Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
344 episodes - English - Latest episode: 9 days ago - ★★★★★ - 3.7K ratingsEver wanted to know how music affects your brain, what quantum mechanics really is, or how black holes work? Do you wonder why you get emotional each time you see a certain movie, or how on earth video games are designed? Then you’ve come to the right place. Each week, Sean Carroll will host conversations with some of the most interesting thinkers in the world. From neuroscientists and engineers to authors and television producers, Sean and his guests talk about the biggest ideas in science, philosophy, culture and much more.
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
279 | Ellen Langer on Mindfulness and the Body
June 17, 2024 11:46 - 1 hour - 65.8 MBFor those of us who are not dualists, the mind arises from our physical bodies -- mostly the brain, but the rest of the body has a role to play. And yet it remains tempting to treat the mind as a thing in itself, disconnected from how the body is doing. Ellen Langer is a psychologist who is one of the foremost researchers on the idea of mindfulness -- the cognitive skill of paying to one's thoughts, as well as to one's external environment. Her most recent book is The Mindful Body: ...
Listen Now: Wow in the World's Summer of Wow!
June 11, 2024 08:00 - 6 minutes - 5.73 MBWow in the World is the #1 science podcast for kids and their grown-ups. Hosts Mindy Thomas and Guy Raz share stories about the latest news in science, technology, and innovation. Stories that give kids hope, agency and make us all say "WOW"! New episodes come out every Monday. Listen to Wow in the World: http://wondery.fm/wowintheworld. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
278 | Kieran Healy on the Technology of Ranking People
June 10, 2024 12:02 - 1 hour - 69.5 MBWe claim to love all of our children, friends, and students equally. But perhaps deep down you assign a ranking to them, from favorite to not-so-favorite. Ranking and quantifying people is an irresistible human tendency, and modern technology has made it ubiquitous. In this episode I talk with sociologist Kieran Healy, who has co-authored (with Marion Fourcade) the new book The Ordinal Society, about how our lives are measured and processed by the technological ecosystem around us. ...
AMA | June 2024
June 03, 2024 12:03 - 3 hours - 219 MBWelcome to the June 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy! Support Mindscape on Patreon. Blo...
277 | Cumrun Vafa on the Universe According to String Theory
May 27, 2024 07:58 - 1 hour - 75.5 MBString theory, the current leading candidate for a theory of quantum gravity as well as other particles and forces, doesn't connect directly to the world we see. It's possible that there is a large landscape of possible states of theory, with the hope that one of them represents our universe. The existence of a landscape implies the existence of a corresponding swampland -- universes that are not compatible with string theory. I talk with Cumrun Vafa, a respected physicist and origi...
276 | Gavin Schmidt on Measuring, Predicting, and Protecting Our Climate
May 20, 2024 13:13 - 1 hour - 73.1 MBThe Earth's climate keeps changing, largely due to the effects of human activity, and we haven't been doing enough to slow things down. Indeed, over the past year, global temperatures have been higher than ever, and higher than most climate models have predicted. Many of you have probably seen plots like this. Today's guest, Gavin Schmidt, has been a leader in measuring the variations in Earth's climate, modeling its likely future trajectory, and working to get the word out. We talk...
275 | Solo: Quantum Fields, Particles, Forces, and Symmetries
May 13, 2024 10:10 - 2 hours - 121 MBPublication week! Say hello to Quanta and Fields, the second volume of the planned three-volume series The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. This volume covers quantum physics generally, but focuses especially on the wonders of quantum field theory. To celebrate, this solo podcast talks about some of the big ideas that make QFT so compelling: how quantized fields produce particles, how gauge symmetries lead to forces of nature, and how those forces can manifest in different phases, inc...
AMA | May 2024
May 06, 2024 11:50 - 3 hours - 197 MBWelcome to the May 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy! Blog post with questions and transc...
274 | Gizem Gumuskaya on Building Robots from Human Cells
April 29, 2024 10:37 - 1 hour - 64.2 MBModern biology is advancing by leaps and bounds, not only in understanding how organisms work, but in learning how to modify them in interesting ways. One exciting frontier is the study of tiny "robots" created from living molecules and cells, rather than metal and plastic. Gizem Gumuskaya, who works with previous guest Michael Levin, has created anthrobots, a new kind of structure made from living human cells. We talk about how that works, what they can do, and what future developm...
