Lex Fridman Podcast - #279 – Alien Debate: Sara Walker and Lee Cronin

Starting point is 00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Sarah Walker and Lee Cronin. They have each been on this podcast once before individually, and now, for their second time, they're here together. Sarah is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist. Lee is a chemist, and, if I may say so, the real life manifestation of Rick from Rick and Morty. They both are interested in how life originates and develops both life here on earth and alien life, including intelligent alien civilizations out there in the cosmos. They are colleagues and friends who love to explore this agree and debate nuanced points about alien life, and so we're calling this an alien debate. Very few questions to me are as fascinating as what do aliens look like? How do we recognize them?

Starting point is 00:00:51 How do we talk to them? And how do we make sense of life here on earth in the context of all possible life forms that are out there? Treating these questions with a seriousness and rigor they deserve, so that I hope to do with this conversation and future ones like it. Our world is shrouded in mystery. We must first be humble to acknowledge this, and then be bold and diving in and trying to figure things out anyway. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor.

Starting point is 00:01:22 Check them out in the description as the best way to support this podcast. We got uncrews for adventure, linoed for cloud computing, expresscpm for privacy, roca for style and athleta greens for performance. She's wise and my friends. And now onto the full ad reads, as always no ads in the middle. I tried to make this interesting, but if you skipped them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by a new sponsor called Uncruz Adventures. Small ship cruises sailing to Alaska, Mexico, Costa Rica and Hawaii. Jews from hiking, kayaking, whale watching, seeing the northern lights, and much, much,

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Starting point is 00:04:01 with a hundred bucks in free credit. That's linode.com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. I use them to protect my privacy on the interior webs. I've used them for many many many years. I love ExpressVPN, the big red sexy button, just makes my heart sing. There's a lot of reasons you want to use a VPN, ExpressVPN being the best one. First of all, ISPs are still collecting your data in that service provider. It doesn't matter if you're using Chrome and Cognito mode, they can still see all the shady stuff you do on the internet. Second, you can change the location if you watch different shows on Netflix and

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Starting point is 00:05:35 They have a place here in Austin, but more than the place the people, both brilliant and passionate, and they know what they want to do, which is to design a stylish eyewear. I was actually did a long run today, and I wore the shades. Part of the reason I actually wore the shades, it wasn't even that sunny, is I want to kind of escape from the world. I want to hide myself in the world. Sometimes it's when I hide away. It's the introverted me. I was listening to a good audio book, and I'm going to hide away. It's the introverted me. I was listening to a good audio book and I went into hide away and looked good while doing it.

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Starting point is 00:07:26 here is my conversation with Sarah Walker and Lee Cronin. First of all, welcome back, say welcome back. You guys, I'm a huge fan of yours. You're incredible people. I should say thank you to Sarah for wearing really awesome boots. We'll probably overlay a picture later on, but why the hell didn't you dress up, please? No, this is me dressed up. You were saying that your pink, that your thing is pink. My thing is black and white, the simplicity of it. Where's the pink? When did the pink, when did it hit you? The pink is your car. I became pink about

Starting point is 00:08:16 I don't know actually maybe 2017. Did you know me? Are you when you first? I think I met you pre pink. Yeah, yeah. So about about 2017, I think I just decided I was boring. And I needed to make a statement. And red was too bright. So I went pink, salmon pink. Well, I think you were always pink. You just found yourself in 2017. There's an amazing photo of him where there's like

Starting point is 00:08:40 everybody in their black gown and he's just wearing the pink pants. Well, that wasn't a wagon in university. It's totally nuts. 100 year anniversary, they got me to give the plenary and they's just wearing the pink pants. Well, that wasn't a wagon in university. It's totally nuts. 100 year anniversary. They got me to give it a plenary and they didn't find the outfit for me. So they were wearing these silly hats and these gowns and there was me dressed up in pink looking like a complete idiot.

Starting point is 00:08:54 We're definitely going to have to find that picture and overlay a big full screen slow motion. All right, let's talk about aliens. We'll find places we disagree, and places we agree, life, intelligence, cautions, and this universe, all of that. Let's start with a tweet from Neil to Grass Tyson stating his skepticism about aliens wanting to visit Earth. Quote, how ego-centric of us to think that space aliens who have mastered interstellar travel across the galaxy would give pardon the French, would give a shit about humans on earth. So let

Starting point is 00:09:34 me ask you, would aliens care about visiting earth, observing, communicating with humans? Let's take a perspective of aliens, maybe Sarah, first, are we interesting in the whole spectrum of life in the universe? I'm completely biased, at least as far as I think right now, we're the most interesting thing in the universe. So I would expect based on the intrinsic curiosity that we have, and how much I think that's deeply related to the physics of what we are, that other intelligent aliens would want to seek out examples of the phenomena they are to understand themselves better. And I think that's kind of a natural thing to want to do. And I don't think there's any kind of judgment on it being a lesser being or not. It's like saying you have nothing to learn by talking to a baby.

Starting point is 00:10:23 You have lots to learn probably more than you two talking to somebody that's 90. So, yeah, so I think they absolutely would. So whatever the phenomena is that is human, there will be an inkling of the same kind of phenomenal within alien species and that will be seeking that same. I think there's got to be some features of us that are universal and I think the ones that are most interesting and I hope I live in an interesting universe, are the ones that are driven by our curiosity and the fact that our intelligence allows us to do things that the universe wouldn't be able to do without things like us existing. We're going to define a lot of terms.

Starting point is 00:11:03 One of them is interesting. Yes. That's very interesting term to try to define a lot of terms. One of them is interesting. That's very interesting term to try to define. Ali, what do you think are humans interesting for aliens? Let's take it from our perspective. We want to go find aliens in a species quite desperately. So if we put the shell on the other foot, of course, we're interesting, but I'm wondering and assuming that we're at the right technological capabilities to go searching for aliens Then that's interesting. So what I mean is if there needs to be a massive leap in technology that we don't have How will aliens prioritize coming to earth and other places? But I do think That they would come and find us because they want to find out about our culture

Starting point is 00:11:43 What things are universal? Yeah, what about I mean I'm a chemist, so I would say, well, is the chemistry universal, right? Are the creatures that we're going to find making all this commotion? Are they made of the same stuff? What does their science look like? Are they off planet yet? I guess there's, so I think that Neil deGrasse Tyson is being slightly pessimistic and maybe trying to play the tune that the universe is vast and it's not worth them coming here. I don't think that, but I just worry that maybe we, we don't have the ability to talk to them, we don't have the universal translator, we don't have the right physics. But sure, they should come. We are interesting. I want to know if they exist. It would make it easier if they just came.

Starting point is 00:12:28 So again, I'm going to use your tweets like it's Shakespeare and analyze it. So Sarah tweeted thinking about aliens, thinking about aliens. So how much do you think aliens are thinking about other aliens, including humans? So you said we humans want to visit, like we're longing to connect with aliens. Why is that? Can you expect that? Is that an obvious thing that we should be? Like what are we hoping to understand by meeting aliens? Exactly. As an introvert, I ask myself the solid time, why go out on a Friday night to meet people? What are you hoping to find? I'm curious. So when I saw Sarah put that tweet, I think I answered it

Starting point is 00:13:13 actually as well, which was we are thinking about trying to make contact. So they're almost certain, certainly, certainly are. But maybe there's a number of classes. There are the those aliens that have not yet made contact with other aliens like us. Those aliens that have made contact with just one other alien, and maybe it's an anticlimax in slime, right? And aliens that have made contact with not just one set of intelligent species, but several. That must be amazing, actually. Literally, there is some place in the universe. There must be one alien civilization. It's not made contact with not one, but two other intelligent civilizations. So they must be thinking about, there must be entire degree courses on aliens thinking about aliens and cultural universal cultural

Starting point is 00:13:59 norms. Do you think they will survive the meeting? And by the way, Lee did respond saying, that's all the universe wants. So Sarah said, thinking about aliens, think about aliens, Lee said, that's all the universe wants. And then Sarah responded, cheeky universe we live in. So cheeky is a cheeky version of the word interesting,

Starting point is 00:14:21 all of which we'll try to define mathematically. cheeky might be harder than interesting. Because there's humor in that too. Yes. I think there's a mathematical definition of humor, but we'll talk about that a bit. Oh interesting. Yeah, I'm still there. So if you're a graduate student, alien looking at multiple alien civilizations, do you think

Starting point is 00:14:40 they survive the encounters? I think there's a tendency to anthropomorphize a lot of the discussions about alien life, which is a really big challenge. So usually when I'm trying to think about these problems, I don't try to think about us as humans, but us as an example of phenomena that exists in the universe that we have yet to explain. And it doesn't seem to be the case that if I think about the features, I would argue our most universal about that phenomenon, that there's any reason to think that a first encounter

Starting point is 00:15:11 with another lineage or example of life would be antagonistic. I think, yeah, and I think there's this kind of assumption, I mean, going back to Neil deGrasse Tyson's quote, I mean, it kind of bothers me because there's a, I mean, I'm a physicist, so I know we have a lot of egos about how much we can describe the world, but that there's this like, because we understand fundamental physics so well, we understand alien life and we can kind of extrapolate, and I just think that we don't. And the quest there is really, you know, really to understand something totally new about the universe and that thing just happens to be us. I agree. I agree. There's something else more profound.

Starting point is 00:15:52 I think Neil was just being again, he's just trying to stir the pot. I would say from a, from a contingency point of view, I want to know how many ways does the universe build structures, build memories, right? That, and then I want to know if many ways this is a universe build structures build memories right that and then I want to know if those memories can interact with each other and if you have to Different origins of life and then origins of intelligence and then these things become conscious Surely you want to go and talk to them and figure out What commonalities you share and it might be that we're just unable to conceive of what they're gonna look like

Starting point is 00:16:23 They're just gonna be completely different, you know, infrastructure. But surely we'll want to go and find out a map and surely curiosity is a property that evolution has made on Earth. And I can't see any reason that it won't happen elsewhere because curiosity probably exists because we want to find innovations in the environment. We want to use that information to help We want to find innovations in the environment. We want to use that information to help our technology. And also, curiosity is like planning for the future. Are they going to fight us? Are they are we going to be able to trade with them?

Starting point is 00:16:54 So I think that Neil's just, I don't know, maybe, you know, I mean, give a shit. That's really, I think that's really down on earth, right? How would aliens categorize humans, do you think? How would we? So let's put the other way around. Slide category. Maybe, no, no, no, we, maybe we could, they have things a bit odd, right? Look at Instagram, Twitter, all these people taking selfies. I mean, does the universe is the ultimate state of consciousness, thinking beings that take photographs themselves and upload them to an insur-wet with other thinking beings looking at each other's photos. So I think that they will be... What's wrong with that?

Starting point is 00:17:30 I did not say there was anything wrong with it. It's consciousness manifested at scale. Yeah, selfies, Instagram. Like the mirror test at scale. Yeah, I do think that curiosity is really the driving force of why we have our technology, right? If we weren our technology, right? If we weren't curious, we wouldn't go out left the cave. So I think that,

Starting point is 00:17:50 so I think that Niels got it completely wrong, in fact. Actually, of course they'd want to come here. It doesn't mean they are coming here. We've seen evidence for that. I guess we can argue about that, right? But I think that we want, I desperately, I know that Sarah does too, but I won't speak for you. You're here. I desperately want to have missions to look for

Starting point is 00:18:09 life in the solar system right now. I want to map life over the solar system. And then I want to understand how we can go and find life as quickly as possible at the nearest stars. And also at the same time do it in the lab, just to compensate, you know. So sure. Yeah, I was just one more point on this. If you think about sort of what's driven the most like features of our own evolution as a species, you could try to map that to alien species. I always think like optimism is what's going to get us furthest.

Starting point is 00:18:37 And so I think a lot of people always think that it's like war and conflict is going to be the way that alien species will, expand out into the cosmos. But if you just look at how we're doing it and how we talk about it, so is our future and space is always built from narratives of optimism. And so it seems to me that if intelligence does get out in the universe that it's going to be more optimism and curiosity driving it, then more in conflict because those things end up crushing you. So there might be some selective filter.

Starting point is 00:19:07 Of course, this is me being an optimist. I'm a half full kind of person, but... Is it obvious that curiosity, not obvious, but what do you think is curiosity, a more powerful force in the universe than violence and the will to power? So, because you said you frame curiosity as a way to also plan on how to avoid violence, which is an interesting frame you have curiosity, but I could also argue that violence is a pretty productive way to operate in the world, which is like that's one way to protect yourself, the best defense is offense. I'm not qualified to answer this, but I'll have a go. I think Violet, let's not go out of

Starting point is 00:19:48 Violet. That's the summary of this podcast. I would, yeah, maybe I would, let's call it Violence, by call it Eurasia. So if you think about the way evolution works, all the way, I obviously call that semi-theehyde, but I worry, so if you say you build pro, you curiosity allows you to open up avenues, new graphs, right? So new features you can play. What, what the ability to erase those things allows you to start again and do some pruning. So the universe, I think curiosity gets you first, curiosity gets you rockets at land, it gets you robots that can make drugs, it gets you poetry and art and communication.

Starting point is 00:20:27 And then, you know, I often think, wouldn't it be great in bureaucracy to have another world war, not literally a world war now, please no world, not war, but the equivalent so we can get, remove all the admin bureaucracy, right, all the admin violence, get rid of it, and start again, you know what I mean? Because you get layers and you get redundant systems built. So actually a reset, so let's not call it violence, a reset in some aspects of our culture and our technology allows us to then build more important things without the, because how many, you know, how many cookies do I have to click on? How many things, how many, how many extra clicks I do,

Starting point is 00:21:04 how many, how many have in the future of my life that I could remove and a bit of a reset would allow us to start again. Maybe that's how I suppose our encounter aliens will be. Maybe they will fight with us and say, we're not as excited by you, we thought we'll just get rid of you. So they might want a reset Earth. Yeah. Why not? To be like, let's see how the evolution runs again. This seems like they've, there's nothing new happening here. They're observing for a while.

Starting point is 00:21:32 This is just not, let's keep it more fun. Let's start with a fish again. I like how you equated violence to resetting your cookies. I suppose that's the kind of violence in this, this model world where words are violence resetting your cookies. I suppose that's the kind of violence. In this this modern world where words are violence resetting cookies. How does it work that came from? I'm completely... Yeah, that's poetic really. Okay, so let's talk about life. What is life? What is non-life? What is the line between life and non-life? And maybe at any point we

Starting point is 00:22:03 can pull in ideas of assembly theory. Like how do we start to try to define life? And for people listening, Sussera identifies as a physicist and Lee identifies as a chemist. Of course, they are very interdisciplinary in nature, in general. But so what is life? Sarah.'ll low-ask that question because it's so

Starting point is 00:22:29 absurdly big. I know, I love it. It's my absolute favorite question in the whole universe. So I think I have three ways of describing it right now and I like to say all three of them because people latch on to different facets of them. And so the whole idea of what Leon and I are trying to work on is not to try to define life, but to try to find a more fundamental theory that explains what the phenomena we call life. And then it should explain certain attributes. And you end up having a really different framing than way people usually talk. So the way I talk about it three different ways.

Starting point is 00:22:59 Life is how information structures matter across space and time. Life is, I don't know, this one's from you, actually, simple machines, constructing more complex machines. The other one is the physics of existence, so to speak, which is life is the mechanism the universe has to explore the space of what's possible. That's my favorite. So, can I add on to that? Or could you say the physics one again? Oh, the physics of

Starting point is 00:23:29 existence? Yeah, the physics of existence, I don't know what to call it, you know, like if you think of all the things that could exist, only certain things do exist. And I think life is basically the universe's mechanism of bringing things into physically existing in the in the moment now. Yeah. And what's another one? We were debating this the other day. So if you think about a universe that has nothing in it, that's kind of hard to conceive

Starting point is 00:23:54 of, right? And this is where the physicists really go wrong. They think of a universe of nothing in it, they can't. And you think that that existence is really hard to think? Not exactly. Yeah. And then you think of a universe with everything in it. That's really hard.

Starting point is 00:24:07 And you just have this white blob, right? This is everything. But the fact we have discrete stuff in the universe beyond, say, planets. So you've got star space, planet stuff, right? The boring stuff. But I would define life. We'll say that life is where there are architectures, any architectures and we

Starting point is 00:24:26 should stop fixating on what is building the architectures to start with. And the fact that the universe has discrete things and it is completely mind blowing. If you think about it for one second, the fact there's any objects at all, and there's, because for me, the object is a proxy for a machine that built it, some information being moved around, actuation, sensing, getting resource, and building these objects. So for me, everyone's been obsessing about the machine, but I'm like, forget the machine,

Starting point is 00:25:04 let's see the objects, but I'm like, forget the machine, let's see the objects, you know, and I think in a way that assembly theory, we realize maybe a few months ago that assembly theory actually does account for the soul and the objects, not mystically like, say, shell-drex-morphic resonance or liveness is monodology, seeing souls in things. But when you see an object, and I've said this before, but this object is evidence of thought, and then there's a lineage of those objects. So I think what is fascinating is that, you put it much more elegantly,

Starting point is 00:25:34 but the barrier between life and non-life is accruing enough memories to then actuate. So, so what that means is there are contingency, there are things that happen in the universe get trapped, these memories then have a causal effect on the future. And then when you get those concentrated in a machine, you're actually able in real time, able to integrate the past, the present with the future and do stuff, that's when you are most alive.

Starting point is 00:26:01 Oh, you being the machine. Yes. Wait a minute. Why is the object? So one of the ways to define life, this Sarah said, it's simple machines creating complex machines. So there's a million questions there. So how the hell does a simple machine create a complex machine? Right. So the this is what we were talking about at the beginning, you have a minimum replicate. So molecule. So this is what I was trying to convince Sarah of the mechanism get there years

Starting point is 00:26:28 ago, I think, but then you've been building on it and saying, you have a small, you have a molecule that can copy itself, but then that has to be some variability. Otherwise, it's not going to get more functional. So you need about add bits on. So you have a minimum molecule that can copy itself, but then it can add bits on and that can be copied as well. And those add-ons can give you additional function to be able to acquire more stuff to exist. So existence is weird, but the fact that there is existence is why there is life. And that's why I realized a few days ago that there must be it. That's why alien life must be everywhere because there is existence. Is there like a conservation of cheeky stuff happening?

Starting point is 00:27:12 So like, how can you keep injecting more complex things? Like, um, doesn't the machine that creates the object need to be as or more complex, more powerful than the things it creates. So how can you get complexity from simplicity? So the way you get complexity from simplicity is that you, I'm just making this up, but this is kind of my notion that you have a large volume of stuff. So you're able to get seats if you like random cues from the environment. So you just use those objects to basically write on your tape,

Starting point is 00:27:48 ones and zeros, whatever. And that is necessarily rich, complex, okay? But it has a low assemblyness, but even though it has a high assembly number, we can talk about that. But then when you start to then integrate that all into a smaller volume as over time and you become more autonomous, you then make the transition. I don't know what you think about that.

Starting point is 00:28:13 I think the easiest way to think about it is actually, which I know is a concept you hate, but I also hate it, which is entropy, but people are more familiar with entropy than what we talk about in assembly theory. And also the idea that, like, say physics as we know it, involves objects that don't exist across time, or as we would say, low memory objects. So one of the key distinctions that that low memory objects, yeah. So physics is all low memory objects. But the physicists are creators of low memory objects or manipulators-memory objects. Quick clip. But physicists are creators of low-memory objects or manipulators of low-memory objects.

Starting point is 00:28:49 Absolutely. It's a very nice way. Putting it, OK, sorry. I got it. Sorry, I tend to keep it around. No, no, no, it's fine. I like it too. It's very funny.

Starting point is 00:28:57 But I think it's a good way of phrasing it, because I think this kind of idea we have in assembly theory is that physics, as, a physics as we know it has basically removed time as being a physical observable of an object. And the argument I would make is that when you look at things like water bottles or us, we're actually things that exist that have a large extent in time. So we actually have a physical size in time and we measure that with something called the assembly index in molecules, but presumably everyone should have sort of a, do you wanna explain what assembly?

Starting point is 00:29:34 Yeah, let's, you know what? Let's step back and start at the beginning. What is assembly theory? Lee sent me some slides. There's a big sexy paper coming out probably maybe I don't know. Almost almost that's that's also a summary of science. We're almost done. Yeah. We're almost done. I think we're ready to start an interesting discussion with our peers. Right. You're the machine that created the object and we'll see what the object takes us.

Starting point is 00:30:01 Yes. Right. You're the machine that created the object and we'll see what the object takes us. All right. So what is assembly theory? Yeah. Well, I think the easiest way for people to understand is to think about assembly and molecules, although the theory is very general, it doesn't just apply to molecules. And this was really leased in sight.

Starting point is 00:30:18 So it's kind of funny that I'm explaining it, but um, okay. Okay. All right. I'm ready. I'm ready. You can tell me where I get the check marks minus. But it's your fairies. Yeah, I know. But imagine a molecule. And then you can break the molecule apart into elementary building blocks. They happen to be bombs. And then you can think of all the ways for molecular assembly theory. You can think of all the ways of building up the original molecule. So there's all these paths that you can assemble it. And the sort of rules or assembly is you can use pieces that have been generated already.

Starting point is 00:30:48 So it has this kind of recursive property to it. And so that's where kind of memory comes into assembly theory. And then the assembly index is the shortest path in that space. So it's supposed to be the minimal amount of history that the universe has to undergo in order to assemble that particular object. And the reason that this is significant is we figured out how to measure that with a mass spec in the lab.

Starting point is 00:31:12 And we had this conjecture that if that minimal number of steps was sufficiently large, it would indicate that you required a machine or a system that had information about how to assemble that specific object because the combinatorial space of possibilities is getting exponentially large as the assembly and X is increasing. So just sorry to interrupt, but so that means there's a sufficiently high assembly index that if observed in an object is an indicator that something life like created it or is the object itself life like created it or is the object itself life like? Both But you might want to make the distinction that a water bottle is not life

Starting point is 00:31:51 But it would still be a signature that you were in that domain of physics and I might be alive so So there will be potentially a lot of arguments about where the line at which assembly index a lot of arguments about where the line at which assembly index does interesting stuff start to happen. The point is we can make all the arguments, but it should be experimentally observable and Lee can talk more about that part of it, but the point I want to make about it is there was always this intuition that I had that there should be some complexity threshold in the universe above which you would start to say whatever physics governs life actually

Starting point is 00:32:24 becomes operative. And I think about it a little bit like we have Planks constant, which, you know, and we have the fine structure constant. And then this sort of assembly threshold is basically another sort of potentially constant of nature. It might depend on specific features of the system, but which we debate about sometimes. But then when you're past that, you have to have some other explanation than the current

Starting point is 00:32:49 explanations we have in physics. Because now you're in high memory, the thing is actually require time for them to exist and time becomes a physical variable. The path to the creation of the object is the memory. So you need to consider that. Yeah, but the point is that's a feature of the object. So when I think of all the things in this room, we see the projection of them as a water bottle,

Starting point is 00:33:16 but assembly theory would say that this is a causal graph of all the ways the universe can create this thing. That's what it is as an object. And we're all interacting a causal graph. And most of the creativity in the biosphere is because a lot of the objects that exist now are huge in their structure across time for a billion years of evolution to get to us. Is it possible to look at me and infer the history that led to me?

Starting point is 00:33:40 If you as a human, you as an individual might be hard you as a representative of a population of objects that have high assembly with similar causal history and structure that you can communicate with i.e. other humans, you can offer a lot probably. Yeah, also with them. Which we do genomically even. I mean, it's not like we have a lot of information in us. We can reconstruct histories from assembly saying something slightly deeper. Yeah, one thing to add, I mean, it's not just about the object,

Starting point is 00:34:05 but the objects occur and not just objects for a high assembly number because you can have random things that have a high assembly number, but they must have, there must be a number of identical copies. So you know you're getting away from the random, because you could take a snapshot. This is why it's like, hey, entropy, I love entropy, when you use correctly, but it's about the problem of entropy, you have to have a labeler.

Starting point is 00:34:26 And so you can label the beginning and the end to start and the finish. You know, what you can do in assembly is say, oh, I have a number of objects in abundance. They all have these features. And then you can infer. And one of the things that we debated a lot, particularly during lockdown, because I almost went insane trying to crush the producing assembly equation. So we came up with the assembly equation. I had, just imagine this. So you have this string where, oh, actually it makes me, makes me think trying to remember it. It was so, it did my head in for a long time.

