Two scientists discuss the principles of organization behind complexity, exploring the origins and evolution of life, the importance of memory and information, the physics of life, the role of linear polymers, parasites in life and their potential presence in the universe, and the implications of assembly theory on understanding complexity.

Physics of Life podcast explores the interdisciplinary nature of physics and life. Guests delve into topics like the limits of the brain, compression in complexity science, energy budgets in the brain, dynamics of living systems, scaling laws in organisms, and the hidden order in nature.

Trailer for Complexity: Physics of Life, from the Santa Fe Institute

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

One way of looking at the world reveals it as an interference pattern of dynamic, ever-changing links — relationships that grow and break in nested groups of multilayer networks. Identity can be defined by informational exchange between one cluster of relationships and any other. A kind of music starts to make itself apparent in the avalanche of data and new analytical approaches that a century of innovation has availed us. But just as with new music genres, it requires a trained ear to attune to unfamiliar order…what can we learn from network science and related general, abstract mathematical approaches to discovering this order in a flood of numbers?Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and in every episode we 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 speak with SFI External Professor, UCLA mathematician Mason Porter (UCLA Website, Twitter, Google Scholar, Wikipedia), about his research on community detection in networks and the topology of data — going deep into a varied toolkit of approaches that help scientists disclose deep structures in the massive data-sets produced by modern life.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.I know it comes as a surprise, but this is our penultimate episode.  Please stay tuned for one more show in May when SFI President David Krakauer and I will reflect on major themes and highlights from the last three-and-a-half years, and look forward to what I’ll be doing next! It’s been an honor and a pleasure to bring complex systems science to you in this way, and hope we stay in touch. I won’t be hard to find.Thank you for listening.Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedInMentioned & Related Media:Bounded Confidence Models of Opinion Dynamics on NetworksSFI Seminar by Mason Porter (live Twitter coverage & YouTube stream recording)Communities in Networksby Mason Porter, Jukka-Pekka Onnela, & Peter MuchaSocial Structure of Facebook Networksby Amanda Traud, Peter Mucha, & Mason PorterCritical Truths About Power Lawsby Michael Stumpf & Mason PorterThe topology of databy Mason Porter, Michelle Feng, & Eleni KatiforiComplex networks with complex weightsby Lucas Böttcher & Mason A. PorterA Bounded-Confidence Model of Opinion Dynamics on Hypergraphsby Abigail Hicock, Yacoub Kureh, Heather Z. Brooks, Michelle Feng, & Mason PorterA multilayer network model of the coevolution of the spread of a disease and competing opinionsby Kaiyan Peng, Zheng Lu, Vanessa Lin, Michael Lindstrom, Christian Parkinson, Chuntian Wang, Andrea Bertozzi, & Mason PorterSocial network analysis for social neuroscientistsElisa C Baek, Mason A Porter, & Carolyn ParkinsonCommunity structure in social and biological networksby Michelle Girvan & Mark NewmanThe information theory of individualityby David Krakauer, Nils Bertschinger, Eckehard Olbrich, Jessica C Flack, Nihat AySocial capital I: measurement and associations with economic mobilityby Raj Chetty, Matthew O. Jackson, Theresa Kuchler, Johannes Stroebel, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert B. Fluegge, Sara Gong, Federico Gonzalez, Armelle Grondin, Matthew Jacob, Drew Johnston, Martin Koenen, Eduardo Laguna-Muggenburg, Florian Mudekereza, Tom Rutter, Nicolaj Thor, Wilbur Townsend, Ruby Zhang, Mike Bailey, Pablo Barberá, Monica Bhole & Nils Wernerfelt Hierarchical structure and the prediction of missing links in networksby Aaron Clauset, Cristopher Moore, M.E.J. NewmanGregory Bateson (Wikipedia)Complexity Ep. 99 - Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I.“Why Do We Sleep?”by Van Savage & Geoffrey West at Aeon MagazineComplexity Ep. 4 - Luis Bettencourt on The Science of CitiesComplexity Ep. 12 - Matthew Jackson on Social & Economic NetworksComplexity Ep. 68 - W. Brian Arthur on Economics in Nouns and Verbs (Part 1)Complexity Ep. 100 - Dani Bassett & Perry Zurn on The Neuroscience & Philosophy of Curious Minds 