273 | Stefanos Geroulanos on the Invention of Prehistory
April 22, 2024 11:45 - 1 hour - 72.7 MBHumanity itself might be the hardest thing for scientists to study fairly and accurately. Not only do we come to the subject with certain inevitable preconceptions, but it's hard to resist the temptation to find scientific justifications for the stories we'd like to tell about ourselves. In his new book, The Invention of Prehistory, Stefanos Geroulanos looks at the ways that we have used -- and continue to use -- supposedly-scientific tales of prehistoric humanity to bolster whateve...
272 | Leslie Valiant on Learning and Educability in Computers and People
April 15, 2024 13:50 - 1 hour - 62.5 MBScience is enabled by the fact that the natural world exhibits predictability and regularity, at least to some extent. Scientists collect data about what happens in the world, then try to suggest "laws" that capture many phenomena in simple rules. A small irony is that, while we are looking for nice compact rules, there aren't really nice compact rules about how to go about doing that. Today's guest, Leslie Valiant, has been a pioneer in understanding how computers can and do learn ...
AMA | April 2024
April 08, 2024 11:53 - 3 hours - 178 MBWelcome to the April 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy! Blog post with questions and tran...
271 | Claudia de Rham on Modifying General Relativity
April 01, 2024 13:16 - 1 hour - 74.8 MBEinstein's theory of general relativity has been our best understanding of gravity for over a century, withstanding a variety of experimental challenges of ever-increasing precision. But we have to be open to the possibility that general relativity -- even at the classical level, aside from any questions of quantum gravity -- isn't the right theory of gravity. Such speculation is motivated by cosmology, where we have a good model of the universe but one with a number of loose ends. ...
270 | Solo: The Coming Transition in How Humanity Lives
March 25, 2024 13:56 - 2 hours - 118 MBTechnology is changing the world, in good and bad ways. Artificial intelligence, internet connectivity, biological engineering, and climate change are dramatically altering the parameters of human life. What can we say about how this will extend into the future? Will the pace of change level off, or smoothly continue, or hit a singularity in a finite time? In this informal solo episode, I think through what I believe will be some of the major forces shaping how human life will chang...
269 | Sahar Heydari Fard on Complexity, Justice, and Social Dynamics
March 18, 2024 12:43 - 1 hour - 65 MBWhen it comes to social change, two questions immediately present themselves: What kind of change do we want to see happen? And, how do we bring it about? These questions are distinct but related; there's not much point in spending all of our time wanting change that won't possibly happen, or working for change that wouldn't actually be good. Addressing such issues lies at the intersection of philosophy, political science, and social dynamics. Sahar Heydari Fard looks at all of thes...
AMA | March 2024
March 11, 2024 13:06 - 3 hours - 216 MBWelcome to the March 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Big congrats this month to Ryan Funakosh...
268 | Matt Strassler on Relativity, Fields, and the Language of Reality
March 04, 2024 12:53 - 1 hour - 82.7 MBIn the 1860s, James Clerk Maxwell argued that light was a wave of electric and magnetic fields. But it took over four decades for physicists to put together the theory of special relativity, which correctly describes the symmetries underlying Maxwell's theory. The delay came in part from the difficulty in accepting that light was a wave, but not a wave in any underlying "aether." Today our most basic view of fundamental physics is found in quantum field theory, which posits that eve...
267 | Benjamin Breen on Margaret Mead, Psychedelics, and Utopia
February 26, 2024 12:39 - 1 hour - 67 MBThe twentieth century was something, wasn't it? Margaret Mead, as well as her onetime-husband Gregory Bateson, managed to play roles in several of its key developments: social anthropology and its impact on sex & gender mores, psychedelic drugs and their potential use for therapeutic purposes, and the origin of cybernetics, to name a few. Benjamin Breen discusses this impactful trajectory in his new book, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psy...
266 | Christoph Adami on How Information Makes Sense of Biology
February 19, 2024 13:10 - 1 hour - 73.6 MBEvolution is sometimes described -- not precisely, but with some justification -- as being about the "survival of the fittest." But that idea doesn't work unless there is some way for one generation to pass down information about how best to survive. We now know that such information is passed down in a variety of ways: through our inherited genome, through epigenetic factors, and of course through cultural transmission. Chris Adami suggests that we update Dobzhansky's maxim "Nothin...
AMA | February 2024
February 12, 2024 14:31 - 3 hours - 187 MBWelcome to the February 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy! Blog post with questions and t...
