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The following is a conversation with Sarah Walker and Lee Cronin.
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They have each been on this podcast once before individually, and now, for their second time, they re here together.
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Sarah is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist.
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Lee is a chemist and, if I may say so, the real-life manifestation of Rick from Rick and Morty.
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They both are interested in how life originates and develops, both life here on Earth and alien life, including intelligent alien civilizations out there in the cosmos.
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They are colleagues and friends who love to explore, disagree, and debate nuanced points about alien life.
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And so we re calling this an alien debate.
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Very few questions to me are as fascinating as what do aliens look like?
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How do we recognize them?
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How do we talk to them?
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And how do we make sense of life here on Earth in the context of all possible life forms that are out there?
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Treating these questions with the seriousness and rigor they deserve is what I hope to do with this conversation and future ones like it.
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Our world is shrouded in mystery.
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We must first be humble to acknowledge this and then be bold in diving in and trying to figure things out anyway.
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And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
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Check them out in the description.
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It s the best way to support this podcast.
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We got Un-Cruise for adventure, Linode for cloud computing, ExpressVPN for privacy, Roka for style, and Athletic Greens for performance.
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Choose wisely, my friends.
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And now, onto the full ad reads.
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As always, no ads in the middle.
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I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors.
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I enjoy their stuff.
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Maybe you will, too.
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This show is brought to you by a new sponsor called UnCruise Adventures.
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Small ship cruises sailing to Alaska, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Hawaii.
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I have quite a bit of travel coming up and there s something about taking a journey out into the unknown and getting to see nature in ways that you haven t quite seen through the mundane day-to-day of your daily existence.
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Makes you both celebrate the new adventure and yet sort of rekindle your love for the place you call home.
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Anyway, you can save $500 on Alaskan adventures through June for bookings made within 30 days of departure by going to uncruise.com slash pages slash lex.
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That s uncruise spelled U-N cruise dot com slash pages slash lex.
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This episode is also brought to you by Linode, Linux Virtual Machines.
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It s an awesome compute infrastructure that lets you develop, deploy, and scale what applications you build faster and easier.
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This is both for small personal projects and huge systems.
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Lower cost than AWS, but more important to me is the simplicity quality of the customer service with real humans 24-7-365.
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I can t tell you, first of all, how much I love Linux and how much I love cloud services that provide that infrastructure and make it super easy to manage it, to monitor it, to scale things up, to make many copies of it.
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As they say, if it runs on Linux, it runs on Linode.
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Visit linode.com slash lex and click on the create free account button to get started with 100 bucks in free credit.
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That s linode.com slash lex.
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This episode is also brought to you by ExpressVPN.
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I use them to protect my privacy on the interwebs.
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I ve used them for many, many, many years.
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I love ExpressVPN.
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The big red sexy button just makes my heart sing.
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There s a lot of reasons you wanna use a VPN, ExpressVPN being the best one.
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First of all, ISPs are still collecting your data, internet service providers.
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It doesn t matter if you re using Chrome incognito mode, they can still see all the shady stuff you do on the internet.
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Second, you can change the location if you watch different shows on Netflix and Hulu and so on.
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Change your graphic location in a split second and it unlocks those parts of those platforms.
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To me, the most important thing is that ExpressVPN just works.
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It s fast.
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Whatever device you got, whatever operating system, including my favorite, of course, Linux, it works.
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And it works wonderfully.
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It does a simple job and it does it well.
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Go to expressvpn.com slash LexPod to get an extra three months free.
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That s expressvpn.com slash LexPod.
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This show is also brought to you by Roka, the makers of glasses and sunglasses that I love wearing for their design, feel, and innovation on material, optics, and grip.
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Roka was started by two all-American swimmers from Stanford and was born out of an obsession with performance.
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I met one of those founders, Rob, and he s an awesome human being.
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They have a place here in Austin, but more than the place, the people.
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Both brilliant and passionate, and they know what they want to do, which is design a stylish eyewear.
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I actually did a long run today, and I wore the shades.
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Part of the reason I actually wore the shades, it wasn t even that sunny, is I want to kind of escape from the world.
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I want to hide myself from the world.
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Sometimes I just want to hide away.
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It s the introvert in me.
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I was listening to a good audiobook and I wanted to hide away.
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And look good while doing it.
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Which is why I wore Roka sunglasses.
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Check them out for both prescription glasses and sunglasses at Roka.com and enter code Lex to save 20% off on your first order.
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That s Roka.com and enter code Lex.
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This show is also brought to you by Athletic Greens and its newly renamed AG1 Drink, which is an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance.
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It replaced the multivitamin for me and went far beyond that with 75 vitamins and minerals.
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It s the first thing I drink every day.
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I drink it twice a day now.
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It brings my heart joy.
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The joy part might be a placebo effect, I don t know, but the fact of the matter is I do some crazy stuff in terms of physical and mental undertakings.
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I also fast often, I do keto diets, I do carnivore, I do all kinds of crazy stuff, and I can count on Athletic Greens to provide the nutritional basis that frees me to do the crazy stuff I do.
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That s freedom, is having that nutritional foundation.
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They ll give you one month s supply of fish oil when you sign up to athleticgreens.com slash Lex.
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That s athleticgreens.com slash Lex.
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This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Sarah Walker and Lee Cronin.
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First of all, welcome back, Sarah, welcome back, Lee.
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You guys, I m a huge fan of yours, you re incredible people.
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I should say thank you to Sarah for wearing really awesome boots.
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We ll probably overlay a picture later on, but why the hell didn t you dress up, Lee?
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No, I m just kidding.
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This is me dressed up.
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You were saying that you re pink, that your thing is pink, my thing is black and white, the simplicity of it.
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Where s the pink?
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When did it hit you that pink is your color?
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I became pink about...
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I don t know, actually, maybe 2017?
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Did you know me when you first- I think I met you pre-pink.
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Yeah, yeah.
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So about 2017, I think, I just decided I was boring, and I needed to make a statement, and red was too bright, so I went pink.
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Salmon pink.
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Well, I think you were always pink, you just found yourself in 2017.
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There s an amazing photo of him where there s like everybody in their black gown and he s just wearing the pink pants.
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Oh that was at the Wagon and University.
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It s totally nuts.
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100 year anniversary they got me to give the plenary and they didn t they didn t find that outfit for me so they re all wearing these silly hats and these gowns and there was me dressed up in pink looking like a complete idiot.
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We re definitely gonna have to find that picture and overlay it.
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Big full screen slow motion.
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All right, let s talk about aliens.
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We ll find places we disagree and places we agree.
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Life, intelligence, consciousness, universe, all of that.
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Let s start with a tweet from Neil deGrasse Tyson stating his skepticism about aliens wanting to visit Earth.
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Quote, how egocentric of us to think that space aliens who have mastered interstellar travel across the galaxy would give
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pardon the French, would give a shit about humans on Earth.
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So let me ask you, would aliens care about visiting Earth, observing, communicating with humans?
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Let s take a perspective of aliens, maybe Sarah, first.
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Are we interesting in the whole spectrum of life in the universe?
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I m completely biased, at least as far as I think right now, we re the most interesting thing in the universe.
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So I would expect, based on the intrinsic curiosity that we have and how much I think that s deeply related to the physics of what we are, that other intelligent aliens would want to seek out examples of the phenomena they are to understand themselves better.
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and I think that s kind of a natural thing to want to do, and I don t think there s any kind of judgment on it being a lesser being or not.
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It s like saying you have nothing to learn by talking to a baby.
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You have lots to learn, probably more than you do talking to somebody that s 90, so yeah, so I think they absolutely would.
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So whatever the phenomena is that is human, there would be an inkling of the same kind of phenomena within alien species, and they would be seeking that same
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I think there s gotta be some features of us that are universal, and I think the ones that are most interesting, and I hope I live in an interesting universe, are the ones that are driven by our curiosity and the fact that our intelligence allows us to do things that the universe wouldn t be able to do without things like us existing.
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We re going to define a lot of terms.
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One of them is interesting.
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Yes.
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That s a very interesting term to try to define.
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Lee, what do you think?
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Are humans interesting for aliens?
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Well, let s take it from our perspective.
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We want to go find aliens as a species quite desperately.
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So, if we put the shoe on the other foot, of course we re interesting.
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But I m wondering, and assuming that we re at the right technological capabilities to go searching for aliens, then that s interesting.
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So what I mean is, if there needs to be a massive leap in technology that we don t have, how will aliens prioritize coming to Earth and other places?
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But I do think that they would come and find us because they d want to find out about our culture,
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What things are universal?
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What about, I mean, I m a chemist, so I would say, well, is the chemistry universal, right?
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Are the creatures that we re gonna find making all this commotion, are they made of the same stuff?
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What does their science look like?
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Are they off planet yet?
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I guess there s, so I think that Neil deGrasse Tyson is being slightly pessimistic and maybe trying to,
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play the tune that the universe is vast and it s not worth them coming here.
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I don t think that, but I just worry that maybe we don t have the ability to talk to them, we don t have the universal translator, we don t have the right physics.
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But sure, they should come.
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We are interesting.
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I want to know if they exist.
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It would make it easier if they just came.
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So again, I m gonna use your tweets like it s Shakespeare and analyze it.
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So Sarah tweeted, thinking about aliens, thinking about aliens.
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So how much do you think aliens are thinking about other aliens, including humans?
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So you said we humans want to visit, like we re longing to connect with aliens.
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Why is that?
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Can you introspect that?
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Is that an obvious thing that we should be, like what are we hoping to understand?
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by meeting aliens, exactly.
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Asking as an introvert, it s like, I ask myself this all the time, why go out on a Friday night to meet people?
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What are you hoping to find?
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I think the curiosity, so when I saw Sarah put that tweet, I think I answered it actually as well, which was, we are thinking about trying to make contact, so they almost certainly are, but maybe there s a number of classes.
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There are those aliens that have not yet made contact with other aliens, like us,
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Those aliens have made contact with just one other alien, and maybe it s an anti-climax in slime.
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And aliens that have made contact with not just one set of intelligent species, but several.
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That must be amazing, actually.
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Literally, there is some place in the universe, there must be one alien civilization that s not made contact with not one.
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but two other intelligent civilizations.
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So they must be thinking about, there must be entire degree courses on aliens, thinking about aliens and cultural, universal cultural norms.
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Do you think they will survive the meeting?
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And by the way, Lee did respond saying, that s all the universe wants.
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So Sarah said, thinking about aliens, thinking about aliens.
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Lee said, that s all the universe wants.
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And then Sarah responded, cheeky universe we live in.
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So cheeky is a cheeky version of the word interesting, all of which we ll try to define mathematically.
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Cheeky might be harder than interesting.
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Because there s humor in that too.
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Yes.
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I think there s a mathematical definition of humor, but we ll talk about that in a bit.
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So if you re a graduate student alien looking at multiple alien civilizations, do you think they survive the encounters?
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I think there s a tendency to anthropomorphize a lot of the discussions about alien life, which is a really big challenge.
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Usually when I m trying to think about these problems, I don t try to think about us as humans, but us as an example of phenomena that exist in the universe that we have yet to explain.
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It doesn t seem to be the case that if I think about the features, I would argue are most universal about that phenomenon, that there s any reason to think that a first encounter with another lineage or example of life would be antagonistic.
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I think, yeah, and I think there s this kind of assumption, I mean, going back to Neil deGrasse Tyson s quote, I mean, it kind of bothers me because there s a, I mean, I m a physicist, so I know we have a lot of egos about how much we can describe the world, but that there s this like, because we understand fundamental physics so well, we understand alien life and we can kind of extrapolate, and I just think that we don t, and the quest there is really,
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you know, really to understand something totally new about the universe and that thing just happens to be us.
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I agree, I agree.
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There s something else more profound.
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I think Neil was just being, again, he s just trying to stir the pot.
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I would say from a contingency point of view, I want to know how many ways does the universe build structures, build memories, right?
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And then I want to know if those memories can interact with each other.
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And if you have two different origins of life and then origins of intelligence and then these things become conscious, surely you want to go and talk to them and figure out
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what commonalities you share.
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And it might be that we re just unable to conceive of what they re gonna look like, they re just gonna be completely different, you know, infrastructure.
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But surely we ll want to go and find out a map, and surely curiosity is a property that evolution has made on Earth, and I can t see any reason that it won t happen elsewhere, because curiosity probably exists because we want to find innovations in the environment, we want to use that information to help our technology,
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And also curiosity is like planning for the future.
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Are they going to fight us?
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Are we going to be able to trade with them?
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So I think that Neil s just, I don t know, maybe, you know, I mean, give a shit.
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That s really, I think that s really down on earth, right?
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How would aliens categorize humans, do you think?
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How would we, so let s put it the other way around.
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Slime category.
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Maybe, no, no, no, we, maybe we could, the thing is a bit odd, right?
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Look at Instagram, Twitter, all these people taking selfies.
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I mean, does the universe, is the ultimate state of consciousness thinking beings that take photographs themselves in the
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might upload them to an internet with other thinking beings looking at each other s photos.
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So I think that they will be.
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What s wrong with that?
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I did not say there was anything wrong with it.
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Consciousness manifested at scale.
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Selfies on Instagram.
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It s like the mirror test at scale.
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Yeah, I do think that curiosity is really the driving force of why we have our technology, right?
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If we weren t curious, we wouldn t have left the cave.
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So I think that,
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So I think that Neil s got it completely wrong, in fact.
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Actually, of course they d want to come here.
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It doesn t mean they are coming here.
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We ve seen evidence for that.
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I guess we can argue about that, right?
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But I think that we want, I desperately, and I know that Sarah does too, but I won t speak for you.
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You re here.
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I desperately want to have missions to look for life in the solar system right now.
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I want to map life over the solar system and then I want to understand how we can go and find life as quickly as possible at the nearest stars and also at the same time do it in the lab just to compensate, you know, so sure.
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Yeah, just one more point on this.
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If you think about sort of what s driven the most features of our own evolution as a species and try to map that to alien species, I always think optimism is what s going to get us furthest.
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And so I think a lot of people always think that it s like war and conflict is going to be the way that alien species will expand out into the cosmos.
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But if you just look at how we re doing it and how we talk about it, it s always our future in space is always
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you know, built from narratives of optimism.
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And so it seems to me that if intelligence does get out in the universe, that it s going to be more optimism and curiosity driving it than war and conflict, because those things end up crushing you.
1
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So there might be some selective filter.
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Of course, this is me being an optimist.
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I m a half
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have full kind of person, but.
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Is it obvious that curiosity, not obvious, but what do you think, is curiosity a more powerful force in the universe than violence and the will to power?
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So, because you said you frame curiosity as a way to also plan on how to avoid violence, which is an interesting frame of curiosity.
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But I could also argue that violence is a pretty productive way to operate in the world, which is like, that s one way to protect yourself.
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The best defense is offense.
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I m not qualified to answer this, but I ll have a go.
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I think violence, let s not talk about violence.
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That s the summary of this podcast.
1
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Yeah, but maybe, let s not call it violence, but I call it erasure.
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So if you think about the way evolution works, or the way, obviously corporate assembly theory, but I won t.
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So if you say, curiosity allows you to open up avenues, new graphs, right?
1
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So new features you can play.
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What the ability to erase those things allows you to start again and do some pruning.
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So the universe, I think, curiosity gets you furthest.
1
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Curiosity gets you rockets that land.
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It gets you robots that can make drugs.
1
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It gets you poetry and art.
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Communication and then you know, I often think wouldn t it be great and bureaucracy to have another world war not literally a world war now Please no world nor war but a the equivalent so we get remove all the admin bureaucracy, right?
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All the admin violence get rid of it and start again.
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Do you know what I mean?
1
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because you get layers and you get redundant systems built so actually a Reset, let s not call it violence a reset in some aspects of our Culture and our technology allows us to then
1
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build more important things without the, because how many cookies do I have to click on?
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How many extra clicks do I have in the future of my life that I could remove and a bit of a reset would allow us to start again?
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And maybe that s how I suppose our encounter with aliens will be.
1
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Maybe they will fight with us and say, we re not as excited by you as we thought, we ll just get rid of you.
1
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So they might want to reset Earth.
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Yeah, why not?
1
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To be like, let s see how the evolution runs again.
1
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This seems like they ve, there s nothing new happening here.
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They re observing for a while.
1
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This is just not, let s keep it more fun.
1
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Let s start with the fish again.
1
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I like how you equated violence to resetting your cookies.
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I suppose that s the kind of violence in this modern world where words are violence, resetting cookies.
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I don t know where that came from.
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That s poetic, really.
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Okay, so let s talk about life.
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what is life, what is non-life?
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What is the line between life and non-life?
1
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And maybe at any point we can pull in ideas of assembly theory.
1
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Like how do we start to try to define life?
1
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And for people listening, so Sarah identifies as a physicist and Lee identifies as a chemist.
1
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Of course, they are very interdisciplinary in nature in general.
1
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So what is life?
1
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Yeah.
1
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Yeah.
1
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I love asking that question because it s so absurdly big.
1
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I know, I love it.
1
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It s my absolute favorite question in the whole universe.
1
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So I think I have three ways of describing it right now.
1
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And I like to say all three of them, because people latch on to different facets of them.
1
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And so the whole idea of what Lee and I are trying to work on is not to try to define life, but to try to find a more fundamental theory that explains what the phenomena we call life, and then it should explain certain attributes.
1
SPEAKER_02
And you end up having a really different framing than the way people usually talk.
1
SPEAKER_02
So the way I talk about it, three different ways.
1
SPEAKER_02
Life is how information structures matter across space and time.
1
SPEAKER_02
Life is, I don t know, this one s from you actually, simple machines constructing more complex machines.
1
SPEAKER_02
And the other one is the physics of existence, so to speak, which is life is the mechanism the universe has to explore the space of what s possible.
1
SPEAKER_02
That s my favorite.
1
SPEAKER_00
So can I, yeah, yeah, can I add on to that?
1
SPEAKER_00
Okay, can you say the physics one again?
1
SPEAKER_00
The physics of existence.
1
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, the physics of existence.
1
SPEAKER_02
I don t know what to call it.
1
SPEAKER_02
You know, like if you think of all the things that could exist, only certain things do exist.
1
SPEAKER_02
And I think life is basically the universe s mechanism of bringing things into physically existing in the moment now.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
And what s another one?
1
SPEAKER_01
We were debating this the other day.
1
SPEAKER_01
So if you think about a universe that has nothing in it, that s kind of hard to conceive of, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
Because this is where physicists really go wrong.
1
SPEAKER_01
They think of a universe with nothing in it.
1
SPEAKER_01
They can t.
1
SPEAKER_01
Non-existence is really hard to think of.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
And then you think of a universe with everything in it.
1
SPEAKER_01
That s really hard and you just have this white blob, right, which is everything.
1
SPEAKER_01
But the fact we have discrete stuff in the universe beyond, say, planets, so you ve got stars, space, planet stuff, right, the boring stuff.
1
SPEAKER_01
But I would define life or say that life is where there are architectures, any architectures, and we should stop fixating on
1
SPEAKER_01
Bill is building the architectures to start with, and the fact that the universe has discrete things in it is completely mind-blowing.
1
SPEAKER_01
If you think about it for one second, the fact there s any objects at all, because for me the object is a proxy for a machine that built it, some information being moved around, actuation, sensing, getting resource,
1
SPEAKER_01
And buildings objects so for me everyone s been obsessing about the machine.
1
SPEAKER_01
But I m like, forget the machine, let s see the objects.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I think in a way that assembly theory, we realized maybe a few months ago, that assembly theory actually does account for the soul in the objects, not mystically like say, Sheldrake s morphic resonance or Leibniz s monodology, seeing souls in things.
1
SPEAKER_01
But when you see an object, and I ve said this before, but this object is evidence of thought,
1
SPEAKER_01
And then there s a lineage of those objects.
1
SPEAKER_01
So I think what is fascinating is that, you put it much more elegantly, but the barrier between life and non-life is accruing enough memories to then actuate.
1
SPEAKER_01
So what that means is there are contingency, there are things that happen in the universe get trapped.
1
SPEAKER_01
These memories then have a causal effect on the future.
1
SPEAKER_01
And then when you get those concentrated in a machine and you re actually able in real time, able to integrate the past,
1
SPEAKER_01
the present with the future and do stuff.
1
SPEAKER_01
That s when you are most alive.
1
SPEAKER_00
are you being the machine?
1
SPEAKER_00
Wait a minute, why is the object, so one of the ways to define life, as Sarah said, is simple machines creating complex machines.
1
SPEAKER_00
So there s a million questions there.
1
SPEAKER_00
So how the hell does a simple machine create a complex machine?
1
SPEAKER_01
So this is what we were talking about at the beginning, you have the minimum replicator, so the molecule.
1
SPEAKER_01
So this is what I was trying to convince Sarah of the mechanism, get there years ago, I think, but then you ve been building on it and saying,
1
SPEAKER_01
You have a molecule that can copy itself, but then there has to be some variability, otherwise it s not gonna get more functional.
1
SPEAKER_01
So you need to add bits on.
1
SPEAKER_01
So you have a minimum molecule that can copy itself, but then it can add bits on, and that can be copied as well, and those add-ons can give you additional function to be able to acquire more stuff to exist.
1
SPEAKER_01
So existence is weird,
1
SPEAKER_01
But the fact that there is existence is why there is life.
1
SPEAKER_01
And that s why I realized a few days ago that there must be, that s why alien life must be everywhere, because there is existence.
1
SPEAKER_00
Is there like a conservation of cheeky stuff happening?
1
SPEAKER_00
So like, how can you keep injecting more complex things?
1
SPEAKER_00
Like, doesn t the machine that creates the object need to be as or more powerful than the things it creates?
1
SPEAKER_00
So how can you get complexity from simplicity?
1
SPEAKER_01
So the way you get complexity from simplicity is that you, I m just making this up, but this is kind of my notion, you have a large volume of stuff, so you re able to get seeds, if you like, random cues from the environment, so you just use those objects to basically write on your tape, ones and zeros, whatever.
1
SPEAKER_01
And that is necessarily rich, complex, okay?
1
SPEAKER_01
But it has a low assembly-ness, but even though it has a high assembly number, we can talk about that.
1
SPEAKER_01
But then when you start to then integrate that all into a smaller volume, as over time, and you become more autonomous, you then make the transition.
1
SPEAKER_01
I don t know what you think about that.
1
SPEAKER_02
I think the easiest way to think about it is actually, which I know is a concept you hate, but I also hate, which is entropy.
1
SPEAKER_02
But people are more familiar with entropy than what we talk about in assembly theory.
1
SPEAKER_02
And also the idea that, like say physics as we know it, involves objects that don t exist across time, or as we would say, low memory objects.
1
SPEAKER_02
So one of the key distinctions that- Low memory objects.
1
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, so physics is all- Physicists are low memory objects.
1
SPEAKER_00
Physicists are creators of low memory objects or manipulators of low memory objects.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yep, absolutely.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s a very nice way of putting it.
1
SPEAKER_00
Okay, sorry, go ahead.
1
SPEAKER_00
Sorry to keep interrupting.
1
SPEAKER_02
No, no, no, it s fine.
1
SPEAKER_02
I like it too, it s very funny.
1
SPEAKER_02
But I think it s a good way of phrasing it because I think this kind of idea we have in assembly theory is that
1
SPEAKER_02
You know, physics as we know it has basically removed time as being a physical observable of an object.
1
SPEAKER_02
And the argument I would make is that when you look at things like water bottles or us, we re actually things that exist that have a large extent in time.
1
SPEAKER_02
So we actually have a physical size and time, and we measure that with something called the assembly index in molecules, but presumably everyone should have sort of a, do you wanna explain what assembly?
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, let s, you know what?
1
SPEAKER_00
Let s step back and start at the beginning.
1
SPEAKER_00
What is assembly theory?
1
SPEAKER_00
Lee, send me some slides.
1
SPEAKER_00
There s a big, sexy paper coming out probably, maybe, I don t know.
1
SPEAKER_01
We ve almost finished it.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s also a summary of science.
1
SPEAKER_00
We re almost done.
1
SPEAKER_00
The history of science.
1
SPEAKER_01
We are ready to start an interesting discussion with our peers.
1
SPEAKER_00
You re the machine that created the object and we ll see where the object takes us.
1
SPEAKER_00
All right, so what is assembly theory?
1
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, well, I think the easiest way for people to understand it is to think about assembly in molecules, although the theory is very general, it doesn t just apply to molecules.
1
SPEAKER_02
And this was really Lee s insight, so it s kind of funny that I m explaining it, but... I ll mark you.
1
SPEAKER_02
Okay.
1
SPEAKER_02
All right.
1
SPEAKER_01
You ready?
1
SPEAKER_02
I m ready.
1
SPEAKER_02
I m ready.
1
SPEAKER_02
You can tell me where I get the check marks minus.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s your theory as well.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I know.
1
SPEAKER_02
But imagine a molecule and then you can break the molecule apart into elementary building blocks.
1
SPEAKER_02
They happen to be bonds.
1
SPEAKER_02
And then you can think of all the ways for molecular assembly theory.
1
SPEAKER_02
You can think of all the ways of building up the original molecule.
1
SPEAKER_02
So there s all these paths that you can assemble it.
1
SPEAKER_02
And the sort of rules of assembly is you can use pieces that have been generated already.
1
SPEAKER_02
So it has this kind of recursive property to it.
1
SPEAKER_02
And so that s where kind of memory comes into assembly theory.
1
SPEAKER_02
And then the assembly index is the shortest path in that space.
1
SPEAKER_02
So it s supposed to be the minimal amount of history that the universe has to undergo in order to assemble that particular object.
1
SPEAKER_02
And the reason that this is significant is we figured out how to measure that.
1
SPEAKER_02
with a mass spec in the lab.
1
SPEAKER_02
And we had this conjecture that if that minimal number of steps was sufficiently large, it would indicate that you required a machine or a system that had information about how to assemble that specific object because the combinatorial space of possibilities is getting exponentially large as the assembly index is increasing.
1
SPEAKER_00
So just, sorry to interrupt, but so that means there s a sufficiently high assembly index that if observed in an object is an indicator that something lifelike created it, or is the object itself lifelike?
1
SPEAKER_02
Both, but you might wanna make the distinction that a water bottle s not life, but it would still be a signature that you were in that domain of physics.
1
SPEAKER_02
and I might be alive, so.
1
SPEAKER_00
So there will be potentially a lot of arguments about where the line, at which assembly index does interesting stuff start to happen.
1
SPEAKER_02
But the point is we can make all the arguments, but it should be experimentally observable, and Lee can talk more about that part of it.
1
SPEAKER_02
But the point I want to make about it is there was always this intuition that I had that there should be some complexity threshold in the universe above which you would start to say whatever physics governs life actually becomes operative.
1
SPEAKER_02
And I think about it a little bit like we have Planck s constant, which, you know,
1
SPEAKER_02
And we have the fine structure constant.
1
SPEAKER_02
And then this sort of assembly threshold is basically another sort of potentially constant of nature.
1
SPEAKER_02
It might depend on specific features of the system, which we debate about sometimes.
1
SPEAKER_02
But then when you re past that, you have to have some other explanation than the current explanations we have in physics, because now you re in high memory.
1
SPEAKER_02
things actually require time for them to exist, and time becomes a physical variable.
1
SPEAKER_00
So the path to the creation of the object is the memory, so you need to consider that.
1
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, but the point is, that s a feature of the object.
1
SPEAKER_02
So when I think of all the things in this room, we see the projection of them as a water bottle, but assembly theory would say that this is a causal graph of all the ways the universe can create this thing.
1
SPEAKER_02
That s what it is as an object.
1
SPEAKER_02
And we re all interacting causal graphs.
1
SPEAKER_02
And most of the creativity in the biosphere is because a lot of the objects that exist now are huge in their structure across time, four billion years of evolution to get to us.
1
SPEAKER_00
So is it possible to look at me and infer the history that led to me, me as a human?
1
SPEAKER_02
You as an individual might be hard.
1
SPEAKER_02
You as a representative of a population of objects that have high assembly with similar causal history and structure.
1
SPEAKER_02
that you can communicate with, i.e.
1
SPEAKER_02
other humans, you can refer a lot probably.
1
SPEAKER_02
Which we do, genomically even.
1
SPEAKER_02
We have a lot of information in us, we can reconstruct histories from.
1
SPEAKER_02
Assembly is saying something slightly deeper.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, one thing to add, it s not just about the object, but the objects that occur and
1
SPEAKER_01
not just objects with high assembly number, because you can have random things that have a high assembly number, but they must have, there must be a number of identical copies.
1
SPEAKER_01
So you know you re getting away from the random, because you could take a snapshot, this is why, it s not that I hate entropy, I love entropy when used correctly, but it s about, the problem with entropy is you have to have a labeler.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so, so you can label the beginning and the end, the start and the finish, you know, where what you can do in assembly is say, Oh, I have a number of objects in abundance.
1
SPEAKER_01
They all have these features and then you can infer.
1
SPEAKER_01
And one of the things that we debated a lot, particularly during lockdown, because I almost went insane trying to crush the.
2
SPEAKER_00
produce the assembly equation so we came up with the assembly equation I had just imagine this so you have this string where oh actually it makes me makes me sick trying to remember it it was so it did my head in for a long time yeah because I couldn t
2
SPEAKER_00
So if you just have a string of, say, words, say, you know, a series of words, series of letters, so you just have A, A, A, B, B, B, C, C, C, D, D, D, and you find that object, and you just have four A s, four B s, four C s, four D s together, boom.
2
SPEAKER_00
Then, and you measured that, so you physically measured that string of letters.
2
SPEAKER_00
Then what you could do is you can infer sub-graphs of maybe the four A s, the four B s, the four C s, and the four C s, but you don t see them.
2
SPEAKER_00
in the real world, you just infer them.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I really got stuck with that because there s a problem to try and work out what s the difference between a long, you know, physical object in this assembly space of objects that we realized the best way to put that is infer in time.