For centuries, Medieval life in Europe meant a world determined and prescribed by church and royalty. The social sphere was very much a pyramid, and everybody had to answer to and fit within the schemes of those on top. And then, on wings of reason, Modern selves emerged to scrutinize these systems and at great cost swap them for others that more evenly distribute power and authority. Cosmic forces preordained one’s role within a transcendental order…but then, across quick decades of upheaval, philosophy and politics started celebrating self-determination and free will. Art and science blossomed as they wove together. Nothing was ever the same.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 engage with returning guest, New York Times best-selling author of seven books and SFI Miller Scholar Andrea Wulf, about her latest lovingly-detailed long work, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and The Invention of The Self. In this episode we explore the conditions for an 18th century revolution in philosophy, science, literature, and lifestyle springing from Jena, Germany. Over just a few years, an extraordinary confluence of history-making figures such as Goethe, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, and Novalis helped rewrite what was possible for human thought and action. Admist a landscape of political revolt, this braid of brilliant friends and enemies and lovers altered what it means to be a self and how the modern self relates to everything it isn’t, inspiring later British and American Romantic movements. Arguing for art and the imagination in the work of science and infusing art with reason, Jena’s rebels of the mind lived bold, iconoclastic lives that seem 200 years ahead in retrospect. We stand to learn a great deal from a careful look at Jena and the first Romantics…maybe even how to replicate their great successes and avoid their self-implosion in the face of social turbulence.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/or consider making a donation at santafe.edu/podcastgive. You can find numerous other ways to engage with us at santafe.edu/engage — in particular, you may wish to celebrate ten years of free online courses at Complexity Explorer with SFI Professor Cris Moore’s Computation in Complex Systems, starting March 28th. Learn more in the show notes…and thank you for listening!Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn Related Reading & Listening:Episode 60 - Andrea Wulf on The Invention of Nature, Part 1: Humboldt's NaturegemäldeEpisode 61 - Andrea Wulf on The Invention of Nature, Part 2: Humboldt's Dangerous IdeaThe Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New Worldby Andrea WulfMagnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and The Invention of The Selfby Andrea WulfCommon As Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownershipby Lewis HydeEpisode 37 - The Art & Science of Resilience in the Wake of Trauma with Laurence Gonzales“Nature” (1844)by Ralph Waldo EmersonChopin’s PreludesFinnegans Wakeby James JoyceInterPlanetary Voyager (Interactive Golden Record Liner Notes)by SFI’s InterPlanetary FestivalBlue Planet (BBC)with David Attenborough

How do we get a handle on complex systems thinking? What are the implications of this science for philosophy, and where does philosophical tradition foreshadow findings from the scientific frontier?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 speak with Carlos Gershenson (UNAM website, Google Scholar, Wikipedia, Twitter), SFI Sabbatical Visitor and professor of computer science at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where he leads the Self-organizing Systems Lab, among many other titles you can find in our show notes. For the next hour, we’ll discuss his decades of research and writing on a vast array of core complex systems concepts and their intersections with both Western and Eastern philosophical traditions — a first for this podcast.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.For 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, please help us improve our scicomm by completing a survey linked in the show notes.Or just a copy of the recently resurfaced SFI Press Archival Volume Complexity, Entropy, and The Physics of Information.There’s still time to apply for the Complexity GAINS UK program for PhD students – apps close March 15th.Or come work for us! We are on the lookout for a new Digital Media Specialist, an Applied Complexity Fellow in Sustainability, a Research Assistant in Emergent Political Economies, and a Payroll, Accounts Payable & Receivable Specialist.You can also 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 • LinkedInMentioned & Related Links:Carlos publishes the Complexity Digest Newsletter.His SFI Seminars to date:A Brief History of BalanceEmergence, (Self)Organization, and ComplexityCriticality: A Balance Between Robustness and AdaptabilityFestina lente (the slower-is-faster effect)Antifragility: Dynamical BalanceW. Ross Ashby & The Law of Requisite VarietyHyperobjectsby Timothy MortonHow can we think the complex?by Carlos Gershenson and Francis HeylighenThe Implications of Interactions for Science and Philosophyby Carlos GershensonComplexity and Philosophyby Francis Heylighen, Paul Cilliers, Carlos GershensonHeterogeneity extends criticalityby Fernanda Sánchez-Puig, Octavio Zapata, Omar K, Pineda, Gerardo Iñiguez, and Carlos GershensonWhen Can we Call a System Self-organizing?by Carlos Gershenson and Francis HeylighenTemporal, Structural, and Functional Heterogeneities Extend Criticality and Antifragility in Random Boolean Networksby Amahury Jafet López-Díaz, Fernanda Sánchez-Puig, and Carlos GershensonWhen slower is fasterby Carlos Gershenson, Dirk HelbingSelf-organization leads to supraoptimal performance in public transportation systemsby Carlos GershensonDynamics of rankingby Gerardo Iñiguez, Carlos Pineda, Carlos Gershenson, & Albert-László BarabásiSelf-Organizing Traffic Lightsby Carlos GershensonDynamic competition and resource partitioning during the early life of two widespread, abundant and ecologically similar fishesby A. D. Nunn, L. H. Vickers, K. Mazik, J. D. Bolland, G. Peirson, S. N. Axford, A. Henshaw & I. G. CowxTowards a general theory of balanceby Carlos GershensonA Calculus for Self-Referenceby Francisco VarelaOn Some Mental Effects of The Earthquakeby William JamesSelf-Organization Leads to Supraoptimal Performance in Public Transportation Systemsby Carlos GershensonAlison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I.Complexity Ep. 99Simon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of EpistemologyComplexity Ep. 72David Wolpert on The No Free Lunch Theorems and Why They Undermine The Scientific MethodComplexity Ep. 45The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibilityby Stewart BrandMichael LachmannStuart KauffmanAndreas WagnerCosma ShaliziNassim TalebDoes Free Will Violate The Laws of Physics?Big Think interviews Sean Carroll

