Sean Brady on LinkedIn Brady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

Delving into the complexity of genius, the podcast features David Krakauer and Dean Simonton discussing the intricate nature of exceptional abilities. They explore the historical perception of genius, innate talent versus environmental factors, and the correlation between mental disorders and creativity. The conversation challenges traditional views on genius and highlights the importance of openness to experience and cognitive disinhibition in making groundbreaking discoveries.

For 300 years, the dream of science was to understand the world by chopping it up into pieces. But boiling everything down to basic parts does not tell us about the way those parts behave together. Physicists found the atom, then the quark, and yet these great discoveries don’t answer age-old questions about life, intelligence, or language, innovation, ecosystems, or economies.So people learned a new trick – not just taking things apart but studying how things organize themselves, without a plan, in ways that cannot be predicted. A new field, complex systems science, sprang up to explain and navigate a world beyond control.At the same time, improvements in computer processing enabled yet another method for exploring irreducible complexity: we learned to instrumentalize the evolutionary process, forging machine intelligences that can correlate unthinkable amounts of data. And the Internet’s explosive growth empowered science at scale, in networks and with resources we could not have imagined in the 1900s. Now there are different kinds of science, for different kinds of problems, and none of them give us the kind of easy answers we were hoping for.This is a daring new adventure of discovery for anyone prepared to jettison the comfortable categories that served us for so long. Our biggest questions and most wicked problems call for a unique and planet-wide community of thinkers, willing to work on massive and synthetic puzzles at the intersection of biology and economics, chemistry and social science, physics and cognitive neuroscience.Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts.Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.David Krakauer's Webpage & Google Scholar Citations.Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

And now for something completely different!  Last October, The Santa Fe Institute held its third InterPlanetary Festival at SITE Santa Fe, celebrating the immensely long time horizon, deep scientific and philosophical questions, psychological challenges, and engineering problems involved in humankind’s Great Work to extend its understanding and presence into outer space. For our third edition, we turned our attention to visionary projects living generations will likely not live to see completed — interstellar travel, off-world cities, radical new ways of understanding spacetime — as an invitation to engage in science as not merely interesting but deeply fun. For our first panel, we decided to inquire: What is time, really? How has science fiction changed  the way we track and measure, speak about, and live in time? And how do physics and complex systems science pose and answer these most fundamental questions?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.In this week’s episode, we share the Complex Conceptions of Time panel from InterPlanetary Festival 2022, moderated by SFI President David Krakauer and featuring an all-star trinity of panelists: science journalist James Gleick, sci-fi author and SFI Miller Scholar Ted Chiang, and physicist and SFI Professor David Wolpert. In this hour, we play with and dissect some favorite metaphors for time, unroll the history of time’s mathematization, review time travel in science fiction, and examine the arguments between free will and determinism.Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com — as well as the extensive, interactive web-based “Voyager Golden Record Liner Notes” with links to not only all of the panels from IPFest 2022 but also copious additional resources, including contributor bios, peer-reviewed publications, science fiction and nonfiction science writing, and more…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.If you’d like some HD virtual backgrounds of the SFI campus to use on video calls and a chance to win a signed copy of one of our books from the SFI Press, help us improve our science communication by completing a survey about our various scicomm channels. Thanks for your time!Lastly, we have a bevy of summer programs coming up! 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!  The application deadline has been extended to March 1st.OR apply to the Graduate Workshop on Complexity in Social Science.OR the Complexity GAINS UK program for PhD students.(OR check our open listings for a staff or research job!)Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.Episode cover art by Michael Garfield with the help of Midjourney.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn(SOME) Mentioned & Related Links:David KrakauerMathematical languages shape our understanding of time in physicsby Nicolas GisinDoes Time Really Flow? New Clues Come From a Century-Old Approach to Mathby Natalie WolchoverThe Principle of Least ActionPath Integral FormulationClosed Timelike CurveThe Time Machineby H. G. WellsKip ThorneJames GleickGenius: The Life and Science of Richard FeynmanThe Physicist and The Philosopherby Jimena CanalesTed Chiang“Story of Your Life”ArrivalExhalationRussian Doll (TV series)“The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate”David WolpertComplexity 94 - David Wolpert & Farita Tasnim on The Thermodynamics of CommunicationComplexity 45 - David Wolpert on The No Free Lunch Theorems and Why They Undermine The Scientific MethodA Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark TwainIntuitionist Mathematics

