back to indexLee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #269
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The following is a conversation with Lee Cronin,
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a chemist from University of Glasgow,
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who's one of the most fascinating, brilliant,
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out of the box thinking scientists I've ever spoken to.
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This episode was recorded more than two weeks ago,
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so the war in Ukraine is not mentioned.
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I have been spending a lot of time each day
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talking to people in Ukraine and Russia.
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I have family, friends, colleagues,
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and loved ones in both countries.
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I will try to release a solo episode on this war,
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but I've been failing to find the words
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that make sense of it for myself and others,
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I ask for your understanding no matter which path I take.
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Most of my time is spent trying to help
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as much as I can privately.
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I'm talking to people who are suffering,
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who are angry, afraid.
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When I returned to this conversation with Lee,
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I couldn't help but smile.
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He's a beautiful, brilliant, and hilarious human being.
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He's basically a human manifestation
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of the mad scientist Rick Sanchez from Rick and Morty.
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I thought about quitting this podcast for a time,
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but for now at least, I'll keep going.
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I love people too much.
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You, the listener.
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I meet folks on the street or when I run.
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You say a few kind words about the podcast
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and we talk about life, the small things,
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and the big things.
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All of it gives me hope.
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People are just amazing.
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I ask for your support, wisdom, and patience
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as I keep going with this silly little podcast,
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including through some difficult conversations
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and hopefully many fascinating and fun ones too.
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors
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in the description.
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And now, dear friends, here's Lee Cronin.
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How do you think life originated on Earth
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and what insights does that give us about life?
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If we go back to the origin of Earth
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and you think about maybe 4.7, 4.6, 4.5 billion years ago,
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the planet was quite hot.
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There was a limited number of minerals.
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There was some carbon, some water, and I think
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that maybe it's a really simple set of chemistry
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that we really don't understand.
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So that means you've got a finite number of elements
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that are going to react very simply with one another
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and out of that mess comes a cell.
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So literally sand turns into cells
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and it seems to happen quick.
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So what I think I can say with some degree of,
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I think not certainty, but curiosity,
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genuine curiosity is that life happened fast.
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Yeah, so when we say fast,
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this is a pretty surprising fact
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and maybe you can actually correct me and elaborate,
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but it seems like most, like 70 or 80% of the time
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that Earth has been around, there's been life on it,
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like some very significant percentage.
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So when you say fast, like the slow part
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is from single cell or from bacteria
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to something more complicated, organisms.
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It seems like most of the time that Earth has been around,
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it's been single cell or like very basic organisms,
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like a couple billion years.
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But yeah, you're right.
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That's really, I recently kind of revisited our history
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and saw this and I was just looking at the timeline.
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Wait a minute, like how did life just spring up so quickly?
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Like really quickly.
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That makes me think that it really wanted to.
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Like put another way, it's very easy for life to spring.
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Yeah, I agree, I think it's much more inevitable
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and I think I try to kind of, not provoke,
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but try and push chemists to think about,
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because chemists are central to this problem, right?
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Of understanding the origin of life on Earth, at least,
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because we're made of chemistry.
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But I wonder if the origin of life on a planet,
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or sorry, the emergence of life on the planet is as,
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common as the formation of a star.
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And if you start framing it in that way,
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it allows you to then look at the universe
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slightly differently, because,
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and we can get into this, I think, in quite some detail,
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but I think, to come back to your question,
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I have little idea of how life got started,
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but I know it was simple.
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And I know that the process of selection
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had to occur before the, by the end of the day,
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the selection had to occur before the biology
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was established, so that selection built the framework
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from which life kind of grew in complexity
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and capability and functionality and autonomy.
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And I think these are all really important words
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that we can unpack over the next while.
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Can you say all the words again?
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So you said selection, so natural selection,
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the original A, B testing.
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And so, and then complexity,
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and then the degree of autonomy and sophistication,
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because I think that people misunderstand what life is.
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Some people say that life is a cell,
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and some people that say that life is a virus
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or life is an on off switch.
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I don't think it's that,
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life is the universe developing a memory.
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And the laws of physics and the way,
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well, there are no laws of physics.
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It's just memory free stuff, right?
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So there's only a finite number of ways
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you can arrange the fundamental particles to do things.
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Life is the universe developing a memory.
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So it's like sewing a piece of art slowly,
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and then you can look back at it.
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So, so there's a stickiness to life.
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It's like universe doing stuff.
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And when you say memory, it's like there's a stickiness
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to a bunch of the stuff that's building together.
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So like you can, in a stable way,
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like trace back the complexity
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and that tells a coherent story.
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Yeah, and I think, yeah.
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Okay, that's, by the way, very poetic and beautiful.
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Life is the universe developing a memory.
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Okay, and then there's autonomy,
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you said complexity we'll talk about,
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but it's a really interesting idea
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that selection preceded biology.
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So first of all, what is chemistry?
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Like does sand still count as chemistry?
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Sure, I mean, as a chemist, a card carrying chemist,
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if I'm allowed a card, I don't know.
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Don't know what I am most days, actually.
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What is a card made of?
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That's what I'm thinking.
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What's the chemical composition of the card?
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So what is chemistry?
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Well, chemistry is the thing that happens
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when you bring electrons together and you form bonds.
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So bonds, well, I say to people
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when they talk about life elsewhere,
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and I just say, well, there's bonds, there's hope,
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because bonds allow you to get heterogeneity.
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They allow you to record those memories,
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or at least on Earth.
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You could imagine a Stanislav Lemtri world
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where you might have life emerging
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or intelligence emerging before life.
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That may be something like Solaris or something,
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but to get to selection,
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if you can form, if atoms can combine and form bonds,
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those bonds, those atoms can bond to different elements
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and those molecules will have different identities
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and interact with each other differently,
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and then you can start to have some degree of causation
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or interaction and then selection and then existence.
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And then you go up the kind of the path of complexity.
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And so at least on Earth, as we know it,
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there is a sufficient pool of available chemicals
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to start searching that combinatorial space of bonds.
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So, okay, this is a really interesting question.
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So bonds, almost like cards.
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We say there's bonds, there is life,
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there's intelligence, there's consciousness.
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And what you just made me realize is
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that those can emerge, let's put bonds aside,
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those can emerge in any order.
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That's really brilliant.
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So intelligence can come before life.
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It's like panpsychists believe that consciousness,
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I guess, comes before life and before intelligence.
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So consciousness permeates all matter,
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it's some kind of fabric of reality.
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Okay, so like within this framework,
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you can kind of arrange everything,
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but you need to have the bonds
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that precedes everything else.
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Oh, and the other thing is selection.
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So like the mechanism of selection, that could proceed.
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See, couldn't that proceed bonds too?
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Whatever the hell selection is.
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So I would say that there is an elegant order to it.
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Bonds allow selection, allows the emergence of life,
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allows the emergence of multicellularity
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and then more information processing,
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building state machines all the way up.
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However, you could imagine a situation if you had,
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I don't know, a neutron star or a sun
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or what a ferromagnetic loops interacting with one another
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and these oscillators building state machines
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and these state machines reading something
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out in the environment.
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Over time, these state machines would be able
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to literally record what happened in the past
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and sense what's going on in the present
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and imagine the future.
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However, I don't think it's ever gonna be
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within a human comprehension, that type of life.
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I wouldn't count it out because whenever you say,
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I know in science, whenever I say something's impossible,
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I then wake up the next day and say,
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no, that's actually wrong.
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I mean, there are some limits, of course.
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I don't see myself traveling fast and light anytime soon,
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Eric Weinstein says that's possible,
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so he will say you're wrong.
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Sure, but I'm an experimentalist as well,
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so one of my, I have two superpowers.
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My stupidity, and I don't mean that as a,
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I'm like absolutely completely witless,
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but I mean my ability to kind of just start again
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and ask the question and then do it with an experiment.
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I always wanted to be a theoretician growing up,
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but I just didn't have the intellectual capability,
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but I was able to think of experiments in my head
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I could then do in my lab or when I was a child outside
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and then those experiments in my head
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and then outside reinforced one another.
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So I think that's a very good way of kind of
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grounding the science, right?
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Well, that's a nice way to think about theoreticians
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is they're just people who run experiments in their head.
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I mean, that's exactly what Einstein did, right?
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But you were also capable of doing that in the head,
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in your head, inside your head and in the real world
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and the connection between the two
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is when you first discovered your superpower stupidity.
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Yes, there you go.
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What's the second superpower?
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Your accent or is that?
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Well, I don't know.
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I am genuinely curious.
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So I have, like everybody, ego problems,
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but my curiosity is bigger than my ego.
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So as long as that happens, I can cope.
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That is so powerful.
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You're just dropping some powerful lines.
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So curiosity is bigger than ego.
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That's something I have to think about
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because you always struggle about the role of ego in life
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and that's so nice to think about,
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don't think about the size of ego,
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the absolute size of ego.
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Think about the relative size of ego
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to the other horses pulling at you.
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If the curiosity one is bigger,
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then ego will do just fine and make you fun to talk to.
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Anyway, so those are the two superpowers.
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How do those connect to natural selection
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or selection and bonds and, I forgot already,
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life and consciousness?
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So we're going back to selection in the universe
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and origin of life on Earth.
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I mean, selection, I'm convinced that selection
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is a force in the universe.
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Not a fundamental force, but it is a directing force
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because existence, although existence appears
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to be the default, the existence of what,
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why does, and we can get to this later, I think,
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but it's amazing that discrete things exist
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and you see this cup.
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It's not the sexiest cup in the world,
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but it's pretty functional.
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This cup, the complexity of this cup
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isn't just in the object.
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It is literally the lineage of people making cups
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and recognizing that, seeing that in their head,
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making an abstraction of a cup,
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and then making a different one.
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So I wonder how many billions of cups
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have come before this one,
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and that's the process of selection and existence,
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and the only reason the cup is still used
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I like the handle.
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It's convenient, so I don't die.
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I keep hydration, and so I think we are missing
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something fundamental in the universe about selection,
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and I think what biology is is a selection amplifier,
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and that this is where autonomy comes in,
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and actually I think that how humanity is gonna,
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humans and autonomous robots,
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or whatever we're gonna call them in the future,
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will supercharge that even further.
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So selection is happening in the universe,
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but if you look in the asteroid belt,
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selection, if objects are being kicked in and out
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of the asteroid belt, those trajectories are quite complex.
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You don't really look at that as productive selection
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because it's not doing anything to improve its function,
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The asteroid belt has existed for some time,
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so there is some selection going on,
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but the functionality is somewhat limited.
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On Earth, at the formation of Earth,
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interaction of chemicals and molecules in the environment
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gave selection, and then things could happen,
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because you could think about, in chemistry,
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we could have an infinite number of reactions happen,
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but all the reactions that are allowed to happen
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don't happen, why?
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Because there are energy barriers.
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So there must be some things called catalysts out there,
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or there are bits of minerals that,
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when two molecules get together in that mineral,
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it lowers the energy barrier for the reaction,
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and so the reaction is promoted.
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So suddenly you get one reaction over another
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series of possibilities occurring
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that makes a particular molecule,
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and this keeps happening in steps,
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and before you know it,
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almost these waves as discrete reactions work together,
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and you start to build a machinery
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that is run by existence.
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So as you go forward in time,
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the fact that the molecules, the bonds are getting,
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there are more bonds in a molecule,
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there's more function,
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there's more capability for this molecule
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to interact with other molecules, to redirect them,
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it's like a series of little,
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and I don't want to use this term too much,
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but it's almost thinking about
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the simplest von Neumann constructor,
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that's the simplest molecule
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that could build a more complicated molecule
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to build a more complicated molecule,
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and before you know it,
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when that more complicated molecule
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can act on the causal chain that's produced itself
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suddenly you start to get towards some kind of autonomy,
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and that's where life, I think, emerges in earnest.
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Every single word in the past few paragraphs,
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let's break those apart,
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but who's von Neumann, what's a constructor,
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the closing of the loop that you're talking about,
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the molecule that starts becoming,
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I think you said like the smallest von Neumann constructor,
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the smallest, the minimal,
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so what do all those things mean,
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and what is, what are we supposed to imagine
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when we think about the smallest von Neumann constructor?
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So John von Neumann is a real hero,
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actually, not just me, but many people, I think,
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computer science and physics.
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He was an incredible intellect
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who probably solved a lot of the problems
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that we're working on today
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and just forgot to write them down.
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And I'm not sure if it's John von Neumann or Johnny,
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as I think his friends called him,
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but I think he was Hungarian, a mathematician,
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and basically was involved in the Manhattan Project
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in developing computation
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and came up with all sorts of ideas,
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and I think he was one of the first people
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to come up with cellular automata.
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I didn't know this little fact.
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I think so, I think so.
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Well, anyway, if he didn't come up with it,
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he probably did come up with it and didn't write it down.
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There was a couple of people who did at the same time,
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and then Conway obviously took it on,
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and then Wolfram loves CAs.
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There is his fabric of the universe.
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And what I think he imagined was that he wasn't satisfied,
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and this may be incorrect recollection,
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but a lot of what I say is gonna be kind of
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just way out of my...
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You're, Lee, you're just part of the universe
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creating its memory, designing...
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Exactly, yeah, rewriting history.
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Rewriting history.
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Exactly, imperfectly.
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So, but what I mean is I think he liked this idea
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of thinking about how could a Turing machine
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literally build itself without a Turing machine, right?
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It's like literally how did state machines emerge?
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And I think that von Neumann constructors,
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he wanted to conceive of a minimal thing,
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autonomous, that could build itself.
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And what would those rules look like in the world?
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And that's what a von Neumann kind of constructor
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looked like, like it's a minimal hypothetical object
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that could build itself, self replicate.
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And I'm really fascinated by that
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because I think that although it's probably not
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exactly what happened, it's a nice model
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because as chemists, if we could go back
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to the origin of life and think about
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what is a minimal machine that can get structured randomly?
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So like with no prime mover, with no architect,
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it assembles through just existence.
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So random stuff bumping in together
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and you make this first molecule.
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So you have molecule A and molecule A interacts
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with another random molecule B and they get together
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and they realize by working together
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they can make more of themselves,
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but then they realize they can mutate
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so they can make AB prime.
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So AB prime is different to AB
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and then AB prime can then act back
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where A and B are being created
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and slightly nudge that causal chain
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and make AB prime more evolvable or learn more.
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So that's the closing the loop part.
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Closing the loop part, got it.
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It feels like the mutation part is not that difficult.
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It feels like the difficult part
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is just creating a copy of yourself as step one.
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That seems like one of the greatest inventions
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in the history of the universe is the first molecule
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that figured out, holy shit, I can create a copy of myself.
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I think it's really, really easy.
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Okay, I did not expect that.
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I think it's really, really easy.
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Well, let's take a step back.
