PODCAST · science
COMPLEXITY
by Santa Fe Institute
The official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. Subscribe now and be part of the exploration!
Episodes
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Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 6: AI’s changing seasons
Guest: Melanie Mitchell, Resident Professor, Santa Fe Institute Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano Follow us on: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn • Bluesky More info: Tutorial: Fundamentals of Machine Learning Lecture:...
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Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 5: How do we assess intelligence?
Guests: Erica Cartmill, Professor, Anthropology and Cognitive Science, Indiana University Bloomington Ellie Pavlick, Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Linguistics, Brown University Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Melanie Mitchell Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano...
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Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 4: Babies vs Machines
Guests: Linda Smith, Distinguished Professor and Chancellor's Professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University Bloomington Michael Frank, Benjamin Scott Crocker Professor of Human Biology, Department of Psychology, Stanford University...
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Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 3: What kind of intelligence is an LLM?
Guests: Tomer Ullman, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University Murray Shanahan, Professor of Cognitive Robotics, Department of Computing, Imperial College London; Principal Research Scientist, Google DeepMind Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Melanie Mitchell Producer: Katherine...
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Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 2: The relationship between language and thought
Guests: Evelina Fedorenko, Associate Professor, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and Investigator, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT Steve Piantadosi, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, and Head of Computation and Language Lab, UC Berkeley Gary Lupyan, Professor of...
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Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 1: What is Intelligence
Guests: Alison Gopnik, SFI External Faculty; Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at University of California, Berkeley; Member of Berkeley AI Research Group John Krakauer, SFI External Faculty; John C. Malone Professor of Neurology, Neuroscience, and Physical Medicine &...
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Trailer for The Nature of Intelligence
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...
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Physics of Life, Ep 6: Multiple worlds, containing multitudes
Guests: Heather Graham, Research Associate at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano Additional sound credits: Digifish music; “Determination of Azimuth,” written by Heather Graham, staged at the...
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Physics of Life, Ep 5: How human history shapes scientific inquiry
Guests: David Krakauer, President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute Sean Carroll, External Professor and Fractal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes...
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Physics of Life, Ep 4: The physics of collectives
Guests: Melanie Moses, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Professor of Computer Science and Associate Professor of Biology at University of New Mexico Hyejin Youn, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Associate Professor at Institute of Northwestern University Hosts: Abha Eli...
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Physics of Life, Ep 3: Why is life so diverse?
Guests: Brian Enquist, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of Arizona Pablo Marquet, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Professor at Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile...
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Physics of Life, Ep 2: How do we identify life?
Guests: Ricard Solé, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Head of the Complex Systems Lab at Universitat Pompeu Fabra Sara Walker, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Associate Director of the ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes...
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Physics of Life, Ep 1: What can physics tell us about ourselves?
Guests: Vijay Balasubramanian, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Cathy and Marc Lasry Professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania Geoffrey West, Shannan Distinguished Professor and Past President, Santa Fe Institute Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes Producer: Katherine...
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Trailer for Physics of Life
Trailer for Complexity: Physics of Life, from the Santa Fe Institute
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Michael Garfield & David Krakauer on Evolution, Information, and Jurassic Park
Episode Title and Show Notes: 106 - Michael Garfield & David Krakauer on Evolution, Information, and Jurassic Park Welcome 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...
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Mason Porter on Community Detection and Data Topology
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...
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Andrea Wulf on Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and The Invention of The Self
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…
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Carlos Gershenson on Balance, Criticality, Antifragility, and The Philosophy of Complex Systems
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...
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Complex Conceptions of Time with David Krakauer, Ted Chiang, David Wolpert, & James Gleick
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...
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Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems with Value Metrics & Governance at Scale (EPE 06)
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…
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Dani Bassett & Perry Zurn on The Neuroscience & Philosophy of Curious Minds
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?...
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Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I.