2
SPEAKER_00
So although we can t infer your entire history, we know at some point the four A s were made, the four B s were made, the four C s were made, the four D s were made, and they all got added together.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that s one really interesting thing that s come out of the theory.
2
SPEAKER_00
But the killer, when we knew we were going beyond standard complexity theory, which was incredibly successful, is that we realized we could start to measure these things for real across domains.
2
SPEAKER_00
So the assembly index is actually an intrinsic property of all stuff that you can break into components.
2
SPEAKER_00
Particularly molecules are good because you can break them up into smaller molecules, into atoms.
2
SPEAKER_00
the challenge will be making that more general across all the domains, but we re working on it right now, and I think the theory will do that.
2
SPEAKER_02
So components, domains, so you re talking about basically measuring the complexity of an object in what, biology, chemistry, physics, that s what you mean by domains.
2
SPEAKER_02
Sociology.
2
SPEAKER_00
Complexity of computers, complexity of memes, you know.
2
SPEAKER_02
Memes?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yep.
2
SPEAKER_02
What is that, ideas?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, so one of the- Ideas are objects in assembly theory.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
They are.
2
SPEAKER_01
They re physical things.
2
SPEAKER_01
They re just features of the causal graph.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, the fact that I can talk to you right now is because we re exchanging structure of our assembly space.
2
SPEAKER_02
So conversation is the exchanging structures in assembly space.
2
SPEAKER_02
What is assembly space?
2
SPEAKER_01
When I started working on Origins of Life, I was writing about something called top-down causation, which a lot of philosophers are interested in and people that worry about the mind-body problem.
2
SPEAKER_01
But the whole idea is if we have the microscopic world of physics,
2
SPEAKER_01
is causally complete, it seems like there s no room for higher level causes like our thoughts to actually have any impact on the world.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that seems problematic when you get to studying life and mind because it does seem that quote unquote emergent properties do matter to matter.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so, and then there s this other sort of paradoxical situation where information looks like it s disembodied.
2
SPEAKER_01
So we talk about information like it can just move from any physical system to any other physical system.
2
SPEAKER_01
And it doesn t require, like you don t have to specify anything about the substrate to talk about information.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then there s also the way we talk about mathematics is also disembodied, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
Like the platonic world of forms.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I think all of those things are,
2
SPEAKER_01
hinting that we really don t know how to think about abstractions as physical things.
2
SPEAKER_01
And really, I think what assembly theory is pointing to is what we re missing there is the dimension of time.
2
SPEAKER_01
And if you actually look at an object being extended across time, what we call information and the things that look abstract are things that are entangled in the histories of those objects.
2
SPEAKER_01
They re features of the overlapping assembly space.
2
SPEAKER_01
So they look abstract because they re not, you know, part of the current
2
SPEAKER_01
structure, but they re part of the structure if you thought about it as like the philosophical concept of a hyperobject, an object that s too big in time for us actually to resolve.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so I think information is physical.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s just physical in time, not in space.
2
SPEAKER_02
too hyperobject, too difficult for us to resolve.
2
SPEAKER_02
So we re supposed to think about, of life as this thing that stretches through time and there s a causation chain that led to that thing.
2
SPEAKER_02
And then you re trying to measure something with the assembly index about,
2
SPEAKER_01
The assembly index is the ordering.
2
SPEAKER_01
You could think of it as like a partial ordering of all the things that can happen.
2
SPEAKER_01
So in thermodynamics, we coarse-grain things by temperature and pressure.
2
SPEAKER_01
In assembly theory, we coarse-grain by the number of copies of an object and the assembly index, which is basically if you think of the space of all possible things, it s like a depth of how far you ve gone into that space and how much time was required to get there.
2
SPEAKER_02
in the shortest possible version.
2
SPEAKER_02
Not average, because can t you just 3D?
2
SPEAKER_01
You re going to kill me with that question.
2
SPEAKER_02
Not 3D.
2
SPEAKER_00
Can t you always 3D print the thing?
2
SPEAKER_01
That s like stab him in the heart.
2
SPEAKER_00
No, because I had such fights.
2
SPEAKER_00
So Sarah s team and my team are writing this paper at the moment.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s so funny.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think we kind of share the, at the beginning, you were like, no, that s not right.
2
SPEAKER_00
Oh, yes, right.
2
SPEAKER_00
And we re doing this for a bit.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then the problem is when you build a theory and build the intuition, there s some certain features, right, of the theory that almost felt like I was being religious about saying, right, you have to do this.
2
SPEAKER_00
A good assembly theorist does this, does this, does this.
2
SPEAKER_00
And Sarah s postdoc, Daniel, and my postdoc, Abhishek, and they were both brilliant, but they were like, no, we don t, we don t buy that.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I was like,
2
SPEAKER_00
It just is.
2
SPEAKER_00
They were like, well, Lee, actually, I thought you re the first to say that, you know, you can t, if you can t explain it, it doesn t, and you can t do an experiment that doesn t exist.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that saved me.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I said to Abhishek, Abhishek s my postdoc in Glasgow, Daniel is Sarah s postdoc in ASU.
2
SPEAKER_00
I was like,
2
SPEAKER_00
I have the experimental data.
2
SPEAKER_00
When I basically take the molecules and chop them up in the mass spec, the assembly number is never the average.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s always the shortest.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s an intrinsic property.
2
SPEAKER_00
Then the penny dropped for Abhishek.
2
SPEAKER_00
I said, okay.
2
SPEAKER_00
I had these things that we had to believe to start with or to trust.
2
SPEAKER_00
Then we ve done the math and it comes out.
2
SPEAKER_00
They now have the shortest path.
2
SPEAKER_00
Actually, it s up there.
2
SPEAKER_00
It explains why the shortest path.
2
SPEAKER_00
Here s why the shortest path is important, not the average.
2
SPEAKER_00
The shortest path needs you to identify when the universe has basically got a memory, not an average.
2
SPEAKER_00
What you want to be able to do is to say, what is the minimum number of features that I want to be able to see in the universe?
2
SPEAKER_00
When I find those features, I know the universe has had a coherent memory.
2
SPEAKER_00
and it s basically a life.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so that gives you the lower bound.
2
SPEAKER_00
So that s like, of course, there s going to be other paths.
2
SPEAKER_00
We can be more ridiculous, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
We can have other paths, but it s just the minimum.
2
SPEAKER_00
So probabilistically, at the beginning, because assembly theory was built as a measure for biosignatures, I needed to go there.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then I realized it was intrinsic.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then Sarah realized it was intrinsic and these hyper objects were coming and we were kind of fusing that notions together.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then the team were like, yeah, but.
2
SPEAKER_00
If I have enough energy and I have enough resources, I might not take the shortest path.
2
SPEAKER_00
I might go a bit longer.
2
SPEAKER_00
I might take a really long path because it allows me then to do something else.
2
SPEAKER_00
So what you can do is, let s say I ve got two different objects, A and B, and they both have different shortest paths to get them.
2
SPEAKER_00
But then if you want to make A and B together,
2
SPEAKER_00
they will have a compromise.
2
SPEAKER_00
So in the joint assembly space, that might be an average, but actually it s the shortest way you can make both A and B with a minimum amount of resource in time.
2
SPEAKER_00
So suddenly you then layer these things up.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so the average becomes not important, but as you literally overlap those sets, you get a new shortest path.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so what we realized time and time again, when we re doing the math, the shortest path
2
SPEAKER_00
is intrinsic, is fundamental, and is measurable, which is kind of mind-blowing.
2
SPEAKER_02
So what we re talking about, some basic ingredients, maybe we ll talk about that, what those basic ingredients could be, and how many, when you say shortest path, how many steps it takes to turn those basic ingredients into the final meal.
2
SPEAKER_02
So how to make a, what s the shortest way to make a pizza?
2
SPEAKER_02
Or a pie, an apple pie.
2
SPEAKER_02
An apple pie, that s right.
2
SPEAKER_00
And a pizza and a pie together.
2
SPEAKER_02
From scratch.
2
SPEAKER_02
So there s a lot of ways.
2
SPEAKER_02
There s the shortest way, and you take the full spectrum of ways, and there s probably an average duration for a noob to make an apple pie.
2
SPEAKER_02
is the average interesting still?
2
SPEAKER_02
If you measure the average length of the path to assemble a thing, does that tell you something about the way nature usually does it?
2
SPEAKER_02
Versus...
2
SPEAKER_02
something fundamental about the object, which I think is what you re aiming at with the assembly index.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, look, we all love to quantify things.
2
SPEAKER_00
The minimum path gives you the lower bounds, you know you re detecting something, you know you re inferring something.
2
SPEAKER_00
The average tells you about really how the objects are existing in the ecosystem or the technology.
2
SPEAKER_00
and there has to be more paths explored because then you can happen upon other memories and then condense them down.
2
SPEAKER_00
I m not making too much sense but if you look at say let s just say I mean maybe we re going to get to alien civilizations later right but I would argue very strongly that alien civilization A and alien civilization B
2
SPEAKER_00
They re different assembly spaces, so they re kind of going to be a bit messed up if they happen to come on another, only when they find some joint overlap in their technology, because if aliens come to us and they don t share any of the causal graph we ve shared, but hopefully they share the periodic table,
2
SPEAKER_00
and bonds and things.
2
SPEAKER_00
So we re gonna have to really think about the language to talk to us aliens by inferring, by using assembly theory to infer their language, their technology, and other bits and bobs.
2
SPEAKER_00
And the shortest path will help you do that quickly.
2
SPEAKER_02
All right, so all aliens in this causality graphs have a common ancestor in the
2
SPEAKER_01
if the building blocks are the same.
2
SPEAKER_01
Which means they live in the same universe as us.
2
SPEAKER_01
It depends on how far back in time you go, though.
2
SPEAKER_02
But the universe has all the same building blocks.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_02
And we have to assume that.
2
SPEAKER_02
So there s not different classes of causality graphs, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
The universe doesn t just say like, here, you get the red causality graph and you get the blue one.
2
SPEAKER_02
These basic ingredients and they re geographically constrained or constrained in space or time or something like that.
2
SPEAKER_01
They re constrained in time because only by the virtue of the fact that you need enough time to have passed for some things to exist.
2
SPEAKER_01
So the universe has to be big enough in time for some things.
2
SPEAKER_01
So just the one point on the shortest path versus the average path, which I think we ll get to this, is you had a nice way of saying it s like the minimal compression is the shortest path for the universe to produce that.
2
SPEAKER_01
But it s also like the first time in the ordering of events that you might expect to see that object.
2
SPEAKER_01
But the average path tells you something about the actual steps that were realized, and that becomes an emergent property of that object s interaction with other objects.
2
SPEAKER_01
So it s not an intrinsic feature of that object, it s a feature of the interactions with other things.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so one of the nice features of assembly is you ve basically gotten rid of, you just look at the things that exist and you ve gotten rid of the mechanisms for constructing them, in some sense, like the machines are not.
2
SPEAKER_01
as important in the current construction of the theory, although I would like to bridge it to some ideas about constructors.
2
SPEAKER_01
But then you can only communicate with things, as Lee was saying, if you have some overlap in the past history.
2
SPEAKER_01
So if you had an alien species that had absolutely no overlap, then there would be no means of communication.
2
SPEAKER_01
But as we become, you know, as we progress further and further in time and more things become possible because
2
SPEAKER_01
the assembly spaces are larger, because you can have a larger assembly space in terms of index and also just the size of the space, because it s exponentially growing, then more things can happen in the future.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the example I like to give is actually when we made first contact with gravitational waves, because, you know, that s an alien phenomena that s been permeating our planet, not alien in life, but alien, like something we had never knew existed.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s been like there s gravitational waves rippling through this room right now.
2
SPEAKER_01
But we had to advance to the level of Einstein writing down his theory of relativity and then 100 years of technological development to even quote unquote see that phenomena.
2
SPEAKER_02
Okay, to see that phenomena, our causal graph had to start intersecting.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, we needed the idea to emerge first, the abstraction, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
And then we had to build the technology that could actually observe features of that abstraction.
2
SPEAKER_02
So the nice promising thing is over time the graph can grow so it can start overlapping eventually.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so the interesting feature of that graph is there was an event, you know, 1.4 billion years away of a black hole merger.
2
SPEAKER_01
that we detected on our detector, and now suddenly we re connected through this communication channel with this distant event in our universe, that if you think about 1.4 billion years ago, what was happening on this planet, or even further back in time, that there s common physics underlying all those events, but even for those two events to communicate with each other.
2
SPEAKER_00
Now I understand what you were going on about the other week.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I m sorry, it s a really abstract example.
2
SPEAKER_02
Your causal graphs are not overlapping.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, let s just say now our causal graphs are overlapping in the deep past.
2
SPEAKER_00
Oh, I like it.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you made a connection with it.
2
SPEAKER_00
No, I do like that.
2
SPEAKER_01
You can tell me what your epiphany is now.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s good.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I should get the jokes before 30 seconds after.
2
SPEAKER_02
Oh, I get it now.
2
SPEAKER_00
I wasn t able to comprehend what you re talking about when saying the channel communicating to the past but what you re saying is we were able to infer what happened 1.4 billion years ago
2
SPEAKER_00
We detected the gravity wave.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I think it s amazing that, you know, at that time we weren t even, we were just becoming multicellular, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
It s like insane.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then we progressed from multicellularity through to technology and built the detector.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then we just extrapolate backwards.
2
SPEAKER_00
So although we didn t do anything back to the graph back in time, we understood this existence then overlapped going forward.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, that s because our graphs are larger.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but that means that has a consequence.
2
SPEAKER_00
One of the things I was trying to say is like, I think, I don t know, Sarah might be, she can correct me, information first, and I m a object first kind of guy.
2
SPEAKER_00
So I mean, there s things that get constructed, there has to be this transition in random constructions.
2
SPEAKER_00
So when the object that s being constructed by the process,
2
SPEAKER_00
bakes in that memory and those memories then add on and add on and add on.
2
SPEAKER_00
Um, so as it becomes more competent and life is about taking those memories and compressing them, increasing their autonomy.
2
SPEAKER_00
And, and so I think that, you know, like the cell that we have in biology on earth is our way of doing that, that really the maximum ability to take memories and to act on the future.
2
SPEAKER_01
Oh, I think that s mathematics.
2
SPEAKER_00
Um, no, mathematics doesn t exist.
2
SPEAKER_01
No, but that s the point.
2
SPEAKER_01
The point is that abstractions do exist.
2
SPEAKER_01
They re real physical things.
2
SPEAKER_01
We call them abstractions.
2
SPEAKER_01
But the point about mathematics that I think is... So I don t disagree.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think you re object first and I m information first.
2
SPEAKER_01
But I think I m only information first in the sense that I think the thing that we need to explain is what abstractions are and what they are as physical things.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because of all of human history, we ve thought that there were these properties that are
2
SPEAKER_01
disembodied exist outside of the universe and really they do exist in the universe and we just don t understand what their physics is.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I think mathematics is a really good example.
2
SPEAKER_01
We do theoretical physics with math, but imagine doing physics of math and then thinking about math as a physical object.
2
SPEAKER_01
And math is super interesting.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think this is why we think it describes reality so well because it s the most copyable kind of information.
2
SPEAKER_01
It retains its properties when you move it between physical media, which means that it s very
2
SPEAKER_01
And so it seems to describe the universe really well, but it probably is because it s information that s very deep in our past.
2
SPEAKER_01
And it s just, we invented a way of communicating it very effectively between us.
2
SPEAKER_00
Isn t math more fundamental?
2
SPEAKER_00
Isn t the assembly of the graph, isn t basically, I m gonna sound, I sound completely boring.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s like math, assembly theory invented math, but it did.
2
SPEAKER_00
It has to be.
2
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
2
SPEAKER_00
So what is math?
3
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s a nice simplification, a simple description of what?
3
SPEAKER_02
So we have a computer scientist, a physicist, and a chemist here.
3
SPEAKER_02
Walk into a bar.
3
SPEAKER_02
I think the chemist is going to define math and you guys can correct me.
3
SPEAKER_00
Go for it.
3
SPEAKER_00
I would say... Lay it on us, Lee.
3
SPEAKER_00
We re ready.
3
SPEAKER_02
I think the ability to label objects and place them into classes and then do operations on the objects is what math is.
3
SPEAKER_01
So on that point, what does it mean to be object first versus information first?
3
SPEAKER_01
So what s the difference between object and information when you get to that low fundamental level?
3
SPEAKER_02
Well, I might change my view.
3
SPEAKER_02
So I m stuff first, the stuff, and then when stuff becomes objects, it has to invent information, and then the information acts on more stuff and becomes more objects.
3
SPEAKER_02
So I think there is a transition to information that occurs when you go from stuff to objects.
3
SPEAKER_00
I just mean time, though.
3
SPEAKER_02
Information is emergent?
3
SPEAKER_02
Not emergent, information is actionable memories from the universe.
3
SPEAKER_02
So when memories become actionable, that s information.
3
SPEAKER_02
But there s always memory, but it s not actionable.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, and then it s not information, great.
3
SPEAKER_02
And actionable is what?
3
SPEAKER_02
You can create.
3
SPEAKER_02
You can use it.
3
SPEAKER_02
If you can t use it, then it s not information.
3
SPEAKER_02
If you can t transmit it, if it doesn t have any causal consequence.
3
SPEAKER_01
Falls in the forest, I don t understand why is that not information?
3
SPEAKER_02
It s not information, it s stuff happening, but it s not causing... Yeah, we can... It s happening.
3
SPEAKER_01
The happening requires information.
3
SPEAKER_01
No, no, no, no.
3
SPEAKER_02
Stuff is always happening.
3
SPEAKER_02
This is where the physicists and the mathematicians get themselves in a loop because they think the universe, I mean, I think, say, Max Tegmark is very playful and say, like, the universe is just math.
3
SPEAKER_02
Well, if the universe is just math, then we might as well not bother having any conversation because the conversation is already written.
3
SPEAKER_02
We just might as well go to the future and say, can you just give us the conversation?
3
SPEAKER_02
It s happened already.
3
SPEAKER_02
So I think the problem is that mathematicians
3
SPEAKER_02
are so successful at labeling stuff and so successful understanding of stuff through those labels, they forget that actually those labels had to emerge and that information had to be built on those memories.
3
SPEAKER_02
So memory in the universe, so constraints, graph,
3
SPEAKER_02
when they become actionable and the graph can loop back on itself or interact with other graphs and they can intersect, those memories become actionable and therefore their information.
3
SPEAKER_02
And I think you just changed my mind on something pretty big, but I don t have a pen, so I m gonna write it down later, but roughly the idea is like you ve got these two graphs of objects, of stuff, they have memories, and then when they intersect,
3
SPEAKER_02
and then they can act on each other, that s maybe the mechanism by which information is then, so then you can then abstract.
3
SPEAKER_02
So when one graph can then build another graph and say, hey, you don t have to go through all the nonsense we had to go through, here s literally the way to do it.
3
SPEAKER_02
Stuff always comes first, but then when stuff builds the abstraction, the abstraction can be then teleported onto other stuff.
3
SPEAKER_02
Abstractions is the looping back.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_02
Okay.
3
SPEAKER_02
Am I making, I don t know, I got stuck.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so first,
3
SPEAKER_01
God made stuff.
3
SPEAKER_01
And after that, when you start to be able to form abstractions, that s when... God is the memory the universe can remember.
3
SPEAKER_01
God is the memory the universe can remember.
3
SPEAKER_01
Otherwise, there s no, wait, did you?
3
SPEAKER_00
Someone s gonna be deciphering that statement hundreds of years from now.
3
SPEAKER_00
What the hell does that mean?
3
SPEAKER_01
What does the humans mean by this?
3
SPEAKER_02
Hey, look, don t diss my one-liners.
3
SPEAKER_02
No, no, I wasn t dissing it.
3
SPEAKER_02
It took me 15 seconds to come up with that.
3
SPEAKER_00
I don t know what it means.
3
SPEAKER_00
What does it mean?
3
SPEAKER_01
Okay, wait, we need to, how do we get onto this?
3
SPEAKER_01
We were time, causality, mathematics.
3
SPEAKER_01
So what is mathematics in this picture of stuff, objects, memory, and information?
3
SPEAKER_01
What exactly is mathematics?
3
SPEAKER_02
It s the most efficient labeling scheme that you can apply to lots of different graphs.
3
SPEAKER_02
Well, the labeling scheme doesn t make it sound useful.
3
SPEAKER_00
Can I try?
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, sure, please.
3
SPEAKER_02
Have you rejected my definition of mathematics?
3
SPEAKER_02
I m shocked.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, no, I m sorry.
3
SPEAKER_02
But it s correct.
3
SPEAKER_02
Go on, sorry.
3
SPEAKER_00
Excellent.
3
SPEAKER_00
No, I mean, I think we have a problem, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Because we can t not be us, like we re stuck in the shells we are and we re trying to observe the world.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so mathematics looks like it has certain properties.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I guess the thought experiment I find is useful is to try to imagine if you were outside of us looking at us as physical systems using mathematics, what would be the specific features you associate to the property of understanding mathematics and being able to implement it in the universe?
3
SPEAKER_00
Right?
3
SPEAKER_00
And when you do that, mathematics seems to have some really interesting properties relative to other kinds of abstraction we might talk about, like language or artistic expression.
3
SPEAKER_00
One of those properties is the one I mentioned already, that it s really easy to copy between physical media.
3
SPEAKER_00
So if I give you a mathematical statement, you almost immediately know what I mean.
3
SPEAKER_00
If I tell you the sky is blue, you might say, is it gold ball blue?
3
SPEAKER_00
Is it azure blue?
3
SPEAKER_00
What color blue do you mean?
3
SPEAKER_00
and you have a harder time visualizing what I actually mean.
3
SPEAKER_00
So mathematics carries a lot of meaning with it when it s copied between physical systems.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s also the reason we use it to communicate with computers.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then the second one is it retains its property of actually what it can do in the universe when it s copied.
3
SPEAKER_00
So the example I like to give there is think about like Newton s law of gravitation.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s actually, it s a compressed regularity of a bunch of phenomena that we observe in the universe.
3
SPEAKER_00
But then that information actually is a causal in a sense that it allows us to do things we wouldn t be able to do without that particular knowledge and that particular abstraction.
3
SPEAKER_00
And in this case, like launch satellites to space or send people to Mars or whatever it is.
3
SPEAKER_00
So if you look at us from the outside and you say, what is it for physical systems to invent a thing called mathematics and then to use and then
3
SPEAKER_00
and then it to become a physical observable, mathematics is kind of like the universally copyable information that allows new possibility spaces to be open in the future because it allows this kind of ability to map one physical system to another and actually understand the general principles.
3
SPEAKER_01
So is it helping the overlap of causal graphs then by mapping?
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh, I think that s the explanation for what it is in terms of the physical theory of assembly would be some feature of the structure of the assembly spaces of causal graphs and their relationship to each other.
3
SPEAKER_00
So for example, and I mean, this is things that we re gonna have to work out over the next few years.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, we re in totally uncharted conceptual territory here.
3
SPEAKER_00
But as is usual, diving off the deep end.
3
SPEAKER_00
But I would expect that we would be able to come up with a theory of like, why is it that some physical systems can communicate with each other?
3
SPEAKER_00
Like language.
3
SPEAKER_00
Language is basically because we re objects extended over time and some of the history of that assembly space actually overlaps.
3
SPEAKER_00
And when we communicate, it s because we actually have shared structure in our causal history.
3
SPEAKER_02
Let me have another quick go at this.
3
SPEAKER_02
I think we all agree.
3
SPEAKER_02
We take mathematics for granted because we ve gone through this chain.
3
SPEAKER_02
We all share a language now.
3
SPEAKER_02
We have languages that we can make interoperable.
3
SPEAKER_02
And so whether you re speaking, I don t know, all the different dialects of Chinese, all the different dialects of English, French, German, whatever, you can interconvert them.
3
SPEAKER_02
The interesting thing about mathematics now is that everybody on planet Earth, every human being and computers share that common language.
3
SPEAKER_02
That language was constructed by a process in time.
3
SPEAKER_02
So what I m trying to say is that assembly invented math.
3
SPEAKER_02
Mathematics didn t exist before life.
3
SPEAKER_02
abstraction was invented by life, right?
3
SPEAKER_02
That doesn t mean that the universe wasn t capable of mathematical things.
3
SPEAKER_01
Wait, wait a minute, can we just ask that old famous question, is math invented or discovered?
3
SPEAKER_01
So when you say assembly invented or whatever, it means it s... Well, someone might refer to assembly as a mathematical theory, but sorry.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right.
3
SPEAKER_01
Are we arguing?
3
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
3
SPEAKER_01
Are we arguing now?
3
SPEAKER_01
That s what it sounds like.
3
SPEAKER_01
Are we discovering
3
SPEAKER_01
No.
3
SPEAKER_02
Well, yes and no.
3
SPEAKER_01
I would say... And you call mathematics a language that you re developing.
3
SPEAKER_02
Look, I m pretty sure that there are some very common seeds of mathematics in the universe, right?
3
SPEAKER_02
But actually, a lot of the mathematics that we are finding now is not discovered, it s invented.
3
SPEAKER_02
But even though, I think those two terms are very triggering and I don t think they re necessarily useful because I think that what people do, the mathematicians that say, oh, mathematics was discovered because they live in a universe where there is no time and it just all exists.
3
SPEAKER_02
But what I m saying is, and I think in the same way you can create, let s say I m gonna go and make a piece of art.
3
SPEAKER_02
Did I make that piece of art or did I discover it?
3
SPEAKER_02
like inventing the airplane.
3
SPEAKER_02
Did I invent the airplane?
3
SPEAKER_02
Let s stick with the airplane.
3
SPEAKER_02
The airplane s a good one.
3
SPEAKER_02
Let s say, did I discover the airplane?
3
SPEAKER_02
Well, in a way, the universe discovered the airplane because it just chucked a load of atoms together, a load of random human beings, wanted to do stuff, and then we discovered the airplane in the space of possibilities.
3
SPEAKER_02
But here s the thing.
3
SPEAKER_02
When the space of possibilities is so vast,
3
SPEAKER_02
infinite almost, and you re able to actualize one of those in an object, then you are inventing it.
3
SPEAKER_02
So in mathematics, because there are infinite number of theorems, the fact you re actually pulling, there s no difference between inventing a mathematical structure and inventing the airplane.
3
SPEAKER_02
They re the same thing.
3
SPEAKER_02
But that doesn t mean that now the airplane exists in the universe, it s something weird about the universe.
3
SPEAKER_02
So I think that the more, this is the thing that I can probably, the more memory,
3
SPEAKER_02
required for the object, the more invented it is.
3
SPEAKER_02
So when a mathematical theorem needs more bytes to store it, the more invented it is, and the less bytes, the more discovered it is.
3
SPEAKER_01
But everything then is invented.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s just more or less invented.
3
SPEAKER_01
Absolutely.
3
SPEAKER_00
The universe has to generate everything as it goes.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
and it wasn t there in the beginning.
3
SPEAKER_01
And the way we re thinking it, when you re thinking about the difference between invented and discovered is because we re throwing away all the memory.
3
SPEAKER_01
So if you start to think in terms of causality and time, then those things become the same.
3
SPEAKER_01
Everything is invented.
3
SPEAKER_00
And the idea is to make everything intrinsic to the universe.
3
SPEAKER_00
So I think one of the features of assembly theory is we don t want to have external observers.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s been this long tradition in physics of trying to describe the universe from the outside and not the inside.
3
SPEAKER_00
And the universe has to generate everything itself if you do it from the inside.
3
SPEAKER_02
Assembly theory describes how the universe builds itself.
3
SPEAKER_01
Did it take you 15 seconds to say that, to come up with that also?
3
SPEAKER_02
No, I ve thought of that before.
3
SPEAKER_02
Okay, good line.
3
SPEAKER_01
Are you making fun of me?
3
SPEAKER_00
No, I m not making fun, I m having fun, there s a difference.
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh, that s good, all right.
3
SPEAKER_01
She s inventing fun.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m not all intimidated.
3
SPEAKER_01
And there s a causal history to that fun.
3
SPEAKER_01
You mentioned that there s no way to communicate with aliens until there s overlap in the causal graph.
3
SPEAKER_01
communication includes being able to see them?
3
SPEAKER_01
And like what are we, this is the question is, is communication any kind of detection?
3
SPEAKER_01
And if so, what do aliens look like as you get more and more overlap on the causal graph?
3
SPEAKER_02
You re assuming, let s assume that, so when you see them and they see you,
3
SPEAKER_02
You re assuming they have vision, they have the ability to construct in 3D, and in time.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s a lot of assumptions we re making.
3
SPEAKER_01
What detection?
3
SPEAKER_01
Alright, let s step back.
3
SPEAKER_01
So yes, okay, you re right.
3
SPEAKER_01
So when, in the English language, when we say the word see, we mean visually, they show up to a party and it s like, oh, wow, that s an alien.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s visual, that s 3D, that s...
3
SPEAKER_01
Okay, and that s also assuming scale, spatial scale of something that s visible to you.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it can t be microscopic or it can t be so big that you don t even realize that s an entity.
3
SPEAKER_01
Okay, but other kinds of detection too.
3
SPEAKER_02
I would make it more abstract and go, I was thinking this morning about how to rewrite the Arecibo message in assembly theory and also to abandon binary.
3
SPEAKER_02
Because I don t think aliens necessarily, why should they have binary?
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, they have some basic elements with which to do information exchange.
3
SPEAKER_02
Let s make it more fundamental, more universal.
3
SPEAKER_02
So we need to think about what is the universal way of making a memory, and then we should re-encode our receiver in that way.
3
SPEAKER_01
What s more basic than zeros and ones?
3
SPEAKER_02
Well, it s really difficult to get out of that causal chain because we re so, so, let s erase the idea of zero for a moment.
3
SPEAKER_02
It took human beings a long time to come up with the idea of zero.
3
SPEAKER_02
Now you ve got the idea of zero, you can t throw it away, it s so useful.
