John Krakauer

Join Alison Gopnik, a child development expert from UC Berkeley, and John Krakauer, a neurology scholar at Johns Hopkins, as they delve into the fascinating nature of intelligence. They explore how infants learn through experimentation and establish causal connections, contrasting this with AI's capabilities. The discussion highlights the importance of common sense and metacognition in shaping human understanding. They also examine the boundaries of emotional and physical pain, revealing the complexities that AI still struggles to grasp.

Neuroscientist and author John Krakauer returns to discuss brain reorganization, plasticity, motor problems after strokes, and artificial general intelligence. They explore the misconception of brain reorganization, the challenges in studying behavioral outcomes after a stroke, and the need to critically analyze scientific papers and challenge established ideas.

Luis Favela, a philosopher and cognitive scientist, joins Edouard Machery, a philosophy expert, along with neuroscientists John Krakauer and Rosa Cao, and philosopher Frances Egan. They dive into the murky waters of the term 'representation,' revealing its varied interpretations in cognitive science. The guests debate the implications of vague terminology on our understanding of mental processes and argue for clearer definitions to enhance interdisciplinary communication. They also touch on the complexities of linking neuroscience to concepts of consciousness and intelligence.

The brain is arguably one of the most complex objects known to science. How best to understand it? That is a trick question: brains are organized at many levels and attempts to grasp them all through one approach — be it micro, macro, anatomical, behavioral — are destined to leave out crucial insights. What more, thinking “vertically” across scales, one might miss important angles from another discipline along the “horizontal” axis. For inquiries too big to sit within one field of knowledge, maybe it is time we resurrected the salon: a mode of scientific exploration that levels hierarchies of expertise and optimizes for more complementary and high-dimensional, egalitarian, communal discourse. As with the Jainist philosophic principle anekantavada — how many blind people does it take to grok an elephant? — neuroscience is perhaps best practiced as innately and intensely multiperspectival…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 is part one of a two-part conversation with SFI External Professor John Krakauer, Professor of Neurology and Director of the Center for the Study of Motor Learning and Brain Repair at Johns Hopkins . In this episode, we talk about the history of different ways of studying the brain — in animals and humans — and how subjects as complex as brains invite a different way of seeing, one that synthesizes many different ways of seeing…Thanks for your patience with the recent delays in publication — with InterPlanetary Festival and our Annual Symposium behind us, Complexity will now return to regular biweekly scheduling.Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com, and stay tuned for part two — in which we talk about how learning is inherently a future-focused exercise, and what that means for education. 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 an open postdoctoral fellowship in Belief Dynamics — at santafe.edu/engage.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 • LinkedInReferenced in this episode:Neuroscience Needs Behavior: Correcting a Reductionist BiasJohn Krakauer, Asif Ghazanfar, Alex Gomez-Marin, Malcolm MacIver, David PoeppelTwo Views of the Cognitive BrainDavid Barack & John KrakauerOn Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life SciencesRichard DoyleSimon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of EpistemologyComplexity Podcast Episode 72Former SFI Fellow David Kinney, epistemologist (re: disciplines as levels of explanatory granularity)Coarse-graining as a downward causation mechanismJessica FlackIntegral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives on the Natural WorldSean Esbjörn-Hargens & Michael ZimmermanCarl Cranor, moral philosopher (re: causation)The Learning Salon: Toward a new participatory scienceIda Momennejad, John Krakauer, Claire Sun, Eva Yezerets, Kanaka Rajan, Joshua Vogelstein, Brad WybleBrain Inspired PodcastPaul MiddlebrookseLife JournalbiorXivW. Brian Arthur on Economics in Nouns and Verbs (Part 1)Complexity Podcast Episode 68W. Brian Arthur (Part 2) on "Prim Dreams of Order vs. Messy Vitality" in Economics, Math, and PhysicsComplexity Podcast Episode 69Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The WorldTyson Yunkaporta

What makes us human?  Over the last several decades, the once-vast island of human exceptionalism has lost significant ground to wave upon wave of research revealing cognition, emotion, problem-solving, and tool-use in other organisms. But there remains a clear sense that humans stand apart — evidenced by our unique capacity to overrun the planet and remake it in our image. What is unique about the human mind, and how might we engage this question rigorously through the lens of neuroscience? How are our gifts of simulation and imagination different from those of other animals? And what, if anything, can we know of the “curiosity” of even larger systems in which we’re embedded — the social superorganisms, ecosystems, technospheres within which we exist like neurons in the brain?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 we conclude a two-part conversation with SFI External Professor John Krakauer, Professor of Neurology and Director of the Center for the Study of Motor Learning and Brain Repair at Johns Hopkins. In this episode, we talk about the nature of curiosity and learning, and whether the difference between the cognitive capacities and inner lifeworld of humans and other animals constitutes a matter of degree or one of kind…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 — at santafe.edu/engage. Please also note that we are now accepting applications for an open postdoc fellowship, next summer’s undergraduate research program, and the next cohort of Complexity Explorer’s course in the digital humanities. We welcome your submissions!Lastly, for more from John Krakauer, check out our new six-minute time-lapse of notes from the 2022 InterPlanetary Festival panel discussions on intelligence and the limits to human performance in space…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 • LinkedInReferenced in this episode:Prospective Learning: Back to the Futureby The Future Learning Collective (Joshua Vogelstein, et al.)The Learning Salon: Toward a new participatory scienceby Ida Momennejad, John Krakauer, Claire Sun, Eva Yezerets, Kanaka Rajan, Joshua Vogelstein, Brad WybleArtificial Intelligence Hits the Barrier of Meaningby Melanie Mitchell at The New York TimesEconomic Possibilities for our Grandchildrenby John Maynard KeynesThe Intelligent Life of the City Raccoonby Jude Isabella at Nautilus MagazineThe maintenance of vocal learning by gene-culture interaction: the cultural trap hypothesisby R. F. Lachlan and P. J. B. SlaterMindscape Podcast 87 - Karl Friston on Brains, Predictions, and Free Energyby Sean CarrollThe Apportionment of Human Diversityby Richard LewontinFrom Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolutionby Simon Conway MorrisI Am a Strange Loopby Douglas HoftstadterCoarse-graining as a downward causation mechanismby Jessica FlackDaniel DennettSusan BlackmoreRelated Episodes:Complexity 9 - Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-makingComplexity 12 - Matthew Jackson on Social & Economic NetworksComplexity 21 - Melanie Mitchell on Artificial Intelligence: What We Still Don't KnowComplexity 31 - Embracing Complexity for Systemic Interventions with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 5)Complexity 52 - Mark Moffett on Canopy Biology & The Human SwarmComplexity 55 - James Evans on Social Computing and Diversity by DesignComplexity 87 - Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale IntelligenceComplexity 90 - Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human DataomeComplexity 95 - John Krakauer Part 1: Taking Multiple Perspectives on The Brain