Kind: captions
Language: en
i don't know what it's like to be an
alien i would like to know two alien
civilizations coexisting on a planet
what's that look like exactly 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
we're making what human level
intelligence has done is quite different
it's not just that we remember states
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 so you can
travel back in time
sometimes yes you travel forward in time
to travel back yes
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 disagree and debate
nuance 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 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 the
seriousness and rigor they deserve is
what i hope to do with this conversation
and future ones like it
our world is rather than mystery we must
first be humble to acknowledge this and
then be bold and diving in and trying to
figure things out anyway
this is the lex friedman podcast to
support it please check out our sponsors
in the description
and now dear friends here's sarah walker
and lee cronin
first of all welcome back sarah welcome
back lee you guys i'm a huge fan of
yours you're incredible people i should
say thank you to sarah for wearing uh
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
you're
pink like your thing is pink
my thing is black and white the
simplicity of it
where's the pink when when did the pink
when did it hit you that pink is your
car i became pink about
i don't know actually maybe 2017. you
know 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 everybody in their black
gown and he's just wearing the pink
pants oh that wasn't the wagon in
university it's totally nuts 100 year
anniversary they got me to give the
plenary and they didn't they didn't find
that outfit for me so they're all
wearing these silly hats and these gowns
and there was me dressed up in pink
looking like a complete idiot we're
definitely going to have to find that
picture and overlay
big full screen
slow motion
all right let's talk about aliens we'll
find places we disagree in places we
agree
life intelligence consciousness universe
all of that
let's start with a
tweet from neil degrasse tyson
stating his skepticism about aliens
wanting to visit earth
quote how egocentric of us to think that
space aliens who have mastered
interstellar travel across the galaxy
would give
pardon the french
uh would give a about humans on
earth
so let me ask you would aliens care
about visiting earth observing
communicating with humans let's take a
perspective of aliens maybe sarah
uh
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 um so
i would expect um 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 uh you have less to
learn probably more than you two talking
to somebody that's 90. so um
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 then we'll 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 one
of them is interesting yes
that's very interesting term to try to
define uh lee what what do you think are
humans interesting for aliens
well let's take it from our perspective
we want to go find aliens as a species
quite desperately
so
if we put the shoe on the other foot of
course we're interesting
but i'm wondering
um and assuming that we're at the right
technological capability 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 i do think
that they would come and find us because
they want to find out about our culture
what things are universal it what about
i mean i'm a chemist 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
um
what does their science look like um are
they off planet yet um i guess there's
so i 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
[Laughter]
so again i'm going to use uh your tweets
like it's shakespeare and analyze it so
sarah tweeted
uh 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 introspect
that is that an obvious thing that we
should be like what are we hoping to
understand
by meeting aliens
exactly
asking as an introvert it's like i ask
myself this all the time why go out on a
friday night to meet people what are you
hoping for i think curiosity so when i
saw sarah put that tweet i think i
answered it actually as well which was
uh
we are thinking about trying to make
contact so they almost certain are
certain
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 have made contact with just
one other alien and maybe it's an
anti-climax and slime
all 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 to not make
contact with not one
but two other intelligent civilizations
so they must be thinking about there
must be entire
um
degree courses on aliens thinking about
aliens and cultural uh universal
cultural 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 thinking
about aliens
they said that's all the universe wants
and then sarah responded cheeky universe
we live in
so cheeky is a is a cheeky version of
the word interesting all of which will
try to define
uh mathematically he 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
yeah
so if you're
a graduate student alien looking at
multiple alien civilizations
uh do you think they survive the
encounters
i think there's a tendency to
anthropomorphize a lot of discussions
about alien life which is a really big
challenge so i usually when i'm trying
to think about these problems i don't
try to think about
um us as humans but us as an example of
phenomena that exists in the universe
that we have yet to explain
um and it doesn't seem to be the case
that if i think about
the features
i would argue are most universal about
that phenomena that there's any reason
to think that a first encounter with
another
lineage or
example of life would be antagonistic
um
i think
yeah and and i think there's this kind
of assumption
i mean going back to neil degrasse
tyson's uh 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 um 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 i think neil is 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 those memories can
interact with each other and if you have
to
um 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 going to look
like they're just going to 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
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
so i think that neil's just i don't know
maybe
you know i mean give a that's
really i think that's really down on
earth right
how would aliens categorize humans do
you think
how would weak so let's put the other
way around slime category maybe no no no
we maybe we could the thing is 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
interweb with other thinking beings
looking at each other's photos so
um i think that they will be wrong with
that
yeah
i did not say there was anything wrong
with it consciousness manifested at
scale
yeah selfies yeah instagram like the
mirror test at scale yeah i do think
that curiosity
is really the driving force why we have
our technology right if we weren't
curious we wouldn't go out left the cave
so i think that um
so i think that neil's 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 um we want i
desperately and i know that sarah does
too but i won't speak for you you're
here you can i desperately want to have
missions to look for 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 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 and try
to map that to alien species i always
think like optimism is what's going to
get us furthest 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 zoe's our future and
space is always
you know 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 than
warren conflict because those things end
up crushing you
um so there might be some selective
filter uh of course this is me being an
optimist i'm a half
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 uh because you said you frame
curiosity as a way to also plan on how
to avoid violence which is an
interesting frame of curiosity but i i
could also argue that
violence is a pretty productive way
to uh operate in the world
which is like that's one way to protect
yourself the best defense is offense
um i'm not qualified to answer this but
i'll have a go i think violent let's not
talk about violence that's the summary
of this podcast
i would yeah but maybe i would let's
call it violence but i call it erasure
so if you think about um the way
evolution works all the way uh um
obviously talk about assembly's theory
but
so if you say you you build pro
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 further curiosity
gets you rockets that land it gets you
robots that can make drugs it gets you
poetry and art
and communication 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 war but a the equivalent so we get
remove all the admin bureaucracy right
all the admin violence get rid of it and
start again do you know what i mean
because you get layers and you get
redundant systems built so actually
a reset let's call it violence a reset
in some aspects of our um
culture and our 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
think how many how many extra clicks i
do i have in the future of my life that
i could remove and a bit of
a reset would would allow us to
to uh to start again and maybe that's
how i suppose our encounter with aliens
will be maybe they will fight with us
and say uh he went on as excited by you
so we thought we'll just get rid of you
so they might want to reset earth yeah
why not to be like let's see how the
evolution runs again this seems like
they've uh
uh there's nothing new happening here
they're observing for a while this is
just not let's keep it more fun let's
start with the fish again
i like how you equated violence to um
resetting your cookies yeah i suppose
that's the kind of violence
in this modern world where wards are
violence resetting cookies i don't know
where that came from i'm completely yeah
that's poetic uh 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 can
pull in ideas of assembly theory
like how do we start to try to define
life and for people
uh listening so sarah
identifies as a physicist and lee
identifies as a chemist of course they
are very interdisciplinary in nature in
general but
um
so what is life
yeah
yeah i love asking that question because
it's so absurdly big i know i love it um
it's my absolute favorite question the
whole universe um so i think i have
three ways of describing it right now um
and i like to say all three of them
because people latch onto different
facets of them and so the whole idea of
what lee and i are trying to work on is
not to try to define life but to try to
find a more fundamental theory that
explains what the phenomena we call life
and then it should explain certain
attributes and you end up having a
really different framing than way people
usually talk so the way i i talk about
it three different ways
um life is how information structures
matter across space and time
um life is
uh
i don't know
this one's from you actually simple
machines constructing more complex
machines
and the other one is the physics of
existence so to speak which is
life is the mechanism the universe has
to explore the space of what's possible
um that's my favorite
so can i yeah yeah can i add on to that
okay can you say the physics one again
uh oh the physics of 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
yeah well what's what's another one
we were debating this the other day so
if you think about universe that has
nothing in it that's kind of hard to
conceive of right because and this is
where physicists really go wrong they
think of a universe with nothing in it
they can't and you think non-existence
is really hard to think
yeah and then you think of universe with
everything in it
that's really hard and and you just you
just have this white blob right this is
everything but the fact we have to
discrete stuff in the universe beyonce
planet so you've got stars space planet
stuff right the boring stuff
but i would define life or say that life
is where
there are architectures any
architectures and we should stop
fixating on
what bill 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 that
and there's because for me the the
object is a proxy for a machine that
built it some information
um
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 let's
see the objects the you know and i think
in a way that assembly theory
we realized maybe a few months ago that
assembly theory actually does
account for the soul in the objects not
mystically like say sheldrick's morphic
resonance or leibniz's monodology seeing
souls and 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 um
you put it much more elegantly but 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 and 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
are you being the machine yes wait a
minute why is the object so one one of
the ways to define life uh that sarah
said
is simple machines creating complex
machines so
there's a million questions there so how
how the hell does a simple machine
create a complex machine
mutation
so this is what we're talking about at
the beginning you have the minimum
replicator so molecule so this is what i
was trying to convince sarah if the
mechanism get there years 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 be a has there has to be
some variability otherwise it's not
going to get more functional so you need
to 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
um
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 that's why alien life must be
everywhere
because there is existence is there like
a conservation
of cheeky stuff
happening 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 would this 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 um
seeds if you like random cues from the
environment so you just use those
objects to basically write on your tape
ones and zeros whatever and that is that
is necessarily
rich complex
okay
but it has a low assembliness but even
though it has a higher 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 i
think
the easiest way
to think about it is actually which i
know is a concept you hate but i also
hate which is entropy but people are
more familiar with entropy than what we
talk about in assembly theory
um and also the idea that
like say physics as we know it um
involves objects that don't exist across
time or as we would say low memory
objects
um so one of the the key distinctions
that that low memory objects yeah so
physics is all physicists are low memory
memory objects
physicists are creators of low memory
objects or manipulators of low memory
objects absolutely that's a very nice
way
putting okay sorry guys yeah
sorry to keep in trouble no it's fine um
i like it too it's very funny um but i
think it's a good way of phrasing it
because i i think you know this kind of
idea we have an assembly theory is that
um
you know 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 and time and we measure
that with something called the assembly
index
in molecules but presumably everyone
should have sort of a
uh do you want to explain what assembly
yeah let's you know what let's step back
and
and start at the beginning what is
assembly theory lee send me some slides
there's a there's a big sexy paper
coming out probably
maybe i don't know we've almost finished
it
um
almost almost that's like that's also a
summary of science we're almost done yes
we're almost done the history of science
we are ready to start an interesting
discussion with our peers
right you're the machine that created
the object and we'll see where the
object takes
all right so what what is assembly
theory um yeah well i think i think the
easiest way for people to understand it
is to think about um
assembly in molecules although the
theory is very general doesn't just
apply to molecules and this was really
leased in sight so it's kind of funny
that i'm explaining it but um okay i'll
mark you okay all right ready i'm ready
i'm ready tell me where i get the check
marks minus but it's your theory as well
yeah i know but ima imagine a molecule
um and then and then you can you know
break the molecule apart into elementary
building blocks they happen to be bonds
and then you can think of all the ways
for molecular assembly theory you can
think about 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
so it has this kind of recursive
property to it um 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 and we had this conjecture
that if that minimal number of steps was
sufficiently large
it would indicate that you required a
machine or a system that had information
about how to assemble that specific
object because the combinatorial space
of possibilities is getting
exponentially large as the assembly
index is increasing so it's 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
um both
but you might want to make the
distinction that a water bottle is not
