Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Stuart Kauffman: There Is No Theory of Everything

Episode Date: January 20, 2026

This is an interview with Stuart Kauffman, one of the founders of complexity theory. He invented random Boolean networks at only 23 years old and helped establish the Santa Fe Institute. Now 86, he makes a striking claim: there is no theory of everything. Kauffman argues that biological evolution creates genuinely new possibilities that cannot be deduced from prior states—paralleling the ancient Chinese Tao more than Plato's Logos. He also believes he's found something new in quantum gravity (and, in his words, "genuinely huge"). He unveils it here for the first time. As a listener of TOE you can get a special 20% off discount to The Economist and all it has to offer! Visit https://www.economist.com/toe SUPPORT: - Support me on Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Support me on Crypto: https://commerce.coinbase.com/checkout/de803625-87d3-4300-ab6d-85d4258834a9 - Support me on PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4 JOIN MY SUBSTACK (Personal Writings): https://curtjaimungal.substack.com LISTEN ON SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e LINKS MENTIONED: - Investigations [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/B00W0DHAH6?tag=toe08-20 - Stuart Kauffman's Books [Amazon]: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B000APT8XK - A Third Transition In Science? [Article]: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsfs/article/13/3/20220063/89381/A-third-transition-in-science-A-third-transition - Genetic Regulatory Mechanisms In Protein Synthesis [Paper]: https://www.gs.washington.edu/academics/courses/braun/55106/readings/jacob_and_monod.pdf - Is Mind In Spacetime? [Paper]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38969235/ - The World Is Not A Theorem [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.00284 - Origins Of Order [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0195079515?tag=toe08-20 - The Universal Constructor [Article]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.157.3785.180.a - Metabolic Stability And Epigenesis In Random Genetic Nets [Paper]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0022519369900150 - Antichaos And Adaptation [Article]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24938683 - The Selfish Gene [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0199291152?tag=toe08-20 - Biological Organization As Closure Of Constraints [Paper]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022519315001009 - Physics And Philosophy [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0061209198?tag=toe08-20 - Combinatorial Chemistry: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/nursing-and-health-professions/combinatorial-chemistry - Connections [Series]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.484e32c5-60bd-4493-a800-e44fd0940312 - Gonen Ashkenasy's Papers: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=7kP7Fi4AAAAJ - Michael Levin [TOE]: https://youtu.be/c8iFtaltX-s - Anna Ciaunica & Michael Levin [TOE]: https://youtu.be/2aLhkm6QUgA - Plato's Cave [TOE]: https://youtu.be/PurNlwnxwfY - "Is God A Taoist?" [TOE]: https://youtu.be/P-jh6tRh3Jw - Chiara Marletto [TOE]: https://youtu.be/40CB12cj_aM - John Donoghue [TOE]: https://youtu.be/dG_uKJx6Lpg - Yang-Hui He [TOE]: https://youtu.be/wbP0KjWm0pw - Tim Palmer [TOE]: https://youtu.be/vlklA6jsS8A - Tim Maudlin [TOE]: https://youtu.be/fU1bs5o3nss - Lee Smolin [TOE]: https://youtu.be/uOKOodQXjhc - Carlo Rovelli [TOE]: https://youtu.be/hF4SAketEHY - Geoffrey Hinton [TOE]: https://youtu.be/b_DUft-BdIE - Richard Dawkins's Lecture: https://youtu.be/nfZMyJq6BBM Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Visit medcan.com slash moments to get started. So if I'm right, there is no theory of everything. We tend to operate on the sonorous promise that the world is understandable. Plato called it the logos. Newton built his mechanics on it. Even I, Kurt Jemungle, with this channel, explicate theories of everything which assumes this intelligibility. Stuart Kaufman, one of the founders of complexity theory,

says this assumption is egregiously incorrect. Kaufman actually finds a parallel to ancient Chinese philosophy, The tau that can be said is not the eternal tau. The biosphere that can be described is not the biosphere that will become. Toward the end of this conversation, Stuart Kaufman outlines some speculation on quantum gravity. He believes non-locality rules out string theory, loop quantum gravity, and even the holographic principle. He maps von Neumann entropy to spatial distance, deriving to sitter space from entanglement. Don't worry, all of these technicalities are explained in the podcast itself.

Now, whether this holds up, he admits, requires independent verification, but the biology, that's been 63 years in the making. I'm excited to bring you one of the only ever recorded podcast with someone who helped build complexity theory from scratch, invented random Boolean networks at 23, and helped found the Santa Fe Institute, Stuart Kaufman. What's the largest unsolved problem in complexity science? getting beyond its utter dependence upon mathematics. Now, how's that for a strange response? Let me tell you about complexity theory. I know it well.

I started doing it when I was 23. I'm 86. So that's 63 years ago. Let me tell you what the problem was then. We didn't know why different cells express different genes. And at that time, Jacob and Mano showed that one gene can make a protein that turns another gene off. Then they published a paper two years later, 63, showing, imagine you've got two genes. Gene one represses gene two.

Gene two represses gene one. So it can have two states. One on, two off. One off, two on. So they solved a fundamental problem and got the Nobel Prize for it. So I took one of the early steps occurred in inventing what became complexity theory. I wondered, and it was obvious that if there's,

we thought 100,000 genes at the time, and I thought, well, there's 100,000 genes, and they're turning one another on and off. And I asked a funny question. I asked, is there a class of networks and dynamics that would generically give rise to the order we see in ontogity? And that's an odd question. To ask it, you have to ask it,

you have to invent a class of networks. I invented random Boolean nets. So there's N binary variables and genes. Each one receives inputs drawn at random from K genes, and each one realizes an arbitrary Boolean function on its K inputs. There's two to the two to the K-bullion functions. And then I studied the generic behavior of that ensemble of systems. It's really interesting. It turns out they're ordered critical or chaotic, and critical behavior predicts lots of the behaviors of actual cells and differentiation. So that was one of the early birthings of complexity theory, published in 1969. In 1984, the Santa Fe Institute was founded. Two years later, Gell Mann and then Chairman David Pines titled the conference Complex Adaptive Systems. It was wonderful, Kurt. About 20 people got

together for two weeks. We absolutely fell in love with the idea of complex adaptive systems, but we didn't know what we were talking about. So the Institute focused on for 15 years and has now developed a genetic behavior of non-dynamical systems, agent-based models, phase transitions, percolation, a lot of stuff. It's spectacular. And SFI established complexity as a new field. that was wonderful. Here's where it stuck. Evolving organisms are actually physical organisms. May I take a few months now and I actually tell you?

Sure. The point is, this is fundamental. You are what is called a Kantian whole. Well, I call it a Kantian hole. So Kant in 1793 or whatever said, and the critique of judgment, this profound, an organized being has the property that the parts exist for and by means of the whole.