Starting point is 00:34:57 Correct. Yeah, because I couldn't, so if you just have a string of say words, say, you know, a series of words, series of letters. So you just have AA, BBB words, say, you know, a series of words, series of letters. So you just have AAABBCCCCDD and you find that object and you just have 4A, 4B, 4C, 4D, together, boom. Then, and that really, that you measured that, you physically measured that string of letters. Then, what you could do is you can infer sub graphs of maybe the 4As, the 4Bs, the 4Cs and the 4Cs, but you don't see them in the real world, you just infer them. And I really got stuck with that because there's a problem to try and work out what's the difference between a long, you know,

Starting point is 00:35:37 physical object and the assembly space that objects, that we realized the best way to put that is inferring time. So although we can't infer your entire history, we know at some point the four A's were made, the four B's were made, the four C's were made, the four D's were made, and they all got added together. And that's one really interesting thing that's come out of the theory, but the killer, when we knew we were going beyond standard complexity theories, but incredibly successful is that we realize we can start to measure these things for real across domains. So the assembly index is actually intrinsic property of all stuff that you can break

Starting point is 00:36:17 into components, particularly molecules are good because you can break them up into smaller molecules into atoms. The challenge will be making that more general across all the domains, but we're working on it right now and I think the theory will do that. So components, domains, so you're talking about basically measuring the complexity of an object in what biology, chemistry, physics, that's what you mean by domains. If tests, sociology, computers, complexity of memes, you know, memes, yeah, what was that ideas? Yeah, I mean, so what ideas are objects in a similar series? Yeah, they are physical things. They're just pictures of the causal graph. I mean, the fact that I can talk to you right now is because we're exchanging

Starting point is 00:37:02 structure of our assembly space. The fact that I can talk to you right now is because we're exchanging structure of our assembly space. So conversation is the exchanging structures in assembly space. What is assembly space? When I started working on origins of life, I was writing about something called top down causation, which a lot of philosophers are interested in, and people that worry about the mind-body problem. But the whole idea is, if we have the microscopic world of physics is causally complete, it seems like there's no room

Starting point is 00:37:31 for higher level causes like our thoughts to actually have any impact on the world. And that seems problematic when you get to studying life and mind because it does seem that quote-unquote emergent properties do matter to matter. And so, and then there's this other sort of paradoxical situation where information looks like it's disembodied. So, we talk about information like it can just move from any physical system to any other physical system. And it doesn't require, like you don't have to specify anything about the substrate to

Starting point is 00:38:01 talk about information. And then there's also the way we talk about mathematics is also disembodied, right? Like the platonic world of forms. And I think all of those things are hinting that we really don't know how to think about abstractions as physical things. And really, I think what Assembly Theory is pointing to is what we're missing there is the dimension of time. And if you actually look at an object being extended across time, what we call information

Starting point is 00:38:31 and the things that look abstract are things that are entangled in the histories of those objects, their features of the overlapping assembly space. So they look abstract because they're not part of the current structure, but they're part of the structure, if you thought about it as the philosophical concept of a hyper-object, an object that's too big in time for us to actually to resolve. And so I think information's physical,

Starting point is 00:38:54 it's just physical in time, not in space. Two hyper-object, two difficult for us to resolve. So we're supposed to think about of life as this thing that stretches through time and there's a causation chain that led to that thing. And then you're trying to measure something with the assembly index about the assembly index is the ordering the or like you could think of it as like a partial ordering of all the things that can happen. So in thermodynamics, we coarse green things by temperature and pressure and assembly theory, we coarse green by the number of copies of an object

Starting point is 00:39:31 and the assembly index, which is basically, if you think of the space of all possible things, it's like a depth of how far you've gone into that space and how much time was required to get there. In the shortest possible version, which is not average, because can't you just 3D? You're gonna be with that question.

Starting point is 00:39:48 Oh, not 3D. Can't you always 3D print the thing? I haven't been to heart. No, because I had such fights, so Sarah's team and my team are writing this paper at the moment. And I think we kind of share the beginning you were like, no, that's not right. Oh, yes, right. And we're doing this for a bit. And then the problem is we build a theory and build the intuition. There's some certain features, right, of the theory that almost felt like I was being religious about say, right, you have to do this.

Starting point is 00:40:15 Yeah. A good assembly theorist does this, does this, does this. And Sarah's postdoc Daniel and my postdoc Amber Shek and they were both brilliant. They're brilliant, but they were like, no, we don't buy that. I was like, it is, they were like, well, Lee actually, I thought you're the first to say that, you can't explain it, you can't do an experiment that doesn't exist. That saved me and I said to Abyshek, Abyshek's my postdoc in Glasgow, Daniel, as Sarah's postdoc in ASU. I was like, I have the experimental data.

Starting point is 00:40:48 So when I basically take the molecules and chop them up in the mass spec, the assembly number is never the average, it's always the shortest. It's an intrinsic property, and then the penny drop for Abyshek's is okay. So I had these things that we had to believe to start with, or to trust, and then we've done the math,

Starting point is 00:41:03 and it came out, and they now have the shortest path. Actually. It's up, it explains why the shortest path, here's why the shortest path is important, not the average. Shortest path needs you to identify when the universe is basically got a memory, not an average. So what you want to be able to do is to say, what is the minimum number of features that I want to be able to see in the universe? When I find those features that I want to be out of sea in the universe, when I find those features that I know the universe has had a coherent memory, and is basically a life. And so that gives you the lower bound. So that's like, of course, there's going to be other parts.

Starting point is 00:41:38 We can be more ridiculous, right? We can have other parts, but it's just the minimum. So probabilistically, at the beginning, because assembly theory was built as a measure for biosignatures, I needed to go there. And then I realized it was intrinsic, and then Sarah realized it was intrinsic, and these high-projects were coming, and we were kind of fusing that notions together. And then the team were like, yeah, but if I have enough energy and I have enough resources, I might not take the short path. I might go a bit longer. I might take a really long path because it allows me then to do something

Starting point is 00:42:11 else. So what you can do is, let's say I've got two different objects, A and B, and they both have different short paths to get them. But then if you want to make A and B together, they will have a compromise. So in the joint assembly space, that might be an average, but actually it's the shortest way you can make both A and B with a minimum amount of resource in time. So suddenly you then layer these things up. And so the average becomes not important, but it's like, as you literally overlap those sets,

Starting point is 00:42:42 you get a new shortest path. And so what we realize time and time again, when we're doing the math, the shortest path is intrinsic, is fundamental, and is measurable, which is kind of mind blowing. So what we're talking about, some basic ingredients, maybe we'll talk about that, what those basic ingredients could be, and how many steps, when you say shortest path, how many steps it takes to turn those basic ingredients into the final meal. So how to make a pizza? What's the shortest way to make a pizza?

Starting point is 00:43:14 And that's our pie. And that will pie, that's right. And the pizza and the pizza are going to pie together. Scratch. So there's a lot of ways. There's the shortest way, and you take the full spectrum of ways and there's probably an average duration for a noob to make an apple pie. Is the average interest thing still? If you measure the average length of the path to assemble a thing, does that tell you something about the way nature usually does it?

Starting point is 00:43:47 Versus something fundamental about the object, which I think is what you're aiming at with the assembly index. Yeah, I mean, look, we all have to quantify things. The minimum path gives you the lower bounds. You know you're detecting something, you know you're inferring something. The average tells you about really how the objects are existing in the ecosystem or the technology. And there has to be more paths explored because then you can happen upon other memories and then condense them down. I'm not making too much sense, but if you look and say, let's just say, maybe we're going to get to alien civilizations later, right? But I would argue very strongly that alien civilization A and alien civilization B

Starting point is 00:44:32 They're different assembly spaces. So they're kind of going to be a bit messed up if they happen to come on another But only when they find some joint overlap in their technology because if aliens come to us and we they don't share any of the causal graph We've showed but hopefully they share the periodic table and some other ambons and things. So we're going to have to really think about the language to talk to us aliens by inferring, by using assembly theory to infer their language, their technology and other bits and bobs, and the shortest path will help you do that quickly. All right. So all aliens in this causality graphs have a common ancestor in the, if the

Starting point is 00:45:11 building blocks are the same, which means they live in the same universe as us. So it depends on how far back in time you go though, but the universe has all the same building blocks. Yeah. And like we have to assume that. So at least there's there's not different classes of causality graphs. Right. The universe doesn't just say like here you get the the red causality graph and you get the blue one. There's basic ingredients and their geograffically constrained or constrained in space or time or something like that. and their geographically constrained, or constrained in space or time or something like that.

Starting point is 00:45:45 They're constrained in time, because only by the virtue of the fact that you need enough time to have passed for some things to exist. So the universe has to be big enough in time for some things. So just the one point on the shortest path versus the average path, which I think we'll get to this is you had a nice way of saying it's like the minimal compression

Starting point is 00:46:03 is the shortest path for the universe to produce that. But it's also like the first time in the ordering of events that you might expect to see that object. But the average path tells you something about the actual steps that were realized and that becomes an emergent property of that object's interaction with other objects. So it's not an intrinsic feature of that object. It's a feature of the interactions with other objects. So it's not an intrinsic feature of that object. It's a feature of the interactions with other things. And so one of the nice features of assemblies,

Starting point is 00:46:29 you've basically gotten rid of, you just look at the things that exist and you've gotten rid of the mechanisms for constructing them in some sense, like the machines are not as important in the current construction of the theory. Although I would like to bridge it to some ideas about constructors.

Starting point is 00:46:47 But then you can only communicate with things as Lee was saying if you have some overlap in the past history. So if you had an alien species that had absolutely no overlap, then there would be no means of communication. But as we become, you know, as we progress further and further in time and more things become possible because the assembly spaces are larger, because you can have a larger assembly space in terms of index and also just the size of the space, because it's exponentially growing, then more things can happen in the future.

Starting point is 00:47:17 And the example I like to give is actually when we made first contact with gravitational waves, because, you know, that's an alien phenomena that's been permeating our plate not alien in life phenomenon by alien like something we had never knew existed. It's been you know like we're you know there's gravitational waves rippling through this room right now. But we had to advance to the level of Einstein writing down his theory of relativity and then a hundred years of technological development to even quote unquote see that phenomena. So the, okay, to see that phenomena, our causal graph have to start intersecting.

Starting point is 00:47:54 Yeah, we needed the idea to emerge first, the abstraction, right? And then we had to build the technology that could actually observe features of that abstraction. So the nice promising thing is over time the graph can grow so we can start overlapping eventually. Yeah, so the interesting feature of that graph is there was an event, you know, 1.4 billion years away of a black hole merger that we detected on our detector. And you know, now suddenly we're connected through this communication channel with this distant event in our universe that, you know, if you think about 1.4 billion years ago, it was happening on this planet, or even further

Starting point is 00:48:28 back in time, that, you know, there is common physics underlying all those events, but even for those two events to communicate with. No, I understand what you were going on about the other week. Yeah, I'm sorry. It's a really abstract example. But it's true. Your causal grass are not over-lapping. Yeah, so, well, let's just say now our causal grass

Starting point is 00:48:46 are overlapping in the deep past. Yeah, I like it. So you made it. I totally missed it. Yeah, you made a connection with it. Now I do like that. No, you can tell me what your epiphany is now. That's good.

Starting point is 00:48:57 Because I was and I should get the jokes before 30 seconds after. So, yeah, I get it now. All right. No, it's all right. I was. Two minutes ago. Oh, I was low on the uptake care. I I was able to comprehend what you were talking about when saying the channel communicating to the past, but what you're saying is we were able to infer what happened 1.4 billion years ago. We don't take to the gravity wave. I mean, I think it's

Starting point is 00:49:21 amazing that, you know, at that time, we weren that time, we were just becoming multicellular, right? It's like insane. And then we progress from multicellularity through to technology and build the detector and then for, yeah, and then we just extrapolate backwards. So so although we haven't didn't do anything back to the graph back in time, we understood this existence then overlapped going forward. Well, that's because our graphs are larger. Yeah, but that means that has a consequence. One of the things I was trying to say is, I think, I don't know, Sarah might be, she can correct me, information first, and I'm an object first kind of guy. So I mean, as things that get constructed, there has to be this transition in random

Starting point is 00:50:02 constructions. So when the object that's being constructed by the process bakes in that memory and those memories they're an add-on, an add-on, an add-on. So as it becomes more competent and life is about taking those memories and compressing them, increasing their autonomy. And so I think that, you know, like the cell that we have in biology on Earth is our way of doing that. That really the maximum ability to take memories and to act on the future. Oh, I think that's mathematics. Um, no, mathematics doesn't exist. No, but that's the point. The point is that abstractions do exist. They're real physical things. We call them do exist. They're real physical things. We call them abstractions, but the point about mathematics that I think is... So I don't disagree. I think you're object first and I'm information first,

Starting point is 00:50:51 but I think I'm only information first in the sense that I think the thing that we need to explain is what what abstractions are and what they are as physical things. Because of all of human history, we've thought that there were these properties that are disembodied, exist outside of the universe, and really they do exist in the universe, and we just don't understand what their physics is. So I think mathematics is a really good example. We do theoretical physics with math, but imagine doing physics of math, and then thinking about math as a physical object. And math is super interesting. I think this is why we think it describes

Starting point is 00:51:26 reality so well because it's the most copyable kind of information. It retains its properties when you move it between physical media, which means that it's very deep and so it seems to describe the universe really well, but it probably is because it's information that's very deep in our past and it's just we invented a way of communicating it very effectively between us. Isn't math more fundamental? Isn't the assembly of the graph? Isn't basically, I'm going to sound completely boring. It's like, math, assembly theory invented math, but it did. It has to be.

Starting point is 00:51:59 Okay. So what is math exactly? It's a nice simplification, a simple description of what. So we have a computer scientist, a physicist, and a chemist here. Why can't you do a bar? I think the chemist is going to define math, and you guys can correct me. Go for it. I would say... Lay, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let, let So on that point, what does it mean to be object first versus information first? So what's the difference between object and information when you get to that loaf on the mental level? Well, I might change my view. So I'm stuff first, the stuff.

Starting point is 00:52:55 And then when stuff becomes objects, it has to invent information. And then the information acts on more stuff and becomes more objects. So I think there is a transition to information that occurs when you go from stuff to object. It's mean time, though. Yeah, information is emergent. Not emergent. Information is actionable memories from the universe. So when memories become actionable, that's information.

Starting point is 00:53:23 But there's always memory, but it's not actionable. Yeah. And then it's not information. Great. Actionable is what you can create. You can use it. If you can't use it, then it's not information. If you can't transmit it, if you, if it doesn't have any causal consequence, or in the forest, I don't understand why is that not information. It's not information. It's, it's, um, it's,'s not information. It's stuff happening, but it's not calls... Yeah, we can...

Starting point is 00:53:51 This is happening. No, in that happening requires information. No, get... No, no, no. Stuff is always happening. No. This is where the physicists get... And the mathematicians get themselves in a loop, because they think the universe...

Starting point is 00:54:02 I mean, I think, say, Max Tecmark and is very playful and say, like the universe, universe, just math, but the universe is just math. Then we might as well not bother having any conversation because the conversation really written, we just might as well go to the future and say, can you just give us the conversations happened already? So I think the problem is that mathematicians are so successful labeling stuff and so successful understanding understanding stuff through those labels, they forget that actually those labels had to emerge and that information had to be built on those memories. So memory in the universe, so constraints, graph, when they become actionable and the graph can loop back on itself

Starting point is 00:54:38 or interact with other graphs and they can intersect, those memories become actionable and therefore their information. And I think you just changed my mind on something pretty big, but I don't have a pen. So I can't write it down later, but roughly the idea is, is like you've got these two graphs of objects of stuff. They have memories, and then when they intersect, and then they can act on each other, that's maybe the mechanism by which information

Starting point is 00:55:05 is then so then you can then abstract. So when one graph can then build another graph and say, hey, you left to go through the nonsense we have to go through. Here's literally the way to do it. Stuff always comes first, but then when stuff builds the abstraction, the abstractions can be then teleported onto what the abstractions is the looping back power. Okay. And I make it, I don't know, I got stuck. Yeah. So first, a God made stuff. And after that, when you start to be able to form abstractions,

Starting point is 00:55:35 that's one of the God issue, memory week, the universe can remember. God is the memory of the universe. Yeah. Remember, otherwise there's not way. Did you deciphering that statement? Hundreds of years from? What are the he was being by this? Hey, look, don't, don't dis my, my one line is.

Starting point is 00:55:51 I, I wasn't didn't it. It was just a 10 to 15 seconds to come up. I don't know what it means. What does it mean? Okay. Wait, we need to, how do we get on to this? We were time, causality, mathematics. So what is mathematics in this picture of stuff, objects, memory, and information? What is that? It's the most efficient labeling scheme that you can apply to lots of different graphs.

Starting point is 00:56:28 Well, the labeling scheme doesn't make it sound useful. Can I try? Yeah, sure, please. If you rejected my definition of mathematics on shocks. No, I'm sorry. But it's correct. Go on, sorry. Excellent. No, I mean, I think I think we have a problem, right? Because we can't not be us like we're stuck in the shells we are and we're trying to observe the world. And so mathematics looks like it has certain properties.

Starting point is 00:56:52 And I guess the thought experiment I find is useful is to try to imagine if you were outside of us looking at us as physical systems using mathematics, what would be the specific features you associate to the property of understanding mathematics and being able to implement it in the universe, right? And when you do that, mathematics seems to have some really interesting properties relative to other kinds of abstraction we might talk about, like language or artistic expression. One of those properties is the one I mentioned already that is really easy to copy between physical media. So if I give you a mathematical statement, you almost immediately know what I mean. If I tell you this guy is blue, you might say, is it cold

Starting point is 00:57:33 bulb blue? Is it your blue? What color blue do you mean? And you have a harder time visualizing what I actually mean. So mathematics carries a lot of meaning with it when it's copied between physical systems. It's also the reason we use it to communicate with computers. And then the second one is it retains its property of actually what it can do in the universe when it's copied. So the example I like to give there is think about like Newton's Law of Gravitation. It's actually, it's a compressed regularity of a bunch of phenomena that we observe in the universe.

Starting point is 00:58:04 But then it'll then that information actually is a causal in a sense that it allows us to do things we wouldn't be able to do without that particular knowledge and that particular abstraction. And in this case, like launch satellites to spacers and people to Mars or whatever it is. So if you look at us from the outside and you say, what is it for physical systems

Starting point is 00:58:21 to invent a thing called mathematics, and then to use, and is it for physical systems to invent a thing called mathematics and then to use and then it to become a physical observable, mathematics is kind of like the universally copyable information that allows new possibilities faces to be opened in the future because it allows this kind of ability to map one physical system to another and actually understand that the general principle. So is it helping the overlap of causal graphs then by mapping? Oh, I think that's the explanation for what it is in terms of the physical theory of assembly. It would be some feature of the structure of the assembly spaces of causal graphs and their relationship to each other. So for example, and I mean, this is things that we're going to have to work out over the next few years.

Starting point is 00:59:06 I mean, we're in totally untarded conceptual territory here. But as is usual, diving off the deep end, but I would expect that we would be able to come up with a theory of like, why is it that some physical systems can communicate with each other? Like language, language is basically because we're objects extended over time and some of the history of that assembly space actually overlaps. And when we communicate, it's because we actually have shared structure in our causal history. Let me have another quick go at this.

Starting point is 00:59:35 So I think we all agree. So I think we take mathematics for granted because we've gone through this chain, we all share a language now. okay? And we can, well, we share language, so we have languages that we can make interoperable. And so whether you're speaking, I don't know, all the different dialects of Chinese, all the different dialects of English, French, German, whatever, you can interconvert them. The interesting thing about mathematics now is that everybody on planet Earth, every human being and computers, I'm sure that common language. That language was constructed by a process in time.

Starting point is 01:00:12 So what I'm trying to say is assembly, invent, and math is those, those pro, right from the, you know, mathematics didn't occur, it didn't exist before life. Abstraction was invented by life, right? That doesn't mean that the universe wasn't capable of mathematical things. Wait a minute. Can we just ask that old famous question is math invented or discovered? So when you say assembly invented or whatever, you mean just... Well, someone might be afraid of some ways of mathematical theory, but sorry. Right. Are we arguing? Exactly.

Starting point is 01:00:42 Are we arguing now? That's what it sounds like. Are we discovering? Exactly. Are we arguing now? That's what it sounds like. Are we discovering? No. Oh well, yes and no. I would say, you call mathematics a language. I would say that. I'm pretty sure that there are some very common seeds of mathematics in the universe, right? But actually, not the mathematics that we are finding now is not discovered. It's invented. But even though I think those two terms are very triggering

Starting point is 01:01:08 and I don't think that necessarily useful because I think that what people do, the mathematicians that say, oh, mathematics was discovered because they live in a universe where there is no time and it just all exists. But what I'm saying is, and I think, in the same way you can create, let's say I'm going to go and create and make a piece of art. Did I make that piece of art? Or did I discover

Starting point is 01:01:33 it? Discover it. Like inventing the airplane. Did I invent the airplane? Let's stick with the airplane. The airplane is a good one. Let's say I discovered the airplane. One in a way, the universe discovered the airplanes. It just chucked a load of atoms together, and load around them human beings, or do stuff, and then we, we discovered the aeroplane in the space of possibilities. But here's the thing, when the space of possibilities is so vast, infinite, almost,

Starting point is 01:01:58 and you're able to actualize one of those in an object and you are inventing it. So in mathematics, because there are infinite number of theorems, the fact you're actually pulling, there's no difference between inventing a mathematical structure and inventing the aeroplane. They're the same thing, but that doesn't mean that now the aeroplane exists in the universe, it's something weird about the universe. So I think that the more, this is the thing that I, you know, probably the more memory required for the object, the more invented it is. So when a mathematical theorem has a, has a needs more bytes to store it, the more invented it is and the less bytes, the more discovered it is.

Starting point is 01:02:39 But everything then is invented. It's just more or less invented. Absolutely. Okay. You first have to generate everything as it goes. Yeah. And it wasn't there in the beginning. And the way we're thinking it, when you're thinking about the difference between invented and discovered is because we're throwing away all the memory. Yeah. So if you start to think in terms of causality and time, then those things become the same. Everything is invented. And the idea is to make everything intrinsic to the universe. So I think one of the features of assembly theory is we don't want to have external observers. There's been this long tradition and physics of trying to describe the universe from the outside and not the inside.

Starting point is 01:03:16 And the universe has to generate everything itself if you do it from the inside. Assembly theory describes how the universe builds itself. They take you 15 seconds to say that. assembly theory describes how the universe builds itself. They take you 15 seconds to say that. Yeah, I'm told to come up with that. No, I've thought about before. Okay. Good line.

Starting point is 01:03:33 It's like, it's making fun again. No, I'm not making fun. I'm having fun. There's a different. Oh, that's good. All right. I'm you. She's inventing. I'm not all intimidated.

Starting point is 01:03:41 And there's a causal history. Did that fun? You mentioned that there's no way to communicate with aliens until there's overlap in the causal graph. Communication includes being able to see them. And like what are we, this is the question is, is communication any kind of detection? And if so, what do aliens look like as you get more and more overlap on the grap? You're assuming, this is the, so when you see them and they see you, you're assuming they have vision, they have the ability to construct in 3D and in time, there's a lot of assumptions

Starting point is 01:04:23 we're making. What detection? All right, let's step back. So yes, okay, you're right. So when in the English language when we say the word C, we mean visually they show up to a party and it's like, oh, wow, that's an alien. That's visual. That's 3D. That's okay. And that's also assuming scale, spatial scale of something that's visible to you. So it can't be microscopic or it can't be so big that you don't even realize that's an entity. Okay. But other kinds of detection too.