life
but it would still be a signature that
you were in that domain of physics
and i might be alive
so um
so there will be potentially a lot of
arguments about where the line at which
assembly index
uh
does interesting stuff start to happen
the point is we can make all the
arguments but it should be
experimentally observable and and we 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 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
uh potentially constant of nature it
might depend on specific features of the
system like but um which we debate about
sometimes but um
but then when you're past that you have
you have to have some other explanation
than the current explanations we have in
physics because now you're in high
memory um
uh the things actually require time for
them to exist and time becomes a
physical variable the the path to the
creation of the object is the memory
yeah so you need to consider that
yeah but the but the point is that's a
feature of the object
so it's it's it so when i think of all
the things in this room uh you know we
see the the projection of them as a
water bottle but assembly theory would
say that this is a causal graph of all
the ways the universe can create this
thing that's what it is as an object and
we're all interacting uh causal graphs
and most of the creativity in the
biosphere is because a lot of the
objects that exist now are huge in their
structure across time four billion years
of evolution to get to us
is it possible to look at me
and
infer the history that led to me
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 refer a lot probably yeah
we'll stay with them which we do
genomically even i mean it's not like
like we have a lot of information and
that's we can reconstruct histories from
assembly is saying something slightly
deeper yeah one thing to add i mean it's
not just about the object 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 they must have there
must be a number of identical copies so
you know you're getting getting away
from the random because you could take a
snapshot this is why it's not i hate
entropy i love entropy when used
correctly but it's about the problem of
entropy you have to have a labeler and
so 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
produce the assembly equation so we came
up with the assembly equation i had just
imagine this so you have this string
where
oh
actually it makes me makes me sick
trying to remember it was so it did my
head in for a long time
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 a aaa
bbb ccc ddd and you and you find that
object and you just just have four a's
four b's four c's four d's 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 four a's the four
b's the four c's and four c's we 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
a physical object in this assembly space
of objects that we realized the best way
to put that is infer in time that so
although we can't infer your entire
history we know at some point the four
a's were made the four b's was made the
four c's were made in four d's were made
and they all got added together and and
that's one really interesting thing
that's come out the theory about the the
killer when we knew we were going beyond
um
and
beyond standard complexity theories was
incredibly successful
is that we realized we could start to
measure these things for real across
domains
so the assembly index is actually an
intrinsic property of all stuff that you
can break 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
uh like if tesla's sociology computers
complexity of memes
you know memes yep
what was that ideas yeah i mean so
one of the ideas are objects and
assemblies areas
they're just pictures of the causal
graph i mean the fact i can talk to you
right now is because we're exchanging
structure of our assembly space
uh
so conversation is the
uh
exchanging structures in assembly space
what is assembly space
when i started working on origins of
life i um i was writing about something
called top down causation which a lot of
like philosophers philosophers are
interested in and people that worry
about the mind body problem but the
whole idea is you know if we have um you
know the microscopic world of physics is
causally complete it seems like there's
no room for higher level causes like
our thoughts to actually have any impact
on the world and that didn't that seems
problematic when you get to studying
life in mind because it does seem that
quote-unquote emergent properties do
matter to matter
um and so
um
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
um like you don't have to specify
anything about the substrate to talk
about information and then there's als
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
um
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 and the things
that look abstract are things that are
entangled in the histories of those
objects they're features of the
overlapping assembly space so they look
abstract because they're not
you know part of the current
structure but they're part of the
structure if you thought about it as
like 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 is physical
it's just physical in time not in space
too
hyper object too 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 um you could think of it as like
a partial ordering of all the things
that can happen
um so in in thermodynamics we course
grain things by temperature and pressure
in assembly theory we coarse grain by
the number of copies of an object and
the assembly index which is basically if
you think about 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
not
average because can't you just 3d
with that question oh not not not 3d
can't you always 3d print the thing in
the heart no because i had such fight so
sarah's team and my team are writing
this paper at the moment and it's so
funny i think we kind of share the at
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
when you build a theory and build the
intuition
there's some certain
features right of the theory that almost
felt like i was being religious about
saying right you have to do this a good
assembler assembly theorist does this
does this does this and
sarah's postdoc daniel and my postdoc
ambershek and they were both both
brilliant they're brilliant but they
were like now we don't we don't buy that
and i was like
it is is they were like well lee
actually um
i thought you're the first to say that
you know you can't if you can't explain
it it doesn't and you can't do an
experiment that doesn't exist and that
saved me and i said to abhishek whoever
takes my postdoc in glasgow daniel was
sarah's postdoc in asu i was like
i have the experimental data so when i
basically take um 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 dropped for abhishek
said okay so i had these things that we
had to
believe to start with or to trust and
then we've done the math and it came out
and they now have the shortest path
actually it's up that explains why the
shortest path here's why the shortest
path is important not the average
the shortest path needs you to identify
when the universe has basically got a
memory not an average so what you want
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 i know the universe has
had a coherent memory
and it's basically a life
and and so
that means it gives you the lower bound
so that's like of course there's going
to be other paths 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 hyper objects 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
shortest path i might go a bit longer i
might take a really long path because it
allows me then to
to do something else so what you do is
let's say i've got two different objects
a and b
and they both have different shortest
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
they might 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 a
as you
literally overlap those sets 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 so maybe
we'll talk about that what those basic
ingredients could be and how many step
when you say shortest path how many
steps it takes
to turn those basic ingredients into the
final
meal
so how to make a p what's the shortest
way to make a
pizza pie
an apple pie that's right
and a pizza and a pie together scratch
yeah uh so there's a lot of ways
um
there's the shortest way and then you
know you take the full spectrum of ways
and there's probably an average
uh like duration
for a noob to make an apple pie
is the average interesting 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
versus
um
something fundamental about the object
which i think is what you're aiming at
with the assembly index yeah i mean look
we all love to quantify things the
minimum path gives you the lower bounce
you know you're detecting something you
know you're inferring something the
average tells you about really how the
objects are are existing in the
ecosystem or the technology
and and that and though and there has to
be more paths explored because then you
can
um
happen upon other memories and then
condense them down i'm not making too
much sense but if you look at say let's
just say i mean maybe we're going to get
to alien civilizations later right but i
i would argue very strongly that alien
civilization a and alien civilization b
um they're different assembly spaces so
they're kind of going to be a bit messed
up if they happen upon one another 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 shown but hopefully
they share the periodic table
and some other and bonds and things that
we're going to have to really think
about the language to talk to us aliens
by inferring by using assembly theory to
infer
um
the their language their technology and
other bits and bobs
and the shortest path will help you do
that quickly all right so all all aliens
in these causality graphs have a common
ancestor
in the if the building blocks are the
same which means they live in the same
universe as us so this 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 no the universe doesn't just say
like
here you get the the red
causality gravity you get the blue one
these basic ingredients and they're
geographically constrained or
constrained in space or time or
something like that
they're constrained in time because uh
only by the virtue of the fact that
um 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 so one
point on the shortest path versus the
average path which i think will get to
this is um you had a nice way of saying
it's like the minimal compression is the
shortest path for the universe to
produce that but it's also like the
first time in the in the ordering of
events that you might expect to see that
object
but the average path tells you
um 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 the future of the interactions with
other things and so one of the nice
features of assembly is you've basically
gotten rid of you just look at the
things that exist and you've gotten rid
of the mechanisms for constructing them
in some sense like the machines are not
um
as important in the current construction
of the theory although i would like to
bridge it to some ideas about
constructors
um
but then
um you could only communicate with
things as 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 and the example i like to give is
actually um when we made first contact
with gravitational waves um because uh
you know that's an alien phenomena
that's been permeating our plate not
alien in life phenom 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 um but we
had to advance to the level of einstein
writing down
um his theory of relativity and then 100
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 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 the nice promising thing is over
time the graph can grow so it 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 what was happening on this
planet or even further back in time
um that you know there was common
physics underlying all those events but
even for those two events to communicate
i understand what you were going on
about the other week yeah i'm sorry it's
a really abstract example but um but
your causal graphs are not overlapping
well let's just say now our causal
graphs are overlapping in the deep past
yeah you made a connection with it no i
do like that no no you can tell me what
your epiphany is now that's good because
i was and i should get the jokes before
30 seconds after
oh i get it now
i wasn't able to comprehend what you
were talking about with 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 detected the
gravity wave i mean i think it's amazing
that you know at that time we weren't
even we were just becoming multicellular
right it's like insane and then we we we
progress from multicellular clarity
through to technology technology
and build the detector and then for you
know and then we'll just extrapolate
backwards so
so i although we haven't didn't do
anything back to the graph back in time
we understood his existence then
overlapped going forward and that well
that's because our graphs are larger
yeah but that means that has a that has
a consequence one of the things i was
trying to say is like i'm
i'm i'm i think
i don't know sarah might be she can
correct me information first and i'm a
object first kind of guy so i mean
there's things that get constructed
there has to be this transition in
random constructions so when the the
constructing the object is construct
being constructed by the process
bakes in that memory and those memories
then add on and add on and add on
so as it becomes more competent and life
is about taking those memories and
compressing them increasing their
autonomy
and and so i think that you know like
the cell that we have in biology on
earth is our way of doing that that
really the maximum
ability to take memories and to act on
the future
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
okay abstractions but the point
about mathematics that i think is so i i
don't i don't disagree i think you're
object first and i'm information first
but i think i'm i'm only information
first in the sense that i think the
thing that we need to explain is why
what abstractions are and what they are
as physical things because of all 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 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
d 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 as the assembly of the
graph isn't basically a i'm gonna sell i
sound completely boring it's like math
assembly theory invented math but it did
it has to be okay
[Music]
[Applause]
so what what is uh what is math
exactly it's a uh
a nice simplification
at this simple description
of what so we have a computer scientist
a physicist in the chemist
here why i can 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 it honestly
we're ready
i think the ability to um to label
objects and and place them into classes
and then do operations on the objects is
what math is
so on that point what does it mean to be
object first
versus information first
so what what's the difference between
object and information when you get to
that low fundamental level well i might
change my view so i'm stuff first the
stuff
and then when stuff becomes objects it
has to invent information
and then the information acts on more
stuff and becomes more objects so i
think there is a transition to
information
that occurs when you go from stuff to
objects
yeah information is
emergent not emergent information is
actionable memories from the universe
so when when memories become actionable
that's information
but there's always memory but it's not
actionable
yeah and then it's not information great
and 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
consequences in the force i don't
understand why is that not information
it's not information it's it's um it's
uh stuff it's stuff happening but it's
not it's not cause yeah yeah we can this
is happening no not happening requires
information no 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 i mean
i think uh say max tegmark and and is
very playful and say like the universe
universe just meth well the universe is
just math then we might as well not
bother having any conversation because
the conversation already written we just
never go to the future and say can you
just give us the conversation it's
happened already so i think the problem
is that mathematicians
are so successful labeling stuff and so
successful understanding of stuff
through those labels they forget that
actually the 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 or
interact with other graphs and they can
intersect
those memories become actionable and
therefore their information and i think
you just changed my son my my mind on
something pretty big but i don't have a
pen so i can't i'm gonna write it down