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

There are maps, and there are territories, and humans frequently confuse the two. No matter how insistently this point has been made by cognitive neuroscience, epistemology, economics, and a score of other disciplines, one common human error is to act as if we know what we should measure, and that what we measure is what matters. But what we value doesn’t even always have a metric. And even reasonable proxies can distort our understanding of and behavior in the world we want to navigate. Even carefully collected biometric data can occlude the other factors that determine health, or can oversimplify a nuanced conversation on the plural and contextual dimensions of health, transforming goals like functional fitness into something easier to quantify but far less useful. This philosophical conundrum magnifies when we consider governance at scales beyond those at which Homo sapiens evolved to grasp intuitively: What should we count to wisely operate a nation-state? How do we practice social science in a way that can inform new, smarter species of   political economy? And how can we escape the seductive but false clarity of systems that rain information but do not enhance collective wisdom?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 Paul Smaldino at UC Merced and University of Utah Professor of Philosophy  C. Thi Nguyen. In this episode we talk about   value capture and legibility, viewpoint diversity, issues that plague big governments, and expert identification problems…and map the challenges “ahead of us” as SFI continues as the hub of a five-year international research collaboration into emergent political economies. (Find links to all previous episodes in this sub-series in the notes below.)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.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 Complex ity 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.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedInMentioned & Related Links:Transparency Is Surveillanceby C. Thi NguyenThe Seductions of Clarityby C. Thi NguyenThe Natural Selection of Bad Scienceby Paul Smaldino and Richard McElreathMaintaining transient diversity is a general principle for improving collective problem solvingby Paul Smaldino, Cody Moser, Alejandro Pérez Velilla, Mikkel WerlingThe Division of Cognitive Laborby Philip KitcherThe Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in The Natural Sciencesby Eugene WignerOn Crashing The Barrier of Meaning in A.I.by Melanie MitchellSeeing Like A Stateby James C. ScottJim RuttSlowed Canonical Progress in Large Fields of Scienceby Johan Chu and James EvansThe Coming Battle for the COVID-19 Narrativeby Wendy Carlin and Samuel BowlesPeter TurchinIn The Country of The Blindby Michael Flynn82 - David Krakauer on Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibility (EPE 01)83 - Eric Beinhocker & Diane Coyle on Rethinking Economics for A Sustainable & Prosperous World (EPE 02)84 - Ricardo Hausmann & J. Doyne Farmer on Evolving Technologies & Market Ecologies (EPE 03)91 - Steven Teles & Rajiv Sethi on Jailbreaking The Captured Economy (EPE 04)97 - Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society (EPE 05)