Starting point is 01:04:53 I would make it more abstract and go down. I was thinking this morning about how to rewrite the IRSC by message in assembly theory and also to abandon binary, because I don't think aliens necessarily, why should they have binary? Well, they have some basic elements with which to do information exchange. Let's make it more fundamental, more universal. So we need to think about what is the universal way of making a memory and then we should re-encode our receiver in that way. What's more basic than zeros and ones? Well, it's really difficult to

Starting point is 01:05:26 get out of that causal chain because we're so, so let's embrace the idea of zero for a moment. It took human beings a long time to come up with the idea of zero. Now you've got the idea of zero, you can't throw away, it's so useful. To discover the idea of zero. Yeah, to discover an event. I don't know, but it took a long time, so it was invented. That's right. Yeah, I think zero was invented. Exactly. So it's not given the aliens know what zero is. That's the one. Massive assumption. It's a useful, it's a useful discovery. You're saying if you break the cause of chain, there might be some other more efficient way of, I want to meet him and ask him for a shortcut, But you won't be able to ask him until well, so I interrupted you and I think you're making good point. I was just

Starting point is 01:06:09 going to say, well, look, thank you. Sorry. Rather than saying these internet tweet at him for the root interruptions. I'm sorry. No, it's okay. Maybe it's change. How do we say, oh, I don't know what it's like to be an alien. I would like to know. What is the full spectrum of what aliens might look like to us? Now that we've laid this all on the table of like, all right, so there has to be some overlap and this causal chain that led to them. What are we looking for? What do you think we should be looking for? So you met, you mentioned mass spec measuring certain objects that aliens could create or

Starting point is 01:06:51 alien are aliens themselves, um, show up to a planet or maybe not a planet or maybe what, what the, what the hell is the basic object we're trying to measure? Our cells of brain assembly index of this car cells of break. This is assume that they are, they're metabolized. They've got an energy source and they've they've they're a size that we can recognize Let's give our car cells a break because there could be aliens that are so big We don't recognize what's seeing them. There might be aliens that are so small We don't yet have the ability to you know, we don't microscopes. You can see you know far enough away It's that it just wouldn't be I see them. So that's a good range.

Starting point is 01:07:25 So let's just make a range. Let's just be very anthropocentric and say, we're going to look for aliens roughly our size and technology our size, because we know it's possible on Earth, right? I mean, a reasonable thing to do would be to find exoplanets that in the same zone as Earth in terms of heat and stuff. And then say, hey, if there is that same kind of gravity, same

Starting point is 01:07:45 kind of stuff, we could reasonably assume that the alien life there might use a similar kind of physical infrastructure. And then we're good. So then your question becomes really relevant and say, right, let's use vision, sound, touch. And so, okay, that's really nice. that if there's a lot of aliens out there, there's a good likelihood if you match to the planet that they're going to be in the same spatial and temporal, operating in the same spatial and temporal domain as humans. Okay, within that, what, what, what, than that, what did they look like visually? What do they sound like?

Starting point is 01:08:31 What do they, oh God, this sounds creepy. Taste like, what do they, smell like, smell like, that's the sound. It sounds like our clubhouse, and we was like, can we have sex of aliens? Which was basically me saying, I'm passionate, passionate love. But it wasn't actually about sex, it was about, is our chemistry compatible, right?

Starting point is 01:08:43 Is there some? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, can we, yeah. Are they edible too? They could be very edible. They could be delicious. That's why I want to see some aliens, right? Because I think, are there, I think evolution, um, I mean, evolution exploits symmetry, right? Because why, why generate memory, why generate storage, the need for storage space when you can use symmetry? So, and symmetry is quite maybe quite effective in allowing you to mechanically design stuff, right? So maybe alien, you could be reasonable to assume that aliens could have, they could be bipedal, they could be symmetric in the same way,

Starting point is 01:09:21 might have a couple of eyes, or a of senses. We can make that. And perhaps this is whole zoo of different aliens out there. And we'll never get to be able to classify some of the weird aliens we can't interact with because they have made such weird stuff. But we are just going to look at, we're going to find aliens that look most like us. Why not? Because those are the first ones we're likely to see. Yeah. But I think it's really hard to imagine what the space of aliens is because the space is huge. Because one of the arguments that you can make about wildlife emerges in chemistry is

Starting point is 01:09:52 because chemistry is the first scale in terms of building up objects from elementary objects. That the number of possible things that could exist is larger than the universe can possibly make all at once. So you imagine you have two planets, and they're cooking some geochemistry. Our planet invented one kind of biochemistry. And presumably, as you start building up

Starting point is 01:10:16 the complexity of the molecules, the chances of the overlap in those trajectories, those causal chains being built up is probably very low. And it gets lower and lower as it gets farther advanced along its evolutionary path. So I think it's very difficult to imagine predicting the technologies that aliens are gonna have. I mean, it's so, you're looking at basically planets

Starting point is 01:10:36 have kind of convergent chemistry, but there's some variability, and then you're looking basically at the outgrowth into the possibility space for chemistry. So do you think we would detect the technology, the objects created by aliens before we detect the aliens? Possibly. So when you're talking about measuring assembly index,

Starting point is 01:10:54 don't you think we would detect the garbage first, like at the outskirts of alien civilizations, is this just gonna be trash? I think I would come back to Aerosybo. The Aerosybo message sent from the Aerosybo telescope built by Drake, I think, and say, how's Aerosybo spelled? AR ECIBL. Yes.

Starting point is 01:11:16 Thank you. And there we go. They got out there. That's this telescope that sent the message that you're trying to ask. So that message was sent where it was was beamed at a star, a specific star, and it was sent out many years ago. And what they did, so this is why I was pushing on binary,

Starting point is 01:11:34 it's a binary message. I think it's a semi-prime link number of characters, so I think 27 E3 by 23, I think, and it basically represents human bit proton,, binary, human beings, DNA, male and female, and it's really cool. But I'm just wondering if it could be done not making any of this because it's made assumptions that aliens speak binary. Why don't make that assumption? Why not just assume that if the difference between physics, chemistry, and biology is the amount of memory that's recordable by the substrates,

Starting point is 01:12:12 then surely the universal thing. I'm going to make some sacrilegious statement which I think is pretty awesome for people to argue with. So this is, we're looking at an image where it's the for people to argue with. So this is, we're looking at an image where it's the the entirety of the message Yeah, encoded in binary and then there's a probably interpretation of different parts of that image. There's a person There's green parts. It looks like for people just listening like a tetra game of Tetris So encoding in minimal ways a bunch of cool information probably So encoding in minimal ways a bunch of cool information probably. Representing all of us at the end. So the top it's kind of teaching us how to count. All of us.

Starting point is 01:12:48 And then it all goes all the way down teaching in chemistry and then just says, but it makes so many assumptions. And I think if we can actually, so look, I think I mean Sarah is much more eloquent expressing this, but I'll have a go and you can correct it if you want, which is like, come we, one of things that Sarah has had a profound effect on the way I look at the origin of life, and this is one of the reasons why we're working together, because we don't really care about the origin of life. We want to make life, make aliens and find aliens, make aliens, find aliens. I think we might have to make aliens in the lab before we find aliens in the universe, right? I think that would be a

Starting point is 01:13:22 cool way to do it. So what is it about the universe that creates aliens? Well, it's selection through assembly theory, creating memories, because when you create memories, you can then command your domain, you can basically do stuff, you can command matter. So we need to find a way by understanding what life is of how the minimal way to command matter, how that would emerge in the universe, and if we want to communicate, I mean, maybe we don't want to necessarily uniformly communicate. What I would do perhaps, if I had, is I would send out lots of probes away from Earth, to have this magic way of communicating with aliens, get them quite a far away from Earth,

Starting point is 01:14:01 plausibly deniable, and then send out the message that would then attract all the aliens, and then basically work out if they were a friend or a foe and how they would hang out. If you're a thief, you're a thief, you're a thief, you're a thief, you're a thief, you're a thief, you're a thief, you're a thief, you're a thief, you're a thief, you're a thief, you're a thief, you're a thief, you're a thief, you're a thief, you're a thief, you're a thief, you're a thief, you're a thief, you're a thief, you're a thief, you're a thief, you're a thief, you're a thief, you're a thief, you're a thief, you're a thief, you're a thief, you're a thief, So aliens need to work out what they are. Once they've worked out what they are, they then can work out how to encode what they are, and then they can go out and send messages. It's like the universal rosetta stone for life in the universe is working out

Starting point is 01:14:34 how the memory is a bit. I don't know, Sarah, you have any, well, whether that you would agree with that. No, I wanted to raise a different point, which is about the fact that we can't see the aliens yet, because we haven't gotten the technology. Presumably, we think assembly theory is the right way of doing it, but I don't think that we know how to go from the data you're describing, like visual data or smell,

Starting point is 01:15:00 to construct the assembly spaces yet. In some ways, I think that the problem of life detection really is the same problem at the foundations of AI that we don't understand how to get machines to see causal graphs, to see reality in terms of causation. So I think assembly and AI are going to intersect in interesting ways, hopefully. But the key point, and I've been trying to make this argument more recently, it might rate an essay on it, is people

Starting point is 01:15:30 talk about the great filter, which is, again, this like Doomsday thing that people want to say, there's no aliens out there, because something terrible happened to them. And it matters whether that's in our past or our future as to the longevity of our species, presumably, which is why people find it interesting. But I think it's not a physical filter.

Starting point is 01:15:49 It's not like things go extinct. I think it's literally, we don't have the technology to see them. And you can see that with microscopes. I mean, we didn't know there were microbes on this table for our tables for thousands of years or telescopes. Like, there's so much of the universe we can't see. And then basically what we have done as a species is outsource our physical perceptions to technology, building microscopes based on our eyes, and building seismometers based on our sense of feelings, like feel

Starting point is 01:16:14 earthquakes and things, and AI is basically retrying outsource what's actually happening in our thinking apparatus into machines now into technological devices. And maybe that's the key technology that's going to allow us to see things like us. And see the universe in a totally different way. But you kind of mentioned the great filter. Do you think there's a way through technology to stop being able to see stuff? So can you take stuff backwards? I think so, yeah. Did you imply that with the great...

Starting point is 01:16:37 Well, no, I mean, I think there's a great perceptual filter in the sense that a example of life evolving on a planet over billions of years has to acquire certain amount of knowledge and technology to actually recognize the phenomena that it is. Well, that's the sense I have is, you talk with physicists, engineers, in general, that there's this kind of idea that we have most of the tools already to hear the signal. But to me, it feels like we don't have any of the tools to see the signal. That's the biggest, like, to hear. We don't have the tools to really hear, to see. Aliens everywhere, we just don't have the...

Starting point is 01:17:20 Exactly. Yeah, well, that's... I mean, I got this in part actually, because you were like, last time I was here, he was like, look at the carpet. You know, could it like if you had alien detector or the carpet be aliens? I mean, I think we really don't.

Starting point is 01:17:33 So it would be, but aliens would never let's have a high assembly index or produce things of high assembly index. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And those things of a high assembly index, you have to have a detector that can recognize high assembly index in all its forms. Yeah. Yes. That's it.

Starting point is 01:17:49 Take data, construct assembly space. Yes. Patterns basically. So one way to think about high assembly index is interesting patterns, all of basic ingredients. I can give you an example, because I mean, in molecules, we've been talking about in objects,

Starting point is 01:18:04 but we're also trying to do it in spatial trajectories. Like imagine you're just like I always get bothered by the fact that like when you look at birds flocking you can describe that with like a simple boys model or like you know people use spin glass to describe animal behavior and those are like really simple physics models. Yet you're looking at a system that you know has agency and there's intelligence in those birds. And I, and basically like you can't help but think there must be some statistical signatures of the fact that they're those are that's a group of agents versus, you know, like, I don't know, you know, the physics example, maybe like, I don't know,

Starting point is 01:18:40 Brownian motion or something. And so what we're trying to do is actually apply assembly to trajectory data to try to say there's a minimal amount of causal history to build up certain trajectories for observed agents. That's like an agency detector for behavior. Do you think it's possible to do some like like, like, boys or those kinds of things, like, artificial, like cellular tomat, play with those ideas with assembly,

Starting point is 01:19:04 with assembly, with assembly theory. Have you found any useful, really simple mathematical simulation tools that allow you to play with these concepts? So like one, of course, you're doing mass spec in this physical space with chemistry, but it just seems what me computer science, perhaps maybe. It seems easier to just agree with you. And sexier in terms of tweeting visual information on Twitter or Instagram more importantly, to play like here's an organism of a low assembly index and here's an organism of a high assembly index and let's watch them create more and more memories and more a higher assembly index. And let's watch them create more and more memories

Starting point is 01:19:46 and more and more complex objects. And so like, a math math, if you get to observe what that looks like, to build up an intuition what assembly index is like. We are building a toolkit right now. So I think it's a really good idea. But what we've got to do is I'm kind of still obsessed with the infrastructure required.

Starting point is 01:20:03 And the one of the reasons why I was pushing on information and mathematics, when human beings, when human beings, we take a lot of the infrastructure for granted. And I think we have to strip that back a bit for going forward, but you're absolutely right. I would agree that I think the fact that we exist in the universe, I can see that lots of people would disagree with the statement,

Starting point is 01:20:24 but I don't think Sarah will, but I don't know. The fact that objects exist, I don't think anyone on earth will disagree that objects can exist elsewhere, right? But they will disagree that life can exist elsewhere. But what perhaps I'm trying to say is that the acquisition, the universe's ability to acquire memory is the very first step for building life.

Starting point is 01:20:49 And that must be, that's so easy to happen. So therefore alien life is everywhere because all alien life is, is those memories being compressed and minimized and the alien equivalent of the cell working. So I think that we will build new technologies to find aliens, but we need to understand what we are first and how we go from physics to chemistry to biology. The most interesting thing, as you say, to these two organisms, different assemblies,

Starting point is 01:21:20 is when you get into biology, biology gets more and more weird, more and more contingent. Physics is probably the chemistry is less weird because the rules of chemistry are smaller than the rules of biology and then going the way to physics where you have a very nicely tangible number of ways of arranging things. And I think assembly theory just helps you appreciate that. And so once we get there, my dream is that we are just going to be able to suddenly are, I mean, I mean, I'm maybe just being really arrogant here. I mean, it's just, again, I've just got this hammer called assembly and everything's now.

Starting point is 01:21:54 But I think that once we crack it, we'll be able to use assembly theory plus telescopes to find aliens. Do you have, Sarah, do you have disagreements with Lee on the number of aliens that are out there? Do actually, yeah. Well, and what they look like. So any of the things we've been talking about is there new ones. It's always nice to discover wisdom through a new one's disagreement. Yeah, I don't, I don't wholly disagree,

Starting point is 01:22:25 but I think, but I do think I disagree. It's kind of, there's nuance there. But we can disagree. No, it's fine. It is nuanced, right? So you made the point earlier that you think, once we discover what alien life is, we'll see alien life everywhere.

Starting point is 01:22:43 And I think I agree on some levels in the sense that I think the physics that governs us as universal. But I don't know how far I would go to say to say that we're a likely phenomenon because we don't understand all of the features of the transition at the original life, which we would say in assembly as you go from the no-memory physics to, there's like a critical transition around the assembly index where assemblyness starts to increase and that's what we call the evolution of the biosphere and complexification of the biosphere. So there's a principle of increasing assemblyness where that goes back to what I was saying at the very beginning about the physics of the possible that the universe basically gets in this mode of trying to make as much possibilities as possible.

Starting point is 01:23:23 Now, how often that transition happens that you get the kind of cascading effect that we get in our biosphere, I think we don't know if we did, we would know the life in the universe. And a lot of people want to say life is common, but I don't think that we can say that yet, so we have the empirical data, which I think you would agree with. But then there's this other kind of thought experiment I have, which I don't like, But then there's this other kind of thought experiment I have, which I don't like, but I did have it, which is you know, if life emerges on one planet and you get this real high density of things that can exist on that planet, is it sort of dominating the density of creation that the universe can actually generate? So like if you're thinking about counting entropy, right?

Starting point is 01:24:00 Like the universe has a certain amount of stuff in it and then you know right? Like the universe has a certain amount of stuff in it. And then, you know, assembly is kind of like an entropic principle. It's not entropy. But the idea is that now transformations among stuff for the actual physical histories of things now become things that you have to count as far as saying that these things exist and we're increasing the number of things that exist. And, uh, and if you think about that cosmologically, maybe Earth is sucking up all the life potential of the whole universe, and don't agree with, but you have to think through them anyway. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:24:48 I just think that you would mind this fascinating. Yeah. I think these sort of counterfactual thought experiments are really good when you're trying to build new theories because you have to think through all the consequences. And there are people that want to try to account for, say, the degrees of freedom on our planet in cosmological inventories of, you know, say, the degrees of freedom on our planet in cosmological inventories of, you know, talking about the entropy of the universe and, you know, and when we're thinking about like cosmological arrow of time and things like that. Now, I think those are pretty superficial

Starting point is 01:25:13 proposals as they stand now, but assembly would give you a way of counting it. And then the question is, if there's a certain maximal capacity of the universe's speed of generating stuff, which we always has this argument that assembly is about time, the universe is generating more states, really what it's generating is more assembly possibilities. And then dark energy might be one manifestation of that, that the universe is accelerating its expansion because that makes more physical space.

Starting point is 01:25:38 And what's happening on our planet is it's accelerating in the expansion of possible things that exist, and maybe the universe just has a maximal rate of what it can do to generate things. And then if there is a maximal rate, maybe only a certain number of planets can actually do that or there's a trade off about the pace of growth on certain planets versus others. I have a million questions there. Would you have thoughts on just a quick, yeah, I'll just say something very quick. It's a thought experiment. No, it's good. I think I get it. Yeah. I think I get it. So what I want to say is, when I mean aliens everywhere,

Starting point is 01:26:08 I mean memories are the prerequisite for aliens via selection and then concentration of selection when selection becomes autonomous. So what I would love to do is to build, say, a magical telescope that was a memory one, or a real one, there would be a memory detector to see selection. So you could get to exoplanets and say that exoplanet looks like there's lots of selection going on there. Maybe there's evolution and maybe there's going to be life. So I'm just trying to say it's narrow down the regions

Starting point is 01:26:39 of space where you say there's definitely evidence of memory as high assembly there or not the high assembly, because that would be life. But so that is where it's capable of happening. And then we're there. And that would also help us frame the search for aliens. I don't know how likely it's to make the transition to cells and all the other things. I think you're right. But I think that is yeah, we just need to get more data. Well, I didn't like the thought experiment, because I don't like the idea that if the universe has a maximal limit on the amount of it can generate per unit time, that our existence

Starting point is 01:27:09 is actually precluding the existence of other things. Well, I would just say one thing. But I think that's probably true anyway because the resource limitations. So I don't like your thought experiment because I think it's wrong. But I do like thought experiment. So what you try to say is like there is a chain of events that goes back that's manifestly culminated with life on earth. And you're not saying that life isn't possible elsewhere, say that there has been these

Starting point is 01:27:30 number of contingent things that have happened that have allowed life to merge here. That doesn't mean that life can't emerge elsewhere, but you're saying that these intersection of events may have maybe concentrated here, right? And I think there's not exactly, it's more like, you know, if you look at, say, the causal graphs are fundamental, maybe space is an emergent property, which is consistent with some proposals and quantum gravity, but also how we talk about things in assembly theory, then the universe is causal graphs generating more structuring causal graphs, right? So this is how the universe is unfolding. And maybe there's a cap on the rate of generation. Like there's only so much stuff that gets made

Starting point is 01:28:11 per update of the universe. And then if there's a lot of stuff being made in a particular region that happens to look the same locally, spatially, that's an after effect of the fact that the whole causal graph is updating. Like, it's, it, it, uh, yeah, I don't, I don't know that. I think that that doesn't work. I don't think it works either, but I don't have a good argument in my mind about. But I do like the idea of the capacity that you know, because you've got a number of states. Yeah, we can come back to it. Well, let me ask you a quick, like, why does, uh, different, like, local pockets of the

Starting point is 01:28:43 universe start remembering stuff. How does memory emerge exactly? So at the origin of the universe, it was very forgetful. That's when the physicists were happiest. There's low memory objects, which is like ultra low memory objects, which is what the definition of stuff. Okay. So how does memory emerge? How does this, this, how does this, the temporal stickiness of objects emerge? I'm going to take a very chemocentric point of you because I can't imagine any other way of doing it. You could think of other ways maybe, but I would say heterogeneity in matter is where the memory, so you must have enough different ways of rearranging matter for there to be a memory. So what that means is if you've got particles colliding in a box, let's just take some elements in a box. Those elements can combine in a combinatorial set of ways.

Starting point is 01:29:49 So there's a combinatorial explosion of the number of molecules or minerals or solid objects, bonds being made. Because there's such a large number, the population of different objects that are possible, this goes back to assembly theory where, assembly theory, there's four types of universes, right? So you've got basically a, and this is what one was up earlier where one universe where you've just got everything is possible, so you can take all the atoms and combine them and make everything. Then you've got basically what is the assembly commentorial where you basically have to accrue information in steps, then you've got

Starting point is 01:30:26 assembly observed, right, and then you've got the object assembly going back. So what that means, what I'm trying to say is like, if you can take atoms and make bonds, let's say you take a nitrogen atom and add it to a carbon atom, you find it in amino acid, then you add another carbon atom on it, in a particular chemical configuration, and another one, all different molecules, they all represent different histories. So I would say for me right now, the most simple route into life seems to be through recording memories and chemistry.

Starting point is 01:30:55 But that doesn't mean there can't be other ways and can't be other emergent effects, but I think if you can make bonds and lots of different bonds, and those molecules can have a causal effect on the future. So imagine a box of atoms, and then you combine those atoms in some way, so you make molecule A from load of atoms, and then molecule A can go back to the box, A can go back to the box and influence the box, then you make a prime or a B or a B C, and that process keeps going, and that's where the memories come from. Is that heterogeneity in the universe from bonding?

Starting point is 01:31:35 I don't know if that makes any sense. In its beginning to flourish at the chemistry level. Yeah. So the physicists have not, not level. Yeah. So the physicists have no, no, like not enough. Yeah. I mean, they're like desperately begging or the physicists would blame freedom and heterogeneous components to play with. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:32:00 That's exactly it. But you think about that, Sarah. I mentioned already, I think it's significant that whatever physics governs life emerges actually in chemistry. It's not relevant at the subatomic scale or even at the atomic scale. It's in, well, atomic scale, because chemistry. But like, when you get into this, this combinatorial diversity that you get from combining things on the periodic table, that's when selection actually matters,

Starting point is 01:32:26 or the fact that some things can exist and others can't exist actually starts to matter. So I think of it like, you don't study gravity inside the atomic nucleus, you study it in terms of large scale structure of the universe or black holes or things like that. And whatever we're talking about as physics of information or physics of assembly becomes relevant at a certain scale of reality.

Starting point is 01:32:46 And the transition that you're talking about, I would think of is just when you get a sufficient density in terms of the assembly space, of like the relationship of the overlap and the assembly space, which is like a feature of common memory, there is this transition to assembly dominated physics, whatever that is, like when we're talking about. And we're trying to map out exactly what that transition looks like. We're pretty sure, you know, of some of its features, but we haven't done all of that. Do you think if you were there in the early universe,

Starting point is 01:33:18 you would have been able to predict the emergence of chemistry and biology. And I ask that because at this stage, as humans, do you think we can possibly predict the length of memory that might be able to be formed later on in this pocket of the universe? Like, how complex is, uh, what is the ceiling of assembly? I think as much time as you have in the past is how much you can predict in the future because that is actually physical in the system and you

Starting point is 01:33:48 have to have enough time for futures of that structure to exist. Wait, let me push back on that. Isn't there somewhere in the universe that's like a shortest path that's been the stretches all the way to the beginning? Yeah. It's building some giant monster. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. So you can predict.

Starting point is 01:34:09 The universe has as much memory as the largest assembly object in the universe. Yeah. Right. But you can't predict. You can't predict any deeper than that. No. Right. So I guess the thing I'm saying is, what intuition do you have about complexity living in the world

Starting point is 01:34:23 that you'd have today, right? Because you just, you can, I mean, I guess how long does it get more fun? Like, isn't there going to be at some point, because there's a, there's a heat death in the universe, isn't it going to be a point of the most, of the highest assembly of object with the highest probability being generated. When is the universe going to be the most fun and can we free ourselves and then live then? Exactly. And will you know when you're having the most fun that this is the best time you're in your

Starting point is 01:34:55 prime? Are you going to do what everyone does which is deny that you're in your prime and the best ears are still out of you? I don't know. What option do you have. I mean, there's a lot of really interesting features here. I just want to mention one thing that might be, is I do think assembly theory applies all the way back to subatomic particles. And I also think that cosmological selection might have been actually, there might have

Starting point is 01:35:21 been, I would say it's a really boring bit, but it's really important for a cosmologist that universes have gone through. Was it least small in your proposed this? Maybe that there is this, the basic universe evolves. You've got the wrong constants. We'll start again. And the most productive constants where you can allow particles to form in a certain way, get propagated to the next universe and go again.