later but roughly the idea is it's like
you've got these 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 is then so then you can then
abstract so one when one graph can then
build another graph and say hey you'll
have to go through all the nonsense we
had to go through here's literally the
way to do it staff always comes first
but then when staff builds the
abstraction the abstraction can be then
teleported onto other stuff directions
is the looping back yeah power
okay am i making i don't know i got
stuck yeah so first
a god made stuff
and after that
when you start to be able to uh form
abstractions that's when the
god is the memory of the universe can't
remember
otherwise there's no way did you just
differ in that statement hundreds of
years from now what does that mean what
did the humans mean by this hey look
don't don't diss my my one-liners
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 uh
time
causality mathematics
so what is mathematics in this uh
picture of stuff
objects
memory
and um
information
is
what is accurate mathematics it's the
most efficient labeling scheme that you
can apply to lots of different graphs
well the labeling scheme
doesn't make it sound useful can i try
yeah sure please have you rejected my
definition of mathematics i'm shocked
yeah no i'm sorry um but it's correct
oh i'm sorry excellent um no i mean i
think um i think we have a problem right
because we 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 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 um 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 the sky is blue you might say is it
cobalt blue is it is 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
um 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 is think
about like newton's law of gravitation
um it's actually it's a it's a
compressed regularity of a bunch of uh
phenomena that we observe in the
universe but then it'll 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 space or send people to
mars or whatever it is um
so
so if you look at us from the outside
and you say what is it for physical
systems to invent a thing called
mathematics and then to use uh
and and then
and then it to become a physical
observable mathematics is kind of like
the universally copyable information
that allows uh new possibility spaces to
be open in the future because it allows
this kind of ability to map one physical
system to another and actually
understand that the general principles
yeah so is it helping the uh overlap of
causal graphs then by mapping oh well i
think that's the explanation for what it
is in terms of the physical theory of
assembly would be some feature of the
structure of
the assembly spaces the 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 i mean we're in
totally uncharted conceptual territory
here um but
as is usual diving off the deep end um
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 so let me have another quick go
at this right so i think we all agree so
i think um
we take mathematics for granted because
we've gone through this chain right of
you know um we all we all share a
language now okay and we can well we
share length so we have languages that
we can we can make interoperable
and 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 um share that common language
that language was constructed by a
process in time so what i'm trying to
say is assembly invented 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 wait a minute can we just
ask that that old famous question is
math invented or discovered so when you
say assembly invented
or whatever
uh you you it means this is simply a
mathematical theory but sorry
right are we arguing exactly are we
arguing that that's what it sounds like
i we discovering
no well yes and no i would say
you called mathematics a language
i would say developing like i'm pretty
sure that um
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
and but even though i think those two
terms are very triggering and i don't
think they're necessarily useful because
i think that what people do the
mathematicians that say oh mathematics
was discovered
because they live in a universe where
there is no time and it just all exists
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
escape discover it
like inventing the airplane did i invent
the airplane let's stick with the
airplane the airplane's a good one i
let's say i'm i did i discovered the
airplane well in a way the universe
discovered the airplane because it just
chucked a load of atoms together a load
of random human beings won't do stuff
and they 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
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 airplane they're the same
thing but that doesn't mean that now the
airplane exists in the universe there's
something weird about the universe that
you know so i think that the more this
is the thing that i you probably the
more memory
required for the object the more
invented it is so when a mathematical
theorem has a
hazard needs more bytes to store it the
more invented it is and the less bites
the more discovered is
but everything then is invented it's
just more or less invented absolutely
okay
has 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 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 in physics of trying to
describe the universe from the outside
and not the inside
and
the universe has to generate everything
itself if you do it from the inside
assembly theory describes how the
universe builds itself
did it take you 15 seconds to say that
yeah to come up with that also no i've
thought about that before okay a good
line
it's like are you making funny no i'm
not making fun i'm having fun there's a
difference oh that's good all right i'm
you know she's inventing i'm not all
intimidated
and there's a causal history to that fun
um
you mentioned that there's no way to
communicate with aliens until
there's overlap in the causal craft
communication
includes being able to see them
and like what are we
this is the question is
um
is communication any kind of detection
and if so
what do aliens look like as you get more
and more overlap on the cause of gravity
you're assuming let's assume
that so when you see them when 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
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 see we mean visually they
show up to a party 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 um but other kinds of detection too
i would make it more abstract and go
down i was thinking this morning about
how to rewrite the arecibo 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 to do information exchange
let's make it more
fundamental more universal so we need to
think about what is a universal way of
making a memory and then we should
re-encode arecibo in that way
what's more basic than zeros and ones
well it's really difficult to get out
that causal chain because we're so let's
raise the idea of zero for a moment it
took human beings a long time to come up
with the idea of zero now now you've got
the idea of zero you can't throw it away
it's so useful to discover the idea 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 so exactly so it's not a
given that aliens know what zero is that
that's the one the massive assumption
it's a useful it's a useful discovery
that you're saying if you break the
causal chain there might be some other
more efficient way of representing why i
want to meet him and ask him
for a shortcut but you won't be able to
um ask him until what so i interrupted
you and i think you're making a good
point i was just going to say well look
thank you
sorry
rather than saying he's internet tweet
at him for the rude interruptions okay
i'm sorry no it's okay um maybe it's
change how do we so
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
on the table of like all right so there
has to be some overlap and this
uh causal chain that led to them
what are we 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 are aliens themselves
um we 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
show ourselves assembly index of let's
cut ourselves a break let's assume that
they are
they they're metabolized they've got an
energy source and they're they've
there are a size that we can recognize
let's give our cut ourselves a break
because there could be aliens that are
so big we don't recognize we're seeing
them there might be aliens that are so
small we don't yet have the ability to
you know we have microscopes we can see
you know far enough away that just
wouldn't be i see them so that's a good
range so let's just make a range let's
just be very am for eccentric and say
we're gonna look for aliens roughly our
size and technology our size because we
we know it's possible on earth right i
mean a reasonable thing to do would be
to to find exoplanets that in the same
zone as earth in terms of heat and stuff
and then say
hey if there's that same kind of gravity
same type 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 then you'll
then then your question becomes really
relevant and say right let's use vision
sound touch
and and so okay that's really nice so
that if there's a lot of aliens out
there
if there's a good likelihood if you
match to the planet that they're going
to be in the same spatial and temporal
operating in the same spatial temporal
domain as humans okay within that
what
wha
what did they look like
visually what do they sound like
uh what are they oh god this sounds
creepy tastes like
what is it
oh it smells like smell like that sounds
like our clubhouse and he's like can we
have sex with aliens which was basically
me saying passionate love but it wasn't
actually about sex it was about is our
chemistry compatible right is there some
yeah so yeah yeah can can we um 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 it could you could be
reasonable to assume that aliens could
have
they could be bipedal they could be
symmetric in the same way
might have a couple of eyes or a couple
of sensors well we can make make that
and perhaps there's this 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
yeah 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 yeah but i i think
it's really hard to imagine what the
space of aliens is because the space is
huge because you know like one of the
arguments that you can make about why
life emerges in chemistry is because
chemistry
is the first
scale in terms of like you know building
up objects from elementary objects
um
that the number of possible things that
could exist is larger than the universe
can possibly make all at once right so
um
so you imagine you have two planets and
they're cooking some geochemistry you
know our planet invented one kind of
biochemistry and presumably as you start
building up the complexity of the
molecules the chances of the overlap in
those trajectories those causal chains
being built up is probably very low
um and it gets lower and lower as it
gets further advanced along its
evolutionary path so i think it's very
difficult to
imagine predicting the technologies that
aliens are going to have
i mean it's it's so it's you're looking
at basically planets have kind of
convergent chemistry but there's some
variability and then you're looking
basically at the outgrowth into the
possibility space chemistry so do you
think it would detect the the technology
the objects created by aliens before we
detect the aliens
possibly so when you're talking about
measuring assembly index
um don't you think we would detect the
garbage first
like at the outskirts of alien
civilizations is this is going to be
trash
[Music]
i think i would come back to arecibo the
arecibo message sent from the arecibo
telescope built by
drake i think and and sagan how's
arecibo spelled
a-r-e-c-i-b-o yes thank you
yeah and there we go out there that
that's the telescope that sent the
message that you're doing so that
message was sent
where it was beamed it beamed at a star
of a specific star um and it was sent
out many years ago um
and what they did so this is why i was
pushing on binary is a binary message
i think it's a semi-prime
number of characters so i think 20 73 by
i think and it basically represents
human bit proton
um binary human beings dna male and
female
and it's it's really cool
but i'm just wondering if um it could be
done
not making any because he's made
assumptions that aliens speak binary
make that assumption why not just assume
that if the difference between physics
chemistry and biology is the amount of
memory that's instead that's recordable
by the substrate
then surely the universal thing my i'm
going to make some sacrilegious
statement which i think is pretty
awesome um for people to argue with so
this is uh we're looking at an image
where it's the the entirety of the
message encoded in binary
and then there's a probably
interpretation of different parts of
that image there's a there's a person
um there's green parts it looks like for
people just listening like a tetra game
of tetris so it's encoding in minimal
ways a bunch of cool information
probably representing all of us so the
top it's kind of teaching us how to
count and then all goes all the way down
teaching you chemistry and then just
says
but it makes so many assumptions and i
think if we can actually so
i think i mean sarah's much more
eloquent expressing this but i'll have a
go and you can correct it if you want
which is like um we one of the things
that sarah has had a profound effect on
the way i
look at the origin of life and this is
one of the reasons why we're working
together because
we don't really care about the origin of
life 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
cool way to do it
so what is it about the universe that
creates a 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 be if we want to communicate i mean
maybe we don't want to necessarily
uniformly communicate
um what i would do perhaps if i had is i
would send out lots of probes
away from earth that have this magic way
of communicating with aliens get them
quite far away from earth
plausibly deniable and then send out the
message that would then attract all the
aliens and then basically work out if
they're a friend or foe and how they
want to hang out the messages being
something has to do with the memory yes
like the the assembly version of arecibo
so that everyone in the universe that
has been understands what life is
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 um the rosetta stone
for life in the universe
is working out how the memories are
built i don't know if sarah you have any
well
um
whether that you would agree with that
no i i 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
and 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
kind of data you're describing lex like
you know visual data or smell to
construct the assembly spaces yet and 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
um and so i i think assembly and ai are
going to intersect in interesting ways
hopefully
um
but the the sort of key point and i've
been trying to make this argument more
recently
um and might write an essay on it is you
know people talk about the great filter
right and which is again this like
doomsday thing that you know people want
to say there's no aliens out there
because something terrible happened to
them um and it matters whether that's in
our 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 it's not a physical
filter it's not like things go extinct i
think it's literally we don't have the
technology to see them
um 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
um you know and building seismometers
based on our sense of feelings like feel
earthquakes and things and ai is
basically we're trying to outsource
what's actually happening in our
thinking apparatus into machines now
into technological devices 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 step backwards
i think so yeah did you imply that with
the great so like well no i mean i think
there's a great perceptual filter in the
sense that
a
example of life evolving on a planet
over billions of years has to acquire a
certain amount of knowledge and
technology to actually recognize
the phenomena that it is well that's the
sense i have
is uh
i mean you talk with physicist engineers
in general that there's this kind of
idea that we have
most of the tools are ready just to hear
the signal
but to me it feels like we don't have
any of the tools to see the segment yeah
i agree that's that's the biggest like
to hear we don't have the tools to
really hear to see yeah
are everywhere we just don't have the
the um yeah i mean well
oh that's i mean i got this in part
actually because you were like you know
that last time i was here was like look
at the carpet you know could it like if
you had an alien detector where the
carpet be aliens i mean i think we
really don't