He was trying to find a notion of natural purpose. Every living organism is a Kantian whole. So you have parts, you have a heart and a liver and a kidney and a spleen. They exist because they're part of you, and you exist because of them. right? Uh-huh. No heart, no pumping blood, you're dead. But Charc's actually a physical system.

Once you've got the notion of a Kantian whole, with parts and whole, you could talk about the function of a part, non-reductively and non-circuitally. The function of your, this is really critical, the function of your heart is that subset of its causal properties that sustains you.

Well, your heart pumps blood. But your heart also makes heart sounds, and it jiggles water in your cardiac sac. In fact, your heart makes indefinitely many different sets of causal properties. So you are a Kantian whole. We can find the function of the part. That actual behavior is physical. It's not symbolic. And mathematics is all pretty symbolic,

and it misses the actual physicality of it. I can show it in one step. Have you heard of the notion of a Darwinian-Earthens? exaptation. Yes, yes. Okay, so let me see if I have the understanding of the correct understanding of an exaptation. When something has been developed for one purpose and then it's used for another. So, for instance, our tongue was developed for eating and swallowing and then it wasn't foreseen necessarily, but we now use it for speaking. Yes, that's a perfect example. So Darwin called them, Darwin said, your heart, I'd get this for something else. And that he called pre-adaptations.

Gould and Verba called them exaptations. Okay, but now let me show you what's going on. What you have is the idea of a function of a part is that some of the causal properties sustain the whole. That part has other causal consequences. So your heart pumps blood, but it makes heart sounds. So apparently Darwinian exaptation is finding a new use for this same organization. Okay, your tongue for speaking.

Open-ended biological evolution is precisely finding new uses for the same thing. So this is really fundamental. It happens all the time in evolution. My favorite example is something called the swim bladder. The swim bladder assesses neutral buoyancy in the water column by the ratio of air to water in the swim bladder. It evolved from the lungs of lungfish by a Darwinian preadaptation. So there's a couple more steps, Jamal. This is not in complexity theory.

It's where complexity theory has to go. You cannot deduce the new use from the old use. Okay, no, this is fundamental. Namely, here's a Kantian hole. It's got a bunch of parts. Each part has a very large number, I will say, indefinitely many subsets of causal features. Any one of them could become of use,

but from the use of a heart to pump blood, you cannot deduce the jiggling water in the paracardial sac might be of survival value. There's no deductive relationship between the different uses of parts. And the word use is not in physics, but it is in biology. The implication is biological, open-ended biological evolution is real, and it's real because parts come to have and have used different non-dedducible functions. So that underlying open-ended evolution, it's not deducible. So uses of things have the following three properties. They can't be put into one-to-one correspondence with the integers.

Use of things is just a nominal scale. There's no ordering relationship. It cannot deduce one use from another. So I find the indefinite really fundamental. The indefinite is things with the, property that they cannot be listed, cannot be ordered relative to one another, and cannot be deduced from one another. The definition is instantiated by the Darwinian pre-adaptations. This opposes Plato's forms, the eternal realm, and the fundamental notion which is central

to Newton, that all the possibilities already exist, and that's Newton's pre-stated, fixed-state space. At the pre-stated fixed-state space of quantum mechanics, biological evolution creates new possibilities. They come into existence. Tigers came into existence, a tearing head, and that's why biological evolution is open-ended. But it also means the evolution of the biosphere is an undidducible propagated construction, not a tale of deduction. So if I'm right, There is no theory of everything. At me, I'm thinking, it's just so weird. It means there's a domain of entailing laws, physics, quantum mechanics, general relativity.

There is a domain of no entailing laws, and we have known that. This is genuinely huge. We in the West have looked for 2,500 or 2,400 years on the basis of Plato's Logos. The world is understandable, which is his internal realm, where all the possibilities already exist. It's so weird to get your mind around. The possibilities already exist again as Newton's pre-stated state space. It's the state-space bit of quantum mechanics. It's the pre-statement of probability theory.

All the possibilities already exist. Therefore, you can calculate a probability. It's the same thing thinking of statistical mechanics. All possibilities already exist. It's sitting there in entailing information. All the possibilities already exist. It's sitting there in logic. You say the statement, X is necessarily true. It's true in all possible worlds. There's no ontological debate for all possible worlds. The stunning thing, Kurt, is that it takes in something huge. So the transformation of complexity that I love, I mean, I've done it since I was 23 is in a world that's already formal, the bits on the computer have no causal consequences, right? But your heart actually does. It's a physical thing, doing physical things in the world. So essentially, all of physics, all of complexity theory, is in the formal world. And essentially it's in Plato's world.

The evolving bias or isn't. I know this is really weird to hear. Justimo, I want to understand the indefinite, the use of the word indefinite. Are you using it here to mean that it's ontologically unlistable, or are you saying that it's intractable for us epistemically for us because we have finite minds? Well, one way of saying is that it's not recursively innumerable. Okay. Is that epistemic or is it ontological?

The points of the following. The possibilities do not exist yet. There are new possibilities. When the tiger and the gazelle evolved, tigers could eat gazelles. And the possibility that a tiger will catch a gazelle and get dinner is real, three billion years ago, there weren't the possibility that the tiger exists. The possibility didn't exist. The possibility itself came into being. And it does so because Darwinian pre-adaptations really are new possibilities. Once a swim bladder exists, for example,

it evolved because it was good at being a swim bladder, namely neutral buoyancy in the water column, but watch, occurred. Once it's true that there's a swim bladder, is it now possible that a worm could evolve to live only in swimbladder? Sure. Before there was a swim bladder, was that possible?

No. New possibilities come to exist all the time in the evolving biosphere, and that's outside of the purview of physics. So life depends on physics but can't be reduced to it. And if that's right, then, beloved, there is no theory of everything. If you want the theory of everything to include an evolving bias, isn't that weird?

It's chapters 9 of Jim. I've had the fortune of being sent a preview of your book, so forgive me if I'm treading on water, that doesn't make sense. much to someone who hasn't read some of your book. I'll try to keep these. And thank you for it. I expect I'm going to read.

Let me go back. A few years ago, 14 physicists declined to read a third transition in science, which Andrea Ennoli and I had published, which is really curious. So if affordances are truly indefinite, then how does natural selection find them without searching? Well, it was wonderful. Let's draw two different pictures. One is it's a vast space of possibilities

and evolution is searching in that vast space. And that image you immediately have, we all put a phase space. It's a huge phase space. That's not what's happening. But in a way, what's happening is, here's a fish with a lung. It didn't search all over.

a spectrum of pre-existing possibilities at all. It creates new adjacent possibilities. It creates up this thing. It gets some water into the lung. Now there's water and air in a lung. You've got to stop with air and water. It's going to evolve into a swim bladder. It didn't search all over the place. It's what came up nearby. We're not used to thinking this way. The system is creating its adjacent possible, but we can't deduce what's in the adjacent possible because it's not deducible. Technological evolution is the same thing. You can't get a crossbow until you've got a bow. If you've got a bow, it's not hard to think about a crossbow. So technological evolution is doing the same thing. It is innovating based on what's around, typically for a new

use, and if it's new, we see if it's patentable. It's not invented. Did you ever see this wonderful series of James Burke called Connections? It's about the evolution of technology. It's wonderful. One of them is about the evolution of the carburetor. I think it's the carburetor from a Persian biologist coarse perfume. Or the canon evolved from a church bell. So it's a carboner. a bell. So you think of the shape of the bell. Squeeze it in and it becomes a canon. That's canon for invented. Most inventions are pre-adaptations, Darwinian exaptations of things that already exist. There's not a pre-existing space of all the possibilities. It's so strange and yet when you think about it, it's just obvious. Think about the evolution of the forelimbs in vertebrates.