3
SPEAKER_02
To discover the idea of zero.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, to discover or invent.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t know, but it took a long time, so it was invented, that s right.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I think zero was invented, exactly.
3
SPEAKER_02
So it s not a given that aliens know what zero is.
3
SPEAKER_01
They just have the one.
3
SPEAKER_02
Massive assumption.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s a useful discovery.
3
SPEAKER_01
You re saying if you break the causal chain, there might be some other more efficient way of representing.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s why I want to meet him and ask him.
3
SPEAKER_02
for a shortcut, but you won t be able to ask them until.
3
SPEAKER_02
So I interrupted you and I think you re making a good point.
3
SPEAKER_02
I was just gonna say, well look.
3
SPEAKER_02
Thank you.
3
SPEAKER_02
Sorry.
3
SPEAKER_02
Rather than saying.
3
SPEAKER_01
Please internet, tweet at him for the rude interruptions.
3
SPEAKER_01
Go ahead, I m sorry.
3
SPEAKER_02
No, it s okay.
3
SPEAKER_02
Maybe it s change.
3
SPEAKER_02
How do we, so, oh, I don t know what it s like to be an alien.
3
SPEAKER_02
I would like to know.
3
SPEAKER_01
What is the full spectrum of what aliens might look like to us?
3
SPEAKER_01
Now that we ve laid this all on the table of like, all right, so there has to be some overlap in this causal chain that led to them.
3
SPEAKER_01
What are we looking for?
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SPEAKER_01
What do you think we should be looking for?
3
SPEAKER_01
So you mentioned mass spec, measuring certain objects that aliens could create or are aliens themselves.
3
SPEAKER_01
We show up to a planet, or maybe not a planet, or maybe, what the hell is the basic object we re trying to measure the assembly index of?
3
SPEAKER_02
Let s cut ourselves a break.
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SPEAKER_02
Let s assume that they are, they re metabolized, they ve got an energy source and they re a size that we can recognize.
3
SPEAKER_02
Let s cut ourselves a break because there could be aliens that are so big we won t recognize we re seeing them.
3
SPEAKER_02
There might be aliens that are so small we don t yet have the ability to, you know, we don t have microscopes that can see, you know, far enough away that we just won t be able to see them.
3
SPEAKER_02
So what s a good range?
3
SPEAKER_02
So let s just make a range, let s just be very anthropocentric and say we re going to look for aliens roughly our size and technology our size because we know it s possible on Earth, right?
3
SPEAKER_02
I mean a reasonable thing to do would be to find exoplanets in the same zone as Earth in terms of heat and stuff
3
SPEAKER_02
and then say, hey, if there s that same kind of gravity, same kind of stuff, we could reasonably assume that the alien life there might use a similar kind of physical infrastructure, and then we re good.
3
SPEAKER_02
So then your question becomes really relevant.
3
SPEAKER_02
Say, right, let s use vision, sound, touch.
3
SPEAKER_01
So okay, that s really nice.
3
SPEAKER_01
So if there s a lot of aliens out there,
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SPEAKER_01
if there s a good likelihood, if you match to the planet, that they re going to be in the same spatial and temporal, operating in the same spatial and temporal domain as humans.
3
SPEAKER_01
Okay, within that, what do they look like, visually?
3
SPEAKER_01
What do they sound like?
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SPEAKER_01
What do they, oh God, this sounds creepy, taste like?
3
SPEAKER_02
What does it smell like smell like that sounds like our clubhouse moves like can we have sex of aliens?
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SPEAKER_02
Which was basically me saying But it wasn t actually about sex.
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SPEAKER_02
It was about is our chemistry compatible, right?
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SPEAKER_01
Is there some yeah, yeah, can couldn t can we?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, are they edible too?
3
SPEAKER_01
That could be very edible.
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SPEAKER_02
They could be delicious That s why I want to see some aliens right because I think are there I think evolution
3
SPEAKER_02
I mean, evolution exploits symmetry, right?
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SPEAKER_02
Because why generate memory?
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SPEAKER_02
Why generate storage, the need for storage space when you can use symmetry?
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SPEAKER_02
And symmetry is maybe quite effective in allowing you to mechanically design stuff, right?
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SPEAKER_02
So maybe you could be reasonable to assume that aliens could have, they could be bipedal, they could be symmetric in the same way, might have a couple of eyes or a couple of senses.
3
SPEAKER_02
I mean, we can make that.
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SPEAKER_02
And perhaps there s this whole zoo of different aliens out there
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SPEAKER_01
and we ll never get to be able to classify some of the weird aliens we can t interact with because they have made such weird stuff.
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SPEAKER_01
But we are just going to look at, we re gonna find aliens that look most like us, why not?
4
SPEAKER_00
Because those are the first ones we re likely to see.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_02
But I think it s really hard to imagine what the space of aliens is because the space is huge.
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SPEAKER_02
Because one of the arguments that you can make about why life emerges in chemistry is because chemistry
4
SPEAKER_02
is the first scale in terms of like, you know, building up objects from elementary objects, that the number of possible things that could exist is larger than the universe can possibly make all at once, right?
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SPEAKER_02
So imagine you have two planets and they re cooking some geochemistry,
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SPEAKER_02
You know, our planet invented one kind of biochemistry.
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SPEAKER_02
And presumably, as you start building up the complexity of the molecules, the chances of the overlap in those trajectories, those causal chains being built up is probably very low.
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SPEAKER_02
And it gets lower and lower as it gets further advanced along its evolutionary path.
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SPEAKER_02
So I think it s very difficult to imagine predicting the technologies that aliens are going to have.
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SPEAKER_02
I mean, it s so, you re looking at basically planets have kind of convergent chemistry, but there s some variability, and then you re looking basically at the outgrowth into the possibility space for chemistry.
4
SPEAKER_00
So do you think we would detect the technology, the objects created by aliens before we detect the aliens?
4
SPEAKER_02
Possibly.
4
SPEAKER_00
So when you re talking about measuring assembly index, don t you think we would detect the garbage first?
4
SPEAKER_00
Like at the outskirts of alien civilizations, this is gonna be trash.
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SPEAKER_01
I think I would come back to Arecibo.
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SPEAKER_01
The Arecibo message sent from the Arecibo telescope built by Drake, I think, and Sagan.
4
SPEAKER_01
How s Arecibo spelled?
4
SPEAKER_02
A-R-E-C-I-B-O.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yes, thank you.
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SPEAKER_01
And there we go, they ve got it up there.
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SPEAKER_02
That s the telescope that sent the message that you re talking about.
4
SPEAKER_00
So that message was sent where?
4
SPEAKER_01
It was beamed at a star, a specific star, and it was sent out many years ago.
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SPEAKER_01
And what they did, so this is why I was pushing on binary, it s a binary message.
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SPEAKER_01
I think it s a semi-prime length number of characters, so I think 73 by 23, I think, and it basically represents human bit proton, binary, human beings, DNA, male and female, and it s really cool.
4
SPEAKER_01
But I m just wondering if it could be done
4
SPEAKER_01
not making any, because he s made assumptions that aliens speak binary.
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SPEAKER_01
Why make that assumption?
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SPEAKER_01
Why not just assume that if the difference between physics, chemistry and biology is the amount of memory that s recordable by the substrate,
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SPEAKER_01
then surely the universal thing, I m going to make some sacrilegious statement which I think is pretty awesome for people to argue with.
4
SPEAKER_00
So this is, we re looking at an image where it s the entirety of the message encoded in binary and then there s probably interpretation of different parts of that image.
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SPEAKER_00
There s a person,
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SPEAKER_00
There s green parts.
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SPEAKER_00
It looks like, for people just listening, like a game of Tetris.
4
SPEAKER_00
So it s encoding in minimal ways a bunch of cool information, probably.
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SPEAKER_02
Representing all of us.
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SPEAKER_01
So at the top, it s kind of teaching us how to count, and then it all goes all the way down, teaching you chemistry, and then just says, but it makes so many assumptions.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I think if we can actually, so look, I think, I mean, Sarah s much more eloquent expressing this, but I ll have a go, and you can correct it if you want.
4
SPEAKER_01
Which is like, one of the things that Sarah has had a profound effect on the way I look at the origin of life, and this is one of the reasons why we re working together, because we don t really care about the origin of life.
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SPEAKER_01
We want to make life, make aliens, and find aliens.
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SPEAKER_01
Make aliens, find aliens.
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SPEAKER_01
I think we might have to make aliens in the lab before we find aliens in the universe, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
I think that would be a cool way to do it.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, what is it about the universe that creates aliens?
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, it s selection.
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SPEAKER_01
through assembly theory, creating memories, because when you create memories, you can then command your domain, you can basically do stuff, you can command matter.
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SPEAKER_01
So we need to find a way, by understanding what life is, of how the minimal way to command matter, how that would emerge in the universe, and if we want to communicate, I mean, maybe we don t want to necessarily uniformly communicate, what I would do, perhaps, if I had, is I would send out lots of probes,
4
SPEAKER_01
away from Earth, they have this magic way of communicating with aliens.
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SPEAKER_01
Get them quite far away from Earth, plausibly deniable, and then send out the message that would then attract all the aliens, and then basically work out if they re a friend or foe and how they want to hang out.
4
SPEAKER_00
The messages being something that has to do with the memories?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yes, like the assembly version of Arecibo, so that everyone in the universe that understands what life is,
4
SPEAKER_01
So aliens need to work out what they are.
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SPEAKER_01
Once they ve worked out what they are, they then can work out how to encode what they are, and then they can go out and send messages.
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SPEAKER_01
It s like the universal, the Rosetta Stone for life in the universe is working out how the memories are built.
4
SPEAKER_01
I don t know if, Sarah, you have any, well, whether that, you would agree with that.
4
SPEAKER_02
No, I wanted to raise a different point, which is about the fact that we can t see the aliens yet, because we haven t gotten the technology.
4
SPEAKER_02
And presumably, we think assembly theory is the right way of doing it.
4
SPEAKER_02
But I don t think that we know how to go from the kind of data you re describing, Lex, like visual data or smell, to construct the assembly spaces yet.
4
SPEAKER_02
And in some ways, I think that the problem of life detection really is the same problem at the foundations of AI.
4
SPEAKER_02
that we don t understand how to get machines to see causal graphs, to see reality in terms of causation.
4
SPEAKER_02
And so I think assembly and AI are going to intersect in interesting ways, hopefully.
4
SPEAKER_02
But the sort of key point, and I ve been trying to make this argument more recently and might write an essay on it, is people talk about the great filter, right?
4
SPEAKER_02
And which is, again, this like doomsday thing that people want to say there s no aliens out there because something terrible happened to them.
4
SPEAKER_02
And it matters whether that s in our past or our future as to the longevity of our species, presumably, which is why people find it interesting.
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SPEAKER_02
But I think it s not a physical filter.
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SPEAKER_02
It s not like things go extinct.
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SPEAKER_02
I think it s literally we don t have the technology to see them.
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SPEAKER_02
And you can see that with microscopes.
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SPEAKER_02
I mean, we didn t know there were microbes on this table for
4
SPEAKER_02
tables for thousands of years or telescopes like there s so much of the universe we can t see and then basically what we have done as a species is outsource our physical perceptions to technology building microscopes based on our eyes you know and building seismometers based on our sense of feelings like feel earthquakes and things and AI is basically we re trying to outsource what s actually happening in our thinking apparatus into machines now into technological devices
4
SPEAKER_02
And maybe that s the key technology that s gonna allow us to see things like us and see the universe in a totally different way.
4
SPEAKER_00
But you kind of mentioned the great filter.
4
SPEAKER_00
Do you think there s a way through technology to stop being able to see stuff?
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SPEAKER_00
So can you take a step backwards?
4
SPEAKER_02
I think so, yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
Did you imply that with the great, so like?
4
SPEAKER_02
Well, no, I mean, I think there s a great perceptual filter in the sense that a example of life evolving on a planet over billions of years has to acquire a certain amount of knowledge and technology to actually recognize
4
SPEAKER_02
the phenomena that it is.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, that s the sense I have is when you talk with physicists, engineers in general, there s this kind of idea that we have most of the tools already to hear the signal.
4
SPEAKER_00
But to me it feels like we don t have any of the tools to see the signal.
4
SPEAKER_00
No, we don t know what we re doing, yeah, I agree.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s the biggest, like to hear.
4
SPEAKER_00
We don t have the tools to really hear, to see.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
Aliens are everywhere, we just don t have the... Yeah, well... I mean, I got this in part, actually, because you were like, you know, last time I was here, you were like, look at the carpet.
4
SPEAKER_02
You know, could it, like, if you had an alien detector, would the carpet be aliens?
4
SPEAKER_02
I mean, I think we really don t.
4
SPEAKER_00
So it would be, but aliens would nevertheless have a high assembly index or produce things of a high assembly index.
4
SPEAKER_00
And those things of a high assembly index, you have to have a detector that can recognize high assembly index in all its forms.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yes, that s it, that s it.
4
SPEAKER_02
Take data, construct assembly space.
4
SPEAKER_00
Those patterns basically, so one way to think about high assembly index is interesting patterns of basic ingredients.
4
SPEAKER_02
I can give you an example, because, I mean, in molecules we ve been talking about in objects, but we re also trying to do it in spatial trajectories.
4
SPEAKER_02
Like, imagine you re just, like, I always get bothered by the fact that, like, when you look at birds flocking, you can describe that with, like, a simple Boyd s model, or, like, you know, people use spin glass to describe animal behavior, and those are, like, really simple physics models.
4
SPEAKER_02
Yet you re looking at a system that you know has agency and there s intelligence in those birds.
4
SPEAKER_02
And basically, you can t help but think there must be some statistical signatures of the fact that that s a group of agents versus, I don t know, the physics example, maybe like, I don t know, Brownian motion or something.
4
SPEAKER_02
And so what we re trying to do is actually apply assembly to trajectory data to try to say there s a minimal amount of causal history to build up certain trajectories for
4
SPEAKER_02
observed agents, that s like an agency detector for behavior.
4
SPEAKER_00
Do you think it s possible to do some like Boids or those kinds of things, like artificial, like cellular automata, play with those ideas with assembly?
4
SPEAKER_00
with assembly theory, have you found any useful, really simple mathematical simulation tools that allow you to play with these concepts?
4
SPEAKER_00
So like one, of course, you re doing math spec in this physical space with chemistry, but it just seems, well, I mean, computer science person, maybe, it seems easier to just- I agree with you.
4
SPEAKER_00
And sexier in terms of tweeting visual information on Twitter or Instagram, more importantly.
4
SPEAKER_00
to play like here s an organism of a low assembly index, and here s an organism of a high assembly index, and let s watch them create more and more memories, and more and more complex objects, and so like, and mathematically you get to observe what that looks like, to build up an intuition what assembly index is like.
4
SPEAKER_01
We are building a toolkit right now.
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SPEAKER_01
So I think it s a really good idea.
4
SPEAKER_01
But what we ve got to do is, I m kind of still obsessed with the infrastructure required.
4
SPEAKER_01
And one of the reasons why I was pushing on information and mathematics, when human beings, we take a lot of the infrastructure for granted.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I think we have to strip that back a bit for going forward.
4
SPEAKER_01
But you re absolutely right.
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SPEAKER_01
I would agree that
4
SPEAKER_01
I think the fact that we exist in the universe, I can see that lots of people are going to disagree with this statement, but I don t think Sarah will, but I don t know.
4
SPEAKER_01
The fact that objects exist, I don t think anyone on earth will disagree
4
SPEAKER_01
the objects can exist elsewhere, right?
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SPEAKER_01
But they all disagree that life can exist elsewhere.
4
SPEAKER_01
But what perhaps I m trying to say is that the acquisition, the universe s ability to acquire memory is the very first step for building life.
4
SPEAKER_01
And that must be, that s so easy to happen.
4
SPEAKER_01
So therefore alien life is everywhere because all alien life is, is those memories being compressed and minimized and the alien equivalent of the cell working.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I think that we will build new technologies to find aliens.
4
SPEAKER_01
But we need to understand what we are first and how we go from physics to chemistry to biology.
4
SPEAKER_01
The most interesting thing, as you say, to these two organisms, different assemblies, is when you get into biology, biology gets more and more weird, more and more contingent.
4
SPEAKER_01
Chemistry is less weird, because the rules of chemistry are smaller than the rules of biology, and then going away to physics, where you have a very nicely tangible number of ways of arranging things.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I think assembly theory just helps you appreciate that.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so once we get there, my dream is that we are just going to be able to suddenly are, I mean, I may be just being really arrogant here.
4
SPEAKER_01
I don t mean to be arrogant.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s just, again, I ve just got this hammer called assembly and everything s a nail.
4
SPEAKER_01
But I think that once we crack it, we ll be able to use assembly theory plus telescopes to find aliens.
4
SPEAKER_00
Do you have, Sarah, do you have disagreements with Lee on the number of aliens that are out there?
4
SPEAKER_00
And what they look like?
4
SPEAKER_00
So any of the things we ve been talking about, is there nuanced, it s always nice to discover wisdom through nuanced disagreement.
4
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I don t wholly disagree, but I do think I disagree.
4
SPEAKER_02
There s nuance there.
4
SPEAKER_02
You can disagree.
4
SPEAKER_02
No, it s fine.
4
SPEAKER_02
It is nuanced, right?
4
SPEAKER_02
So you made the point earlier that you think once we discover what life is, we ll see alien life everywhere.
4
SPEAKER_02
And I think I agree on some levels in the sense that I think the physics that governs us is universal.
4
SPEAKER_02
But I don t know how far I would go to say that we re a likely phenomenon, because we don t understand all of the features of the transition at the origin of life, which we would just say in assembly, as you go from the no-memory physics to, there s like a critical transition around the assembly index where assembliness starts to increase, and that s what we call the evolution of the biosphere and complexification of the biosphere.
4
SPEAKER_02
So there s a principle of increasing assembliness, or that goes back to what I was saying at the very beginning about the physics of the possible, that the universe basically gets in this mode of trying to make as much possibilities as possible.
4
SPEAKER_02
Now, how often that transition happens?
4
SPEAKER_02
that you get the kind of cascading effect that we get in our biosphere, I think we don t know.
4
SPEAKER_02
If we did, we would know the likelihood of life in the universe.
4
SPEAKER_02
And a lot of people want to say life is common, but I don t think that we can say that yet until we have the empirical data, which I think you would agree with.
4
SPEAKER_02
But then there s this other kind of thought experiment I have, which I don t like, but I did have it, which is, you know, if life emerges on one planet and you get this real high density of things that can exist on that planet, is it sort of dominating
4
SPEAKER_02
the density of creation that the universe can actually generate.
4
SPEAKER_02
So like if you re thinking about counting entropy, right?
4
SPEAKER_02
Like the universe has a certain amount of stuff in it.
4
SPEAKER_02
And then, you know, assembly is kind of like an entropic principle.
4
SPEAKER_02
It s not entropy.
4
SPEAKER_02
But the idea is that now transformations among stuff or the actual physical histories of things now become things that you have to count as far as saying that these things exist and we re increasing the number of things that exist.
4
SPEAKER_02
And if you think about that cosmologically, maybe Earth is sucking up all the life potential of the whole universe, I don t know.
4
SPEAKER_00
But I have a- How s that, can you explain that a little bit?
4
SPEAKER_00
Why can t any one geographical region suck up the creative capacity of the universe?
4
SPEAKER_02
Just like, I know it s a ridiculous thought.
4
SPEAKER_02
I don t actually agree with it, but it was just a thought experiment.
4
SPEAKER_00
I love that you can have thoughts
4
SPEAKER_00
that you don t like and don t agree with, but you have to think through them anyway.
4
SPEAKER_00
The human mind is fascinating.
4
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I think these sort of counterfactual thought experiments are really good when you re trying to build new theories, because you have to think through all the consequences.
4
SPEAKER_02
And there are people that want to try to account for
4
SPEAKER_02
say, the degrees of freedom on our planet in cosmological inventories of, you know, talking about the entropy of the universe and, you know, and when we re thinking about, like, cosmological arrow of time and things like that.
4
SPEAKER_02
Now, I think those are pretty superficial proposals as they stand now, but assembly would give you a way of counting it.
4
SPEAKER_02
And then the question is, if there s a certain maximal capacity of the universe s speed of generating stuff, which Lee always has this argument that assembly is about time, the universe is generating more states, really what it s generating is more assembly possibilities.
4
SPEAKER_02
And then dark energy might be one manifestation of that, that the universe is accelerating its expansion because that makes more physical space.
4
SPEAKER_02
And what s happening on our planet is it s accelerating in the expansion of possible things that exist, and maybe the universe just has a maximal rate of what it can do to generate things.
4
SPEAKER_02
And then if there is a maximal rate, maybe only a certain number of planets can actually do that, or there s a trade-off about the pace of growth on certain planets versus others.
4
SPEAKER_00
I have a million questions there, but do you have thoughts?
4
SPEAKER_01
Just a quick, yeah, I ll just say something very quick.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s a thought experiment.
4
SPEAKER_01
No, it s good.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think I get it.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think I get it.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, what I want to say is, when I mean aliens are everywhere, I mean memories are the prerequisite for
4
SPEAKER_01
aliens via selection and then concentration of selection when selection becomes autonomous.
4
SPEAKER_01
So what I would love to do is to build, say, a magical telescope that was a memory, magical one, a real one that would be a memory detector to see selection.
4
SPEAKER_01
So you could get to exoplanets and say that exoplanet looks like there s lots of selection going on there.
4
SPEAKER_01
Maybe there s evolution and maybe there s going to be life.
4
SPEAKER_01
So what I m trying to say is narrow down the regions of space.
4
SPEAKER_01
We can say there s definitely evidence of memory as high assembly there, or not high assembly because that would be life, but where it s capable of happening.
5
SPEAKER_00
And then that would also help us frame the search for aliens.
5
SPEAKER_00
I don t know how likely it is to make the transition to cells and all the other things.
5
SPEAKER_00
I think you re right.
5
SPEAKER_00
But I think that we just need to get more data.
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, I didn t like the thought experiment because I don t like the idea that if the universe has a maximal limit on the amount it can generate per unit time, that our existence is actually precluding the existence of other things.
5
SPEAKER_01
But I think that s probably true anyway because of the resource limitations.
5
SPEAKER_00
So I don t like your thought experiment because I think it s wrong.
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, no, no.
5
SPEAKER_00
I do like the thought experiment.
5
SPEAKER_00
So what you re trying to say is there is a chain of events that goes back that s manifestly culminated with life on Earth.
5
SPEAKER_00
And you re not saying that life isn t possible elsewhere.
5
SPEAKER_00
You say that there has been these number of contingent things that have happened that have allowed life to emerge here.
5
SPEAKER_00
That doesn t mean that life can t emerge elsewhere, but you re saying that the intersection of events may be concentrated here, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
And I think there s
5
SPEAKER_01
Not exactly.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s more like, you know, if you look at, say, the causal graphs are fundamental, maybe space is an emergent property, which is consistent with some proposals in quantum gravity, but also how we talk about things in assembly theory.
5
SPEAKER_01
Then the universe is causal graphs generating more structure in causal graphs, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
So this is how the universe is unfolding.
5
SPEAKER_01
And maybe there s a
5
SPEAKER_01
cap on the rate of generation, like there s only so much stuff that gets made per update of the universe.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then if there s a lot of stuff being made in a particular region that happens to look the same locally, spatially, that s an aftereffect of the fact that the whole causal graph is updating.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s... Yeah, I don t know that.
5
SPEAKER_00
I think that that doesn t work.
5
SPEAKER_01
I don t think it works either, but I don t have a good argument in my mind about it.
5
SPEAKER_00
But I do like the idea of the capacity, because you ve got a number of states.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, we can come back to it.
5
SPEAKER_02
Let me ask you real quick.
5
SPEAKER_02
Why does different local pockets of the universe start remembering stuff?
5
SPEAKER_02
How does memory emerge exactly?
5
SPEAKER_02
So at the origin of the universe, it was very forgetful.
5
SPEAKER_02
That s when the physicists were happiest.
5
SPEAKER_02
It was low memory objects, which is like ultra low memory objects, which is what the definition of stuff.
5
SPEAKER_02
Okay, and so how does memory emerge?
5
SPEAKER_02
How does the temporal stickiness,
5
SPEAKER_02
of objects emerge?
5
SPEAKER_00
I m gonna take a very chemocentric point of view because I can t imagine any other way of doing it.
5
SPEAKER_00
You could think of other ways maybe, but I would say,
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SPEAKER_00
heterogeneity in matter is where the memory so you must have enough different ways of rearranging matter for there to be a memory so what that means if you ve got particles colliding in a box let s just take a some in some elements in a box
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SPEAKER_00
those elements can combine in a combinatorial set of ways.
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SPEAKER_00
So there s a combinatorial explosion of the number of molecules or minerals or solid objects, bonds being made.
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SPEAKER_00
Because there s such a large number, the population of different objects that are possible, this goes back to assembly theory where assembly theory, there s four types of universes, right?
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SPEAKER_00
So you ve got basically, and this is what was up earlier, where
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one universe where you ve just got everything as possible so you can take all the atoms and combine them and make everything.
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Then you ve got basically what is the assembly commentarial where you basically have to accrue information in steps.
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SPEAKER_00
Then you ve got assembly observed
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right, and then you ve got the object assembly going back.
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SPEAKER_00
So what I m trying to say is like, if you can take atoms and make bonds, let s say you take a nitrogen atom and add it to a carbon atom, you find an amino acid, then you add another carbon atom on it in a particular configuration, then another one, all different molecules, they all represent different histories.
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SPEAKER_00
So I would say for me right now, the most simple route into life seems to be through recording memories and chemistry.
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SPEAKER_00
But that doesn t mean there can t be other ways and can t be other emergent effects.
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SPEAKER_00
But I think if you can make bonds and lots of different bonds and those molecules can have a causal effect on the future.
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SPEAKER_00
So imagine a box of atoms and then you combine those atoms in some way.
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SPEAKER_00
So you make molecule A from a load of atoms and then molecule A can go back to the box and influence the box
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SPEAKER_00
then you make A prime, or AB, or ABC, and that process keeps going, and that s where the memories come from, is that heterogeneity in the universe from bonding.
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SPEAKER_00
I don t know if that makes any sense.
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SPEAKER_02
And it s beginning to flourish at the chemistry level.
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SPEAKER_02
So the physicists have no, like not enough.
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SPEAKER_02
They re like desperately begging for more freedom and heterogeneous components to play with.
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SPEAKER_00
That s exactly it.
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SPEAKER_02
What do you think about that, sir?
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SPEAKER_01
I mentioned already, I think it s significant that whatever physics governs life emerges actually in chemistry.
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SPEAKER_01
It s not relevant at the subatomic scale or even at the atomic scale.
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SPEAKER_01
It s in, well, atomic scale because chemistry.
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SPEAKER_01
But when you get into this combinatorial diversity that you get from combining things on the periodic table, that s when selection actually matters or the fact that some things can exist and others can t exist actually starts to matter.
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SPEAKER_01
So I think of it like you don t study gravity inside the atomic nucleus, you study it in terms of large-scale structure of the universe or black holes or things like that.
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SPEAKER_01
And whatever we re talking about as physics of information or physics of assembly becomes relevant at a certain scale of reality.
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SPEAKER_01
And the transition that you re talking about, I would think of as just when you get a sufficient density
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SPEAKER_01
in terms of the assembly space of the relationship of the overlap and the assembly space, which is a feature of common memory, there is this transition to assembly-dominated physics, whatever that is.
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SPEAKER_01
And we re trying to map out exactly what that transition looks like.
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SPEAKER_01
We re pretty sure of some of its features, but we haven t done all of the
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SPEAKER_02
Do you think if you were there in the early universe, you would have been able to predict the emergence of chemistry and biology?
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SPEAKER_02
And I ask that because at this stage, as humans, do you think we can possibly predict the length of memory that might be able to be formed later on in this pocket of the universe?
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SPEAKER_02
How complex is, what is the ceiling of assembly?
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SPEAKER_01
I think as much time as you have in the past is how much you can predict in the future, because it s actually physical in the system, and you have to have enough time for features of that structure to exist.
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SPEAKER_02
Wait, let me push back on that.
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SPEAKER_02
Isn t there somewhere in the universe that s like a shortest path that s been, that stretches all the way to the beginning?
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_02
That s building some giant monster?
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SPEAKER_01
Maybe, yeah.
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SPEAKER_02
Yeah, so you can t predict the monster.
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SPEAKER_01
The universe has as much memory as the largest assembly object in the universe.
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SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_02
Right, but so you can t predict.
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SPEAKER_01
You can t predict any deeper than that, no.
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SPEAKER_02
Right, so I guess what I m saying is, what intuition do you have about complexity living in the world that you have today, right?
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SPEAKER_02
Because you just, you can...
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SPEAKER_02
I mean, I guess how long, does it get more fun?
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SPEAKER_02
Isn t there gonna be at some point, because there s a heat death in the universe, isn t there going to be a point of the most, of the highest assembly of object, with the highest probability being generated?
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SPEAKER_01
When is the universe gonna be the most fun and can we freeze ourselves and then live then?
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SPEAKER_02
Exactly.
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SPEAKER_02
Will you know when you re having the most fun that this is the best time you re in your prime?
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Are you going to do what everyone does which is deny that you re in your prime and the best years are still ahead of you?
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SPEAKER_00
What option do you have?
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SPEAKER_00
I don t, I mean the problem is there s lots of really interesting features here.
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SPEAKER_00
I just want to mention one thing that might be, is I do think assembly theory applies all the way back to subatomic particles and I also think that cosmological selection might have been actually, there might have been, I would say it s a really boring bit but it s really important if you re a cosmologist,
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that universes have gone through.
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Was it Lee Smolin who proposed this?
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Maybe that there is this, that basically a universe evolves, you ve got the wrong constants, we ll start again.
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And the most productive constants where you can allow particles to form in a certain way, propagate to the next universe and we go again.
