SFI's 28th Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture Series - Ricard Solé "Evolving Brains: Solid, Liquid and Synthetic"
Lecture 2 - "Synthentic Brains and Minds: What is Possible"
In our search for the laws of cognitive complexity, we use available evidence from existing life forms — we analyze evolutionary trees and make comparative analyses between them. But there is another path for our search — building new theories, evolving artificial minds, and engineering living and non-living cognitive systems. This lecture explores how synthetic biology, artificial life, physics, and artificial intelligence can help us answer questions about the diversity of cognitive complexity and determine if synthetic cognitions are different from ours.
Ricard Solé is a researcher at the Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA), the head of the Complex Systems Lab at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. He is a member of the Council of the European Complex Systems Society, and serves on the editorial board of several international peer reviewed journals.
One of his main research interests is understanding the possible presence of universal patterns of organization in complex systems, from prebiotic replicators to evolved artificial objects. Key questions are how robust structures develop, how information is incorporated into these structures and how computation emerges. He is also interested in how to determine what are the contributions of selection, chance and self-organization to the evolution of complexity.
Reserve your free tickets to this event via the Lensic Performing Arts Center's box office. Please abide by the Lensic's COVID safety policies.
This lecture will be streamed live via SFI's YouTube channel, and recorded for future viewing.
About the Ulam Memorial Lecture Series
Many of the most famous books in science, including Relativity by Albert Einstein and QED by Richard Feynman, were based on public lectures. The idea behind the series is to have a brilliant scientist deliver a series of public talks on a cutting-edge topic, in honor of the late theoretical mathematician Stanislaw Ulam.
Ulam was a renowned mathematician long associated with Los Alamos National Laboratory who is highly regarded by the Santa Fe Institute's scientific community. Former SFI Vice President Mike Simmons said, "The enormous range of Ulam's scientific thought encompassed not only mathematics but also physics, computation, biology, and much else. He would have been very much at home in the present-day Santa Fe Institute, which was founded in the year of his death."
These lectures can be enjoyed together or independently.
The 2023 Santa Fe Institute Community Lecture Series is free to attend thanks to generous sponsorship by the McKinnon Family Foundation, with additional support from the Santa Fe Reporter, and the Lensic Performing Arts Center.