Emergence Explained with David Krakauer
Every now and then, a podcast comes along that doesn’t just pass the time, it rearranges how you think about it. One such episode, from Neil deGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk, features David Krakauer, president of the Santa Fe Institute, talking about emergence, complexity, intelligence, and whether life is just problem-solving matter doing its best in a chaotic universe.
That may sound like a lot because, well, it is. But Krakauer has the kind of mind that thrives in the deep end. You get the sense that if you tossed him a broken clock, an octopus in an aquarium and an existential question, he’d calmly rearrange them into a theory of time that makes unsettling sense.
Krakauer is one of those rare thinkers whose job description “professor of complex systems” sounds both vague and unreasonably cool. He traces the arc of complexity science from steam engines to cities to ant colonies to AI, with a kind of amused precision and articulate speech. If you’ve ever wondered why humans build societies that resemble slime moulds, or why consciousness might just be a useful side effect of being confused, this is your man.
The podcast covers it all: from Mars being populated by robots (not humans, yet), to the question of whether chemistry is universal (spoiler: it is), to whether music is (spoiler: maybe). It asks whether AI is clever, or just pretending to be, and whether we’re doing the same. But at the heart of the episode is a quiet reverence for what Krakauer calls emergence: the strange, often beautiful phenomenon by which simple rules give rise to complex behaviours. Birds flock, neurons fire, cities breathe, and somehow, out of it all, intelligence flickers into being. Not because someone designed it, but because complexity happened.
It’s an oddly comforting thought, really. That maybe we don’t need to have all the answers. Maybe the best we can do is pay attention, ask better questions, and marvel at the patterns we didn’t know we were part of. Which, incidentally, is exactly why I listen to podcasts while doing groceries or washing up. Because occasionally, amid the noise, something emerges.