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SPEAKER_00
So actually selection goes all the way back and there s this cycle of universes and now this universe has been selected because life can occur and it carries on.
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SPEAKER_00
But I ve really butchered that.
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SPEAKER_00
There is a much more
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SPEAKER_02
So this is some aspect where, through the selection process, there s parameters that are being fine-tuned and we happen to be living in one where there s some level of fine-tuning.
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SPEAKER_02
Is there, given that,
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SPEAKER_02
Can you still man the case that we humans are alone in the universe?
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SPEAKER_02
We are the highest assembly index object in the universe.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I can, I guess.
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SPEAKER_00
Sad, though.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, so from a- Is it possible?
5
SPEAKER_00
Yes, it s possible.
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SPEAKER_00
Let s assume, well, we know, I mean, it s possible.
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SPEAKER_00
So let me, so okay, so there is a particular set of elements on Earth in a particular ratio.
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SPEAKER_00
and the right gravitational constant and the right viscosity of stuff being able to move around, the right distance from our sun, the right number of events where we have a moon, the Earth is rotating, the late heavy bombardment brought in the right stuff.
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SPEAKER_00
And Mars was cooking up the right molecules first, so it was habitable before Earth.
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SPEAKER_00
It was actually doing the combinatorial search.
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SPEAKER_00
And before Mars kind of became unhabitable, it seeded Earth with the right molecular replicators, and there was just the right stuff on Earth, and that s how the miracle of life occurred.
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SPEAKER_00
Although I find I m very uncomfortable with that because actually, because life came so quickly in the Earth s past.
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SPEAKER_00
But that doesn t mean that life is easy elsewhere.
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SPEAKER_00
It just might mean that, because chemistry is actually not a long-term thing.
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SPEAKER_00
Chemistry can happen quickly.
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SPEAKER_00
So maybe
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SPEAKER_00
going on with the steel manning of the argument to say actually the fact that life emerged quickly doesn t mean that life is easy it just means that the chemistry was right on earth and earth is very special and that s why there s no life anywhere else in the universe.
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SPEAKER_02
Yeah, so Sarah mentioned this kind of cascading thing.
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SPEAKER_02
So what if that s the reason we re lucky, is that we got to have a rare cascading of, like an accelerating cascading effect in terms of the complexity of things?
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SPEAKER_02
So like, maybe most of the universe is trying to get sticky with the memory, and it s not able to really form it.
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SPEAKER_02
And then we got really lucky in that.
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SPEAKER_02
And it has nothing, like there s a lot of Earth-like conditions, let s say, but it s just, you really, really have to get lucky on this.
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SPEAKER_00
But I m doing experiments right now.
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SPEAKER_00
In fact, experiments that Sarah and I are working on, because we have some joint funding for this, where we re seeing that the universe can get sticky really quickly.
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SPEAKER_00
Now, of course, we re being very anthropocentric, we re using laboratory tools, we re using theory, but actually,
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The phenomena of selection, the process of developing heterogeneity, we can do in the lab.
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SPEAKER_00
We re just seeing the very first hints of it.
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Wouldn t it be great if we can start to pin down a bit more precisely, becoming good Bayesianists for this, for the origin of life and the emergence of life.
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SPEAKER_00
to finding out what kind of chemistries we really need to look for.
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And I m becoming increasingly confident we ll be able to do that in the next few years.
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SPEAKER_00
Make life in the lab or make some selection in the lab from inorganic stuff, from sand, from rocks, from dead stuff, from moon.
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SPEAKER_00
Wouldn t it be great to get stuff from the moon, put it in our origin of life experiment and make moon life and restrict ourselves to interesting self-replicating stuff that we find on the moon?
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SPEAKER_02
Sarah, what do you think about this approach of engineering life in order to understand life?
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So building life in the machine.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so, I mean, Lee and I are trying right now to build a vision for a large institute or experimental program, basically, to do this problem.
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SPEAKER_01
But I think of it as like, we need to simulate a planet.
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SPEAKER_01
So like the Large Hadron Collider was supposed to be simulating conditions just after the Big Bang.
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SPEAKER_01
Lee s built a lot of technology in his lab to do these kind of selection engines.
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SPEAKER_01
But the question you re asking is, how many experiments do you need to run?
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What volume of chemical space do you need to explore before you actually
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see an event.
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SPEAKER_01
And I like to make an analogy to one of my favorite particle physics experiments, which is Super Kamiokande that s looking for the decay of the proton.
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SPEAKER_01
So this is something that we predicted theoretically, but we ve never observed in our universe.
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SPEAKER_01
And basically what they re doing is every time they don t see a proton decay event, they have a longer bound on the lifetime of a proton.
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SPEAKER_01
So imagine we built an experiment with the idea in mind of trying to simulate planetary conditions, physically simulate.
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SPEAKER_01
You can t simulate original life in a computer.
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SPEAKER_01
You have to do it in an experiment.
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SPEAKER_01
Simulate enough planetary conditions to explore the space of what s possible and bound the probability for an original life event.
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SPEAKER_01
Even if you re not observing it, you can talk about the probability.
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SPEAKER_01
But we hopefully, life is not exponentially rare, and we would then be able to evolve
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SPEAKER_01
in an automated system, alien life in the lab.
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SPEAKER_01
And if we can do that, then we understand the physics as well as we understand what we can do in particle accelerators.
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SPEAKER_02
So keep expanding physically the simulation, the physical simulation, until something happens.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, or just build a big enough volume of chemical experiments and evolve them.
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SPEAKER_02
So when you say volume, you mean like literally volume?
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SPEAKER_01
I mean physical volume in terms of space, but I actually mean volume in terms of the combinatorial space of chemistry.
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SPEAKER_02
How do you nicely control the combinatorial exploration, the search space, such that it s always like you keep grabbing the low-hanging fruit?
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, how do you build a search engine for chemistry?
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SPEAKER_00
I think it s explained really well.
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SPEAKER_00
We should carry on doing this.
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SPEAKER_00
I should pretend to be the physicist, you be the chemist.
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SPEAKER_00
No, so the way to do it is, I will always play a joke, because I like writing grants to ask for money to do cool stuff.
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SPEAKER_00
and years ago I started wanting to build, so I actually wanted to, so I built this robot in my lab called a Kemputer, which is this robot you can program to do chemistry.
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SPEAKER_00
Now it s a pro, I made a programming language for the Kemputer and made it operate chemical equipment.
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SPEAKER_00
Originally I wrote grants to say, hey, I want to make an origin of life system, and no one would give me any money for this, this is ridiculous.
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SPEAKER_00
why are you wanting to make, oh, it s really hard, it takes forever, you re not a very good origin of life chemist anyway, why would we give you any money?
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SPEAKER_00
And so I turned it around and said, can you instead, can you give me money to make robots, to make molecules that are interesting?
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SPEAKER_00
And everyone went, yeah, okay, you can do that.
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SPEAKER_00
And that s, so actually the funny thing is the computer project, which I have in my lab, which is very briefly, it s just basically, it s like literally an automated test tube, and we ve made a programming language for the test tube.
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SPEAKER_00
which is cool, has literally came from this.
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SPEAKER_00
I went to my lab one day.
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SPEAKER_00
I said, I want to make a search engine to get the origin of life, because I don t have a planet.
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SPEAKER_00
And I thought about doing it in a microfluidic format.
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SPEAKER_00
So microfluidic is very small channels in device, where you can basically have all the pipes lit up, produced by lithography.
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SPEAKER_00
And you can have a chamber maybe, say, between, say, 10 and 100 microns in volume.
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SPEAKER_00
And we slot them all together like Lego, and we can make an origin of life system.
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SPEAKER_00
And I could never get it to work.
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SPEAKER_00
And I realized I had to do chemistry at the kind of test tube level.
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SPEAKER_00
And what you want to be able to do, yeah, it goes back to that tweet in 1981.
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SPEAKER_02
In 1981, the computer, we re looking at a tweet from Lee.
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SPEAKER_02
In 1981, the computer was a distant dream.
5
SPEAKER_02
Oh wow, this is the scientist looking back at his, the young boy who dreamed.
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SPEAKER_02
In 2018, it was realized, spelled in a British way, realized.
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SPEAKER_02
So now there s a system that does the physical manifestation or whatever the programming language.
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SPEAKER_02
the spec tells you to do.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, well in 1981 I got my first computer, ZX81.
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SPEAKER_01
What was the computer?
6
SPEAKER_01
ZX81.
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SPEAKER_01
ZX81.
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SPEAKER_01
Sinclair ZX81.
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SPEAKER_01
And I got a chemistry set.
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SPEAKER_01
And I like the chemistry set and I like the computer and I just wanted to put them together.
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SPEAKER_01
I thought, wouldn t it be cool if I could just use the computer to control the chemistry set?
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SPEAKER_01
And obviously that was insane.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I was like, you know, eight years old, right?
6
SPEAKER_01
Nine years old, going on nine years old.
6
SPEAKER_01
And then I...
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SPEAKER_01
I invented the computer just because I wanted to build this origin of life grid, which is literally a billion test tubes connected together in real time and real space, basically throwing a chemical dice.
6
SPEAKER_01
Throw dice, throw dice, throw dice.
6
SPEAKER_01
You re going to get lucky.
6
SPEAKER_01
And that s what we, I think Sarah and I have been thinking very deeply about, because, you know, there s more money being spent on the origin of the gravity or looking at the Higgs boson than the origin of life, right?
6
SPEAKER_01
And the origin of life
6
SPEAKER_01
is the, I think, the biggest question.
6
SPEAKER_01
Well, not the biggest question, it is a big question.
6
SPEAKER_01
Let s put it that way.
6
SPEAKER_04
It is the biggest question.
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SPEAKER_04
You re okay saying that.
6
SPEAKER_02
Okay, all right.
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SPEAKER_02
Isn t it possible once you figure out the origin of life that that s not going to solve, that s not actually going to solve the question of what is life?
6
SPEAKER_02
Because you re kind of putting a lot of... I don t think so, yeah.
6
SPEAKER_04
I think that s the same problem.
6
SPEAKER_02
But you re putting, is it possible that you re putting too many, too much bets into this origin part?
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SPEAKER_02
Maybe the origin thing isn t, isn t there always a turtle underneath the turtle?
6
SPEAKER_02
Isn t it a stack of turtles?
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SPEAKER_02
Because then if you create it in the lab, maybe you need some other stuff.
6
SPEAKER_02
Like in the lab, there s still memory.
6
SPEAKER_04
Yes, the experiment is already the product of evolution.
6
SPEAKER_02
Right, in some maybe really deep way, not an obvious way, in some very deep way.
6
SPEAKER_02
So maybe the haters are always going to be like, well, you have to reconstruct the fold, you have to build it from scratch.
6
SPEAKER_04
Fortunately for us, the haters are not aware of that argument.
6
SPEAKER_02
Well, no, I know.
6
SPEAKER_04
You re the one making that argument usually, but yeah.
6
SPEAKER_02
I just think that if we create life in the lab, it s not obvious that you ll get to the deep, deep understanding of necessarily what is the line between life and non-life.
6
SPEAKER_01
No, I think so.
6
SPEAKER_01
There s so much here.
6
SPEAKER_01
I m just playing devil s advocate.
6
SPEAKER_01
So much here.
6
SPEAKER_01
But let me play devil s advocate back in a previous conversation and say,
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I will.
6
SPEAKER_01
Why not?
6
SPEAKER_01
We ve got time.
6
SPEAKER_01
Cellular automata.
6
SPEAKER_01
Cellular automata, these very simple things where you color squares black or white and implement rules and play them in time and you can get these very complex patterns coming out.
6
SPEAKER_01
There s nice rules, there are Turing complete rules.
6
SPEAKER_01
I would argue that cellular automata don t really exist on their own.
6
SPEAKER_01
They have to exist in a computing device, whether that s computing devices, a piece of paper, an abstraction, a mathematician drawing a grid, or a framework.
6
SPEAKER_01
Now, so I would argue CAs are beautiful things, simple going complex, but the complexity is all borrowed from the lithography, not numbers.
6
SPEAKER_01
Right, now let s take that same argument with the chemistry experiment origin of life.
6
SPEAKER_01
Cat, what you need to be able to do is go, and I m inspired to do this, to go out and look for CAs that occur in nature.
6
SPEAKER_01
Let s find some CAs that just emerge in our universe.
6
SPEAKER_02
For people, just to interrupt, for people just listening, and in general, I think what we re looking at is a cellular automata where, again, as Lee described, there is just binary black or white squares.
6
SPEAKER_02
and they only have local information, and they re born and they die, and you would think nothing interesting would emerge, but actually what we re looking at is something that I believe is called glider guns, or a glider gun, which is moving objects in this multi-cell space that look like they re organisms.
6
SPEAKER_02
that have much more information, that have much more complexity than the individual building components, in fact, look like they have a long-term memory, while the individual components don t seem like they have any memory at all.
6
SPEAKER_01
which is fascinating.
6
SPEAKER_01
The argument here is that has to exist on all this layer of infrastructure, right?
6
SPEAKER_01
And though it looks simple.
6
SPEAKER_01
And then what I would make, the argument I would make if I were you, say well I think CAs are really simple and everywhere, is say show me how they emerge in a substrate.
6
SPEAKER_01
Now let s go to the origin of life, or machine.
6
SPEAKER_01
I don t think we want to do the origin of life, just any origin is good.
6
SPEAKER_01
So what we do, so we literally have our sand shaker, shake the sand like massive grid of chemistry experiments, shaking sand, shaking whatever.
6
SPEAKER_01
And then because we know what we ve put in, so we know how we ve cheated, and the same way with CA, we know how we ve cheated, we know the number of operations needed, we know how big a grid we want to get this.
6
SPEAKER_01
If we could then say, okay, how can we generate this recipe in the lab and make a life form?
6
SPEAKER_01
what contingency did we need to put in?
6
SPEAKER_01
And we re upfront about how we cheated.
6
SPEAKER_01
Say, oh, you had to shake it.
6
SPEAKER_01
It was periodic.
6
SPEAKER_01
Planet rotates, stride comes in and out.
6
SPEAKER_01
And then we can start to basically say, okay, how
6
SPEAKER_01
difficult is it for these features to be found and then we can look for exoplanets and other features.
6
SPEAKER_01
So, I think Sarah is absolutely right.
6
SPEAKER_01
We want to explain to people we re cheating.
6
SPEAKER_01
In fact, we have to cheat.
6
SPEAKER_01
No one has given – I m good at writing grants.
6
SPEAKER_01
I used to be.
6
SPEAKER_01
I m not very good right now.
6
SPEAKER_01
I keep getting rejected.
6
SPEAKER_01
But writing a grant for a planet in 100 million years, no grant funder is going to give me that.
6
SPEAKER_01
But maybe money to make a kind of a grid, a computer grid, origin of life computer grid.
6
SPEAKER_01
In physical space.
6
SPEAKER_01
In physical space and just do it.
6
SPEAKER_02
So Sarah said something, which is you can t simulate the origin of life in a computer, so like in simulation, why not?
6
SPEAKER_02
You said it very confidently, so is it possible?
6
SPEAKER_02
And why would it be very difficult?
6
SPEAKER_02
What s your intuition there?
6
SPEAKER_04
I think it s very difficult right now because we don t know the physics, but if you go based on principles of assembly theory and you think every molecule is actually a very large causal graph, not just the molecule, then you have to simulate all the features of those causal graphs.
6
SPEAKER_04
And I think it becomes computationally intractable.
6
SPEAKER_04
You might as well just build the experiment.
6
SPEAKER_02
Because you have, in the physical space, you have all the objects with all the memories.
6
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
6
SPEAKER_02
And in the computer, you have to copy them and reconstruct them.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s beautifully put.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I would say that lots of people,
6
SPEAKER_01
you just don t have enough resources.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s easier to actually do the physical experiment because we are literally, I would view the physical experiment almost like a computational experiment.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s just basically we re just outsourcing all the matrix algebra.
6
SPEAKER_04
On your point about the experiment being also an example of life, it s almost like you wanna design, it s like all of us are
6
SPEAKER_04
lineages of propagating information across time and so everything we do becomes part of life because it s part of that causal chain.
6
SPEAKER_04
So it s like you want to try to pinch off as much as you can of the information from your causal chain that goes into the experiment, but you can t pinch off all of it to move it to like a different timeline.
6
SPEAKER_04
It s always going to be part of your timeline.
6
SPEAKER_04
But at least if you can control how much information you put in, you can try to see how much does that particular trajectory you set up start generating its own assembly.
6
SPEAKER_04
So you know where it starts, and then you want to try to see it take off on its own when you ve tried to pinch it off as much as possible.
6
SPEAKER_02
Got it.
6
SPEAKER_02
Quick pause, bathroom break.
6
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
6
SPEAKER_02
All right, cool.
6
SPEAKER_02
And now we re back.
6
SPEAKER_02
All right, we talked about the early days of the universe when there was just stuff and no memory, not even causality.
6
SPEAKER_02
I think Lee at least implied that causality is emergent somehow.
6
SPEAKER_02
We could discuss this.
6
SPEAKER_02
What happened before this all originated?
6
SPEAKER_02
What s outside the universe?
6
SPEAKER_00
Defined by zero.
6
SPEAKER_02
Okay, so it s not relevant, not understandable.
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SPEAKER_02
Is it useful to even ask the question?
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No.
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Because it s so hard?
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SPEAKER_01
No, it s not hard.
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It s just not a question.
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If I can t do an experiment or even think of an experiment, the question doesn t exist.
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SPEAKER_02
Well, no, you can t think of a lot of experiments, no offense.
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What I mean is, I can t- Because your causality graph is like, this is what we ve been talking about.
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It s like, there is limits to your ability to construct experiments.
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I agree, but I was trying to be facetious and I m trying to make a point, because I think that if there is a
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causal bottleneck through which information can t propagate in principle, then it s very hard to think of an experiment, even in principle, even one that s beyond my mediocre intellect, right?
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Which is fine, I m happy to accept that.
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But this is one of the things I actually do think there was something before the Big Bang, because I would say that I think the Big Bang just couldn t occur and create time.
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Time created the Big Bang.
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There was time before the Big Bang.
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Yeah.
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There was no space, but there was time.
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Yeah.
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SPEAKER_03
Yeah, but I mean, I m just making that stuff up just to make all the physicists happy, but I think it s... Do you think that would make them happy?
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Because they would be quite upset, actually.
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SPEAKER_03
Why would they be upset?
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Because they would say that time can t exist before the Big Bang.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, this goes back to an argument that you might not want to have the argument here.
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I was talking to Sarah earlier today about an argument we had about time a long time ago.
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I think there is this thing called time or state creation.
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The universe is creating states and it s outside of space but they create space.
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So what I mean is you can imagine there are states being created all the time and there is this thing called time.
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Time is a clock which you can use to measure when things happen but that doesn t mean because you can t measure something that states aren t being created.
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And so you might locally refer to the Big Bang, and the Big Bang occurred at some point when those states were there.
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Probably there had to be enough states for the Big Bang to occur.
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But I think that there is something wrong with our conception of how the universe was created and the Big Bang, because we don t really get time.
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Because again, I don t want to become boring and sound like a broken record, but
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But time is a real thing, and until I can really explain that more elegantly, I m just gonna get into more trouble.
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We re gonna talk about time, because time is a useful measuring device for experiments, but also time is an idea.
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But let me first ask Sarah, what do you think?
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Is it a useful question to ask what happened before the Big Bang?
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Is it a useful question to ask what s outside the universe?
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So I would think about it as the Big Bang is an event that we reconstructed as probably happening in the past of our universe based on current observational data.
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And so the way I like to think about it is
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we exist locally in something called a universe.
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So, and going back to like the physics of existence, we exist locally in the space of all things that could exist.
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And we can infer certain properties of the structure of where we exist locally.
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And one of the properties that we ve inferred in the past is that there is a thing we call the Big Bang.
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There s some signatures of our local environment that indicate that there was a very
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low information event that started our universe.
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I think that s actually just an artifact of the structure of the assembly space that when you start losing all the memory in the objects, it looks like what we call a Big Bang.
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So I think it makes sense to talk about where you are locally.
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I think it makes sense to talk about counterfactual possibilities, what could exist outside the universe,
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in the sense that they become part of our reasoning and therefore part of our causal chain of things that we can do.
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So like the multiverse in my mind exists, but it doesn t exist as a multiverse of possible universes.
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It exists as an idea in our minds that allows us to reason about how physics works and then to do physics differently because we reason about it that way.
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So I always like to recenter it on
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things exist, but they don t always exist like we think they exist.
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So when we re thinking about things outside the universe, they absolutely exist because we re thinking about them, but they don t look like, they don t look like the projections in our minds.
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They re something else.
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Something you said just gave me an idea to go back to your question.
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If something caused the Big Bang, if there was some memory or some artifact of that, then of course, to answer your question, it s worth going back to that, because that would imply there is something beyond that barrier, that filter.
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And that s what you were saying, I guess, right?
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Right.
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I m agnostic to what exists outside the universe.
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I just don t think that.
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I think the most interesting things for us to be doing are finding explanations that allow
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us to do more, like that optimism.
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So I tend to draw the boundary on questions I ask as being scientific ones because I find that that s where the most creative potential is to impact the future trajectory of what we re doing on this planet.
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It s interesting to think about the Big Bang is basically from our current perspective of what we re able to detect, it s the time when things were forgotten.
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It s the time to reset from our limited perspective.
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And so the question is, is it useful to ever study the thing that was forgotten?
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Or should we focus just on the memories that are still there?
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Well, the point I was trying to make about the experiment is I was trying to say both things.
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And I think perhaps yes, from the following point of view, if you could then imagine what was forgotten and then work forwards, you will have different consequences.
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So then it becomes testable.
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So as long as we can find tests, and it s definitely worth thinking about, what I don t like is when physicists say, what happened before the Big Bang and before, before, before, without giving me any credible conjecture about how would we know the difference.
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But the way you framed it is quite nice, I like that.
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It s like, what have we forgotten?
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Is there room for God in assembly theory?
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Who s God?
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I like arguments for a necessary being better than God.
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SPEAKER_01
Well I think I said it earlier.
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What s a necessary being?
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Like something that has to exist.
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Oh, so you like, I mean, you like the shortest path.
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SPEAKER_04
Like, does God need... No, no, no, I mean, well, you can go back to like Thomas Aquinas and arguments for the existence of God, but I think most of the interesting theological arguments are always about whether something has to exist or there was a first thing that had to exist.
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But I think there s a lot of logical loopholes in those kind of arguments.
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Well, so God here meaning the machine that creates, that generates the stuff.
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So what I was trying to say earlier is that- Isn t that just the universe?
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Yeah, yeah.
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Well, yeah, well, but there s a difference between, I imagine like a black box, like a machine.
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Then I would be more comfortable calling that God, because it s a machine.
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You go into a room and there s a thing with a button.
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Yeah, I don t like the great programmer in the sky version.
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Yeah, but if it s more kind of, like I don t like to think of, if you look at a cellular automata, if it s the cells and the rules, that doesn t feel like God that generates a bunch of stuff.
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But if there s a machine,
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that runs the cellular automata and set the rules, then that feels like God.
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In terms of terminology.
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So I wonder if there s a machine that s required to generate this universe.
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That s very important for running this in the lab.
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So as I said earlier, I think I said this earlier, that I can t remember the phrase, but something like, I mean, does God exist in our universe?
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Yes.
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Where does God exist?
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God at least exists in the abstraction in our minds, particularly of people who have religious faith they believe in.
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But let s then take your, but you re talking a little bit more about generic, say, well, is there a mechanism beyond the universe you re calling God?
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I would say God did not exist at the beginning.
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but he or she does now.
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Because I m saying the mechanism.
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Well, you don t know if he didn t exist in the beginning.
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So like, this could be us in our minds trying to, like just listening to gravitational waves, detecting gravitational waves, it s the same thing.
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It s us trying to go back further and further into our memories to try to understand the machines that make up
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that make up us.
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And so it s possible that we re trying to grasp at possible kind of, what kind of machines could create.
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There s always a tweet.
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There s always a tweet.
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If the universe is a computer, then God must have built it because computers need creators.
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There you go.
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And then Yoshe Bach replied, since there s something rather than nothing, perhaps existence is the default.
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Hmm, if existence is the default, then many computers exist.
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Creator gods are necessary computers, unnecessarily computers too.
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I m very confused by that.
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But that s an interesting idea, that existence is a default versus non-existence.
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I agree with that, but the rest is- And then Lee responds, perhaps this reasoning is incomplete.
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That s how scientists talk trash to each other on Twitter, apparently.
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Which part don t you agree with?
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When he said if existence is default then many computers exist, this comes back to the inventor and discovery argument.
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I would say the universe at the beginning wasn t capable of computation because there wasn t enough technology, enough states.
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So what you re saying is if God is a mechanism, so I might actually agree, but then the thing is lots of people see God as more than a mechanism.
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For me, God could be the causal graph in assembly theory that creates all the stuff and the memories we know.
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And the fact that we can even relate to each other is because we have the same, we share that heritage.
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And why we love each other or we like to see God in each other is it s just
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we know we have a shared existence.
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So if the God is the mechanism that created this whole thing,
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I think a lot of people see God, in a religious sense, as that mechanism also being able to communicate with the objects it creates.
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And if it s just the mechanism, it won t be able to communicate with the objects it creates.
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It can only create, it can t interact with the... Well, there s versions of God that create the universe and then left.
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You know?
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Yeah, like spark.
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For some religions, but.
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The first spark, yeah.
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Yeah, but I think I liked your analogy of the machine and the rules, right?
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But I think part of the problem is, I mean, we have this conception that we can disentangle the rules from the physical substrate, right?
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And that s the whole thing about like software and hardware being separate or the way Newton wrote his laws that there was some
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You know, like they exist outside the universe.
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They re not actually a feature of the universe.
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They don t have to emerge out of the universe itself.
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So I think if you merge your two views, then it gets back to the God is the universe.
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And then I think the deeper question is why does it seem like there s meaning and purpose?
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And if I think about the features of the universe that give it the most meaning and purpose, those are what we would call the living components of the universe.
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So if you wanted to say God is a physically real thing, which you were saying is like an emergent property of our minds, but I would just say, you know, the way the universe creates meaning and purpose, there is really a physics there.
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It s not like a illusory thing, and that is just what the physics of life is.
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It s a little bit more.
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Is it possible that we ve forgotten much of the mechanisms that created the universe?
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Yes.
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So basically, whatever, if God is that mechanism, we just leave parts of that behind.
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But the universe is constantly generating itself, so if God is that mechanism, it would be that, that would still be active today.
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I m agnostic, but if I recall the things I believe in God in the way that some people
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talk about God, I would say that God is in the universe now.
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It s not an absent thing.
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SPEAKER_00
So I think there s a mislabeling here, because you re... I mean, I m a professional idiot, actually.
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SPEAKER_00
She put that on your CV.
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Professionally.
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Not recreationally or amateur, but professionally.
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I would say if you were talking about God, I mean, again, I m way out, way out of my depth here and I m almost feeling, you know, I feel quite uncomfortable articulating, but I ll try.
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For me, a lot of people that think of God as a consciousness, a reasoning entity that actually has causal power and you re, and you re, and so you re like, then you re saying like gravity could be God or time could be God.
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I mean, I think for me,
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my conception of time is probably as fundamental as God because it gave rise to human intelligence and consciousness in which we can have this abstract notion of God.
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So I think that you re maybe talking about God in a very mechanistic kind of unsophisticated sense whereas other people say that God is more sophisticated and got all this you know feelings and love and you know
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SPEAKER_00
And this abstracting ability, so is that what, or do you mean that?
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SPEAKER_00
Do you mean God as in this conscious entity that decided to flick the universe into existence?
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Well, one of the features that God
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would have is the ability to flick the universe into existence.
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You know, like Windows 95.
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I don t know if God is Windows 95 or Windows XP or Windows 10.
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I don t know the full feature set.
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So at the very least, you have to flick the universe into existence.
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And then other features might include ability to interact with that universe in interesting ways.
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And then how do you interact with the universe in interesting ways?
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You have to be able to speak the language of its different components.
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So in order to interact with humans, you have to know how to act human-like.
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So I don t know.
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But it seems like whatever mechanism created the universe might want to also generate local pockets of mechanisms that can interact with that.
7
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Like inject.
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God was lonely.
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SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I mean, it could be just a teenager in another, just playing a video game.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, maybe.
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SPEAKER_00
Well, I was going to say, I mean, I don t, so this is referring to our origin of life engine.
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It s like, I don t believe in God, but that doesn t mean I don t want to be one.
7
SPEAKER_00
Right.
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Because I want to make a universe and make a life form.
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But that may be rude to people who have, you know, dear religious beliefs.
7
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What I mean by that is,
7
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If we are able to create an entirely new life form, different chemistry, different culture, what does it make us?
7
SPEAKER_00
By that definition, it makes us gods, right?
7
SPEAKER_02
Well, there is, I mean, like when you have children, you re like, one of the magical things of that is you re kind of mini gods.
7
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I mean, first of all, from a child s perspective, parents are gods for quite a while.
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And then, I mean, in a positive sense, there s a magic to that.
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That s why I love robotics, is you instill life into something.
7
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And that makes you, you know,
7
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feel God-like in a sort of positive way.
7
SPEAKER_01
Being a creator is a positive thing.
7
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Creator, yeah, exactly.
7
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On a small scale, and then God would be a creator at the largest possible scale, I suppose.
7
SPEAKER_02
Okay, you mentioned offline the Assembletron.
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Assemblytron.
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What s an Assemblytron?
7
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This is an early idea of something you re thinking about.
7
SPEAKER_00
So Sarah s team, well I think Sarah s team are interested in using AI to understand life, my team is, and I m wondering if we could apply the principles of assembly theory, that is,
7
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the causal structure that you get with assembly theory and hybridize it and make a new type of neuron, if you like.