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I think replicating molecules are rare,
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but if you say, I think I was saying on,
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I probably got into trouble on Twitter the other day,
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so I was trying to work this.
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There's about more than 18 mils of water in there.
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So one mole of water, 6.022 times 10 to the 23 molecules.
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That's about the number of stars in universe, I think,
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So there's three universe worth, but between one and.
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Somebody corrected you on Twitter?
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Yeah, as if, I'm always being corrected.
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It's a great, but there's a lot of molecules in the water.
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And so there's a lot of, so although it's for you and me,
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really hard to conceive of,
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if existence is not the default for a long period of time,
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because what happens is the molecules get degraded.
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So much of the possibilities in the universe
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are just broken back into atoms.
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So you have this kind of destruction of the molecules
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for our chemical reactions.
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So you only need one or two molecules
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to become good at copying themselves
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for them suddenly to then take resources in the pool
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and start to grow.
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And so then replication actually over time,
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when you have bonds, I think is much simpler, much easier.
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And I even found this in my lab years ago.
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I had one of the reasons I started doing inorganic chemistry
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and making rust, making a bit of rust based on
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a thing called molybdenum, molybdenum oxide
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is this molybdenum oxide, very simple.
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But when you add acid to it and some electrons,
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they make these molecules you just cannot possibly imagine
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would be constructed big, gigantic wheels
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of 154 molybdenum atoms in a wheel
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or I cost a dodecahedron 132 molybdenum atoms
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all in the same pot.
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And I realized when I,
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and I just finished experiments two years ago,
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I've just published a couple of papers on this,
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that they're actually, there is a random small molecule
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with 12 atoms in it that can form randomly,
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but it happens to template its own production.
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And then by chance, it templates the ring,
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just an accident, just like just an absolute accident.
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And that ring also helps make the small 12 mer.
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And so you have what's called an autocatalytic set
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where A makes B and B helps make A and vice versa.
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And you then make this loop.
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So it's a bit like these, they all work in synergy
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to make this chain of events that grow.
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And it doesn't take a very sophisticated model
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to show that if you have these objects are competing
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and then collaborating to help one another build,
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they just grow out of the mess.
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And although they seem improbable,
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they are improbable, in fact, impossible in one step.
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There's multiple steps.
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This is when the blind people look
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at the blind watchmaker argument
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and you talk about how could a watch spontaneously emerge?
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It's a lineage of watches and cruder devices
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that are bootstrapped onto one another.
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Right, so it's very improbable,
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but once you get that little discovery
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like with the wheel and fire,
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it just explodes because it's so successful, it explodes.
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It explodes, it's basically selection.
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So this templating mechanism that allows you
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to have a little like blueprint for yourself,
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how you go through different procedures
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is to build copies of yourself.
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So in chemistry somehow it's possible to imagine
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that that kind of thing is easy to spring up.
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In more complex organisms, it feels like a different thing
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and much more complicated.
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Like we're having like multiple abstractions
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of the birds and the bees conversation here,
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but with human, I'm sorry, with complex organisms,
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it feels like difficult to have reproduction to,
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that's gonna get clipped out.
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I'm gonna make fun of that.
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It's difficult to develop this idea
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of making copies of yourself or no.
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Because that seems like a magical idea for life to,
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but wow, that feels like very necessary
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for what selection is, for what evolution is.
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But then if selection precedes all of this,
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then maybe these are just like echoes
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of the selecting mechanism at different scales.
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Yeah, that's exactly it.
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So selection is the default in the universe if you want to.
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And what happens is that life,
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the solution that life has got on earth,
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life on earth, biology on earth is unique to earth.
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We can talk about that.
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And that was really hard fought for,
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but that is a solution that works on earth,
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the ribosome, the fundamental machine
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that is responsible for every cell on earth
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of whatever, wherever it is in the kingdom of life.
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That is an incredibly complex object,
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but it was evolved over time
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and it wasn't involved in a vacuum.
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And I think that once we understand that selection
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can occur without the ribosome,
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but what the ribosome does,
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it's a phase transition in replication.
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And I think that that, and also technology
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that is probably much easier to get to than we think.
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Why do you put the ribosome as a central part
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of living organisms on earth?
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It basically is a combination
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of two different polymer systems, so RNA and peptides.
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So the RNA world, if you like,
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gets transmitted and builds proteins
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and the proteins are responsible for all the catalysis.
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The majority of the catalysis goes on in the cell.
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No ribosome, no proteins, no decoding, no evolution.
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So ribosome is looking at the action.
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You don't put like the RNA itself as the critical thing,
link |
like information, you put action as the most important thing.
link |
I think the actual molecules
link |
that we have in biology right now are entirely contingent
link |
on the history of life on earth.
link |
There are so many possible solutions.
link |
And this is where chemistry got itself into,
link |
origin of life chemistry gets itself into a bit of a trap.
link |
Yeah, let me interrupt you there.
link |
You've tweeted, you're gonna get,
link |
I'm gonna cite your tweets like it's Shakespeare, okay?
link |
It's surprising you haven't gotten canceled on Twitter yet.
link |
Your brilliance once again saves you.
link |
You like to have a little bit of fun on Twitter.
link |
You've tweeted that quote,
link |
origin of life research is a scam.
link |
So if this is Shakespeare, can we analyze this word?
link |
Why is the origin of life research a scam?
link |
Aren't you kind of doing origin of life research?
link |
Okay, it was tongue in cheek, but yeah,
link |
I think, and I meant it as tongue in cheek.
link |
I'm not doing the origin of life research.
link |
I'm trying to make artificial life.
link |
And I also want to bound the likelihood
link |
of the origin of life on earth,
link |
but more importantly to find origin of life elsewhere.
link |
But let me directly address the tweet.
link |
There are many, many good chemists out there
link |
doing origin of life research, but I want to nudge them.
link |
And I think they're brilliant.
link |
Like there's no question the chemistry they are doing,
link |
the motivation is great.
link |
So what I meant by that tweet is saying
link |
that maybe they're making assumptions about saying,
link |
if only I could make this particular type of molecule,
link |
say this RNA molecule or this phosphodiester
link |
or this other molecule,
link |
it's gonna somehow unlock the origin of life.
link |
And I think that origin of life has been looking at this
link |
for a very long time.
link |
And whilst I think it's brilliant to work out
link |
how you can get to those molecules,
link |
I think that chemistry and chemists doing origin of life
link |
could be nudged into doing something even more profound.
link |
And so the argument I'm making,
link |
it's a bit like right now,
link |
let's say, I don't know, the first Tesla
link |
that makes its way to, I don't know,
link |
into a new country in the world.
link |
Let's say there's a country X
link |
that has never had a Tesla before
link |
and they get the Tesla.
link |
And they take the Tesla,
link |
and what they do is they take the Tesla apart
link |
and say, we want to find the origin of cars in the universe
link |
and say, okay, how did this form and how did this form?
link |
And they just randomly keep making
link |
till they make the door, they make the wheel,
link |
they make the steering column and all this stuff.
link |
And they say, well, that's the route.
link |
That's the way cars emerged on earth.
link |
But actually we know that there's a causal chain of cars
link |
going right back to Henry Ford and the horse and carriage.
link |
And before that, maybe, you know,
link |
where people were using wheels.
link |
And I think that obsession with the identities
link |
that we see in biology right now
link |
are giving us a false sense of security
link |
about what we're looking for.
link |
And I think that origin of life chemistry is in danger
link |
of not making the progress that it deserves
link |
because the chemists are doing this.
link |
The field is exploding right now.
link |
There's amazing people out there, young and old doing this.
link |
And there's deservedly so more money going in.
link |
You know, I used to complain
link |
there's more money being spent searching for the Higgs boson
link |
that we know exists than the origin of life.
link |
You know, why is that?
link |
The origin, we understand the origin of life.
link |
We're gonna actually work out what life is.
link |
And we're gonna be at a bound,
link |
the likelihood of finding life elsewhere in the universe.
link |
And most important for us,
link |
we are gonna know or have a good idea
link |
of what the future of humanity looks like.
link |
You know, we need to understand
link |
that although we're precious,
link |
we're not the only life forms in the universe.
link |
Or that's my very strong impression.
link |
I have no data for that.
link |
It's just right now a belief.
link |
And I want to turn that belief
link |
into a more than a belief by experimentation.
link |
But coming back to the scam,
link |
the scam is if we just make this RNA,
link |
we've got this fluke event, we know how that's simple.
link |
Let's make this phosphodiester,
link |
or let's make ATP or ADP.
link |
We've got that part nailed.
link |
Let's now make this other molecule, another molecule.
link |
And how many molecules are gonna be enough?
link |
And then the reason I say this
link |
is when you go back to Craig Venter,
link |
when he invented his life form, Cyndia,
link |
this micro, this minimal plasmid,
link |
it's a myoplasma, something, I don't know the name of it,
link |
but he made this wonderful cell
link |
and said, I've invented life.
link |
He facsimileed the genome from this entity
link |
and made it in the lab, all the DNA,
link |
but he didn't make the cell.
link |
He had to take an existing cell
link |
that has a causal chain going all the way back to Luca.
link |
And he showed when he took out the gene,
link |
the genes and put in his genes, synthesized,
link |
the cell could boot up.
link |
But it's remarkable that he could not make a cell
link |
And even now today, synthetic biologists
link |
cannot make a cell from scratch
link |
because there's some contingent information embodied
link |
outside the genome in the cell.
link |
And that is just incredible.
link |
So there's lots of layers to the scam.
link |
Well, let me then ask the question,
link |
how can we create life in the lab from scratch?
link |
What have been the most promising attempts
link |
at creating life in the lab from scratch?
link |
Has anyone actually been able to do it?
link |
Do you think anyone will be able to do it
link |
in the near future if they haven't already?
link |
Yeah, I think that nobody has made life
link |
in the lab from scratch.
link |
Lots of people would argue that they have made progress.
link |
So Craig Venter, I think the synthesis
link |
of a synthetic genome milestone in human achievement.
link |
Yeah, can we just walk back and say,
link |
what would you say from your perspective,
link |
one of the world experts in exactly this area,
link |
what does it mean to create life from scratch
link |
where if you sit back, whether you do it
link |
or somebody else does it, it's like,
link |
damn, this is, we just created life.
link |
Well, I can tell you what I would expect,
link |
I would like to be able to do,
link |
is to go from sand to cells in my lab and...
link |
Can you explain what sand is?
link |
Yeah, just inorganic stuff, like basically just,
link |
so sand is just silicon oxide with some other ions in it,
link |
maybe some inorganic carbon, some carbonates,
link |
just basically clearly dead stuff
link |
that you could just grind rocks into sand.
link |
And it would be what, in a kind of vacuum
link |
so they could remove anything else
link |
that could possibly be like a shadow of life
link |
that can assist in the chemical.
link |
You could do that, you could insist and say,
link |
look, I'm gonna take, and not just inorganic,
link |
I want some more, I wanna cheat and have some organic,
link |
but I want inorganic organic,
link |
and I'll explain the play on words in a moment.
link |
So I would like to basically put into a world,
link |
let's say a completely synthetic world, if you like,
link |
a closed world, put some inorganic materials
link |
and just literally add some energy in some form,
link |
be it lightning or heat, UV light,
link |
and run this thing in cycles over time
link |
and let it solve the search problem.
link |
So I see the origin of life as a search problem
link |
in chemical space.
link |
And then I would wait, literally wait for a life form
link |
to crawl out of the test tube.
link |
That's a joke I tell my group.
link |
Literally wait for a very, don't worry,
link |
it's gonna be very feeble,
link |
it's not gonna take over the world.
link |
There's ways of ethically containing it.
link |
Famous last words.
link |
Indeed, indeed, indeed, but I.
link |
You know this is being recorded, right?
link |
It'll make you, it will not make you look good
link |
once it crawls out of the lab
link |
and destroys all of human civilization, but yes.
link |
But there is very good,
link |
there is a very good things you can do to prevent that.
link |
For instance, if you put stuff in your world,
link |
which isn't earth abundant,
link |
so let's say we make life based on molybdenum
link |
and it escapes, it would die immediately
link |
because there's not enough molybdenum in the environment.
link |
So we can put in, we can do responsible life.
link |
Or as I fantasize with my research group on our away day
link |
that would go in, it's, you know,
link |
I think it's actually morally if we don't find,
link |
until humanity finds life in the universe,
link |
this is going on a tangent,
link |
it's our moral obligation to make origin of life bombs,
link |
identify dead planets and bomb them
link |
with our origin of life machines and make them alive.
link |
I think it is our moral obligation to do that.
link |
Some people might argue with me about that,
link |
but I think that we need more life in the universe.
link |
And then we kind of forget we did it
link |
and then come back and then.
link |
So where did you come from?
link |
But coming back to the, what I'd expect.
link |
So I just say. Father, are you back?
link |
I think this is once again, a Rick and Morty episode.
link |
It's definitely all Rick and Morty all the way down.
link |
So we, I imagine we have this pristine experiment
link |
and everything is, you know, sanitized
link |
and we put in inorganic materials
link |
and we have cycles with them,
link |
day, night cycles, up, down, whatever.
link |
And we look for evidence of replication
link |
and evolution over time.
link |
And that's what the experiment should be.
link |
Now, are there people doing this in the world right now?
link |
There are a couple of,
link |
there's some really good groups doing this.
link |
There's some really interesting scientists
link |
doing this around the world.
link |
They're kind of perhaps too much associated with the scam.
link |
So, and so they're using molecules
link |
that are already, were already invented by biology.
link |
So there's a bit of replication built in,
link |
but I still think the work that is doing,
link |
they're doing is amazing.
link |
But I would like people to be a bit freer and say,
link |
let's just basically shake a load of sand in a box
link |
and wait for life to come out
link |
because that's what happened on earth.
link |
And so that we have to understand that.
link |
Now, how would I know I've been successful?
link |
Well, because I'm not obsessing
link |
with what molecules are in life now,
link |
I would wager a vast quantity of money.
link |
I'm not very rich, so just be a few dollars,
link |
but for me, the solution space will be different.
link |
So the genetic material will be not RNA.
link |
The proteins will not be what we think.
link |
The solutions will be just completely different.
link |
And it might be, and it will be very feeble
link |
because that's the other thing we should be able to show
link |
fairly robustly that even if I did make
link |
or someone did make a new life form in the lab,
link |
it would be so poor that it's not gonna leap out.
link |
It is the fear about making a lethal life form
link |
in the lab from scratch is similar to us imagining
link |
that we're gonna make the terminator
link |
at Boston Dynamics tomorrow.
link |
Simply not, and the problem is
link |
we don't communicate that properly.
link |
I know you yourself very, you explain this very well.
link |
There is not the AI catastrophe coming.
link |
We're very far away from that.
link |
That doesn't mean we should ignore it.
link |
Same with the origin of life catastrophe.