They can't keep being four limbs and use the bone, right? I can't get from first arms to tails to whatever. Isn't it an odd thought? It's not that there's this huge space. The evolving biosphere is invading the very adjacent possible that it creates. As in, the swim bladder emerges. Once it does, could a worm evolves to live in a swim bladder? Yeah.

It couldn't before there was. some bladders. My understanding, if I recall correctly, is there's a chapter called the domain of non-entailing laws or something like that. Is chapter 13? I just sent you, and I sent you the rewrite that I did about three weeks ago. I've been thinking about this with Sudip Patra for a long time now. And the connection is it's Plato told us what to think, all the possibilities already exist, then what becomes very strange is the domain of no law of indefinite, Kurt, is almost identical to the Chinese Tao.

The Chinese Tao says the Tao that can be said is not the eternal Tao, or Tao. The indefinite says the bias that exists now and can be described, therefore can be said, is not the biosphere that will become next. We've lived with a dream of a theory of everything, at least in Snowden. It's an exquisite dream.

Why wouldn't we think that? It's fascinating. Lao Tze, who comes up with the Tao, is the same time as Plato. There are about 230 years before Christ. And I'm finding myself imagining that since the Chinese Tao, says the world that can be said is not the real, it's not the final word.

And Plato says the world is understandable. That's the logos. Western science has flourished because of Plato. Well, what are we going to do now that we know that the bias or as it evolves cannot be said. It can't be deduced. It's some enormous transition that we have to go through.

And I love complexity theory. I spent my life participating in it. This last discovery is in the last couple years. It's an enormous transition. There's lots to be said about it, Kurt. We cannot say what will next become. We cannot predate it like the now. We don't know the sample size of the process,

so we can't define probability, so we can't define random, so we can't assess risk for you true capitalists. You kind of know that. And now I get something fundamental culturally to it. It means Plato and Newton gave us a machine. The world is a machine. It's a clockwork.

But a machine has the property that we can master it. And we have dominion, which is what Roger Bacon told us. In fact, we cannot reason about what's going to become. The response has to be. participation, not dominion. So it's got into some kind of cultural transformation that is something about humanity and participation and wisdom, not dominion power. It's this stuff glimmering in me, and I don't know. So in all of the examples given the tongue, the swim bladder, these are quite high level. And I'm sure that many of your physicist colleagues who are physicalists, they would

say Stuart, you are speaking about it at an effective field theory level. So you're not speaking fundamentally. So if you were to speak fundamentally, you would see that whatever there is fundamentally, maybe a molecule or an electron or what have you. You'd see that it's fully constrained by the physics with known, well, with probability distributions, yes, but it's constrained and entailed by the physics. So what do you say to that? That's true. That's true. Fundamental affordances are uses of things introduced by Gibson years ago. They are not independent degrees of freedom of the world. They're not like position and momentum. Don't let it be like small teeny balls. They really do have positions and momentum.

But uses of things is a triadic relationship. There's an instance that produces as follows. It says horizontal surface for a place to sit. That means you can use a horizontal surface to sit and happen to walk to. Those aren't physics. Those are uses of things. There's nowhere in physics where we have the notion of uses of things and uses of things are not independent features of the world. Meanwhile, it's true that, you know, the molecules in the, in the, in the

board that you're going to sit on are that, and the molecules in your kidney that is making urine and the loop of Henley and the countercurrent mechanisms are also just molecules, but they're also a kidney. Let me say a couple more things because it's going to be so difficult for the physicists. I know how to say this because I've been saying it for a while. Statement what. The universe is not ergodic above about 500 Dalton's. So a simple calculation, you know, proteins are sequences of amino acids. There's 20 kinds of standard amino acids. A protein length 200 is pretty typical.

Typical in U is 300. How many possible proteins are there, length 200? Well, it's 20 to the 200th, which is 10 to the 260th. Okay. Can the universe have made them all in its lifetime? Well, the universe is 10 to the 17th seconds old. The fastest time scale is 10 to the 10 to the 20th. the minus 43rd, there's 10 to the 80th particles.

So if you imagine ignoring space-like separation, that all the particles on the plank time scale were making proteins length 200 amino acids at that rate, it would take the current age of the universe raised to the 37th power or something to make all the proteins length 200. Uh-huh. Now, that means that the universe won't make all possible,

complex things in many times the lifetime of the universe. There's a fundamental statement that's a physical statement. You know, I could be off by a couple orders of magnitude, but it doesn't matter. Second statement, Kurt, you have a human heart. Thank you. It weighs 300 grams and it pumps blood. So stop. How is it possible physically that there's a human heart that pumps blood in the

biosphere and in the universe? Well, it can't be that it's their god. you know, the universe made all possible things, and among them is a heart because it's not going to. So that preamble is really important. It's not physically possible in the lifetime of the universe to make all possible complex things, like a human heart that can pump blood. Okay, so why are their hearts? Well, life started about four billion years ago on Earth, and eventually the organism got too big for diffusion to do it.

So it would be really neat if there was some way of squirting some fluid. So imagine there's something like a little tube that can squirt fluid. Well, that's the start of something like a heart. So here's the critical thing. Over the next two billion years or whatever it is, hearts evolved to be better and better hearts because of natural selection. So there are hearts in the universe. But that means something really fundamental,

functions, the use of X is ontologically. effective in the universe because we can only explain why there are hearts in the universe because life started. Physics allows life to start. The physics allows hearts. And it's been selected for three billion years or whatever. We have to appeal to select a function of something to find why it actually exists. Okay, so let me see if I got this correct. To explain why something exists, not all of the time can you just make it a direct appeal to physics. You have to sometimes make an appeal to uses. Usees are not in physics. Thus, you can't be a reductionist to physics, to physicalism. You can't just be a physicalist.