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I mean, there are causal neural networks out there, but they are not quite the architecture that I would like.
7
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I would like to associate memory bits with
7
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Basically I d like to make a, rather than having an ASIC for neural networks, I want to make an ASIC for assembly networks.
7
SPEAKER_00
Can you say that again, assembly networks?
7
SPEAKER_02
So what is a thing with an input and an output, and it s like a neural network type of a thing, what does it do exactly, what s the input, what s the output?
7
SPEAKER_00
So in this case, so if you re talking about a general neural network, I mean, general neural network, you can train it on any sort of data, right, depending on the framework, whether it s like text or image data or whatnot.
7
SPEAKER_00
And that s fine, but there s no causal structure associated with that data.
7
SPEAKER_00
Now just imagine, rather than, you know, let s say we re going to classify a difference between cat and dog, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
Classic cat and dog neural network.
7
SPEAKER_00
What about if the system understood the assembly space that created the cat and the dog?
7
SPEAKER_00
And rather than guessing what was happening and training on those images and not understanding those features, you could imagine going back a step and training, going back a step and doing the training, going back a step, back a step, back a step.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I wonder if that is actually the origin of intelligence or how we ll crack intelligence.
7
SPEAKER_00
Because we ll create the entire graph of events
7
SPEAKER_00
and be able to kind of look at cause and effect across those graphs.
7
SPEAKER_00
I m explaining it really badly, but it s a gene of an idea, and I m guessing very smart, very rich people in AI are already doing this.
7
SPEAKER_02
Trying to not generate cats and dogs, but trying to generate things of high assembly index.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and also using causal graphs in neural networks and machine learning and deep learning, maybe building a new architecture.
7
SPEAKER_00
I m just wondering, is there something we can get out of assembly theory that allows us to rebuild current machine learning architectures to give causation more cheaply?
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I don t know if that s what you re... We ve been inventing this for a little while, but we re trying to finish the theory paper first before we do anything else.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you also want to have...
7
SPEAKER_01
say goal-directed behavior in neural networks, then assembly theory is a good framework for doing that.
7
SPEAKER_01
Daniel s been thinking about that a lot.
7
SPEAKER_01
And I think it s a really interesting idea that you can map concepts from how neural networks learn to thinking about goal-directed behavior as a learning process, that you re learning a specific goal, the universe is learning a goal when it generates a particular structure, and that you can map that physical structure in a neural network.
7
SPEAKER_02
What s the goal?
7
SPEAKER_01
Well, in a neural network, you re designing the goal.
7
SPEAKER_01
People are not supposed to use teleological language in biology, which is ridiculous, because goals are real things.
7
SPEAKER_01
They re just post-selected, so you can talk about goals after the fact.
7
SPEAKER_01
Once a goal emerges in the universe, that physical entity has a goal.
7
SPEAKER_01
But Lee and I came up with a Turing test for goal-directed behavior based on the idea of assembly.
7
SPEAKER_01
We have to formalize this still, but I would like to write a paper on it.
7
SPEAKER_01
But the basic idea is if you had two systems that were completely equivalent,
7
SPEAKER_01
you know, like in the instantaneous, like physical experimental setup.
7
SPEAKER_01
So we have to figure out how to do this.
7
SPEAKER_01
But there was something that would be different in their future.
7
SPEAKER_01
And there was a symmetry breaking you observe in the present based on that possibility of that future outcome, then you could say that that system had some representation of some kind of goal in mind about what it wanted to do in the future.
7
SPEAKER_01
And I so so goals are interesting, because they don t exist as instantaneous things, they exist across time, which is one of the reasons that
7
SPEAKER_01
assembly theories may be more naturally able to account for the existence of goals.
7
SPEAKER_02
So goals are, they only exist in time or they manifest themselves in time through, you said symmetry breaking.
7
SPEAKER_01
So it s almost like,
7
SPEAKER_01
Imagine like if representations in your mind are real, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
and you you can imagine future possibilities, but imagine everything else is physically equivalent and the only thing that you actually change your decision based on is what you model as being the future outcome then somehow that representation in your mind of the future outcome becomes causal to what you re doing now, so it s kind of like retrocausal effect and
7
SPEAKER_01
but it s not actually retrocausal, it s just that your assembly space is actually, includes those possibilities as part of the structure.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s just you re not observing all the features of the assembly space in the current moment.
7
SPEAKER_02
Well, the possibilities exist, but they don t become a goal until they re realized.
7
SPEAKER_01
So one of the features of assembly space that s super interesting, and it s easier to envision with Legos, for example,
7
SPEAKER_01
is if you re thinking about an assembly space, you can t observe the entire assembly space in any instant in time.
7
SPEAKER_01
So if you imagine a stack of Legos and you want to look at the assembly space of a stack of Legos, you have to break the Legos apart.
7
SPEAKER_01
and then you look at all the possible ways of building up the original object.
7
SPEAKER_01
So now you have in your mind the goal of building that object, and you have all the possible ways of doing it, and those are actual physical features of that object, but that object doesn t always exist.
7
SPEAKER_01
What exists is the possibility of generating it.
7
SPEAKER_02
Right, and the possibilities are always infinite.
7
SPEAKER_01
Well, for that particular object, you know, it has a well-defined assembly space.
7
SPEAKER_01
And I guess what I m saying is that object is the assembly space, but you actually have to unpack that object across time to view that feature of it.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s only an observable across time.
7
SPEAKER_00
The term goal is such an important and difficult to explain concept, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
Because what you want is a way, it s like, I think only conscious beings can have conscious goals.
7
SPEAKER_00
everything else is doing selection.
7
SPEAKER_00
But selection does invent goals and in a way that biology reinterprets the past in the present
7
SPEAKER_00
It kind of helps you to understand there was a goal in the past now, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
It s kind of like goals only exist back in time.
7
SPEAKER_02
So first of all, only conscious beings can have conscious goals.
7
SPEAKER_02
I m not even going to touch that one.
7
SPEAKER_02
Why?
7
SPEAKER_02
Go for it, come on.
7
SPEAKER_02
The line between conscious goals and non-conscious goals, exactly.
7
SPEAKER_02
And also maybe just on top of that, you said a Turing test for goal-directed behavior.
7
SPEAKER_02
What does a Turing test potentially look like?
7
SPEAKER_00
So if you ve got two objects, we were thinking about this, so we actually got some funding to work together on two teams, so I m trying to do, and part of this is I m trying to do a bit of theory, and Sarah s teaching me a bit of theory, and Sarah s trying to design experiments, and I m teaching experiments, because I think it s really good for us to have that.
7
SPEAKER_00
So that s good, I like this, should we use the Dan Dennett essay?
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and I can explain why we wouldn t want to call it a Turing test after.
7
SPEAKER_00
So Dan Dennett wrote this really nice essay about herding cats and free will inflation.
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SPEAKER_01
I love the title, the title s so brilliant.
7
SPEAKER_00
That s the actual title?
7
SPEAKER_00
That s the title, yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
Herding Cats and Free Will Inflation.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, something like that.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, it s not, maybe not.
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SPEAKER_00
No, I think that s right.
7
SPEAKER_00
So if you ve got a, let s imagine you ve got two objects on a hillside,
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SPEAKER_00
Okay, and this happens to be a snowy hill, and let s just say you see an object go rolling down the hill, and it rolls down the hill, but the start goes to the end.
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SPEAKER_00
How do you know that object s had a goal?
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SPEAKER_00
Now you unveil the object and you ll see it s actually a skier, and the skier starts at the top and goes down the bottom.
7
SPEAKER_00
Great.
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SPEAKER_00
Then you look at the rock, rock rolls down the hill, gets to the bottom.
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SPEAKER_00
How can you tell the difference between the two?
7
SPEAKER_00
And what Dan says is like, well, it s clear the ski is in control because they re adjusting the trajectory, so there s some updating going on.
7
SPEAKER_00
Then the only way you could really do that is you put the skier back to the top of the hill again.
7
SPEAKER_00
they would tend to start roughly in the same space and probably take all that complex set of trajectories and end up pretty much at the same finish point, right?
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SPEAKER_00
With plus or minus a few metres, whereas if it s just a random rock going down to a random trajectory,
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SPEAKER_03
that wouldn t happen.
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SPEAKER_03
And so what Sarah and I were kind of doing when we were writing this grant, we were like, we need to somehow instantiate the skier and the rock in an experiment and then say, okay, when does the object, so for an object to have a goal, it has to have an update, it has to have some sensing and some kind of inbuilt actuation to respond to the environment.
8
SPEAKER_03
And then we just have to iterate on that.
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SPEAKER_03
And maybe Sarah, you can then fill in the Turing test part.
8
SPEAKER_00
Well, yeah, I guess the motivation for me was slightly different.
8
SPEAKER_00
So I get really frustrated about conversations about consciousness, as most people do.
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You know, a lot of people are, which is not necessarily related to free will directly or to this goal directed behavior.
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But I think there s a whole set of bundled and related topics here.
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But I think for me, I was, you know, everybody s always interested in explaining intrinsic experience and quantifying intrinsic experience.
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SPEAKER_00
And there s all sorts of problems with that.
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because you can never actually be another physical system, so you can t know what it s like to be another physical system.
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SPEAKER_00
So I always thought there must be some way of getting at this problem about if an agent or an entity is conscious or at least has internal representations, and those are real physical things, that it must have causal consequences.
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SPEAKER_00
So the way I would ask the question of consciousness is not
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you know, what is it like intrinsically?
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But if things have intrinsic experience, is there any observable difference from the outside about the kind of causation that that physical system would enact in?
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And for me, the most interesting thing that humans do is have imagination.
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So like we can imagine rockets centuries before we build them.
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They ve become real physical things because we imagine them.
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And people might disentangle that from conscious experience, but I think a lot of the sort of imagination we do is actually
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a conscious process.
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So then this becomes a question of if I were observing systems and I said one had an internal representation, which is slightly different than a conscious experience, obviously, so I m entangling some concepts, but it s a loose set of thought experiments, and I set them up in a physically equivalent situation, would it be the case that there would be
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experimental observables associated with it.
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And that became the idea of trying to actually measure for internal representation or consciousness.
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SPEAKER_00
So Turing basically didn t want to do that.
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He just wanted the machine that could emulate and trick you into having the behavior, but never dealt with the internal experience because he didn t know how to do that.
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SPEAKER_00
And I guess I was wondering, is there a way to set up the experiment where you could actually test for that?
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for imagination that led to the... That there was something internal going on, some kind of inner world as people say, or you could say...
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SPEAKER_00
You know, like, it actually is an agent.
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SPEAKER_00
It s making decisions.
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It has an internal representation.
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SPEAKER_00
And whether you say that s experience or not is a different thing.
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SPEAKER_00
But at least the feature that there s some abstraction it s doing, that s not obvious from looking at the physical substrates.
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Do you think it s possible to do that kind of thing?
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One of the compelling things about the Turing test is that, you know, defining intelligent, defining any complicated concept as,
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as a thing like observing it from the surface and not caring about what s going on deep inside because how do you know?
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That s the point.
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SPEAKER_03
So the idea is exactly that.
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SPEAKER_03
So what we re trying to do, the Turing test for goal-directedness is literally take some objects that clearly don t have any internal representation, grains of sand blowing on the beach or something,
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SPEAKER_03
right?
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And I don t know, a crab wandering around on the beach and then generating an experiment where we literally, the experiment generates an entity that literally has no internal representation to sand.
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SPEAKER_03
These are oil droplets actually, what I ve got in mind, a robot that makes oil droplets.
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SPEAKER_03
But then what we want to try and do is train the oil droplets to be like crabs.
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Give them an internal representation.
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Give them the ability to integrate information from the environment so they remember the past, are in the present, and can imagine a future.
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And in a very limited way, their kind of game engine, their limited simulation of the world allows them to then make a decision.
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SPEAKER_00
They re objects across time.
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SPEAKER_02
So then you would run a bunch of crabs, like over and over and over and over?
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SPEAKER_00
How many crabs, Lee?
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SPEAKER_02
How many, is there, what s, because you have to have a large number of crabs.
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SPEAKER_02
What is, what does your theory say?
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SPEAKER_02
Is there a mathematical... We re working on it.
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SPEAKER_02
I mean, this is literally... Limit.
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SPEAKER_02
Crab limit.
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SPEAKER_03
There s literally a... What s the herding cats have to do?
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SPEAKER_02
Oh, that s random.
8
SPEAKER_02
Wait, what s cats in the title by Daniel Dennett?
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SPEAKER_02
Herding cats and the free will inflation.
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SPEAKER_02
What does herding cats mean?
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What does free will inflation mean?
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SPEAKER_03
So this, I love this essay, because it explained to me how I can live in a deterministic universe, but have, not free will, but have freedom, you know.
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SPEAKER_03
And also, it helped me explain that time needed to be a real thing in this universe.
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SPEAKER_03
So what basically Dan was saying here is like, how do you, these cats appear to just do what they want.
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And if you live in a deterministic universe, why do the cats do these things?
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SPEAKER_03
You know, aren t they just, isn t it all obvious?
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SPEAKER_03
And how does free will inflate the universe?
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SPEAKER_03
And for me, I mean, probably I love the essay because my interpretation of the essay in assembly theory makes complete sense.
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SPEAKER_03
Because you need an expanding universe in assembly theory to create novelty that you search
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that then when you find something interesting and you keep doing it because it s cool and it gives you an advantage, then it appears in the past to be a goal.
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SPEAKER_02
So what does, in assembly theory, the expansion of the universe look like?
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SPEAKER_02
What are we talking about?
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SPEAKER_02
Why does the expansion of the universe give you more possibilities of novelty and cool stuff?
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SPEAKER_03
So for me, I don t think about the universe in terms of big bang in space.
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SPEAKER_03
I think about in terms of the big, the big memory expansion that you have one, you only have the ability to store one bit of information.
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SPEAKER_03
So then you can t do very much.
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SPEAKER_03
So what the universe has been doing since the, since forever, it s been creating more.
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SPEAKER_03
It s been increasing the size of its Ram.
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SPEAKER_03
Okay.
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SPEAKER_03
So like one megabyte, two megabyte, three megabyte, four megabytes, all the way up.
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SPEAKER_03
And so the more RAM you have, the more you can remember about the past, which allows you to do cooler things in the future.
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SPEAKER_03
So if you can remember how to launch a rocket, then you might be able to imagine how to land a rocket, and then relaunch, re-land, and carry on.
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And so you re able to expand the space,
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and remember the past.
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SPEAKER_03
And so that s why I think it s very important.
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SPEAKER_02
But not a perfect memory.
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SPEAKER_02
It s an interesting question whether there s some forgetting that happens and might increase.
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SPEAKER_02
Is the expansion of the forgetting at some point accelerate faster than the remembering?
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SPEAKER_03
I think that that s a very important thing that probably intelligence does and we re going to learn in machine learning about because you want
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SPEAKER_03
machine learning right now or artificial intelligence right now doesn t have memory right but you want the ability to or not for if you want to get to human-like consciousness you need to have the ability I suppose to remember stuff and then to selectively forget stuff so you can re-remember it and compress it.
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SPEAKER_03
Arguably the way that we come up with new physical laws
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SPEAKER_03
I think that there is a great deal to be gained from having the ability to remember things, but then when you forget them, you can basically do the simulation again and work out if you get to that compressed representation.
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SPEAKER_03
so that it s in cycles.
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SPEAKER_03
So cycles of remembering and forgetting are probably important, but there shouldn t be an excuse to have a universe with no memory in it.
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SPEAKER_03
The universe is going to remember that it forgot, but just not tell you.
8
SPEAKER_02
I m looking at this paper and it s talking about a puppet controlling a puppet controlling a puppet controlling a puppet controlling a puppet controlling a puppet.
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SPEAKER_02
Conceptually easy to understand, but physically impossible.
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SPEAKER_02
It s physically impossible.
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It s predicting a fair coin toss.
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SPEAKER_02
I don t know what he s talking about, but there s pictures of puppets controlling puppets.
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SPEAKER_02
Let me ask you, there s a few things I want to ask, but we brought up time quite a bit.
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SPEAKER_02
You guys tweet about time quite a bit.
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SPEAKER_02
What is time in all of this?
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SPEAKER_02
We kind of mentioned it a bunch.
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SPEAKER_02
Is it not important at all in terms of, is it just a word?
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SPEAKER_02
Should we be talking about causality mostly?
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SPEAKER_02
Like, say, what do you think?
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SPEAKER_02
We ve talked about, like, memories.
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SPEAKER_02
Is that the fundamental thing that we should be thinking about, and time is just a useful measurement device or something like that?
8
SPEAKER_00
Well, there s different concepts of time, right?
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SPEAKER_00
So I think in assembly theory, when we re talking about time, we re talking about the ordering of things.
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SPEAKER_00
So that s the causal graph part.
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SPEAKER_00
And so then the fundamental structure of the universe is that there is a certain ordering, and certain things can t happen until other things happen.
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SPEAKER_00
But usually when we colloquially talk about time, we re talking about the flow of time.
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SPEAKER_00
And I guess we and I were actually debating about this this morning.
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SPEAKER_00
So in talking on it, walking on the river here, which is a very lovely spot for talking about time.
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SPEAKER_00
But that the you know, that when the universe is updating, it s transitioning between
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SPEAKER_00
things that exist now and things that exist now.
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That s really the flow of time.
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SPEAKER_00
So there s, there s, you have to separate out those concepts at bare minimum.
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SPEAKER_00
And then there s also an arrow of time that people talk about in physics, which is that time doesn t appear to have a directionality in fundamental physics, but it does to us, right?
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SPEAKER_00
Like we can t go backwards in time.
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SPEAKER_00
And usually we, you know, that would be explained in physics in terms of, well, there s a cosmological arrow of time, but there s also the thermodynamic arrow of time of increasing entropy.
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SPEAKER_00
But what we would say in assembly theory is that there is a clear directionality, the universe only runs in one direction, which is why some things, it s easy to make, if the universe runs in one direction, it s easy to make processes look reversible.
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SPEAKER_00
For example, if they have no memory, they re easy to run forward and backwards, which is why the laws of physics that we have now look the way they do, because they involve objects that have no memory.
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SPEAKER_00
But when you get to things like us,
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SPEAKER_00
it becomes very clear that the universe has a directionality associated to it.
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SPEAKER_02
So it s not reversible at all.
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SPEAKER_02
It s the no man ever steps in the same river.
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SPEAKER_02
I just have to bring that up because you re walking on the river.
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SPEAKER_02
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it s not the same river and he s not the same man.
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SPEAKER_02
So it s not reversible.
8
SPEAKER_00
No, but reversibility is an emergent property, right?
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SPEAKER_00
So we think of the reversibility laws as being fundamental and the irreversibility as being emergent.
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SPEAKER_00
But I think what we would say,
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SPEAKER_00
from how we think about it and certainly sees it the case for our perception of time, but also You know what s happening in biological evolution?
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SPEAKER_00
You can make things reversible but it requires work to do it and it requires certain machines to run it forward and backward and Chiara Marletta was working some interesting ideas and constructor theory related to that which is totally different set of ideas and you can travel back in time sometimes
8
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
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SPEAKER_00
You can t travel actually back in time, but you could reconstruct things that have existed in the past.
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SPEAKER_00
You re always moving forward in time, but you can cycle through.
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SPEAKER_00
Can I clarify what you just said?
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, go for it.
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SPEAKER_03
Quickly, you travel forward in time to travel back.
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SPEAKER_00
Yes.
8
SPEAKER_03
Thank you, that really clarified it.
8
SPEAKER_03
What Sarah s saying is you don t go back in time, you recreate what happened in the past in the future and inspect it again.
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SPEAKER_02
So in that local pocket of time, it s as if you travel back in time.
8
SPEAKER_02
How s that not traveling back in time?
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SPEAKER_03
Because you re not going back to your same self back in time.
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SPEAKER_03
You re creating that in the future.
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SPEAKER_02
But everything else is the same as it was in the past.
8
SPEAKER_03
No, no, no, no.
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SPEAKER_03
It s not in registry.
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SPEAKER_03
I mean, it goes back to the big question.
8
SPEAKER_03
I m saying, I mean, this is something I was trying to look up today when we first had this discussion and I was talking to Sarah on Skype and said, by the way, time is the fundamental thing in the universe.
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SPEAKER_03
She almost hung up on me.
8
SPEAKER_00
Right, but you can even, I mean, if you want to make an analogy to computation, and I think Charles Bennett actually has a paper on this, like about reversible computation and reversible Turing machines.
8
SPEAKER_00
In order to make it reversible, you have to store memory to run the process backwards.
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SPEAKER_00
So time is always running forward in that.
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SPEAKER_00
Because you have to write the memory.
8
SPEAKER_02
You can t erase the memory.
8
SPEAKER_00
You can erase the memory, but the point, when you go back to zero, right?
8
SPEAKER_00
But the whole point is that in order to have a process that even runs in both directions, you have to start talking about memory to store the information to run it backwards.
8
SPEAKER_02
I got it.
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SPEAKER_02
So you can t really then, you can t have it exactly how it was in the past.
8
SPEAKER_02
You have extra stuff, extra baggage always.
8
SPEAKER_03
A really important thing that I want to say on this, I think if I try and get it right, is to say that if you can think that the universe is expanding in terms of the number of
8
SPEAKER_03
boxes that it has to store states, right?
8
SPEAKER_03
And this is where the directionality of the universe comes from, everything comes from.
8
SPEAKER_03
You could erase what s in those boxes, but the fact you ve now got so many boxes at time, now, in this present, there s more of those boxes than there were in the past.
8
SPEAKER_02
See, but the boxes aren t physical boxes.
8
SPEAKER_02
It s not space or time.
8
SPEAKER_03
So why is the number of boxes always expanding?
8
SPEAKER_03
It s very hard to imagine this because we live in space.
8
SPEAKER_03
So what I m saying, which is, I think, probably correct, is that we just, let s just imagine for a second, there is a non-local situation, but there are these things called states, and that the universe
8
SPEAKER_03
Irrespective of whether you measure anything, there is a universal, let s call it a clock or a state creator.
8
SPEAKER_03
Maybe you can call it God, but let s call it a state creator where the universe is expanding in the number of states it has.
8
SPEAKER_02
Why are you saying it s expanding though?
8
SPEAKER_02
Is that obvious that it s expanding?
8
SPEAKER_03
It s obvious because that s where the... Because we... That s a source of novelty.
8
SPEAKER_03
It s a source of novelty and it also explains why the universe is not predictable.
8
SPEAKER_03
How do you know it s not predictable?
8
SPEAKER_01
I just like interrupting you.
8
SPEAKER_01
Sorry, it s fun.
8
SPEAKER_01
Because you re struggling.
8
SPEAKER_03
I m struggling because I m trying to be as concrete as possible and not sound like I m insane.
8
SPEAKER_03
And I m not insane.
8
SPEAKER_03
It s obvious because you...
8
SPEAKER_03
I m a chemist, so as a chemist, I grew into the world understanding irreversibility.
8
SPEAKER_03
Irreversibility is all I knew.
8
SPEAKER_03
And when people start telling me the universe is actually reversible, it s a magic trick.
8
SPEAKER_03
We can use time to do it.
8
SPEAKER_03
So what I mean is the second law is really the magical.
8
SPEAKER_03
But why does it need to be magical?
8
SPEAKER_03
The universe is just asymmetric.
8
SPEAKER_03
All I m saying is the universe is asymmetric in the state production and we can erase those states but we just have more computational power.
8
SPEAKER_03
So what I m saying is that the universe s deterministic horizon, this is one of the reasons we can t live in a simulation by the way.
8
SPEAKER_02
You can t live in a simulation.
8
SPEAKER_02
The irreversibility?
8
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, so basically every time you try and simulate the universe, you live in a simulation, the universe is expanded in states.
8
SPEAKER_03
You re like, oh damn it, I need to make my computer bigger again.
8
SPEAKER_03
And every time you try and contain the universe in the computation, because it s got bigger in number of states.
8
SPEAKER_03
And so I m saying,
8
SPEAKER_03
The fact the universe has novelty in it is going to turn out experimentally to be proof that time, as I ve labelled it, is fundamental and exists as a physical thing that creates space.
8
SPEAKER_02
Okay, so if you can prove that novelty is always being created, you re saying that it s possible to also then prove that it s always expanding in the state space.
8
SPEAKER_02
Those are things that have to be proven.
8
SPEAKER_03
That s what we re working on experiments for, yeah.
8
SPEAKER_02
And you re trying to, by looking at the sliver of reality, show that there s always novelty being generated.
8
SPEAKER_03
Because if we go and live in a universe that the conventional physicists would live in, it s a big look-up table of stuff and everything exists.
8
SPEAKER_03
I want to prove that that book doesn t exist.
8
SPEAKER_03
It s continuously being added pages on.
8
SPEAKER_03
So all I m saying, if the universe is a book, the universe at the beginning only had no pages, or had one page, another page, another page, whereas the physicists would now say all the pages exist and we could in principle access them.
8
SPEAKER_03
I m saying that is fundamentally incorrect.
8
SPEAKER_02
Do you know what s written in this book?
8
SPEAKER_02
The free will question.
8
SPEAKER_02
Is there room for free will in this view of the universe?
9
SPEAKER_02
is generating novelty and getting greater and greater assembly structures built.
9
SPEAKER_02
Sarah?
9
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
9
SPEAKER_02
Okay.
9
SPEAKER_01
Done.
9
SPEAKER_01
Next question.
9
SPEAKER_02
What s the source of free will in this?
9
SPEAKER_01
Well, I think it depends on what you mean by free will.
9
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, well, please.
9
SPEAKER_01
I think what I m interested in as far as the phenomena of free will is do we have
9
SPEAKER_01
individual autonomy and agency.
9
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, when I do things, is it really me or is it my atoms that did it?
9
SPEAKER_01
And that s the part that s interesting to me.
9
SPEAKER_01
I guess there s also the determinism versus randomness part.
9
SPEAKER_01
But the way I think about it is like each of us are like a thread or like an assembly space through this giant possibility space.
9
SPEAKER_01
And it s like we re moving on our own trajectory through that space and that is defined by our history.
9
SPEAKER_01
So we re sort of causally contingent on our past, but also because of the sort of intersection of novelty generation, it s not completely predetermined by the past.
9
SPEAKER_01
And so then you have the causal control of the determinism part, that you are your causal history and there s some determinism from that past, but there s also room for creativity.
9
SPEAKER_01
And I think it s actually necessary that something like free will exists if the universe is gonna be as creative as possible.
9
SPEAKER_01
Because if I were all intelligent being inventing a universe and I wanted it to have
9
SPEAKER_01
maximal number of interesting things happen.
9
SPEAKER_01
Again, we should come up with the metric of interesting.
9
SPEAKER_01
But generating, yes I know, generating maximal possibilities, then I would want the agents to have free will because it means that they re more individual, like each entity actually is a different causal force in the universe.
9
SPEAKER_01
And it s intrinsic and local property of that system.
9
SPEAKER_02
there s a greater number of distributed agents?
9
SPEAKER_02
Like are you always creating more and more individuality?
9
SPEAKER_01
Kind of.
9
SPEAKER_01
I would say you re creating more causal power.
9
SPEAKER_02
So causal power, the word consciousness, is the causal power somehow correlated with consciousness?
9
SPEAKER_01
I mean, that s why I have this conception of consciousness being related to imagination, because the more that we can imagine can happen, and the more counterfactual possibilities you have in mind,
9
SPEAKER_01
the more you can actually implement.
9
SPEAKER_01
And somehow free will is also at the intersection of the counterfactual becoming the actual.
9
SPEAKER_02
So can you elaborate on that a little bit, that consciousness is imagination?
9
SPEAKER_01
I don t know exactly how to articulate it, and I m sure people will take aim at certain things I m saying, but I think the language is really imprecise, so I m not the best way to.
9
SPEAKER_02
It s really interesting.
9
SPEAKER_02
What is imagination, and what role does it play in the human experience, in an experience of any agent?
9
SPEAKER_01
Yes, I love imagination.
9
SPEAKER_01
I think it s the most amazing thing we do.
9
SPEAKER_01
But I guess one way I would think about it is, we talked about the transition to life being the universe,
9
SPEAKER_01
acquiring memory.
9
SPEAKER_01
And life does something really interesting.
9
SPEAKER_01
If you think about biology generally, it remembers states of the past to adapt to things that happen in the future.
9
SPEAKER_01
So the longer life has evolved on this planet, the deeper that past is, the more memory we have, the more kinds of organisms and things.
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But what human-level intelligence has done is quite different.
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It s not just that we remember states that the universe has existed in before,
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is that we can imagine ones that have never existed and we can actually make them come into existence.
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And I think that s the most unique feature about the transition to whatever we are from what life on this planet has been doing for the last four billion years.
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SPEAKER_01
And I think it s deeply related to the phenomena we call consciousness.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I was gonna, I mean, just agree with that.
9
SPEAKER_00
I think that consciousness is the ability to generate those counterfactuals.
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SPEAKER_00
Now, whether you can say, you know, are there degrees of consciousness?
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, I m sorry, panpsychics, but electrons don t have counterfactuals, although they do have some kind of, they are able to search a space and pathways.
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SPEAKER_00
But I think that there is a very,
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concrete, there s a very specific property that humans have and I don t know if it s unique to humans.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean maybe dogs can do it and birds can do it, right?
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SPEAKER_00
And where they are basically solving a problem because consciousness was invented or this abstraction was invented by evolution for a specific reason.
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SPEAKER_00
And so look, one of the reasons why I came to the conclusion that time was fundamental was actually because Sarah and I had a completely different.
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SPEAKER_01
The most heated debate on Skype chat ever.
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SPEAKER_00
No, no, no.
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SPEAKER_00
No, it goes back to the free will thing.
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SPEAKER_00
So I think that, although I ve changed my view a bit because there s some really interesting physicists out there who talks about how the measurement problem
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SPEAKER_00
in Newtonian space.
