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 own our data, but our data owns us — or, at least, the pressure of responsibility to keep providing data to the Internet and its devices (and the wider project of human knowledge construction) implicates us in the evolution of a vast, mysterious, largely ineffable self-organizing system that has grabbed the reins of our economies and cultures. This is, in some sense, hardly new: since humankind first started writing down our memories to pass them down through time, we have participated in the “dataome” — a structure and a process that transcends, and transforms, our individuality. Fast-forward to the modern era, when the rapidly-evolving aggregation of all human knowledge tips the scales in favor of the dataome’s emergent agency and its demands on us… Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity, we talk to Caleb Scharf, Director of Astrobiology at Columbia University, about his book, The Ascent of Information: Books, Bits, Genes, and LIfe’s Unending Algorithm. In this episode, we talk about the interplay of information, energy, and matter; the nature of the dataome and its relationship to humans and our artifacts; the past and future evolution of the biosphere and technosphere; the role of lies in the emergent informational metabolisms of the Internet; and what this psychoactive frame suggests about the search for hypothetical intelligences we may yet find in outer space. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. Note that applications are now open for our Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships! Tell a friend. And if you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn Mentioned and related resources: Caleb’s Personal Website, Research Publications, and Popular Writings Caleb’s Twitter We Are The Aliens by Caleb Scharf at Scientific American We Are Our Data, Our Data Are Us by Caleb Scharf at The Los Angeles Times Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence? by Caleb Scharf at Nautilus Where Do Minds Belong? by Caleb Scharf at Aeon Autopoiesis (Wikipedia) The physical limits of communication by Michael Lachmann, M. E. J. Newman, Cristopher Moore The Extended Phenotype by Richard Dawkins “Time Binding” (c/o Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics) (Wikipedia) The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone by Cosma Shalizi Argument-making in the wild SFI Seminar by Simon DeDeo Coarse-graining as a downward causation mechanism by Jessica Flack If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking? by Kathleen McAuliffe at Discover Magazine When and Why Did Human Brains Decrease in Size? A New Change-Point Analysis and Insights From Brain Evolution in Ants by Jeremy DeSilva, James Traniello, Alexander Claxton, & Luke Fannin Complexity 35 - Scaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West (Part 1) The Collapse of Networks SFI Symposium Presentation by Raissa D'Souza Jevons Paradox (Wikipedia) What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly The Glass Cage by Nicholas Carr The evolution of language by Martin Nowak and David Krakauer Complexity 70 - Lauren F. Klein on Data Feminism (Part 1) Complexity 87 - Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale Intelligence Simulation hypothesis (Wikipedia) Complexity 88 - Aviv Bergman on The Evolution of Robustness and Integrating The Disciplines Building a dinosaur from a chicken by Jack Horner at TED Complexity 80 - Mingzhen Lu on The Evolution of Root Systems & Biogeochemical Cycling Why Animals Lie: How Dishonesty and Belief Can Coexist in a Signaling System by Jonathan T. Rowell, Stephen P. Ellner, & H. Kern Reeve The evolution of lying in well-mixed populations by Valerio Capraro, Matjaž Perc & Daniele Vilone Complexity 42 - Carl Bergstrom & Jevin West on Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World