link |
It's not coming anytime soon.
link |
We shouldn't ignore it, but we shouldn't let that fear
link |
stop us from doing those experiments.
link |
But this is a much, much longer discussion
link |
because there's a lot of details there.
link |
I would say there is potential for catastrophic events
link |
to happen in much dumber ways.
link |
In AI space, there's a lot of ways to create,
link |
like social networks are creating a kind
link |
of accelerated set of events
link |
that we might not be able to control.
link |
The social network virality in the digital space
link |
can create mass movements of ideas that can then,
link |
if times are tough, create military conflict
link |
and all those kinds of things.
link |
But that's not super intelligent AI.
link |
That's an interesting at scale application of AI.
link |
If you look at viruses, viruses are pretty dumb,
link |
but at scale, their application is pretty detrimental.
link |
And so origin of life, much like all the kind of virology,
link |
the very contentious word of gain of function research
link |
and virology, sort of like research on viruses,
link |
messing with them genetically,
link |
that can create a lot of problems if not done well.
link |
So we have to be very cautious.
link |
So there's a kind of,
link |
whenever you're ultra cautious about stuff in AI
link |
or in virology and biology,
link |
it borders on cynicism, I would say,
link |
where it's like everything we do is going to turn out
link |
to be destructive and terrible.
link |
So I'm just going to sit here and do nothing.
link |
Okay, that's a possible solution except for the fact
link |
that somebody is going to do it.
link |
It's science and technology progresses.
link |
So we have to do it in an ethical way, in a good way,
link |
considering in a transparent way, in an open way,
link |
considering all the possible positive trajectories
link |
that could be taken and making sure as much as possible
link |
that we walk those trajectories.
link |
So yeah, I don't think Terminator is coming,
link |
but a totally unexpected version of Terminator
link |
may be around the corner.
link |
Might be here already.
link |
Yeah, so I agree with that.
link |
And so going back to the origin of life discussion,
link |
I think that in synthetic biology right now,
link |
we have to be very careful about how we edit genomes
link |
and edit synthetic biology to do things.
link |
So that's kind of, that's where things might go wrong
link |
in the same way as Twitter turning ourselves
link |
into kind of strange scale effects.
link |
I would love origin of life research
link |
or artificial life research to get to the point
link |
where we have those worries,
link |
because that's why I think we're just so far away from that.
link |
We are just, you know, right now,
link |
I think there are two really important angles.
link |
There is the origin of life people,
link |
researchers who are faithfully working on this
link |
and trying to make those molecules,
link |
the scan molecules I talked about.
link |
And then there are people on the creationist side
link |
who are saying, look,
link |
the fact you can't make these molecules
link |
and you can't make a cell means that evolution isn't true
link |
and all this other stuff.
link |
Yeah, and so, and I find that really frustrating
link |
because actually the origin of life research
link |
is all working in good faith, right?
link |
And so what I'm trying to do
link |
is give origin of life research
link |
a little bit more of an open context.
link |
And one of the things I think is important,
link |
I really want to make a new life form in my lifetime.
link |
I really want to prove that life is a general phenomena,
link |
a bit like gravity in the universe,
link |
because I think that's gonna be really important
link |
for humanity's global psychological state,
link |
meaning going forward.
link |
That's beautifully put.
link |
So one, it will help us understand ourselves.
link |
So that's useful for science,
link |
but two, it gives us a kind of hope,
link |
if not an awe at all the huge amounts
link |
of alien civilizations that are out there.
link |
If you can build life and understand
link |
just how easy it is to build life,
link |
then that's just as good, if not much better,
link |
than discovering life on another planet.
link |
It's, I mean, it's cheaper.
link |
It's much cheaper and much easier
link |
and probably much more conclusive
link |
because once you're able to create life,
link |
like you said, it's a search problem
link |
that there's probably a lot of different ways to do it.
link |
Once you create the, once you find the first solution,
link |
you probably have all the right methodology
link |
for finding all kinds of other solutions.
link |
Yeah, and wouldn't it be great
link |
if we could find a solution?
link |
I mean, it's probably a bit late for,
link |
I mean, I worry about climate change,
link |
but I'm not that worried about climate change,
link |
and I think one day you could think about,
link |
could we engineer a new type of life form
link |
that could basically, and I don't want to do this,
link |
and I don't think we should do this necessarily,
link |
but it's a good thought experiment
link |
that would perhaps take CO2 out of the atmosphere
link |
or an intermediate life form, so it's not quite alive.
link |
It's almost like an add on
link |
that we can, with a time dependent add on,
link |
you could give to say cyanobacteria in the ocean
link |
or to maybe to wheat and say, right,
link |
we're just gonna, we're gonna fix a bit more CO2,
link |
and we're gonna work out how much we need to fix
link |
to basically save the climate,
link |
and we're gonna use evolutionary principles
link |
to basically get there.
link |
What worries me is that biology has had a few billion years
link |
to find a solution for CO2 fixation,
link |
hasn't really done, it's not,
link |
the solution isn't brilliant for our needs,
link |
but biology wasn't thinking about our needs.
link |
Biology was thinking about biology's needs,
link |
but I think if we can do, as you say,
link |
make life in the lab, then suddenly we don't need
link |
to go to everywhere and conclusively prove it.
link |
I think we make life in the lab.
link |
We look at the extent of life in the solar system.
link |
How far did Earth life get?
link |
Probably we're all Martians.
link |
Probably life got going on Mars.
link |
The chemistry on Mars seeded Earth.
link |
That might have been a legitimate way
link |
to kind of truncate the surface.
link |
But in the outer solar system,
link |
we might have completely different life forms
link |
on Enceladus, on Europa, and Titan.
link |
And that would be a cool thing, because.
link |
Okay, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.
link |
Did you just say that you think, in terms of likelihood,
link |
life started on Mars, like statistically speaking,
link |
life started on Mars and seeded Earth?
link |
It could be possible, because life was,
link |
so Mars was habitable for the type of life
link |
that we have right now, type of chemistry before Earth.
link |
So it seems to me that Mars got searching,
link |
doing chemistry, like, and.
link |
It started way before.
link |
Yeah, and so they had a few more replicators
link |
and some other stuff.
link |
And if those replicators got ejected from Mars
link |
and landed on Earth, and Earth was like,
link |
I don't need to start again.
link |
And then it just carried on.
link |
So I'm not going, I think we will find evidence
link |
of life on Mars, either life we put there by mistake,
link |
contamination, or actually life,
link |
the earliest remnants of life.
link |
And that would be really exciting.
link |
It's a really good reason to go there.
link |
But I think it's more unlikely,
link |
because the gravitational situation in the solar system,
link |
if we find life in the outer solar system.
link |
Titan and all that, that would be its own thing.
link |
Wow, that would be so cool.
link |
If we go to Mars and we find life that looks
link |
a hell of a lot similar to Earth life,
link |
and then we go to Titan and all those weird moons
link |
with the ices and the volcanoes and all that kind of stuff,
link |
and then we find there something that looks,
link |
I don't know, way weirder.
link |
Some other, some non RNA type of situation.
link |
But we might find almost life,
link |
like in the prebiotic chemical space.
link |
And I think there are four types of exoplanets
link |
we need to look for, right?
link |
Because when JWST goes up and touch wood,
link |
it goes up and everything's fine.
link |
When we look at a star, well, we know statistically,
link |
most stars have planets around them.
link |
What type of planet are they?
link |
Are they going to be dead?
link |
Are they going to be just a prebiotic origin of life coming?
link |
So are they going to be technological?
link |
So with intelligence on them, and will they have died?
link |
So, you know, had life on them, but gone.
link |
Those are the four states of the boat.
link |
And suddenly, it's a bit like I want to classify planets
link |
the way we classify stars.
link |
And I think that, in terms of their,
link |
rather than having this, oh, we've found methane,
link |
there's evidence of life.
link |
We found oxygen, that's the evidence of life.
link |
We found whatever molecule marker.
link |
And start to then frame things a little bit more.
link |
As those four states.
link |
Which, by the way, you're just saying four,
link |
but there could be, before the dead,
link |
there could be other states
link |
that we humans can even conceive of.
link |
Yeah, yeah, just prebiotic, almost alive,
link |
got the possibility to come alive.
link |
But there could be a post technological.
link |
Like, whatever we think of as technology,
link |
that could be a, like, pre conscious,
link |
like, where we all meld into one super intelligent conscious,
link |
or some weird thing that naturally happens over time.
link |
I mean, I think that all bets are on that.
link |
We join into a virtual metaverse and start creating,
link |
which is kind of an interesting idea,
link |
almost arbitrary number of copies of each other,
link |
much more quickly, so we can mess with different ideas.
link |
Like, I can create a thousand copies of Lex,
link |
like, every possible version of Lex,
link |
and then just see, like,
link |
and then I just have them, like, argue with each other,
link |
and, like, until, like, in the space of ideas
link |
and see who wins out.
link |
How could that possibly go wrong?
link |
But anyway, there's, especially in this digital space
link |
where you could start exploring with AIs mixed in,
link |
you could start engineering arbitrary intelligences,
link |
you can start playing in the space of ideas,
link |
which might move us into a world that looks very different
link |
than a biological world.
link |
Like, our current world, the technology,
link |
is still very much tied to our biology.
link |
It's, we might move past that completely.
link |
Oh, definitely, we definitely will.
link |
We definitely, but that could be another phase then.
link |
Because then you, yeah.
link |
But I did say technological, so I think I agree with you.
link |
I think, so you can have, let's get this right.
link |
So, dead world, no prospect of alive.
link |
Prebiotic world, life emerging.
link |
Living and technological.
link |
And you probably, and the dead one,
link |
you probably won't be able to tell
link |
between the dead never being alive and the dead one,
link |
maybe you've got some artifacts and maybe there's five.
link |
There's probably not more than five.
link |
And I think the technological one could allow,
link |
could have life on it still,
link |
but it might just have exceeded.
link |
Because, you know, one way that life might survive on Earth
link |
is if we can work out how to deal with the coming,
link |
the real climate change that comes when the sun expands.
link |
It might be a way to survive that, you know, but yeah.
link |
I think that we need to start thinking statistically
link |
when it comes to looking for life in the universe.
link |
Let me ask you then, sort of statistically,
link |
how many alien civilizations are out there
link |
in those four phases that you're talking about?
link |
When you look up to the stars
link |
and you're sipping on some wine
link |
and talking to other people with British accents
link |
about something intelligent and intellectual, I'm sure.
link |
Do you think there's a lot of alien civilizations
link |
looking back at us and wondering the same?
link |
My romantic view of the universe
link |
is really taking loans from my logical self.
link |
So what I'm saying is I have no doubt, I have no idea.
link |
But having said that, there is no reason to suppose
link |
that life is as hard as we first thought it was.
link |
And so if we just take Earth as a marker,
link |
and if I think that life is a much more general phenomena
link |
than just our biology,
link |
then I think the universe is full of life.
link |
And the reason for the Fermi paradox
link |
is not that they're not out there,
link |
it's just that we can't interact with the other life forms
link |
because they're so different.
link |
And I'm not saying that they're necessarily like
link |
hasn't depicted in Arrival or other, you know,
link |
I'm just saying that perhaps
link |
there are very few universal facts in the universe
link |
and maybe our technologies are quite divergent.
link |
And so I think that it's very hard to know
link |
how we're gonna interact with alien life.
link |
You think there's a lot of kinds of life that's possible.
link |
I guess that was the intuition you provided
link |
that the way biology itself,
link |
but even this particular kinds of biology
link |
that we have on Earth is something that is just one sample
link |
of nearly infinite number of other possible,
link |
complex, autonomous, self replicating type of things
link |
that could be possible.
link |
And so we're almost unable to see
link |
the alternative versions of us, huh?
link |
I mean, we'll still be able to detect them,
link |
we'll still be able to interact with them,
link |
we'll still be able to like which,
link |
what's exactly is lost in translation?
link |
Why can't we see them?
link |
Why can't we talk to them?
link |
Because I too have a sense,
link |
you put it way more poetically,
link |
but it seems both statistically
link |
and sort of romantically,
link |
it feels like the universe should be teeming with life,
link |
like super intelligent life.
link |
And I just, I sit there and the Fermi paradox is very,
link |
it's felt very distinctly by me
link |
when I look up at the stars because it's like,
link |
it's the same way I feel when I'm driving
link |
through New Jersey and listening to Bruce Springsteen
link |
and feel quite sad.
link |
It's like Lucy Kay talks about pulling off
link |
to the side of the road and just weeping a little bit.
link |
I'm almost like wondering like,
link |
hey, why aren't you talking to us?
link |
It feels lonely, it feels lonely
link |
because it feels like they're out there.
link |
I think that there are a number of answers to that.
link |
I think the Fermi paradox is perhaps based
link |
on the assumption that if life did emerge in the universe,
link |
it would be similar to our life
link |
and there's only one solution.
link |
And I think that what we've got to start to do
link |
is go out and look for selection detection
link |
rather than an evolution detection,
link |
rather than life detection.
link |
And I think that once we start to do that,
link |
we might start to see really interesting things.
link |
And we haven't been doing this for very long
link |
and we are living in an expanding universe
link |
and that makes the problem a little bit harder.
link |
Everybody's always leaving distance wise.
link |
I'm very optimistic that we will,
link |
well, I don't know, there are two movies that came out
link |
within six months of one another,
link |
Ad Astra and Cosmos.
link |
Ad Astra, the very expensive blockbuster
link |
with Brad Pitt in it and saying there is no life
link |
and it's all, we've got to,
link |
life on Earth has more pressures than Cosmos,
link |
which is a UK production,
link |
which basically aliens came and visited Earth one day
link |
and they were discovered in the UK, right?
link |
It was quite, it's a fun film.
link |
But I really loved those two films.
link |
And at the same time, those films,
link |
at the time those films were coming out,
link |
I was working on a paper, a life detection paper,
link |
and I found it was so hard to publish this paper
link |
and it was almost as depressed,
link |
I got so depressed trying to get this science out there
link |
that I felt the depression of the film in Ad Astra,
link |
like life, there's no life elsewhere in the universe.
link |
And, but I'm incredibly optimistic
link |
that I think we will find life in the universe,
link |
firm evidence of life,
link |
and it will have to start on Earth,
link |
making life on Earth and surprising us.
link |
We have to surprise ourselves
link |
and make non biological life on Earth.
link |
And then people say, well, you made this life on Earth,
link |
therefore it's, you're part of the causal chain of that.
link |
And that might be true,
link |
but if I can show how I'm able to do it
link |
with very little cheating
link |
or very little information inputs,
link |
just creating like a model planet.
link |
Some description and watching it, watching life emerge,
link |
then I think that we will be even to persuade
link |
even the hardest critic that it's possible.