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SPEAKER_00
I don t want to go there just now because I think I ll mess it up, but briefly, I could not see how we can have free will.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, this is really boring because this is a well-trodden path, but it s not so boring.
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SPEAKER_00
I suppose it s kind of, we just want to be precise.
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SPEAKER_00
If the universe is deterministic, how can we have free will, right?
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SPEAKER_00
So, Sarah is a physicist.
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SPEAKER_00
I think she can show that most of the laws we have are deterministic to some degree, quantum mechanics onto Newtonian stuff, and yet there s Sarah telling me she believes in free will.
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SPEAKER_00
I m like,
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SPEAKER_00
Your belief system is broken here, right?
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SPEAKER_00
Because you re demanding free will in a deterministic universe.
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SPEAKER_00
And then I realized that I agreed with her that I do think that free will is a thing because we are able to search for novelty.
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SPEAKER_00
And then that s where I came to the conclusion that time, the universe is expanding in terms of novelty.
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SPEAKER_00
And it goes back to that Dan Dennett essay that we re talking about, the free will inflation.
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SPEAKER_00
So the past, it did not exist in the past, the past exists in the present.
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SPEAKER_00
What I mean is like, there was no past, there is only present.
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SPEAKER_00
So that means you are the sum total of everything that occurs in the past is manifestly here in the present.
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SPEAKER_00
And then you have this little echo state in your consciousness because you re able to imagine something without actualization.
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SPEAKER_00
But the fact you imagine it, that occurs in electrons and potassium ion flows in your neural network in your brain.
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SPEAKER_01
Maybe consciousness is just the present.
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SPEAKER_00
So somehow you imagine that, and then by imagining, oh, that s good, yeah, I m gonna make a robot to do this thing, and program it, and then you physically then go and do it.
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SPEAKER_00
So that changes the future, sorry.
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SPEAKER_02
What s imagination?
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Does it require the past?
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SPEAKER_02
Does it require the future?
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SPEAKER_02
Does it require memory?
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SPEAKER_02
Does it only exist in the moment?
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SPEAKER_00
So imagination is probably an instantaneous readout of what s going on.
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SPEAKER_00
Maybe your subconscious brain has been generating all the bits for it.
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SPEAKER_00
But no, imagination occurs when you
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SPEAKER_00
In your game engine, you remember the past, and you integrate sensory with the present, and you try and work out what you want to do in the future, and then you go and make that happen.
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SPEAKER_00
So the imagination, it s like asking what imagination is about asking what surfing is.
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SPEAKER_00
You can see, you can surfboard, surfer, wave coming in.
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SPEAKER_00
When you re on that wave and you re surfing, that s where the imagination is.
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SPEAKER_01
I think imagination is just accessing things that aren t the present moment in the present moment.
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SPEAKER_01
So like I m sitting here and I m looking at the table and I can imagine the river and things or whatever it was.
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SPEAKER_01
And so it seems to be that it s like
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SPEAKER_01
it s our ability to access things that aren t present.
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SPEAKER_02
But to conjure up worlds, some of them might be akin to something that happened to you recently.
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SPEAKER_01
Right, but they don t have to be things that actually happened in your past.
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SPEAKER_01
And I think this gets back to assembly theory, like the way I would think about imagination from an assembly theoretic standpoint is I m a giant causal graph, and I exist in a present moment as a particular configuration of Sarah,
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SPEAKER_01
And, but there s a lot of, I carry a lot of evolutionary baggage.
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SPEAKER_01
I have that whole causal history and I can access parts of it.
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SPEAKER_01
Now, when you talk about getting to something as complex as us, having as large an assembly space as us, there s ways of like, there s a lot of things in that causal graph that have ever actually never existed in the past history of the universe.
9
SPEAKER_01
Cause like the universe got big enough to contain the three of us in this room in time.
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SPEAKER_01
but not all the features of each one of us individually have come into existence as physical objects we would recognize as individual objects.
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SPEAKER_01
This goes back to your point that we actually have to explain why things actually even look like objects and aren t just a schmear of mess.
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SPEAKER_01
And just on the free will in physics thing, when you were talking, I just want to bring this up because I think it s a really interesting viewpoint that
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SPEAKER_01
Nicholas Jisen has that, you know, like we want to use the laws of physics and then say you can t have free will.
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SPEAKER_01
And his point is, you have to have free will in order to even choose to set up an experiment to test the laws of physics.
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SPEAKER_01
So in some sense, free will should be more fundamental than physics is because to even do science, there s some assumption that
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SPEAKER_01
the agents have free will.
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SPEAKER_01
And I always thought it was really perplexing that, you know, physics wants to remove agency because the idea that I could do an experiment here on this part of Earth, and then I can move somewhere else and prepare an identically, you know, identically prepared experiment, run an experiment again, seems to imply something about the structure of our universe that is not encoded in the laws that we re testing in those experiments.
9
SPEAKER_02
So this kind of dream of physics that you can do multiple experiments, different locations, and then validate each other, you re saying that s an illusion?
9
SPEAKER_01
No, I m saying that requires decision-making and free will to be a real thing, I think.
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SPEAKER_01
I think the fact that we can do science is not arbitrary.
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SPEAKER_01
And I think people, you know, the standard canon in physics would be, well, you could trace all of that back to the initial condition of the universe, but the whole point of science is I can imagine doing the experiment and I can do it, and then I can do it again and again and again all over the planet.
9
SPEAKER_02
To you, imagination is somehow fundamentally generative of novelty.
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SPEAKER_01
Yes.
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SPEAKER_02
So it s not like the universe could have predicted the things you imagined.
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SPEAKER_00
So, coming back to novelty, I think novelty can exist outside of imagination, but it supercharges it.
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SPEAKER_00
It s another transition, I think.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, I would say, I mean, this may be a boring statement, but I would say- I m not sure.
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SPEAKER_00
Sorry?
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SPEAKER_01
I m not sure.
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SPEAKER_01
These are hard questions.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, I think the fact that objects exist is yet another proof that time is fundamental and novelty exists, right?
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SPEAKER_00
Because I think, again, if you ask a physicist to write down an infinite Bible of the universe, let s call it the Bible.
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SPEAKER_00
The mathematical universe, whether you re Max Tegmark or Sean Carroll or Frank Wilczek.
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SPEAKER_00
Or Stephen Wolfram, okay?
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SPEAKER_00
I like that book.
9
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I love it too.
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SPEAKER_02
Lots of pretty pictures.
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SPEAKER_00
It s really interesting that they cope with the enormity of the universe by saying, well, it s all there, mathematics, it all exists, right?
9
SPEAKER_00
And I would say that that s why I m excited about the future of the universe, because although it is somehow dependent upon the past, it is not constrained just by the past.
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SPEAKER_02
Which is kind of mad.
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SPEAKER_02
Yeah, that s what free will is.
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SPEAKER_02
It s not constrained by the past.
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SPEAKER_02
It s dependent on the past.
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SPEAKER_02
This moment, it s not just dependent.
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SPEAKER_02
This moment is the past, and yet it has the capacity to generate a totally unpredictable future.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, the other thing I would say that s super important for human beings, right?
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SPEAKER_00
Human beings have actually very little causal control in the future.
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SPEAKER_00
I realized this the other week.
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SPEAKER_00
So this is what I think it is.
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SPEAKER_00
By reinterpreting your past, I mean from a kind of psychological cognitive point of view, by reinterpreting your past,
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SPEAKER_00
in your current mind, you can actually help you shape your future again.
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SPEAKER_00
But you have much more freedom to interpret your past, to act in the present, to change your future, than you do to change your future.
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SPEAKER_00
I may sound weird, so I m saying everybody, imagine your past, think about your past, reinterpret your past in the nicest way you can, then imagine what you can do next, or imagine your past in a more negative way and what you do next.
9
SPEAKER_00
And look at those two counterfactuals, they re different.
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SPEAKER_02
Yeah, it s fascinating.
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SPEAKER_02
Daniel Kahneman talks about this, that most of our life is lived in our memories.
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SPEAKER_02
And it s interesting because you can essentially, in imagination, choose the life you live.
9
SPEAKER_02
So maybe free will exists in imagination.
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SPEAKER_02
choices are made in your imagination.
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SPEAKER_02
And that results in you basically able to control how the future unrolls.
9
SPEAKER_02
Because you re like, imagining, like reinterpreting constantly the things that happen to you.
9
SPEAKER_00
Exactly, so if you want to increase your amount of free will, those people that have most, I don t think everyone has equal amounts of agency.
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SPEAKER_00
Because of our sad constraints, whether, you know, happenstance, health, economic,
9
SPEAKER_00
born in a certain place, right?
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SPEAKER_00
But those of us that have the ability to go back and reinterpret our past and use that to change the future are the ones that exert most agency in the present.
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SPEAKER_00
And I want to achieve higher degrees of agency and enable everyone else to do that as well, to have more fun in the universe.
9
SPEAKER_01
Then we ll hit that peak?
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SPEAKER_01
The maximum fun point?
9
SPEAKER_00
I don t think there s ever going to be a maximum fun point.
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SPEAKER_00
I think the wonderful thing about the future is it s always going to be more fun.
9
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I think, again, going back to Twitter, I think you retweeted something about being a life maximalist and you want to maximize the number of life.
9
SPEAKER_02
the amount of life in the universe.
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SPEAKER_02
And that s the more general version of that goal is to maximize the amount of fun in the universe, because life is a subset of fun.
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SPEAKER_02
There are all kinds of, I suppose they re either correlated or exactly equal, I don t know.
9
SPEAKER_02
Anyway, speaking of fun, let me ask you about alien sightings.
9
SPEAKER_02
So there s been quite a bit of UFO sightings and all that kind of stuff.
9
SPEAKER_02
What do you think would be the first time when humans sight aliens, see aliens in a sort of unquestionable way?
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SPEAKER_02
This extremely strong and arguable way.
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SPEAKER_02
we ve made contact with aliens, Sarah, what would it look like?
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SPEAKER_02
Obviously, the space of possibilities is huge here, but if you were to kind of look into the future, what would that look like?
9
SPEAKER_02
Would it be inklings of UFOs here and there that slowly unravel a mystery, or would it be like an obvious overwhelming signal?
9
SPEAKER_01
So I think we have an obsession with making contact with events.
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SPEAKER_01
So what I mean by that is, you know, like people have a UFO sighting, they make contact.
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SPEAKER_01
And I always think, you know, what s interesting to me about the UFO narratives right now is not that I have a disbelief about
9
SPEAKER_01
people are experiencing or feeling, but like the discussion right now is sort of at the level of modern mythology.
9
SPEAKER_01
Aliens are our mythos in modern culture.
9
SPEAKER_01
And when you treat it like that, then I want to think about when do things that we traditionally only regularize through mythology actually become things that become standard knowledge?
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SPEAKER_01
So, you know, like it used to be
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SPEAKER_01
you know, variations in the climate were described by some kind of gods or something, and now it s like, you know, our technology picks up an anomaly or someone sees something, we say it s aliens.
9
SPEAKER_01
And I think the real thing is it s not contact with events, but like first contact is actually contact with knowledge of the phenomena or the explanation.
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SPEAKER_01
And so this is very subtle and very abstract, but when does it become something that we actually understand what it is that we re talking about?
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SPEAKER_01
That s first contact.
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SPEAKER_02
It s not- Would you make the myth, would you give credit to the myth, the mythology as first contact?
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SPEAKER_01
I think yes.
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SPEAKER_01
I think it s the rudimentary that we have some understanding that there s a phenomena that we have to understand and regularize.
9
SPEAKER_02
So I think- To understand that there is weather.
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SPEAKER_02
You have to construct a mythology around that.
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SPEAKER_02
It s something that s controllable.
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SPEAKER_01
I see mythology basically as like baby knowledge.
9
SPEAKER_00
It could be that, you know, although there s lots of alien sight,
10
SPEAKER_00
so-called alien sightings, right?
10
SPEAKER_00
So there is a number of things you can do.
10
SPEAKER_00
You could just dismiss them and say they re not true, they re kind of made up.
10
SPEAKER_00
Or you say, well, there s something interesting here, right?
10
SPEAKER_00
We keep seeing a commonality, right?
10
SPEAKER_00
We see the same phenomena again and again and again.
10
SPEAKER_00
Also, there s this interesting thing about human imagination.
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SPEAKER_00
Even if they are, let s not say made up, but misappropriated kind of other inputs, the fact that human consciousness is capable of imagining contact with aliens,
10
SPEAKER_00
Does that not tell us something about where we are in our position, in our culture, in our technology?
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SPEAKER_02
It tells us about where in time we are.
10
SPEAKER_00
Could it be that we re making contact with, let s say, let s take the most miserable version, there are no aliens in the universe, life is only on Earth.
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SPEAKER_00
that then the interpretation of that is we re desperate to kind of understand why we re the only life in the universe, right?
10
SPEAKER_00
The other one is the other most extreme is that aliens are visiting all the time and we re just not able to capture them coherently or there s a big conspiracy and there s Area 51 and there are lizards everywhere and there s that.
10
SPEAKER_00
I m kind of in favor of the idea that maybe humanity is waking up to the idea that we aren t alone in the universe and we re just running the simulation and we re seeing some evidence
10
SPEAKER_00
We don t know what life is yet.
10
SPEAKER_00
We do have some anomalies out there.
10
SPEAKER_00
We can t explain everything.
10
SPEAKER_00
And over time, we will start to unpack that.
10
SPEAKER_00
One very plausible thing we might do, which might be boring for the average alien
10
SPEAKER_00
observer or believes that aliens, as in intelligent aliens, are visiting Earth, it could be that we might go to the outer solar system and find a new type of life that has completely new chemistry.
10
SPEAKER_00
Bring these cells back to Earth, where you could say in my hand, on Earth, here s RNA, DNA and proteins and look, cells self-replicating.
10
SPEAKER_00
From Titan, we have this new set of molecules, new set of cells
10
SPEAKER_00
and we feed it stuff and it grows.
10
SPEAKER_00
That for me, if we were able to do that, which would be like the most, that would be my UFO sign.
10
SPEAKER_01
That s a good test, so you feed it and it grows.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_01
We ve made, so not until you know how to feed the thing, and it grows somehow.
10
SPEAKER_00
We can make a comic book, you know, the tiger that came for tea, the alien that came for tea.
10
SPEAKER_01
What would you say is between the two of you is the biggest disagreement about aliens, alien life out there?
10
SPEAKER_01
Is it from the basic framework of thinking about what is life, to maybe what aliens look like, to alien civilizations, to UFO sightings, what would you think?
10
SPEAKER_00
So I would say the biggest one is that the emergence of life does not have to be that it can t just happen once on the planet, that it could be two or more life forms present on the planet at once.
10
SPEAKER_00
And I think Sarah doesn t agree with that.
10
SPEAKER_02
I think that s like logically inconsistent.
10
SPEAKER_00
That s really polite.
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SPEAKER_00
You re saying it s nonsense.
10
SPEAKER_01
How likely is that?
10
SPEAKER_01
What does it look like?
10
SPEAKER_01
Let s imagine two alien civilizations coexisting on a planet.
10
SPEAKER_01
What s that look like exactly?
10
SPEAKER_00
I think I ve got to get around your argument.
10
SPEAKER_00
Let s say that on this planet there s lots of available chemistry, and one life form emerges based on carbon and interacts, and there s an ecosystem based on carbon, and there s an orthogonal, and so it s planetary phenomena, which is what you, I think, right?
10
SPEAKER_00
But there s also one that carries on silicon.
10
SPEAKER_00
And because there s enough energy and there s enough
10
SPEAKER_00
stuff that these life forms might not actually necessarily compete evolutionarily.
10
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, but they would have to not interact at all because they re going to be co-constructing each other s causal chains.
10
SPEAKER_00
I think that s where you just got me, yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
So there s no overlap in terms of their causal chains or a very limited overlap.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so I think the only way I can get away with that is to say, right, life could emerge on a planet underneath
10
SPEAKER_03
The lizard people under the crust of the Earth.
10
SPEAKER_00
I think, I think, I think, let s go, I think, but look, as you can see, we disagree.
10
SPEAKER_00
And I think Sarah actually has convinced me because of that life is a planetary phenomenon, the emergence of life is a planetary phenomenon, and actually, because of the way evolution selection works, that nothing occurs in isolation, the causal chains interact, so there is a common, there s a consensus model for life on the Earth.
10
SPEAKER_01
But you don t think you can place aliens from elsewhere onto the, can t you just place multiple alien civilizations on one planet?
10
SPEAKER_03
Right, but I think, so you can take two original life events that were independent and co-mingle them, but I don t think, when you re talking about, when you look at the interaction of that structure,
10
SPEAKER_03
It s like the same idea as like an experiment being an example of life, right?
10
SPEAKER_03
That s a really abstract and subtle concept.
10
SPEAKER_03
And I guess what I m saying is, life is information propagating through matter.
10
SPEAKER_03
So once you start having things interacting, they, in some sense, commingle and they become part of the same
10
SPEAKER_03
chain, so.
10
SPEAKER_01
The commingling starts quickly.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
It proceeds, we proceed to commingle quickly.
10
SPEAKER_03
Right, right.
10
SPEAKER_03
So you could say, so the question is then, the more interesting question is are there two distinct origins events?
10
SPEAKER_03
And I still think that there s reasons that on a single planet you would have one origins event because of the time scales of cycling, of geochemistry on a planet, and also the fact that I don t think that the origin of life happens in a pool and like radiates outward through
10
SPEAKER_03
evolutionary processes, I think it s a multi-scale phenomenon.
10
SPEAKER_03
It happens at the level of individual molecules interacting, collections of molecules interacting, and entire planetary-scale cycles.
10
SPEAKER_03
So life as we know it has always been multi-scale.
10
SPEAKER_03
And there s brilliant examples of individual mutations at the genome level changing global climate, right?
10
SPEAKER_03
So there s a tight coupling between things that happen at the largest scale, our planetary scale, and the smallest scale that life mediates.
10
SPEAKER_01
But it still might be difficult within something you would call as a single alien civilization.
10
SPEAKER_01
You know, there s species and stuff.
10
SPEAKER_01
And they might not be able to communicate.
10
SPEAKER_03
But you re asking about life, not species, right?
10
SPEAKER_01
But what s the difference between...
10
SPEAKER_01
one living civilization?
10
SPEAKER_01
This is almost like a category question.
10
SPEAKER_01
Versus species, because it can be very different.
10
SPEAKER_01
Because there s like islands, like literally islands, that you can evolve different kinds of turtles and stuff.
10
SPEAKER_01
And they can be weird in different ways.
10
SPEAKER_03
So I guess what I m saying is, if you look at the structure of two interacting living things, populations,
10
SPEAKER_03
and you look in their past, and they have independent origins for their causal chain, then you would say one was alien, they have different independent origins events.
10
SPEAKER_03
But if you look at their future, by virtue of the fact they re interacting, their causal chains have become co-mingled, so that in the future, they are not independent.
10
SPEAKER_03
So that s why you would even define them as alien.
10
SPEAKER_03
So the structure across time,
10
SPEAKER_03
is two examples of life become one example of life because life is the entire structure across time.
10
SPEAKER_01
But there could be a lot of variation with this.
10
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, so the question we re all interested in is how many independent origins of a complexifying causal chain are there in the universe?
10
SPEAKER_01
See, but the idea of origin
10
SPEAKER_01
is easy for you to define?
10
SPEAKER_01
When the species split in the evolutionary process, and you get like a dolphin versus a human, or Neanderthal versus Homo sapien, isn t there...
10
SPEAKER_00
Let me make a distinction here quickly.
10
SPEAKER_00
So I think, sorry to interrupt, what we re saying, I mean Sarah won that argument because I think she s right, that once the causal chains interact and going forward, so we re talking about a number of things.
10
SPEAKER_00
Let s go all the way back before origin of life.
10
SPEAKER_00
Origin of life?
10
SPEAKER_00
On Earth.
10
SPEAKER_00
On Earth.
10
SPEAKER_00
chemistry emerges, so there s all these, I would say there s probably mechanistically, the chemistry is desperately trying to find any way to get replicators, the ribosome kind of was really rubbish at the beginning and it just competed, competed, competed and you got better and better ribosome and suddenly that was the technology.
10
SPEAKER_00
The ribosome is the technology that, boom, allowed evolution to start.
10
SPEAKER_00
So why I interrupted you is to say that once evolution has started using that technology, then you can speciate.
10
SPEAKER_00
And I was trying to, and I think what Sarah said was to convince me of, because I was like, no, we have lots of different chemistry, shadow biosphere on Earth.
10
SPEAKER_00
And she s like, no, no, no, you have to get to this minimum evolutionary machine
10
SPEAKER_00
And then when that occurs, speciation occurs, exactly what you say, dolphins, humans, everything on earth.
10
SPEAKER_00
But when you re looking at aliens or alien life,
10
SPEAKER_00
There s not going to be two different types of chemistry because they compete and interact and cooperate because the causal chains overlap.
10
SPEAKER_00
One might kill the other, one might combine with the other and then you go on and then you have this kind of average and sure there might be respeciation.
10
SPEAKER_00
It might be you have two types of emerging chemistry.
10
SPEAKER_00
It almost looks like the origin of life on Earth required two different pre-life forms, the peptide world and the RNA world.
10
SPEAKER_00
Somehow they got together.
10
SPEAKER_00
And by combining, you got the ribosome.
10
SPEAKER_00
And that was the minimum competent entity for evolution.
10
SPEAKER_00
And off you go.
10
SPEAKER_01
And would all alien civilizations have an evolutionary process on a planet?
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So like that s one of the almost, it s almost the definition of life.
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To create all those memories, you have to have something.
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Things have to change in time.
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Yeah.
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But there has to be selection.
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That s like an efficient, there s no other way to do it.
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No.
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SPEAKER_00
Well, never say never because soon I ll say that.
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That s the part that depresses me though, going back to like, I don t know, the earlier discussion on violence and things like, and I don t know where I, somebody was tweeting about this recently, but like, you know, how much stuff had to die.
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Maybe it was you.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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So we re talking about life, and I guess a lot of murder had to occur.
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Death, destruction.
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SPEAKER_03
Well, we can celebrate that.
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Death makes way for the tulip.
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And also, one of the most interesting features of major extinction events in the history of our planet is how much novelty emerged immediately after.
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And of course, a lot of people make arguments, we wouldn t be here if the dinosaurs didn t go extinct.
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So, in some ways,
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we can attribute our existence to all of that.
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But I guess I was just wondering if I was gonna build a universe myself, in the most optimistic way, would I retain that feature?
10
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But it does seem to be a universe.
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I think you have to.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, I think we re probably being over-anthropomorphizing.
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I remember watching, I think it was the Blue Planet, David Attenborough was showing these seals, and because of climate change, some seals were falling off a cliff, and how tragic that was.
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And I was like,
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I ll say to my son, that s pretty cool.
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Look at those ones down there.
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They ve obviously got some kind of mutations, some, and they re not doing that daft thing.
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And so that poor gene will be weeded out.
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Of course, at the individual level, it looks tragic.
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And of course, as human beings, we have the ability to abstract, and we empathize.
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We don t want to cause suffering on other human beings, and we should retain that.
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But we shouldn t look back in time and say, you know, how many butterflies had to die
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I remember how many, if you think about the caterpillar become the chrysalis and then the butterfly getting out, how many, if that suffering, we call it suffering, if that process of pruning had not occurred, we have no butterflies.
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So none of the butterfly beauty in the world without all that pruning.
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So pruning is required, but we shouldn t apophomorphize and feel sorry for the biological entities.
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Because that seems to be a backwards way of looking at it.
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SPEAKER_00
What we should do is project forward and maybe think about what values we have across our species and our ecosystem and our fellow human beings.
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SPEAKER_00
Now that we know that animals suffer at some level, think about humane farming.
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When we find that plants can in fact are conscious and can think and have pain, then we ll do humane gardening.
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SPEAKER_00
Until that point, we won t do it, right?
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I like this.
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Famous chemist endorses the majestic nature of murder.
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That s the title.
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SPEAKER_00
I didn t say that, but okay.
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Well, I just inserted it.
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I have a hard time with it, though.
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I think the way you put it is kind of... But it s the reality of, it is beautiful.
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SPEAKER_01
You know, there s an Instagram account called natureismetal.
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SPEAKER_01
And I keep following it and unfollowing it because I can t handle it for prolonged periods of time.
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SPEAKER_00
We evolve together, you die alone.
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SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
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We evolve together, but we die alone.
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We live alone, too.
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It s the Gatsby thing.
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I don t know.
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We evolve together.
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Where s the together?
10
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The together is the murder.
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The population.
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And the sex.
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Sex and murder.
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SPEAKER_03
My romantic vision of it, to try to make me happy, Sarah, instead of sad, Sarah, I talk in third person when I think very abstractly, sorry, is,
10
SPEAKER_03
You know, like this whole, like certain things can coexist, so the universe is trying to maximize existence, but there s some things that just aren t the most productive trajectory together, but it doesn t mean that they don t exist on another timeline or another chain somewhere else.
10
SPEAKER_03
And maybe you would call that then some kind of multiverse or things, but what am I saying?
10
SPEAKER_00
I think you can t, I just, you can t go down a level.
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SPEAKER_02
I m just making stuff up to make myself feel better.
10
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I don t understand, it is illogical and we need, we need.
10
SPEAKER_01
No, I know, I know.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, if you look at bacteria, if you look at virus, I mean, just, just the number of organisms that are constantly, like looking at bacteria, they re just dying non-stop.
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Right.
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It s like a slaughter.
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SPEAKER_03
Right.
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So.
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SPEAKER_03
Well, and this goes back to the conversation about God, I mean, like there s the whole thing about like, why does the universe enable suffering?
10
SPEAKER_00
Individuals don t exist, right?
10
SPEAKER_00
So for this, if you think about life as an entity on earth, right?
10
SPEAKER_00
Let s just go back a second.
10
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I ll be ludicrous for a second.
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I don t exist.
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You don t exist, right?
10
SPEAKER_00
But the actions you do, the product of evolution exists, right?
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The objects you create exist.
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quantitatively in the real world.
10
SPEAKER_00
If you then understand life on Earth or alien life or any life in the universe as this integrated entity where you need cells in your body to die, otherwise you d just get really big and you wouldn t be able to walk around, right?
10
SPEAKER_00
So, you know, you do.
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SPEAKER_03
It s the patterns that persist, not the physical things.
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SPEAKER_00
And of course, we place immense values on fellow human beings, and I m majestic professor does like other individual human beings.
10
SPEAKER_02
Now you re talking in third person too.
10
SPEAKER_01
I know, it happens, right?
10
SPEAKER_01
So death, would you say, I mean, because you said evolution is a fundamental part of life, so death is a fundamental part of life.
10
SPEAKER_00
Right now, it might not be in the future, we might hack some aspects of death, and we ll evolve in different ways.
10
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But isn t there, I think Sarah mentioned this life density.
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SPEAKER_01
Can t that become a problem?
10
SPEAKER_01
Too much bureaucracy, too much baggage builds up.
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SPEAKER_01
You need to keep erasing stuff.
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SPEAKER_03
I think it s okay that we dissipate.
10
SPEAKER_03
I don t think of it like... Dissipate, yes.
10
SPEAKER_03
No, but we re so fixated on ourselves as individuals and agents, and we were talking about this last night, actually.
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over dinner, but like, you know, an individual persists for a certain amount of time.
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SPEAKER_03
But what you want to do, like, if you re really concerned with immortality is not to live indefinitely as an individual, but maximize your causal impact.
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SPEAKER_03
So like, what are the traces of you that are left?
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SPEAKER_03
And you re still a real, I always think of Einstein, like, for a period of time, he was a real physical
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thing we would identify as a human.
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SPEAKER_03
And now we just see echoes of that human in all of the ways that we talk about his, you know, causal implacor, frankly, right, is another great example.
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SPEAKER_00
How many Easter eggs could you leave in the future?
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SPEAKER_03
So I guess the question is, how much do you want to control the localization of certain features of, say, a packet of propagating information we might call a person?
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SPEAKER_03
and keep them localized to one individual physical structure?
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Is there a time when that just becomes a dissipated feature of the society that it once existed in?
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And I m okay with the dissipated
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because I just think that makes more room for more creativity in the future.
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SPEAKER_03
So you mentioned engineering life in the lab.
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Let me take you to computer science world.
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What about robots?
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So is it possible to engineer, because you re really talking about
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like engineering life at the chemistry level.
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SPEAKER_03
But do you think it s possible to engineer life at the humanoid level, at the dog level?
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Or is that, at which level can we instill the magic of life into inanimate stuff?
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SPEAKER_02
No, I think you could do it at every level.
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I just think that we re particularly interested in chemistry because it s the origin life transition.
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that presumably, or at least that s how I feel about it, it s gonna give you the most interesting or deepest insights into the physics.
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SPEAKER_02
But presumably everything that we do and build is an example of life.
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And the question is just how much do you wanna take from things that we have now and put them into examples of life and copy them into machines?
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I don t know.
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I saw that there was this tweet again.
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I think you were at the Mars conference and you were hanging out with a humanoid robot.
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SPEAKER_02
Yes.
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That was a fun time.
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Making lots of new friends at Mars 2020.
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Did you guys color match ahead of time with the robot or did that accidentally happen?
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Accidentally, I went up and I wanted to say hi.
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SPEAKER_03
Turquoise, would that be the correct name for the color?
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SPEAKER_02
I think so.
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SPEAKER_02
We didn t color coordinate our outfits.
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SPEAKER_03
Well, you didn t.
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Maybe the robot did.
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SPEAKER_02
The robot probably did.
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Much more stylish.
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So for people who are just listening, there s a picture of Sarah standing next to a humanoid robot.
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I guess you like them with a small head and perfect vision.
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Actually, no.
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I just... There s a lidar.
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No, I mean, I think I was just deeply interested because... Sorry to interrupt.
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Was it manual control?
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Was it actually stabilizing itself?
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SPEAKER_02
Oh, no, it was walking around.