Humans have an unusually long childhood — and an unusually long elderhood past the age of reproductive activity. Why do we spend so much time playing and exploring, caregiving and reflecting, learning and transmitting? What were the evolutionary circumstances that led to our unique life history...
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Ricard Solé on Liquid and Solid Brains and Terraforming The Biosphere
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”?...
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Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society (EPE 05)
In his foundational 1972 paper “More Is Different,” physicist Phil Anderson made the case that reducing the objects of scientific study to their smallest components does not allow researchers to predict the behaviors of those systems upon reconstruction. Another way of putting this is that...
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John Krakauer Part 2: Learning, Curiosity, and Consciousness
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 —...
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John Krakauer Part 1: Taking Multiple Perspectives on The Brain
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...
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David Wolpert & Farita Tasnim on The Thermodynamics of Communication
Communication is a physical process. It’s common sense that sending and receiving intelligible messages takes work…but how much work? The question of the relationship between energy, information, and matter is one of the deepest known to science. There appear to be limits to the rate at which...
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Kate Adamala on Synthetic Biology, Origins of Life, and Bioethics
What does it mean to be alive? Our origins are the horizon of our understanding, and as with the physical horizon, our approach brings us no closer. The more we learn, the more mysterious it all becomes. What if we’re asking the wrong questions? Maybe life did not begin at all, but rather…
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Miguel Fuentes & Marco Buongiorno Nardelli on Music, Emergence, and Society
One way to frame the science of complexity is as a revelation of the hidden order under seemingly separate phenomena — a teasing-out of music from the noise of history and nature. This effort follows centuries of work to find the rules that structure language, music, and society. How strictly...
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Steven Teles & Rajiv Sethi on Jailbreaking The Captured Economy (EPE 04)
As the old nut goes, “To the victor goes the spoils.” But if each round of play consolidates the spoils into fewer hands, eventually it comes to pass that wealthy special interests twist the rules so much it undermines the game itself. When economic power overtakes the processes of democratic...
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Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome
Chances are you’re listening to this on an advanced computer that fits in your pocket, but is really just one tentacle tip of a giant, planet-spanning architecture for the gathering and processing of data. A common sentiment among the smartphone-enabled human population is that we not only don’t...
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Daniel Lieberman on Evolution and Exercise: The Science of Human Endurace
Human beings are distinctly weird. We live for a very long time after we stop reproducing, move completely differently than all of our closest relatives, lack the power of chimpanzees and other primates but completely outdo most other terrestrial mammals in a contest of endurance. If we think…
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Aviv Bergman on The Evolution of Robustness and Integrating The Disciplines
Ask any martial artist: It’s not just where a person strikes you but your stance that matters. The amplitude and angle of a blow is one thing but how you can absorb and/or deflect it makes the difference. The same is true in any evolutionary system. Most people seem to know “the butterfly effect”...
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Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale Intelligence
What is life, and where does it come from? These are two of the deepest, most vexing, and persistent questions in science, and their enduring mystery and allure is complicated by the fact that scientists approach them from a myriad of different angles, hard to reconcile. Whatever else one might...
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Dmitri Tymoczko on The Shape of Music: Mathematical Order in Western Tonality
Math and music share their mystery and magic. Three notes, played together, make a chord whose properties could not be predicted from those of the separate notes. In the West, music theory and mathematics have common origins and a rich history of shaping and informing one another’s field of...
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Seth Blumsack on Power Grids: Network Topology & Governance
We lead our lives largely unaware of the immense effort required to support them. All of us grew up inside the so-called “Grid” — actually one of many interconnected regional power grids that electrify our modern world. The physical infrastructure and the regulatory intricacies required to keep…
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Ricardo Hausmann & J. Doyne Farmer on Evolving Technologies & Market Ecologies (EPE 03)
As our world knits together, economic interdependencies change in both shape and nature. Supply chains, finance, labor, technological innovation, and geography interact in puzzling nonlinear ways. Can we step back far enough and see clearly enough to make sense of these interactions? Can we map…
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Eric Beinhocker & Diane Coyle on Rethinking Economics for A Sustainable & Prosperous World (EPE 02)
In the digital era, data is practically the air we breathe. So why does everybody treat it like a product to be hoarded and sold at profit? How would our world change if Big Tech operated on assumptions and incentives more aligned with the needs of a healthy society? Are more data — or are bigger...
