EP135 Dennis Waters on Behavior & Culture in One Dimension

Jim has a wide-ranging talk with Dennis Waters about his book, Behavior and Culture in One Dimension: Sequences, Affordances, and the Evolution of Complexity... Jim has a wide-ranging talk with Dennis Waters about his book, Behavior and Culture in One Dimension: Sequences, Affordances, and the Evolution of Complexity. They chat about the challenges of interdisciplinary work in academia, value in understanding sequences, emergent behavior, constraint dynamics, instructive & descriptive sequences, emergent patterns, why "talk is cheap", co-evolution, the Fermi paradox, origins of life, energetic costs, rate independence vs dependence, laws vs rules, self-referentiality, the importance of language & writing, DNA & RNA, open-endedness, coherent pluralism, the Cambrian explosion, the role of interactors, Dennis' view of AGI plausibility, and much more. Episode Transcript Behavior and Culture in One Dimension Santa Fe Institute Facebook Page The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves JRS: EP40 Eric Smith on the Physics of Living Systems Dennis P. Waters received his Ph.D. in 1990 from the Watson Engineering School at Binghamton University, where his advisor was Howard Pattee. Rather than travel the academic road, Waters became a serial entrepreneur, founding and selling several technical publishing businesses. Since retiring from business, Waters has returned to the research project that inspired his Ph.D., how one-dimensional patterns of DNA, language, and computer code orchestrate the behavior of the three-dimensional world in which we live.