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SPEAKER_03
Oh, nice.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
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Nice.
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It was pretty impressive.
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I mean, actually, there s some videos online of Jeff Bezos walking with one of those across the lawn nearby there.
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This is great.
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Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
So... I wasn t invited.
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SPEAKER_02
Yeah, but...
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There you go.
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See?
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That s incredible, isn t it?
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Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
So you look at the walking robot.
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Where did the idea for walking come from?
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It was invented by evolution, right?
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And us as human beings, able to conceptualize and design and engineer.
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SPEAKER_00
So that robot is evidence of life.
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And so I think what s going to happen is there s the
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We want to find where the spark comes from mechanistically.
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How can you literally go from sand to cells?
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SPEAKER_00
So that s the first transition that I think, you know, there are a number of problems we want to do.
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SPEAKER_00
Make life in a lab.
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SPEAKER_00
Great.
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SPEAKER_00
Then we want to make life in a lab and want to suddenly start to make intelligent life or life that can solve, start to solve abstract problems.
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SPEAKER_00
And then we want to make life that is conscious.
11
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
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SPEAKER_00
In that order?
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SPEAKER_00
I think it has to happen in that order.
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You know, getting towards this artificial general intelligence.
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I think that artificial general intelligence can t exist in a vacuum.
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SPEAKER_00
It has to have a causal chain all the way back to Luca, right?
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
And so the question I think, I really like the question is to say, what are we, how is
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how is our pursuit of more and more lifelike?
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SPEAKER_00
I know you like robots, you want to project into them, you want to interact with them.
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SPEAKER_00
I think you would want, if you have a robot dog and the robot dog does everything expected of a normal dog and you can t tell the difference, you re not really going to ask the question anymore if it s a real dog or not or it s got a personality, you re interacting with it.
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And so I think what would be interesting would be to kind of
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understand the computational architecture, how that evolves, because you could then teleport the personality from one object to the other and say, right, does it act the same?
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SPEAKER_00
And I think that as we go along, we re gonna get better and better at integrating our consciousness into machines.
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SPEAKER_03
Well, let me ask you that question just to linger on it.
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I would call that a living, conscious thing, potentially.
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I, as a human, allegedly.
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SPEAKER_03
But would you, as a person trying to define life, if you pass the Turing test, are you a life form?
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One of the reasons I walked up to the robot was because I wanted to meet the robot.
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Right, so I, it felt like I was,
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And I base a lot of my interaction with reality on emotion and feeling, but like, how do you feel about an interaction?
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SPEAKER_02
And I always love your point about like, is it enough to have that shared experience with a robot, right?
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SPEAKER_02
So walking up to it, does it feel like you re interacting with a living thing?
11
SPEAKER_02
And it did to an extent, but in some degrees, it feels like you re interacting with a baby living thing.
11
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So I think our relationship with technology and particularly robots we build is really interesting because
11
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Basically, they exist as objects in our future in some sense, like we re a much older evolutionary lineage than robots are, but we re all part of the same causal chain.
11
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And presumably, you know, they re kind of in their infancy, so it s almost like you re looking at the future of life when you re looking at them, but it hasn t really become life in a full manifestation of whatever it is that they re gonna become.
11
SPEAKER_02
And the example of the walking robot was super interesting, but they also had a dolphin that they put in the pool at the cocktail party at Mars, and it looked just like a real dolphin swimming in the pool.
11
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And it s in this kind of uncanny valley because, and I was having this conversation with a gentleman named Mutu, who was super perceptive, but he was basically saying it made him feel really uncomfortable.
11
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And I think- The dolphin.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, and I think a lot of people would have that response.
11
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And I guess my point about it is, it is kind of interesting because you re basically trying to make a thing that you think is non-living mimic a living thing.
11
SPEAKER_02
And so the thought experiment I would want to run in that case is imagine we replaced every living thing on Earth with a robot equivalent, like all the dolphins and things.
11
SPEAKER_02
And in some sense, then you re making, if you think that the robots aren t experiencing reality, for example, in the way that
11
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a biologically evolved thing would, you re basically making the philosophical zombie argument become real.
11
SPEAKER_02
And basically building reality into a simulation because you ve made everything quote unquote fake in some sense.
11
SPEAKER_02
You ve replaced everything with a physical simulation of it.
11
SPEAKER_03
So as opposed to being excited by the possibility of creating something new, you re terrified of humans being replaced.
11
SPEAKER_02
I was just trying to run like what would be the absolute, you know, thought experiment, but I don t think that scenario would actually play out.
11
SPEAKER_02
I guess what I think is weird for why we feel this kind of uncanny valley interacting with something like the robot dolphin is we re looking at an object we know is kind of in the future in the sense of like if everything s ordered in time, but it s borrowing from a structure that we have common history with, and it s basically copying in a kind of superficial way things from one part of the causal chain to another.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_03
Well, that s a video.
11
SPEAKER_02
I never believed it was real.
11
SPEAKER_02
They look so real.
11
SPEAKER_02
And obviously, the technology was developed for movies, so.
11
SPEAKER_00
Well, I think we re confusing our emotional response and understanding the causal chain of how we got there, right?
11
SPEAKER_00
Because the philosophical zombie argument thinks about objects just appearing, right, that you re facsimilated in some way, whereas there is, the chain of events that caused the dolphin to be built weren t for a human being.
11
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, would philosophical zombies still have a high assembly index?
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_00
Because it can t be.
11
SPEAKER_00
Philosophical zombies, like Boltzmann brains, just can t appear out of nowhere.
11
SPEAKER_02
Well, I guess my question would be in that scenario where you build all the robots and replace everything on Earth with robots, would the biosphere be as creative under that scenario or not?
11
SPEAKER_02
And so are there quantitative differences you would notice over time?
11
SPEAKER_03
And it s not obvious either way, right?
11
SPEAKER_02
It s not obvious right now because we don t really, we don t understand, we haven t built into machines how we work.
11
SPEAKER_00
So that s, I think, one of the big missing things, I think, that we re both looking for, right?
11
SPEAKER_01
This is a robot.
11
SPEAKER_01
It s a cute robot.
11
SPEAKER_00
But the point, Sarah, is that the biosphere won t be as creative if you did it right now.
11
SPEAKER_01
No, of course.
11
SPEAKER_00
I think that s why people don t like it.
11
SPEAKER_00
But in the future,
11
SPEAKER_00
We will be able to solve the problem of origin of life, intelligence and consciousness because they exist in physical substrates.
11
SPEAKER_00
We just don t understand enough about the material substrate.
11
SPEAKER_00
and the causal chain, but I m very confident we will get to an AGI, but it won t be what people think, it won t be, solution won t be a, we ll get fooled a lot, and so GPT-3 is getting better at fooling us, and GPT-153 might really fool us, but it won t have the magic we re looking for, it won t be a creative, but it will help us understand the differences between what we-... Really though, because isn t that what love is, being fooled?
11
SPEAKER_03
Like, why are you not giving much value to the emotional connection with objects, with robots, with humans?
11
SPEAKER_00
Emotion is that thing which happens when your expectation function is dashed and something else happens, right?
11
SPEAKER_00
I mean, that s what emotion is.
11
SPEAKER_01
Is that what love is too?
11
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_03
You were expecting one thing and something else happened.
11
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_03
I don t know.
11
SPEAKER_01
I don t think that s true either.
11
SPEAKER_00
Well, what is it then?
11
SPEAKER_00
I think no emotion.
11
SPEAKER_00
Look, I m sorry.
11
SPEAKER_02
Emotion is that but I think love is just fulfilling your purpose.
11
SPEAKER_00
No, but, okay, I mean, look, look.
11
SPEAKER_02
Like whatever that means, that s all I m gonna ask.
11
SPEAKER_00
So, yeah, okay.
11
SPEAKER_02
But when are you happiest?
11
SPEAKER_02
It s like when you re doing.
11
SPEAKER_00
All right, all right, all right, let me go back.
11
SPEAKER_00
If you want me to define.
11
SPEAKER_02
Follow your bliss.
11
SPEAKER_00
Let me define love quickly.
11
SPEAKER_01
Okay, go for it.
11
SPEAKER_00
In terms of assembly space, right?
11
SPEAKER_01
Excellent.
11
SPEAKER_00
I didn t think I d be doing this today.
11
SPEAKER_01
I can t wait till Assembly Theory 101 is taught and the second lecture is Assembly Theory of Love.
11
SPEAKER_00
No, no, but look, well, but actually, but look, but.
11
SPEAKER_03
is being surprised, the expectation s being broken.
11
SPEAKER_03
I m just, I m not.
11
SPEAKER_01
No, go for it.
11
SPEAKER_00
I m not an emotional being.
11
SPEAKER_00
But I would say, so we ll talk about emotional, but love is more complex.
11
SPEAKER_00
Love is a very complex set of emotions together and logical stuff.
11
SPEAKER_00
But if you ve got this thing, this person that s on this causal chain that has this empathy for this other thing, love is being able to project ahead in your assembly space and work out what the person you re in love with has a need for
11
SPEAKER_00
And to do that for them, without selflessly, right?
11
SPEAKER_00
Because you can project ahead what they re going to need, and they are there, and maybe you can see someone is going to fall over, and you catch them before they fall over, or maybe you can anticipate that someone s going to be hungry, and without helping you, you just help them.
11
SPEAKER_00
That s what love is.
11
SPEAKER_03
That just sounds like empathy.
11
SPEAKER_00
But it s more complex than that, right?
11
SPEAKER_00
It s more complex, it s more about not just empathy, it s understanding, it s about kind of sharing that experience.
11
SPEAKER_02
That s an expression of love though, that s not what it s like to feel love.
11
SPEAKER_02
Like feeling love is like, I think it s like when you re aligned with things that you feel like are your purpose or your reason for existing.
11
SPEAKER_03
So if you have those feelings towards the robot, why is that robot, I mean, because you said the AGI, we ll build an AGI, but it won t, there ll be a fundamental difference in AGI.
11
SPEAKER_02
I don t think we ll build it, it s gonna merge from our technology.
11
SPEAKER_00
I think you guys all argue the same thing.
11
SPEAKER_00
I just said that GPT, we do not correctly capture the causal chain that we have.
11
SPEAKER_03
Within GPT.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, within AI.
11
SPEAKER_03
But don t you think it captures, because GPT-3 is fundamentally trained
11
SPEAKER_00
on a corpus of knowledge, you know, like the internet, don t you think it gets better and better and better at capturing the memory of all the... It will be better at fooling you, and at some point, you won t care, but when it comes, my guess, this is a quick, this is what I was getting to right before we got, I got in the love trap.
11
SPEAKER_03
Love trap, yeah.
11
SPEAKER_00
It was like, Lee Cronin in the love trap, you know.
11
SPEAKER_03
Sounds like a good, bad name.
11
SPEAKER_00
Sad, okay.
11
SPEAKER_00
Assembly space is sad.
11
SPEAKER_00
But I think there are other features that we pull on innovation that allow us to do more than what we just see in GPT-3, so if you re being fooled there.
11
SPEAKER_00
So I think what I mean is human beings have this ability to be surprising and creative, whereas, is it Dali?
11
SPEAKER_00
this thing, or if you take, GPT-3 is not gonna create a new verb.
11
SPEAKER_00
Shakespeare created new verbs.
11
SPEAKER_00
You re like, wow.
11
SPEAKER_00
And that required Shakespeare to think outside of language, in a different domain.
11
SPEAKER_00
So I think having that connections across multiple domains is what you need for AGI.
11
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, but I don t know if you need, I don t know if there s any limitation to GPT-N, not being able to be cross-domain.
11
SPEAKER_00
The number one problem is it s instantiated in a resource-limited substrate, in silicon.
11
SPEAKER_00
The architectures used for training for learning is about fooling, it s not about understanding.
11
SPEAKER_00
And I think that there is some understanding that we have that is not yet symbolically representable.
11
SPEAKER_03
Language, learning language and using language seems to be fundamentally about fooling, not understanding.
11
SPEAKER_03
Why do you use language exactly?
11
SPEAKER_00
I might disagree with that quite fundamentally actually, but I m not sure I understand how to make a coherent argument for that, but my feeling is that there is comprehension
11
SPEAKER_00
in reality, in our consciousness, below language.
11
SPEAKER_00
And we use those for language, for all sorts of expressions, and we don t yet understand that there s a gap.
11
SPEAKER_00
We will get there, but I m saying, wouldn t it be interesting, it s a bit like saying, could I facsimile you or Sarah into a new human being, right?
11
SPEAKER_00
And let s just say I could copy all your atoms and the positions of all your atoms and electrons.
11
SPEAKER_00
into this other person, they would be you?
11
SPEAKER_00
The answer s no.
11
SPEAKER_00
And it s quite easy to show using assembly theory, because actually the feature space that you have, that graph, the only way to copy you is to create you on that graph.
11
SPEAKER_00
So everything that s happened to you in your past, we have to have a faithful record for.
11
SPEAKER_00
If you want another copy of Lex, you have to do the exact thing.
11
SPEAKER_00
Want another copy of Sarah, want another copy of Lee, the exact past has to be replicated.
11
SPEAKER_03
Let me push back on that a little bit.
11
SPEAKER_03
That s maybe from an assembly theory perspective, but it,
11
SPEAKER_03
I don t think it s that difficult to recreate a version of me, like a clone, that would make everybody exactly equally as happy.
11
SPEAKER_03
Like, they wouldn t care which one.
11
SPEAKER_03
And like, there s two of me, and then they get to pick which one, and they ll kill either one, they ll be fine.
11
SPEAKER_03
As long as they re forced to kill one.
11
SPEAKER_00
They ll be fine, but here s what will happen is, let s say we make artificial legs.
11
SPEAKER_00
and everyone s like, wow, so cool, it looks the same, interact, then there ll be this battle of like, right, we re gonna tell the difference, we re gonna basically keep nudging lex and artificial lex until we get novelty from one and we ll kill the other one.
11
SPEAKER_00
And I think, thank God.
11
SPEAKER_00
Novelty is a fuzzy concept, that s the whole problem of novelty.
11
SPEAKER_00
So I will define novelty, it s not fuzzy.
11
SPEAKER_00
Novelty is the ability for you to create
11
SPEAKER_00
um, architectures that are, um, or create an architecture.
11
SPEAKER_00
So let s say you ve got a corpus of architectures known, you can write down, you ve got some distance measure.
11
SPEAKER_00
And then I create a new one and the distance measure is so far away from what you d expected.
11
SPEAKER_00
There s no linear algebra we re going to get there.
11
SPEAKER_00
It s like, that is creativity.
11
SPEAKER_00
And we don t know how to do that yet on any level.
11
SPEAKER_02
Well, I was also thinking about like your argument about free will, like you wouldn t be able to know it was, it doesn t work instantaneously.
11
SPEAKER_02
It s not like a micro level thing, but more a macro level thing over the scale of trajectories or longer term decisions.
11
SPEAKER_02
So if you think that the novelty manifests over those longer timescales, it might be the two Lex s diverge quite a bit over certain timescales of their behavior.
11
SPEAKER_03
But nobody would notice the difference.
11
SPEAKER_02
They might not.
11
SPEAKER_03
And the universe, the Earth won t notice the difference.
11
SPEAKER_03
The universe won t notice the difference.
11
SPEAKER_02
The universe would notice the difference.
11
SPEAKER_03
No, the universe doesn t know about its novelty that s being generated.
11
SPEAKER_03
That s the whole point of novelty.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, but this is what selection is, right?
11
SPEAKER_02
It s like taking nearly equivalent ones and then deciding, like the universe selects, right?
11
SPEAKER_02
So whatever selection is, selects some things to persist in time.
11
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, it s gonna select the artificial one just because it likes that one better.
11
SPEAKER_00
Well, you re mixing up two arguments here.
11
SPEAKER_00
So let s go back a second.
12
SPEAKER_02
What are you basing this argument on, Link?
12
SPEAKER_03
I m just saying that I kind of don t think, because Lee said that it s not possible, if you copy every single molecule in a person s body, that it s not going to be the same person.
12
SPEAKER_03
that they won t have the same assembly index, it won t be the same person.
12
SPEAKER_03
And I just don t, I think copying, you can compress, not only do I disagree with that, I think you can even compress a person down to some, where you can fool the universe.
12
SPEAKER_00
I m saying, let me restate it, it is not possible to copy somebody unless you copy the causal history.
12
SPEAKER_02
Also, you can t have two identical, I mean, actually, I really like the idea that everything in the universe is unique, so even if there were two Lexus.
12
SPEAKER_03
I know you like that idea, because you re human, and you think you re unique.
12
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, exactly.
12
SPEAKER_02
But also, I can make a logical argument for it, that even if we could copy all of your molecules and all their positions, the other you would be there, and you have a different position in space.
12
SPEAKER_02
You re distinguishable.
12
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, the other thing I was gonna ask.
12
SPEAKER_03
How unique are you, just by the position in space, really?
12
SPEAKER_02
Sure, but then how much does that light translation of Lex, the sitting lair, affect the future?
12
SPEAKER_03
I see, but wait a minute.
12
SPEAKER_03
Is part of the definition of something being interesting is how much it affects the future?
12
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
12
SPEAKER_03
But let me come back.
12
SPEAKER_02
Don t you agree?
12
SPEAKER_02
You disagree?
12
SPEAKER_00
But let me come back to one point quickly that you were making.
12
SPEAKER_03
Sure, I think I probably agree, yes.
12
SPEAKER_00
There s two Lexus, right?
12
SPEAKER_00
There s a robot Lex that you just basically, it is a charade.
12
SPEAKER_00
It s a facsimile.
12
SPEAKER_00
It s just coded to emulate you.
12
SPEAKER_01
Are you robot, Lex?
12
SPEAKER_00
I wouldn t know, right?
12
SPEAKER_00
That s the point.
12
SPEAKER_00
I wouldn t know.
12
SPEAKER_00
That s a very important point here because he s ducking and diving between this.
12
SPEAKER_00
So if I facsimile you into a robot, then your robot might be, would be a representation of you now, but fundamentally be boring because you go and have other ideas.
12
SPEAKER_00
If, however, you built an architecture that itself is capable of generating novelty, you would diverge in your causal chain and you d both be equally interesting to interact with.
12
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_00
We don t know that mechanism.
12
SPEAKER_00
All I m trying to say is we don t yet know that mechanism.
12
SPEAKER_00
We do not know the mechanism that generates novelty.
12
SPEAKER_00
And at the moment in our AIs, we are emulating.
12
SPEAKER_00
We are not generating.
12
SPEAKER_03
You don t think we re sneaking up on that?
12
SPEAKER_03
Do you think it s a fun one?
12
SPEAKER_00
No, no.
12
SPEAKER_00
There is no ghost in the machine.
12
SPEAKER_00
and I want there to be one.
12
SPEAKER_00
I want the same thing you want.
12
SPEAKER_00
Sorry, I was interrupted.
12
SPEAKER_03
I know you want that as a human because everything you just said makes you feel more special.
12
SPEAKER_00
I wanna be, no, no, no, screw my specialness.
12
SPEAKER_00
I just wanna be surprised.
12
SPEAKER_00
If I can- You don t think a robot can surprise you.
12
SPEAKER_00
If you can produce an algorithm instantiated in a robot to surprise me, I will have one of those robots.
12
SPEAKER_00
It ll be brilliant.
12
SPEAKER_00
But it won t surprise me.
12
SPEAKER_02
But why is it a problem to think that humans are special?
12
SPEAKER_03
maybe it s not the special, you re right, it s the better than.
12
SPEAKER_03
Because then you start to not recognize the magic in other life forms that you either have created or you have observed.
12
SPEAKER_03
Because I just think there is magic in legged robots moving about, and they are full of surprises.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so I m a little... I know why you like cellular automata, right?
12
SPEAKER_00
But the specialness in your robot
12
SPEAKER_00
comes from the roboticist that built it.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_02
It s part of the lineage.
12
SPEAKER_00
And so that s fine.
12
SPEAKER_00
I m happy with that.
12
SPEAKER_02
That s what I felt like looking at the standing robot was I was looking at four billion years of evolution.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_00
Right.
12
SPEAKER_00
If it wasn t.
12
SPEAKER_00
So I think I m happy.
12
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I m happy we re going to coexist.
12
SPEAKER_00
I m just saying you re going to get more excitement.
12
SPEAKER_00
There s something missing in our understanding of intelligence.
12
SPEAKER_00
Intelligence isn t just training.
12
SPEAKER_00
The way the neural network is conceived right now is great, and it s lovely, and it ll be better, and we ll argue forever, but you want to know, wouldn t it be great if I said, look, I know how to invent an architecture, and I can give it a soul.
12
SPEAKER_00
And what I mean by a soul is some, I know for real that there is internal reference.
12
SPEAKER_00
Soon as I not fake internal reference, and if we could generate that mechanism for internal reference, that s why our goal directness.
12
SPEAKER_02
We can do that.
12
SPEAKER_00
Get that goal directness.
12
SPEAKER_00
You would love that robot more than the one that s just made to look like it does because you ll have more fun with it because you better generate search other problems, get more novelty.
12
SPEAKER_00
Hell, you d be able to fall in love with that robot for real, but not the one that s faking it.
12
SPEAKER_01
What about fake it till you make it?
12
SPEAKER_03
Well, I think a lot of people fall in love with fake humans.
12
SPEAKER_03
It s nice to fall in love with something that s full of novelty, yes.
12
SPEAKER_03
I could imagine all kinds of robots that I would want to have a close relationship with.
12
SPEAKER_03
And I don t mean like sexual, I mean like intimacy.
12
SPEAKER_03
But I just don t think that novelty generation is such a special,
12
SPEAKER_03
Okay, there s like mathematical novelty or something like that, and then there s just humans being surprised, and I think we re easily surprised.
12
SPEAKER_00
That s fine, but that s- But you don t think that s a good definition of novelty?
12
SPEAKER_00
No, that s good.
12
SPEAKER_00
I m happy to be surprised, but not globally surprised, because someone else, but I really want, that s why I m a scientist, I really want to be,
12
SPEAKER_00
the first to be surprised about something, and the first thing in the universe to create that novelty, and to know for sure that that novelty has never occurred anywhere else.
12
SPEAKER_00
That s a real buzz, right?
12
SPEAKER_03
That s always- Is there a way to really know that?
12
SPEAKER_00
You have to have a really big look-up table.
12
SPEAKER_00
Right.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you re never gonna know for sure, right?
12
SPEAKER_00
That s one of the hard things about being a scientist searching for this type of novelty.
12
SPEAKER_00
Maybe that s why mathematics, mathematicians love
12
SPEAKER_00
discovery, but actually they are creating.
12
SPEAKER_00
When they create a new mathematical structure, you can write code to work out whether that structure exists before.
12
SPEAKER_00
That s almost why I would love to have been a mathematician from that regard, to invent new math that really I know pretty much for sure does not exist anywhere else in the universe because it s so contingent.
12
SPEAKER_02
But this gets into like, you said a few times that I still really don t understand how you actually plan to do this, to build an experiment that detects how the universe is generating novelty or that time is the mechanism.
12
SPEAKER_02
So the problem that we all have, which I think is what Lex is pushing against, is if I build the experiment,
12
SPEAKER_02
you don t know what you put into it.
12
SPEAKER_02
Unless you can quantify everything you put in, all of your agency, all the boundary conditions, you don t know if you somehow biased it in some way.
12
SPEAKER_02
Is the novelty actually intrinsic to that experiment or to that robot, or is it something you gave it, but you didn t realize you
12
SPEAKER_00
It s gonna be, it s gonna asymptote towards that, right?
12
SPEAKER_00
You re never gonna know for sure, but you can start to take out, you know, you can use good Bayesian approaches and just keep updating and updating and updating until you point, to all intents and purposes.
12
SPEAKER_02
So you wanna bound on how much novelty generation could be.
12
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_02
Got it.
12
SPEAKER_03
So the ability to generate novelty is correlated with high assembly index, with assembly index?
12
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, yeah.
12
SPEAKER_02
Cause the space of possibilities is bigger.
12
SPEAKER_03
Hmm.
12
SPEAKER_03
So that s the key.
12
SPEAKER_03
This could be a good, so I have a running joke of like why Lex is single.
12
SPEAKER_03
This could be a good part four.
12
SPEAKER_03
So what you re looking for in a robot partner is ability to generate novelty.
12
SPEAKER_03
And that s, I suppose you would say it s a good definition of intelligence too.
12
SPEAKER_03
Boy, is novelty a fuzzy concept.
12
SPEAKER_02
Is creativity better?
12
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, I mean, that s all pretty fuzzy.
12
SPEAKER_00
It s kind of the same.
12
SPEAKER_00
Maybe that s why aliens haven t come yet.
12
SPEAKER_00
It s because we re not creating enough novelty.
12
SPEAKER_00
There s some kind of a hierarchy of novelty in the universe.
12
SPEAKER_02
Well, I think novelty is like things surprise you, right?
12
SPEAKER_02
So it s a very passive thing.
12
SPEAKER_02
But I guess what I meant by saying creativity is I think it s much more active.
12
SPEAKER_02
You think there s like a mechanism.
12
SPEAKER_02
of the things that exist are generating the creativity.
12
SPEAKER_02
Novelty seems to be there s some spontaneous production.
12
SPEAKER_02
It s completely decoupled from the things that exist.
12
SPEAKER_00
No, I understand.
12
SPEAKER_00
I think that s really good.
12
SPEAKER_03
Creativity is the mechanism and novelty is the observable.
12
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_03
novelty could just be surprise, your model of the world was broken, and not necessarily in a positive way.
12
SPEAKER_00
That s surprise.
12
SPEAKER_00
So there s three things now, let s go back, that s cool, right, let s go.
12
SPEAKER_00
You ve got surprise, which is basically, I mean, I m surprised all the time, because I don t read very much, I m pretty dumb, I was like, oh, wow, this, I often used to invent new scientific ideas, and I was really surprised by that, and then I went and looked in literature properly, and it s there.
12
SPEAKER_00
So surprise, that s to the extent that you don t have full information.
12
SPEAKER_00
creativity, the act of pushing on the causal structure, and novelty, which is measuring that degree.
12
SPEAKER_00
I think that s pretty well defined in that regard.
12
SPEAKER_00
In the end, that s why actually the way the internet and the printing press share
12
SPEAKER_00
I actually think creativity has dropped a bit since the internet, because everyone s just regurgitating stuff.
12
SPEAKER_00
But of course, now it s beginning to accelerate again, because everyone s using this tool to be creative.
12
SPEAKER_00
And boom, it s exploding.
12
SPEAKER_00
I think that s what happens when you create these new technologies.
12
SPEAKER_03
That s really helpful.
12
SPEAKER_03
There s a difference between novelty and surprise.
12
SPEAKER_03
Okay, I think I was thinking about surprise.
12
SPEAKER_00
If you give me a toy that surprises me for a bit, it d be great.
12
SPEAKER_00
A robot that surprises me.
12
SPEAKER_02
An experiment that surprises you.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, that s why I love doing experiments, because I can t... It s still exciting.
12
SPEAKER_03
Surprise is exciting.
12
SPEAKER_03
Even negative surprise, like some people love drama in relationships.
12
SPEAKER_03
It s like, why the hell, why d you do this?
12
SPEAKER_00
That can be exciting.
12
SPEAKER_00
I can imagine companies selling updates to their companion robots that just basically generate negative surprise just to spice things up a bit.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s the push and pull.
12
SPEAKER_03
That s one of the components of love.
12
SPEAKER_03
As you said, love is a complicated thing.
12
SPEAKER_03
Oh, Beauty, I wanted to mention this, because you also tweeted, I think this was Sarah, no, it might have been Lee, I don t remember, but it was a survey published in Nature, showing that scientists find, yeah, anyway, there s a plot, this is published in Nature, of what scientists find beautiful in their work, and it separates biologists and physicists,
12
SPEAKER_03
It d be nice if he showed the full plot.
12
SPEAKER_03
And there s simplicity, elegance, hidden order, inner logic of systems, symmetry, complexity, harmony, and so on.
12
SPEAKER_03
Is there any interesting things that stand out to you?
12
SPEAKER_01
I think the fact that biologists like complexity and pleasing colors.
12
SPEAKER_03
Oh, there s pleasing colors on there?
12
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
12
SPEAKER_01
Or shapes.
12
SPEAKER_03
Or shapes.
12
SPEAKER_03
Pleasing colors or shapes.
12
SPEAKER_03
And then physicists obviously love simplicity above all else.
12
SPEAKER_03
Simplicity and elegance.
12
SPEAKER_03
Simplicity, elegance.
12
SPEAKER_03
They love symmetry.
12
SPEAKER_03
And then biologists love complexity.
12
SPEAKER_03
Or they just love a little bit less.
12
SPEAKER_02
They love everything a little bit less, but complexity a little bit more.
12
SPEAKER_03
A little bit more.
12
SPEAKER_03
That s so interesting.
12
SPEAKER_02
And pleasing colors or shapes.
12
SPEAKER_03
Do you think it s a useful, I forget what your tweet was, that this is missing some of the, something.
12
SPEAKER_02
No, I think, it s because I think about how explanations become causal to our future, so I have this whole philosophy that the theories we build and the way we describe reality should be, have the largest breadth of possibilities for the future of
12
SPEAKER_02
what we can accomplish.
12
SPEAKER_02
So in some sense, it s not like Occam s razor is not for simplicity, it s for optimism or the kind of future you can build.
12
SPEAKER_02
And so I think, I think you have to think this way when you re thinking about life and alien life, because ultimately we re trying to build, I mean, science is just basically our narratives about reality.
12
SPEAKER_02
And now you re building a narrative that is what we are as physical systems.
12
SPEAKER_02
It seems to me it needs to be as positive as possible, because it s basically going to shape
12
SPEAKER_02
the future trajectory where we re going.
12
SPEAKER_02
And we don t use that as a heuristic in theory building, because we think theories are about predicting features of the world, not causing them.
