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 schem...
24 Mar 20231h 6min
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?We...
9 Mar 20231h 6min
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 ...
24 Feb 20231h
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 ...
9 Feb 20231h 12min
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 understan...
25 Jan 20231h 20min
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...
11 Jan 20231h 8min
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 cog...
22 Des 20221h 13min
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 predi...
10 Des 20221h 17min