link |
Now, with regards to the Fermi paradox,
link |
I think that we might crush that with the JWST.
link |
It's basically, if I recall correctly,
link |
the mirror is about 10 times the size of the Hubble
link |
that we're gonna be able to do spectroscopy,
link |
look at colors of exoplanets, I think, not brilliantly,
link |
but we'll be able to start to classify them.
link |
And we'll start to get a real feel
link |
for what's going on in the universe on these exoplanets.
link |
Cause it's only in the last few decades, I think,
link |
maybe even last decade that we even
link |
came to recognize that exoplanets even are common.
link |
And I think that that gives us a lot of optimism
link |
that life is gonna be out there.
link |
But I think we have to start framing,
link |
we have to start preparing the fact
link |
that biology is only one solution.
link |
I can tell you with confidence that biology on Earth
link |
does not exist anywhere else in the universe.
link |
We are absolutely unique.
link |
Well, okay, I love the confidence,
link |
but where does that confidence come from?
link |
Chemistry, like how many options does chemistry really have?
link |
Many, that's the point.
link |
And the thing is, this is where the origin of life scam
link |
comes in, is that people don't quite count,
link |
they don't count the numbers.
link |
So if biology as you find on Earth is common everywhere,
link |
then there's something really weird going on
link |
that basically written in the quantum mechanics,
link |
there's some kind of these bonds must form over these bonds
link |
and this catalyst must form over this catalyst
link |
when they're all quite equal.
link |
Life is contingent.
link |
The origin of life on Earth was contingent
link |
upon the chemistry available at the origin of life on Earth.
link |
So that means if we want to find other Earth like worlds,
link |
we look for the same kind of rocky world.
link |
We might look in the same zone as Earth
link |
and we might expect reasonably
link |
to find biological like stuff going on.
link |
That would be a reasonable hypothesis,
link |
but it won't be the same, it can't be.
link |
It's like saying, I don't believe in magic.
link |
That's why I'm sure.
link |
I just don't believe in magic.
link |
I believe in statistics and I can do experiments.
link |
And so I won't get the same, exactly the same sequence
link |
of events, I'll get something different.
link |
And so there is TikTok elsewhere in the universe,
link |
but it's not the same as our TikTok, right?
link |
That's what I mean.
link |
Which aspect of it is not the same?
link |
Well, I just think, so what is TikTok?
link |
TikTok is a social media where people upload videos, right?
link |
So I guess there might be.
link |
Well, there's humor, there's attention,
link |
there's the ability to process,
link |
there's ability for intelligent organisms
link |
to collaborate on ideas and find human ideas
link |
and play with those ideas, make them viral, memes.
link |
Humor seems to be kind of fundamental
link |
to the human experience.
link |
And I think that that's a really interesting question
link |
we can ask, is humor a fundamental thing in the universe?
link |
I think maybe it will be, right?
link |
In terms of, you think about in a game theoretic sense,
link |
humor, the emergence of humor serves a role
link |
in our game engine.
link |
And so if selection is fundamental in the universe,
link |
Well, I actually don't know exactly
link |
what role humor serves.
link |
Maybe it's like, from a chemical perspective,
link |
it's like a catalyst for,
link |
I guess it's for several purposes.
link |
One is the catalyst for spreading ideas on the internet.
link |
That's modern humor.
link |
But humor is also a good way to deal
link |
with the difficulty of life.
link |
It's a kind of valve, release valve for suffering.
link |
Throughout human history, life has been really hard.
link |
And for the people that I've known in my life
link |
who've lived through some really difficult things,
link |
humor is part of how they deal with that.
link |
It's usually dark humor.
link |
But yeah, it's interesting.
link |
I don't know exactly what's the more mathematically
link |
general way to formulate what the hell is humor.
link |
What humor does it serve?
link |
But I still, we're kind of joking here,
link |
but it's a counterintuitive idea to me
link |
to think that life elsewhere in the universe
link |
is very different than life on Earth.
link |
And also, like all of each instantiation of life
link |
is likely very different from each other.
link |
Yeah, like maybe there's a few clusters of similar life,
link |
but it's much more likely is what you're saying.
link |
To me, it's a kind of novel thought.
link |
I'm not sure what to do with it.
link |
But you're saying that it's more common
link |
to be a weird outcast in the full spectrum of life
link |
than it is to be in some usual cluster.
link |
So every instantiation of a kind of chemistry
link |
that results in complexity that's autonomous
link |
and self replicating however the hell you define life,
link |
that is going to be very different every time.
link |
It feels like a selection is a fundamental
link |
kind of directed force in the universe.
link |
Won't selection result in a few pockets
link |
of interesting complexities?
link |
I mean, yeah, if we ran Earth over again,
link |
over and over and over,
link |
you're saying it's going to come up with,
link |
there's not going to be elephants every time?
link |
Yeah, I don't think so.
link |
I think that there will be similarities.
link |
And I think we don't know enough
link |
about how selection globally works.
link |
But it might be that the emergence of elephants
link |
was wired into the history of Earth in some way,
link |
like the gravitational force, how evolution was going,
link |
Cambrian explosions, blah, blah, blah,
link |
the emergence of mammals.
link |
But I just don't know enough about the contingency,
link |
All I do know is you count the number of bits
link |
of information required to make an elephant
link |
and think about the causal chain
link |
that provide the lineage of elephants
link |
going all the way back to Luca,
link |
there's a huge scope for divergence.
link |
Yeah, but just like you said, with chemistry and selection,
link |
the things that result in self replicating chemistry
link |
and self replicating organisms,
link |
those are extremely unlikely, as you're saying.
link |
But once they're successful, they multiply.
link |
So it might be a tiny subset of all things
link |
that are possible in the universe, chemically speaking,
link |
it might be a very tiny subset
link |
is actually successful at creating elephants.
link |
Or elephant like or slash human like creatures.
link |
Well, there's two different questions here.
link |
The first one, if we were to reset Earth and to start again.
link |
The different phases, sorry to keep interrupting.
link |
Yeah, no, if we restart Earth and start again,
link |
say we could go back to the beginning
link |
and do the experiment or have a number of Earths,
link |
how similar would biology be?
link |
I would say that there would be broad similarities,
link |
but the emergence of mammals is not a given
link |
unless we're gonna throw an asteroid at each planet
link |
at each time and try and faithfully reproduce what happened.
link |
Then there's the other thing about
link |
when you go to another Earth like planet elsewhere,
link |
maybe there's a different ratio, particular elements,
link |
maybe the bombardment at the beginning of the planet
link |
was quicker or longer than Earth.
link |
And I just don't have enough information there.
link |
What I do know is that the complexity of the story of life
link |
on Earth gives us lots of scope for variation.
link |
And I just don't think it's a reasonable
link |
mathematical assumption to think that life on Earth
link |
that happened again would be same as what we have now.
link |
Okay, but you've also extended that to say
link |
that we might, as an explanation for the Fermi paradox,
link |
that that means we're not able to interact with them.
link |
Or that's an explanation for why we haven't at scale
link |
heard from aliens is they're different than us.
link |
We've only been looking for, say, 70, 80 years.
link |
So I think that the reason we have not found aliens yet
link |
is that we haven't worked out what life is.
link |
No, but the aliens have worked that out, surely.
link |
Statistically speaking, there must be a large number
link |
of aliens that are way ahead of us
link |
on this whole life question.
link |
Unless there's something about this stage
link |
of intellectual evolution that often quickly results
link |
in nuclear war and destroys itself.
link |
Like there's something in this process
link |
that eventually, I don't know, crystallizes the complexity
link |
and it stops, either dies or stops developing.
link |
But most likely, they already figured it out.
link |
And why aren't they contacting us?
link |
Is it some grad student somewhere?
link |
Wants to study a new green planet?
link |
I mean, I don't have a coherent answer to your question,
link |
other than to say that if there are other aliens out there
link |
and they're far more advanced,
link |
they might be in contact with each other.
link |
And they might also, we might be at a point
link |
where what I'm saying quite critically
link |
is it takes two to talk, right?
link |
So the aliens might be there.
link |
But if we don't have the ability to recognize them
link |
and talk to them, then the aliens aren't going
link |
to want to talk to us.
link |
And I think that's a critical point
link |
that probably if that's a filter,
link |
there needs to be an ability for one
link |
to communicate with the other.
link |
And we need to know what life is before we do that.
link |
So we haven't qualified to even join the club
link |
Well, I think they still wanna teach us how to talk, right?
link |
But my worry is that, or I think they would wanna teach us
link |
how to talk like you do when you meet it.
link |
Like when you even meet, I was gonna say child,
link |
but that's a human species.
link |
You want to try to communicate with them
link |
through whatever devices you can,
link |
given what an ant is like.
link |
I just, I worry mostly about that humans
link |
are just too close minded or don't have the right tools.
link |
No, I'm gonna push back on this quite significantly.
link |
I would say, because we don't understand what life is
link |
and because we don't understand
link |
how life emerged in the universe,
link |
we don't understand the physics
link |
that gave rise to life yet.
link |
That means our fundamental description,
link |
I'm way out of my pay grade, even further out.
link |
But I'll say it anyway,
link |
because I think it's a fun.
link |
You don't get paid much anyway, as you said earlier.
link |
So I would say that we,
link |
because we don't understand the universe yet,
link |
we do not understand how the universe spat out life.
link |
And we don't know what life is.
link |
And I think that until we understand that,
link |
it is gonna limit our ability to even,
link |
we don't qualify to talk to the aliens.
link |
So I'm gonna say that they might be there,
link |
but we just, I'm not gonna say that I believe
link |
in interdimensional aliens being present in this room.
link |
Yeah, but I think you're just being self critical,
link |
like we don't qualify.
link |
I think the fact that we don't qualify qualifies us.
link |
We're interesting in our innocence.
link |
No, I'm saying that because we don't understand
link |
causal chains and the way that information
link |
is propagated in the universe.
link |
And we don't understand what replication is yet.
link |
And we don't understand how life emerged.
link |
I think that we would not recognize aliens.
link |
And if someone doesn't recognize you,
link |
you wouldn't go and talk to it.
link |
You don't go and talk to ants.
link |
You don't go and talk to birds
link |
or maybe some birds you do, right?
link |
Cause you can, there's just enough cognition.
link |
So I'm saying because we don't have enough,
link |
our cognitive abilities are not yet where they need to be.
link |
We probably haven't been communicating with them.
link |
So you don't agree with the dating strategy
link |
of playing hard to get?
link |
Cause us humans, that seems to attract us.
link |
Within a species, that's fine.
link |
But I think we don't actually have abstraction.
link |
No, actually I think in this talk, in this conversation,
link |
you've helped me crystallize something
link |
that I think has been troubling me for a long time
link |
with the thermi paradox.
link |
I'm pretty sure that a reasonable avenue
link |
is to say that you would not go and talk to your cat
link |
about calculus, right?
link |
But I would still pet it.
link |
Sure, but I'm not talking about petting a cat.
link |
The analogy is that the aliens are not going to talk to us
link |
because we, and I'm using calculus as analogy
link |
for abstraction because we lack the layer,
link |
the fundamental layer of understanding what life is
link |
and what the universe is in our reality
link |
that it would be so counterproductive
link |
interacting with intelligent alien species
link |
that it would cause more angst for human race.
link |
Okay, they gotta be self interested.
link |
So they'll probably, they more care about
link |
is it interesting for them?
link |
Maybe they, I mean, surely there's a way
link |
to pet the cat in this analogy
link |
because even if we lack complete understanding,
link |
it must be a very frustrating experience
link |
for other kinds of intelligence to communicate with us.
link |
Still, there must be a way to interact with us.
link |
Like perturb the system in interesting ways
link |
to see what these creatures do.
link |
We might actually find the answer.
link |
I mean, again, out of my pay grade,
link |
in a simulation of the Earth,
link |
let's say a simulation where we allow
link |
an intelligent AI to emerge, right?
link |
And that AI, we then give it the objective
link |
is to be curious, interact with other intelligence
link |
And then we might find the parameters required
link |
for that AI to walk with.
link |
And I think you'll find if the AI will not talk
link |
to other AIs that don't share the ability
link |
to abstract at the level of the AI
link |
because it's just a cat and are you gonna travel
link |
20 light years to go and pet a cat?
link |
So not because of the inability to do so,
link |
but because of like boredom.
link |
It's more interested, it will start talking to,
link |
it will spend most, it will spend a majority
link |
of its time talking to other AI systems
link |
that can at least somewhat understand
link |
and it's much more fun.
link |
It's a bit like, do we know that plants are conscious?
link |
Well, plants are unconscious in the way we typically think,
link |
but we don't talk to them.
link |
They could be, right?
link |
Yeah, but there's a lot of people on Earth
link |
who like gardening.
link |
There's always going to be a weird.
link |
They're not talking, they're just gardening.
link |
Okay, well, you're not romantic enough
link |
to see gardening as a way of communication
link |
between humans and plants.
link |
Oh, okay, you've got me there.
link |
But there's ways, there's always going to be
link |
the people who are curious.
link |
Jane Goodall who lives with the chimps, right?
link |
There's always going to be curious intelligent species
link |
that visit the weird Earth planet and try to interact.
link |
I mean, it's a, yeah, I think it's a super cool idea
link |
that you're expressing.
link |
I just kind of have a sense.
link |
Maybe it's a hope that there's always going to be
link |
a desire to interact even with those
link |
that can't possibly understand the depth
link |
of what you understand.
link |
So I'm with you, so I want to be as positive as you
link |
that aliens do exist and we will interact with them.
link |
What I'm trying to do is to give you
link |
a reasonable hypothesis why we haven't yet.
link |
And also something to strive for to be able to do that.
link |
I mean, you know, there is the other view
link |
that the universe is just too big
link |
and life is just too rare.
link |
But I want to come up with an alternative explanation
link |
which I think is reasonable and not being philosophically
link |
and scientifically thought out, which is this,
link |
if you can't actually communicate with the object,
link |
the thing competently, you don't even know it's there,
link |
then there's no point yet.
link |
See, I disagree with that, but I'm totally aligned
link |
with your hopeful vision, which is like,
link |
we need to understand the origin of life.
link |
It will help us engineer life.
link |
It will help us engineer intelligent life through perhaps
link |
on the computer side through simulation
link |
and explore all the ways that life emerges.
link |
And that will allow us to, I think the fundamental reason
link |
we don't see overwhelming amounts of life
link |
is I actually believe aliens,
link |
of course, these are all just kind of open minded beliefs.
link |
It's difficult to know for sure about any of this,
link |
but I think there's a lot of alien civilizations
link |
which are actively communicating with us and we're too dumb.
link |
We don't have the right tools to see it.
link |
That's what I'm saying.
link |
No, but maybe I misinterpreted you,
link |
but I interpreted you to say they kind of tried a few times
link |
and they're like, oh God.