12
SPEAKER_02
But if you look at the history of all of the development of human thought, it s caused the things that happen next.
12
SPEAKER_02
So it s not just about looking at the world and observing it, it s about actually that feedback loop that s missing, and it s not in any of those categories.
12
SPEAKER_03
what do you think is the most beautiful idea in the physics of life, in the chemistry of life, in this, through all your exploration with assembly theory, what is the thing that made you step back and say this idea is beautiful, or potentially beautiful?
12
SPEAKER_02
For me, it s that the universe is a creative place.
12
SPEAKER_02
I guess I want to think, and whether it s true or not, is that we are special in some way, and it s not like an arbitrary, added-on, epiphenomenal or ad hoc feature of the universe that we exist, but it s something deep and intrinsic to the structure of reality.
12
SPEAKER_02
And to me, the most beautiful ideas that come out of that is that the reason we exist is for the universe to generate more things and to think about itself and use that as a mechanism for creating more stuff.
12
SPEAKER_02
That s for me.
12
SPEAKER_03
So like the life that this, however common it is, is an intrinsic part, is a fundamental part of this universe, at least that we live in.
12
SPEAKER_02
I think so.
12
SPEAKER_02
I mean, it s always interesting to me because
12
SPEAKER_02
You know, like, we have theories of quantum mechanics and gravity, and they re supposed to be, like, our most fundamental theories right now.
12
SPEAKER_02
And they describe, you know, things like the interaction of massive bodies, or the way that charges accelerate, or all these kind of features.
12
SPEAKER_02
And they re these really deep theories, and they tell us a lot about how reality works, but they re completely agnostic to our existence.
12
SPEAKER_02
And I just, I can t help but think that, like, whatever describes us has to be even deeper than that.
12
SPEAKER_03
And I think incorporating memory, I guess, or causality, whatever the term you want to use, into the physics view of the world might be taking a step forward.
12
SPEAKER_02
That s the easiest way to do it.
12
SPEAKER_02
It s the cleanest, so here we go again with the physicist, I m a physicist, the cleanest, I was gonna say the simplest, most elegant way of resolving all of the kind of ways that we have these paradoxes associated with life.
12
SPEAKER_02
It s not that life is not,
12
SPEAKER_02
Current physics is not incompatible with life, but it doesn t explain life.
12
SPEAKER_02
And then you want to know where are the explanatory gaps.
12
SPEAKER_02
And this idea that we have in assembly that time is fundamental and objects actually are extended in time and have physical extent in time is the cleanest way of resolving a lot of the explanatory gaps.
12
SPEAKER_00
So I ve struggled with assembly theory for many years, because I could see this gap.
12
SPEAKER_00
And I think when I first met Sarah, and we realized we were kind of talking about the same problem, but we understood another language.
12
SPEAKER_00
It was quite hilarious, actually, because it s like, I have no idea what you re talking about, but I think it sounds right.
12
SPEAKER_00
So for me, the most beautiful thing about assembly theory is I realized
12
SPEAKER_00
The assembly theory explains why life is a universe developing a memory.
12
SPEAKER_00
But not only that, poetically, I could actually go and measure it.
12
SPEAKER_00
And I was like, holy shit, we physically measured this thing, this abstract thing, and we could measure it.
12
SPEAKER_00
And not only could we measure it, but we can then start to quantify the causal consequences.
12
SPEAKER_00
And because I mean, you know, I think as a kind of inventing this together with Sarah and her team.
12
SPEAKER_00
I thought there was quite a high chance that, you know, we re doing science, there s such a high probability we re wrong, you know, on this.
12
SPEAKER_00
And I remember kind of trying to go to hard physicists, mathematicians, complexity theorists, and everyone just kind of giving me such a hard time about it.
12
SPEAKER_00
And said, you know, this is kind of, you ve just done this, you ve just done that, you ve just recapitulated an old theory.
12
SPEAKER_00
and I was unable, I lacked the language to really explain and I had to, it was a real struggle.
12
SPEAKER_00
So this realization that life, what life does that physics cannot understand or chemistry is the universe develops a memory that s causally actionable and then we can measure it but it isn t just a one thing
13
SPEAKER_00
there is this intrinsic property of all the objects in the universe.
13
SPEAKER_00
Like I ve said before, me holding up this water bottle, it isn t any other water bottle, but it is a sum total of all the water bottles that have existed, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
And will likely change the future of water bottles and for other objects.
13
SPEAKER_00
So for me, assembly theory explains the soul in stuff.
13
SPEAKER_00
The monology is not like Sheldrake s morphic resonance where we have this kind of wooey thing permeating the universe.
13
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It is the interaction of objects with other objects and some objects have more instantaneous causal power.
13
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that s life, living things, and some objects are the instantaneous output of that causal power, dead objects, but they re part of the lineage.
13
SPEAKER_00
And that, for me, is fascinating and really beautiful.
13
SPEAKER_00
And I think that even if we re determined to be totally wrong, I think it will help us help hopefully understand what life is and go into tech life elsewhere and make life in the lab.
13
SPEAKER_00
How does that make you feel, by the way?
13
SPEAKER_00
Does it make you feel less special?
13
SPEAKER_01
that you re so deeply integrated, interconnected to the lineage?
13
SPEAKER_00
I mean, okay, on one level, I just wanted in my life as a scientist, I wanted to have an interesting idea just once or an original idea.
13
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it was like, you know, so I think that was cool that we had this idea and we were playing with it.
13
SPEAKER_00
And I think also that I kind of, I mean, it took me ages to realize that Sarah had also had the same kind of form, coming towards the same formulation, just from a completely different point.
13
SPEAKER_00
Because I but no it makes me feel special and it also makes me feel connected to the universe.
13
SPEAKER_00
It also makes me feel
13
SPEAKER_00
not just humble about being a living object in the universe, but the fact that it makes me really optimistic about what the universe is gonna do in the future.
13
SPEAKER_00
Because we re not just isolated phenomena, we are connected.
13
SPEAKER_00
I will be able to have, one of my small objectives in life is to change the future of the universe in some profound way just by existing.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s not ambitious at all.
13
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I think it s also good because it makes me feel less lonely because I just realized I m not like, I mean, I m a unique assembly structure, but I have so much overlap with the other entities I interact with that we re not completely individual, right?
13
SPEAKER_01
And yet, your existence does have a huge amount of impact on how this whole thing unrolls on the future of the world.
13
SPEAKER_02
As individuals, that s, yeah.
13
SPEAKER_02
Local packets of agency.
13
SPEAKER_00
I think we all have a profound impact on the future.
13
SPEAKER_00
Some more than others, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
All human beings, all life.
13
SPEAKER_00
And I mean, that s why I think it s a privilege in a way to assert some degree of ego and agency.
13
SPEAKER_00
you know, I m gonna make a computer, or make an origin life machine, or we re gonna do this thing.
13
SPEAKER_00
But actually, it s just like, you know, life s probably living, if there is a God, or there s a soul in everything, it s probably laughing at us, going, I fool these guys by giving them ego, so they strive for this stuff, and look what it does for, you know, the assembly space of the universe.
13
SPEAKER_02
And there s always a possibility that science can t answer all of it, so that part s challenging for me.
13
SPEAKER_01
There might be a limit to this thing.
13
SPEAKER_01
Let me ask you a bunch of ridiculous questions and I demand relatively short answers.
13
SPEAKER_01
Lee, what s the scariest thing you ve ever done?
13
SPEAKER_01
Or what s the scary thing that pops to mind?
13
SPEAKER_00
Giving seminars in front of other scientists.
13
SPEAKER_01
That s, yeah, that is terrifying.
13
SPEAKER_01
I could, if I had more time, I would ask you about the most embarrassing, but we ll spare you.
13
SPEAKER_01
What about you, Sarah, scariest thing?
13
SPEAKER_01
Up there, some of the scary things you ve done.
13
SPEAKER_02
Um, actually the scariest for me was deciding I wanted to get divorced because it was like a totally radical, like, um... Life transformation.
13
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, because we had been married for a really long time.
13
SPEAKER_02
Um, and I think it was just so much, like, I realized, like, so much of my individual agency I didn t realize I had before, and that was just really, like, scary, like, empowering scary, but, like, terrifying.
13
SPEAKER_02
Like, you were living in a kind of one way for your whole life, and then you realize your life could be a different way.
13
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, there is a between humans.
13
SPEAKER_01
I mean, that s the beautiful thing about love is the connection you have, but it s also becomes a dependency and breaking that, whether it s a mentor with your parents, your close friends.
13
SPEAKER_02
It s almost like waking up, like just there s a different reality.
13
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, that was scary.
13
SPEAKER_01
reinventing yourself.
13
SPEAKER_01
Okay, if you could leave, maybe I ll actually alternate.
13
SPEAKER_01
Sarah, if you could be someone else for a day, someone alive today, who you haven t met yet, or maybe you could do one who you ve met, who would it be?
13
SPEAKER_02
Kim Kardashian.
13
SPEAKER_02
No joke.
13
SPEAKER_02
The woman s brilliant.
13
SPEAKER_02
I would just like to experience, I think she s got such an interesting and very deep understanding of social reality.
13
SPEAKER_01
But you also said you have a appreciation, a love for fashion.
13
SPEAKER_02
Cool.
13
SPEAKER_02
I do.
13
SPEAKER_02
But that s actually the same, I just think it s really interesting, because we live in a social reality which is completely artificially constructed, and some people are really genius about moving through that, and I think she s particularly good at it.
13
SPEAKER_01
I wonder if she s good at understanding it, or if she s just- I think it s very deeply intrinsic to her, so I don t know if she has much- Right, she s like surfing a wave.
13
SPEAKER_02
How much cognitive awareness she has of it, or how strategic it is, but I think it s deeply fascinating, so I guess that s the first one that comes to mind.
13
SPEAKER_01
What about you, Lee, if you could be somebody for a day?
13
SPEAKER_01
Don t say Yoshua Bach.
13
SPEAKER_02
Don t say Kim Kardashian.
13
SPEAKER_00
Those two are off the table.
13
SPEAKER_02
Off the table.
13
SPEAKER_00
No, I was going to say I would like to be a... Does it have to be here today?
13
SPEAKER_00
I was going to say I d like to be the latest ARM processor.
13
SPEAKER_00
I would like to be the latest ARM processor.
13
SPEAKER_00
I would like to understand... I would like to know what it feels like to basically
13
SPEAKER_02
You like being objects.
13
SPEAKER_00
I ve always been obsessed with being objects ever since I was a kid.
13
SPEAKER_00
What s the best part of being an arm processor for a day?
13
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I d like to understand how I access my memory, what I anticipate is coming next in clock cycles.
13
SPEAKER_00
What about how it feels like?
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I wonder how it feels like.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, to be useful.
13
SPEAKER_00
Thanks for that.
13
SPEAKER_01
All right, if, Lee, if everyone on earth disappeared and it was just you left, what would your days look like?
13
SPEAKER_01
What would you do?
13
SPEAKER_01
Nobody else left to impress.
13
SPEAKER_01
Nobody, no, probably can t really do any real science at scale.
13
SPEAKER_01
What would you do with your remaining days?
13
SPEAKER_00
Get every possible tool I could and put it in my workshop and just make stuff.
13
SPEAKER_00
So try to make stuff.
13
SPEAKER_00
Just try to make stuff.
13
SPEAKER_00
Make companions.
13
SPEAKER_00
I m probably not making companions, probably, yeah.
13
SPEAKER_00
So in the physical space.
13
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
13
SPEAKER_01
What about you, Sarah?
13
SPEAKER_01
What would you, when you re just left alone on Earth, you re the last person?
13
SPEAKER_02
Are there animals in this scenario?
13
SPEAKER_01
No.
13
SPEAKER_01
Nothing?
13
SPEAKER_01
No living beings.
13
SPEAKER_02
No plants?
13
SPEAKER_01
No plants.
13
SPEAKER_02
Oh, interesting.
13
SPEAKER_02
I was gonna say I would just, I would try to walk the entire planet, at least all the landmass.
13
SPEAKER_01
Well, that s true, so you probably don t know if there s stuff.
13
SPEAKER_01
You could be searching for plants or other humans.
13
SPEAKER_01
What would I eat?
13
SPEAKER_01
It s a, you just have daily just allotment.
13
SPEAKER_02
I would just walk all the time, I think.
13
SPEAKER_01
Of Soylent.
13
SPEAKER_02
I don t know why.
13
SPEAKER_01
Just walk.
13
SPEAKER_02
That s just what came to mind.
13
SPEAKER_01
You re the explorer.
13
SPEAKER_02
I would just walk.
13
SPEAKER_02
And I guess I would make a goal of covering all of the entire Earth.
13
SPEAKER_02
Because what else are you going to do with your time?
13
SPEAKER_01
What s an item on your bucket list, Sarah, that you haven t done yet, but you hope to do?
13
SPEAKER_01
Skydiving.
13
SPEAKER_01
Travel to space.
13
SPEAKER_02
I don t know.
13
SPEAKER_02
You know, it s funny with my bucket list.
13
SPEAKER_02
I only know it was on my bucket list once I check it off.
13
SPEAKER_01
Once you check it off.
13
SPEAKER_01
So your bucket list is like a fog.
13
SPEAKER_01
It s like a mystery.
13
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
13
SPEAKER_01
Almost by doing it.
13
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
13
SPEAKER_02
So it s very subconsciously driven.
13
SPEAKER_01
So it s in your subconscious in there.
13
SPEAKER_01
I think so.
13
SPEAKER_01
You re bringing it to the surface.
13
SPEAKER_02
I think most of the steering of our agency is in our subconscious anyway.
13
SPEAKER_02
So I just kind of go with the flow, but I guess,
13
SPEAKER_02
No, seriously.
13
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, no, I get it.
13
SPEAKER_01
It s nice.
13
SPEAKER_02
I don t know, I guess, but I would like to go on a submarine, like to the bottom of the ocean.
13
SPEAKER_02
I think that d be really cool.
13
SPEAKER_01
To the bottom of the ocean.
13
SPEAKER_01
Are you captivated by the mystery of the ocean?
13
SPEAKER_02
I am, yeah.
13
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, what about you, Lee?
13
SPEAKER_01
What item on your bucket list?
13
SPEAKER_00
I don t have a bucket list, but I ll just make one.
13
SPEAKER_00
I would love to take a computer to the moon or Mars and make drugs off-world.
13
SPEAKER_00
Be the first chemist to make drugs off-world.
13
SPEAKER_02
the first drug manufacturer in space?
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, why not?
13
SPEAKER_01
Do they have to be somehow, like, be able to habitate, like, be able to survive on that particular space?
13
SPEAKER_01
Or, like, what s the connection between being on Mars and doing manufacturing?
13
SPEAKER_00
I just would like to take the ability to have command and control over chemicals.
13
SPEAKER_00
programmatically off Earth to somewhere else in the universe.
13
SPEAKER_01
That just seems like you like difficulty engineering problems.
13
SPEAKER_00
Before I die, if I can do that, that s great.
13
SPEAKER_01
Would you travel to space before you die?
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, that s what I m saying.
13
SPEAKER_00
I d love to go into space, but not just to be a tourist.
13
SPEAKER_00
I wanna take scientific experiment in space and do a thing in space that s never been done before.
13
SPEAKER_00
That s a real possibility.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
13
SPEAKER_00
So that s why, there s no point in listing things I can t do, yeah.
13
SPEAKER_00
All right.
13
SPEAKER_01
What small act of kindness were you once shown that you will never forget?
13
SPEAKER_01
Small act of kindness, not big.
13
SPEAKER_01
Somebody was just kind to you, somebody did something sweet.
13
SPEAKER_00
When I was a PhD student, someone helped me out with a, just, I was, basically I needed a computer, I needed some power, computation power, and someone took pity on me and helped me, and gave me, I was really touched, they didn t have to, and they were actually quite, they were a disabled scientist, they had other things to do rather than help some random PhD student, gave me access, taught me a load of stuff.
13
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, actually, when you re a grad student, or when you re a student, when you re a student, the younger it is, the better.
13
SPEAKER_01
The attention, the support, the love you get from an older person, a teacher, something like that is super powerful.
13
SPEAKER_01
It s fascinating.
13
SPEAKER_01
And from the perspective of the teacher, they might not realize the impact I have, but that little bit,
13
SPEAKER_01
Those few words, a little bit of help can have a lot of impact.
13
SPEAKER_01
What about you, Sarah?
13
SPEAKER_01
Somebody give you a free Starbucks at some point?
13
SPEAKER_02
I love free Starbucks.
13
SPEAKER_02
I like it when you re in the line at Starbucks and somebody buys your coffee in front of you and then you buy the next one.
13
SPEAKER_02
I love those, but that s not my example.
13
SPEAKER_02
Those are great.
13
SPEAKER_02
I love that too, yeah.
13
SPEAKER_02
It makes me happy.
13
SPEAKER_02
And then my kids get all excited when we do it, when we go in.
13
SPEAKER_02
We re the first ones in line doing it.
13
SPEAKER_02
I guess I can use a similar example about just being a student.
13
SPEAKER_02
So Paul Davies is a very well known theoretical physicist and I, you know, he was generous enough with his time to take me on as a postdoc.
13
SPEAKER_02
But before I became his postdoc, he invited me to a workshop at Arizona State University and the Beyond Center and took a walk with me around campus just to talk about ideas after.
13
SPEAKER_02
And I think there were two things that were completely generous about
13
SPEAKER_02
that.
13
SPEAKER_02
One is Paul s philosophy is always interacting with young people.
13
SPEAKER_02
It s like you interact with a mind in the room.
13
SPEAKER_02
It doesn t matter how well-known or whatever.
13
SPEAKER_02
It s like you evaluate the person for the person.
13
SPEAKER_02
But he also gave me a book, The Eerie Silence, that he had written, and he wrote in it, this is how E.E.
13
SPEAKER_02
gets to E.T.
13
SPEAKER_02
which was Enantiomeric Excess, which I worked on as a PhD student, was the origin of homochirality, all the way up to what the book was about, which was are we alone in the universe and is there intelligent life out there?
13
SPEAKER_02
And it was just so much about the questions I wanted to ask, because it was just everything about, it was just really, really kind.
13
SPEAKER_01
Like that it s okay to ask these questions.
13
SPEAKER_01
And you can actually have strong enough to answer them.
13
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of my career is mostly his encouragement to ask deep questions.
13
SPEAKER_02
Like he gave me the space to do it in ways that a lot of previous mentors had.
13
SPEAKER_02
I mean, I ve had a good experience with mentors, but it was like, go off the deep end, ask the hardest questions.
13
SPEAKER_02
And I think that s the best gift you can give somebody.
13
SPEAKER_01
What would you, because you re both fascinating minds and non, I would say, non-standard in the best possible way.
13
SPEAKER_01
Is there advice you can give to young folks how to be non-standard, how to stand out, novelty, how to generate novelty?
13
SPEAKER_01
That s what I want on my tombstone, I have one.
13
SPEAKER_01
He generated novelty.
13
SPEAKER_00
No, no, how to.
13
SPEAKER_00
I just love doing science.
13
SPEAKER_00
And so when I was younger, I was just, just wanted to, I mean, I m still not sure I m a real scientist, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
So I want to try.
13
SPEAKER_00
So my advice for young people is just
13
SPEAKER_00
If you love asking questions, then don t be afraid to ask the question, even if it pisses people off, because if you piss people off, you re probably asking the right question.
13
SPEAKER_00
What I would say, though, is don t do what I did, which is just piss everyone off.
13
SPEAKER_00
Try and work out how to, you know, I think if other people are challenged by your questions,
13
SPEAKER_00
You will get not only respect, but people will create space for you because you re doing something really new.
13
SPEAKER_00
I really try to create space in my academic career with my team, really try and praise them and push them to do new things.
13
SPEAKER_00
So my advice is try to do new things, get feedback, and the universe will help you.
13
SPEAKER_00
Because the universe likes novelty.
13
SPEAKER_00
I think so.
13
SPEAKER_00
I think so, right?
13
SPEAKER_01
This one will keep them around.
13
SPEAKER_01
What about you, Sarah?
13
SPEAKER_01
You two like to ask the out there.
13
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, because I have a strong passion for them.
13
SPEAKER_02
So I think...
13
SPEAKER_02
It goes back to the love.
13
SPEAKER_02
If you re doing the thing you re supposed to be doing, you should really love it.
13
SPEAKER_02
So I always tell people that they should do the thing they re most passionate about.
13
SPEAKER_02
But I think a flip side of that is that s when you become, not to sound cheesy, but your best version of yourself.
13
SPEAKER_02
So I guess for me, as I become more successful in my career, I feel like I can be more myself as an individual.
13
SPEAKER_02
And so there s this, I ve always been following the questions I m most interested in, which very early on I was discouraged from doing by many people because they thought they were unanswerable questions.
13
SPEAKER_02
And I always just thought,
13
SPEAKER_02
Well, if no one s even trying to answer them, of course they re gonna be unanswerable.
13
SPEAKER_02
And then that was kind of an odd viewpoint.
13
SPEAKER_02
But the more I found my way in that space, the more I also made a space for myself as a person, because you re basically generating the niche that you wanna exist in.
13
SPEAKER_02
And so I think that s part of it, is not just to follow your passion, but also think about who do you wanna be and create
13
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, who am I, who do you wanna be?
13
SPEAKER_01
I mean, yeah, play temporally with it.
13
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, who am I now, who do I wanna be now, but who do I wanna be in the future?
13
SPEAKER_02
They re not decoupled.
13
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I always wonder if that s like, if I become something.
13
SPEAKER_01
Am I finding myself or am I creating myself?
13
SPEAKER_01
And I think those are somehow the same kind of thing.
13
SPEAKER_01
I do feel often like I was always meant to be this kind of thing, but is that created or discovered?
13
SPEAKER_01
I don t know, but basically go towards that direction.
13
SPEAKER_01
If you were abducted by aliens, Sarah?
13
SPEAKER_02
Excellent.
13
SPEAKER_02
I m waiting.
13
SPEAKER_01
Come find me.
13
SPEAKER_01
They re on a spaceship, and then they somehow figured out the language you speak, and ask you, what are you?
13
SPEAKER_01
Explain yourself.
13
SPEAKER_01
Not you, Sarah, but the species.
13
SPEAKER_01
Life on Earth, we don t have time.
13
SPEAKER_01
We re busy grad students from another planet.
13
SPEAKER_01
What s interesting about human civilization?
13
SPEAKER_01
What s interesting about you?
13
SPEAKER_01
Oh, you specifically too, they could be very kind of personal, kind of pushy.
13
SPEAKER_01
And yeah, how would you describe?
13
SPEAKER_02
Okay, I have one.
13
SPEAKER_02
Because, you know, I was
13
SPEAKER_02
I self-identify as a scientist and a physicist, but intrinsically I feel more like an artist.
13
SPEAKER_02
But it s almost like you re an artist that you don t know what you re painting yet.
13
SPEAKER_02
And I guess I feel like that s humanity, in some sense.
13
SPEAKER_02
We re creating something I think is profound and potentially very beautiful in existence in the universe, but we re just so night, not night, we re just early.
13
SPEAKER_02
We re early, we re young, we don t know what we re doing yet.
14
SPEAKER_02
All the nuclear weapons is a big question too.
14
SPEAKER_02
Like what are you guys... What are we doing with them?
14
SPEAKER_02
This creativity that you talk, it sounds very nice, but it s... We re making things that are... Like very destructive and like the rockets, this seems very aggressive.
14
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I know.
14
SPEAKER_01
This is my blinders on.
14
SPEAKER_01
I don t know.
14
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it goes back to the whole conversation about suffering.
14
SPEAKER_01
I have a hard time regularizing certain aspects of reality into what I want to envision, and that s obviously problematic.
14
SPEAKER_01
But, you know, nuclear power has also given us a lot of good things.
14
SPEAKER_02
So both, that s human nature, both human beings and the technology we create has the capacity for evil and the capacity for good.
14
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and we can t all be good all the time.
14
SPEAKER_01
I mean, there s like this huge misnomer that you need to be liked by everyone universally.
14
SPEAKER_01
And obviously that s like an ideal, but it s physically impossible.
14
SPEAKER_01
You can t get a group of people in a room and have everyone like each other all the time.
14
SPEAKER_01
So I think that kind of tension is actually really important, that we have different aesthetics, different goals, and sometimes conflict comes out of that.
14
SPEAKER_02
Speaking of which, do you, Lee, and Yosha Bach ever say anything nice to each other, or is it always conflict?
14
SPEAKER_00
We never have conflict.
14
SPEAKER_00
We argue, but I don t think the arguments are bad.
14
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I think the problem I have, not problem, I think- Here we go.
14
SPEAKER_00
And he s not here to defend himself.
14
SPEAKER_00
No, it s just I don t necessarily understand.
14
SPEAKER_00
I mean, he s just talking at such a high level.
14
SPEAKER_00
I m a dimwit.
14
SPEAKER_00
So I think a lot of our
14
SPEAKER_00
Conflict, it s not conflict, we actually have a, I think, I mean I can t speak for Yasha, I have a deep appreciation for him, he s brilliant, but I think I m kind of frustrated and I m trying to, he thinks the universe is a computer and I want to turn the universe into a computer.
14
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, that s a small disagreement.
14
SPEAKER_02
So how would you defend your life to an alien when you re being abducted?
14
SPEAKER_02
Would you focus on the specifics of your life?
14
SPEAKER_00
No, no, no.
14
SPEAKER_00
I would try to be as random as possible and try and confuse them.
14
SPEAKER_00
Oh, good.
14
SPEAKER_00
Good.
14
SPEAKER_01
Excellent.
14
SPEAKER_00
That might be the wiser choice.
14
SPEAKER_00
The easter eggs in reality?
14
SPEAKER_00
No, I mean if aliens abducted me, I would try and be as random as possible.
14
SPEAKER_00
I would try and do something that would surprise the hell out of them, which I thought, I mean, probably risky, they might kill me, but I think that might be funny.
14
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, they might want to study you for prolonged periods of time.
14
SPEAKER_00
My reasoning is, if I wanted to stay alive, okay, so if the thing is, if I wasn t going back to Earth and the job was to stay alive, if I could be as surprising as possible, they d keep me around like a pet, right?
14
SPEAKER_00
on the alien spaceship.
14
SPEAKER_02
So you d be okay being a pet?
14
SPEAKER_02
Well no, but I mean.
14
SPEAKER_02
The last human that survives would just be a pet to the aliens.
14
SPEAKER_00
I don t know, but I mean, I think that might be fun because then I might get some feedback from their curiosity, but yeah.
14
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Let me ask you this question, given our conversation has a very different meaning, a more profound meaning perhaps, but would you rather lose all of your old memories or never be able to make new ones?
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I would have to lose all my old memories.
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Again, it s the novelty.
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What about you, Sarah?
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I m the same, because I don t think, like, it s about the future experience, right?
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And in some sense, like you were saying earlier, most of our lived experience is actually in our memories.
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So if you can t generate new memories, it s like you re not alive anymore.
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That s it, yeah.
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What comforts you on bad days?
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When you look at human civilization, when you look at your own life, what gives you hope, what makes you feel good about what we re doing, about life at the small scale of you as a human and at the big scale of us as a human civilization, maybe the big scale of the universe?
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children, my kids, but I also mean that in like a grand sense of like, not a grand, but like, like future minds in some sense.
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So for me, like the most bleak movie ever, you know, people worry about apocalyptic things like AI, existential risk and climate change, which children of men, you know, the whole premise of the movie was there can be no children born on the entire planet.
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And the youngest person on the planet is like 18 years old or something.
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Can you imagine a world without children?
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It s just, it s harrowing.
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That s the scariest thing.
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So I think what gives me hope is always youth and the hope of children and the possibilities of the future they see.
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And they grow up in a completely different reality than adults do.
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And I think we have a hard time seeing what their reality actually looks like.
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But I think most of the time it s super interesting.
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Yeah, they have dreams, they have imagination, they have this kind of excitement.
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It s so cool, it s so fun to watch.
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And yeah, you feel like you re almost getting in the way of all that imagination.
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What about you, Lee?
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What gives you hope?
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So when I go back to my eight-year-old self,
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The thing that I dreamed of as an eight-year-old self was this world in which technology became programmable, and there was internet, and I d get information, and I would expand my consciousness by just, you know, getting access to everything that was going on.
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And it s happened in my lifetime.
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I mean, we really do have that.
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I mean, okay, there s some bad things, you know, there s TikTok, everyone just, or whatever, all the bad things about social media, but I think,
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I mean, I can t quite believe my luck being born now.
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It s so amazing.
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Being able to program reality in some way.
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Yeah.
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And the thing that I really find fascinating about human beings is just how ingenious they are.
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Whether it s from my kids, my research group, my peers,
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other companies just how ingenious everyone is and and I m pretty sure humanity has a bit or our causal chain in which humanity is a vital part in the future is going to have a lot of fun and I m just yes just it s just mind-blowing just to watch and you know so humans are ingenious and I hope to help them be more ingenious if I can.
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Well, what gives me hope, what makes me feel good on bad days is the existence of wild minds like yours, novelty generators, assembly structures that generate novelty, and do so beautifully, and then tweet about it.
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Sarah, I really, really enjoy talking to you.
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I enjoy following you.
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I m a huge fan.
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Sarah Lee, I hope to talk to you many times in the future, maybe with Yosha Bach.
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You re just incredible people.
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Thank you for everything you do.
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You re awesome.
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Thank you for talking today.
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I really, really appreciate it.
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Yeah, it s brilliant to be here.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sarah Walker and Lee Cronin.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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Now, let me leave you with some words from Arthur C. Clarke.
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Two possibilities exist.
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Either we are alone in the universe or we are not.
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Both are equally terrifying.
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And let me, if I may, add to that by saying that both possibilities, at least to me, are both terrifying and exciting.
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And keeping these two feelings in my heart is a fun way to explore, to wander, to think, and to live, always a little bit on the edge of madness.
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Thank you for listening.
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I hope to see you next time.