What is life? What is intelligence? What is… complexity? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly learn how complexity science, chaos theory, and emergence could be the key to understanding our place in the universe with David Krakauer, president of the Santa Fe Institute and professor in complex systems.

Watch at: www.youtube.com

Life thrives far from equilibrium, driven by dynamic energy flows that build complexity and break symmetry. These flows create patterns, from the mesmerizing murmur of starlings to the rippling protein waves in cells, revealing a self-organizing dance in the physics of living systems. By understanding these patterns, we can understand the arrow of time, energy, and the processes that sustain life, challenging us to perceive existence as a vibrant, evolving ballet.

Nikta is an associate professor in the department of physics at MIT and the physics of living systems group. She studies how to adapt and extend physics concepts to describe how tiny biological components give rise to living organisms. Her research group combines concepts from physics, biology, and engineering to decode non-equilibrium mechanisms in active living matter and exploit these mechanisms to engineer functional, active materials.

Watch at: www.youtube.com

The eighth Dialogue was carried out by Sara Imari Walker and Carlos Gershenson. They explored the role of information in the emergence of complexity and the mechanisms underlying organization in natural and artificial systems. The title was: Information and the Emergence of Complexity. The session took place on November 19th, 2025. It was moderated by IAIS Board member Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic.

Read the full article at: www.youtube.com

loadYouTubePlayer(‘yt_video_51t8jM_tP8w_r3jUbC5aY6bFPGwr’);

“The Divided Mind”
I will talk about this recently published book: why did I write it, what was I trying to say that it would have been difficult to communicate in a peer-reviewed paper, and who was I hoping might read it? I will summarise the content and key themes of the book along the following lines, but I hope to leave a good amount of time for discussion. Briefly, the book tries to tell two occasionally interwoven histories. First, the world history of what we now call schizophrenia, especially the controversy between Freudian (brainless) and Kraepelinian (mindless) tribes, the dark crisis of the Kraepelinian concept of dementia praecox before and during World War 2, and its long-lasting imprint on how we continue to think about schizophrenia to this day. Second, my personal story as I became a psychiatrist and tried to get to grips with scientific questions about the origins of schizophrenia and the prospects for better treatments or preventions in future.

Watch at: www.youtube.com

Theoretical computer science has over the years sought more and more refined answers to the question of which mathematical truths are knowable by finite beings like ourselves, bounded in time and space and subject to physical laws. I’ll tell a story that starts with Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem and Turing’s discovery of uncomputability. I’ll then introduce the spectacular Busy Beaver function, which grows faster than any computable function. Work by me and Yedidia, along with recent improvements by O’Rear, Riebel, and others, has shown that the value of BB(549) is independent of the axioms of set theory; on the other end, an international collaboration proved last year that BB(5) = 47,176,870. I’ll speculate on whether BB(6) will ever be known, by us or our AI successors. I’ll next discuss the P!=NP conjecture and what it does and doesn’t mean for the limits of machine intelligence. As my own specialty is quantum computing, I’ll summarize what we know about how scalable quantum computers, assuming we get them, will expand the boundary of what’s mathematically knowable. I’ll end by talking about hypothetical models even beyond quantum computers, which might expand the boundary of knowability still further, if one is able (for example) to jump into a black hole, create a closed timelike curve, or project oneself onto the holographic boundary of the universe.

Watch at: www.youtube.com