link |
No, no, no, what I'm saying is we, so this goes two ways.
link |
Yeah, I agree with you.
link |
There could be information out there,
link |
but just put in such a way
link |
that we just don't understand it yet.
link |
So sorry if I didn't make that clear.
link |
I mean, it's not just, I don't think we,
link |
I think we qualify as soon as we can decode their signal.
link |
Right, so when you say qualify, got it, got it.
link |
So you mean, we're just not smart enough,
link |
the word qualify was throwing me off.
link |
So we're not smart enough to do,
link |
it's like we just need to get smarter.
link |
And there's a lot of people who believe,
link |
let me get your opinion on this, about UFO sightings.
link |
So sightings of weird phenomena
link |
that, you know, what does UFO mean?
link |
It means it's a flying object
link |
and it's not identified clearly at the time of sighting.
link |
That's what UFO means.
link |
So it could be a physics phenomena,
link |
it could be ball lightning,
link |
it could be all kinds of fascinating.
link |
I was always fascinated with ball lightning as a,
link |
like the fact that there could be physical phenomena
link |
in this world that are observable by the human eye.
link |
Of course, all physical phenomena generally are fascinating
link |
that really smart people can't explain.
link |
Cause it's like, wait a minute,
link |
especially if you can replicate it,
link |
it's like, wait a minute, how does this happen?
link |
That's like the precursor to giant discoveries
link |
in chemistry and biology and physics and so on.
link |
But it sucks when those events are super rare, right?
link |
Physically, like ball lightning.
link |
So that's out there.
link |
And then of course that phenomena
link |
could have other interpretations
link |
that don't have to do with the physics of chemistry,
link |
the biology of earth.
link |
It could have to do
link |
with more extraterrestrial explanations
link |
that in large part, thanks to Hollywood and movies
link |
and all those kinds of things,
link |
captivates the imaginations of millions of people.
link |
But just because it's science fiction
link |
that captivates the imagination of people,
link |
it doesn't mean that some of those sightings,
link |
all it takes is one.
link |
One of those sightings is actually a sign
link |
that it's extraterrestrial intelligence,
link |
that it's object that's not of this particular world.
link |
Do you think there's a chance that that's the case?
link |
What do you make, especially the pilot sightings,
link |
what do you make of those?
link |
So I agree with there's a chance.
link |
There's always a chance.
link |
Any good scientist would have to,
link |
or observationist would have to,
link |
I want to see if aliens exist come to earth.
link |
What I know about the universe
link |
is I think it's unlikely right now
link |
that there are aliens visiting us, but not impossible.
link |
I think the releases, the dramatization
link |
that's been happening politically
link |
saying we're gonna release all this information,
link |
this classified information.
link |
I was kind of disappointed
link |
because it was just very poor material.
link |
And right now, the ability to capture high resolution video,
link |
everybody is carrying around
link |
with them an incredible video device now.
link |
And we haven't got more compelling data.
link |
And so that we've just seeing grainy pictures,
link |
a lot of hearsay, instrument kind of malfunctions
link |
And so I think on balance, I think it's extremely unlikely,
link |
but I think something really interesting is happening.
link |
And then also during the pandemic, right?
link |
We've all been locked down.
link |
We all want to have,
link |
we want to, our imaginations are running riot.
link |
And I think that the,
link |
I don't think that the information out there
link |
has convinced me there are any,
link |
anything interesting on the UFO side.
link |
But what it has made me very interested about
link |
is how humanity is opening up its mind to ponder aliens
link |
and the mystery of our universe.
link |
And so I don't want to dissuade people
link |
from having those thoughts and say, you're stupid
link |
and look at that, it's clearly incorrect.
link |
What I would say is that I lack sufficient data,
link |
replicated observations to make me go,
link |
oh, I'm gonna take this seriously,
link |
but I'm really interested by the fact
link |
that there is this great deal of interest.
link |
And I think that it drives me
link |
to maybe want to make an artificial life form even more
link |
and to help NASA and the Air Force
link |
and whoever go and look for things even more,
link |
because I think humanity wants to know what's out there.
link |
There's this yearning, isn't there?
link |
Yeah, but I see, I almost,
link |
depending on the day, I sometimes agree with you,
link |
but with the thing you just said,
link |
but one of the disappointing things to me
link |
about the sightings, I still hold the belief
link |
that a nonzero number of them
link |
is an indication of something very interesting.
link |
So I don't side with the people who say
link |
everything can be explained
link |
with sensor artifacts kind of thing.
link |
Yeah, I agree with you.
link |
I didn't say that either.
link |
I would say I just don't have enough data.
link |
But the thing I want to push back on is the statement
link |
that everybody has a high definition camera.
link |
One of the disappointing things to me
link |
about the report that the government released,
link |
but in general, just having worked with government,
link |
having worked with people all over
link |
is how incompetent we are.
link |
Like if you look at the response to the pandemic,
link |
how incompetent we are in the face of great challenges
link |
without great leadership.
link |
How incompetent we are in the face
link |
of the great mysteries before us without great leadership.
link |
And I just think it's actually,
link |
the fact that there's a lot of high definition cameras
link |
is not enough to capture the full richness of weird,
link |
of the mysterious phenomena out there
link |
of which extraterrestrial intelligence visiting Earth
link |
I don't think we have,
link |
I don't think everybody having a smartphone
link |
in their pocket is enough.
link |
I think that allows for TikTok videos.
link |
I don't think it allows for the capture
link |
of even interesting, relatively rare human events.
link |
That's not that common.
link |
It's rare to have been the right moment in the right time
link |
to be able to capture the thing.
link |
Let me rephrase what I think on this.
link |
I haven't seen enough information.
link |
I haven't really actively sorted out.
link |
I must admit, but I'm with you
link |
and I love the idea of anomaly detection
link |
in chemistry in particular, right?
link |
I want to make anomalies, sorry,
link |
or not necessarily make anomalies.
link |
I want to understand an anomaly.
link |
Let me give you two from chemistry,
link |
which are really quite interesting.
link |
Phlogiston, going way back,
link |
where people said there's this thing called phlogiston.
link |
And for ages, the alchemists got really this kind of,
link |
that fire is the thing.
link |
And then we determined that phlogiston
link |
wasn't what we thought it is.
link |
Let's go to physics, the ether.
link |
The ether's a hard one
link |
because I think actually the ether might exist.
link |
And I'll tell you what I think the ether is later.
link |
Can you explain the ether?
link |
so the light traveling through the ether in the vacuum,
link |
there is some thing that we call the ether
link |
that basically mediates the movement of light, say.
link |
And I think that...
link |
And then the other one is cold fusion,
link |
which is more of a...
link |
So a few years ago,
link |
people observed that when they did some electrochemistry,
link |
when they were splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen,
link |
that you got more energy out than you put in.
link |
And people got excited
link |
and they thought that this was a nuclear reaction.
link |
And in the end, it was kind of discredited
link |
because you didn't detect neutrons and all this stuff.
link |
But I'm pretty sure...
link |
I'm telling you this on your podcast, but why not?
link |
I'm pretty sure there's interesting
link |
electrochemical phenomena
link |
that's not completely bottomed out yet,
link |
that there is something there.
link |
However, we lack the technology and the experimental design.
link |
So all I'm saying in your response about aliens
link |
is we lack the experimental design
link |
to really capture these anomalies.
link |
And we are encircling the planet
link |
with many more detection systems.
link |
We've got satellites everywhere.
link |
So there is, I do hope
link |
that we are gonna discover more anomalies.
link |
And remember that the solar system
link |
isn't just static in space,
link |
it's moving through the universe.
link |
So there's just more and more chance.
link |
I'm not what with Avi Loeb.
link |
He's generating all sorts of kind of a cult,
link |
I would say, with this, but I'm not against him.
link |
I think there is a finite chance
link |
if there are aliens in the universe
link |
that we're gonna happen upon them
link |
because we're moving through the universe.
link |
What's the nature of the following that Avi Loeb has?
link |
He's doubling down more and more and more
link |
and say there are aliens,
link |
interdimensional aliens and everything else, right?
link |
He's gone from space junk accelerating out of
link |
to interdimensional stuff in a very short space of time.
link |
He's obviously bored.
link |
Or he wants to tap into the psyche and understand.
link |
And he's playfully kind of trying to interact
link |
with society and his peers to say,
link |
stop saying it's not possible.
link |
Which I agree with, we shouldn't do that.
link |
But we should frame it statistically
link |
in the same way we should frame everything
link |
as good scientists, statistically.
link |
Yeah, good scientists.
link |
Recently, the idea of good scientists is,
link |
I take quite skeptically.
link |
I've been listening to a lot of scientists
link |
tell me about what is good science.
link |
That makes me sad.
link |
Because you've been interviewing
link |
what I would consider a lot of really good scientists.
link |
A lot of great thinkers.
link |
But that's exactly right.
link |
And most of the people I talk to
link |
are incredible human beings.
link |
But there's a humility that's required.
link |
Science is not, science cannot be dogmatism.
link |
I mean, authority, like a PhD does not give you authority.
link |
A lifelong pursuit of a particular task
link |
does not give you authority.
link |
You're just as lost in clues as everybody else.
link |
But you're more curious and more stubborn.
link |
So that's a nice quality to have.
link |
But overall, just using the word science and statistics
link |
can often, as you know, kind of become a catalyst
link |
for dismissing new ideas, out of the box ideas, wild ideas,
link |
all that kind of stuff.
link |
I think that, so I like to,
link |
some people find me extremely annoying in science
link |
because I'm basically, I'm quite rude and disruptive.
link |
Not in a rude, you know,
link |
some up to people and say they're ugly or stupid
link |
or anything like that.
link |
I just say, you know, you're wrong.
link |
Or why do you think this?
link |
And something, a gift I got given by society
link |
when I was very young,
link |
because I was in the learning difficulties class at school
link |
is I was told I was stupid.
link |
And so I know I'm stupid,
link |
but I always wanted to be smart, right?
link |
I remember going to school going,
link |
maybe today they're going to tell me
link |
I'm not as stupid as I was yesterday.
link |
And I was always disappointed, always.
link |
And so when I went into academia and everyone says,
link |
you're wrong, I was like, join the queue.
link |
Because it allowed me to walk through the wall.
link |
So I think that people like to always imagine science
link |
as a bit like living in a Japanese house,
link |
the paper walls, and everyone sits in their room.
link |
And I annoy people because I walk straight through the wall.
link |
Not because, why should I be a chemist
link |
and not a mathematician?
link |
Why should I be a mathematician and not a computer scientist?
link |
Because if the problem requires us
link |
to walk through those walls,
link |
but I like walking through the walls.
link |
But as long, then I have to put up,
link |
you know, I have to do good science.
link |
I have to win the people in those rooms
link |
across by good science,
link |
by taking their criticisms and addressing them head on.
link |
And I think we must do that.
link |
And I think that I try and do that in my own way.
link |
And I kind of love walking through the walls.
link |
And it gives me, it's difficult for me personally.
link |
It's quite painful,
link |
but it always leads to a deeper understanding
link |
of the people I'm with.
link |
In particular, you know, the arguments I have
link |
with all sorts of interesting minds,
link |
because I want to solve the problem,
link |
or I want to understand more about why I exist.
link |
You know, that's it really.
link |
And I think we have to not dismiss science
link |
I think we can work with science.
link |
No, science is beautiful,
link |
but humans with egos and all those kinds of things
link |
can sometimes misuse good things,
link |
like social justice,
link |
like all ideas we're all aspire to misuse
link |
these beautiful ideas to manipulate people,
link |
to all those kinds of things.
link |
And that's, there's assholes in every space
link |
and walk of life, including science.
link |
Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.
link |
And those are no good.
link |
But yes, you're right.
link |
The scientific method has proven to be quite useful.
link |
That said, for difficult questions,
link |
for difficult explanations for rare phenomena,
link |
you have to walk cautiously.
link |
Because the scientific method,
link |
when you totally don't understand something,
link |
and it's rare, and you can't replicate it,
link |
doesn't quite apply.
link |
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it.
link |
The challenge is to not dismiss the anomaly
link |
because you can't replicate it.
link |
I mean, we can talk about this.
link |
This is something I realized
link |
when we were developing assembly theory.
link |
People thinking that the track they're on
link |
is so dogmatic, but there is this thing that they see,
link |
but they don't see.
link |
And it takes a bit of time
link |
and you just have to keep reframing it.
link |
And my approach is to say, well, why can't this be right?
link |
Why must we accept that RNA is the only way into life?
link |
Does RNA have a special class of information
link |
that's encoded in the universe?
link |
No, of course it doesn't, right?
link |
RNA is not a special molecule
link |
in the space of all the other molecules.
link |
But it's so elegant and simple
link |
and it works so well for the evolutionary process
link |
that we kind of use that as an intuition
link |
to explain that that must be the only way to have life.
link |
But you mentioned assembly theory.
link |
Well, first let me pause, bathroom break, needed?
link |
Yeah, let's take two minutes.
link |
We took a quick break and offline,
link |
you mentioned to me that you have a lab in your home.
link |
And then I said that you're basically Rick
link |
from Rick and Morty,
link |
which is something I've been thinking
link |
this whole conversation.
link |
And then you say that there's a glowing pickle
link |
that you used something involving cold plasma, I believe.
link |
I don't know, but can you explain
link |
the glowing pickle situation?
link |
And is there many, arbitrarily many versions of you
link |
in alternate dimensions that you're aware of?
link |
I tried to make an electrochemical memory at home
link |
using a pickle and the only way I could get
link |
any traction with it was actually by plugging it
link |
into a very high voltage alternating current
link |
and then putting in a couple of electrodes.
link |
But my kids weren't impressed.
link |
They're not impressed with anything I do,
link |
any experiments I do at home.
link |
I think it's quite funny.
link |
But you connected a pickle to some electrode.
link |
240 volts, yeah, AC.
link |
And then had a couple of electrodes on it.
link |
So what happens is a pickle,
link |
this is a classic thing you do.
link |
I mean, I shouldn't, pranks you do,
link |
you put a pickle into the mains
link |
and just leave it, run away and leave it.
link |
And what happens is it starts to decompose.
link |
It heats up and then explodes
link |
because the water turns to steam
link |
and it just violently explodes.
link |
But I wondered if I could cause the iron,
link |
sodium, potassium ions in the pickle to migrate.
link |
It'd been in a jar, right?
link |
So it'd been in a brine.
link |
That was, yeah, that was not my best experiment.
link |
So I've done far better experiments in my lab at home.
link |
At that time it was a failed experiment,
link |
but you never know, it could,
link |
every experiment is a successful experiment
link |
if you stick with it long enough.
link |
Well, I mean, I get, I got kicked out of my own lab
link |
by my research team many years ago and for good reason.
link |
I mean, my team is brilliant
link |
and I used to go and just break things.