i i would be both the aliens would
nevertheless have a high assembly index
or produce things like high assembly
yeah yeah yeah and those things have a
high assembly index
uh you have to have a detector that can
recognize high assembly index in all its
forms yeah yes that's it that's it take
data
construct assembly space yes patterns
basically so one way to think about high
assembly index is interesting patterns
uh of basic ingredients i can give you
an example because i mean molecules
we've been talking about in objects but
we're also trying to do it in um spatial
trajectories like imagine you're just
um like i 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 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
brownie emotion or something um 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 um
causal history to build up certain
trajectories for observed agents that's
like an agency detector for behavior do
you do you think it's possible to do
some like like voids or
those kinds of things
like artificial like cellular automata
play with those ideas with assembly um
with assembly theory have you found any
useful really simple mathematical
um like 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 with chemistry
but it just seems well i mean computer
science person maybe it seems easier to
just i agree with you and sexier in
terms of uh tweeting visual information
on
uh twitter or instagram more importantly
um
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
uh and more and more complex objects and
so like and mathematically you get to
observe what that looks like to build up
an intuition what assembly index is like
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 and one of the reasons why i
was pushing on
information and mathematics when human
beings
when human being we take a lot of the
infrastructure for granted and 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
this is like i can see there are lots of
people disagree with the statement but i
don't think i don't think sarah will but
i don't know the fact that objects exist
i don't think anyone on earth can just
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 the
the acquisition the universe's ability
to acquire memory
is the very first step for building life
and
that must be that's so easy to happen so
therefore alien life is everywhere
because all alien life is
is uh those memories being compressed
and minimalized and the alien equivalent
of the cell working
so i think that we will build new
technologies to find aliens
um but we do not we need to understand
what we are first and and how we go from
physics to chemistry to biology
the most interesting thing as you're
saying between these two organisms
different assemblies is when you get
into biology biology gets more and more
weird more and more contingent where
physics is pro chemistry is less weird
because the rules of chemistry are
smaller than the rules of biology and
then going away to physics where you
have a very
nicely tangible number of ways of
arranging things
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'm i mean i'm maybe just being
really arrogant here i don't mean to be
arrogant it's just again i've just got
this hammer called assembly and
everything's nail 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 so and
actually yeah well and what they look
like so any of the things we've been
talking about is there um nuanced
oh it's always nice to discover
uh wisdom
through nuance
disagreement yeah i i don't i don't
wholly disagree but i think um but i do
think i disagree it's kind of there's
nuance there um but but you can disagree
no it's fine um
it is nuanced right so you made the
point earlier that you think um
you know once we discover what alien
like what life is we'll see alien life
everywhere
um and i think i agree on some levels in
the sense that i think the physics that
governs us is universal but i 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 which we would
just say in assembly as you go from uh
the no memory physics to
uh
there's like a critical transition
around the assembly index where
assembliness starts to increase and
that's what we call the evolution of the
biosphere and complexification of the
biosphere
so there's a principle of increasing
assembliness or that goes back to what i
was saying at the very beginning about
the physics of the possible that the
universe basically gets in this mode of
trying to make
as much possibilities as possible um 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 likelihood of 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 i
don't like um but i did have it um which
is um
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 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
or the actual physical histories of
things now become things that you have
to count as far as
saying that these things exist and we're
increasing the number of things that
exist
and uh and if you think about that
cosmologically maybe earth is sucking up
all the life potential of the whole
universe i don't know
but how's that can you explain that a
little bit why can any one geographical
region
suck up the creative capacity of the
universe um just like
i i know it's a ridiculous thought i
don't i don't actually agree with it but
it was just the thought i love that you
can have thoughts
that you don't like and don't agree with
but you have to think through them
anyway yeah
the human mind is fascinating yeah i i
think these sort of um
like counter factual 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 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 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 lee always has this argument that
assembly is about time the universe is
generating more states really what it's
generating is more
assembly possibilities and then dark
energy might be one manifestation of
that that the universe is accelerating
its expansion because that makes more
physical space 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 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 you have thoughts and just a
quick yeah i'll just say something very
quickly
no it's good i think i get it i think i
get it so um all i want to say is
when i mean aliens are everywhere 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 a
magical one yeah
or a real one there would be a memory
detector to see selection so you could
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 what i'm trying to say is narrow
down the regions 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
if select this where where it's capable
of happening and then we've then that
would also help us frame the search for
aliens i don't know how likely it is 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 it can generate per unit time
that our existence is actually
precluding the existence of other things
i'll 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 because well no no no i do
like thor express so what you're trying
to say is like there is a chain of
events that goes back that's manifestly
collimated with life on earth
and you're not saying that life isn't
possible elsewhere say that there has
been these number of things contingent
things that have happened that have
allowed life to merge here um that
doesn't mean that life can't emerge
elsewhere but you're saying that these
the intersection of events may have may
be concentrated here right
um and i think that's not exact not
exactly it's more like um
like uh you know if you you look at say
the causal graphs are fundamental maybe
space is an emergent property which is
consistent with some proposals in
quantum gravity but also how we talk
about things in assembly theory
then the universe is causal graphs
generating
more structure in clausal graphs right
so this is how the universe is unfolding
and maybe there's a
cap on the rate of generation like the
there's only so much stuff that gets
made 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 the
universe because you've got the number
of states yeah we can come back to it
well let me ask real quick like why does
uh different like local pockets
of the universe start remembering stuff
how does memory uh emerge exactly so
at the origin
of the universe
i was very forgetful that's when the
physicists were happiest as low memory
objects um
which is like ultra low memory objects
which is what the definition of stuff
okay so how does memory emerge how does
which is
this how does this the temporal
stickiness
so objects emerge
um
i i i i'm going to take a very
chemocentric point of view because i
can't imagine any other way of doing it
you you could think of other ways maybe
um 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 a um some in or
some elements in a box
those elements can combine in a
combinatorial set of ways so there's a
commentary 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 um 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 combinatorial where
you basically have to accrue information
in steps then you've got um assembly
observed right and then you've got the
object assembly going back so what that
mean what i'm trying to say is like if
you can take atoms and make bonds let's
say you take a nitrogen atom and add it
to a carbon atom you find an amino acid
then you add another carbon atom on in a
particular configuration then 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
but that doesn't mean there can't be
other ways and can't be other emergent
effects but i i think if you can make
bonds and lots of different bonds
and they those molecules can have a
causal effect on the future so imagine a
box of atoms
and then 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
and influence the box
then you make
a prime or a b or abc and that process
keeps going and that's where the
memories come from is that heterogeneity
in the universe from bonding
i don't know if it makes anything and
it's
beginning to flourish
at the chemistry level
yeah so the physicists have no no
no like not enough yeah the phys i mean
they're like desperately begging well
the physicist would claim
freedom yeah uh and heterogeneous
components to play with yeah that's
exactly it what do 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 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 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 and um 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 and
the assembly space which is like a
feature of common memory there is this
transition
um to assembly dominated physics
whatever that is
oh 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 you
would have been able to predict the
emergence of chemistry and biology and i
asked that because at this stage as
humans do you think we can possibly
predict
the length of memory that's that might
be able to be formed
later on
in this pocket in the universe like how
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 it's actually
physical in the system and you have to
have enough time for
uh
features of that structure to exist
wait let me push back on that wait god
what isn't that isn't there somewhere in
the universe that's like a shortest path
that's been that stretches all the way
to the beginning yeah that's building
some giant monster
maybe yeah yes
so the universe has as much memory as
the largest assembly object in the
universe yeah right but like so you
can't predict
you can't predict any deeper than that
no right so like that i guess
i'm saying is
like what intuition do you have about
complexity living in the world that
you'd have today
right because you you just you can
i mean i guess how long
um
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
uh 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 freeze
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 prime are you going to do
what everyone does which is deny that
you're in your prime and the best years
are still ahead of you
i don't know what option do you have um
uh
i i i mean the problem is with there's a
lots of
lots 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
there might be it's not i would say it's
a really boring bit but it's really
important for a cosmologist that the
universes have gone through was it lee
smolin who proposed this maybe that
there is this that basically 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 we go
again so actually selection goes all the
way back and there's these cycle of
universes and now this universe has been
selected because
um life can occur and it carries on but
i've i've really butchered that there's
a much more so this is some aspect where
through the selection process
there's parameters that are being
fine-tuned and we happen to be living in
one where there's some level of
fine-tuning
is there given that
um can you still man the case that we
humans are alone in the universe we are
the highest assembly index object in the
universe yeah i can i guess sad though i
mean so from is it possible yes
it's possible
let's assume
well we 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 you know of
staff being able to move around the
right right distance from our sun
right number of offense where we have a
moon
um the earth is rotating
um
the late heavy bombardment produced a
lot of
brought in the right stuff and um
and mars was cooking up cam you know the
right molecules first so it was
habitable before earth was literally
doing the combinatorial search and
before mars kind of became unhabitable
it it seeded earth with the right
molecular replicators
and there was just the right stuff on
earth and that's how the miracle of life
occurred
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 it just
might mean that that the 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
so what if
that's the reason we're lucky is that we
got to have a rare cascading
of um like accelerating cascading effect
in terms of the complexity of things
so like
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 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 experiment i'm doing
experiments right now in fact
experiments that sarah and i are working
on because we have some joint funding
for this where we're seeing that the
universe can get sticky really quickly
now of course we're being very
anthropocentric we're using laboratory
tools we're using theory but actually
the phenomena of selection
the process of heterogen developing
heterogeneity
we can do in the lab we're just seeing
the very first hints of it and
it wouldn't it be great if um we can
start to pin down
a bit more precisely
um begin because becoming good
bayesianists for this for the origin of
life and the emergence of life to
finding out what kind of chemistries we
really need to look for
and i'm becoming increasingly confident
we'll be able 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
well sarah what do you think about this
approach of engineering life in order to
understand life so building life in the
in the machine yeah so
i mean lee and i are trying right now to
build a vision for
a large
institute or experimental program
basically to do this problem but i think
of it as like
we need to simulate a planet so like the
large hadron collider was supposed to be
simulating conditions just after the big
bang lee built a lot of technology in
his lab to do these kind of selection
engines 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 super kami
akande that's looking for the decay of
the proton 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 a
proton so imagine we built an experiment
with the idea in mind of trying to
simulate planetary conditions physically
simulate you can't simulate original
life in the computer you have to do it
in an experiment
simulate enough planetary conditions to
explore the space what's possible and
bound the probability for an original
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 can do in
particle accelerators
so keep expanding physically the
simulation
the physical simulation
until something happens yeah or just
build build a big enough volume of
chemical experiments and and evolve them
just say volume you mean like literally
volume i mean uh 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
such that it's always like
you keep grabbing the low-hanging fruit
yeah how do you build a search engine
for chemistry
well we should carry on doing this i
should pretend the physics be the
physicist you'd be the chemist no so the
way to do it is um
i will always play a joke because i i i
like writing grants um uh to ask for you
know money to do cool stuff but and i
years ago i started wanting to build so
i actually wanted the weather so i built
this robot in my lab called the computer
which is this robot you can program to
do chemistry
um
now it's a pro i made a programming
language for the computer and made it
operate
