Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

Whenever we talk about complexity, which we do very often hear at Mindscape,

whenever we talk about complexity as a concept, there's a question that is being begged,

which is, is there enough coherence and consistency and commonality

between different manifestations of complex systems to legitimately talk about a field called complexity?

I mean, there are things in the universe that are complex, but do they share enough ideas between them

or features between them that it makes sense to abstract from the individual things to talk about complexity

as its own field of study? So today, our guest is David Krakauer, who is president of the Santa Fe Institute.

Santa Fe, as you probably know, is the World's Leading Research Institute into complex systems.

You'll not be surprised to say that when faced with this question, David says,

yes, there is enough commonality between complex systems to study complexity.

But after that, it was very interesting because I've known David for a while,

you know, I'm part-time faculty at Santa Fe, but his definition of complexity and how he thinks about it

was a little bit different than what I expected, you know, not to give away too much,

but he really puts the ability of complex systems to in some sense reflect the world around them

to carry some information inside them about the rest of the world and adapt to it

as a central defining feature of complexity, which is fascinating to me because many discussions of complexity

start with purely physical systems that don't do that.

Hurricanes are supposed to be a paradigmatic complex systems, and David is very clear.

He says, nope, I don't count that.

And that has very interesting implications for all sorts of things down the line.

So it's a wide-ranging conversation with a lot of name-dropping.

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