Starting point is 01:35:39 So as she's selecting, goes all the way back and these cycle of universes. And now this universe has been selected because Life can occur and it carries on but I've really butchered that there's a much more So it's some aspect where through the selection process There's parameters that are being fine tuned and we happen to be living in one where there's some level of fine tuning Is there given that um some level of fine tuning. Is there given that, can you still man the case that we humans are alone in the universe? Where are the highest assembly index object in the universe?

Starting point is 01:36:13 Yeah, I can, I guess. Sad though. I mean, so from... It's impossible. Yes, it's possible. Let's assume... Well, we know, I mean, it's possible. So let me, so okay, so there is a particular set of elements on Earth in a particular ratio and the right gravitational constant and the right viscosity of staff being at a move around. The right distance from our Sun, right number of events, we have in Moon, the Earth is rotating,

Starting point is 01:36:47 the late heavy bombardment produced a lot of, brought in the right stuff. And Mars was cooking up, you know, the right molecules first, so it was habitable before Earth, it was actually doing the combinatorial search and before Mars kind of became unhabitable it it ceded Earth with the right Molecular replicators and there was just the right stuff on Earth and that's how the miracle of life occurred Although I find I'm very uncomfortable with that because actually because life came so quickly in the Earth's past. But that doesn't mean that life is easy elsewhere.

Starting point is 01:37:34 It just might mean that the, because chemistry is actually not a long term thing, chemistry can happen quickly. So maybe going on with a steel manning of the argument to say, actually, the fact that life emerged quickly doesn't mean that life is easy. It just means that the chemistry was right on Earth, and Earth is very special. And that's why there's no life anywhere else in the universe. Yeah. So Sarah mentioned this kind of cascading thing.

Starting point is 01:38:00 So what if that's the reason we're lucky, is that we've got to have a rare cascading of accelerating cascading effect in terms of the complexity of things. So, maybe most of the universe is trying to get sticky with the memory, and it's not able to really form it, and then we've got really lucky in that. And it has nothing, like there's a lot of earth like conditions, let's say, but it's just, you really, really have to get lucky on this. But I'm doing experiments.

Starting point is 01:38:31 I'm doing experiments right now. In fact, experiments at Sarah and I are working on because we have some joint funding for this, where we're seeing that the universe can get sticky really quickly. Now, of course, we're being very, and for placentric, we're using laboratory tools, we're using theory, but actually the phenomena of selection, the process of heterogeneous developing heterogeneity, we can do in the lab.

Starting point is 01:38:54 We're just seeing the very first hints of it. And it wouldn't it be great if we can start to pin down a bit more precisely, beginning becoming good basinists for this, for the origin of life and the emergence of life, to finding out what kind of chemistry is we really need to look for. And I'm becoming increasingly confident we'll be out to do that in the next few years. Make life in the lab or make some selection in the lab from inorganic stuff, from sand, from rocks, from dead stuff, from moon. Wouldn't it be great to get stuff from the moon, put it in our origin of life experiment and make moon life? And restrict ourselves to interesting self-replicating stuff that we find on the moon. Sarah, what do you think about this approach of engineering life in order to understand life?

Starting point is 01:39:42 So building life in the machine. Yeah, so I mean, Leigh and I are trying right now to build a vision for a large institute or experimental program basically to do this problem. But I think of it as like, we need to simulate a planet. So like the large Hage-On-Collider was supposed to be simulating conditions just after the Big Bang. Least built a lot of technology in his lab to do these kind of selection engines.

Starting point is 01:40:08 But the question you're asking is, how many experiments do you need to run? What volume of chemical space do you need to explore before you actually see an event? And I like to make an analogy to one of my favorite particle physics experiments, which is superchamia conda that's looking for the decay of the proton.

Starting point is 01:40:25 So this is something that we predicted theoretically, but we've never observed in our universe. And basically what they're doing is every time they don't see a proton decay event, they have a longer bound on the lifetime of proton. So imagine we built an experiment with the idea and mind of trying to simulate planetary conditions physically simulate. You can't simulate origin, life, and the computer. You have to do it in an experiment. Simulate enough planetary conditions

Starting point is 01:40:49 to explore the space of what's possible and bound the probability for an origin, life, event. Even if you're not observing it, you can talk about the probability. But we hopefully, life is not exponentially rare. And we would then be able to evolve in an automated system, alien life in the lab. And if we can do that, then we understand the physics as well as we understand what we

Starting point is 01:41:14 can do in particle accelerators. So, keep expanding physically the simulation, the physical simulation until something happens. Yeah, or build a big enough volume of chemical experiments and evolve them. So if you say volume, you mean like literally volume. I mean, physical volume in terms of space, but I actually mean volume in terms of the combinatorial space of chemistry. So how do you nicely control the combinatorial exploration, the search space? No, I said such that it's always like, you keep grabbing the low hanging fruit.

Starting point is 01:41:47 Yeah, how do you build a search engine for chemistry? I think it's really well. Wish you carry on doing this. I should pretend the physics, be the physicist, you be the chemist. No, so the way to do it is, I will always play a joke, because I like writing grants

Starting point is 01:42:00 to ask for money to do cool stuff. And years ago, I started wanting to build. So I actually wanted to, where the, so I built this robot in my lab called the Computer, which is this robot you can program to do chemistry. Now it's a pro, I made a programming language for the computer and made it operate chem, chemical equipment. Originally, I wrote grants to say,

Starting point is 01:42:24 hey, I want to make an origin of life system. No one would give me any money for this. This is ridiculous. Why are you wanting to make it? It's really hard. It takes forever. You're not a very good origin of life, chemist anyway. Why would we give you any money? And so I turned it around and said, can you, can you, can you give me money to make robots, to make molecules are interesting? And everyone went, yeah, that okay, you can do that. And that's so actually the funny thing is the computer project, which I have in my lab, which is very briefly, it's just basically, it's like literally an automated test tube. And we've made a programming language for the test tube, which is cool. It has come out, it has literally came from this.

Starting point is 01:43:07 I went to my lab one day, so I want to make a search engine to get the origin of life because I have a planet. I thought about doing it in a microfluidic format. Microfluidic is very small channels in device where you can basically have all the pipes produced by lithography and you can have a chamber, maybe say between say 10 and 100 microns in volume, and you can have a chamber maybe say between, say, 10 and 100 microns in volume, and we slot them all together like Lego,

Starting point is 01:43:29 and we can make an origin of life system. And I could never get it to work, and I realized I had to make do chemistry at the kind of test tube level. And what you want to be able to do, yeah, it goes back to the that tweet 1981 1981 the computer We're looking at tweet from Lee in 1981 the computer was a distant dream in oh wow This is the scientist looking back at his the young boy who dreamed in

Starting point is 01:43:58 2018 it was realized spelled in a British way realized Yeah, I'm just not sure. They're dead, but not so now the system that does the physical manifestation, whatever the programming language. The spec tells you to do. Yeah, well, in 1981, I got my first computer, ZX81. What was the computer? ZX81.

Starting point is 01:44:21 ZX81. Sinclair ZX81. It was and I got a chemistry set. And I like the chemistry set and I like the computer and I just wanted to put them together. I thought it wouldn't be cool if I could use the computer to control the chemistry set. And obviously that was insane. And I was like, you know, eight years old, right? Nine years old, going on nine years old. And, um, and then I, I, I invented the computer just because I wanted to build this origin of life grid, right? Which is like literally a billion test tubes connected together in real

Starting point is 01:44:58 time and real space, basically throwing a chemical dice, dice, throw dice, throw dice, throw dice. You're gonna get lucky. And that's what we, I think Sarah and I have been thinking very deeply about, because there's more money being spent on the origin of gravity or looking at the Higgs boson than the origin of life, right? And the origin of life is the, I think,

Starting point is 01:45:21 the biggest question, or not the biggest question, it is a big question, let's put it that way. It is the biggest question or not the biggest question is a big question. That's the biggest question You're okay saying that Is it's not possible once you figure out the origin of life that that's not going to solve That's not actually gonna solve the question of what is life? Like is isn't because you're kind of putting a lot of yeah, I think that's the same problem But you're you're putting is it possible that you're putting too many Too much bets into this origin part maybe the origin thing isn't isn't there always a turtle underneath the turtle

Starting point is 01:45:55 Isn't a stack of turtles because then if you create it in the lab, maybe you need some other stuff Well, that's nothing but the already like you you like in the lab, they're still memory. Yeah. Yes. Right. The experiment is already the product of evolution. Right. And some maybe really deep way, not an obvious way, in some very deep way. So maybe the haters are always going to be like, well, you have to reconstruct the fold. You have to build it for us. Fortunately for us, the haters are not aware of that argument. Well, I know, I know, I just... I'm part of one making that argument usually.

Starting point is 01:46:28 I mean, yeah. I just think that if we create life in the lab, it's not obvious that you'll get to the deep, deep understanding of necessarily what is the line between life and non-life. No, I think so. Well, there's so much here. I'm just like playing devil. So much here, but let me play there was I've got back in a previous conversation, right? And say, yeah, I will. Why not?

Starting point is 01:46:53 We're not. We've got time. School. Celerol Thomas. Yes. Celerol Thomas are these very simple things where you color squares, black or white, and implement rules and play them in time, and you can get these very complex patterns coming out. There's nice rules, there are cheering complete rules, and I would argue that so or so

Starting point is 01:47:16 as other, don't really exist on their own, they have to exist in a computing device. If that, whether it's computing devices, a piece of paper, an abstraction, a mathematician drawing a grid, or a framework. Now, so I would argue, CAAs are beautiful things, simple, going complex, but the complexity is all borrowed from the lithography, not numbers. Right, now let's take that same argument

Starting point is 01:47:44 with the the chemistry experiment origin of life. Cat, what you need to be able to do is go out and I'm inspired to do this to go out and look for CAs occurring nature. You know, let's kind of let's find some some CAs that just emerge in our universe and for people just start to interrupt for people just listening in general, I think what we're looking at is a cellular automata, where again, as we described, there is just binary, black or white squares, and they only have local information, and they're born, and they die.

Starting point is 01:48:21 And you would think nothing interesting would emerge, but actually what we're looking at is something that I believe is called glider guns, or a glider gun, which is moving objects in this multi-cell space that look like their organisms that have much more information, that have much more complexity than the individual building components, in fact, look like they have a long term memory. While the individual components don't seem like they have any memory at all.

Starting point is 01:48:53 Yes, the argument here is that has to exist on all this layer of infrastructure, right? And they look simple. And then what I would make, I would make a value, say what I think C.A. is a really simple one everywhere, is say show me how the immersion is substrate. Now let's go to the origin of life where or machine. I don't think we want to do the origin of life just any origin is good. So what we do, so we literally have our sand shaker, shake the sand, like massive grid of chemistry experiments, shaking sand, shaking whatever. And then because we know what we've put in, so we know where how we've cheated. And the same way we see, we know

Starting point is 01:49:28 how we've cheated, we know what the micro we know the number of operations needed, we know how big a grid we want to get this. If we could then say, okay, how can we generate this recipe in the lab and make a life form? What contingency did we need to put in and we're up front about how we cheated? Okay, say, oh, you had to shake it. Was it periodic? Planet rotates. It's tried, comes in and out. So, and then we can start to basically say, okay, how difficult is it for these features to be found? And then we can look for exoplanets and other features. So, I think Sarah's absolutely right. We want to explain to people we're cheating.

Starting point is 01:50:08 In fact, we have to cheat. No one has given, I'm good at writing grants or used to be. I'm not very good right now, I'll keep getting rejected. But I writing a grant for a planet in 100 million years, no grant fund there is going to give me that. But maybe money to make a kind of a grid, a computer grid, origin of life, computer space, in physical space, and just do it. So Sarah said something, which is you can't simulate the origin of life in a computer, so like in simulation, why not?

Starting point is 01:50:38 What, what, what are your, you said it very confidently, so is it possible? And why would it be very difficult like with your intuition there? I think it's very difficult right now because we don't know the physics. But if you go based on principles of assembly theory and you think every molecule is actually a very large causal graph, not just the molecule, then you have to simulate all the features of those causal graphs. And I think it becomes computationally intractable. You might as well just build the experiment.

Starting point is 01:51:05 Oh, because you have, in the physical space, you have all the objects with all the memories. Yes. And in the computer, you'd have to copy them or reconstruct. Yes. Yeah. That's a beautifully put. And I would say that lots of people, you just don't have enough resource. It's easier to actually do the physical experiment because we are literally,

Starting point is 01:51:28 I review the physical experiment almost like a computational experiment. We're just outsourcing, it's just basically, we're just outsourcing all the matrix. And algebra. On your point about the experiment being also an example of life, it's almost like you wanna design, it's like all of us are lineages

Starting point is 01:51:47 of propagating information across time. And so everything we do becomes part of life because it's part of that causal chain. So it's like you want to try to pinch off as much as you can of the information from your causal chain that goes into the experiment, but you can't pinch off all of it to move it to like a different timeline.

Starting point is 01:52:02 It's always going to be part of your timeline. But at least if you can control how much information you put in, you can try to see how much does that particular trajectory you set up start generating its own assembly. So you know where it starts. And then you want to try to see it take off on its own when you try to pinch it off as much as possible. Got it.

Starting point is 01:52:22 Quick pause, bathroom break. Yes. All right, cool. And now we're back. All right. We talked about the early days of the universe when there was just stuff in no memory, not even causality. I think Lee at least implied the causality's immersion somehow. We'll get to discuss this.

Starting point is 01:52:41 What happened before this all originated? What's outside the universe? If I was zero. Okay, so it's not relevant, not understandable. Is it useful to even ask the question? No, just because it's so hard. No, it's not hard. It's just not a question. If I can't do an experiment or even think of experiment, the question doesn't exist. Well, no, you can't think of a lot of experiments, no offense.

Starting point is 01:53:13 What I mean is if I can't... Because your causality graph is like, this is what we're talking about. It's like, there is limits to your ability to construct experiments. I agree, but I'm be facetious, I'm not trying to make a point, as I think that if you, if there is a causal bottleneck, through which information can't propagate in principle, then it's very hard to ask, to think of an experiment, even in principle,

Starting point is 01:53:43 even one that's beyond my mediocre intellect, right? Which is fine. I'm happy to accept that. But this is one of the things I actually do think there was something before the Big Bang, because I would say that I think the Big Bang just couldn't occur and create time, time create the Big Bang. But there was time before the Big Bang.

Starting point is 01:54:02 Yeah. There was no space for those time. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, I'm just making that stuff up just to make all the physicists happy. But I think it's it that would using that would make them happy because they would be quite upset. Actually, why would they be upset? Because they would say that time, time can exist before the big bang. Yeah, I mean, this goes back to an argument that you might not want to do have the argument here.

Starting point is 01:54:24 I was talking to Sarah earlier today about argument we had about time a long time ago. Yeah. A long time in time. And what I would, it's like, I think there is this thing called time or state creation. The universe is creating states. And it's outside of space, but they create space. So what I mean is, you can imagine there are states being created all the time. And there is this thing called time, time is a clock,

Starting point is 01:54:48 which you can use to measure when things happen, but that doesn't mean because you can't measure something that states aren't being created. And so you might locally refer to the big bang and the big bang occurs at some point in when those states were there. Probably there had to be enough states for the Big Bang to occur. But I think that there is something wrong with our conception of how the universe was created

Starting point is 01:55:15 in the Big Bang because we don't really get time. Because again, I don't want to become boring and sound like a broken record, but time is a real thing. And until I can really explain that more elegantly, I'm just gonna get into more trouble. Well, we're gonna talk about time because time is a useful, measuring device for experiments, but also time is an idea, all that. Okay, but let me first ask Sarah,

Starting point is 01:55:42 is like, what do you think? Is it a useful question to ask what happened before the big bang? Is it useful question to ask what's outside the universe? So I would think about it as the big bang is an event that we reconstructed as probably happening in the past of our universe based on current observational data. And so the way I like to think about it is, we exist locally in something called a universe. And going back to the physics of existence, we exist locally in the space of all things that could exist. And we can infer certain properties of the structure of where we exist locally.

Starting point is 01:56:22 And one of the properties that we've inferred in the past is that there is a thing we call the Big Bang. There's some signatures of our local environment that indicate that there was a very low information event that started our universe. I think that's actually just an artifact of the structure of the assembly space that when you start losing all the structure of the assembly space that when you

Starting point is 01:56:51 when you start losing all the memory and the objects, it looks like what we call a big bang. So I think it makes sense to talk about where you are locally. I think it makes sense to talk about counterfactual possibilities. What could exist outside the universe in the sense that they become part of our reasoning and therefore part of our causal chain of things that we can do. So like the multiverse in my mind exists, but they don't always exist like we think they exist. So when we're thinking about things outside the universe, they absolutely exist because we're thinking about them, they don't look like the projections in our mind. There's something else.

Starting point is 01:57:39 And something you said just gave an idea. So go back to your question. If there was, I mean, something caused the big bang, if there was some memory or some artifact of that, then of course, it's to answer your question's worth going back to that, because that would imply there is something beyond that barrier, that filter. And that's what you were saying, I guess, right? Right. I'm agnostic to what exists outside the universe. I just don't think that, like, I think the most interesting things for us to be doing

Starting point is 01:58:05 are finding explanations that allow us to do more, like, that optimism. So I tend to draw the boundary on questions I ask as being scientific ones, because I find that that's where the most creative potential is to impact the future trajectory of what we're doing on this planet. It's interesting to think about the Big Bang is basically from our current perspective of what we're able to detect. It's the time when things were forgotten. Yes. It's the time of the reset. From our limited perspective.

Starting point is 01:58:37 And so the question is, is it useful to ever study the thing that was forgotten? Or should we focus just on the memories that are still there? Well the point I was trying to make about the experiment is I was trying to say both things and I think perhaps yes from the portfolio point of view if you could then imagine what was forgotten and then work forwards you will have different consequences. So then it becomes testable. So I'm as long as we can find tests and it's definitely worth thinking about, what I don't like is when physicists say, what happened before the Big Bang and before, before, before,

Starting point is 01:59:10 without giving me any credible conjecture about how we know the difference. But the way you've framed it is quite nice. I like that. It's like, what have we forgotten? Is there a room for God in assembly theory? Who's God? I like arguments for a necessary being better than God. What I think I said earlier.

Starting point is 01:59:33 What's a message? Something that has to exist. Oh, so you like, I mean, you like the shortest path. Like this God need. No, no, no. I mean, you can go back to like time sequinist and arguments for the existence of God, but I think I think most of the interesting theological arguments are always about whether something has to exist or there was a first thing that had exist,

Starting point is 01:59:56 but I think there's a lot of logical loopholes in those kind of arguments. Well, so God here, meaning the machine that creates, that generates the stuff. But good God. So what I was about to say earlier, it's not just the universe. Yeah. Well, yeah. Well, but I, there's a difference between I said, I imagine like a black box, like a machine. Yeah. That's then I would be more comfortable calling that God.

Starting point is 02:00:23 Because it's a machine. You go into a room and there's a thing with a button. Yeah, I don't like the great programmer in the sky or is it? Yeah, but if it's more kind of like I don't like to think of if you look at a cellular automata, if it's the cells and the rules, that doesn't feel like God that generates a bunch of stuff. But if there's a machine that runs the cellular automata and sets the rules, then that feels like God. That sort of in terms of terminology.

Starting point is 02:00:58 So I wonder if there's a machine that's required to generate the universe. That's very important for running this in the lab. So as I said earlier, I think I said this earlier that I can't generate the universe. That's very, it's sort of important for running this in the lab. So, as I said earlier, I think I said this earlier that I can't remember the phrase, but something like, I mean, does God exist in our universe? Yes. Where does God exist? God at least exists in abstraction in my and our minds, particularly a people who have religious faith they believe in. But let's then take you, but you're talking a little bit more about generic say, well, is there a mechanism beyond the universe

Starting point is 02:01:30 you're calling God? I would say God did not exist at the beginning, but he or she does now. Because I'm saying the message. Well, you don't know that he didn't exist in the beginning. So like this could be us in our minds, trying to just listen to gravitational waves, detecting gravitational waves.

Starting point is 02:01:51 It's the same thing. Us trying to go back further and further into our memories to try to understand the machines that make up us. And so it's possible that we're trying to grasp at possible kind of what kind of machines could create. There's always a tweet. There's always a tweet. The universe is a computer than God must have built it because computers need creators. There you go. And then Yoshibok replied, since there's something rather than nothing, perhaps existence is the default. If existence is the default, then many computers exist.

Starting point is 02:02:35 Creator gods are necessary computers and necessarily computers too. I'm very confused by that. But that's an interesting idea that existence is a default versus not existence. I agree with that. But the rest is leave response. Perhaps this reasoning is incomplete. That's that's how scientists talk to our each other on Twitter apparently. Which part don't you agree with? When he said if existence is default, then many computers exist. This comes back to the inventor and discovery argument. I would say the universe at the beginning wasn't capable of computation because there wasn't enough technology, enough states. So what you're saying is the mech, if God is a mechanism, so I might actually agree, but then the thing is lots of people seem more, see God is more than a mechanism. For me, God

Starting point is 02:03:24 could be the causal graph in a assembly theory that creates all the stuff that the memories we know. And the fact that we can even relate to each other is because we have the same, we share that heritage. And why we love each other or we like to see God in each other is, it's just, we can, we know we have a shared existence. So, if the God is the mechanism that created this whole thing I think a lot of people see God, you know in religious sense as That mechanism also being able to communicate with the objects it creates and if it's just the mechanism We won't be able to create with object communicate with objects it creates it can only create you can't like interact the object, communicate with objects that creates, it can only create, it can't like interact with the, there's versions of God that create the universe and then left, you know.

Starting point is 02:04:12 Yeah, like spark for some, for some religions, but the first spark, yeah. But I think I liked your analogy of the machine and the rules, right? But I think part of the problem is, I mean, we have this conception that we can disentangle the rules from the physical substrate, right? And that's the whole thing about software and hardware being separate, or the way Newton wrote his laws that there was some, you know, like they exist outside the universe.

Starting point is 02:04:37 They're not actually a feature of the universe. They don't have to emerge out of the universe itself. So I think if you merged your two views, then it gets back to the God as the universe. And then I think that the deeper question is, why does it seem like there's meaning and purpose? And if I think about the features of the universe that give it the most meaning and purpose, those are the what we would call the living components of the universe. So if you wanted to say, God is a physically real thing, which you were saying is like an immersion property of our minds, but I would just say, you know,

Starting point is 02:05:07 the way the universe creates meaning and purpose, there is really a physics there. It's not like a loosery thing. And that is just what the physics of life is. Is it possible that we've forgotten much of the mechanisms that created the universe? So like is so basically, you know, whatever, if God is that mechanism, we just leave parts of that behind.

Starting point is 02:05:31 Well, but the universe is constantly generating itself. So if God is that mechanism, it would be that that would still be acted today. I don't believe, like I'm agnostic, but if I, if I, if I recall, would call the things I believe in God in the way that some people talk about God, I would say that God is like in the universe now, it's not an absent thing. You, I'm, so I think there's a mislabeling here because you're, I mean, I'm a professional idiot eventually, but she put that in your CV professionally. That recreationally or amateur, but professionally. I think for it.

Starting point is 02:06:15 I would say if you were talking about God, I mean again, I'm way out way out my debt fee and I'm almost feeling comfortable, you know, I feel quite uncomfortable articulating, but I'll try. For me, a lot of people that think of God as a consciousness, of reasoning entity that actually has causal power, and you're... Human like intelligence. And so you're, like then you're saying,

Starting point is 02:06:35 like, gravity could be God, or time could be God. I mean, I think for me, for my conception of time is probably as fundamental as God, because it gave rise to human intelligence and consciousness in which we can have this abstract notion of God. So I think that you're maybe talking about God in a very mechanistic, un-sophisticated sense. Where other people say that God is more sophisticated and got all this feelings and love and you know, sophisticated and got all this, you know, feelings and love and, you know, and this abstracting ability. So is that what, or do you mean that? Do you mean God has in this conscious entity that decided to flick the universe into existence?