link |
So what I do do at home
link |
is I have a kind of electronics workshop
link |
and I prototype experiments there.
link |
Then I try and then I try and suggest to my team sometimes,
link |
maybe we can try this thing.
link |
And they would just say, oh,
link |
wow, that's not gonna work because of this.
link |
And I'll say, aha, but actually I've tried
link |
and here's some code and here's some hardware.
link |
So I'm doing that less and less now
link |
as I get even more busy, but that's quite fun
link |
because they feel that we're in the experiment together.
link |
You do, in fact, brilliantly, just like Rick
link |
from Rick and Morty, connect up chemistry with computation.
link |
And when we say chemistry,
link |
we don't mean the simulation of chemistry,
link |
a modeling of chemistry.
link |
We mean chemistry in the physical space
link |
as well as in the digital space, which is fascinating.
link |
We'll talk about that.
link |
But first you mentioned assembly theory.
link |
So we'll stick on theory in these big ideas.
link |
I would say revolutionary ideas,
link |
this intersection between mathematics and philosophy.
link |
What is assembly theory?
link |
And generally speaking, how would we recognize life
link |
So assembly theory is a theory,
link |
goes back a few years now in my struggle
link |
for maybe almost 10 years
link |
when I was going to origin of life conferences
link |
and artificial life conferences,
link |
where I thought that everybody was dancing
link |
around the problem of what life is and what it does.
link |
But I'll tell you about what assembly theory is
link |
because I think it's easier.
link |
So assembly theory literally says if you take an object,
link |
and you are able to break the object into parts very gently.
link |
So just maybe let's say take a piece
link |
of very intricate Chinese porcelain
link |
and you tap it just with a hammer or the nail at some point,
link |
and it will fragment into many parts.
link |
And if that object is able to fragment into many,
link |
and you count those parts, the different parts,
link |
so they're unsymmetrical,
link |
assembly theory says the larger the number of parts,
link |
unsymmetrical parts that object has,
link |
the more likely it is that object has been created
link |
by an evolutionary or information process,
link |
especially if that object is not one off,
link |
you've got an abundance of them.
link |
And that's really important.
link |
So because what I'm literally saying about the abundance,
link |
if you have a one off object and you break it into parts
link |
and it has lots of parts,
link |
you'd say, well, that could be incredibly intricate
link |
and complex, but it could be just random.
link |
And I was troubled with this for years
link |
because I saw in reality that assembly theory works.
link |
But when I talked to very good
link |
computational complexity computation lists,
link |
algorithmic complexity people,
link |
they said, you haven't really done this properly.
link |
You haven't thought about it.
link |
It's like, this is the random problem.
link |
And so I kept working this up
link |
because I invented an assembly theory in chemistry,
link |
first of all, with molecules.
link |
And so the thought experiment was,
link |
how complex does a molecule need to be when I find it
link |
that it couldn't possibly have risen by chance,
link |
probabilistically.
link |
And if I found this molecule,
link |
able to detect it enough quantities in the same object,
link |
like a machine, like a mass spectrometer.
link |
So typically in a mass spectrometer,
link |
you weigh the molecules in electric field.
link |
You probably have to have all the order of 10,000
link |
identical molecules to get a signal.
link |
So 10,000 identical molecules that are complex.
link |
What is the chance of them occurring by chance?
link |
Well, we can do the math.
link |
Let's take a molecule like strychnine
link |
or, yeah, so strychnine is a good molecule actually to take
link |
or Viagra is a good molecule.
link |
I made jokes about Viagra because it's a complex molecule.
link |
And one of my friends said, yeah,
link |
if we find Viagra on Mars in detectable quantities,
link |
we know something is up.
link |
And yeah, but anyway, it's a complex molecule.
link |
So what you do is you take this molecule
link |
in the mass spectrometer and you hit it with some electrons
link |
or in electric field and it breaks apart.
link |
And if the larger the number of different parts,
link |
you know when it starts to get refreshed,
link |
my idea was that that molecule could not be created
link |
by chance, probabilistically.
link |
So that was where assembly theory was born
link |
in an experiment, in a mass spec experiment.
link |
And I was thinking about this
link |
because NASA is sending mass spectrometers to Mars,
link |
to Titan, it's gonna send them to Europa.
link |
There's gonna be a nuclear powered mass spectrometer
link |
I mean, this is the coolest experiment ever.
link |
They're not only sending a drone
link |
that's gonna fly around Titan,
link |
it's gonna be powered by a nuclear slug, a nuclear battery,
link |
and it's gonna have a mass spectrometer on it.
link |
Is this already launched?
link |
No, it's Dragonfly
link |
and it's gonna be launched in a few years.
link |
I think it got pushed a year because of the pandemic.
link |
So I think it's three or four years.
link |
Dragonfly, nuclear Dragonfly is going to fly to Titan
link |
and collect data about the composition
link |
of the various chemicals on Titan.
link |
Yeah, I'm trying to convince NASA.
link |
I don't know if I'll be able to convince
link |
the Dragonfly team that they should apply this approach,
link |
but they will get data.
link |
And depending on how good their mass spectrometer is.
link |
But I had this thought experiment anyway,
link |
and I did this thought experiment.
link |
And for me, it seemed to work.
link |
I turned the thought experiment into an algorithm
link |
in assembly theory.
link |
And I basically, assembly theory, if I take,
link |
let's just make it generic.
link |
And so let's just take the word abracadabra.
link |
Say, can I, if you find the word,
link |
so if you have a book with lots of words in it
link |
and you find abracadabra one off,
link |
and it's a rap book that's been written by,
link |
in a random way, set of monkeys in a room.
link |
And you're on typewriters.
link |
And you find one off abracadabra,
link |
But if you find lots of recurrences of abracadabra,
link |
well, that means something weird is going on.
link |
But let's think about the assembly number of abracadabra.
link |
So abracadabra has a number of letters in it.
link |
You can break it down.
link |
So you just cut the letters up.
link |
But when you actually reassemble abracadabra,
link |
the minimum number of ways of organizing those letters.
link |
So you'd have an A, a B, and keep going up.
link |
When you cut abracadabra up into parts,
link |
you can put it together again in seven steps.
link |
So what does that mean?
link |
That means if you basically don't,
link |
you're allowed to reuse things
link |
you make in a chain at the beginning.
link |
That's the memory of the universe,
link |
the process that makes abracadabra.
link |
And because of that causal chain,
link |
you can then get to abracadabra
link |
quicker than the number of letters
link |
for having to specify only in seven.
link |
So if you take that to a molecule
link |
and you cut the molecule up into parts,
link |
and you can, on the causal chain,
link |
and you basically start with the atoms
link |
and then bonds, and then you randomly add on those parts
link |
to make the A, make the B, and keep going all the way up,
link |
I found that literally, assembly theory
link |
allows me to say how compressed a molecule is.
link |
So when there's some information in there.
link |
And I realized assembly theory
link |
isn't just confined to molecular space.
link |
It can apply to anything.
link |
But let me finish the molecular argument.
link |
So what I did is I had this theory.
link |
I, with one of my students, we wrote an algorithm.
link |
We basically took the 20 million molecules from a database
link |
and we just calculate their assembly number.
link |
And that's the index.
link |
Like basically, if I take a molecule
link |
and I cut it up into bonds,
link |
what is the minimum number of steps I need to take
link |
to reform that molecule from atoms?
link |
So reusability of previously formed things
link |
is somehow a fundamental part of what it is.
link |
Exactly, it's like a memory in the universe, right?
link |
I'm making lots of leaps here.
link |
Like, it's kind of weird.
link |
I'm saying, right, there's a process
link |
that can form the A and the B and the C, let's say.
link |
And then because we've formed A and B before,
link |
we can use A and B again with no extra cost except one unit.
link |
So that's the kind of what the chain of events.
link |
And that's how you think about memory here
link |
when you say the universe,
link |
when you talk about the universe
link |
or life is the universe creating memory.
link |
So we went through chemical space
link |
and we looked at the assembly numbers.
link |
We were able to classify it.
link |
So, okay, let's test it.
link |
So we're able to take a whole bunch of molecules
link |
and assign an assembly index to them, okay?
link |
And it's just a function of the number of bonds
link |
in the molecule and how much symmetry.
link |
So literally assembly theory is a measure
link |
of how little symmetry a molecule has.
link |
And so the more asymmetry, the more information,
link |
the more weird it is,
link |
like a Jackson Pollock of some description.
link |
So I then went and did a load of experiments.
link |
And I basically took those molecules,
link |
I cut them up in the mass spec
link |
and measured the number of peaks
link |
without any knowledge of the molecule.
link |
And we found the assembly number,
link |
there was almost not quite a one to one correlation,
link |
but almost because not all bonds are equal.
link |
They have different energies.
link |
I then did this using two other spectroscopic techniques,
link |
NMR, nuclear magnetic resonance,
link |
which uses radio frequency to basically jangle the molecules
link |
and get a signature out.
link |
And I also used infrared.
link |
And infrared and NMR almost gave us a one to one correlation.
link |
So what am I saying?
link |
Saying by taking a molecule
link |
and doing either infrared or NMR or mass spec,
link |
I can work out how many parts there are in that molecule
link |
and then put it on a scale.
link |
And what we did in the next part of the work
link |
is we took molecules randomly from the environment,
link |
from outer space, from all around earth,
link |
from the sea, from Antarctica,
link |
and from fossils and so on.
link |
And even NASA, because they didn't believe us,
link |
blinded some samples.
link |
And we found that all these samples that came from biology
link |
produced molecules that had a very high assembly number
link |
above a threshold of about 15.
link |
So basically all the stuff that came
link |
from an ebiotic origin was low.
link |
There was no complexity there.
link |
So we suddenly realized that on earth at least,
link |
there is a cutoff that natural phenomena
link |
cannot produce molecules
link |
that need more than 15 steps to make them.
link |
So I realized that this is a way to make a scale of life,
link |
a scale of technology as well.
link |
And literally you could just go sniffing for molecules
link |
off earth, on Titan, on Mars.
link |
And when you find a molecule in the mass spectrometer
link |
that gives you more than 15 parts,
link |
you'll know pretty much for sure
link |
that it had to be produced by evolution.
link |
And this allowed me to come up with a general definition
link |
of life based on assembly theory,
link |
to say that if I find an object that has a large number
link |
of parts, say an iPhone or Boeing 747,
link |
or any complex object and I can find it in abundance
link |
and cut it up, I can tell you whether that has been produced
link |
by an informational process or not.
link |
And that's what assembly theory kind of does.
link |
But it goes a bit further.
link |
I then realized that this isn't just about life,
link |
it's about causation.
link |
So actually it tells you about
link |
whether it's a causal structure.
link |
So now I can look at objects in the universe,
link |
say that again, this cup and say, right,
link |
I'm gonna look at how many independent parts it has.
link |
So that's the assembly number.
link |
I'll then look at the abundance, how many cups?
link |
There are two on this table,
link |
maybe there's a few more you got stashed away.
link |
So assembly is a function of the complexity of the object
link |
times the number of copy numbers of that object
link |
or a function of the copy number normalized.
link |
So I realized there's a new quantity in the universe.
link |
You have energy, entropy, and assembly.
link |
So assembly, the way we should think about that
link |
is how much reusability there is.
link |
Because reusability is like,
link |
can you play devil's advocate to this?
link |
So could this just be a nice tertiary signal
link |
for living organisms?
link |
Like some kind of distant signal that's,
link |
yeah, this is a nice property,
link |
but it's not capturing something fundamental.
link |
Or do you think reusability is something fundamental
link |
to life and complex organisms?
link |
I think reusability is fundamental in the universe,
link |
not just for life and complex organisms.
link |
It's about causation.
link |
So I think assembly tells you if you find objects,
link |
cause you can do this with trajectories as well.
link |
You think about it,
link |
that the fact there are objects in the universe on earth
link |
You think about it,
link |
we should just have a combinatorial explosion of stuff.
link |
The fact that not everything exists is really weird.
link |
And then as I'm looking at two mugs and two water bottles
link |
and the things that exist kind of are similar
link |
and multiply in copies of each other.
link |
So I would say that assembly allows you to do something
link |
that statistical mechanics and people looking at entropy
link |
have got stuck with for a while.
link |
So I'm making, it's pretty bold.
link |
I mean, I'm writing a paper with Sarah Walker
link |
on this at the moment.
link |
And we're realizing,
link |
we don't want to get ahead of ourselves
link |
because I think that there's lots of ways where this is,
link |
you know, it's a really interesting idea.
link |
It works for molecules and it appears to work
link |
for any objects produced by causation.
link |
Cause you can take a motor car,
link |
you can look at the assembly of the motor car,
link |
look at a book, look at the assembly of the book.
link |
Assembly theory tells you
link |
there's a way of compressing and reusing.
link |
And so when people, I talk to information theorists,
link |
they say, oh, this is just logical depth.
link |
I say, it is like logical depth,
link |
but it's experimentally measurable.
link |
They say, oh, it's a bit like Komogolov complexity.
link |
And so, but it's computable.
link |
And now, okay, it's not infinitely computable,
link |
gets MP hard very quickly, right?
link |
It's very hard problem when you could get,
link |
but it's a computable enough,
link |
you could tractable enough to be able to tell
link |
the difference between a molecule
link |
that's been formed by the random background
link |
And I think that that's really interesting
link |
because until now there's no way
link |
of measuring complexity objectively.
link |
Complexity has required algorithmic comparisons
link |
and programs and human beings to label things.
link |
Assembly is label free.
link |
Well, not entirely.
link |
We can talk about what that means in a minute.
link |
Okay, my brain has been broken a couple of times here.
link |
I'm sorry I explained it really badly.
link |
No, it was very well explained.
link |
It was just fascinating.
link |
And it's, my brain is broken into pieces
link |
and I'm trying to assemble it.
link |
So when you have a molecule,
link |
you're trying to figure out, okay,
link |
if we were to reuse parts of this molecule,
link |
which parts can we reuse as an optimization problem,
link |
and be hard to figure out the minimum amount
link |
of reused components that will create this molecule.
link |
And it becomes difficult when you start
link |
to look at a huge, huge molecules, arbitrarily large.
link |
Cause I'm also like mapping this.
link |
Can I think about this in complexity generally,
link |
like looking at a cellular automata system
link |
and saying like, what's the,
link |
can this be used as a measure of complexity
link |
for like a arbitrarily complicated system?
link |
Yeah, I think it can.
link |
And I think that the question is, and what's the benefit?
link |
Cause there's plenty of, I mean,
link |
in computer science and mathematics and in physics,
link |
people have been really seriously studying complexity
link |
And I think there's a really interesting problems
link |
of where we course grade and we lose information.
link |
And all assembly theory does really,
link |
assembly theory just explains weak emergence.