Yeah, that's right. This is necessary, but not physicalism. Now, in none of these uses, is there something that violates the laws of physics? As a preamble, physics has to allow for whatever is being used or made useful or what have you. But we can't account for their existence in a non-urgotic universe. Okay, so what does ergodicity have to do with any of this? Because as soon as you have gravity, you have a non-urgotic universe, so it's not like what does bringing up ergodicity add to the argument or non-urgotic? If it was the case, suppose it was the case the universe could make all possible molecules

for the length of the large proteins, 1,400 amino acids or something, then it's a vast array of things. There are hearts. it'll be whatever. If the universe can't make everything possible and there's a weird thing like the heart, we have to say, how come there's hearts? And the obvious explanation is, life started, and it was useful. So it's been selected. I mean, how else could you explain it? It's not violating the explanation at all. We're saying, can I explain the existence of something like the heart? and the molecular, I'm going to trial diversity.

What could happen is so enormous, but explaining why it is. So let's rewind time, Stuart, or Stu, sorry, let's rewind time to the 1990s, early 1990s. Richard Dawkins is giving a lecture at the Royal Institution, I think it's called that. And in it he was asked, or he was tasked with explaining how the heck can an eye develop. And in it, he shows, well, this is one of the counterarguments from people who are religious, who he deems foolish or misguided. And then he says, but here's the proper guidance. Let me show you how an eye can develop from just one photo sensitive cell forward.

Okay. So in that, I don't recall if he would have said, we need to make an appeal to uses there. It seemed to me, from my recollection, which could be faulty, that he was going step by step, almost like a a single block of Lego a jenga, almost like one piece here and then another one on top here, another one on top here, along with natural selection.

So do you have any counter arguments to Dawkins was his account incorrect or incomplete or what? Well, Dawkins is brilliant, but he's also, I think, wrong. I'll try to say why. Narwin was worried about the eye and it's perfectioned, you know. So what Richard has pointed out that there's something like eyes have evolved many times.

But to say natural selection is to say that it was useful, right? It helps the organism survive. Oh. So if he didn't use the word function, he's still saying it's useful. Of course, that's Darwin's insight. And Gillespie came along. He wasn't well known with affordances. but, I mean, Gibson rather.

Gibson's right, and I should imagine that wouldn't, I should imagine that Dawkins wouldn't, might at all the notion of an affords. It's that which is useful to an organism, and it evolves. I'll tell you where I think Dawkins was brilliant but wrong. You know, he wrote his wonderful book, The Selfish Gene, that's dominated evolution for years. Well, what he's trying to do is to make it clear

that evolution isn't arbitrary, and there's a unit of selection called the gene. Here is what he's missing. It's not his fault. He just, you know, the notion of a Kantian whole was not around. Once you've got the notion of a contian, take a bacterial cell, selection acts on the whole organism, not its parts. So selection, selection acts on you. It doesn't act on your livers and your kidneys.

in your spleen. But if your liver and your kidney in your spleen help you survive, you have kids, and they will inherit your improved liver, kidney, and spleen. So selection and acts at the level of the whole organism indirectly it acts on the parts. Given that, and this is the cruxed, genes are just other parts. So, of course, genes are selected. The organism is the vehicle. The organism is a cantian hole. And selection acts at the level of the cantyen hole. And once you see that, you know, I'd love to see what Richard

would think about the notion of a cantyan hole. It's true. So I think once you take the Kantian hole and the organism are selected and if you connect it at that level, then genes are the other parts, the fundamental parts.

So the gene is, in a sense a replicator, but that's the organism. The organism is a replicating thing. Yeah, it produces, makes two rabbits or two bacteria cells, and it connects at that level of a population of bacteria, but it's going to grab it, of course. So earlier I said that in this, nothing violates physics, but I'm also curious if in your findings, your worldview, your theorems, your thoughts, your shower thoughts, let's say. Is there anything that violates physics? No.

At least the biology part. Oh, the thing I'm worrying about is physics. The first part of my book is the Stuicalberg and Tri-Quantum Gravity. It's the first five chapters, not violating physics. That's arguing about physics within physics. But anyway, chapter six. Chapter six is the RNA worldview. Seven is the origin.

of life. Eight is agency and constraint closure. Did I say constraint closure? In 2000, I published a book called Investigations. I read a book by Atkins on the Second Law. So what's work? Well, work is forced acting through a distance. And Atkins, in his book on the second law, says, no, work is much more interesting. It is the constrained release of energy to a few degrees of freedom. So I'm a biology. What's that? Well, think of a cannon. The cannon is a boundary condition constraint. Think of the powder, the base of the cannon and the ball. The powder explodes. Because of the cannon, you don't get a spherical wave. The explosion goes through the remaining degrees of freedom, namely the cannon bore, and it does thermodynamic work on the cannonball,

which flies up the hill and hits the ground up there. So, okay, no constraint on the release of energy in some non-equilibrium process, no work. So I'm not a physicist. I said, where did the cannon come from? You physically just assume your boundary conditions, because that's what Newton's, we need some. Kurt, it took work to make the cannon, right?

I mean, right? And I was around at the Big Bang and there were no canons. So from that you get, uh-oh, no constraint on the release of energy, no work, but at least sometimes it takes work to make the constraints. And I realized that work could also make a constraint. I got that far. And I got stuck in 2000. In 2015, wonderful Mael Montevil and Mateo Mosio invented constraint closure.

Here's what they meant. It's a set of constraints that depend upon one another. So a system can be constraint. There's a bunch of constraints that they just depend upon one another. And I fell in love with it. But I also modified it. And I didn't realize until a year later, until a year ago, what I'd done. So for Miel and there's really important now.

For Miel and Mateo, constraints depend upon one another. The step I took was to say constraint A depends upon constraint B if constraint B does thermodynamic work to construct A. So now I'm going to show you constraint closure. It's really an interesting idea. And cells do it. So here it is abstractly. I've got three non-equilibium processes, one, two, and three.

I got three constraints, A, B, and C. A constrains the release of energy in process one, the process of material flow, and construct a B. B constrains the release of energy of some material flow. It constructs a C. C constrains the release of energy in process one, no three, and it constructs an A. What this is, it's positive. And the 10, there are three constrained boundary conditions, A, B, and C. They constrain the release of energy to construct

precisely the same boundary conditions. This system is a perfectly classical physical system. It's a system where the boundary condition constraints in the release of energy process that construct the same boundary conditions. The system constructs itself. Can you feel it? I'll show you in a minute. Cars don't construct their boundary conditions. We construct them. Systems that don't sell to them. They only do the work and strengthen the release energy processes that construct the same boundary conditions. If I may show you a great example, there's a guy named Gannon Ashkenazi at Ben-Gurion. First of all, this is self-producing out of molecules. It really is.

So molecular production has been done with RNA sequences, DNA sequences with time. Here's what Gannon does. There's nine of times. Just think of one structure, two, structure, three. It's complex in that. But I think Gannon is feeding in. So it's not any chemical reaction work, okay? Peptide 1 binds the two fragments of peptide in its tool.