Starting point is 02:07:14 Well, one of the features that God would have is the ability to flick the universe into existence. I, you know, like Windows 95, I don't know if God is Windows 95, but I'm not What have is the ability to flick the universe into existence? I you know like windows 95. I don't know if God is Windows 95 or Windows XP or Windows 10 I don't know the full feature set. Okay, so you the very least you have to flick the universe into existence and then other features might include ability to interact with that universe in interesting ways. And then how do you interact with the universe in interesting ways? You have to be able to speak the language of its different components. So in order to interact with humans, you have to know how to act human-like. So I don't know, but it seems like

Starting point is 02:08:10 whatever mechanism created the universe might want to also generate local pockets of mechanisms that can interact with that. Like inject. Inject. My God was lonely. Yeah, it was lonely. I mean, it could be just a teenager and another just playing a video game. Yeah, maybe. Well, I was going to say, I mean, I don't,

Starting point is 02:08:33 so this is referring to our origin of life engine. It's like, I don't believe in God, but that doesn't mean I don't want to be one. Right. Because I want to make a universe and make a life form, but that maybe that maybe rude to people who have, you know, their religious beliefs. What I mean by that is, isn't if we are able to create an entirely new life form, different chemistry, different culture, what does it make up and makes us good by that definition? It makes us gods, right? Well, there is. I mean, like, when you have children, you're like one of the magical things of that

Starting point is 02:09:07 is you're kind of mini gods. I mean first of all from a child's perspective parents are gods for quite a while. And then you, I mean they're in the positive sense that there's a magic to that. So I love robotics is you instill life into something and that makes you, few god like in a sort of positive way like that.

Starting point is 02:09:29 Being a creator is a positive thing. Yeah, exactly. And a small scale and then goddess would be a creator at the largest possible scale, I suppose. Okay, you mentioned offline the assembled tron. Assembly tron. Assembly tron. Yeah. What's an assembled tron? Assembly tron. Assembly tron. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:09:46 What's an assembly tron? These are the early ideas of something you're thinking about. So Sarah's team, I think Sarah's team are interested in them using AI to understand life. My team is, and I'm wondering if we could apply the principles of assembly theory, that is the causal structure that you get with the assembly theory and hybridize it and make a new type of neuron, if you like. I mean, there are causal neural networks out basically, I'd like to make a, rather than having an ASIC for neural networks, I want to make it ASIC for assembly networks, right? And can you say that again, assembly networks.

Starting point is 02:10:39 So what is a, so it's like a, a thing with an input and output, and it's like a or network type of thing, what does it do exactly what's the input, what's the output? So in this case, say if you're talking about a general neural network, I mean, in general neural network, you can train it

Starting point is 02:10:54 on all sorts of data, right? Depending on the framework, whether it's like text or image data or whatnot. And that's fine, but there's no causal structure associated with that data. Now just imagine, rather than, you know, let's say when a classified difference between cat and good dog, right?

Starting point is 02:11:15 Classic cat and dog neural network. What about if the system understood the assembly space, create the cat and the dog? And rather than guessing what was happening and training on those images and not understanding those features, you almost like you could imagine doing a going back a step and doing and training, going back a step and doing the training, going back a step, back a step, back a step, and I wonder if that is actually the origin of intelligence or how we'll crack intelligence because we'll create the entire graph of

Starting point is 02:11:52 events and be able to kind of look at calls and effect across those graphs. I'm explaining it really badly, but it's a gene of an idea and I'm guessing very smart, very rich people in AI are already doing this. I'm trying to not generate cats and dogs, but trying to generate things of higher assembly index. Yeah. And also using causal graphs in neural networks, a machine learning and deep learning, maybe building a new architecture.

Starting point is 02:12:23 I'm just wondering, is there something we can get out of assembly theory allows us to rebuild current machine learning architectures to give causation more cheaply? I don't know if that's what you are. We've been inventing this for a little while, but we're trying to finish the theory paper first before we do anything else. Yeah, you also want to have, say, goal directed behavior in neural networks. Then assembly theory is a good framework for doing that. Daniel's been thinking about that a lot. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:12:50 And I think it's a really interesting idea that you can map concepts from how neural networks learn to think about goal directed behavior as a learning process that you're learning a specific goal. The universe is learning a goal when it generates a particular structure and that you can map that physical structure in a neural network. What's the goal?

Starting point is 02:13:09 Well, in a neural network, you're designing the goal in biology. I mean, people are not supposed to use teleological language and biology, which is ridiculous, but because goals are real things, they're just posts selected. So you can talk about goals after the fact. Once a goal emerges in the universe that physical entity has a goal. But Lee and I came up with a test for like a touring test for goal directed behavior based on the idea and assembly. Like we have to formalize this still,

Starting point is 02:13:42 but I would like to write a paper on it. But like the basic idea is if you had two systems that were completely equivalent, in the instantaneous physical experimental setup, so we have to figure out how to do this. But there was something that would be different in their future. And there was a symmetry breaking you observe

Starting point is 02:14:02 in the present based on that possibility, that future outcome. Then you could say that that system had some representation of some kind of goal in mind about what it wanted to do in the future. And so goals are interesting because they don't exist as instantaneous things. They exist across time, which is one of the reasons that assembly theories may be more naturally able to account for the existence of goals. So goals are the only existent time or they manifest themselves in time

Starting point is 02:14:34 through you said symmetry breaking. So it's almost like imagine like if representations in your mind are real, right? And you can imagine future possibilities, but imagine everything else is physically equivalent. And the only thing that you actually change your decision based on is what you model as being the future outcome. Then somehow that representation in your mind of the future outcome becomes causal to what you're doing now, so it's kind of like retro causal effect.

Starting point is 02:15:03 But it's not actually retro causal, it's just that your assembly space is actually includes those possibilities as part of the structure. It's just you're not observing all the features the assembly space in the current moment. Well, the possibilities exist, but they don't become a goal until they realize.

Starting point is 02:15:21 So one of the features of assembly space that's super interesting, and it's easier to envision with like Legos, for example, is if you're thinking about an assembly space, you can't observe the entire assembly space in any instant in time. So if you imagine a stack of Legos and you want to look at the assembly space of a stack of Legos, you have to break the Legos apart and then you look in, then you look at all the possible ways of building up the original object. So now you have in your mind the goal of building that object and you have all the possible

Starting point is 02:15:48 ways of doing it. And those are actual physical features of that object, but that object doesn't always exist. What exists is the possibility of generating it. And the possibilities are always infinite. Well for that particular object, it has a well-defined assembly space. And I guess what I'm saying is that object is the assembly space, but you actually have to unpack that object across time to view that feature of it. It's only an observable across time. The term goal is such an important and difficult to explain concept, right? Because what you

Starting point is 02:16:21 want is a way, it's like, I think only conscious beings can have conscious goals. Everything else is doing selection. But selection does invent goals and in a way that the way that biology reinterprets the past in the present is kind of how that is you to understand there was a goal in the past now, right? It's kind of like goals only exist back in time So first of all Only conscious beings can have Conscious goals. I'm not even gonna touch that one Well go for it. Come on. Well, we're the line between conscious goals and

Starting point is 02:17:08 non-conscious goals exactly right and also maybe just on top of that, you say the touring test for goal-directed behavior, what is the touring test potentially look like? So if you've got two objects, we were thinking about this. So we've actually got some funding to work to go on two teams. So I'm trying to do, in part of this is I'm trying to do a bit of theory. And Sarah's teaching me a bit of theory. And Sarah's trying to design experiments and I'm teaching experiments. Because I think it's really good for us to have that.

Starting point is 02:17:32 So say, when would a, so that's good. I like this. I'm sure you usually Dan, Dan at essay. They wrote on. Yeah. And I can explain where we want to call it a turning test after. But yeah, yeah. So Dan, Dan wrote road, it's really nice essay about herding cats and free will inflation. The title is so brilliant.

Starting point is 02:17:52 I think it's the actual title. I think so. Herding cats and free will inflation. Yeah, something like that. I mean, it's not maybe not. And so, no, I think that's right. So if you've got a, let's imagine you got two objects on a hillside. Okay. And this happens to be a snowy hill.

Starting point is 02:18:07 And let's just say you see an object get rolling down the hill or you, you, you, you, and the rock, it rolls down the hill. Let's start goes to the end. How did that objects had a goal? Now you unveil the object and you'll see it's actually a skier. And the skier starts the top and goes down the bottom. Great. Then you look at the rock. Rock rolls down the hill, gets the bottom.

Starting point is 02:18:27 How can you tell the difference between the two? So, and what Dan says is like, well, it's clear the skiers in control and because they're adjusting the trajectory, so some updating going on. Then the only way you can really do that is you have to put the skier back to the top of the hill again. They tend to start roughly in the same space and probably go take all that complex set of trajectories and end up pretty much at the same finish point, right, with Plasma Minds for you me as whereas if it's just a random rock going down to a random trajectory that wouldn't happen.

Starting point is 02:18:57 And so what Sarah and I were kind of doing when we were writing this grant, we were like, we need to somehow instantiate the skier and the rock in an experiment and then say, okay, when is the object? So for an object to have a goal, it has to have an update, it has to have some sensing and some kind of, you know, in-built actuation to respond to the environment. And then we just have to iterate on that and maybe Sarah, you can infolume the cheering test part. Well, yeah, I guess the motivation for me was slightly different. So I get really frustrated about conversations,

Starting point is 02:19:31 about consciousness that most people do. You know, a lot of people are, which is not necessarily related to free will directly or to this goal directed behavior. But I think there's a whole set of bundled and related topics here. But I think for me, everybody was, you know, everybody's always interested in explaining intrinsic experience and quantifying intrinsic experience.

Starting point is 02:19:51 And there's all sorts of problems with that because you can never actually be another physical system. So you can't know what it's like to be another physical system. So I always thought there must be some way of getting at this problem about if an agent or an entity is conscious or at least has internal representations, and those are real physical things, that there must have causal consequences. So the way I would ask the question of consciousness is not, you know, what it is like intrinsically,

Starting point is 02:20:19 but if things have intrinsic experience, is there any observable difference from the outside about the kind of causation that that physical system would enact? And for me, the most interesting thing that humans do is have imaginations. So we can imagine rockets, centuries before we build them. They've become real physical things because we imagine them.

Starting point is 02:20:39 And people might disentangle that from conscious experience, but I think a lot of the sort of imagination we do is actually a conscious process. So then this becomes a question of if I were observing systems and I said one had an internal representation, which is slightly different than a conscious experience, obviously. So I'm entangling some concepts, but it's a loose set of thought experiments. Then how and I set them up in a physically equivalent situation, would it be the case that there would be experimental observables associated with it? And that that

Starting point is 02:21:14 became the idea of trying to actually measure for internal representation and consciousness. So touring basically didn't want to do that. You just wanted the machine that could emulate and trick you into having the behavior, but never dealt with the internal experience because he didn't know how to do that. And I guess I was wondering, is there a way to set up the experiment

Starting point is 02:21:34 where you could actually test for that? For imagination, that led to the... That there was something internal going on, some kind of inner world as people say, but I, or you could say, you know, like it actually is an agent. It's making decisions. It has an internal representation.

Starting point is 02:21:53 And whether you say that's experience or not is a different thing, but at least the feature that there's some abstraction it's doing, that's not obvious from looking at the physical substrates. Do you think it's possible? Do you do that kind of thing? One of the compelling things about the touring test is that, you know, defining intelligence, defining any complicated concept as a thing like observing it from the surface and not caring about what's going on deep inside because how do you know?

Starting point is 02:22:21 That's the point. So the idea is exactly that. So what we're trying to do, the Turing test for gold directiveness is literally, takes some objects that clearly don't have any internal representation, grains of sand, blowing on the beach or something. Right? And I don't know, a crab wandering around on the beach.

Starting point is 02:22:38 And then generating experiment where we, literally, the experiment generates an entity that literally has no internal representation to sand, but like these are oil droplets, actually, what we've got in mind, a robot that makes oil droplets. But then what we wanna try and do is train the oil droplets to be like crabs, give them an internal representation, give them the ability to integrate information

Starting point is 02:23:00 from the environment. So they remember the past, are in the present and can imagine a future and a very limited way, they're kind of game engine, their limited simulation of the world allows them to then make a decision. Here objects across time. So then you would run a bunch of crabs, like over and over and over and over. How many crabs? How many is there? What's because you have to have a large number of crabs like over and over and over and over. How many crabs? Lee. How many is it? What's because you have to have a large number of crabs. What is what is your theory?

Starting point is 02:23:30 Say is there a mathematical? We're working on it. I mean, this is literally a crab limit. There's literally a there's literally what's the hurting cats have to do? Oh, that's random. Wait, what's cats in the title by Daniel Denet hurting cats and the free will inflation. So what is hurtingett hurting cats and the free will inflation?

Starting point is 02:23:45 So what does hurting cats mean? What does free will inflation mean? So this I love this essay because it explained to me how I could live in the deterministic universe, but have free will but have freedom. And also, it helped me explain that time needed to be a real thing in this universe. So what basically Dan was saying here is, how do you, how do these cats appear to just do what they want? Right? And if you live in a deterministic universe, why do the cats do these things? You know, aren't they just all obvious? And how does free will inflate the universe? And for me, I mean, probably I love the essay because my interpretation of the essay

Starting point is 02:24:32 in assembly theory makes complete sense. Because you need an expanding universe in assembly theory to create novelty that you search for, that then when you find something interesting and you keep doing it because it's cool and it gives you an advantage, then it appears in the past to be a goal. So what does an assembly theory, the expansion of the universe look like? What are we talking about?

Starting point is 02:25:01 Why does the expansion of the universe give you more possibilities of novelty and cool stuff? So, for me, I don't think about the universe in terms of Big Bang and space. I think about in terms of the big memory expansion. You only have the ability to store one bit of information, so you can't do very much. So, what universe has been doing since the since forever It's been creating more it's been increasing the size of its RAM Okay, so it's like one megabyte two megabyte three megabyte four megabytes all the way up and so the more RAM you have The more you can remember about the past Then we shall allow you to do cooler things in the future.

Starting point is 02:25:46 So if you can remember how to launch a rocket, then you might be able to imagine how to land a rocket and then relaunch relan and carry on. And so you're able to expand the space and remember the past. And so that's why I think it's very important. But not a perfect memory. It's an interesting question whether there's some forgetting that happens and might increase. Is the expansion of the forgetting at some point accelerated faster than the, the remembering? I think that that's a very important thing that probably intelligence does.

Starting point is 02:26:19 And we're going to learn a machine learning about because you want machine learning right now or artificial intelligence right now, it doesn't have memory right, but you want the ability to or not for if you want to get to human like consciousness, you need to have the ability I suppose to remember stuff and then to selectively forget stuff so you can re-remember it and compress it. Arguably the way that we come up with new physical laws. So currency. Yeah, sorry, you were from... No, no, sorry, no, I just wanted to say that.

Starting point is 02:26:47 I think that there is a great deal to be gained from having the ability to remember things, but then when you forget them, you can basically do the simulation again and work out if you get to that compressed representation. So there's en cycles. So cycles of remembering and forgetting are probably important, but they shouldn't be excused to have a university of no memory in it. The universe is gonna remember that it forgot,

Starting point is 02:27:16 but just not tell you. I'm looking at this paper and it's talking about a public controlling, a public controlling, a public controlling, a public controlling, a puppet controlling a puppet controlling a puppet controlling a puppet controlling a puppet controlling a puppet concept should be to understand but physically impossible it's physically impossible it's predicting a fair coin toss. I don't know what he's talking about but there's pictures of puppets controlling puppets. Let me ask you there's a there's a few things I want to ask but we brought up time quite a bit.

Starting point is 02:27:43 I want to ask, but we brought up time quite a bit. You guys tweet about time quite a bit. What is time and all of this? We kind of mentioned in a bunch. Is it not important at all in terms of, is it just a word? Should we be talking about causality mostly? Like Sarah, what do you think? Is, we've talked about like memories. Is that the fundamental thing that we should be thinking about and time is just a useful

Starting point is 02:28:07 measurement device or something like that? Well, there's different concepts of time, right? So I think in assembly theory, when we're talking about time, we're talking about the ordering of things. So that's the causal graph part. And so then the fundamental structure of the universe is that there is a certain ordering. And certain things can't happen to all other things happen. But usually when we colloquially talk colloquoquially talk about time, we're talking about the flow of time.

Starting point is 02:28:30 And I guess we and I were actually debating about the system morning, so in talking on it, walking on the river here, which is a very lovely spot for talking about time, but that the, you know, that when the universe is updating, it's transitioning between things that exist now and things that exist now. That's really the flow of time. So there's, you have to separate out those concepts at bare minimum, and then there's also an arrow of time that people talk about in physics,

Starting point is 02:28:58 which is that time doesn't appear to have a directionality in fundamental physics, but it does to us, right? Like we can't go backwards in time. And usually we, you know, that would be explained in physics in terms of, well, there's a cosmological arrow of time, but there's also the thermodynamic arrow of time of increasing entropy.

Starting point is 02:29:15 But what we would say in assembly theory is that there is a clear directionality that universally runs in one direction, which is why some things. It's easy to make, if the universe runs in one direction, it's easy to make processes look reversible. For example, if they have no memory, they're easy to run forward and backwards, which is why the laws of physics that we have now look the way they do, because they involve objects that have no memory. But when you get to things like us,

Starting point is 02:29:37 it becomes very clear that the universe has a directionally associated to it. So it's not reversible at all. It's the no man ever steps in the same river. I just have to bring that out because you want to wonder if no man ever steps in the same river twice. For it's not the same river and he's not the same man. So that's not reversible here this year. No, no, but reversibility is an emergent property. Right. So we think of the reversibility of laws as being fundamental and the irreversibility is being emergent. But I think what we would say from how we think about it and certainly it's easy to get the case for our perception of time, but also what's happening in biological evolution, you can make things reversible,

Starting point is 02:30:14 but it requires work to do it. And it requires certain machines to run it forward and backward. And Kiarah Marleto is working some interesting ideas on constructor theory related to that, which is totally different side of ideas, isn't it? So you can travel back in time sometimes. Yes. You can't travel actually back in time, but you could reconstruct things that have existed in the past. You're always moving forward in time, but you can cycle

Starting point is 02:30:39 through, like I mean, I can clarify what you said. Quickly, you travel forward in time to travel back. Yes. That thank you That really clear what what what's there saying you don't go back in time You recreate what happened in the past in the future and inspect it again So in that local pocket of time is as if you travel back in time So I don't how's that natural in back in time because you're not going back to yourself back in time You are you're not going back to your same self back in time. You are creating that in future. But I've got to be honest, is the same as it was in the past.

Starting point is 02:31:08 No, no, no, it's not in registry. I mean, it goes back to the big question. I'm saying, I mean, this is something I was trying to look up today when I first had this discussion and I was talking to Sarah on Skype and I said, by the way, time is the fundamental thing in the universe. She almost hung up on me. Right. But you can even, I mean, if you want to make

Starting point is 02:31:28 an analogy to computation, and I think Charles Bennett actually has a paper on this like about reversible computation and reversible touring machines, in order to make it reversible, you have to store memory to run the process backwards. So time is always running forward in that. Because you have to write the memory. You can't erase the memory. You can erase the memory, but the point it when you go back to zero, right?

Starting point is 02:31:50 But the whole point is that in order to have a process that even runs in both directions, you have to start talking about memory to store the information to run it backwards. I got it. So you can't really then or you can't have exactly how it was in the past. Exactly. You have extra stuff, extra baggage always. A really important thing that I want to say on this, I think if I try and get it right, I just say that if you can think that the universe is expanding in terms of the number of boxes that it has to store states, right? And this is where the direction out at the universe comes from, everything comes from. You could erase what's in those boxes, but the fact you've now got so many boxes at time now in this present, there's more of those boxes than they were in the past.

Starting point is 02:32:36 See, but the boxes aren't physical boxes. They are not spaces. They are not spaces of time. I mean, why is the number of boxes always expanding? It's very hard to imagine this because we live not space. It's not space. I mean, why is the number of boxes always expanding? It's very hard to imagine this because we live in space. So what I'm saying, which is, I think, probably correct, is that we just, let's just imagine for a second, there is a non-local situation, but there are these things called states, and that the universe irrespective of whether you measure

Starting point is 02:33:06 anything, there is a universal, let's call it a clock or a state creator. Maybe we can call it, that's why maybe you can call it God, but let's call it a state creator where the universe is expanding and the number of states it has. Why are you saying it's expanding, though, is that obvious? There's expanding numbers. It's obvious because that's where the, because we, we, we, we, that's the source of novelty. It's a source of novelty and it also explains why the universe is not predictable. I didn't know it's not predictable. Well, it's, I just like interrupting them. I'm sorry, it's fun.

Starting point is 02:33:39 I'm struggling. I'm struggling because it's, I'm trying to be as concrete as possible and not sound like I'm insane. And I'm not insane. It's obvious because I'm a chemist. So as a chemist, I grew into the world understanding irreversibility. Irreversibility is all I knew. And when people start telling me the universe is actually reversible, it's a magic trick. We can use time to do it. So what I mean is the second law is really the magical.

Starting point is 02:34:17 But why does it need to be magical? The universe is just asymmetric. All I'm saying is universe is asymmetric in the state production. And we can erase those states, but we just have more computational power. So what I'm saying is that the universe is deterministic horizon. This is one of the reasons we can't live in a simulation, by the way. The irreversibility. You can't live in a simulation. The irreversibility, which basically every time you try and simulate the universe, and I live in a simulation, the universe is expanded in states.

Starting point is 02:34:48 Like, oh, damn it, I need to make my computer bigger again. And every time you try and contain the universe in the computation, because it's got bigger in number of states. And so I'm saying the fact the universe has novelty in it is going to turn out experimentally to be proof that time as I've labeled it is fundamental and exists as a physical thing that creates space. Okay, so if you can prove that novelty is always being created, you're saying that it's possible to also then prove that it's always expanding in the state space.

Starting point is 02:35:24 Those are things that have to be proven. That's what work and experiments for, yeah. And you're trying to, like by looking at the sliver of reality, show that there's always novelty being generated. Yeah. Because if we go and live in a universe that the conventional physicist would live in, it's a big lookup table of stuff and everything exists.

Starting point is 02:35:44 I want to prove that that book is, that book doesn't exist, it's continuously being added pages on. So all I'm saying, if the universe is a book, we started, the universe at the beginning only had no pages and they had one page, another page, another page, whereas the physicists would now say, all the pages exist and we could, in principleable access them. I'm saying that is fundamentally incorrect. Do you know what's written in this book, the free will question? Is there room for free will in this view of the universe is generating novelty and getting greater and greater assembly

Starting point is 02:36:21 structures built? Sarah. Yes. Okay. Done. Next question. Why, what's the source of free will in this? Well, I think it depends on what you mean by free will. But yeah, well, please. I think what I'm interested in as far as the phenomena of free will is, I think what I'm interested in as far as the phenomena free will is, do we have individual autonomy and agency? And when I do things, is it really me or is it my atoms that did it? And that's the part that's interesting to me. I guess there's also the determinism versus randomist part. But the way I think about it is like each of us are like a thread or like an assembly space through this giant possibility space. And it's like we're moving on our own trajectory

Starting point is 02:37:16 through that space. And that is defined by our history. So we're sort of causally contingent on our past. But also because of the sort of intersection of novelty generation, it's not completely predetermined by the past. And so, so then you have the causal control of the determinism part that you are your causal history, and there's some determinism from that past, but there's also room for creativity.

Starting point is 02:37:43 And I think it's actually necessary that something like free will exist if the universe is going to be as creative as possible. Because if I were all intelligent being inventing a universe, and I wanted it to have maximal number of interesting things happen. Again, we should come up with the metric of interesting. But generating, yes, I know, generating, you know, maximal possibilities, then I would want the agents to have free will because it means that they're more individual. Like, each entity actually is a different causal force in the universe. And it's intrinsic and local property of that system. There's a greater number of distributed agents.

Starting point is 02:38:29 Like, are you always creating more and more individuality? Kind of. I would say you're creating more causal power, but. So causal power, the word consciousness, is the causal power somehow correlated with consciousness? I mean, that's why I have this conception of consciousness being related to imagination, because the more that we can imagine can happen, and the more counterfactual possibilities you have in mind, the more you can actually

Starting point is 02:38:54 implement. And somehow free will is also at the intersection of the counterfactual becoming the actual. So, can you elaborate on that a little bit to consciousness is imagination? I don't know exactly how to articulate it and I'm sure people will take you know, aim at certain things I'm saying, but I think the language is really in precise. So I'm not the best way to it. It's really interesting. Like what is imagination and what is it?