link |
And so what assembly theory says, look,
link |
going from the atoms that interact,
link |
those first replicators that build one another,
link |
assembly at the minimal level just tells you evidence
link |
that there's been replication and selection.
link |
And I think the more selected something is,
link |
the higher the assembly.
link |
And so we were able to start to know
link |
how to look for selection in the universe.
link |
If you go to the moon,
link |
there's nothing a very high assembly on the moon
link |
except the human artifacts we've left there.
link |
So again, let's go back to the sandbox.
link |
In assembly theory says,
link |
if all the sand grains could stick together,
link |
that's the infinite combinatorial explosion
link |
in the universe, that should be the default.
link |
We don't have that.
link |
Now let's assemble sand grains together
link |
and do them in every possible way.
link |
So we have a series of minimal operations
link |
that can move the sand together.
link |
But all that doesn't exist either.
link |
Now, because we have specific memory where we say,
link |
well, we're gonna put three sand grains in line
link |
or four and make a cross or a triangle
link |
or something unsymmetrical.
link |
And once we've made the triangle
link |
and the unsymmetrical thing, we remember that,
link |
we can use it again, cause on that causal chain.
link |
So what assembly theory allows you to do
link |
is go to the actual object that you exist,
link |
you find in space.
link |
And actually the way you get there is by disassembling.
link |
It's disassembly theory works by disassembling objects
link |
you have and understanding the steps to create them.
link |
And it works for molecules beautifully
link |
cause you just break bonds.
link |
But like you said, it's very difficult.
link |
It's a difficult problem to figure out
link |
how to break them apart.
link |
For molecules, it's easy.
link |
If you just keep low enough in molecular weight space,
link |
So it's a complete theory.
link |
When we start to think about objects,
link |
we can start to assign,
link |
we can start to think about things at different levels,
link |
different atoms, what you assign as your atom.
link |
So in a molecule, the atom, this is really confusing
link |
cause the word atom, I mean smallest breakable part.
link |
So in a molecule, the atom is the bond
link |
cause you break bonds, not atoms, right?
link |
So in a car, the atom might be, I don't know,
link |
a small amount of iron or the smallest reusable part,
link |
a rivet, a piece of plastic or something.
link |
So you gotta be really careful.
link |
In a microprocessor, the atoms might be transistors.
link |
And so the amount of assembly that something has
link |
is a function, you have to look at the atom level.
link |
What are your parts?
link |
What are you counting?
link |
That's one of the things you get to choose.
link |
What is, at what scale is the atom?
link |
What is the minimal thing?
link |
I mean, there's a huge amounts of trade offs
link |
in when you approach a system and try to analyze.
link |
Like if you approach Earth,
link |
you're an alien civilization trying to study Earth,
link |
what is the atom for trying to measure
link |
the complexity of life?
link |
Is it, are humans the atoms?
link |
I would say to start with, you just use molecules.
link |
I can say for sure, if there are molecules
link |
of sufficient complexity on Earth,
link |
then I know that life has made them.
link |
And then go further and show technology.
link |
There are molecules that exist on Earth
link |
that are not possible even by biology.
link |
You needed technology
link |
and you needed microprocessors to get there.
link |
So that's really cool.
link |
And that there's a correlation between that,
link |
between the coolness of that and assembly number,
link |
whatever the measure.
link |
What's the, what would you call the measure?
link |
Yeah, assembly index.
link |
So there are three kind of fundamental
link |
kind of labels we have.
link |
So there's the quantity of assembly
link |
and the assembly, so if you have a box,
link |
let's just have a box of molecules.
link |
So I'm gonna have my box.
link |
We count the number of identical molecules
link |
and then we chop each molecule up
link |
in an individual molecule class
link |
and calculate the assembly number.
link |
So basically you then have a function
link |
that sums over all the molecules for each assembly
link |
and then you divide through.
link |
So you make it divide through
link |
by the number of molecules.
link |
So that's the assembly index for the box?
link |
So that will tell you the amount of assembly in the box.
link |
So basically the assembly equation we come up with
link |
is like basically the sum of e to the power
link |
of the assembly index for molecule i
link |
times the number of copies of the molecule i
link |
and then you normalize.
link |
So you sum them all up and then normalize.
link |
So some boxes are gonna be more assembled than others.
link |
Yeah, that's what they tell me.
link |
So if you were to look at me as a box,
link |
so say I'm a box, am I assembling my parts?
link |
In terms of like, how do you know,
link |
what's my assembly index?
link |
So I've been gentle.
link |
So let's just, we'll talk about the molecules in you.
link |
So let's just take a pile of sand the same way as you
link |
and I would take you and just cut up all the molecules.
link |
I mean, and look at the number of copies
link |
and assembly number.
link |
So in sand, let's say there's probably gonna be
link |
nothing more than assembly number of two or three,
link |
but there might be trillions and trillions of sand grains.
link |
In your body, there might be,
link |
the assembly number is gonna be higher,
link |
but there might not be as quite as many copies
link |
because the molecular weight is higher.
link |
So you do wanna average it out.
link |
You can average, you do average it.
link |
I'm not defined by the most impressive molecules.
link |
No, no, you're an average in your volume.
link |
Well, I mean, we're just working this out,
link |
but what's really cool is you're gonna have
link |
a really high assembly.
link |
The sand will have a very low assembly.
link |
Your causal power is much higher.
link |
You get to make decisions, you're alive, you're aspiring.
link |
Assembly says something about causal power in the universe.
link |
And that's not supposed to exist
link |
because physicists don't accept
link |
that causation exists at the bottom.
link |
So I understand at the chemical level
link |
why the assembly causes causation.
link |
Why is it causation?
link |
Because it's capturing the memory.
link |
Capturing memory, but there's not an action to it.
link |
So I'm trying to see how it leads to life.
link |
Well, it's what life does.
link |
So I think it's, we don't know.
link |
So. Yeah, that's a good question.
link |
What is life versus what does life do?
link |
Yeah, so that's, this is the definition of life.
link |
The only definition we need, right?
link |
The assembly index.
link |
It's basically that life is able to create objects
link |
in abundance that are so complex,
link |
the assembly number is so high,
link |
they can't possibly be formed in an environment
link |
where there's just random interactions.
link |
So suddenly you can put life on a scale.
link |
And then life doesn't exist actually in that camp.
link |
It's just how evolved you are.
link |
And you as an object,
link |
because you have incredible causal power,
link |
you could go and, you can go and, you know,
link |
launch rockets or build cars or create drugs,
link |
or, you know, you can do so many things.
link |
You can build stuff, build more artifacts
link |
that show that you have had causal power.
link |
And that causal power was this kind of a lineage.
link |
And I think that over time,
link |
I've been realizing that physics as a discipline
link |
has a number of problems associated with it.
link |
Me as a chemist, it's kind of interesting
link |
that assembly theory, and I'm really, you know,
link |
I want to maintain some credibility in the physicists eyes,
link |
but I have to push them because they,
link |
physics is a really good discipline.
link |
It's reduced the number,
link |
physics is about reducing the belief system,
link |
but they're down to some things in their belief system,
link |
which is kind of really makes me kind of grumpy.
link |
Number one is requiring order
link |
at the beginning of the universe magically.
link |
We don't need that.
link |
The second is the second law.
link |
Well, we don't actually need that.
link |
This is blasphemous.
link |
Well, in a minute, I'll recover my career in a second.
link |
Although I think the good,
link |
the only good thing about being the regis chair
link |
means I think there has to be an act of parliament to fire me.
link |
But you can always go to Lee's Twitter and protest.
link |
And I think the third thing is that,
link |
so we've got, you know,
link |
we've got the order at the beginning.
link |
The second law and the fact that causation is emergent,
link |
And that time is emergent.
link |
John Carroll just turned off this program.
link |
I think he believes that it's emergent.
link |
So causation is not...
link |
That's clearly incorrect
link |
because we wouldn't exist otherwise.
link |
So physicists have kind of got confused about time.
link |
Time is a real thing.
link |
Well, I mean, so look,
link |
I'm very happy with the current description
link |
of the universe as physics give me,
link |
because I can do a lot of stuff, right?
link |
I can go to the moon with Newtonian physics, I think,
link |
and I can understand the orbit of Mercury with relativity.
link |
And so, and I can build transistors
link |
with quantum mechanics, right?
link |
And I can do all this stuff.
link |
So I'm not saying the physics is wrong.
link |
I'm just saying, if we say that time is fundamental,
link |
i.e. time is nonnegotiable, there's a global clock,
link |
I don't need to require
link |
that there's order been magically made in the past
link |
because that asymmetry is built into the way the universe is.
link |
So if time is fundamental,
link |
I mean, you've been referring to this kind of
link |
an interesting formulation of that is memory.
link |
So time is hard to like put a finger on,
link |
like what the hell are we talking about?
link |
Well, it's just the direction,
link |
but memory is a construction,
link |
especially when you have like,
link |
think about these local pockets of complexity,
link |
these nonzero assembly index entities
link |
that's being constructed and they remember.
link |
Never forget molecules.
link |
But remember, the thing is I invented assembly theory.
link |
I'll tell you how I invented it.
link |
When I was a kid, I mean, the thing is,
link |
I keep making fun of myself to my research group.
link |
I've only ever had one idea.
link |
I keep exploring that idea over the 40 years or so
link |
since I had the idea.
link |
Well, aren't you the idea that the universe had?
link |
So it's very kind of hierarchical.
link |
That's very poetic.
link |
So I think I came up with assembly theory
link |
with the following idea.
link |
When I was a kid, I was obsessed about survival kits.
link |
What is the minimum stuff I would need
link |
to basically replicate my reality?
link |
And I love computers and I love technology
link |
or what technology is gonna become.
link |
So I imagined that I would have
link |
basically this really big truck full of stuff.
link |
And I thought, well, can I delete some of that stuff out?
link |
Can I have a blueprint?
link |
And then in the end, I kept making this smaller.
link |
I got to maybe a half a truck and then to a suitcase.
link |
And then I went, okay, well, screw it.
link |
I wanna carry my entire technology in my pocket.
link |
And I'm not gonna launch into Steve Jobs and iPlayer.
link |
I came up with a matchbox survival kit.
link |
In that matchbox survival kit,
link |
I would have the minimum stuff
link |
that would allow me to interact the environment,
link |
to build my shelter, to build a fishing rod,
link |
to build a water purification system.
link |
And it's kind of like, so what did I use in my box
link |
to assemble in the environment,
link |
to assemble, to assemble, to assemble?
link |
And I realized I could make a causal chain
link |
in my survival kit.
link |
So I guess that's probably why I've been obsessed
link |
with assembly theory for so long.
link |
And I was just pre configured to find it somewhere.
link |
And when I saw it in molecules,
link |
I realized that the causal structure that we say emerges
link |
and the physics kind of gets really stuck
link |
because they're saying that time,
link |
you can go backwards in time.
link |
I mean, how do we let physicists get away
link |
with the notion that we can go back in time
link |
and meet ourselves?
link |
I mean, that's clearly a very hard thing
link |
to allow, physicists would not let other sciences
link |
get away with that kind of heresy, right?
link |
So why are physicists allowed to get away with it?
link |
So first of all, to push back, to play devil's advocate,
link |
you are clearly married to the idea of memory.
link |
You see in this, again, from Rick and Morty way,
link |
you see, you have these deep dreams of the universe
link |
that is writing the story through its memories,
link |
through its chemical compounds
link |
that are just building at top of each other.
link |
And then they find useful components they can reuse.
link |
And then the reused components create systems
link |
that themselves are then reused
link |
and all in this way, construct things.
link |
But when you think of that as memory,
link |
it seems like quite sad that you can walk that back.
link |
But at the same time, it feels like that memory,
link |
you can walk in both directions on that memory
link |
You could walk in both directions,
link |
but I don't think that that makes any sense
link |
because the problem that I have with time being reversible
link |
is that, I mean, I'm just a, you know,
link |
I'm a dumb experimental chemist, right?
link |
So I love burning stuff, burning stuff and building stuff.
link |
But when I think of reversible phenomena,
link |
I imagine in my head,
link |
I have to actually manufacture some time.
link |
I have to borrow time from the universe to do that.
link |
I can't, when anyone says,
link |
let's imagine that we can go back in time or reversibility,
link |
you can't do that.
link |
You can't step out of time.
link |
Time is nonnegotiable, it's happening.
link |
No, but see, you're assuming that time is fundamental,
link |
which most of us do when we go day to day,
link |
but it takes a leap of wild imagination
link |
to think that time is emergent.
link |
No, time is not emergent.
link |
Yeah, I mean, this is an argument we can have,
link |
but I believe I can come up with an experiment.
link |
An experiment that proves
link |
that time cannot possibly be emergent.
link |
An experiment that shows how assembly theory
link |
kind of is the way that the universe produces selection
link |
and that selection gives rise to life.
link |
And also to say, well, hang on,
link |
we could allow ourselves to have a theory
link |
that requires us to have these statements to be possible.
link |
Like we need to have order in the past,
link |
or we can use the past hypothesis,
link |
which is order in the past, but as well, okay.
link |
And we have to have an arrow of time.
link |
We have to require that entropy increases.
link |
And we have to say, and then we can say, look,
link |
the universe is completely closed and there's no novelty
link |
or that novelty is predetermined.
link |
What I'm saying is very, very important
link |
that time is fundamental, which means,
link |
if you think about it,
link |
the universe becomes more and more novel each step.
link |
It generates there's more states
link |
in the next step than it was before.
link |
So that means bigger search.
link |
So what I'm saying is that the universe
link |
wasn't capable of consciousness at day one,
link |
actually, because it didn't have enough states.
link |
But today the universe is, so it's like how?
link |
All right, all right, hold on a second.
link |
Now we've pissed off the panpsychist too, okay.
link |
No, this is brilliant, sorry.
link |
Part of me is just joking, having fun with this thing,
link |
but because you're saying a lot of brilliant stuff
link |
and I'm trying to slow it down before my brain explodes.
link |
So, because I want to break apart
link |
some of the fascinating things you're saying.
link |
So novelty, novelty is increasing in the universe
link |
because the number of states is increasing.
link |
What do you mean by states?
link |
So I think the physicists almost got everything right.
link |
I can't fault them at all.
link |
I just think there's a little bit of dogma.
link |
I'm just trying to play devil's advocate.
link |
I'm very happy to be entirely wrong on this, right?
link |
I'm not right on many things at all,
link |
but if I can make less assumptions
link |
about the universe with this,
link |
then potentially that's a more powerful way
link |
of looking at things.
link |
If you think of time as fundamental,
link |
you can make less assumptions overall.
link |
Exactly, if time is fundamental,
link |
I don't need to add on a magical second law
link |
because the second law comes out of the fact
link |
the universe is actually, there's more states available.