It acts as a little catalyst by finding them, lowering the activation energy for the reaction because it's a constraint to peptide. Then actual thermodynamic work is done. The system is used to construct PEP2 to have fragments around. the cycles. The peptides themselves are the boundary conditions. Uh-huh. They're the constraint boundary conditions. Each acts as a ligase. This little system achieves catalytic closure and constraint

closure. It literally constructs itself. So it's a small, it's a peptide system that does what we're talking about. It literally constructs itself. There's a couple more things that's just worth talking about. I'm babbling a lot, but what the hell. So think of, you know, Von Neumann's universal constructor, sort of everybody does. So he invented this at about 53. So what he wants to do is he wants to have some analog of a universal computer, a universal touring machine. He imagines a universal constructor, you. You can construct anything. So you better have some instructions. So you, you, you, you, well together a bunch of steel beams and stick it inside of you. And now something magic happens.

You now has dual properties. It serves as instructions. So you, when it construct something, happens to construct another you rather than a telephone booth. Sure. Then the constructions are treated as an object. It's copied. And the copy of the instructions are stuck in. into the second U, and now it has instructions, and it can do it, and that's Van Neumann's idea.

So there's a distinction between software and hardware, right? Uh-huh. That's what we think. Godin Ashkenazi's set has no distinction between software and hardware. It achieves constraint closure, whereby it constructs specifically itself. You can't stick some instructions and then they make something else. So again, this is huge. We've been thinking that life requires software and hardware.

It doesn't. Conn't Set is reproducing and there's no software hardware distinction. So there's lots of things we think that aren't true. Isn't that strange? Okay, so let me see if I understand the enabling constraints. Yeah. My understanding is that Kant saw the tree as problematic because the tree seemed, the biological tree,

seemed to be circular in that the tree makes leaves, but then the leaves also make the trees. Yeah. So it seemed like it required a circular explanation. Yes. But one of the solutions is to distinguish causes from constraints. No, but it is. It's enabling constraints.

The Kantian enabled construct. It constructs the release of energy, which does work. Uh-huh. Now, does this avoid circularity because we're now speaking about two different categories. One is actuality, one is potentiality? I think. I'm a little confused about it. I begin to think that the chain is all enablements, not causes. The move that Newton did was to translate an efficient cause. This is Robert Rosen's point. Translated Aristotle's efficient cause into deductions. the logical for the deduction. Go for a student explanation and cause deducting from initial conditions and boundary conditions and laws. But the fact that the heart both pumps and makes heart sounds means that heart sounds can come to be of use. It enables it, doesn't cause it.

And it's funny, Kurt, I'm not used to thinking about enabling. Think of the modem. Do you remember the modem? Yeah. Just think of the modem didn't cause the internet. It enabled it. Uh-huh. Right?

The internet didn't cause eBay. It enabled it. And enablement is, if new possibilities come into existence, the enablement of new possibilities is enormously powerful, and new actual things happen. So allow me, Stu, to stay at your level and not reduce down to something like, neurology then to physics and so and so forth. So let me stay at a high level.

What then? I assume you cannot just create anything. Like the modem enables the internet. The modem doesn't enable this glass to turn into ice and then turn into a nuclear power plant and vice versa immediately. So what precisely is it that's doing this constraining in this larger space and this finding? And is my use of the word finding misleading? Is it not actually finding? Is it not searching?

You say creating. Evolution stumbles upon novel uses of things. Right? It's a stumbling upon. What so stunning about it is that the biosphere now enables its next non-prestatedable adjacent possible and that it enters some subset of it. which enables the next adjacent possible. Once there's swim bladders,

worms really can involve to live only in swim bladders, but we couldn't have said it ahead of time. And natural selection didn't make a swim bladder that works, such that worms could come to live in it. In other words, evolution is warping and changing what is next possible, but selection isn't achieving that. Now, is this word adjacent itself a metaphorical word, because to me, adjacent would suggest a topology.

Yeah. And topology is math. I don't know. However, my understanding is we've escaped the realm of math into some lawless domain of non or no entailing laws. I think that's right. Yeah. It's something like, it's like the Tao.

The Tao that could be said is not the eternal Tao. It is that given what is in the economy right now, there's all this stuff's out there, right? they could only put all sorts of features of the current technology that's out there can be put to novel uses. We can't even say what the novel uses are. We don't have a distance measure, so what does adjacent mean? But it was there when you said, yeah, but it couldn't make an airplane. Right?

So somehow it's metaphoric, but it's also in some profound sense real. I mean, you can't get from a bacterium to an elephant without going in between, whatever in between means, even though it doesn't seem like there's any metric. We're in this weird space, not even a space. Right, right. Language gets a bit tricky here, especially for us who are ensconced in math.

So let's switch gears for a moment because your book, when is it coming out? I hope in April. Okay, so your book's out shortly, but this interview is likely out at the end of January, and so it's too much of a teaser. People aren't able to satisfy themselves immediately. And while I like being a tease,

that's a bit too much of a tease. So I'll place a link on screen to your book, and I want to switch gears to ask you about there are myriad questions that you tackle from my perusal of your career. So how does life self-organize? Is evolution merely Darwinian? How does complexity come about spontaneously?

And where does agency come from? And is the universe creative? And what explains morphological diversity and consciousness is connections to quantum mechanics and so forth? There are a variety of questions here. What I want to know is, what is it to you that unifies all of these questions? What's the through line other than they came from you?

Like, there must be something about these questions. Kurt, I really think I may have constructed a theory of quantum gravity and quantum cosmology. But let me briefly talk about that. I'm not a physicist. Chapter 5 is full of mathematics. Non-locality is now loophole-free. I started in 2019, but in that case since 2022, said, that non-locality is loophole-free, then we have a choice. Either we say locality is fundamental,

then we explain non-locality, or we say non-locality is fundamental. We have to explain locality. Move like, look, 2019, it's okay. Non-locality is fundamental. I mean by non-locality, there is no space. That's what I mean. Now just follow up with me with the beginning, assumption. Watch how powerful it is. If non-locality is fundamental, then my assumption is any theory for which locality is fundamental can't be fundamental. It's kind of trivial. General relativity is fundamentally local. So if non-locality is fundamental, general relativity isn't loop quantum gravity is local. Therefore, if non-locality is fundamental, loop quantum gravity isn't. String theory is local for the fact that it's got strings, for it to be fundamental.

The one-fold space formal field theory is, in fact, local. It's local on a D-minus-1-dimensional manifold that it gives you the bulk, because they're duels. But it's local on the D-minus-1 manifold, right? all of them are ruled and therefore also the holographic principle assumes locality, so it can't be fundamental. That doesn't mean my assumption is true. It means that if you start with it, you rule out almost everything,

which is really interesting, it's very powerful. Causal set theory is allowed. So the move I'd made was two. You know Heisenberg's interpretation of quantum mechanics in 58, the quantum state are potential ontologically real picture, right? So I assume that also. I do because it's an immediate explanation of superpositions. Here it is. The cat simultaneously alive and dead. Well, that disobeys Aristotle's law of the excluded middle and non-contradiction. The cat is possibly alive and possibly dead. That's not a contradiction.

