Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hey everyone, it's Paul. Obviously this is just going to be a very brief announcement, an invitation to you.
[00:00:09] So ever since I read David Krakauer's recent book the Complex An Introduction to the Foundations of Complexity Science, and then had him on the podcast a few episodes ago, I really thought about the idea of actually going through this four volume collection of what David and many people at the Santa Fe Institute found to be the foundational papers in complexity science since 1922, from 1922 through 2000.
[00:00:53] So I went and bought the first volume of the book and if you're watching this, you can see it's massive.
[00:01:01] I wasn't expecting it to be so big, but the books are actually kind of cool. Okay, so let me, let me cut to the chase here. I thought I'm just going to, I'm just going to go through all of these papers because they're annotated in the book. Each of the foundational papers has an introduction by a relevant expert. And then throughout each paper there are annotations in the margins and then along, you know, actually in this first volume, David Krakauer's introduction, which I bought separately, but it actually comes in the first volume, so you wouldn't need that.
[00:01:37] And then I thought instead of just me going through all of them, it might be something fun for us all to do.
[00:01:44] Fun and hopefully useful to create a sort of journal club or group study group sort of thing where we could all meet, having read one of the papers and to discuss the paper. And so the idea would be, and I'll link to a webpage which has more details because I want to keep this really quick. But the idea would be that someone picks one of the papers that they really love.
[00:02:14] For example, I will start off by picking just the first paper.
[00:02:19] The ideal would be to kind of go kind of in order, but maybe skip around. But these things are up for discussion. Someone picks a paper, that person who's excited about that paper is more or less responsible for kind of just knowing about the paper, being able to summarize it and kind of lead a discussion. But I don't, you know, I wouldn't expect anyone, including myself, to deliver, you know, some 30 minute presentation on the paper, rather just to serve as the lead in the discussion.
[00:02:52] And then, you know, I don't know if the person would keep that lead throughout the discussion because hopefully we would all be discussing this, including things like the historical context of the paper, what it did at the time, how it has potentially affected or not affected the cognitive sciences. Moving forward.
[00:03:15] If there are things like relevant these days that, that's, you know, sight that kind of work and you know, kind of its current place in the ethos of studying brains and minds, both natural and artificial. And then also I thought it would be fun if, you know, if any of the people who are discussing it during our little discussion groups had ideas of their own, you know, like could think about how it relates or could relate to their own work or how they could be inspired to do some analysis or think about their own work. So that I thought that would be fun for us to kind of talk about each other's ongoing projects as well.
[00:03:57] What else here? So. Oh yeah. Okay, so. So I thought we would start with the first volume and you wouldn't have to buy the book.
[00:04:06] Actually, before that, let me just say I created an email opt in form on my website. I'll link to it in below here. But it is. The URL is braininspired co complexity group email. But again I'll link to it. And if you opt into that, then if enough people join and I don't know what enough means yet, but enough people. If enough people join and are interested in doing this sort of group discussion thing, I will make it official and I'll email people, probably create like either a Slack or Discord or some sort of group forum where we can all discuss these things offline also.
[00:04:50] And then I'd like to get it going, you know, as soon as we get enough people joined up. Okay. So yeah, I just wanted to show you this book because it is, it is like gigantic. But There are only 20 papers and David's like intro takes up, you know, whatever, like a sixth of seventh or eighth of it right there. But also the, you know, the printing is nice because there are large margins, presumably, so you can take notes. But also that's where the annotations are, are placed in the margins. But, but if you're watching, you can see that there's. So there's a lot of white space in the book. So it can look fairly overwhelming and I don't really want to cart it around with me everywhere I go. So it'll be staying at my home.
[00:05:34] All right, so I think that's what I wanted to say. If you have questions about this, you can reach out to me like either on the Discord, if you're a Patreon supporter or through Patreon, you could message me in Patreon. Oh, so yeah, so the way that this will work in terms of what we do and what gets released and stuff. We will. When we meet, assuming this all happens when we meet, we will record the live session. Anyone can join these live sessions, so that's open to the public, but the recording will then go out to Patreon subscribers to give you guys something extra special. I hope so. I hope that we can get this thing going, and I hope it's going to be a lot of fun. I would love for you to join if you're interested. And that's all this email list is going to be is this Complexity Group discussion group.
[00:06:28] Okay, so look for the link or just go to braininspired co Complexity Group email.
[00:06:38] All right. I'll be seeing you again soon with a new episode release upcoming.
[00:06:45] Hope you're well.