Starting point is 02:39:17 What role does it play in the human experience, in experience of any? Yes, I love imagination. I think it's like the most amazing thing we do. But I guess one way I would think about it is, we talked about the transition to life being the universe acquiring memory. And life does something really interesting. It's just a thing about biology generally.

Starting point is 02:39:37 It remembers states of the past to adapt to things that happen in the future. So the longer life has evolved on this planet, the deeper that past is, the more memory we have, the more kinds of organisms and things. But what human level intelligence has done is quite different. It's not just that we remember states

Starting point is 02:39:53 that the universe has existed in before, it's that we can imagine ones that have never existed. And we can actually make them come into existence. And I think that's the most unique feature about the transition to whatever we are from what life on this planet has been doing for the last four billion years. And I think it's deeply related to the phenomenon we call consciousness. Yeah, I was going to just agree with that. I think that consciousness is the ability to generate

Starting point is 02:40:17 those counterfactuals. Now, whether you can say, you know, are there degrees of consciousness? I mean, I mean, I'm sorry, panpsychists, but electrons don't have kind of factures, although they do have some kind of, they are able to search a space in pathways. But I think that there is a very concrete, concrete, there's a very specific property that humans have, and I don't know if it's unique to humans I mean maybe dogs can do it and and birds can do it right and where they are basically solving a problem because Consciousness was invented or this abstraction was invented by evolution for that for a specific reason and so look the one of the reasons why I came to the conclusion that time was fundamental was actually because Sarah and I had completely different the most heated debate on scape-chat ever.

Starting point is 02:41:11 No, no, no, no, we had to. I was just stopping. No, no, no, it goes back to the free will thing. So I think that although I've changed my view a bit because there's some really interesting physicists out there who talks about how the measurement problem in Newtonian space. I don't want to go there just now because I think I'll mess it up. Briefly, I could not see how we could have free will.

Starting point is 02:41:35 I mean, this is really boring because this is like, this is a well-trot and path. But I'll, but I'm not so boring. I suppose it's kind of, I just want to be precise. If the universe is deterministic, how can we have free will? Right? So Sarah's a physicist, I think she believed, not believe, can show that most of the laws we have are deterministic to some degree, quantum mechanics onto Newtonian stuff. And yet, there's Sarah telling me she believes in free will. I'm like, you're belief systems broken here, right? Because you're demanding free will. I'm like, your belief system's broken here, right? Because you're demanding free will

Starting point is 02:42:08 in a deterministic universe. And then I realize that I agreed with her that I do think that free will is a thing because we are able to search for novelty. And then that's where I came to the conclusion that time the universe is expanding in terms of novelty and It goes back to that damn denet essay. They were talking about the free will inflation

Starting point is 02:42:33 Free will so you are you haven't so the past It did not exist in the past the past exists in the present What I mean is like you are the there was no past there is only present So I mean you are the sum to or there everything that occurs's occurs in the past is manifestly here in the present. And then you have this little echo state in your consciousness because you're able to imagine something with our actualization, but the fact you imagine it, that occurs in electrons and potassium ion flows in your neural network, in your brain. Maybe consciousness is just the present. So somehow you imagine that, and then by imagining, oh that's good, yeah, I'm going to make a robot do this thing and program it, and then you physically then go and do it.

Starting point is 02:43:17 So that changes the future, sorry. What's imagination? Does it require the past? Does it require the future? Does it require memory? Does it? It's imagination. Does it only exist in the moment? So imagination is probably it's an instantaneous readout of what's going on.

Starting point is 02:43:38 You can maybe your subconscious brain has been generating all the bits for it. But no, imagination occurs when you, in your game engine, you remember the past and you integrate sensory to present and you try and work out what you want to do in the future. And then you go and make that happen. So the imagination is this, it's like, asking what imagination is about asking what surfing is. You can see you can surfboard, surf a wave coming in. When you're on that wave and you're surfing, that's where the imagination is. I think imagination is just accessing things that aren't the present moment in the present

Starting point is 02:44:14 moment. So like I'm sitting here and I'm looking at the table and I can imagine the river and things or whatever it was. And so it seems to be that it's like it's our ability to access things that aren't present. But to conjure up worlds, some of them might be akin to something that happened to you recently. Right, but they don't have to be things that actually happen in your past. And I think this gets back to assembly theory. Like the way I would think about imagination from an assembly theory at a standpoint is I'm a giant causal graph. And I exist in a present moment as a particular configuration of Sarah. And but there's a lot of, I carry a lot of evolutionary baggage, I have that whole causal history and I can access parts of it. Now, when you talk about getting to something

Starting point is 02:45:03 as complex as us, having as large as assembly spaces us, there's ways of like, there's a lot of things in that causal graph that have ever actually never existed in the past history of the universe because like the universe got big enough to contain the three of us in this room in time, but not all the features of each one of us individually have come into existence as physical objects. We would recognize as individual objects. This goes back to your point that we actually have to explain why things actually even look like objects and aren't just a smear of mass.

Starting point is 02:45:39 And just on the free will and physics thing, when you were talking, I just wanna bring this up because I think it's a really interesting viewpoint that Nicholas Jisin has that, we wanna use the laws of physics and then say you can't have free will. And his point is, you have to have free will in order to even choose to set up an experiment

Starting point is 02:45:56 to test the laws of physics. So in some sense, free will should be more fundamental than physics is, because to even do science, there's some assumption that the agents have free will. And I always thought it was really perplexing that, you know, physics wants to remove agency because the idea that I could do an experiment here on this part of Earth, and then I can move somewhere else and prepare an identically, you know, identically prepared experiment, run an experiment again, seems to imply something about the structure of

Starting point is 02:46:24 our universe that is not encoded in the laws that we're testing in those experiments. So, this kind of dream of physics that you can do multiple experiments, different locations and invalidate each other, you're saying that's an illusion? No, I'm saying that requires decision-making and free will to be a real thing, I think. I think the fact that we can do science is not arbitrary. And I think people, you know, the standard candidate physics would be, well, you could trace all of that back to the initial condition in the universe, but the whole point of science is I can imagine doing the experiment and I can do it,

Starting point is 02:46:57 and then I can do it again and again and again, all over the planet. Do you imagine some of how fundamentally generative of novelty? Yes. So it's not like the universe could have predicted the things you imagined. Imagination, so coming back to novelty, I think novelty can exist outside of imagination, but it's super charges it. It's another transition, I think. I mean, I would say, I mean, this may be a boring statement, but I would say that's fact, they're sorry. I'm not sure. These are her questions.

Starting point is 02:47:20 Yeah, I mean, I think the fact that objects exist is yet another proof that time is fundamental and novelty exists, right? Because I think again, if you ask the physicists to write down an infinite Bible of the universe that's called it the Bible, the Mac, you know, the Mac, the mathematical universe, whether you're a Max Tech Mark or Sean Carroll or Frank Wilcheck. Or Stephen Wolfram, okay? I like that book.

Starting point is 02:47:51 Yeah, I love it too. Lots of pretty pictures. It's really interesting that they cope with the enormity of the Universe by saying, well, it's all their mathematics, it all exists, right? And I would say that there's why I'm excited about the future of the universe, because it, although it is somehow dependent upon the past, it is not constrained just by the past. Which is kind of mad. Yeah, that's what free willers, it's not constrained by the past, is dependent on the past, this moment, it's not just dependent, this moment is the past, It's dependent on the past, this moment, not just dependent,

Starting point is 02:48:25 this moment is the past, and yet it has the capacity to generate a totally unpredictable future. I mean, the other thing I would say is super important for human beings, right? Human beings have actually very little cause or control in the future. I realize this the other week. Oh, the next future in the future. Yeah, yeah. So what happened to what? So this is what I think it is. The way, by reinterpreting your past, I mean, talk about from a kind of cognitive,

Starting point is 02:48:50 psychological cognitive point of view, by reinterpreting your past in your current mind, you can actually help you shape your future again. So you have much more freedom to interpret your past, to act in the present, to change your future, than you do to change your future. I may sound weird, so I'm saying everybody, imagine your past, think about your past, reinterpret your past in the nicest way you can, then imagine what you can do next, or

Starting point is 02:49:18 imagine your past in a more negative way, and what you do next, and look at those two counterfactuals, they're different. Yes, fast. I mean, Daniel Connerman talks about this the most of our life is lived in our memories and it's interesting because you can essentially in imagination choose the life you live. So maybe free will exist in imagination. Choices are made in your imagination and that's results in you base capable to control how the future enrols because you're like, imagining, like,

Starting point is 02:49:47 reinterpreting constantly the things that happen to you. Exactly. So you, if you want to increase your amount of free will, those people that have most, I don't think everyone has equal amounts of agency, because of our sad constraints, whether, you know, happenstance, health, economic, born in a certain place, right? But those of us that have the ability to go back and reinterpret our past and use that to change

Starting point is 02:50:15 the future are the ones that exert most agency in the present. And I want to achieve higher degrees of agency and enable everyone else to do that as well to have more fun in the universe. Then we'll hit that peak. Maximum fun. I don't think there's ever going to be a maximum. I think it's the wonderful thing about the future is always going to be more fun. Yeah, you, I think again, go back to Twitter. I think you lead tweeted something about being a life maximalist that you want to maximize the number of life. The amount of life in the universe.

Starting point is 02:50:53 That's the more general version of that goal is to maximize the amount of fun in the universe because life is a subset of fun, all kinds of, I suppose they're either correlated or exactly equal. I don't know. Anyway, speaking of fun, let me ask you about alien sightings. So there's quite a bit of UFO sightings and all that kind of stuff. What do you think would be the first time when humans sight aliens, see aliens in an unquestionable way, this extremely strong and arguable way, we've made contact with aliens, Sarah. What would it look like?

Starting point is 02:51:38 Obviously, the space of possibility is huge here, but if you were to kind of look into the future, what would that look like? Would it be inklings of UFOs here and there that slowly unravel a mystery or would it be like an obvious overwhelming signal? So, I think we have an obsession with making contact with events. So what do I mean by that is, people have a UFO sighting they make contact. And I always think, what's interesting to me about the UFO narratives right now is not that I have a disbelief about

Starting point is 02:52:18 what people are experiencing or feeling, but the discussion right now is sort of at the level of modern mythology. Aliens are myth level of modern mythology. Aliens are our mythos in modern culture and when you treat it like that, then I want to think about when do things that we traditionally only regularize through mythology actually become things that become standard knowledge. So, you know, like it used to be, you know, variations in the climate were described by some kind of gods or something. And now it's like, you know, variations in the climate were described by some kind of gods or something.

Starting point is 02:52:45 And now it's like, you know, our technology picks up an anomaly or someone sees something we say as aliens. And I think the real thing is it's not contact with events, but like first contact is actually contact with knowledge of the phenomenon or the explanation. And so this is very subtle and very abstract, but when does it become something that we actually understand what it is that we're talking about? That's first contact. It's not.

Starting point is 02:53:09 Would you make the myth, would you give credit to the myth, the mythology as first contact? Because you might... I think yes. I think it's the rudimentary that we have some understanding that there's a phenomena that we have to understand and regularize. So I think... I tell you understand that there is weather. Yes. You have to construct a mythology around that. Yes. It's something that's controllable.

Starting point is 02:53:29 Like this is a methodology. I see mythology basically as like baby knowledge. It could be that, you know, although there's lots of there's lots of alien sight up, so-called alien sightings, right? So there is a number of things you can do. You could just dismiss them and say they're not true. They're kind of made up. Or you say, well, there's some, because there's something interesting here, right? We keep seeing a commonality, right? We see the same phenomena again and again and again. But also, there's interesting about human imagination. Even if they are, there's not say made up, but misappropriated kind of other inputs, the fact that human consciousness is capable of

Starting point is 02:54:05 imagining it, contact with aliens. Does that not tell us about something about where we are in our position and our culture and our technology? It tells us about where in time we are. Could it be that we're making contact with, let's say that, so let's say, let's take the most miserable version, there are no aliens in the universe. Life is only on Earth. That then, the interpretation of that is we're desperate to kind of understand why we're

Starting point is 02:54:27 the only life in the universe, right? The other one is the other most extreme is that aliens are visiting all the time. We just, you know, we're just not able to capture them coherently or there's a big conspiracy and, you know, there's the area 51 and there are lasers everywhere and there's that. Or I'm, of in favor of the idea that maybe humanity is waking up to the idea that we aren't alone in the universe and we're just running the simulation and we're seeing some evidence. We don't know what life is yet. We do have some anomalies out there. We can't explain everything. And over time, we will start to unpack that. One very plausible thing we might do, which might be boring for the average alien observable

Starting point is 02:55:14 believes that aliens are, as in intelligent aliens, are visiting Earth, it could be that we might go to the outer solar system and find a new type of life that has completely new chemistry, bring these cells back to Earth, where you can say my hand, on Earth, here's RNA, DNA, and proteins, and look, cells, self-replicate. From Titan, we got this new set of molecules, new set of cells, and we feed it stuff and it grows. That for me, if we were able to do that, which would be like the most,

Starting point is 02:55:46 that would be my UFO sign. That's a good test, so you feed it and it grows. Yeah. We've made, so not until you know how to feed the thing. Yeah. And it grows somehow. We can make a comic book, you know, the tiger that came for tea, the alien that came for tea.

Starting point is 02:56:05 What would you say is between the two of you is the biggest disagreement about aliens, alien life out there. Is it from the basic framework of thinking about what is life, to maybe what aliens look like, to alien civilizations, to your foresightings, what would you think? So I would say the biggest one is that the emergence of life does not have to be, it can't just happen once on a planet that it could be two or more life forms present on a planet at once. And I think Sarah doesn't agree with that. I think that's like logically inconsistent.

Starting point is 02:56:46 That's really polite. I'm just saying it's nonsense. But because you think that yeah. I like these there. So the idea that what does it look like? What's imagine two alien civilizations coexist in on a planet? What's that look like exactly?

Starting point is 02:57:00 So I would say, I think I've got to get around your argument. OK. Yeah, let's say that on this planet, So I would say, I think I've got to get around your argument. Okay. Yeah, let's say on this planet, there's just like, there's lots of available chemistry, and one life form gets emerged as based on carbon and interacts, and there's an ecosystem based on carbon. And there's an orthogonal, and so it's planetary phenomena, which is what you, I think, right?

Starting point is 02:57:23 But there's also one that goes on silicon. And because there's planetary phenomena, which is what you, I think, right? Right. But there's also one that carries on silicon. And because there's enough energy and there's enough stuff that these light forms might not actually necessarily compete evolutionarily. Yeah, but they would have to not interact at all because they're going to be co-constructing each other's causal chains. I think that's what you just got me. Yeah. So there's no overlap in terms of their causal chains,

Starting point is 02:57:48 or very limited overlap. Yeah, so I think the only way I can get away with that is to say, right, life can emerge on a planet underneath. And OK. And lizard people under the crust of the earth. I think, I think, let's go. I think, but look, as you can see, we disagree. So I think Sarah actually has convinced me

Starting point is 02:58:06 because of that life is a planetary phenomenon, the emotional life is a planetary phenomenon. And actually because of the way evolution selection works, then nothing occurs in isolation. The causal chains interact. So there is a common, there's a consensus model for life on the earth. But you don't think you can place aliens from elsewhere

Starting point is 02:58:26 onto the, can't you just place multiple alien civilizations on one planet? Right. But I think so you can take two original life events that were independent and co-mingle them. But I don't think when you're talking about, when you look at the interaction of that structure, it's like the same idea as like an experiment being an example of life, right? That's a really abstract and subtle

Starting point is 02:58:51 concept. And I guess what I'm saying is life is information propagating through matter. So once you start having things interacting, they in some sense, combing will and they become part of the same chain. So, there is a coming link starts quickly. Yeah. Proceeds. We proceed to come angle quickly. Right.

Starting point is 02:59:12 Right. So you, you could say, so the question is then, the more interesting question is, are there two distinct origins events? And I still think that there's reasons that on a single planet, you would have one origins event because of the time scales of cycling, of geochemistry on a planet planet, you would have one origins event because of the time scales of cycling, of geochemistry on a planet, and also the fact that I don't think that the origin of life happens in a pool and like radiates outward through evolutionary processes, I think it's a multi-scale phenomenon.

Starting point is 02:59:36 It happens at the level of individual molecules interacting, collections of molecules interacting, an entire planetary scale cycles. So life as we know it has always been multi-scale. And there's, I'm brilliant examples of individual mutations at the genome level changing global climate, right? So there's a tight coupling between things that happen at, you know, the largest scale of our planetary scale and the smallest scale that life mediates. But it still might be difficult within something you would call as a single alien civilization,

Starting point is 03:00:08 you know, difference their species and stuff. But I think what I can't man, I'd be able to communicate. But you're asking about life, not species, right? So, what's the difference between one living civilization? This is almost like a category question. Yeah. Versus species because it can be very different. Right. Revolution because there's like island, like literally islands that you can evolve different kinds of turtles and stuff. Yeah. And they can. So I guess what I'm saying is weird.

Starting point is 03:00:38 If you look at the structure of two interacting living things, populations, and you look in their past and they have independent origins for their causal chain, and you would say one was alien, you know, they have different independent origins events. But if you look at their future by virtue of the fact they're interacting, their causal chains have become co-mingled, so that, and then in the future, they are not independent. Right. Right. So that's why you would even define them as aliens. So the structure across time is two examples of life become one example of life because

Starting point is 03:01:12 life is the entire structure across time. Right. But there could be a lot of variation with that. Yeah. So the question we're all interested in is how many independent origins of a complexifying causal chain are there in the universe. See, but the idea of origin is easy for you to define because like, is that when the two, when the species split in the evolutionary process and you get like, a dolphin versus a human or neodra Thal versus Homo sapien, isn't there?

Starting point is 03:01:49 Let me make a distinction here quickly. So I think, sorry, I interrupt. What we're saying, I mean, I mean, Sarah won that argument because she was, I think she's right, that once the causal chains interact and going forward. So we're talking about number of things. This go all the way back before Origin of Life. Origin of Life. On Earth. On Earth. Chemistry emerges. So there's all these, I would say there's probably mechanistically, the chemistry is desperately trying to find anyway to get replicated. The ribosome kind of was really rubbish at the beginning and it was just competed, competed, competed, and you got better and better ribosome suddenly, that was a technology. The ribosone is the technology that way, boom, allowed evolution to start.

Starting point is 03:02:30 So what I was trying to, why interrupted you is say that once evolution has started using that technology, then you can speciate. And I was trying to, and I think what Sarah said was convinced me of because I was like, no, we can have lots of different chemistry, shadow, biosphere on Earth. And she's like, no, no, no, you have to have this, you have to get to this minimum evolutionary machine. And then when that occurs, speciation occurs,

Starting point is 03:02:57 exactly what's like dolphins, humans, everything on Earth. But when you're looking at aliens or alien life, there's not going to be two different types of chemistry because they compete, they compete and interact and cooperate because the causal chains overlap. One might kill the other, one might combine with the other, and then you go on, and then you have this kind of this average, and sure there might be respeciation. It might be have two types of emerging chemistry. It almost looks like the origin of life on earth required to a different pre-life forms, the peptide world and the RNA world, somehow they got together and by combining you got the ribosome and that was the minimum

Starting point is 03:03:36 competent entity for evolution. And would all alien civilizations have an evolutionary process on a planet? All alien civilizations have an evolutionary process on a planet. So that's almost a definition of life. To create all those memories, you have to have something. You have to change in time. But there has to be selection. That's like an efficient, there's no other way to do it. No.

Starting point is 03:04:02 Well, never say never, because soon I'll say that. That's the part that depresses me, though, going back to, like, I don't know, the earlier discussion on violence and things, like, and I don't know where somebody was tweeting about this recently, but, like, you know, how much stuff had to die. Maybe it was you. Yeah. Yeah. So, we were talking about life.

Starting point is 03:04:23 And I guess a lot of murder had to occur. Right. So selection means things had to be weeded out, right? So what we can celebrate that death makes way for a tool. Yeah. I mean, it is. And also, you know, one of the most interesting features of major extinction events in the history of our planet

Starting point is 03:04:40 is how much novelty emerged immediately after, right? So and of course, you know, a lot of people make arguments, we wouldn't be here of the dinosaurs and go extinct. So, in some ways, we can attribute our existence to all of that. But I guess I was just wondering in sort of like, if I was going to build a universe myself in the most optimistic way, would I retain that feature? But it does seem to be a universe. I do have to. I mean, I think we're probably being over anthropomorphizing. I remember watching the blue, I think it was the blue planet, David Attenborough showing these seals because of climate change. Some seals were falling off a cliff and how tragic that was.

Starting point is 03:05:18 I was like, let's say my son, that's pretty cool. Look at the, look at the, those ones down there. They've obviously got some kind of mutations. Some're not doing that dark thing. And so that poor gene will be weeded out. Of course, at the individual level, it looks tragic. And of course, as human beings, if the ability to abstract and we empathize, we don't want to cause suffering on other human beings. And we should retain that. But we shouldn't look back in time and say, you know, how many butterflies had to die? I remember making this get you. How many, if you think about the caterpillar become the chrysalis and then the butterfly getting out, how many, if that suffering, we call it suffering, if that process of pruning

Starting point is 03:05:59 had not occurred, we have no butterflies. So none of the butterfly beauty in the world without all that pruning. So pruning is required, but we shouldn't amplify and feel sorry for the biological entities, because that seems to be backwards way of looking at it. What we should do is project forward and maybe think about what values we have across our species and our ecosystem and our fellow human beings. You know, you know, now that we know that animals suffer at some level, think about humane farming. When we find that plants can, in fact, are conscious and can think and have pain, then we'll do humane gardening.

Starting point is 03:06:37 Until that point, we won't do it, right? I like this. Famous chemist endorses the majestic nature of murder. That's such a title. I didn't say that, but I just insert it. I have a hard time with it, though. I think that we put it, it's kind of... But it's the reality of...

Starting point is 03:06:58 It is beautiful. There's an Instagram account called Nature's Medal. And I keep following it, on following it, It is beautiful. There's an Instagram account called Nature's Medal. And I keep following it, on following it, because I can't handle it for prolonged periods of time. We evolve together, you dialogue. Yeah. We evolve together, we die alone. So I live alone too.

Starting point is 03:07:18 So gas be thing, I don't know. We evolve together. Where's the together? The together is the murder. The population is the murder and the sex. I just want to like, my romantic vision of it to try to make me happy Sarah instead of Sad Sarah. I talk in third person when I think very abstractly sorry.

Starting point is 03:07:35 Is, you know, like this whole, like, you know, like certain things can coexist so the universe is trying to maximize existence, but there's some things that just aren't the most productive trajectory together, but it doesn't mean that they don't exist on another timeline or another chain somewhere else. Like, I, like, it maybe you would call that, like, then some kind of multiverse or things, but what am I saying? I think you can't, I just, you can't go down the level. I'm just making stuff up. No, you know, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

Starting point is 03:08:06 no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, like, there's the whole thing about like, why is the universe in able suffering? Individuals don't exist, right? So for this, I think if you think about life as an entity on Earth, right? Let's just go back a second.

Starting point is 03:08:32 I mean, I like to be ludicrous for a second. I don't exist. You don't exist, right? But the actions you do, the product of evolution exists, right? The objects you create exist, quantitatively in the real world. If you then understand life on earth or alien life or any life in the universe, as this integrated entity where you need, you need cells in your body to die. Otherwise, you'd just get really big and you wouldn't be at a walk around, right?

Starting point is 03:08:59 So you do. Yeah. Yeah. So I think the patterns that persist and not the physical thing. And of course, we have, we have, we place immense values on fellow human beings. And I'm a majestic professor,

Starting point is 03:09:16 does like other individual human beings. Now you're talking in third person too. I know, happens, right? So death, would you say, I mean, because you said evolution is a fundamental part of life. So evolution is a fundamental part of life. So death is a fundamental part of life. Yeah. It might right now, it might not be in the future.