265 | John Skrentny on How the Economy Mistreats STEM Workers
February 05, 2024 13:15 - 1 hour - 73.5 MBUniversities and their students are constantly being encouraged to produce more graduates majoring in STEM fields -- science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. That's the kind of training that will get you a rewarding job, students are told, while at the policy level it is emphasized how STEM workers are needed to drive innovation and growth. In his new book Wasted Education, sociologist John Skrentny points out that the post-graduation trajectories of STEM graduates are mor...
264 | Sabine Stanley on What's Inside Planets
January 29, 2024 12:46 - 1 hour - 66.4 MBThe radius of the Earth is over 6,000 kilometers, but the deepest we've ever dug below the surface is only about 12 km. Yet we have a quite reliable idea of the structure of the Earth's interior -- inner core, outer core, mantle, crust -- not to mention pretty good pictures of what's going on inside some other planets. How do we know those things, and what new things are we learning in the exoplanet era? I talk with astrophysicist and planetary scientist Sabine Stanley about how we ...
263 | Chris Quigg on Symmetry and the Birth of the Standard Model
January 22, 2024 13:28 - 1 hour - 78.9 MBEinstein's theory of general relativity is distinguished by its singular simplicity and beauty. The Standard Model of Particle Physics, by contrast, is a bit of a mess. So many particles and interactions, each acting somewhat differently, with a bunch of seemingly random parameters. But lurking beneath the mess are a number of powerful and elegant ideas, many of them stemming from symmetries and how they are broken. I talk about some of these ideas with Chris Quigg, who with collabo...
262 | Eric Schwitzgebel on the Weirdness of the World
January 15, 2024 13:25 - 1 hour - 73.4 MBScientists and philosophers sometimes advocate pretty outrageous-sounding ideas about the fundamental nature of reality. (Arguably I have been guilty of this.) It shouldn't be surprising that reality, in regimes far away from our everyday experience, fails to conform to common sense. But it's also okay to maintain a bit of skepticism in the face of bizarre claims. Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel wants us to face up to the weirdness of the world. He claims that there are no non-weird w...
261 | Sanjana Curtis on the Origins of the Elements
January 08, 2024 13:07 - 1 hour - 61.8 MBIn mid-20th-century cosmology, there was a debate over the origin of the chemical elements. Some thought that they could be produced in the Big Bang, while others argued that they were made inside stars. The truth turns out to be a combination of both, with additional complications layered in. Some of the elements of the periodic table come all the way from the Big Bang, but others are made inside stars or in stellar explosions. But still others are made by cosmic rays or when neutr...
260 | Ricard Solé on the Space of Cognitions
January 01, 2024 14:15 - 1 hour - 64.1 MBOctopuses, artificial intelligence, and advanced alien civilizations: for many reasons, it's interesting to contemplate ways of thinking other than whatever it is we humans do. How should we think about the space of all possible cognitions? One aspect is simply the physics of the underlying substrate, the physical stuff that is actually doing the thinking. We are used to brains being solid -- squishy, perhaps, but consisting of units in an essentially fixed array. What about liquid ...
Holiday Message: Reflections on Immortality
December 18, 2023 13:35 - 55 minutes - 50.8 MBThe final Mindscape podcast of each year is devoted to a short, reflective Holiday Message. This year the theme is Immortality: whether it's an attractive idea, and whether the laws of physics and cosmology would allow for it in principle. (Spoiler: they do not.) Mindscape will return as usual on January 1, 2024. Happy holidays everyone! Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/12/18/holiday-message-2023-reflections-on-immortality/ Support Minds...
259 | Adam Frank on What Aliens Might Be Like
December 11, 2023 13:50 - 1 hour - 71.9 MBIt wasn't that long ago that topics like the nature of consciousness, or the foundations of quantum mechanics, or prospects for extraterrestrial life were considered fringey and disreputable by much of the scientific community. In all these cases, the tide of opinion is gradually changing. Life on other worlds, in particular, has seen a remarkable growth in interest -- how life could start on other worlds, how we can detect it in the solar system and on exoplanets, and even thoughts...
AMA | December 2023
December 04, 2023 12:44 - 3 hours - 198 MBWelcome to the December 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy! Blog post with questions and t...
258 | Solo: AI Thinks Different
November 27, 2023 12:21 - 1 hour - 74 MBThe Artificial Intelligence landscape is changing with remarkable speed these days, and the capability of Large Language Models in particular has led to speculation (and hope, and fear) that we could be on the verge of achieving Artificial General Intelligence. I don't think so. Or at least, while what is being achieved is legitimately impressive, it's not anything like the kind of thinking that is done by human beings. LLMs do not model the world in the same way we do, nor are they...