So it gives a trivial interpretation of superpositions, and it answers the six mysteries, you know, which way information on that. This is in chapter two. So just take those. The move I made is to say, that which is ontologically real and is not space-time, are possibilities in Hilbert space. Okay, so I take that. And now, if, if in fact, what's in history.

Hilbert space, it's not as our possibilities, how do you ever get anything actual? Decoherence doesn't do it. You're left with finite off diagonals. The only thing gets rid of the tension is quantum measurement, is actualization. Well, actualization happens. We just don't know what hell's going on. So actualization, I say, is real. What quantum measurement is doing, if you say this, is converting possible to actuals, which is, ontological. It's not epistemic. So the basic move I make, Kurt, is, I'll just tell you what I do. Sure. I got four mutually entangled particles. There's a reason. They sequentially actualize and stay entangled until they actualize. And I'm going to map von Neumann entropy,

or better mutual information. There's six entangled pages. I got four things that are all intangeloved, so there's six pairs. So in the book I see a von Neiman entropy, a better choice is mutual information, it's symmetric. I simply mapped that into a linear distance. So you get four events, A, B, C, D, four events, okay? And they're actual events.

And I use the von Neumann entropy. So I get the mutual information between this, them and the potential to be actual distances of some length deal. So I get four events, six actual distances, and I learned about the gram matrix. They didn't teach me as a biologist. You can take the actual distances, the absence of it. You can get the metric tensor. That's from the six distances.

It turns out that the metric tensor is Lawrence invariant, because it seems disentangled. It also is decider space, not anti-de-sitter space. And it turns out it also fits the Bianchi identities we've learned about. This is kind of remarkable as no theory is done. No theory. It only gets the metric tensor. So that's pretty interesting. Then I use in this chapter 5, I learned about regic calculus.

So as theory builds tetrahedra, the tetrahedra can have a share a space with another tetrahedra. So space-time constructs itself and grows, and it can be the case that it grows. Every tetrahedron is on average one point and a half, so it's one-dimensional. Or occasionally it could be higher-dimensional. I wound up replacing Einstein's cosmological constant spacetime explores spacetime with a modified cosmological constant, which spacetime spans a portion of the fourth root of matter density. So it's in learning about Bianchi Solitons. It seems to unite dark energy with dark matter and inflation at the construction of space time. It seems to prevent

singularities in black holes. It seems to help the X-A tension, the Hubble tension, a bunch of other things. It may be right. The math in Chapter 5 has to be completely checked. I can't check it. I also wound up with data that really challenged Lambda CDM. So that's all in the book in Chapter 5 with kind of the debate we get looked at by somebody who's competent. I'm a biologist. So the throughput in all of this is if it is right. Space time constructing it into an adjacent possible that is deterministic. Life is constructing it into an adjacent possible.

It can't be pre-said and then possibly mind. There's something about the indefinite. I don't know that that applies to the physics part. I don't know what to make of the whole thing. Maybe it's a complete crock. And indefinite here is then a synonym for the possibility space?

Well, I mean the indefinite for the possibility space where, in fact, it is indefinite. I don't think that's true in quantum mechanics. Quantix mechanics can be context dependent, but there's no new possibilities that arise in quantum mechanics. So I don't know. There's some kind of becoming going on everywhere, Kurt.

It's not being. It's not an entailed trajectory in a pre-stated phase space. It's not the black universe where nothing becomes at all. So, Stu, throughout this conversation we've talked about, or you've talked about, some odd thoughts,

verbatim, quote, odd. Now, here's an odd question. Mm-hmm. What does God have to do with any of this creativity? I actually wrote that in chapter 14. I'll tell you. I'm throwing you a ball to hit it out of the park. Well, Sudeep and I wrote a paper a couple years ago asking,

is mind in space time? There's evidence that it's not. It's very weak. It's one in a thousand. There's evidence that in human beings, the correlations you get in quantum mechanics are greater than the Surreelsen bound. The guy who did it, Dietrich Ertz can get more evidence, and he's got another interpretation. Well, the bound comes about because of finite speed of light.

It's continuity of action in Einstein. So one way of accounting for those results that they were stronger statistically is that mind isn't inspecting. FaceTime. Wait, just a moment. I just want to linger on that because someone who's listening when they hear mind one in a thousand, what is this one in a thousand referring to?

And then what is mind referring to? This is work done by Dietrich Ertz in a single person looking at some kind of correlation that's related to the Bell Inequalities. And there's an upper limit on that correlation that you can get. It's called the Surrealson Bound.

The correlation that you get is the Tsyrelson bound. They have an interpretation that is different. What Sadipe and I said, the sireelson bound, the one in a thousand means data, is a three sigma. Okay. The Tsyrelson bound erupts because of continuity of action, finite speed of light. So if the process is not a key player where there's a finite speed of light that accounts, for it, but finite speed of light is spacetime and Einstein's finite, you know. So this could be taken as evidence, whatever the thing is, it's not in space time.

But there are some other lines of evidence that the city is pretty persuaded about, about contextual dependence. The argument is that if under some criteria, context dependence, we'll have to ask Sudip, but the basic idea is whatever it is in that case is not causal. So Sudip and I have written about this in Chapter 14 I wound up saying there are some grounds to say that whatever is happening with whatever mind is, maybe it's thought in space time. So now, jump. What is not in space time on this theory are potential. therefore maybe mind has something to do with potential, jump. Therefore, maybe there's something like cosmic mind

that potential can be actualized, and when that happens we have qualia, a jump. Well, if it's true that there is something like cosmic mind, then the molecules in you, Kurt, have quantum things, features, right? Because complicated molecules have a quantum fringe where decoherit isn't complete, and so there's some off-diagnals. Well, if this whole thing is right, you are coupled to and part of cosmic mind. So it's a bilateral coupling. So we're all coupled to cosmic mind, and part of it, well, you know, maybe that's a sense of God. So it's not entirely nuts.

but maybe it's completely nice. Well, I like parkour as much as the next guy, but some of these jumps are ones that hurt me. They're a bit too far of a jump for me. No, no, look, I agree. I agree with you. But one has led to the jumps. So a question I have, Stu, is you've collaborated in the past with Lee Smolin.

Yes. Are you planning on collaborating with him again on quantum gravity? especially as you have these chapters, chapter five coming out. And also, I'm curious what that collaboration was like, as he's a titan in the field. Lee's wonderful. We've been friends for years. He's very patient with me.

We got into an argument. Probably I was more at fault than Lee, and we've had a falling out. And I'm hoping that Lee will accept by apologies. You know, as usual, there's two sides to every story. There's the Jewish tradition of Toshuva. Do you know about Tashuva? No.

Well, it's Yom Kippur. It says, I suppose I've done something that's hurt you, Kurt. I say, Kurt, I did this to you and I hurt your feelings, or I hurt you. I own it. I did it. I'm sorry. Do you accept my apology? You know, it's really easy.