This is a podcast by and for the curious — and yet, in over three years, we have pointed curiosity at nearly every topic but itself. What is it, anyway? Are there worse and better frames for understanding how desire and wonder, exploration and discovery play out in both the brain and in society? How is scientific research like an amble through the woods? What juicy insights bubble up where neuroscientists, historians, philosophers, and mathematicians meet to answer questions like these? And how long of a path must we traverse to get there?In this episode, we talk with SFI External Professor Dani Bassett, physicist and neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, and their birth twin Perry Zurn, philosopher at American University in Washington, DC. You might consider each one of two lenses in a stereoscopic inquiry. Their new MIT Press book Curious Minds: The Power of Connection bridges quantity and quality to recast curiosity as a phenomenon of networks — as a kind of “edgework” (generative, drawing new associations) instead of “acquistion” (of individuals collecting facts). The brain, after all, is made of networked neurons, and society’s a kind of super-brain of networked people, so why not think in terms of links?  Their research offers a taxonomy of kinds of curiosity — three different ways that people move through knowledge networks. Traveling across a web of related ideas, rupturing and mending, weaving, percolating, synthesizing, we embody and perform the objects of their academic study. We hope you find this lively and self-referential conversation offers you a helpful map as you draw your distinct connectome through the world of what is and what could be known...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.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!  Apps close February 1st.OR Apply to participate in the Complex Systems Summer School.OR 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!)Thank you for listening…EDITORIAL CORRECTION: We mention a review of Cormac McCarthy's latest novels in this discussion. The correct link is to James Wood’s piece in The New Yorker, not Michael Gorra’s in NYRB. 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 • LinkedInMentioned & Related Links:Curious Minds: The Power of Connectionby Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett (MIT Press, 2022)Curiosity as filling, compressing, and reconfiguring knowledge networksby Shubhankar P. Patankar, Dale Zhou, Christopher W. Lynn, Jason Z. Kim, Mathieu Ouellet, Harang Ju, Perry Zurn, David M. Lydon-Staley, Dani S. BassettMurray Gell-Mann on information overload (from A Crude Look At The Whole) [Video]The Arrival of the Fittest: How Nature Innovates by SFI External Professor Andreas WagnerComplexity 99: Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I.Complexity 80: Mingzhen Lu on The Evolution of Root Systems & Biogeochemical CyclingBusybody, Hunter, Dancer: Three Historical Models of Curiosityby Perry ZurnHunters, busybodies and the knowledge network building associated with deprivation curiosityby David M. Lydon-Staley, Dale Zhou, Ann Sizemore Blevins, Perry Zurn & Danielle S. BassettComplexity 29: On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David KrakauerThe Dimensions of Experience: A Natural History of Consciousness by Andrew P. SmithComplexity 68: W. Brian Arthur on Economics in Nouns and Verbs (Part 1)Complexity 90: Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human DataomeComplexity 94: David Wolpert & Farita Tasnim on The Thermodynamics of CommunicationComplexity 35: Scaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West (Part 1)Complexity 87: Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale IntelligenceThe extent and drivers of gender imbalance in neuroscience reference listsby Jordan D. Dworkin, Kristin A. Linn, Erin G. Teich, Perry Zurn, Russell T. Shinohara & Danielle S. BassettUnderflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice by Cleo Wölfle HazardThe Sounds of Life by Karen BakkerBraiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall KimmererDirk Brockmann’s interactive explorablesNicky Case’s interactive explorablesThe Thing From The Future (speculative futurism card game by Stuart Candy & Jeff Watson at Situation Lab)Bayo Akomolafe (re: networks, the nonhuman turn, and questioning the rhetoric of individuals as “designers”)LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text modelsby Christoph Schuhmann, Romain Beaumont, Richard Vencu, Cade Gordon, Ross Wightman, Mehdi Cherti, Theo Coombes, Aarush Katta, Clayton Mullis, Mitchell Wortsman, Patrick Schramowski, Srivatsa Kundurthy, Katherine Crowson, Ludwig Schmidt, Robert Kaczmarczyk, Jenia JitsevComplexity 86: Dmitri Tymoczko on The Shape of Music: Mathematical Order in Western TonalityDani & Perry on SFI External Professor Sean Carroll’s MINDSCAPE Podcast