Starting point is 03:09:33 We might hack some aspects of death because I'm all involved in different ways. But isn't there, I think Sarah mentioned, like this life density. Can't that become a problem? Like too much bureaucracy, too much baggage builds up. Like you need to keep erasing. I think it's okay that we dissipate. I don't think I've like, like, I'm. Disappear. Yes. No, but I mean, like, like we're so fixated on ourselves as individuals and agents and we were talking about this last night, night actually over dinner, but you know an individual persists for a certain amount of time. But what you want to do,

Starting point is 03:10:10 like if you're really concerned with immortality is not to live indefinitely as an individual, but maximize your causal impact. So like what are the traces of you that are left? And you're still a real, I always think of Einstein, like, for a period of time, he was a real physical thing. We identify as a human. And now we just see echoes of that human in all of the ways that we talk about his causal impact of Frank Lloyd Wright is another great example. Because how many easter eggs could you leave in the future?

Starting point is 03:10:37 Like, how long have I got here? So I guess the question is, how much do you want to control the localization of certain features of say a prop packet of propagating information we might call person and keep them localized to one individual physical structure. Do you want to, you know, is there a time when that just becomes a dissipated feature of the society that it once existed in? And I'm okay with the dissipated feature because I just think that makes more room for more creativity in the future. So you mentioned engineering life in the lab.

Starting point is 03:11:10 Let me take you to computer science world. What about robots? So is it possible to engineer? You're really talking about like engineering life at the chemistry level. But do you think it's possible to engineer a life at the humanoid level, at the dog level, or is that at which level can we instill the magic of life into inanimate stuff? No, I think you could do it at every level. I just think that we're particularly interested in chemistry because it's the origin of life

Starting point is 03:11:51 transition that presumably, or at least the sour I feel about, is going to give you the most interesting or deepest insights into the physics. But presumably everything that we do and build is an example of life. And the question is just how much do you want to take from things that we have now and put them into like examples of life and copy them into machines? I saw that there was this tweet again. I think you were at the Mars conference and you were hanging out with a humanoid robot. Yes. That was a fun thing. Making lots of new friends at Mars 2020. Do you guys

Starting point is 03:12:26 color match on head of time with the robot or did that accidentally happen? Accidentally. I went up and I wanted to say hi to the voice. Would that be the correct name for the color? I think so. We didn't color coordinator outfits. Well, you didn't maybe the robot did. The robot probably did Much more stylish. So for people who are just listening, there's a picture of Sarah standing next to a human at robot, I guess you like them with a small head and perfect vision. Actually, no, I just,

Starting point is 03:12:55 do I did their perfect, there's a lidar. No, I mean, I think I was just deeply interested because I'm, What was, sorry to interrupt, was it manual control? Was it actually stabilizing itself? Oh, no, it was it manual control was it actually stabilizing itself oh no it was walking around oh nice yeah nice it was pretty impressive I mean actually that there's some videos online of Jeff Bezos walking with one of those across the lawn nearby there so yeah um so I wasn't invited

Starting point is 03:13:22 So I wasn't invited Yeah, but There you go see That's incredible, isn't it? Yeah, see you look at the walking robot Where did the idea for walking come from was invented by evolution right and us as human beings able to conceptualize and design an engineer. So that robot is evidence of life. And so I think what's going to happen is we want to find where the spark comes from mechanistically. How can you literally go from sand to cells? So that's the first transition that I think. You know, there are a number of problems we want to do. Make life in the lab. Great.

Starting point is 03:14:03 Then we're going to make life in the lab and. Then we want to make life in lab and want to suddenly start to make intelligent life or life that can solve, start to solve abstract problems. And then we want to make life that is conscious. Okay. In that order. I think it has to happen in that order. You know, this getting towards this other official general intelligence. I think that artificial general intelligence can't exist in a vacuum. I have to have a causal chain all the way back to Luka, right? And so the question I think I really like the question is to say, how is how is our pursuit of more and more life like? I know you want to and you like robots, you want to project into them, you want to interact with them, I think you would

Starting point is 03:14:44 want if you have a robot dog and a robot dog does everything expect a normal dog and you can't tell a difference, you're not really going to ask the question anymore if it's a real dog or not or you've got a personality, you're interacting with it. And so I think what would be interesting would be to kind of understand the computational architecture, how that evolves because you could then teleport the personality from one object to the other and say, right, is it act the same? And I think that as we go along, we're going to get better and better at integrating our consciousness into machines. Well, let me ask you that question just to link on it.

Starting point is 03:15:22 I would call that a living conscious thing potentially eyes as a human allegedly, but would you as a person trying to define life? If you pass the touring test, are you a life form? One of the reasons I walked up to the robot was because I wanted to meet the robot. Right. So I, it felt like I was in a, I, I, I, I base a lot of my interaction with reality on emotion and feeling. But like, like, how do you feel about an interaction? And I always love your point about, like, is it enough to have that shared experience with a robot? Right. So, so walking up to it, does it

Starting point is 03:15:58 feel like you're interacting with a living thing? And it did to an extent. But in some degrees, it feels like you're interacting with a baby living thing. So I think our relationship with technology and particularly robots we build is really interesting because basically they exist as objects in our future in some sense, like where much older evolutionary lineage than robots are, but we're all part of the same causal chain.

Starting point is 03:16:21 And presumably, you know, they're kind of in their infancy. So it's almost like you're looking at the future of life when you're looking at them, but it hasn't really become life in in a full manifestation of whatever it is that they're going to become. And, you know, the more, the example of the walking robot was super interesting, but they also had a dolphin that they put in the pool, the cocktail party at Mars, and it looked just like a real dolphins swimming in the pool. And you know, it's in this kind of uncanny valley because, and I was having this conversation with a gentleman in Moutou who was super perceptive, but he was basically saying like it made him feel really uncomfortable. And I think the dolphin. Yeah, and I think a lot of people would have that response. And I guess my point about it is it is kind of interesting because you're basically trying to make a thing that you think is non-living mimic a living thing. And so, so the thought experiment I would want

Starting point is 03:17:19 to run in that case is imagine we replaced every living thing on earth with a robot equivalent, like all the dolphins. And things. And in some sense, then you're making, if you think that the robots aren't experiencing reality, for example, in a way that a biologically evolved thing would, you're basically making the philosophical zombie argument become real. Yeah. And basically building reality into a simulation because you've made everything, quote,

Starting point is 03:17:44 unquote, fake in some sense. You've replaced everything with a physical simulation of it. So as opposed to being excited by the possibility of creating something new, you're terrified of humans being replaced. I was just trying to run like, what would be the absolute thought experiment? But I don't think that scenario would actually play out. I guess what I

Starting point is 03:18:09 I think is weird for why we feel this kind of uncanny valley interacting with something like the robots all fit is we're looking on an object we know is kind of in the future in the sense of like if everything's ordered in time, but it's borrowing from a structure that we have common history with and it's basically copying in kind of superficial way things from one part of the causal chain to another. Yeah. Well, that's that's a video. I believe it was real. They look so real. And obviously, the technology was developed for movies. But I think we're confusing our emotional response and understanding the causal chain of how we got there, right? Because the philosophical zombie argument thinks about objects just appearing, right?

Starting point is 03:18:54 You're facsimileid in some way, whereas there is the causal, the chain of events that caused the dolphin to be built with for human being. Yeah, would a for a South Cosal Army still have a higher assembly index? Yeah. built for human being. Yeah, would a South Cosmese still have a higher assembly index? Yeah, because it can't be philosophical zombies, can't like a like Boltzmann brains, just can't appear out of nowhere. Well, I guess my question would be in that scenario where you built all the robots and were placed everything on Earth with robots, with the, with the biosphere BS creative under that scenario or not.

Starting point is 03:19:19 Yeah, no, no, no. And so are there, are there quantitative differences you would notice over time? And it's not obvious either way right? It's not obvious right now because we don't really we don't understand we haven't built into machines how we work So that's I think that there are one of the big missing things that I think I that we're both looking for right It's a cute robot But the point Sarah is the bias we won't be as creative if you did it right now No, of course, I think that's why I won't be as creative if you did it right now. No, of course.

Starting point is 03:19:45 I think that's why I wouldn't like it. But in the future, we will be able to solve the problem of origin of life, intelligence and consciousness, because they exist in physical substrates. We just don't understand enough about the material substrate and the causal chain, but I'm very confident we will get to an AGI, but it won't be what people think. It won't be, solution won't be a, we'll get fooled a lot. And so GPT-3 is getting better at falling us and GPT-153 might really fool us, but it won't have the magic we're looking for. It won't be a creative, but it will help us understand the differences between what?

Starting point is 03:20:27 Really though, because is that what love is being fooled? Like why are you not giving much value to the emotional connection with objects, with robots, with humans? Emotion is that thing which happens when your expectation function is dashed and something else happens, right? I mean, that's what emotion is. Is that what love is too? Yeah. You were expecting one thing and something else happened. Yeah, I don't know. I don't think that's true either. Well, what is it then? I think no emotion, I'm sorry, emotion is that. So I think love is just fulfilling your purpose. No, but I can't mean look, look.

Starting point is 03:21:08 Like whatever that means, that's all that I'm talking about. So you're okay. But when are you happiest? Like when you're... Alright, alright, alright, let me go back. If you want me to do part... Follow your bliss. Let me define love quickly.

Starting point is 03:21:17 Okay, go for it. In terms of assembly space, right? Okay. I can't wait till Assembly Theory 101 is taught. And the second lecture is Assembly Theory of Love. No, but actually, but luck, but it's being surprised. The expectations being broken. I'm just, I'm not.

Starting point is 03:21:36 No, go for it. I'm not, I'm not, I want to hear you. I'm not an emotional being. But I would say, so let's talk, so we'll talk about emotion in a bit, but love is more complex. Love is a very complex set of emotions to get at and logical stuff. But if you've got this thing, this person, it's on this causal chain, that has this empathy for this other thing,

Starting point is 03:21:53 love is being able to project ahead in your assembly space and work out what the person you're in love with has a need for and to do that for them without selflessly, right? Because you can project ahead what they're going to need. And they are there and maybe you can see someone is going to fall over and you catch them before they fall over. Or maybe you can anticipate that someone's going to be hungry and without helping you, you just help them.

Starting point is 03:22:17 That's what sounds like empathy. But it's more complex than that, right? It's more complex. It's more about not just empathy, it's understanding, it's about kind of sharing that experience. I'm an expression of love, though. That's not what it's like to feel love. Like feeling love is like, I think it's like when you're aligned with things that you feel like are your purpose or your reason for existing.

Starting point is 03:22:39 So if you have those feelings towards the robot, why is that rope? I mean, because you said that the AJ will build an AGI, but it won't, there'll be a fundamental difference in AGI and G.I. Well, build it. It's going to merge from our technical. I think you guys are all arguing the same thing. I just said that G.P.T. that we do not correctly capture the causal chain that we have within G.P.T.

Starting point is 03:23:03 Yeah, within I.I. But don it comes, my guess, this is as quick as what I was getting to right before we got, I got in the love trap. The love trap. It was like the Conan in the love trap. You know. Sounds good. It's good saying.

Starting point is 03:23:37 Sad, okay, sad, assembly space of sad. No, it's that so short, but I think there are other features that allow that we pull on innovation that allow us to do more than what we just see in GPT3. So if you're being fooled there. So I think what I mean is human beings have this ability to be surprising and creative. Whereas is it dali? This thing or if you take GP-3 is not going to create a new verb, Shakespeare created new verbs. You're like, wow. And that required Shakespeare to think outside of language in a different domain. So I think having that connections across multiple domains is what you need for

Starting point is 03:24:19 AGI. Yeah, but I don't know if you need, I don't know if there's any limitations to GBT and not being able to be cost-home-in. The number one problem is instantiated and resource-limited substrate, and that we don't use silicon. The architecture is used for training for learning, it is about falling, it's not about understanding. And I think that there is some understanding that we have that is not yet symbolically representable. Language, learning language and using language seems to be fundamentally about fooling, not understanding.

Starting point is 03:25:00 Why do you use language exactly? I might disagree with that, quite fundamentally actually, but I don't I'm not sure I understand how to make a coherent argument for that but my feeling is that there is there are there is comprehension. In reality in our consciousness below language. And and we use those for language for all sorts of expressions and we don't yet understand that there's a gap. We will get there, but I'm saying wouldn't it be interesting? Is it a bit like saying could I facsimile you or Sarah into a new human being, right? And let's just say I could copy all your atoms into the positions of all your atoms,

Starting point is 03:25:40 the electrons into this other person they would be you. The answer is no. And it's quite easy to show using assembly theory because actually the feature space that you have, that graph, the only way to copy you is to create you on that graph. So everything that's happened to you in your past, we have to have a faithful record for. If you want another copy of Lex, you have to do the exact thing. One other copy of Sarah, one other copy of Lee, the exact past has to be replicated. Let me push back on that a little bit. That's maybe from an assembly theory perspective,

Starting point is 03:26:10 but I don't think it's that difficult to recreate a version of me, like a clone that would make everybody exactly equally as happy, like they wouldn't care which one. And like there's two of me and then they get to pick which one and they'll kill you the one they'll be fine. As long as they're forced to kill. They'll be fine, but here's what will happen is let's say we make artificial legs. And it was like, wow, so cool, it looks the same interact. Then there'll be this battle of like, right, we're gonna tell the difference,

Starting point is 03:26:40 we're gonna, we're gonna basically keep nudgingging our artificial legs until we get novelty from one and we'll kill the other one. And I think thank God we're not novelty is a fuzzy concept. That's the whole problem of novelty. So I will define novelty. It's not as fuzzy. for you to create architectures that are, a creating architecture. So let's say you've got a corpus of architectures known, you can write down, you've got some distance measure. And then I create a new one and the distance measure, so far away from what you'd expected,

Starting point is 03:27:16 there's no linear algebra we're gonna get there. It's like that is creativity. And we don't know how to do that yet on any level. Well, I was also thinking about like your argument about free will, like you wouldn't be able to know it was, it doesn't work instantaneously. It's not like a micro level thing, but more macro level thing over the scale of trajectories or longer term decisions.

Starting point is 03:27:38 So if you think that the novelty manifests over those longer time scales, it might be the two lexes diverge quite a bit over certain time scales of their behavior. But nobody would notice the difference. They might not. And the universe, the earth won't notice the difference. The universe won't notice the difference. The universe would notice the difference.

Starting point is 03:28:01 No, the universe doesn't know about its novelty, this being generated, it's the whole point of novel. Yeah, but this is what selection is, right? It's like taking nearly equivalent ones and then deciding like the universe selects, right? So whatever selection is, select some things to persist in time. Yeah, it's going to select the artificial one.

Starting point is 03:28:19 So it likes that one better. Well, you're mixing up two arguments here. So look, let's go back a second. What are you facing with argument on my? I'm just saying that I kind of don't think, because at least said that it's not possible, if you copy every single molecule in a person's body, that's not going to be the same person,

Starting point is 03:28:41 that they won't have the same assembly index, they won't be the same person. And I just don't, I think copying, you can compress, not only do I disagree with that, I just, I think you can even compress a person down to some where you can fool the universe. I'm saying, I will, let me restate it. It is not possible to copy somebody

Starting point is 03:29:02 on because you, unless you copy the causal history. Also, you can't have two identical, I mean, actually, I really like the idea that everything in the universe is unique. So even if like, there were two lectures. I know you like that idea because you're human, and you think you're unique. Yeah, exactly. But also, I can make a logical argument for it that even if we could copy, you know, all of your molecules and all their positions, the other you would be there, and you have

Starting point is 03:29:23 a different position in space. You're distinguishable. Yeah, the other thing was how unique are you just by the position in space really? Sure, but then how much of that like translation of Lex. Well, that's not an interesting. I see, but but no, wait, wait a minute. It's part of the definition of something being interesting is how much it affects the future. Yes. But let me come back. Let me come back.

Starting point is 03:29:50 Let me just agree. One point quickly that you would make it. Sure. I think I probably agree. Yes. There's two lexas, right? There's a robot lex that you just basically, it's a it's a it is a charade. It's a facsimile. it's just coded to emulate you. Are you robot legs? I would know, right? Let's get there. That's the point. That's the very important point here, because he's ducking and diving between this eye.

Starting point is 03:30:14 So, if I facsimileed you into a robot, then your robot might be a representation of you now, but fundamentally be boring, because you go and have other ideas. If however you built an architecture, there's itself as capable of generating novelty, you would diverge in your causal chain, and you're both equally interesting to interact with. We don't know that mechanism. All I'm trying to say is we don't yet know that mechanism. We do not know the mechanism that generates novelty. And at the moment in our AIs, we are emulating. We are not generating. You don't think we're sneaking up on that.

Starting point is 03:30:47 Do you think there's a problem? There is no ghost in the machine. And I want there to be one. I want the same thing, you want, sorry, I was looking for. I know you want that as a human, because everything you just said makes you feel more special. I want to be such a genius. No, no, screw my specialness.

Starting point is 03:31:03 I just want to be surprised. If I... You think produce an algorithm instantiated and robot surprise me, I will I will I will I will have one of those robots to be brilliant, but they won't surprise me. But why is it a problem to think that humans are special? Maybe it's not the special you write right? It's the better than. Yes. Because then you start to not recognize the magic and other life forms that you either have created or you have observed.

Starting point is 03:31:35 Because I just think there's magic and, uh, legate robots moving about and they are full of surprises. Yeah. So this is... In personality. Yeah. So I'm a little... I know where you like cellular automata, right? But the specialness in your robot comes from the robot assist that built it.

Starting point is 03:31:56 Yeah. Yeah. It's part of the lineage. Yeah. And so that's fine. I'm happy with that. That's what I felt like looking at the standing robot was I was looking at four billion years of evolution. Yeah, right. If it wasn't so I think I'm happy. I mean, I'm happy. We're going to coexist. I'm just saying you're going to get more excitement. There's something missing in our understanding of intelligence. Intelligence isn't just training.

Starting point is 03:32:18 The way the neural network is conceived right now is gray and it's lovely and it'll be better and we will argue forever, but you want to know, wouldn't it be great if I said, look, I know how to invent an architecture, and I can give it a soul. Now, what I mean by a soul is some, I know for real that there is internal reference. Soon as I not fake internal reference, and if we could generate that mechanism for internal reference, that's why I'll go direct.

Starting point is 03:32:43 That's why you have to do that. We can do that. We can do that. Get that goal, that's why I'll go direct directly. That's why you have to do that. We can do that. We can do that. Get that goal, directness. You would love that robot more than the one that's just made to look like it does. Because you'll have more fun with it, because you better generate search, other problems, get more novelty.

Starting point is 03:32:57 Hell, you better fall in love with that robot. For real, but not the one that's faking it. What about fake it till you make it? Well, I think a lot of people fall in love with fake humans. It's nice to fall in love with something that's full of novelty. I could imagine all kinds of robots that I would want to have a close relationship with. And I don't mean like sexual I mean like intimacy. But I just don't think that novelty generation is such a special. Okay, there's like mathematical nullification, something like that. And then there's just

Starting point is 03:33:38 humans being surprised. And I think we're easily surprised. That's fine, but that's that, but you don't think that's a good definition. No, that's good. I'm happy to be surprised. That's fine, but you don't think that's a good definition of it. No, that's good. I'm happy to be surprised, but not globally surprised, because someone else, but I really want, I was one of, I'm a scientist. I really want to be the first to be surprised about something and the first thing in the, first in the universe to create that novelty. And to know for sure that that novelty has never occurred anywhere else. That's a real buzz, right? So, I'll wait to really that novelty. And to know for sure that that novelty has never occurred anywhere else. That's a real buzz, right? So we really know that. You have to have a really big look up table. Right. Yeah, you're never going to be no for sure, right? That's one of the hard things

Starting point is 03:34:14 about being and scientists searching for this type of novelty. Maybe that's why mathematics, mathematicians love discovery, but actually they are creating. And then when they decorate a new love discovery, but actually they are creating, and then when they create a new mathematical structure that they can then, you can write code to work out whether that structure exists before. That's almost why I would love to have been a mathematician from that regard to invent new math. That really, I know pretty much for sure does not exist anywhere else in the universe, because it's so contingent. Right, but this gets into, like, you set a few times, and I still really don't understand how you actually plan to do this, to build an experiment that detects how the universe is generating novelty or that time is the mechanism. So the problem that we all have, which I think is what Lex is pushing against, is if I

Starting point is 03:35:00 build the experiment, you don't know what you put into it. You don't know it. Unless you can quantify everything you put in, all of your agency, all the boundary conditions, you don't know if you somehow biased it in some way. Is the novelty actually intrinsic to that experiment or to that robot, or is it something you gave it, but you didn't realize you could do it? It's going to be, it's going to asymptote towards that, right? You're never going to know for sure, but you can start to take out, you know, you can use good Bayesian approaches

Starting point is 03:35:29 and just keep updating and updating and updating until you point to one sense of purposes. So you wanna bound on how much novelty generation could be, got it. So the ability to generate novelty is correlated with high assembly index, with assembly index. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 03:35:46 Because the space possibilities is bigger. So that's the key. This could be a good, so we're running joke of like, Y Lexus single. This could be a good part for. So what you're looking for in a robot partner is ability to generate novelty. And that's, I suppose you would say it's a good definition of intelligence too. Mm-hmm. Boy is novelty a fuzzy concept. Is creativity better?

Starting point is 03:36:29 Yeah, I mean, that's all pretty fuzzy. It's kind of the same. Maybe that's why aliens haven't come yet, is because we're not correct enough novelty. Like there's some kind of a hierarchy of novelty in the university. Well, I think novelty is like, things surprise you, right?

Starting point is 03:36:43 So it's a very passive thing, but I guess I would remember by saying creativity is I think it's much more active Like you think there's like a mechanism of like the things that exist or generating the creativity novelty seems to be there's some spontaneous production and it has it's completely decoupled from the things that exist No, I understand I think it's really Creativity is the mechanism and novelty is the observable. Yeah. novelty could just be surprised.

Starting point is 03:37:07 Your model of the world was broken and not necessarily in a positive way. That's surprise. So there's three things now. Let's go back to school. All right, let's go. You got surprise, which is basically, I mean, I'm surprised all the time

Starting point is 03:37:20 because I don't read very much. I'm pretty dumb. I was like, oh wow, I often used to invent new scientific ideas and I was really surprised by that and then when looking at the literature properly and it's there, so surprise, that's the extent that you don't have full information. Creativity, the act of pushing on the causal structure

Starting point is 03:37:41 and novelty, which is measuring that degree. Right? So, and I think that's pretty well defined in that regard. So, you want your robot, you mean, and in the end, that's why actually the way the internet and the printing press share some, I actually think creativity has dropped a bit since the internet, because everyone's just, you know, just regurgitating stuff. But, of course, now it's beginning to accelerate again, because everyone's using this tool to be creative, and boom, it's exploding.

Starting point is 03:38:10 I think that's what happens when you create these new technologies. That's really helpful. There's a different security and novelty and surprise. Okay, I think I was thinking about surprise. If you give me a toy that surprises me for a bit, it'd be great. Robot surprises me. Experiment that surprises you. Yeah, I mean, that's. Robot surprises me. You know, experiment that surprises you. Yeah, I mean, that's why I love doing experiments because I'm, I can't. It's still exciting.

Starting point is 03:38:29 Yeah. Surprise is exciting. Yeah. Even negative surprises, like some people love drama and relationships. Like, it's like, why the hell, what, why'd you do this? That could be exciting.

Starting point is 03:38:41 I could imagine companies selling updates to their companion robots that just basically generate negative surprise just to spice things up a bit. Yeah, it's the push and pull. That's one of the components of love. As you said, love is a complicated thing. Oh, beauty. I wanted to mention this because you're also tweeted.

Starting point is 03:38:58 I think this was Sarah. No, it might have been Lee. I don't remember. But it was a survey published in Nature showing that scientists find. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, there's a plot. This is published in Nature of what scientists find beautiful in their work and it separates biologists and physicists. It'd be nice if he showed the full plot. And there's simplicity, elegance, hidden order, interlogic of system, symmetry, complexity, harmony and so on.

Starting point is 03:39:28 Is there any interesting things that stand out to you? I think the fact that biologists like complexity and pleasing colors. Oh, there's pleasing colors on there, yay. Or shapes. Or shapes, pleasing colors, and then physicists obviously love simplicity, blah call it a shit. And then physicists obviously love simplicity of all of us.