And you say, yeah, well, then we're done. suppose you don't that I say, Kurt, what in the world can I do to make it better? And you can say, please do the following things. I'm honor bound to do those things. I do them. If after that, you will not accept my apology. The problem's on you. You know, it's a 4,000-year-old tradition.

It's like the Hawaiian prayer. I'm sorry. Forgive me. Thank you. I love you. It's reconciliation. And Lee and I have had a fight, and I think he's wonderful and he's brilliant. And he's, you know, he's dealing with Parkinson's.

And if ever Lee sees this, we can become friends again. I admire him deeply. And I just said a lot in public. Probably the problem's more mine than Lee's, but who knows? There's always two sides to every history. The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy. What did you mean when you said that, well, when you said Lee's been patient with you, that implies to me that it's not easy to work with you.

No, that's not. Or maybe it's just with Lee. I don't know. Lee has been kind with me in that he first taught me about Luke Quantum Gravity. I'm a biologist. In fact, I'm a medical doctor. It's even worse. And Lee has listened to me over the years, coming with one enthusiastic idea after the other,

that really turned out to be silly. and he never just said you're just silly. He was really paid and I finally earned more. I meant that. Ah, okay. Let's have some fun. Tell me your most zanie idea that Lee had to politely shoot down. I don't remember.

We did some good stuff, you know. We found out saying the problem, the problem with time, you can mistake the phase space of general relativity. And maybe you can't. That wasn't entirely. stupid. I can't remember. If I could, I'd certainly tell you. There were some really dumb ones, but they were about 15 years ago. If I recall correctly, you argued that AGI is impossible because Turing machines or universal Turing Machines can't find affordances. I don't know where.

It may have been from your book, but it also may have been just from reading a transcript of an interview of yours from a while ago. Yeah. This was. Am I correct or? Yes. And here is. artificial general intelligence. So, apologies, he's wonderful. I don't remember the dumbest thing I said to him, but I'm sure there was some good ones. Anyway, we haven't achieved open-ended evolution in artificial life.

We have achieved general artificial intelligence with computers. I'm not going to say anything about large language models. The fundamental reason is open-ended evolution requires the creation of new possibilities that cannot be deduced through old possibilities. Well, Darwinian pre-adaptations do that, and I think the human mind does it. We jerry-rig the current, jerry-rig to find non-dedducible new uses for things. Well, it's the same as Darwinian pre-adaptations. So a trivial example is, my daughter years ago lost her purse.

in a little bottle. And I took a broom and I said, I walked the coat hanger over. I used the hook on the wire coat hanger to pull up her purse. We do multi-step jerry rigging. No step can be deduced. How do we do 20-step jury rigging? When no step can be deduced, there's no local clue that it's getting better. It's not a search on a landscape. It's definable. We do it all the time. I don't think, I don't think the universe, I'm sure that the universe leaves out the large language model. Just take your computer. I don't think you can get all this jerry rigging. I think of what, of how a rope would do it, 20-step jerry-rigging. You have to manipulate the work to stumble upon the fact that, oh, this could be useful. So, human minds do it. Biological evolution is at it all the time, one step at a time.

If I find a new use for this, there are Darwinian pre-adaptations. That's how evolution is open-ended. And it's this actual physics things like molecules and bits of a computer. So I think I don't know about large language models. Nobody has achieved open-ended evolution in artificial life, and nobody has achieved general artificial life on a computer. But evolving organisms have. they're embodied and embedded in the world.

So a cell that constructs itself by constraint closure and is a dynamical system with multiple attractors is constructing itself. And if it's a different attractors, it is doing work on the world. And that is categorizing the world and acting in the world, but there's no representation going on. None.

we think representation is necessary. Gononazcunajizade is representing nothing that's constructing itself. Hmm. Okay, speaking about the limits of formalization, quote, the world is not a theorem, end quote. Explain.

Yeah, great title, huh? Well, what Andre and I did, we showed that. I reached it. He's just wonderful. He has robotics and he's really terrific. I reached out to him at Seponnes. And Andrea, there's really funny about set theory.

And we had gotten to, we had gotten to our own sense that you cannot list all the uses of a thing before, before, um, uh, Mikhail Procopenko's theorem. Okay. So we had gotten to, we can't list all the uses of something. The uses of something are not orderable, and we can't deduce the uses.

So therefore, we said we can't list the uses of a screwdriver, and we can't list the uses of an engine block. So Andre and I were saying, we were looking at the axioms of set theory, and Andre says, look at the axiom of extensionality. two sets are identical if and only if they have the same members. But I can't list the uses of a screwdriver, and I can't list the uses of an engine block, so it can't prove that they're identical. That's it.

There's no axiom of extensionality, given the indefinite. Say it again. Two sets are identical if they have the same members. I cannot list the uses of a single members. I cannot list the uses of an engine block. I cannot list the uses of a screwdriver. Therefore, I cannot prove that the uses are identical. There's no axiom of extensionality for uses of things.

And also, the axiom of choice turns out to be identical to well-ordering, but since the uses of things are not orderable, there's no well-ordering, so we don't have the axiom of choice. But we can't get numbers. So Russell says the number two is a set of all things with members. Well, that's a set of all things with exactly two uses. Well, instead of things with exactly two uses, the number of uses of a screwdriver, two or three or ten.

In fact, it's indefinite. I would say indefinite, and I don't know what that is. So we can't get a number from Russell. If we can't get two, we can't get three. We can't get 2 plus 3 is equal to 5. So we can't get equations like 2 plus 3 equals X or X plus 2 equals 5. So we can't get rational numbers. We can't get equations.

We can't get quadratic equations. So we can't get real numbers. We can get union and intersection of sets. We can't get topology. We can't get equations. It's zero. Instead of it, it would be very useless. So that doesn't make any sense.

And when it's next, it's great. We need plus one. But our things are unordered, so they don't have a plus one. So we can't get numbers. To get three, we can't get any equations. We can't get a manifold. We keep writing equations that we did. We couldn't integrate them. You can't. It's become a conclusion. We can't use any of the mathematics of set theory to compute or deduce the evolution of the biosphere. That's right. That tells me that there's some other mathematics and maybe category theory to do it or something. We're just referring to set theory. That's a lot. It means that the world is not a theorem. It means by theorem you can write down some equation, some phase space, and deduce a trajectory in it. You can't. You're not going to be Lagrangian, and there's not going to be a theory I teach you if you want to explain the evolution of the biosphere as part of your theory. And if you do, fine, but the pressure is incredibly complicated, and it's been around for four billion years. So now what?

There's a lot to swallow. And I said 14. Fourteen physicists wouldn't read it, including a Nobel laureate economist, a famous philosopher. And they're not evil. I mean, look at this as a mess. A Nobel laureate con artist. I said, con-ist. Economist.

Oh, geez, yeah, because it cuts in and out. I'm like, a Nobel laureate con artist. I'm like, that's a strong statement. Okay. So, Stu, let me ask you this. Do you have students, like PhD students? Oh, I did. I've been retired for a while.

