Hello everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. You all know if you're a listener here that I am on the complexity bandwagon. I think that complex systems are really interesting. I mean maybe that's just kind of obvious. Maybe

everyone thinks complex systems are interesting. The question is can we make

progress thinking about complexity in and of itself.

In other words, there is a human being, here is an economy,

here is the Milky Way Galaxy.

These are three complicated systems. Do they have anything in common? Does it make sense to study the idea

of complexity as a field of study rather than just studying the individual examples of it separately.

So I think that it does make sense and I think that we don't have the answers yet.

We don't have a fully fleshed out theory for how best to think about complexity.

I did the recent podcast with David Crackower where I suggested that maybe we should think

of complexity science as pre-paradigmatic.

He didn't like that. He says he thinks that there's a paradigm out there which is great it's

great that people disagree about this I mean maybe we actually agree on the

substance or just slightly disagreeing about the words.

But one way you can make progress on thinking about complexity is to really narrow in on a particular

kind of complex system and study it from all angles. And if that's true, then what

better kind of complex system to study than the brain or not just the human brain

in its biological specificity, but the idea of an intelligent brain.

Okay? So of course you can study the brain, you can be a neuroscientist, etc, etc.

But you can also take a step back. You can abstract. You can say, okay. etc.

But you can also take a step back. You can abstract. You can say, okay, I think that a human brain is intelligent.

It has thoughts. It does reasoning.

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