chemist chemical equipment
um originally i wrote grants to say hey
i want to make an origin of life system
and no one would give me any money
for this this isn't what is ridiculous
why are you wanting to make oh it's
really hard it takes forever you're not
a very good origin of life chemist
anyway why would we give you any money
and so i turned around and said can we
you can instead can you give me money to
make robots to make molecules are
interesting and everyone went yeah okay
you can do that
uh um
and that's so actually the funny thing
is the computer
um 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 um
um has come as literally came from this
i went to my lab one day said i want to
make a search engine to get the origin
of life because i don't have a planet
and i thought about doing in a
microfluidic format so microfluidic is
very nano
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 we slot them all together like lego
and we can make an origin of life system
and i i could never get it to work
um 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
yeah it goes back tonight that tweet
1981 1981 the computer we're looking at
a tweet from lee in 1981 the computer
was a distant dream
and oh wow this is the scientist looking
back it is
the young boy who dreamed in 2018 it was
realized
spelled in a british way realized
um
so now there's a system that does the
physical manifestation or whatever the
programming language
um
the spec
uh tells you to do yeah well in 1981 i
got my first computer zx81
what was the computer zx81 zx81
sinclair zx81 it was um and i got a
chemistry set
and i like i like the chemistry set and
i like the computer and i just wanted to
put them together i thought wouldn't be
cool if i could use use the computer to
control the chemistry set
and um and obviously that was insane and
i was like
you know eight years old right nine
years 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
time and real space
basically throwing a chemical dye dice
throw dice through a dice for a dice
you're gonna get lucky um and that's
what we i think sarah and i have been
thinking very deeply about because um
you know there's more money being spent
on the
the the origin of
the gravity or looking at the higgs
boson than the origin of life right and
the origin of life
is the i think the biggest question or
not the biggest question it is a big
question let's put it that way the
biggest question you're okay saying that
okay all right
isn't it possible once you figure out
the origin of life that that's not going
to solve
um
that's not actually going to solve
the question of what is life
like is isn't it because you're kind of
putting a lot of yeah i think that's the
same problem but you're putting is it
possible that you're
putting too many um
too much bets into this origin part
maybe the origin thing isn't
isn't there always a turtle underneath
the turtle isn't it a stack of turtles
because then if you create it in the lab
maybe you need some other stuff well
that's nothing but they already like you
like in the lab there's still memory
yeah yes right the experiment is already
the product of evolution right in some
maybe really deep way not an obvious way
it's a very deep way yeah so maybe uh
the haters are always going to be like
well
you have to reconstruct the full do you
have to build it fortunately for us the
haters are not aware of that argument
well no i know i know you're the one
making that argument usually but
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 um
what is the line between life and
non-life no i think so there's so much
here i'm just saying god playing devil
so much here but let me play devil's
advocate back in a previous conversation
right and say um
uh
yeah i will why not we're not we've got
time school seller automata yes celery
all thomas are these these very
very um simple
things where you color squares
um black or white and implement rules
and play them in time and you can get
these very very complex patterns coming
out you know there's nice rules there
are two and complete rules and
um
and um
i would argue that cellular automata are
that are don't really exist on their own
they have to exist on a in a computing
device
if that whether it's computing devices a
piece of paper an abstraction a
mathematician drawing a grid or um a
a a framework
now so i would argue cas are beautiful
things simple going complex but the
complexity is all borrowed from the
lithography the not numbers
right now let's take that same argument
with the um
the chemistry experiment origin of life
cat what you need to be able to do is go
and i'm inspired to do this to go out
and look for cas occur in nature
you know let's kind of let's find some
um some cas that just emerge in our
universe and for people just decide to
interrupt for people um just listening
and in general i think what we're
looking at
um is a cellular automata where again as
lee described there is just binary black
or white
squares and they only have local
information and they they're born and
they die
and
you would think nothing interesting
would emerge but actually what we're
looking at is something that i believe
is called glider guns
uh or or a glider gun which is uh
moving objects in this multi-cell space
that look like they're 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
uh well while the individual components
don't seem like they have any memory at
all
yeah it's just fascinating the argument
here is um
that has to exist on all this layer of
infrastructure right and though it looks
simple
and then what i would make the argument
i would make a value say well i think
cas are really simple and everywhere is
safe show me how they emerge and
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 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 with ca we know 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
um
generate this recipe in the lab and make
a life form
what were the 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 in fact
we have to cheat no one has given i'm
good at writing grants i used to be i'm
not very good right now keep getting
rejected but i writing a grant for a
planet and 100 million years no grant
fund there is going to give me that but
maybe money to make a a kind of a grid a
computer grid
origin of life computing into this space
in physical space and just do it so
sarah said something which is you can't
simulate the or engine of life in a in a
computer so like in simulation
why not
what what were your you said it very
confidently so yeah is it possible
and why would it be very difficult like
what's 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
because you have in the physical space
you have all the objects with all the
memories yes
and in the computer you would have to
copy them and reconstruct yes
that's a beautifully put and i would say
that
lots of people
you you just don't have enough resources
it's easier to actually do the physical
experiment because
we are literally i would view 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
want to design it's like you know all of
us are
lineages 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 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 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
quick pause bath 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 and
no memory
not even causality i think lee at least
implied the causality's immersion
somehow we could discuss this what
happened before
this all originated
what's outside the universe
divided by zero
okay so it's not
it's not relevant not understandable
is it useful to even ask the question
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 effects
what i mean is your causality graph is
like this is what we've been talking
about
it's like
there is limits to your ability
to construct experiments i agree but i'm
i'm i was trying to be facetious and i'm
trying to make a point 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 even one that's beyond my 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'm i would say that i think the big
bang just couldn't occur and create time
time created the big bang
but uh there was time before the big
bang yeah there was no space but those
times yeah
yeah
but i mean i'm just making that stuff up
just to make all the physicists happy
but i think it's
dad would you think that would make them
happy because they would be quite upset
actually and why would they be upset
because they would say that
like time can't exist before yeah i mean
this goes back to an argument that you
might not want to have the argument here
i i was talking to sarah earlier today
about an argument we had about time a
long time ago
time and 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 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 bing bang occurred
at some point
in when those states were there
probably there had to be enough states
for the big bang to occur
um and then
but i i i think that there is something
wrong with our conception of how the
universe was created in the big bang um
because we don't really get time and
because again you know
i don't want to become boring and sound
like a broken record but but um
time is a real thing
and until
i can really explain that more elegantly
i'm just going to get into more trouble
we're going to talk about time because
uh time is useful measuring device for
experiments but also time is as an idea
all that okay but let me first ask sarah
is like what what do you think
is it a useful question to ask what
happened
before the big bang is a useful question
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 the universe
um so and and going back to like 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
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 um low
information
uh
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 memory in the
objects it it looks like what we call a
big bang
um 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
um so like the multiverse
in my mind exists but it doesn't exist
as a multiverse of possible universes it
exists as an idea in our minds that
allows us to reason about how physics
works and then to do physics differently
because we reason about it that way
um so i always like to re-center it on
things exist but they don't always exist
like we think they exist
um so when we're thinking about things
outside the universe they absolutely
exist because we're thinking about them
but they don't look like
they don't look like the projections in
our minds they're something else
something you said just gave me an idea
to go back to your question
if
there was court i mean some if something
caused the big bang if there was some
memory or some artifact of that then of
course it's to answer your question it's
worth going back to that because it that
would imply there is something beyond
that barrier that filter yeah and that's
what you were saying i guess 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 are finding explanations
that allow us to do more like 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 the
interesting thing 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 the reset
from our limited perspective
and so the question is is it useful to
ever
study the thing that was forgotten
um or should we focus just on the on the
memories that are still there well the
point i was trying to make with
experiment is i was trying to say both
things and i think perhaps yes from the
pot following 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 without giving me
any credible
um conjecture about what we would
what how would we know the difference
but the way you've framed it is quite
nice i like that it's like what
what have we forgotten
is there room for god
in assembly theory
who's god
i like arguments for a necessary being
better than god
well i think i said it earlier
like something that has to exist
oh so you like i mean you like the
shortest path like does god need no no i
i mean well you can go back to like
thomas aquinas 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
but i think there's a lot of logical
loopholes in those kind of organs well
so god here meaning the machine
that creates
that generates
the stuff
because god so what i was trying to say
earlier isn't that just the universe
yeah yeah well yeah well but i there's a
difference between
i i should i imagine like a black box
like a machine
yeah that's then i would be more
comfortable calling that god
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 version can i yeah but if
it's more kind of uh
um like i don't like to think of if you
look at a cellular automata
if it 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
like uh that does that runs the cellular
automata and set the rules then that
feels like god
that the other sort of in terms of
terminology so i wonder if there's like
a machine that's required to generate
this universe that's very 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 exhaust god at
least exists in the abstraction in my in
our minds
particularly people who have who have
religious faith they believe in but
let's then take your but you're talking
a little bit more about generics say
well
is there a mechanism beyond the universe
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 mix well you
don't know if
he didn't exist in the beginning
so like uh
this could be us in our minds trying to
like just
listening to gravitational waves
detecting gravitational waves it's the
same thing us trying to
uh go back further and further into our
memories to try to understand the
machines that make up
that make up us and so it's possible
that we're trying to
um
grasp that possible kind of
what kind of machines could create
uh there's a there's always a tweet
there's always a tweet uh if the
universe is a computer then god must
have built it because computers need
creators there you go
and then uh yoshibok replied
since there's something rather than
nothing perhaps existence is the default
if existence is the default then many
computers exist creator gods are
necessary computers unnecessarily
computers too i'm very confused by that
but that's an interesting idea that
existence is a default versus
non-existence i agree with that but the
rest is the response perhaps this
reasoning is incomplete that's
that's how scientists talk trash each
other on twitter apparently uh which
part don't you agree with
uh 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 mec 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
could be the causal graph and 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
know we have a shared existence
so that if the god is the mechanism that
created this whole thing
i think a lot of people see god you know
in a religious sense
as a
as that mechanism also being able to
communicate with the objects it creates
and if it's just the mechanism it won't
be able to create with the object uh
communicate with the objects it creates
it can only create you can't like
interact
with the uh there's versions of god that
create the universe and then left
you know
yeah like spark for some for some
religions but the first spark yeah yeah
but i i think i liked your analogy of
the machine and the rules right but
um
i think part of the problem is you i
mean we have this conception that we can
disentangle the rules from the physical
substrate right and that's the whole
thing about like software and hardware
being separate or the way newton wrote
his laws that there was some you know
like they exist outside the universe
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 if you merged your two
views then it gets back to the god is
the universe and then i think the 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 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 emergent property of
our minds but i would just say
you know the way the universe creates
meaning and purpose there is really a
physics there it's not like a illusory
thing and that is just what what the
physics of life is
um is it 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 well
but the universe is constantly
generating itself so if god is that
mechanism it would be that that would
still be active today i don't belie 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
you know like in the like universe now
it's not an absent thing
are you
i'm so i think there's a mislabeling
here because you're
i mean from
i mean i'm
a professional idiot um actually but but
you should put that on your cv yeah
yeah professionally but not
recreationally or amateur but
professionally but i think for it
i would say if you were talking about
god i mean again i'm way out way out of
my death and i almost feel uncomfortable
yeah but i feel quite uncomfortable
articulating but i'll try
for me a lot of people that think of god