Were there any pieces of advice that you would consistently give your students? Yeah. Or was it different? Yeah, okay. I would like to know. You know, so fundamental, Kurt, I'm older than you. I'll give it to you, too. You don't need it.

Trust yourself. Trust your sense of what an important question is. You're the one that will find a new question. Just trust yourself. Try to find a way in your life to do the thing that in some sense is uniquely yours to do and then do it. Trust yourself. You're the source of it, right?

Where do the questions come from? You can't deduce the questions. So, if I'm not mistaken, you are 86. You're not mistaken. At 86, what do you hope is true? The last chapter of this book, 15, is called a nextaxial age. We're in a mess. We're in the middle of the Anthropocene.

We're destroying the biosphere. We are stuck in the middle of early 21st century capitalism. We make our livings pouring more concrete every year. We live in an era of yet more dominion. I'm hoping that there's some transition hovering in the not-distant future to what I'm calling a next axial age. and I'm hoping that origins with its notion of that we're closer to the towel

of participation and intellectual humility because we don't have mastery the world isn't ours to command and control that Roger Bacon hoped for now what I suspect it's going to take a long time

to take this in I'm hoping it leads to something like membership, participation, humility, collaboration with nature, not raping it. We still have to earn our livings. You know, but trees are in their livings. They don't rape the bias here. They're part of it. Every other species does it.

What are we screwing up? And in some funny sense, Kurt, we are because of the glory of Western science. It's given us the confidence that we are masters. But we're not. That's a big hope. And I don't know, I don't even know what I mean. What's a lesson in life that you learned too late? We had a wonderful colleague named Ilya Schmulevich. Died a couple years ago. Lee Hood is a friend of mine. We're biologists.

I said, Ilya is a spectacular scientist but a better human being. That is awesome. I don't do that. I don't know. It takes kind of generosity. Easy to say, hard to be and do. I'm learning. I'm learning it insofar as I incurred much in my late life. Michael Levin asked me to ask you, suppose there's an oracle who can answer any question.

What would be the question you want to know the answer to? Michael asked me that. Isn't he wonderful? Yes. It's just amazing. Have you seen Xenobots? Yes, yeah. I've spoken to Michael several times on this channel.

I'll put some of the links on screen and in the description. Oh, dude, just amazing. Xenobots. I thought that Xenobots are a Darwinian pre-adaptation. I think it's unprestatedable. Use of things cells already do. What would I want to ask? Gosh, you did not talk about it, but somehow.

I don't mean to be cute. a couple of years ago, my wife, my first wife, Dr. Packer, Kate, and I were in Marrakesh. And we were in this beautiful almost alabaster space. The Andalusian civilization was there in the 1200s. Christians and Arabs and the Jews flourished. I want to, before science pauses in the West, what was important in the 1215 in Marrakesh. I think people worried an awful lot about what was a delight.

We've forgotten. We're consumers, right? What first world is busy consuming black-purple penguins from the pool side? I guess in some deep sense it is, what is a good life, what is flourishing, mean in conjunction with everybody else. And by everybody else, I mean the chick muntz and the squirrels. And somehow I'm hoping that origins in the fact that we are closer to the tau invites us

to find that again, that somehow that becomes a major question. I mean, you're asking me something, how can I possibly know the answer? But life's been flourishing, you know, for four billion years. We're screwing it up so terribly. With such arrogance, would you take the same question coming back? Well, I'm a much more fearful person, and there are many questions that I don't want to know the answer to. That's interesting.

Tell me about the book you're writing. At this point, Stu and I were talking about my book, but I can't speak about it publicly yet as it's in the pre-publishing phase, so I had to cut this part out. You should hear more about it shortly. I don't know if you know Nancy Cartwright, who's a philosopher. She was, I was, this is very recently, I was a young professor at the University of Chicago.

We decided that it was really important to do the philosophy of biology. I had no idea what it was, and we for two years, once Nancy was in the group, I haven't seen her since, she's brilliant. and her dappled universe is an example of it. Oh, by the way, there's something else that ties in with Nancy Cartwright, too. If there's a domain of no entailing law, we can't define work. I mean, see if you agree with me. It's one of the chapters again.

What is work? Work is the occurrence of some subset of the known possibilities. It's a release of energy into a few degrees of freedom, right? Well, what's a few degrees of freedom? It's some subset of the known possibilities. If you don't know what the possibilities are, how do you define work? You could define energy because you can define work. And Jules said, well, you get the same thing when you, you know, heat up the water.

If you can't define work, you can't define energy. If you can't define energy, you can't define conservation of energy. Does this start to be another example of what you're talking about? You hear it? Yes, well, I don't know if thermodynamics requires knowing all possibilities beforehand. Yeah, I may be entirely wrong. I don't know either. Stuart, is there anything that you wanted to say that I haven't had a chance to ask you about? Yeah, in the last chapter, I've been in Ovna for five years in global soil restoration.

And the compost in David Johnson. It's very easy to make. It restores the soil, sequesters water locally. It, and it probably sequesters carbon dioxide in the atmosphere efficiently to fight climate change. Another thing, something that's been a long dream of mine, Kurt. I invented random bullion nets when I was 23 and showed for us in radicality. and we know that genetic networks are critical. When I was 42, a phoning just happened,

and my friend, Molly, and I invented the idea of making billions of random DNA sequences like billions of random proteins to select them to find useful molecules. That's now an entire field called combinatorial chemistry. Thank you for speaking with me, sir. It's an honor. Thank you. You too. You really go. This is terrific.

You are doing good stuff. and is a genuine congratulations. It needs to be done. Thanks. Hi there. Kurt here. If you'd like more content from theories of everything

and the very best listening experience, then be sure to check out my substack at kurtjymongle.org. Some of the top perks are that every week you get brand new episodes ahead of time. You also get bonus written content exclusively for our members

that's C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L.org. You can also just search my name and the word substack on Google. Since I started that sub-stack, it somehow already became number two in the science category. Now, substack for those who are unfamiliar is like a newsletter, one that's beautifully formatted, there's zero spam, this is the best place to follow the content of this channel that isn't anywhere else. It's not on YouTube. It's not on Patreon. It's exclusive to the substack. It's free. There are ways for you to support me on substack if you want, and you'll get special bonuses if you do. Several people ask me like, hey, Kurt, you've spoken to so many people

in the fields of theoretical physics, a philosophy, of consciousness. What are your thoughts, man? Well, while I remain impartial in interviews, this substack is a way to people. into my present deliberations on these topics. And it's the perfect way to support me directly. Kurtjymongle.org or search Kurtzimungle substack on Google. Oh, and I've received several messages, emails, and comments from professors and researchers saying that they recommend theories of everything to their students. That's fantastic. If you're a professor or a lecturer or what have you and there's a particular standout episode that students can benefit from

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