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 ex

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 communication between two

David Wolpert explores the Monotheism Theorem, Penrose’s ideas, consciousness, free will, and the notion of uncaused causation, challenging deterministic assumptions and highlighting limits of inference devices. The conversation weaves philosophy, physics, and algorithmic information theory into a provocative debate.-

In this episode Curt Jaimungal talks with David Wolpert about free will, the limits of scientific knowledge, the No Free Lunch theorem, and the Mathematical Universe hypothesis. They explore how Bayesian reasoning, Zen Buddhism, and superdeterminism intersect with physics and philosophy, and critique popular views on f

On the one hand, we have math: a world of forms and patterns, a priori logic, timeless and consistent. On the other, we have physics: messy and embodied interactions, context-dependent and contingent on a changing world. And yet, many people get the two confused, including physicists and mathematicians. Where the two m