Liquid Brains and Solid Brains: The Cognitive Biosphere

We live on a planet filled with life, where very diverse intelligences have emerged, from cells and ants to octopi and humans. With such diversity comes a wide range of brains and minds that living systems use to explore and sense their worlds. This lecture explores what constitutes a “brain”, how complex brains evolved, what differences and commonalities span living brains, and how we might build a space for possible new minds.

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.