as a consciousness a reasoning entity
that actually has causal power
and you're just human like intelligence
and you're and so you're like then
you're saying 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
um
so i i think that
you're maybe talking about god in a very
mechanistic kind of unsophisticated
sense
whereas other people say that god is
more sophisticated and got all this you
know feelings and love and
you know
and this abstracting ability so
is that what or do you mean that do you
mean god as in this conscious entity
that decided to flick the universe into
existence
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 or windows xp or
windows 10 i don't know the full feature
set okay so you at 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
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
um
know how to act human-like
so so i don't i don't know
but it seems like
whatever mechanism created the universe
might want
to also generate
local pockets of mechanisms that can
interact with that
inject
god was lonely
yeah it was long i mean it could be just
a teenager and another
just playing a video yeah maybe well i
was gonna say i mean i i don't so this
is referring from our origin of life
engine it's like i i don't believe in
god but that doesn't mean i don't want
to be one
right
i want to make a universe and make a
life form but that maybe that may be
rude to people who have you know dear
religious beliefs what i mean by that is
isn't it 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 is you're kind of
mini gods i mean first of all
uh from a child's perspective parents
are gods for quite a while
and then you i mean they're they're in
the positive sense there's a magic to
that's why i love robotics is you
instill life into something and that
makes you
um feel god like in a sort of positive
way being a creator is a positive
creator yeah exactly and a small scale
and then god is would be a creator at
the largest possible scale i suppose
okay
you mentioned offline the assembledtron
assemblytron assemblytron yep uh what
what's an assemblytron these are the
there's an early idea of something
you're thinking about um so sarah's team
uh well i think sarah's team are
interested in um
under using ai to understand life my
team is and i'm and i'm think wondering
if we could apply the principles of
assembly theory that is
um the causal structure that you get
with assembly theory and hybridize it
and make a new type of
neuron if you like i mean there are
causal
neural networks out there but they are
they are not quite the architecture like
what i would like i would like to
associate
memory bits with um
basically i'd like to make a rather than
have an asic for neural networks i want
to make it asic for assembly networks
right and um so can you say that again
assembly networks uh
uh so what what is a
like a
a thing with an input and output and
it's like a neural network type of thing
what does it do exactly what's the input
what's the output so in in this case so
if you're talking about a general neural
network i mean in general neural network
you can train it on all sort any sort of
data right depending on
the the framework whether it's like um
text or
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 we're
going to classify a difference between
cat and good dog right classic cat and
dog neural network what about if the
system understood the assembly space it
created 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 an and
training going back a step and doing the
training going back a step back a step
back a step and and i wonder if that is
actually the origin of intelligence or
how we'll crack intelligence
because we need to because we'll we'll
create the entire graph of events
and
and be able to kind of look at calls and
effect across those graphs i'm
explaining it really badly but it's it's
a gene of an idea and i'm guessing very
smart very rich
um people in ai are already doing this
trying to not generate cats and dogs but
trying to generate
things of high assembly index yeah and i
think that i think and and also using
causal graphs in neural networks and
machine learning and deep learning maybe
building a new architecture i'm just
wondering is there something we can get
out assembly theory allows us to rebuild
current machine learning architectures
to give more give causation more cheaply
i mean i don't know if that's what you
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 um
say goal directed behavior in neural
networks then assembly theory is a good
framework for doing that danielle's been
thinking about that a lot yeah and i
think it's a really interesting idea
that you can map concepts from
how neural networks learn to thinking
about goal directed
behavior as a learning process that
you're learning a specific goal the
universe is learning a goal when it
generates a particular structure and
that you can map that physical structure
into a neural network how
what's the goal
uh
well in a neural network you're
designing the goal and um
in
biology i mean you know people are not
supposed to use teleological language in
biology which is ridiculous but um
uh because goals are real things they're
just
post-selected so you can talk about
goals after the fact
um
you know once a goal emerges in the
universe that physical entity has a goal
but but lee and i came up with a test
for um like a turing test for goal
directed behavior uh based on the idea
of assembly when like we have to
formalize it still but i i would like to
write a paper on it but like the basic
idea is like if you
like if you had two systems that were
completely equivalent
um
you know like in the instantaneous like
physical experimental setup so lee has
to figure out how to do this
but there was something that would be
different in their future
um and there was a symmetry breaking you
observe in the present based on that
possibility that future outcome then you
could say that that system had some
representation of of some kind of goal
in mind about what it wanted to do in
the future
um and i so so goals are interesting
because
they don't exist as instantaneous things
they exist across time which is one one
of the reasons that assembly theories
may be more naturally
uh able to account for the existence of
goals
um so goals are they they only exist in
time
or they manifest themselves in time
through
um you said symmetry breaking so it's
it's almost like
imagine like if representations in your
mind are real right
um and you you can imagine future
possibilities but imagine everything
else is physically equivalent and the
only thing that you actually change your
decision based on is what you model as
being the future outcome
then somehow that representation in your
mind of the future outcome becomes
causal to what you're doing now so it's
kind of like retrocausal effect but it's
not actually retrocausal it's just that
your
your assembly space is actually
includes those possibilities as 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're realized so 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 and 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 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 right and
the possibilities are always infinite
uh well for that particular object
you know like you know 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 a
important and difficult to explain
concept right because what you want is a
way is like um
i think only conscious beings can have
conscious goals
everything else is doing selection
and but selection does invent goals and
in a way that um
the the way that biology reinterprets
the past in the present
is kind of how allows 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 um
only conscious beings can have
conscious goals i'm not even going to
touch that one
why
well
go for it come on what what the line
between conscious goals and uh
non-conscious goals exactly right and
also maybe just on top of that you said
a touring test for gold directed
behavior what's what's what's it what's
the turn what is the touring test
potentially look like so if you've got
two objects we were thinking about this
so we we actually got some funding to
work together two teams so
i'm trying to do in part of this is i'm
trying to do a bit theory and sarah is
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
just say
um when would a
so that's good i like this this i'm sure
we use the dandenon essay right on
google yeah and i can explain why we
wouldn't want to call it a turing test
after but yeah yeah so dan dalett wrote
this really nice essay about um
uh herding cats and free will inflation
the title is so pretty it's the actual
title i think so hurting 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've got two objects on
a hillside
okay and this happens to be a snowy hill
and let's just say you see an object go
rolling down the hill
or you you you and the rocker rolls
downhill but the start goes to the end
how do 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 to the bottom how can
you tell the difference between the two
so and what dan says is like well this
is clear the skier's in control
and the um because they're they're
adjusting 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 would tend to start roughly in the
same space and probably go
take all that that complex set of
trajectories and end up pretty much at
the same finish point right with plus or
minus view mirrors whereas if it's just
a random rock going down random
trajectory that wouldn't happen and so
what sarah and i were kind of doing when
we were writing this grant we're like we
need to somehow
instantiate the skier and the rock in an
experiment and then say okay when does
the object
when it 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
and then we just have to iterate on that
and maybe sarah you can then fill in the
turing test part well yeah i guess the
motivation for me was slightly different
so i i get really frustrated about
conversations about consciousness as
most people do um you know a lot of
people are
which is not necessarily related to 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 i was you know
everybody's always interested in
explaining intrinsic experience and
quantifying intrinsic experience 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 um 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
they're it must
have causal consequences
so the way i would ask the question of
consciousness is not you know what it is
like intrinsically but if if things have
intrinsic experience
is there any observable difference from
the outside about the the kind of
causation that that physical system
would enact in and for me the most
interesting thing that humans do is have
imagination so like we can imagine
rockets centuries before we build them
they become real physical things because
we imagine them 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 and i set
them up in a physically equivalent
situation
um would it be the case that
there would be
experimental observables associated with
it and that that became the idea of
trying to actually
measure for internal representation or
conscious so turing 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 where you could
actually test for that
for imagination the blood
to the that there was something internal
going on some kind of
inner world as people say but i i or you
could say
you know like it actually is an agent
it's making decisions it has an internal
representation and whether you say
that's experience or not is a different
thing but at least the 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 to do that kind of thing one of
the compelling things about the turing
test
is that
you know defining intelligent defining
any complicated concept
as
um as a thing like observing it from the
surface and not caring about what's
going on deep inside because how do you
know
that's the point so the idea is exactly
that so
what we're trying to do the turing test
for goal directedness is literally
um take some objects that clearly don't
have any internal representation grains
of sand blowing on the beach or
something right
and i know a crab wandering around on
the beach
and then generating an experiment where
we literally the experiment generates an
entity that literally has no internal
representation to sand be like a drop
these are oil droplets actually we've
got in mind a robot that makes all
droplets but then what we want to try
and do is train the oil droplets to be
like crabs
give them an internal representation
give them the ability to
integrate information from the
environment so they unders they remember
the past
are in the present
and can imagine a future
and a very limited way their kind of
game engine their limited simulation of
the world
allows them to then make a decision your
objects across time
so then you would run a bunch of crabs
like over and over and over and over how
many crabs lee how many is that what
what's because you have to have a large
number of crabs what is
what does your theory say is there a
mathematical we're working on it i mean
this is limit crab limit there's
literally a excellent there's lit
literally what's the herding cats have
to do oh that's random wait what's cats
in the title by uh daniel dennett
hurting cats and the free will inflation
so um what does herding cats mean what
does free will inflation mean so this i
love this essay um because it explained
to me how i could live in a
deterministic universe
um but
have
not free will but have freedom you know
um and beca and also it helped me
explain that
that time needed to be a real thing in
this universe so what basically dan was
saying here is like um how do you how do
these cats appear to just do what they
want
right and how if you live in a
deterministic universe why do the cats
do these things you know aren't they
just isn't it all obvious
um and how does free will inflate the
universe and for me
i mean probably i love the essay because
my interpretation of the essay in
assembly theory makes complete sense
um
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 what does in assembly theory the
expansion of the universe
look like
what are we what are we talking about
why is why
why does the expansion 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 in space i
think about in terms of the big the big
memory expansion that you have one you
only have the ability to store one bit
of information so then you can't do very
much so what the 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
megabytes three megabytes four megabytes
all the way up and so
the more ram you have
the more you can remember about the past
then which allows you to do cooler
things in the future so if you can
remember how to launch a rocket then you
might be able to imagine how to land a
rocket
and then re-launch re-land and carry on
because and so the the
you able 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 it's a it's an
interesting question whether there's
some forgetting that happens it might
increase
is the expansion of the
forgetting at some point accelerate
faster than
the remembering i think that that's a
very important thing that probably
intelligence does and we're going to
learn in machine learning about because
you want 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
yeah you like it that's it for that yeah
sorry you were confronted no no that's
all right no i just wanted it i i think
that um
there is a
a great deal to be gained from having
the ability to remember things but then
when you forget them you can then have a
you can basically do the simulation
again and work out if you get to that
compressed representation
so that it's in cycles so cycles of
memory remembering and and forgetting
are probably important but there
shouldn't be excuse to
have a universe with no memory in it the
universe is going to remember that it
forgot but just not tell you
i'm i'm looking at the this paper and
it's talking about a puppet controlling
a puppet controlling a puppet
controlling a puppet controlling a
puppet controlling a puppet conception
easy to understand but physically
impossible as physically impossible as
predicting a fair coin toss i don't know
what he's talking about but there's
pictures of puppets controlling puppets
um let me ask you there's a there's a
few things i want to ask but we brought
up time quite a bit
you guys tweet about time quite a bit
uh what is time in all this we kind of
mentioned it a bunch
um is it not important at all in terms
of uh is it just a word should we be
talking about causality mostly like sir
what do you think
is uh we've talked about like memories
is that the fundamental thing that we
should be thinking about and and time is
just a useful 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 till
other things happen but usually when we
