Complexity Explorer Santa Fe Institute

INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS & REPRESENTATION

 

OVERVIEW & SYNTHESIS

Shea, N. (2018). Representation in cognitive science. Oxford University Press.

Krakauer, J. W. (2022). Representation in Cognitive Science by Nicholas Shea: But Is It Thinking? The Philosophy of Representation Meets Systems Neuroscience. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 92, 267–269.

Thomson, E., & Piccinini, G. (2018). Neural representations observed. Minds and Machines, 28, 191–235.

Dretske, F. (1991). Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes. MIT Press. Preface • Ch. 1 • Ch. 2 • Ch. 3 • Ch. 4 • Ch. 5 • Ch. 6

Ramsey, W. M. (2007). Representation Reconsidered. Cambridge University Press. Contents • Preface • Ch. 1 • Ch. 2 • Ch. 3 • Ch. 4 • Ch. 5 • Ch. 6

 

CORE TOPICS

Other Minds & Social Cognition

Tomasello, M. (2023). Social cognition and metacognition in great apes: A theory. Animal Cognition, 26(1), 25–35.

Clayton, N. S., Dally, J. M., & Emery, N. J. (2007). Social cognition by food-caching corvids: The western scrub-jay as a natural psychologist. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 362(1480), 507–522.

Wellman, H. M. (2011). Developing a theory of mind. In The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Cognitive Development (2nd ed.), 258–284.

Concepts, Abstraction & Analogy

Mitchell, M. (2021). Abstraction and analogy-making in artificial intelligence. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1505(1), 79–101.

Ullman, T. D., & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2020). Bayesian models of conceptual development: Learning as building models of the world. Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, 2, 533–558.

Gopnik, A., & Wellman, H. M. (2012). Reconstructing constructivism: Causal models, Bayesian learning mechanisms, and the theory theory. Psychological Bulletin, 138(6), 1085.

Spelke, E. S. (2023). Précis of What Babies Know. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1–36.

Synchronization

Ariaratnam, J. T., & Strogatz, S. H. (2001). Phase diagram for the Winfree model of coupled nonlinear oscillators. Physical Review Letters, 86(19), 4278.

Collective Motion

Couzin, I. D., Krause, J., Franks, N. R., & Levin, S. A. (2005). Effective leadership and decision-making in animal groups on the move. Nature, 433(7025), 513–516.

Stigmergy & Environmental Coordination

Goss, S., Aron, S., Deneubourg, J. L., & Pasteels, J. M. (1989). Self-organized shortcuts in the Argentine ant. Naturwissenschaften, 76(12), 579–581.

Culture & Shared Representation

Sperber, D. (1985). Anthropology and psychology: Towards an epidemiology of representations. Man, 73–89.

Sperber, D. (2006). Conceptual tools for a naturalistic approach to cultural evolution. In Evolution of Culture: A Fyssen Foundation Symposium (pp. 147–165). MIT Press.

Goodwin, C. (1994). Professional vision. American Anthropologist, 96(3), 606–633.

Foster, J. G. (2018). Culture and computation: Steps to a probably approximately correct theory of culture. Poetics, 68, 144–154.

Arseniev-Koehler, A., & Foster, J. G. (2022). Machine learning as a model for cultural learning: Teaching an algorithm what it means to be fat. Sociological Methods & Research, 51(4), 1484–1539.

Koch, B., Silvestro, D., & Foster, J. G. The evolutionary dynamics of cultural change (as told through the birth and brutal, blackened death of metal music).

Information, Complexity & Individuality

Krakauer, D. C. (2023). Symmetry–simplicity, broken symmetry–complexity. Interface Focus, 13(3), 20220075.

Krakauer, D. C. (in press). The structure of complexity and machine learning science. Frontiers of Complexity.

Krakauer, D., Bertschinger, N., Olbrich, E., Flack, J. C., & Ay, N. (2020). The information theory of individuality. Theory in Biosciences, 139, 209–223.

Daniels, B. C., Flack, J. C., & Krakauer, D. C. (2017). Dual coding theory explains biphasic collective computation in neural decision-making. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 11, 313.

Ramos-Fernandez, G., Smith Aguilar, S. E., Krakauer, D. C., & Flack, J. C. (2020). Collective computation in animal fission-fusion dynamics. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 90.

Embodiment, Action & Tool Use

Makin, T. R., & Krakauer, J. W. (under review). Can the cortical body representation incorporate tools and prosthetic limbs?

Cartmill, E. A., Beilock, S., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2012). A word in the hand: Action, gesture and mental representation in humans and non-human primates. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 367(1585), 129–143.

Language, Gesture & Reference

Trueswell, J. C., Lin, Y., Armstrong III, B., Cartmill, E. A., Goldin-Meadow, S., & Gleitman, L. R. (2016). Perceiving referential intent: Dynamics of reference in natural parent–child interactions. Cognition, 148, 117–135.

Cartmill, E. A (2025). Gestural iconicity and alignment as steps in the evolution of language. Topics in Cognitive Science.

Foster, J. G., & Cartmill, E. A. (2018). Managing the Multiplicity of Meaning. In D. Favareau (Ed.), Co-operative Engagements in Intertwined Semiosis: Essays in Honour of Charles Goodwin. University of Tartu Press.

 

INTELLIGENCE, LEARNING & GENERALIZATION

Measuring Intelligence

Chollet, F. (2019). On the measure of intelligence. arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.01547.

Moskvichev, A., Odouard, V. V., & Mitchell, M. (2023). The ConceptARC Benchmark: Evaluating Understanding and Generalization in the ARC Domain. Transactions on Machine Learning Research.

Webb, T., Holyoak, K. J., & Lu, H. (2023). Emergent analogical reasoning in large language models. Nature Human Behaviour, 1–16.

Simulation & Scientific Intelligence

Lavin, A., Krakauer, D., Zenil, H., Gottschlich, J., Mattson, T., Brehmer, J., ... & Pfeffer, A. (2021). Simulation intelligence: Towards a new generation of scientific methods. arXiv preprint arXiv:2112.03235.

 

FRONTIERS & COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES

Machine Understanding & Large Language Models

Mitchell, M., & Krakauer, D. C. (2023). The debate over understanding in AI’s large language models. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(13), e2215907120.

Shanahan, M. (2023). Talking about large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.03551.

Shanahan, M., McDonell, K., & Reynolds, L. (2023). Role-Play with Large Language Models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.16367.

Conceptual Perspectives on Minds & Machines

Krakauer, D. C. (2022). The Mind Made Matter. Return.

Krakauer, D. C. (2020). Playing Go with Darwin. Nautilus.

Krakauer, D. C. (2020). At the Limits of Thought. Aeon.

Humanities & Representation

Aeschylus. Oresteian Trilogy. Trans. Philip Vellacott. Penguin Classics.

McCarthy, T. (2015). Satin Island. Jonathan Cape.