Synthetic Brains and Minds: What is Possible?

In our search for the laws of cognitive complexity, we use available evidence from existing life forms — we analyze evolutionary trees and make comparative analyses between them. But there is another path for our search — building new theories, evolving artificial minds, and engineering living and non-living cognitive systems. This lecture explores how synthetic biology, artificial life, physics, and artificial intelligence can help us answer questions about the diversity of cognitive complexity and determine if synthetic cognitions are different from ours.

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.

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.