colloquially attack colloquially talk
about time we're talking about the flow
of time um
and i guess lee and i were actually
debating about this this morning so and
talking on it walking on the river here
which is a very lovely spot for talking
about time um 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 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 which is that time doesn't
appear to have a directionality in
fundamental physics but it does um 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 um well
there's a cosmological arrow of time but
there's also the thermodynamic arrow of
time of increasing entropy
um but what we would say in assembly
theory is that there is a clear
directionality the universe only runs in
one direction which is why some things
it's easy to make if the universe ones
and 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 it
becomes very clear that the universe has
a directionality associated to it so
it's not reversible at all it's the um
no man ever steps in the same river i
just have to bring that out because yeah
on the river no man ever steps in the
same river twice for it's not the same
river and he's not the same man uh so
that it's not reversible any of this 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
sees the case for our perception of time
but also you know what's happening in
biological evolution
you can make things reversible but it
requires work to do it and it requires
certain machines to run it forward and
backward and akira marletto is working
some interesting ideas on constructor
theory related to that which is totally
different set of ideas so you can travel
back in time
sometimes yes
you can not you can't travel actually
back in time but you could reconstruct
yeah you tried things that have existed
in the past you're always moving forward
in time but you can cycle through like i
i mean i might clarify yeah yeah go for
it quickly you travel forward in time to
travel back yes that thank you that
really clearly
what what's sarah 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
it's as if you travel back in time so i
i don't
how's that not traveling back in time
because you're not going back to your
same self back in time you are you're
creating that in the future what else is
the same as it was in the past
no
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 we first had this discussion and i
was talking to sarah on skype and i said
by the way
time because time is the fundamental
thing in the universe she's almost hung
up on me right but but you can even i
mean if you want to make an analogy to
computation and i think charles bennett
actually has a paper on this like about
reversible computation and reversible
turing machines 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
erase the memory you can erase the
memory but the point
when you go back to zero right 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
you can't have it exactly how it was in
the past yeah you exactly so you either
have extra stuff extra baggage always
okay a really important thing i want to
say on this i think if i try and get it
right to 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
um and this is where the directionality
of 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 the in this
present there's more of those boxes than
there were in the past see but the boxes
aren't physical boxes
they
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
um irrespective of whether you measure
anything
there is a universal let's call it a
clock or a state creator
maybe we can call it this way maybe you
can call it god but let's call it a
state creator where the universe is
expanding in the number of states it has
why are you saying it's expanding though
is that obvious that it's expanding it's
obvious because that's where the because
um we
we
that's a source of novelty it's a source
of novelty and it also explains why the
universe is not predictable
um and you know it's not predictable
well
i just like interrupting you i'm sorry
it's fun as you're struggling i'm
struggling because it's but i'm trying
to be as concrete as possible and not
sound like i'm insane yeah um and i'm
not insane it's it's obvious because you
did um
i'm a chemist so as a chemist i grew
into the world understanding
irreversibility all 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 the
the second law
is um
really the
magical
but why does it need to be magical the
universe is just asymmetric all i'm
saying is the universe is asymmetric in
the state production
and we can erase those states but we
just have more computational power 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
we can't live in a simulation the
irreversibility yeah yeah so basically
every time you try and simulate the
universe
in this you know live in a simulation
the universe has expanded in states 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 a 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 those are things that to
be
have to be proven that's what working
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 physicists would
live in it's a big lookup table of stuff
and everything exists
i want to prove
that that book is
that book doesn't exist it's
continuously being added pages on so
what i'm saying if the universe is a
book
we started the universe at the beginning
only had no pages and they have all had
one page another page another page
whereas a physicist will now say all the
pages exist and we could in principle
access them i'm saying that is
fundamentally incorrect do you know
what's written in this book the free
will question
um is there room for free will
in this
uh
in us in this view of the universe is
generating novelty and getting greater
and greater assembly
uh structures
built
sarah
yes
okay
done
next question
why what's the source of free will in
this well so i i think it depends on
what you mean by free will um
but
yeah well please
i think i think what i'm interested in
as far as the
phenomena of free will is
uh do we have
individual autonomy and agency
and you know when i do things is it
really me or is it my atoms that did it
um and
that's the part that's interesting to me
i guess there's also the determinism
versus randomness part
um but the way i think about it is like
each of us are
like a thread or like an a you know
assembly space through
you know this this giant possibility
space and it's like we're moving
on our own trajectory 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 and i think it's
actually
necessary that something like free will
exists 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 um but
generating yes i know generating um you
know maximal possibilities then i would
want the agents to have free will
because it means that they're
more individual like they are 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
like are you always creating more and
more individuality
kind of
i i would say you're creating more
causal power but so cause of power
the word consciousness is is the cause
of power somehow correlated with
consciousness i mean that 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 counter-factual possibilities
you have in mind the more you can
actually implement and somehow free will
is also at the intersection of the
counter factual becoming the actual
um so can you elaborate on that a little
bit that consciousness in his
imagination i don't know exactly how to
articulate it and i'm sure people take
you know aim at certain things i'm
saying but i think the language is
really imprecise so i'm not the best way
to really it's really interesting like
what is imagination and what is it uh
what role does it play
in the human experience in experience of
any yeah
i love imagination i think it's like the
most amazing uh 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
just think about biology generally it
remembers states of the past to adapt to
things that happen in the future so 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 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
phenomena we call consciousness yeah i
was gonna i mean just agree with that i
think that consciousness is the ability
to generate those counter factuals now
whether you can say you know are there
degrees of consciousness i mean and i
mean
i mean i'm i'm sorry
pan psychists but electrons don't have
counterfactuals although they do have
some kind of they are able to search the
space and pathways but but i think that
there is a very
concrete or
concrete there's a very specific
property that humans have and i'm and i
don't know if it's unique to humans i
mean maybe dogs can do it and 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
um 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 skype chat ever no no no no
no i no it goes back to the free will
thing so i 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 in in newtonian space but i want to
go there just now because i think i'll
mess it up but
briefly
um
i could not see how the universe how we
can have free will and i mean this is
really boring because like this is like
this is a well trodden path but
but it's not so boring i suppose it's
kind of we just want to be precise
if the universe is deterministic how can
we have free will
right so
uh sarah is a physicist
i think she believes but not believe can
show that the most of the laws we have
are deterministic to some degree quantum
mechanics onto newtonian stuff and yet
there's serotonin i mean she believes in
free will and i'm like
you but your belief system is broken
here right because you you're demanding
free will
in a deterministic universe
and and then i've
realized that i 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
was expanding in terms of novelty and it
goes back to that dan dennett essay they
were talking about the free will
inflation
free will so you are you have 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
that means you are the sum total
although everything that occurs in the
past is it is manifestly here in the
present
and then
you have this little echo state in your
consciousness because you're able to
you're able to imagine something without
actualization but the fact you imagine
it that occurs in electrons and
potassium iron flows in your neural
network in your brain maybe
consciousness is just the present
so so somehow you imagine that
and then by imagining oh that's good
yeah um i'm gonna make a robot then do
this thing
and program it and then you physically
then go and do it
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
yeah probably it's an instantaneous
readout of what's going on you can maybe
your your subconscious brain has been
generating all the all the bits for it
but no imagination occurs
when you
in your game engine you you remember the
past and you integrate sensory the
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 is like imagine
asking what imagination is about asking
what surfing is
you can see you can surfboard surfer
wave coming in when you're on that wave
and you're surfing
that's where the imagination is i think
i think imagination is just accessing
things that aren't the present moment in
the present moment so like i can i'm
sitting here and i'm looking at the
table and i can imagine
the river in 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 so
conjure up worlds some of them might be
akin to
something that happened to you recently
right but they don't have 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
theoretic 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 as complex as
us having as large assembly space as us
there's ways of
like there's a lot of things in that
causal graph that have ever actually
never existed in the past history of the
universe 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 why
things
actually even look like objects and
aren't just a smear of
mass
um
and just on the the free will and
physics thing
when you were talking i was i just want
to bring this up because i think it's a
really interesting viewpoint that
nicholas jizzin has that um you know
like we want to 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 to test the laws of
physics so in some sense free will
should be more fundamental than physics
is to because to even do science there's
some assumption
that
the agents have free will and i always
thought it was really perplexing that
um
you know physics wants to remove agency
because the idea that i could do an
experiment here on this part of earth
and then i can move somewhere else and
prepare an identically you know
identically prepared experiment run an
experiment again
seems to imply something about the
structure of our universe that is not
encoded in the laws that we're testing
in those experiments
so this kind of dream of physics that
you can do multiple experiments
different locations and then validate
each other
um you're saying that's uh that's an
illusion no i'm saying that requires
decision making and free will to be a
real thing i think
like i think that i think the fact that
we can do science is not arbitrary and i
think people you know the standard canon
in physics would be well you could trace
all of that back to the initial
condition the universe but the whole
point of science is i can imagine doing
the experiment and i can do it and then
i can do it again and again and again
all over the place to you imagination
somehow fundamentally
generative of novelty yes so it's not
like the universe could have predicted
the things you imagined imagination
super so coming back to novelty i think
novelty can exist outside of imagination
but it supercharges 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 they're sorry i'm
not sure it's a heart these are hard
questions yeah i mean i think the fact
that objects exist is yet another proof
that
that time is fundamental and novelty
exists right
because i think again
if you ask a physicist to write down in
their infinite bible of the universe
let's call it the bible the the you know
matebook
the mathematical universe whether you're
max tag mark or sean carroll or frank
wilcheck
[Laughter]
or or stephen wolfram okay yeah
i like that book yeah i love it too lots
of pretty pictures
it's really interesting that they they
cope with the enormity of the universe
by saying well it's all their
mathematics it all exists right and and
i would say that
that's why i'm excited about the future
of the universe because it
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 will is it's not
constrained by the past it's dependent
on the past
this moment it's not just dependent 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 causal control in
the future
i realized this the other week
yeah yeah so what happened so this is
what i think it is the way
by reinterpreting your past i mean talk
about from a kind of cognitive
psychological cognitive point of view by
reinterpreting your past
in your current mind
you can actually helps you shape your
future again
so you but you 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 it may
sound weird so i'm saying everybody
imagine your past think about your past
reinterpret your past in the nicest way
you can
then imagine what you can do next or
imagine your past in a more negative way
and what you do next and look at those
two counterfactuals they're different
yeah it's fascinating i mean daniel
o'connor talks about this that most of
our life is lived in our memories 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 results in you basically able
to control how the future unrolls
because you're like
imagining
like reinterpreting constantly the
things that happen to you exactly so
you're the 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 uh because of our sad
sad constraints whether whether you know
happenstance with health
economic
born born in a certain place right
but
you're those of us that have the ability
to go back and reinterpret our past
and and and use that to change the
future
are the ones that exert most agency in
the present
and i i want to 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 pop but i think
it's the wonderful thing about the
future is always always gonna be more
fun yeah you i think again going back to
um
to twitter i think you lee tweeted
something about being a life maximalist
that you want to maximize the number of
life
the the amount of life in the universe
so and you know 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 been quite a bit of ufo
sightings and all that kind of stuff
what do you think
would be the first time
when humans cite aliens see aliens in a
sort of
unquestionable way
this
extremely strong and arguable way
we've made contact with aliens
sarah what would it look like obviously
the the the space of possibilities is 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 or would it be like an obvious
