For 300 years, the dream of science was to understand the world by chopping it up into pieces. But boiling everything down to basic parts does not tell us about the way those parts behave together. Physicists found the atom, then the quark, and yet these great discoveries don’t answer age-old questions about life, intelligence, or language, innovation, ecosystems, or economies.
So people learned a new trick – not just taking things apart but studying how things organize themselves, without a plan, in ways that cannot be predicted. A new field, complex systems science, sprang up to explain and navigate a world beyond control.
At the same time, improvements in computer processing enabled yet another method for exploring irreducible complexity: we learned to instrumentalize the evolutionary process, forging machine intelligences that can correlate unthinkable amounts of data. And the Internet’s explosive growth empowered science at scale, in networks and with resources we could not have imagined in the 1900s. Now there are different kinds of science, for different kinds of problems, and none of them give us the kind of easy answers we were hoping for.
This is a daring new adventure of discovery for anyone prepared to jettison the comfortable categories that served us for so long. Our biggest questions and most wicked problems call for a unique and planet-wide community of thinkers, willing to work on massive and synthetic puzzles at the intersection of biology and economics, chemistry and social science, physics and cognitive neuroscience.
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Multiple worlds, containing multitudes
How human history shapes scientific inquiry
Ep 4: The physics of collectives
Why is life so diverse?
How do we identify life?
What can physics tell us about ourselves?
Relaunch of Complexity Podcast Trailer
Michael Garfield & David Krakauer on Evolution, Information, and Jurassic Park
Mason Porter on Community Detection and Data Topology
Andrea Wulf on Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and The Invention of The Self
Carlos Gershenson on Balance, Criticality, Antifragility, and The Philosophy of Complex Systems
Complex Conceptions of Time with David Krakauer, Ted Chiang, David Wolpert, & James Gleick
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems with Value Metrics & Governance at Scale (EPE 06)
Dani Bassett & Perry Zurn on The Neuroscience & Philosophy of Curious Minds
Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I.
Ricard Solé on Liquid and Solid Brains and Terraforming The Biosphere
Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society (EPE 05)
John Krakauer Part 2: Learning, Curiosity, and Consciousness
John Krakauer Part 1: Taking Multiple Perspectives on The Brain
David Wolpert & Farita Tasnim on The Thermodynamics of Communication
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