257 | Derek Guy on the Theory and Practice of Dressing Well
November 20, 2023 14:27 - 1 hour - 73.9 MBPutting on clothes is one of the most universal human experiences. Inevitably, this involves choices; maybe you just grab the cheapest and most convenient clothing available, or maybe you want to fit seamlessly into your local environment, whatever that might be. But maybe you choose to dress more consciously, putting a bit of effort into crafting a personal style and creating a desired impression in others. Derek Guy has, to his own surprise, become well-known as the menswear guy o...
256 | Kelly and Zach Weinersmith on Building Cities on the Moon and Mars
November 13, 2023 12:33 - 1 hour - 77.2 MBThere is an undeniable romance in the idea of traveling to, and even living in, outer space. In recent years, a pragmatic justification has become increasingly popular: the Earth is vulnerable to threats both natural and human-made, and it seems only prudent to spread life to other locations in case a disaster befalls our home planet. But how realistic is such a grand ambition? The wife-and-husband team of Kelly and Zack Weinersmith have tackled this question from a dizzying number ...
AMA | November 2023
November 06, 2023 12:36 - 4 hours - 238 MBWelcome to the November 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy! Blog post with questions and t...
255 | Michael Muthukrishna on Developing a Theory of Everyone
October 30, 2023 11:53 - 1 hour - 70.8 MBA "Theory of Everything" is physicists' somewhat tongue-in-cheek phrase for a hypothetical model of all the fundamental physical interactions. Of course, even if we had such a theory, it would tell us nothing new about higher-level emergent phenomena, all the way up to human behavior and society. Can we even imagine a "Theory of Everyone," providing basic organizing principles for society? Michael Muthukrishna believes we can, and indeed that we can see the outlines of such a theory...
254 | William Egginton on Kant, Heisenberg, and Borges
October 23, 2023 11:21 - 1 hour - 61.3 MBIt can be tempting, when first introduced to a deep concept of physics like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, to draw grand philosophical conclusions about the impossibility of knowing anything precisely. That is generally a temptation to be resisted, just because it's so easy to do it wrong. But there is absolutely a place for a careful humanistic synthesis of these kinds of scientific ideas with other ideas, for example from philosophy or literature. That's the kind of task Will...
253 | David Deutsch on Science, Complexity, and Explanation
October 16, 2023 11:48 - 1 hour - 93.5 MBDavid Deutsch is one of the most creative scientific thinkers working today, who has as a goal to understand and explain the natural world as best we can. He was a pioneer in quantum computing, and has long been an advocate of the Everett interpretation of quantum theory. He is also the inventor of constructor theory, a new way of conceptualizing physics and science more broadly. But he also has a strong interest in philosophy and epistemology, championing a Popperian explanation-ba...
AMA | October 2023
October 09, 2023 11:24 - 2 hours - 163 MBWelcome to the October 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy! Blog post with questions and tr...
252 | Hannah Ritchie on Keeping Hope for the Planet Alive
October 02, 2023 11:27 - 1 hour - 69.2 MBOur planet and its environment are in bad shape, in all sorts of ways. Those of us who want to improve the situation face a dilemma. On the one hand, we have to be forceful and clear-headed about how the bad the situation actually is. On the other, we don't want to give the impression that things are so bad that it's hopeless. That could -- and, empirically, does -- give people the impression that there's no point in working to make things better. Hannah Ritchie is an environmental ...
251 | Rosemary Braun on Uncovering Patterns in Biological Complexity
September 25, 2023 11:38 - 1 hour - 65.3 MBBiological organisms are paradigmatic emergent systems. That atoms of which they are made mindlessly obey the local laws of physics; even cells and organs do their individual jobs without explicitly understanding the larger whole of which they are a part. And yet the system as a whole functions beautifully, with apparent purpose and function. How do the small parts come together to form the greater whole? I talk with biophysicist Rosemary Braun about what we're learning about collec...
250 | Brendan Nyhan on Navigating the Information Ecosystem
September 18, 2023 11:52 - 57 minutes - 52.9 MBThe modern world inundates us with both information and misinformation. What are the forces that conspire to make misinformation so prevalent? Can we combat the flow of misinformation, perhaps by legal restrictions? Would that even be a good idea? How can individuals help distinguish between true and false claims as they come in? What are the biases that we are all subject to? I talk to political scientist Brendan Nyhan about how information and misinformation spread, and what we ca...