link |
I mean, we might even be able to do weird things
link |
like dark energy in the universe
link |
might actually just be time, right?
link |
Yeah, but then you have to still have to explain
link |
why time is fundamental,
link |
because I can give you one explanation
link |
that's simpler than time and say God.
link |
You know, like just because it's simple
link |
doesn't mean it's, okay, you still have to explain God
link |
and you still have to explain time.
link |
Like why is it fundamental?
link |
So let's just say existence is default,
link |
which means time is the default.
link |
So how did you go from the existence
link |
of the time to the default? Well, we exist, right?
link |
So let's just be very.
link |
We're yet to talk about what exist means.
link |
All right, let's go all the way back.
link |
Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
link |
I think it's very poetic and beautiful
link |
what you're weaving into this.
link |
I don't think this conversation is even about the assembly,
link |
which is fascinating and we'll keep mentioning it
link |
in the index on this idea,
link |
that I don't think is necessarily connected to time.
link |
Oh, I think it is deeply connected.
link |
I can't explain it yet.
link |
So you don't think everything you've said
link |
about assembly theory and assembly index
link |
can still be correct even if time is emergent?
link |
So yeah, right now, assembly theory appears to work.
link |
I appear to be able to measure objects of high assembly
link |
in a mass spectrometer and look at their abundance
link |
and you know, all that's fine, right?
link |
It's a nice, if nothing else, it's a nice way
link |
of looking at how molecules can compress things.
link |
Now, am I saying that a time has to be fundamental,
link |
not emergent for assembly theory to work?
link |
No, I think I'm saying that the universe,
link |
it appears that the universe has many different ways
link |
You could have three different types of time.
link |
You could just have time that's,
link |
the way I would think of it,
link |
if you want to hold onto emergent time,
link |
I think that's fine, let's do that for a second.
link |
Hold onto emergent time
link |
and the universe is just doing its thing.
link |
Then assembly time only exists when the universe
link |
starts to write memories through bonds.
link |
So let's just say there's rocks running around,
link |
you know, when the bond happens and selection starts,
link |
suddenly there are, the universe is remembering cause
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in the past and those structures will have effects
link |
So suddenly a new type of time emerges at that point,
link |
which has a direction.
link |
And I think Sean Carroll at this point
link |
might even turn the podcast back on and go,
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okay, I can deal with that, that's fine.
link |
But I'm just basically trying to condense the conversation,
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say, hey, let's just have time fundamental
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and see how that screws with people's minds.
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You're triggering people by saying fundamental.
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Well, you just say, like, let's say.
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Why am I, look, I'm walking through the wall.
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Why should I grow up in a world where time,
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I don't go back in time.
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I don't meet myself in the past.
link |
There are no one, there are no aliens coming
link |
from the future, right?
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You know, it's just like.
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No, no, no, but that's not, no, no, no, hold on a second.
link |
That's like saying we're talking about biology
link |
or like evolutionary psychology
link |
and you're saying, okay, let's just assume
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that clothing is fundamental.
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People wearing clothes is fundamental.
link |
It's like, no, no, no, wait a minute.
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You can't, like, I think you're gonna get in a lot of trouble
link |
if you assume time is fundamental.
link |
Give me one reason why I'm getting into trouble
link |
with time being fundamental.
link |
Because you might not understand
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the origins of this memory that might be deeper.
link |
Like this memory, that could be a thing
link |
that's explaining the construction of these
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higher complexities better than just saying
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it's a search, it's chemicals doing a search
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for reusable structures that they can like
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then use as bricks to build a house.
link |
Okay, so I accept that.
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So let's go back a second because it's a kind of,
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I wanted to drop the time bomb at this part
link |
because I think we can carry on discussing it
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for many, many, many, many, many days, many months.
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But I'm happy to accept that it might be wrong.
link |
But what I would like to do is imagine a universe
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where time is fundamental and time is emergent
link |
and ask, let's just then talk about causation
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because physicists require that causation.
link |
So this is where I'm gonna go.
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Causation emerges and it doesn't exist at the micro scale.
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Well, that clearly is wrong
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because if causation has to emerge at the macro scale,
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life cannot emerge.
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So how does life emerge?
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Life requires molecules to bump into each other,
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produce replicators, those replicators
link |
need to produce polymers.
link |
There needs to be cause and effect at the molecular level.
link |
There needs to be an agardic, non agardic
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to an agardic transition at some point.
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And those replicators have consequence,
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material consequence in the universe.
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Physicists just say, oh, you know what?
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I'm gonna have a bunch of particles in a box.
link |
I'm gonna think about it in a Newtonian way
link |
and a quantum way and I'll add on an arrow of time
link |
so I can label things
link |
and causation will happen magically later.
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Explain causation and they can't.
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The only way I can reconcile causation
link |
is having a fundamental time
link |
because this allows me to have a deterministic universe
link |
that creates novelty.
link |
And there's so many things to unpack here
link |
but let's go back to the point.
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You said, can assembly theory work with emergent time?
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Sure it can, but it doesn't give me a deep satisfaction
link |
about how causation and assembly gives rise
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to these objects that move through time and space.
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And again, what am I saying to bring it back?
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I can say without fear, take this water bottle
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and look at this water bottle
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and look at the features on it.
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There's writing, you've got a load of them.
link |
I know that causal structures gave rise to this.
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In fact, I'm not looking at just one water bottle here.
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I'm looking at every water bottle
link |
that's ever been conceived of by humanity.
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This here is a special object.
link |
In fact, Leibniz knew this.
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Leibniz who was at the same time of Newton,
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he kind of got stuck.
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I think Leibniz actually invented assembly theory.
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He gave soul, the soul that you see in objects
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wasn't the mystical soul, it is assembly.
link |
It is the fact there's been a history of objects related
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and without the object in the past,
link |
this object wouldn't exist.
link |
There is a lineage and there is conserved structures,
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causal structures have given rise to those.
link |
And you're saying it's just a simpler view
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if time is fundamental.
link |
And it shakes the physicist's cage a bit, right?
link |
Because I'm gonna say, but I think that.
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I just enjoy the fact that physicists are in cages.
link |
I think that, I mean, I would say that, you know,
link |
Lee Smolin, I don't want to speak for Lee.
link |
I mean, I'm talking to Lee about this.
link |
I think Lee also is an agreement
link |
that time has to be fundamental,
link |
but I think he goes further.
link |
You know, even in space,
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I don't think you can go back to the same place in space.
link |
I've been to Austin a few times now.
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This is my, I think third time I've been to Austin.
link |
Is Austin in the same place?
link |
No, the solar system is moving through space.
link |
I'm not back in the same space.
link |
Every event in the universe is unique.
link |
Doesn't mean we can't go back though.
link |
I mean, you know, let's just, you know,
link |
rest this conversation, which was beautiful,
link |
with a quote from the Rolling Stones
link |
that you can't always get what you want,
link |
which is you want time to be fundamental,
link |
but if you try, you'll get what you need,
link |
which is assembly theory.
link |
Okay, let me ask you about,
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continue talking about complexity,
link |
and to clarify with this beautiful theory of yours
link |
that you're developing,
link |
and I'm sure we'll continue developing
link |
both in the lab and in theory.
link |
Yeah, it can't be said enough,
link |
just the ideas you're playing with in your head are just,
link |
and we've been talking about are just beautiful.
link |
So if we talk about complexity a little bit more generally,
link |
maybe in an admiring romantic way,
link |
how does complexity emerge from simple rules?
link |
Okay, the nice algorithm of assembly is there.
link |
I would say that the problem I have right now is,
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I mean, you're right, we can, about time as well.
link |
The problem is I have this hammer called assembly,
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and everything I see is a nail.
link |
So now let's just apply it to all sorts of things.
link |
We take the Bernard instability.
link |
The Bernard instability is you have oil,
link |
if you heat up oil, let's say on a frying pan,
link |
when you get convection, you get honeycomb patterns.
link |
Take the formation of snowflakes, right?
link |
Take the emergence of a tropical storm,
link |
or the storm on Jupiter.
link |
When people say, let's talk about complexity in general,
link |
what they're saying is,
link |
let's take this collection of objects
link |
that are correlated in some way,
link |
and try and work out how many moving parts there are,
link |
how this got, how this exists.
link |
So what people have been doing for a very long time
link |
is taking complexity and counting what they've lost,
link |
calculating the entropy.
link |
And the reason why I'm pushing very hard on assembly
link |
is entropy tells you how much you've lost.
link |
It doesn't tell you the microstates are gone.
link |
But if you embrace the bottom up with assembly,
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those states, and you then understand the causal chain
link |
that gives rise to the emergence.
link |
So what I think assembly will help us do
link |
is understand weak emergence at the very least,
link |
and maybe allow us to crack open complexity in a new way.
link |
And I've been fascinated with complexity theory
link |
I mean, as soon as I could,
link |
I learned of the Mandelbrot set,
link |
and I could just type it up in my computer and run it,
link |
and just show it and see it kind of unfold.
link |
It was just this kind of,
link |
this mathematical reality that existed in front of me,
link |
I just found incredible.
link |
But then I realized that actually we were cheating.
link |
We're putting in the boundary conditions all the time.
link |
We're putting in information.
link |
And so when people talk to me
link |
about the complexity of things,
link |
I say, but relative what, how do you measure them?
link |
So my attempt, my small attempt, naive attempt,
link |
because there's many greater minds than mine
link |
on the planet right now thinking about this properly.
link |
And you've had some of them on the podcast, right?
link |
Just absolutely fantastic.
link |
But I'm wondering if we might be able to reformat
link |
the way we would explore algorithmic complexity
link |
What's the minimum number of constraints we need
link |
in our system for this to unfold?
link |
So whether it's like, if you take some particles
link |
and put them in a box,
link |
at a certain box size, you get quasi crystallinity
link |
coming out, right?
link |
But that quite, that emergence, it's not magic.
link |
It must come from the boundary conditions you put in.
link |
So all I'm saying is a lot of the complexity that we see
link |
is a direct read of the constraints we put in,
link |
but we just don't understand.
link |
So as I said earlier to the poor origin of life chemists,
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you know, origin of life is a scam.
link |
I would say lots of the complexity calculation theory
link |
is a bit of a scam
link |
because we put the constraints in,
link |
but we don't count them correctly.
link |
And I'm wondering if...
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Oh, you're thinking and starting to drop
link |
as assembly theory, assembly index
link |
is a way to count to the constraints.
link |
So assembly theory doesn't do,
link |
doesn't lower any of the importance of complexity theory,
link |
but it allows us to go across domains
link |
and start to compare things,
link |
compare the complexity of a molecule,
link |
of a microprocessor, of the text you've writing,
link |
of the music you may compose.
link |
You've tweeted, quote,
link |
"'Assembly theory explains why Nietzsche understood
link |
we had limited freedom rather than radical freedom.'
link |
So we've applied assembly theory
link |
to cellular automata in life and chemistry.
link |
What does Nietzsche have to do with assembly theory?
link |
Oh, that gets me into free will and everything.
link |
So let me say that again.
link |
Assembly theory explains why Nietzsche understood
link |
we had limited freedom rather than radical freedom.
link |
Limited freedom, I suppose, is referring to the fact
link |
that there's constraints or what is radical freedom?
link |
So Sartre was like believed in absolute freedom
link |
and that he could do whatever he wanted in his imagination.
link |
And Nietzsche understood that his freedom
link |
was somewhat more limited.
link |
And it kind of takes me back to this computer game
link |
that I played when I was 10.
link |
So I think it's called Dragon's Lair.
link |
Do you know Dragon's Lair?
link |
I think I know Dragon's Lair, yeah.
link |
Dragon's Lair, I knew I was being conned, right?
link |
Dragon's Lair, when you play the game,
link |
you're lucky that you grew up
link |
in a basically procedurally generated world.
link |
That was RPG a little bit.
link |
No, it's like, is it turn based play?
link |
It was a role playing game.
link |
But really good graphics and one of the first laser disks.
link |
And when you actually flick the stick,
link |
you took, it's like it was like a graphical adventure game
link |
And when I played this game, I really, you know,
link |
you could get through the game in 12 minutes
link |
if you knew what you were doing without making mistakes,
link |
just play the disk, play the disk, play a disk.
link |
So it was just about timing.
link |
And actually it was a complete fraud
link |
because all the animation has been prerecorded on the disk.
link |
It's like the Black Mirror, the first interactive
link |
where they had all the, you know,
link |
several million kind of permutations of the movie
link |
that you could select on Netflix.
link |
I've forgotten the name of it.
link |
So this was exactly that in the laser disk.
link |
So you basically go left, go right, fight the yoga,
link |
And when you flick the joystick at the right time,
link |
it just goes to the next animation to play.
link |
It's not really generating it.
link |
And I played that game and I knew I was being had.
link |
So to you, Dragon Lair is the first time you realized
link |
that free will is an illusion.
link |
And why does assembly theory give you hints
link |
about free will, whether it's an illusion or not?
link |
Yeah, so no, so not tightly.
link |
If I do think I have some will and I think I am an agent
link |
and I think I can interact and I can play around
link |
with the model I have of the world
link |
and the cost functions, right?
link |
And I can hack my own cost functions,
link |
which means I have a little bit of free will.
link |
But as much as I want to do stuff in the universe,
link |
I don't think I could suddenly say,
link |
I mean, actually this is ridiculous.
link |
Cause now I say I could try and do it, right?
link |
Like I'm suddenly give up everything
link |
and become a rapper tomorrow, right?
link |
Maybe I could try that,
link |
but I don't have sufficient agency
link |
to make that necessarily happen.
link |
I'm on a trajectory.
link |
So when in Dragon's Lair,
link |
I know that I have some trajectories that I can play with
link |
where Sartre realized he thought
link |
that he had no assembly, no memory.
link |
He could just leap across and do everything.
link |
And Nietzsche said, okay, I realize I don't have
link |
full freedom, but I have some freedom.
link |
And the assembly theory basically says that,
link |
it says, if you have these constraints in your past,
link |
they limit what you were able to do in the future,
link |
but you can use them to do amazing things.
link |
Let's say I'm a poppy plant and I'm creating some opiates.
link |
Opiates are really interesting molecules.
link |
I mean, they're obviously great for medicine,
link |
cause great problems in society.
link |
But let's imagine we fast forward a billion years,
link |
what will the opioids look like in a billion years?
link |
Well, we can guess because we can see
link |
how those proteins will evolve
link |
and we can see how the secondary metabolites will change.
link |
But they can't go radical.
link |
They can't suddenly become, I don't know,
link |
like a molecule that you find in an OLED in a display.
link |
They will have some,
link |
they will be limited by the causal chain that produced them.
link |
And that's what I'm getting at,
link |
saying we are unpredictably predictable
link |
or predictably unpredictable within a constraint
link |
on the trajectory we're on.
link |
Yeah, so the predictably part