The world is unfair — but how much of that unfairness is inevitable, and how much is just contingency? After centuries of efforts to arrive at formal theories of history, society, and economics, most of us still believe and act on what amounts to myth. Our predecessors can’t be faulted for their lack of data, but in 2022 we have superior resources we’re only starting to appreciate and use. In honor of the Santa Fe Institute’s new role as the hub of an international research network exploring Emergent Political Economies, we dedicate this new sub-series of Complexity Podcast to conversations on money, power, governance, and justice. Subscribe for a new stream of dialogues and trialogues between SFI’s own diverse scholastic community and other acclaimed political economists, historians, and authors of speculative fiction.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.In this episode, we talk with SFI President David Krakauer about the goals of this research theme and what SFI brings to the table. We discuss the legacy of long-standing challenges to quantitative history and mathematical economics, how SFI thinks differently about these topics, and a brief outline of the major angles we’ll explore in this sub-series over the next year-plus — including the roles of dimension, causality, algorithms, scaling, innovation, emergence, and more.Subscribe to Complexity Podcast for upcoming episodes with an acclaimed line-up of scholars including Diane Coyle, Eric Beinhocker, Ricardo Hausmann, Doyne Farmer, Steven Teles, Rajiv Sethi, Jenna Bednar, Tom Ginsburg, Niall Ferguson, Neal Stephenson, Paul Smaldino, C. Thi Nguyen, John Kay, John Geneakoplos, and many more to be announced…If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe to Complexity Podcast wherever you prefer to listen, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. You can find the complete show notes for every episode, with transcripts and links to cited works, at complexity.simplecast.com.Thank you for listening!Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedInMentions and additional resources:Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibilityby David Krakauer for SFI Parallax Newsletter, Spring 2022 EditionPolicing stabilizes construction of social niches in primatesby Jessica Flack, Michelle Girvan, Frans de Waal, and David Krakauer in NatureConflicts of interest improve collective computation of adaptive social structuresby Eleanor Brush, David Krakauer, and Jessica Flack in Science AdvancesThe Star Gazer and the Flesh Eater: Elements of a Theory of Metahistoryby David C. Krakauer in History, Big History, and Metahistory at SFI PressThe Cultural Evolution of National Constitutionsby Daniel Rockmore, Chen Fang, Nick Foti, Tom Ginsburg, & David Krakauer in SSRNScaling of Hunter-Gatherer Camp Size and Human Socialityby José Lobo, Todd Whitelaw, Luís M. A. Bettencourt, Polly Wiessner, Michael E. Smith, & Scott Ortman in Current AnthropologyW. Brian Arthur on Complexity Podcast (eps. 13, 14, 68, 69)Reflections on COVID-19 with David Krakauer & Geoffrey West (Complexity Podcast)The Dawn of Everythingby David Graeber and David Wengrow at Macmillan PublishersMitch Waldrop speaks on the history of SFI (Twitter excerpts)The Hedgehog and the Foxby Isaiah BerlinWar and Peaceby Leo TolstoyOn the Application of Mathematics to Political Economyby F. Y. Edgeworth in Journal of the Royal Statistical SocietyHow Economics Became A Mathematical Scienceby E. Roy Weintraub at Duke University PressMachine Dreamsby Philip Mirowski at Cambridge University PressAll Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (TV series)by Adam Curtis for BBCCan’t Get You Out of My Head (TV series)by Adam Curtis for BBCThe Collective Computation Group at SFISeeing Like A Stateby James. C Scott at Yale BooksUncertain timesby Jessica Flack and Melanie Mitchell at AeonAt the limits of thoughtby David Krakauer at AeonPreventative Citizen-Based Medicineby David Krakauer for the SFI Transmissions: Reflections seriesThe uncertainty paradox. Can science make uncertainty optimistic?by Stuart Firestein (SFI Seminar)Editorial note: At one point DK mentions "John" Steuart but meant James Steuart, author ofAn Inquiry Into the Principles of Political Economy(a more thoroughly-indexed and searchable version can be found here)

