COMPLEXITY

In the final episode of the season, Abha sits down with Melanie to hear her perspective. They chat about Melanie’s career and research with Douglas Hofstadter, the author of Gödel, Escher, Bach. They also discuss her opinions on LLMs’ current capabilities, what she thinks of existential questions like the alignment problem, how sustainable the industry is, the difficulty of making claims about concepts like “intelligence” and “understanding,” and what she thinks future technological development should focus on.

There’s an argument to be made that if we train AI systems to learn the way babies do, we’ll get them closer to human-like intelligence. But how our own learning development functions in babyhood is still a mystery that researchers are untangling. We know that the information babies absorb is very different from how an LLM learns, and in today’s episode, with guests Linda Smith and Michael Frank we’ll attempt to look at the world through an infant’s eyes and examine why they’re able to do more with, seemingly, less information.

Complex language is unique to the human species. It’s part of how we evolved, the backbone of our societies, and one of the primary ways we judge others’ intellect. Is it our intelligence that leads to our language abilities, or conversely, does our ability for language enhance our intelligence, or both? How do language and thinking interact? And can one exist without the other? Guests: Evelina Federenko, Steve Piantadosi, and Gary Lupyan.

Right now, AI is having a moment — and it’s not the first time grand predictions about the potential of machines are being made. But, what does it really mean to say something like ChatGPT is “intelligent”? What exactly is intelligence? In this season of the Complexity podcast, The Nature of Intelligence, we'll explore this question through conversations with cognitive and neuroscientists, animal cognition researchers, and AI experts in six episodes. Together, we'll investigate the complexities of human intelligence, how it compares to that of other species, and where AI fits in. We'll dive into the relationship between language and thought, examine AI's limitations, and ask: Could machines ever truly be like us?

In this episode, we examine how the course of human history has shaped our scientific knowledge, why the physics community prioritizes some questions over others, and why progress in complex systems research is especially difficult. Academia continues to operate within set boundaries and students are taught certain concepts as fundamental and to skirt others completely. However, the history of science demonstrates that such concepts aren’t always set in stone. It’s possible that blowing open the “shackles of reality,” such as redefining the concept of life itself, and reprioritizing the problems that scientists want to tackle, might help scientists make more progress in this very difficult world of complexity research.

In the first two episodes of this season, we’ve examined how fundamental rules like scaling laws constrain evolution for all forms of life. But if everything is bound to these core rules, then why do we see exceptions? In this episode, Abha and Chris get into the incredible diversity of plants and animals on this planet, where that diversity comes from, and if it’s possible to make forecasts about the biosphere, just like we do for the weather. And, what happens when biodiversity is threatened?

Humans can live up to age 100, and not 1000 – why? Are there limits in how much our brains can think and compute? The laws of physics can help explain a lot, both about our own human bodies and how we are connected to life all around us.

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

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

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

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

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!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 & Related WorksLiquid and Solid Brains: Mapping the Cognition SpaceSFI Seminar by Ricard SoléJohn Hopfield (re: biology as computation)Synthetic transitions: towards a new synthesisby Ricard SoléComplexity 93 - Kate Adamala on Synthetic Biology, Origins of Life, and BioethicsThe Multiple Paths to Multiple Lifeby Chris Kempes and David KrakauerSimon Conway Morris (re: macroevolutionary trends)Scale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolutionby Jaewon Shin et al.Smarter Parts Make Collective Systems Too Stubbornby Jordana Cepelewicz at Quanta MagazineComplexity 90 - Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human DataomeWill Ratcliff (re: yeasts and emergent multi-cellularity)Complexity 29 - On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 3)Synthetic criticality in cellular brainsby Ricard Solé et al.Tom Ray (re: artificial life)Complexity and fragility in ecological networksby Ricard Solé and José MontoyaEcological Networks and Their Fragilityby José Montoya, Stuart Pimm, and Ricard SoléThe small world of human languageby Ramon Ferrer i Cancho and Ricard SoléMacroscopic patterns of interacting contagions are indistinguishable from social reinforcementby Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, Sam Scarpino, and Jean-Gabriel YoungComplexity 56 - J. Doyne Farmer on The Complexity Economics RevolutionComplexity 66 - Katherine Collins on Better Investing Through BiomimicryChris Langton (re: criticality)Jim Crutchfield (re: the edge of chaos)Per Bak (re: self-organized criticality)Complexity 10 - Melanie Moses on Metabolic Scaling in Biology & ComputationComplexity 3 - Sabine Hauert on Swarming Across ScalesNiles Eldredge (re: punctuated equilibria)Terraforming the biosphere: can bioengineering save us?SFI Seminar by Ricard SoléEcological complexity and the biosphere: the next 30 yearsby Ricard Solé and Simon LevinEcological firewalls for synthetic biologyby Blai Vidiella and Ricard SoléRachel Armstrong (re: synthetic biology for CO2 fixing in concrete)Stewardship of global collective behaviorby Joseph Bak-Coleman et al.Complexity 64 - Reconstructing Ancient Superhighways with Stefani Crabtree and Devin WhiteComplexity 5 - Jennifer Dunne on Food Webs & ArchaeoEcology

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