249 | Peter Godfrey-Smith on Sentience and Octopus Minds
September 11, 2023 11:23 - 1 hour - 80.7 MBThe study of cognition and sentience would be greatly abetted by the discovery of intelligent alien beings, who presumably developed independently of life here on Earth. But we do have more than one data point to consider: certain vertebrates (including humans) are quite intelligent, but so are certain cephalopods (including octopuses), even though the last common ancestor of the two groups was a simple organism hundreds of millions of years ago that didn't have much of a nervous sy...
AMA | September 2023
September 04, 2023 12:37 - 4 hours - 223 MBWelcome to the September 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy! Blog post with questions and ...
248 | Yejin Choi on AI and Common Sense
August 28, 2023 11:14 - 1 hour - 66.5 MBOver the last year, AI large-language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have demonstrated a remarkable ability to carry on human-like conversations in a variety of different concepts. But the way these LLMs "learn" is very different from how human beings learn, and the same can be said for how they "reason." It's reasonable to ask, do these AI programs really understand the world they are talking about? Do they possess a common-sense picture of reality, or can they just string together wor...
247 | Samuel Bowles on Economics, Cooperation, and Inequality
August 21, 2023 11:30 - 1 hour - 73.7 MBBlog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/08/21/247-samuel-bowles-on-economics-cooperation-and-inequality/ Economics, much like thermodynamics, is a story of collective behavior arising from the interactions of many individual constituents. The big difference is that in economics, the constituents are themselves complicated human beings with their own goals and limitations. We can still make progress by positing some simple but plausible axioms go...
246 | David Stuart on Time and Science in Maya Civilization
August 14, 2023 09:13 - 1 hour - 63.6 MBYou might remember the somewhat bizarre worries that swept through certain circles back in 2012, based on the end of the world being predicted by the Maya calendar. The world didn't end, which is unsurprising because the Maya hadn't predicted that, and for that matter they had no way of doing so. But there is very interesting archeology behind our understanding of how the Maya developed their calendar, as well as other aspects of their language and scientific understanding. Mayanist...
AMA | August 2023
August 07, 2023 10:17 - 3 hours - 200 MBWelcome to the August 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy! Blog post with questions and tra...
245 | Solo: The Crisis in Physics
July 31, 2023 12:34 - 4 hours - 240 MBPhysics is in crisis, what else is new? That's what we hear in certain corners, anyway, usually pointed at "fundamental" physics of particles and fields. (Condensed matter and biophysics etc. are just fine.) In this solo podcast I ruminate on the unusual situation fundamental physics finds itself in, where we have a theoretical understanding that fits almost all the data, but which nobody believes to be the final answer. I talk about how we got here, and argue that it's not really a...
244 | Katie Elliott on Metaphysics, Chance, and Explanation
July 24, 2023 13:16 - 1 hour - 88.6 MBIs metaphysics like physics, but cooler? Or is it a relic of an outdated, pre-empirical way of thinking about the world? Closer to the former than the latter. Rather than building specific quantitative theories about the world, metaphysics aims to get a handle on the basic logical structures that help us think about it. I talk with philosopher Katie Elliott on how metaphysics helps us think about questions like counterfactuals, possible worlds, time travel, mathematical equivalence,...
243 | Joseph Silk on Science on the Moon
July 17, 2023 13:19 - 1 hour - 65.3 MBThe Earth's atmosphere is good for some things, like providing something to breathe. But it does get in the way of astronomers, who have been successful at launching orbiting telescopes into space. But gravity and the ground are also useful for certain things, like walking around. The Moon, fortunately, provides gravity and a solid surface without any complications of a thick atmosphere -- perfect for astronomical instruments. Building telescopes and other kinds of scientific instru...
242 | David Krakauer on Complexity, Agency, and Information
July 10, 2023 13:31 - 1 hour - 85.4 MBComplexity scientists have been able to make an impressive amount of progress despite the fact that there is not universal agreement about what "complexity" actually is. We know it when we see it, perhaps, but there are a number of aspects to the phenomenon, and different researchers will naturally focus on their favorites. Today's guest, David Krakauer, is president of the Santa Fe Institute and a longtime researcher in complexity. He points the finger at the concept of agency. A b...