Jim has a wide-ranging talk with David Krakauer about the ideas in his forthcoming paper "The Structure of Complexity in Machine Learning Science" and how AI may alter the course of science. They discuss data-driven science vs theory-driven science, a bifurcation in science, the protein folding problem, brute force methods, the origin of induction in David Hume, the origin of neural networks in deductive thinking of the '40s, super-Humean models, crossing the statistical uncanny valley, ultra-high-dimensionality, adaptive computation, why genetic algorithms might come back, Chomsky's poverty of the stimulus, the lottery ticket hypothesis, neural nets as pre-processors for parsimonious science, how human expertise constrains model-building, GPT-4's arithmetic problem, cognitive synergy, why LLMs aren't AGIs, incompressible representations, gravitational lensing, the new sciences LLMs will lead to, encoding adaptive history, Jim's ScriptWriter software, discovery engines vs libraries vs synthesizers, the history of science as a history of constraint, Occam's razor & meta-Occam, assembly theory, whether existential risk is a marketing ploy, the Idiocracy risk, using empirical precedent in tech regulation, networks of info agents, the outsourcing of human judgment, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS EP10 - David Krakauer: Complexity Science Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, by Daniel Dennett JRS Currents 100: Sara Walker and Lee Cronin on Time as an Object David Krakauer's research explores the evolution of intelligence and stupidity on Earth. This includes studying the evolution of genetic, neural, linguistic, social, and cultural mechanisms supporting memory and information processing, and exploring their shared properties. President of the Santa Fe Institute since 2015, he served previously as the founding director of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, the co-director of the Center for Complexity and Collective Computation, and professor of mathematical genetics, all at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

David Krakauer and Sean Carroll discuss human history's impact on scientific inquiry, from genetic causality debates to the quest for emergent laws in complex systems. They explore the balance between simplicity and complexity in physics, interdisciplinary challenges in research, and the entropic nature of life and the universe. The podcast highlights the Santa Fe Institute's role in promoting adaptive scientific inquiry.

If you’re honest with yourself, you’re likely asking of the last two years: What happened? The COVID-19 pandemic is a prism through which our stories and predictions have refracted…or perhaps it’s a kaleidoscope, through which we can infer relationships and causes, but the pieces all keep shifting. One way to think about humankind’s response to COVID is as a collision between predictive power and understanding, highlighting how far the evolution of our comprehension has trailed behind the evolution of our tools. Another way of looking at it is in terms of bottlenecks and reservoirs — whether it’s N95 mask distribution, log-jammed shipping lanes, or everybody looking up to Tony Fauci, superspreader events or narrative rupture, COVID is a global crash course in how things flow through networks. Ultimately, the effects go even deeper: How has COVID changed our understanding of individuality — the self and its relationship to other selves?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.In this special year-end wrap-up episode, we speak with  SFI President David Krakauer and former SFI President and Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West about The Complex Alternative, a new SFI Press volume gathering the perspectives of over 60 members of the complex systems research community on COVID-19 — not just the disease but the webbed and embedded systems it revealed.Complexity Podcast will take a winter hiatus over the holidays and return on Wednesday, January 12th. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe wherever you prefer to listen, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and/or consider making a donation at santafe.edu/give. Please also be aware that PhD students are now welcome to apply for our tuitionless (!) Summer 2022 SFI GAINS residential program in Vienna, Austria. Learn more at santafe.edu/gains.Thank you for listening!Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedInRelated Reading & Listening:The Complex Alternative: Complexity Scientists on the COVID-19 PandemicSelected contributions from that volume:David Kinney - Why We Can’t Depoliticize A PandemicSimon DeDeo - From Virus To SymptomOn Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 3)Bill Miller on Investment Strategies in Times of CrisisCristopher Moore on the heavy tail of outbreaksSidney Redner on exponential growth processesAnthony Eagan - The COVID-19-Induced Explosion of Boutique NarrativesCarrie Cowan on the future of educationMelanie Mitchell - The Double-Edged Sword of Imperfect MetaphorsDanielle Allen, E. Glen Weyl, and Rajiv Sethi - Prediction and Policy in a Complex SystemAdditional Media:John Kaag - What Thoreau can teach us about the Great ResignationKyle Harper - The Fall of the Roman Empire (SFI Talk)Niall Ferguson’s Networld, Part 1 “Disruption” feat. Geoffrey WestNeal Stephenson, SFI Miller ScholarThe Limits of Human Scale - David Pakman interviews Geoffrey WestSamuel Bowles, Wendy Carlin - The coming battle for the COVID-19 narrativeJonathan Rausch - The Constitution of KnowledgeLaurent Hébert-Dufresne on Halting the Spread of COVID-19Sam Scarpino on Modeling Disease Transmission & InterventionsScaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West (Part 1)Geoffrey West on Scaling, Open-Ended Growth, and Accelerating Crisis/Innovation Cycles: Transcendence or Collapse? (Part 2)New Directions in Science Emerge from Disconnection and Discordby Yiling Lin, James Allen Evans, Lingfei WuScaling of Urban Income Inequality in the United Statesby Elisa Heinrich Mora, Jacob J. Jackson, Cate Heine, Geoffrey B. West, Vicky Chuqiao Yang, Christopher P. Kempes