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David Krakauer is the president of the Santa Fe Institute, where their mission is officially “Searching for Order in the Complexity of Evolving Worlds.” When I think of the Santa Fe institute, I think of complexity science, because that is the common thread across the many subjects people study at SFI, like societies, economies, brains, machines, and evolution. David has been on before, and I invited him back to discuss some of the topics in his new book The Complex World: An Introduction to the Fundamentals of Complexity Science.
The book on the one hand serves as an introduction and a guide to a 4 volume collection of foundational papers in complexity science, which you’ll David discuss in a moment. On the other hand, The Complex World became much more, discussing and connecting ideas across the history of complexity science. Where did complexity science come from? How does it fit among other scientific paradigms? How did the breakthroughs come about? Along the way, we discuss the four pillars of complexity science – entropy, evolution, dynamics, and computation, and how complexity scientists draw from these four areas to study what David calls “problem-solving matter.” We discuss emergence, the role of time scales, and plenty more all with my own self-serving goal to learn and practice how to think like a complexity scientist to improve my own work on how brains do things. Hopefully our conversation, and David’s book, help you do the same.
- David’s website.
- David’s SFI homepage.
- The book: The Complex World: An Introduction to the Fundamentals of Complexity Science.
- The 4-Volume Series: Foundational Papers in Complexity Science.
- Mentioned:
- Aeon article: Problem-solving matter.
- The information theory of individuality.
Read the transcript.
0:00 – Intro
3:45 – Origins of The Complex World
20:10 – 4 pillars of complexity
36:27 – 40s to 70s in complexity
42:33 – How to proceed as a complexity scientist
54:32 – Broken symmetries
1:02:40 – Emergence
1:13:25 – Time scales and complexity
1:18:48 – Consensus and how ideas migrate
1:29:25 – Disciplinary matrix (Kuhn)
1:32:45 – Intelligence vs. life