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David Krakauer on Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibility (EPE 01)
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...
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C. Brandon Ogbunu on Epistasis & The Primacy of Context in Complex Systems
Context is king: whether in language, ecology, culture, history, economics, or chemistry. One of the core teachings of complexity science is that nothing exists in isolation — especially when it comes to systems in which learning, memory, or emergent behaviors play a part. Even though this...
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Mingzhen Lu on The Evolution of Root Systems & Biogeochemical Cycling
As fictional Santa Fe Institute chaos mathematician Ian Malcolm famously put it, “Life finds a way” — and this is perhaps nowhere better demonstrated than by roots: seeking out every opportunity, improving in their ability to access and harness nutrients as they’ve evolved over the last 400…
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The Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles with Bryant Walker Smith
Autonomous vehicles hardly live up to their name. The goal of true “driverlessness” was originally hyped in the 1930s but keeps getting kicked further and further into the future as the true complexity of driving comes into ever-sharper and more daunting focus. In 2022, even the most capable...
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Elizabeth Hobson on Animal Dominance Hierarchies
Irrespective of your values, if you’re listening to this, you live in a pecking order. Dominance hierarchies, as they’re called by animal behaviorists, define the lives of social creatures. The society itself is a kind of individual that gathers information and adapts to its surroundings by...
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Hard Sci-Fi Worldbuilding, Robotics, Society, & Purpose with Gary Bengier
As a careful study of the world, science is reflective and reactive — it constrains our flights of fancy, anchors us in hard-won fact. By contrast, science fiction is a speculative world-building exercise that guides imagination and foresight by marrying the known with the unknown. The field is...
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Multiscale Crisis Response: Melanie Moses & Kathy Powers, Part 2
COVID has exposed and possibly amplified the polarization of society. What can we learn from taking a multiscale approach to crisis response? There are latencies in economies of scale, inequality of access and supply chain problems. The virus evolves faster than peer review. Science is…
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Fractal Inequality & The Complexity of Repair: Kathy Powers & Melanie Moses, Part 1
Some people say we’re all in the same boat; others say no, but we’re all in the same storm. Wherever you choose to focus the granularity of your inquiry, one thing is certain: we are all embedded in, acting on, and being acted upon by the same nested networks. Our fates are intertwined, but our...
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Reflections on COVID-19 with David Krakauer & Geoffrey West
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…
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Tina Eliassi-Rad on Democracies as Complex Systems
Democracy is a quintessential complex system: citizens’ decisions shape each other’s in nonlinear and often unpredictable ways; the emergent institutions exert top-down regulation on the individuals and orgs that live together in a polity; feedback loops and tipping points abound. And so perhaps…
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Simon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of Epistemology
What makes a satisfying explanation? Understanding and prediction are two different goals at odds with one another — think fundamental physics versus artificial neural networks — and even what defines a “simple” explanation varies from one person to another. Held in a kind of ecosystemic balance,...
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Lauren Klein on Data Feminism (Part 2): Tracing Linguistic Innovation
Where does cultural innovation come from? Histories often simplify the complex, shared work of creation into tales of Great Men and their visionary genius — but ideas have precedents, and moments, and it takes two different kinds of person to have and to hype them. The popularity of “influencers”...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
The official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. Subscribe now and be part of the exploration!
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COMPLEXITY currently has 119 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
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The official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. Subscribe now and be part of the exploration!
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COMPLEXITY publishes regularly with 119 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
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