Starting point is 03:39:45 Simplicity, elegance. Simplicity, elegance. Yeah. They love symmetry and then biologists love complexity and, well, they just love a little bit less. They love being less. They love everything a little bit less but complexity a little bit more.

Starting point is 03:40:00 A little bit more. That's so interesting. And the things in colors are shapes. Do you think it's a useful, I forget what your tweet was that this is missing some of the. Oh, no, I think it's because I think about how explanations become causal to our future. So I have this whole philosophy that the theories we build in the way we describe reality should be have the largest breadth of possibilities

Starting point is 03:40:28 for the future of what we can accomplish. So in some sense, it's not like Occam's razor is not for simplicity, it's for optimism or the kind of future you can build. And so I think you have to think that's way when you're thinking about life and alien life, because ultimately we're trying to life and alien life, because ultimately we're trying to build, I mean, science is just basically our narratives about

Starting point is 03:40:48 reality. And now you're building a narrative that is what we are as physical systems. It seems to me it needs to be as positive as possible because it's basically going to shape the future trajectory where we're going. And we don't use that as a heuristic in theory building because we think theories are about predicting features of the world, not causing them. But if you look at the history of all of the development of human thought, it's caused the things that happen next. So it's not just about looking at the world and observing it.

Starting point is 03:41:15 It's about actually that feedback loop that's missing and it's not in any of those categories. What do you think is the most beautiful idea in the physics of life, in the chemistry of life, in this, through all your exploration with the assembly theory, what is the thing that made you step back and say this idea is beautiful or potentially beautiful. For me, it's that the universe is a creative place. I guess I want to think, and whether it's true or not, is that we are special in some way, and it's not like an arbitrary added-on, epiphenomenar, ad hoc feature of the universe that we exist, but it's something deep and intrinsic to the structure of reality. And to me, the most beautiful ideas that come out of that is that the reason we exist

Starting point is 03:42:14 is for the universe to generate more things and to think about itself and use that as a mechanism for creating more stuff. That's for me. So the life that this however common it is, is an intrinsic part, is a fundamental part of this universe at least that we live in. I think so. I mean, it's always interesting to me because we have theories, aquatic mechanics and gravity, and they're supposed to be our most fundamental theories right now, and they describe things like

Starting point is 03:42:50 the interaction of massive bodies or the way that charges accelerate or all these kind of features. And there are these really deep theories, and they tell us a lot about how reality works, but they're completely agnostic to our existence. And I just, I can't help but think that whatever describes us has to be even deeper than that. And I think incorporating memory, I guess, because of the personality, whatever the

Starting point is 03:43:13 term you want to use into the physics of the world might be. That's the easiest way to do it. It's the cleanest. So here we go again with the physicists on the physicists. The clean, I was going to say the simplest, most elegant way of resolving all of the kind of ways that we have, we have these paradoxes associated with life when you it's not that life is not um, current physics is not incompatible with life, but it doesn't explain life. And then you want to know where are the explanatory gaps. And this idea that we have an assembly that time is fundamental and objects actually are extended in time and have physical extent in time is the cleanest way of resolving a lot of the explanatory gaps. So I've been struggling with assembly theory for many years because I could see this gap. because I could see this gap. And I think when I first met Sarah and we realized we were kind of talking about the same problem, but we were, we understood another language. It was quite hilarious actually,

Starting point is 03:44:14 because it's like, look, I've no idea what we're talking about, but I think it sounds right. So for me, the most beautiful thing about assembly theory is I realized the assembly theory explains why the universe why life is a universe developing a memory. But not only that poesically, I could actually go measure it. And I was like, holy shit, we would just we physically measure this thing, this abstract thing, and we can measure it. And not only could we measure it, but we can then start to quantify the causal consequences. And because I mean we measure it, but we can then start to quantify the causal consequences.

Starting point is 03:44:47 Because I mean, I think as a kind of inventing this together with Sarah and her team, I thought there was a quite a high chance that we're doing science. There's such a high probability we're wrong. Mm-hmm. You know, on this. Every day. And I remember kind of trying to go to hard physicists, mathematicians, complexity theorists, and everyone just kind of giving me such a hard time about it. And so, you know, this is kind of, this is, you've just done this, you've just done that.

Starting point is 03:45:20 It's, you know, if you've just recupitulated an all theory. And I was unable, I lacked the language to really explain, and I had to, it was a real struggle. So this realization that life, what life does, that physics cannot understand or chemistry, is the universe develops a memory that's causally actionable, and then we can measure it, but it isn't just one thing. There is this intrinsic property of all the objects in the universe, like I've said before, but you know, me holding up this water bottle, it's just any other water bottle, but it is a sum total of all the water bottles that have existed, right? And we'll likely change the future of water bottles. for other objects. So it's that this kind of, so for me, assembly

Starting point is 03:46:06 theory explains the soul in stuff. But it is monology is not like showdex, morphic resonance where we have this kind of wooey thing permeate universe. It is the interaction of objects of other objects and some objects have more instantaneous causal power, that's life, living things. And some objects are the instantaneous output of that causal power, dead objects, but they're part of the lineage. And that for me is fascinating and they're really beautiful. And I think that even if we're determined to be totally wrong, I think that will help us help hopefully understand what life is and go into tech life elsewhere and make life in the lab.

Starting point is 03:46:48 How does that make you feel, by the way, does it make you feel less special that you're so deeply integrated, interconnected to the lineage? I mean, on one level, I just wanted, in my life as a scientist, I wanted to have an interesting idea just once or an original idea. I mean, it was like, you know, so I think that was cool that we had this idea and we were playing with it. And I think also that I kind of, I mean, it took me ages to realize that Sarah had also had the same kind of form, coming towards the same formulation just from a completely different point because I, but no, it makes me feel special.

Starting point is 03:47:24 Well, it also makes me feel connected to the universe. It also makes me feel not just humble about, you know, being a living object in the universe, but the fact that it makes me really optimistic about what the universe is going to do in the future, because we're not just isolated phenomena. We are connected. I will be able to have, know one of my small objectives in life is to change the future of the universe and some profound way just by existing. Yeah, that's not ambitious at all. I think it's also good because it makes me feel less lonely because I just realized I'm not like I mean I'm a unique assembly structure But I have so much overlap with the other entities I interact with that.

Starting point is 03:48:07 We're not completely individual, right? And yet your existence does have a huge amount of impact on the, how this whole thing unrolls on the future of the world. As individuals, that's, yeah. But I was going to say, what? Local packets of agency. I think we all have a profound impact on the world. As individuals, that's yeah. But I was going to say why. All packets of agency. I think we all have a profound impact on the future. Some of the others, right? All human beings, all life. And I mean, that's why I think it's a privilege

Starting point is 03:48:32 in a way for you know, to say I to assert some degree of ego and agency, you know, I'm going to make a computer or make an origin life machine or we can do this thing. But actually, it's just like, you know, life's probably living, so if there is a God or there's a soul in everything, it's what we laughing at is going, I fool these guys by giving them ego. So they strive for this stuff and look what it does for the assembly space of the universe. And there's always a possibility

Starting point is 03:48:57 that science can't answer all of it. So that part's challenging for me. There may be a limit to this thing. Let me ask you a bunch of ridiculous questions and I demand relatively short answers. Lee, what's the scariest thing you've ever done? Or what's the scary thing that pops the mind? Giving seminars in front of other scientists. That's, yeah, that is terrifying.

Starting point is 03:49:30 I could, if I were, I would ask you about the most embarrassing, but we'll spare you. What about you Sarah, scariest thing? Up there, some of the scary things you've done. Actually, the scariest for me was deciding I wanted to get divorced because it was like a totally radical like

Starting point is 03:49:50 life transfer made. Yeah, because we had been married for a really long time. And I think it was just so much like, I realized like so much of my individual agency, I didn't realize I had before. And that was just really like scary, like empowering, scary, but like terrifying, like you were living in a kind of one way for your whole life and then you realized your life could be a different way. There's a between humans. The beautiful thing about love is the connection you have,

Starting point is 03:50:17 but it's also become a dependency and breaking that. Whether it's a mentor, what's your parents, your girlfriend. It's like waking up. There's a mentor, what's your parents, your de- And someone's like waking up, like, just there's a different reality. Yeah, that was scary reinventing yourself. Okay, if you could leave, maybe I'll actually will alternate. Sarah, if you could be someone else for a day, someone alive today, you haven't met yet. Or maybe you could do one who you've met, who would it be? Kim Kardashian.

Starting point is 03:50:44 No joke. The woman's brilliant. I just like to experience like I just, Maybe you could do one who you've met, who would it be? Kim Kardashian. No joke. The woman's brilliant. I was just like to experience. I think she's got such an interesting and very deep understanding of social reality. But you also said you have a appreciation, a love for fashion. I do. But that's actually the same.

Starting point is 03:51:02 I just think it's really interesting because we live in a social reality which is completely artificially constructed. And some people are really genius about moving through that And I think she's particularly good at I wonder if she's good at understanding her if she's I think it's very deeply intrinsic to her So I don't know if she happens like surfing away how much cognitive awareness she has of it or how strategic it is But I think it's deeply fascinating. So I guess that's the first one that comes fine What about you Lee if you could be somebody for a day, I don't say you're sure back.

Starting point is 03:51:28 Don't say Kim Kardashian. Let's do it off the table. off the table. No, I was going to say I would like to like to be a, is that to be here today, I was going to say I'd like to be the latest arm processor. I would like to be the latest arm processor. I'd like to understand what I would like to know what it feel like to basically um you like being objects. I like being

Starting point is 03:51:54 otherwise obsessed with being objects ever since I was a kid. What's the best part of being an arm processor for a day? I mean, I'd like to understand how I access my memory, what anticipates coming next in clock cycles. What about how it feels like? Yeah, I wonder how I'd like to understand how I access my memory, why anticipate coming next and clock cycles. What about how it feels like? Yeah, I wonder how it feels like Yeah, to be to be useful to people I mean, thanks for that All right, um if uh leave everyone on earth disappeared and it was just you left What would your days look like? would you do nobody else left to impress

Starting point is 03:52:27 nobody no probably can't really do any real science at scale what would you do with your remaining every possible tool i could and put it in my workshop and just make stuff as so try to make stuff just try to to make stuff. Make up, not making companions probably. Yeah. So in the physical space. Yeah. What about you, sir? What would you, when you just left the

Starting point is 03:52:53 loan on earth, you're the last? Other animals in this scenario. No living beings. No plants. No plants. Oh, interesting. I was going to say I would just, I would try to walk the entire planet, at least all the

Starting point is 03:53:06 landmass. Well, that's true. So you probably don't know if there's a stuff, you could be searching for plants or other humans or other plants. And what would I eat? It's a, you just have daily just, no, I would just walk all the time. That's soil and I don't know why I just walk that's just came to my or just walk.

Starting point is 03:53:30 And I guess I would make a goal of covering all of the entire earth. Because what else are you going to do with your time? What's an item on your bucket list Sarah that you haven't done yet, but you hope to do. Skydiving. I traveled the space. I don't know. You know, it's funny. It was my bucket list. I only know it was on my bucket list once I check it off. I want you to check it off. So your bucket list is like a fog. It's like a mystery. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:53:57 Almost by doing it. Yeah, so it's very subconsciously driven. Um, so it's in your subconscious in there. I think that I think most of the steering of our agencies in our subconscious anyway, so I just kind of go with the flow, but I guess some no seriously. Yeah, I get it. I don't know, I guess, but I would like to go into summering like to the bottom of the ocean. I think that'd be really cool. To the bottom of the ocean. Are you captivated by the mystery of the ocean? Like how long? I am. Yeah. Yeah. What about you Lee? What item on your bucket list? I don't have a bucket, but I'll just make one. I would love to take a computer to the moon or Mars and make drugs off world. Be the first camera to make drugs off world.

Starting point is 03:54:39 The first drug manufacturer in space. Yeah. Why not? Drugs, do you have to be somehow like, be able to have a tape, like be able to survive on that particular space? Or like, what's the connection between being on Mars and doing, maybe? I just would like to be that I'd like to take the ability to have command and control over chemicals programmatically, offer to somewhere else in the universe. That just seems like you like difficulty engineering.

Starting point is 03:55:07 Before I die, if I can do that, you travel to space. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I'd love to go into space, but not just to be a tourist. I want to take a scientific experiment in space and do a thing in space that never been done before. That's a real possibility. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:55:22 Yeah. So that's why there's no point in listing things I can't do. Yeah. All right. What small act of kindness were you once shown that you will never forget? Small act of kindness, not big. Somebody was just kind to you. Somebody did something sweet. When I was a PhD student,

Starting point is 03:55:44 um, someone helped me out with just, I was basically, I needed a computer, I needed some power, a computation power, and someone took pity on me and helped me. I was really touched, they didn't have to. And they were actually quite, they were disabled scientists, they were, had other things to do rather than help some random PhD student,ave me access taught me a lot of stuff Yeah, actually when you're a grad student or when you're a student when you're even a student y'all the younger it is the better

Starting point is 03:56:14 the attention the support the love you get from a from an older person a teacher something like that is super powerful Mm-hmm, that's anything and like from the perspective the teacher, they might not realize the impact they have, but that little bit, those few words, a little bit of help can have a lot of impact. What about you, sir? Somebody give you a free Starbucks at some point.

Starting point is 03:56:38 I love free Starbucks. I like it when you're like in the line at Starbucks and somebody buys your coffee in front of you and then you buy the next one. I love those, but that's not my example. Those are great. I love them too. And you're like in the line at Starbucks and somebody buys your coffee in front of you and then you buy the next one. I love those. But that's not my example. I love them too.

Starting point is 03:56:48 It makes me happy. And then my kids get excited when we do it, when we go in for the first ones in line doing it. But I guess I can use a similar example about just being a student. So Paul Davies is a very well-known theoretical physicist. And I, you know, he was generous enough with his time to take me on as a postdoc. But before I became his postdoc, he invited me

Starting point is 03:57:13 to a workshop at Arizona State University in the beyond center, and took a walk with me around campus just to talk about ideas after. And I think there were two things that were completely generous about that. One is, Paul's philosophy is always interacting with young people. It's like, you interact with a mind in the room. It doesn't matter how well known or whatever. It's like, you evaluate the person for the person. But he also gave me a book, The Erie Silence, that he had written, and he wrote in it. This is how EE gets to ET, which was an anti-maric excess, which I worked on as a PhD student,

Starting point is 03:57:51 was the origin of homo chirality, all the way up to what the book was about, which was are we alone in the universe, and is there an intelligent life out there? And it was just so much about the questions I wanted to ask, because it was just everything about, like it was just really, really kind. Like that is okay to ask these questions. Yeah. And you, can I share a strong message? I mean, I think a lot of my career

Starting point is 03:58:14 is mostly his encouragement to ask deep questions. Like he gave me this space to do it in ways that a lot of previous mentors had. I mean, I've had a good experience with mentors, but it was like, go off the deep end, ask the hardest questions. And I think that's the best gift you can give somebody. Well, would you, because you're both fascinating minds and not, I would say, non-standard in the best possible way. Is there advice you can give to young folks how to be non-standard, how to stand out, novelty, how to generate novelty.

Starting point is 03:58:46 That's why I want on my tombstone, I have one. He generated novelty. No, no, how to. It's like how to. How to. How still. I just love to experience science. And so when I was younger, I was just to just wanted to, I mean, I'm still not sure on a real scientist, right? So I want to try.

Starting point is 03:59:10 So my advice for the young people is just, if you just, if you love asking questions, then don't be afraid to ask the question, even if it pisses people off, because if you piss people off, you're probably asking the right question. What I would say though is don't do what I do, which is just piss everyone off, try and work out how to, you know, I think church, if other people challenge my questions, you will get not only respect, but people will give you great space for you because you're doing something really new. I really try to create space in my academic career, my team really try and praise them and push them to do new things. So my advice is try to do new things,

Starting point is 03:59:51 get feedback and the universe will help you. Because the universe likes novelty. I think so. I think so, right? This one will keep them around. What about you, right? This one will keep them around. Oh my God. What about you, Sarah? You too like to ask the really out there. Yeah, because I have a strong passion for them. So I think it goes back to the love.

Starting point is 04:00:15 Like if you're doing the thing you're supposed to be doing, you should really love it. So I always tell people that they should do the thing they're most passionate about. But I think a flip side of that is that's when you become in some, like, not to sound cheesy, but like your best version of yourself. So I guess, like for me, as I become more successful in my career, I feel like I can be more myself as an individual.

Starting point is 04:00:36 And so there's this, I've always been following the questions I'm most interested in, which very early on I was discouraged from knowing by many people because they thought they were unanswerable questions. And I always just thought, well, if no one's even trying to answer them, of course they're going to be unanswerable. And then that was kind of an odd viewpoint, but the more I found my way and that space, the more I also made a space for myself as a person because you're basically generating the niche that you want to exist in. And so I think that's part of it is not just to follow your passion, but also think about like, who do you want

Starting point is 04:01:11 to be and create that? Yeah, who am I? Who do you want to be? I mean, we have played temporarily with it. Yeah, who am I now? Who do I want to be now? But who do I want to be in the future? They're not decoupled. Yeah, I always wonder if that's like if I become something Am I finding myself or am I creating myself? Yeah, and I think those are somehow the same kind of thing I do feel often like that I was always meant to be this kind of thing. Yeah, but Is that created or discovered? I don't know. But basically go towards that direction. If you were abducted by aliens, Sarah. Waiting.

Starting point is 04:01:54 Don't a spaceship there. And then they somehow figured out the language you speak. And ask you, what are what are you? What explain yourself? Not you Sarah, but the species. What's life on earth? Like we don't have time or busy grad students from another planet. What's interesting about human civilization? What's interesting about you?

Starting point is 04:02:26 I'll use specifically to the they could be very kind of personal kind of pushy and yeah, well, how would you get the describe? Okay, I have one because you know, like at least I obviously I self-identify as a scientist and a physicist, but intrinsically I feel more like an artist, but it's almost like you're an artist that you don't know what you're painting yet. And I guess I feel like that's humanity, like in some sense, where we're creating something, I think, is profound and potentially very beautiful, like, existence of the universe, but we're just so naive, like, not naive. We're just early, we're early. We're young. We don't know what we're doing yet.

Starting point is 04:03:07 Yeah, what's with the nuclear weapons? There's a big question too. Like what are you guys? What are we doing with them? This creativity that you talk is not very nice, but it's the you're making things that are like very destructive and like the rockets, what it seems very aggressive. Yeah, I know.

Starting point is 04:03:24 This is my blinders on. Yeah, I know. This is my, my blinders on. Um, I don't know. I, I mean, it goes back to the whole conversation. I suffer. I have a hard time, uh, regularizing certain aspects of reality into what I want to envision. And that's obviously problematic. But, you know, nuclear power has also given us a lot of good things. So, um, so both, that's human nature, both, both human beings and the technology we create has the capacity for evil and the capacity to go. Yeah, we can't all be good all the time. I mean, there's like this huge misnomer that you need to be liked by everyone universally. And obviously, that's like an ideal, but it's physically impossible. You, like, you can't get a group of people in a room and have everyone like

Starting point is 04:04:02 each other all the time. So I think that kind of tension is actually really important that we have different aesthetics, different goals, and sometimes conflict comes out of that. Yeah, speaking of which, do you, Lee and Yoshibah ever say anything nice to each other, or is it always conflict? We never have conflict, we argue, but I don't think they argue arguments are bad. I mean, I think the problem I have, not the problem, I think.

Starting point is 04:04:32 Here we go. Isn't that here as a defendants side? No, I just don't necessarily understand. The, I mean, he's just talking at such a high level. You know, I'm a dimwit, so I'm like, I spend some, so I think a lot of our conflict is not conflict. We actually have a, I think, I mean, I can't speak for you,

Starting point is 04:04:49 I actually have a deep appreciation for it. I'm brilliant, but I think I'm kind of frustrated and I'm trying to, he thinks the universe is a computer and I want to turn the universe into a computer. Yeah, that's a small disagreement. So what would you, how would you defend your life to an alien when you're being abducted? Would you focus on the specifics of your life? No, no, no, I would be, I would try and be as random as possible or try and confuse them.

Starting point is 04:05:15 Oh, good. Good. Excellent. That might be the way there's choice. Easter eggs in reality. No, I mean the Thali is a don't to me. I would try and be as random as I would try and do something that would surprise a hell out of them. I mean, I probably like risking, they might kill me, but I think that might be funny. Yeah, they might want to study you for prolonged periods of time. My reasoning is, if I wanted to stay alive, okay, so if the thing is, I wasn't going back to earth and the job was to stay alive, if I could be as surprising as possible, they'd

Starting point is 04:05:47 keep me around like a pet, right? Pet Lee. On the alien space. You'd be okay being a pet. No, but I mean, the last human that survives would just be a pet to the aliens. I don't know, but I mean, I think that might be fun because they might, I might get some feedback from their curiosity. Let me ask you this question.

Starting point is 04:06:07 Given our conversation has a very different meaning, not a more profound than you perhaps, but would you rather lose all of your old memories or never be able to make new ones? I would have to lose all my old memories. Again, it's the novelty. What about you, Sarah? I'm the same because I don't think, like, it's about the future experience, right? And in some sense, like you were saying earlier, most of our lived experiences actually in our memories.

Starting point is 04:06:41 So if you can't generate new memories, it's like you're not alive anymore. That's it. Yeah. What comforts you on bad days? When you look at human civilization, when you look at your own life, what gives you hope? What makes you feel good about what we're doing about life? At the small scale of you as a human and at the big scale of us as a human civilization, maybe the big scale of the universe. Children, my kids, but I also mean that in like a grand sense of like, not a grand, but like, like, future minds in some sense. So for me, like the most bleak movie ever,

Starting point is 04:07:19 you know, people worry about apocalyptic things like AI, existential risk and climate change, which children of men, you know, the whole premise of the movie was there can be no children born on the entire planet. And the youngest person on the planet is like 18 years old or something. Like, can you imagine a world without children? It's just, it's harrowing. That's the scariest thing. So I think what gives me hope is always youth and the hope of children and the possibilities of the future they see, and they grow up in a completely different reality than adults do.

Starting point is 04:07:53 And I think we have a hard time seeing what their reality actually looks like, but I think most of the time it's super interesting. Yeah, they have dreams, they have imagination, they have this kind of excitement. Yeah. So it's so cool, so fun to watch. And yeah, you feel like you're almost getting in the way of all that imagination. What about you, Lee? What gives you hope?

Starting point is 04:08:20 So when I go back to my eight year old self, the thing that I dreamed of as my year old self was this world in which technology became programmable when there was internet and I get information. And I would expand my consciousness by just, just, you know, getting access to everything that was going on. And it's happened in my lifetime. I mean, really do have that, I mean, okay, there's some bad things, you know, there's TikTok, everyone just don't, whatever, all the bad things about social media. But I think, I mean, I can't quite believe my luck being bored now. So amazing. I'd be able to program reality in some way. Yeah. And the thing that I really find fascinating about human beings is that just how ingeniously are. I'm, you know, whether it's from my kids, my research group, my peers, other companies,

Starting point is 04:09:14 just how ingenious everyone is. And I'm pretty sure humanity has a bit or our cause or chain in which humanity is a vital part in the future is going to have a lot of fun and I'm just just just mind blowing just to watch and you know so humans are ingenious and I hope to help them be more ingenious if I can. What gives me hope what makes me feel good on bad days is the existence of wild minds like yours novelty novelty, generators, assembly structures that generate novelty and do so beautifully and then tweet about it. Sarah, I really, really enjoy talking to you. I enjoy following you. I'm a huge fan. Sarah, Leah, I hope to talk to you many times in the future. Maybe with your Shabbak, you're just incredible people. Thank you for everything you do. You're awesome. Thank you for talking today.

Starting point is 04:10:05 We really, really appreciate it. Thanks. I'm pretty into being here. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sarah Walker and the Equonym. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. Now, let me leave you with some words,

Starting point is 04:10:18 some Arthur C. Clark. Two possibilities exist. Either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying. And let me, if I may, add to that by saying that both possibilities, at least to me, are both terrifying and exciting. And keeping these two feelings in my heart is a fun way to explore, to wander, to think, and to live. Always a little bit on the edge of madness.

Starting point is 04:10:49 Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time. Thank you.

Lex Fridman Podcast - #279 – Alien Debate: Sara Walker and Lee Cronin

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