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 cognition — what defines the threshold at which so-called “solid” brains transition into “liquids”? And how might we apply these and related lessons from ecology and evolution to help steward a diverse and thriving future with technology, and keep the biosphere afloat? 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 the show we talk to SFI External Professor Ricard Solé of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Website, Twitter, Google Scholar) about liquid and solid brains, the scaling of cognition, criticality, contagions, and terraforming our own planet with synthetic bio. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. 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, including our upcoming program for Undergraduate Complexity Research, our new SFI Press book Ex Machina by John H. Miller, and an open postdoctoral fellowship in Belief Dynamics — at santafe.edu/engage. Lastly, join us June 19-23 for Collective Intelligence: Foundations + Radical Ideas, a first-ever event open to both academics and professionals, with sessions on adaptive matter, animal groups, brains, AI, teams, and more.  Space is limited! Apps close February 1st. Learn more on our website. 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 Referenced & Related Works Liquid and Solid Brains: Mapping the Cognition Space SFI Seminar by Ricard Solé John Hopfield (re: biology as computation) Synthetic transitions: towards a new synthesis by Ricard Solé Complexity 93 - Kate Adamala on Synthetic Biology, Origins of Life, and Bioethics The Multiple Paths to Multiple Life by Chris Kempes and David Krakauer Simon Conway Morris (re: macroevolutionary trends) Scale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolution by Jaewon Shin et al. Smarter Parts Make Collective Systems Too Stubborn by Jordana Cepelewicz at Quanta Magazine Complexity 90 - Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome Will Ratcliff (re: yeasts and emergent multi-cellularity) Complexity 29 - On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 3) Synthetic criticality in cellular brains by Ricard Solé et al. Tom Ray (re: artificial life) Complexity and fragility in ecological networks by Ricard Solé and José Montoya Ecological Networks and Their Fragility by José Montoya, Stuart Pimm, and Ricard Solé The small world of human language by Ramon Ferrer i Cancho and Ricard Solé Macroscopic patterns of interacting contagions are indistinguishable from social reinforcement by Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, Sam Scarpino, and Jean-Gabriel Young Complexity 56 - J. Doyne Farmer on The Complexity Economics Revolution Complexity 66 - Katherine Collins on Better Investing Through Biomimicry Chris Langton (re: criticality) Jim Crutchfield (re: the edge of chaos) Per Bak (re: self-organized criticality) Complexity 10 - Melanie Moses on Metabolic Scaling in Biology & Computation Complexity 3 - Sabine Hauert on Swarming Across Scales Niles Eldredge (re: punctuated equilibria) Terraforming the biosphere: can bioengineering save us? SFI Seminar by Ricard Solé Ecological complexity and the biosphere: the next 30 years by Ricard Solé and Simon Levin Ecological firewalls for synthetic biology by Blai Vidiella and Ricard Solé Rachel Armstrong (re: synthetic biology for CO2 fixing in concrete) Stewardship of global collective behavior by Joseph Bak-Coleman et al. Complexity 64 - Reconstructing Ancient Superhighways with Stefani Crabtree and Devin White Complexity 5 - Jennifer Dunne on Food Webs & ArchaeoEcology