overwhelming signal
so i think we have an obsession with
making contact with events
so uh
what i mean by that is
you know like people have a ufo sighting
they make contact
um and i always think
you know
what's interesting to me about
the ufo narratives right now is not that
i have a disbelief about
what people are experiencing or feeling
but like the discussion right now is
sort of
at the level of modern mythology aliens
are our mythos
in modern culture and and when you treat
it like that then 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 our technology picks up an
anomaly or someone sees something we say
it's 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 phenomena 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 would you make the myth would
you give credit to the myth the
mythology as first contact
because 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 right to
understand that there is weather yes you
have to construct the pathology around
that yes
it's something that's controllable
right yeah like this is i see mythology
basically as like baby knowledge
right
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 are a number of things you can
do you could just dismiss them and say
that's not true they're kind of made up
or you say well there's some there's
something interesting here right we keep
seeing the commonality right we see the
same phenomenon again and again and
again
also this is interesting about human
imagination
even if they are
let's not say made up but mis
misappropriated kind of other inputs
the fact that human consciousness is
capable of imagining contact with aliens
does that not tell us about something
about where we are in our position in
our culture and our technology it tells
us 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 the only life in the universe
right the other one is the other most
extreme is that aliens are visiting all
the time and we just you know we're just
not able to capture them coherently or
there's a big conspiracy and you know
there's an area 51 and there are lizards
everywhere and
there's that
um or i i'm i kind of in favor of the
idea that maybe humanity is waking up to
the idea that we aren't alone in the
universe and we're just running the
simulation
and we're seeing some evidence you know
we don't we don't know what life is yet
we are we do have some anomalies out
there
we can't explain everything
um
and over time
um you know we will start to unpack that
one very plausible thing we might do
which might be boring for the average
alien
um
observer or 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 could say
in my hand on earth here's rna dna and
proteins and look cells self-replicate
from titan we've 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 the most that would be
my ufo sighting 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
[Music]
it grows somehow we can make a comic
book you know the tiger that came for
tea the alien that came for tea
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 a
ufo sightings
what would you think
so i would say the biggest one is that
um the emergence of life does not have
to be
um
that can it can't just happen once on
the planet that it could be two or more
life forms present on the planet at once
and i think sarah doesn't agree with
that
i think that's like
logically inconsistent
that's really polite you're saying it's
nonsense but because you think that yeah
how likely is that so the idea that what
is what does it look like let's imagine
uh two alien civilizations coexisting on
a planet what's that look like exactly
so i would say um
i think i've got to get around your
argument okay yeah let's say that say
that on this planet there's just like
there's lots of available chemistry
and one life form gets some
emerges based on carbon and interacts
and there's a there's an ecosystem based
on carbon and there's an orthogonal
um
and so it's planetary phenomena which is
what you i think right
but there's also one that goes on
silicon
and and because there's enough energy
and there's enough
stuff
that these light forms might not
actually necessarily compete um
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 where you
just got me yeah so there's no
so there's no overlap
in terms of their causal change they're
very limited 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 uh okay lizard people under the
quest of the year i think i think i
think let's go d i i i think
that but look as you can see we disagree
so and i think sarah actually has
convinced me because of that that life
is a planetary for not the emotional
slice of planetary phenomena and and
actually um 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 onto the can't you just
uh 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 when you look at the
interaction of that structure it's it
it's like the same idea as like an
experiment being an example of life
right that's a really abstract and
subtle 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 commingle and they
become part of the same
chain
so
the commingling starts quickly yeah
proceeds we proceed to co-mingle quickly
right 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 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
phenomena it happens at the level of
individual molecules interacting
collections of molecules interacting and
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 our
planetary scale and the smallest scale
that life mediates but it still might be
difficult within something you would
call as a single civil alien
civilization you know different their
species and stuff but i think what yeah
they might not be able to communicate
but you're asking about life not species
right so what's the difference between
one
living civilization this this is almost
like a category question yeah
versus species because it can be very
different like evolution because there's
like island like literally islands that
you can involve different kinds of
turtles and stuff and they can
so i guess what i'm saying is weird 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 then 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 they
they are not independent
um 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 life is the
entire structure across time right but
there could be a lot of variation with
this 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
is the idea of origin
is easy for you to define
because like um well
when the two when the species split in
the evolutionary process
and you get like um
a dolphin versus a human or neanderthal
versus homo sapien that
isn't there let me make a distinction
here um quickly so i think um sorry to
interrupt um
what we're saying i mean i mean i mean
i mean sarah what we won that argument
because she i think she's right that um
once the calls will change interact and
going forward so we're talking about a
number of things let's go all the way
back before origin of life origin life
on earth on earth
chemistry emerges there's so there's all
these i would say there's probably
mechanistically
the chemistry is desperately trying to
find anyway get replicators the ribosome
kind of was really rubbish at the
beginning and they just competed
competed competing and got better and
better ribosomes and suddenly that was a
technology the ribosome is the
technology that boom allowed evolution
to start
so what i was trying to why i
interrupted you is say that once
evolutionist 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 exactly what it's like dolphins
humans
everything on earth
but when you're looking at aliens or
alien life
um there's not gonna 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
re-speciation it might be have two types
of emerging chemistry it almost looks
like the origin of life on earth
required two 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 competent entity for
evolution and
would all alien civilizations
have an evolutionary process
on a planet
so like that's one of the almost it's
almost the definition of life to create
all those memories you have to
have something like change in time yeah
and then but there has to be selection
um that's like an official there's no
other way to do it no i don't well never
say never because students say that's
what 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 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 ah yeah so
yes sorry so we were talking we're
talking about life yeah and uh
i guess a lot of murder had to occur
right so selection means things had to
be weeded out right so well we can
celebrate that death makes way for too
long yeah i mean it and also you know
one of the most interesting features of
major extinction events in the history
of our planet 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 if the dinosaurs didn't go extinct
so
um
in some ways we can attribute our
existence to all of that but i guess i
was just wondering and 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 yeah you have to i mean i think
we're i think we're probably being over
um anthropomorphizing i remember
watching uh the blue i think it was the
blue planet david attenborough was
showing these seals and because of
climate change some seals were falling
off a cliff and how tragic it was i was
like
i'm saying my son that's pretty cool
look at look at those ones down there
they've obviously got some kind of
mutations some and they're not doing
that daft thing and so that that that
poor gene will be weeded out of course
at the individual level it looks tragic
and of course as human beings have 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 with this how many
if you think about the caterpillar
become the chrysalis and then the
butterfly getting out
how many if that suffering we call it
suffering if that process of pruning had
not occurred we have no butterflies so
none of the butterfly beauty in the
world without all that pruning so
pruning is required but we shouldn't
amphimorphize and feel sorry for the
biological entities
but because that's that seems to be a
backwards way of looking at it what we
should do is project forward and maybe
think about what values we have across
our species 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 until that point we
won't do it right
i like this
famous chemist endorses the majestic
nature of murder that's actually
that's the title
um i didn't say that but it came well i
just it's inserted i have a hard time
with it though i think the way you put
it it's kind of
but it it's the reality of it's the
reality of it is beautiful
um you know there's an instagram account
called nature's metal
and i i keep following and unfollowing
it because i can't handle it for
prolonged periods of time we evolve
together you die alone
yeah we evolved together well you die
alone so i you live alone too it's a
gatsby thing i don't know we evolved
together we're still together the
together is the murder the population
and the sex i just
my romantic vision of it to try to make
me happy sarah instead of sad sarah um i
talk in third person when i think very
abstractly sorry um
is um
you know like like this whole like you
know the like certain things can
co-exist so the universe is trying to
maximize existence but there's some
things that just
aren't
the most projective productive
trajectory together but it doesn't mean
that they don't exist on another
timeline or another chain somewhere else
like i like and 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 just making stuff up no you're not
no matter
i don't underst it is illogical and we
need we know i know if you look at
bacteria if you look at virus i mean
just just the number of organisms that
are constantly like looking at bacteria
they're just dying non-stop right
slaughter right so well and this goes
back to the conversation about god i
mean like there's the whole thing about
like why does the universe enable
suffering individuals don't exist right
in individual so for this i think if you
think about life as an entity on earth
right
let's just let's just go back a second i
mean i like to i'll be ludicrous for a
second i don't exist you don't exist
right um but you 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 there's
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 able to walk around
right so you know you do
yeah yeah
yeah so yeah so i think
the patterns that persist not the
physical things and of course we you
know we have we have we place and
mention values on fellow human beings
and i'm
my majestic professor does like other
individual human beings or now you're
talking in third person too i know it
happens right so death would you say i
mean because you said evolution is a
fundamental part of um
life so death is a fundamental part of
life yeah
it might right now it might not be in
the future we might hack some aspects of
death
we could and will evolve in different
ways but isn't there i think sarah
mentioned like this life density
um is it can't that become a problem
like too much
to too much uh bureaucracy too much of
baggage uh builds up like you need to
keep
erasing okay that we dissipate like i
don't think of like like i'm
disappearing 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 actually
over dinner but like
um you know an individual persists for a
certain amount of time but what you want
to do like if you're really concerned
with immortality is not to live
indefinitely as an individual but
maximize your causal impact so like what
are the traces of you that are left
i and and you're still a real i always
think of einstein like for a period of
time he was a real physical thing we
would identify as a human and now we
just see echoes of that human in all of
the ways that we talk about his you know
causal impact or frankly right is
another great example because how many
easter eggs can you leave in the future
say hello
so i guess the the question is how much
do you want to control the localization
of
certain features
of say a prop a packet of propagating
information we might call a person and
keep them localized to one individual
physical structure do you wanna 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
let me take you to computer science
world
what about robots
so
is it possible to engineer see because
you're really talking about
like engineering life at the chemistry
level
but do you think it's possible to
engineer
life
at the like humanoid level at the at the
dog level
like or is that like at which level can
we instill the magic of life into
uh 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 life transition
that presumably or at least is how i
feel about it it's going to give you the
most
and 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
uh i saw that there was this
tweet again uh i think you're at the
mars conference and you were hanging out
with a humanoid robot yes
making lots of new friends at mars 2022
did you guys color match ahead of time
with the robot or
did that accidentally happen
accidentally i went up and i wanted to
say hi to the boys would that be the
correct name for the color i think so we
didn't color coordinate our outfits uh
well you didn't maybe through what did
the robot probably did much more stylish
so for people who are just listening
there's there's a picture of sarah
standing next to a humanoid robot i
guess you like them with a small head
and perfect vision actually no i just um
i did the perfect there's a lighter
no i mean i think i was just deeply
interested because um what was sorry to
interrupt was it manually controlled was
it actually uh stabilizing itself oh no
it was walking around oh nice yeah nice
it was pretty impressive i mean actually
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
[Laughter]
um
yeah but um
there you go
see that's incredible wasn'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 and engineer so
the calls will change so that robot is
evidence of life
and so i think what's going to happen is
there's
the um
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 i think
you know there are a number of problems
we want to do make life in lab
great then when i make life in lab we
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 that order you know this getting
towards this artificial general
intelligence i think that artificial
general intelligence
can't exist in a vacuum it has to have a
causal change all the way back to luca
right yeah and so the question i think i
really like the question is to say
what are we how is
how
is our pursuit of more and more life
like i know you want to you like your
robots you want to project into them you
want to interact with them you you i
think you would want if you have a robot
dog and a robot dog does everything
expect of 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 you know teleport the
personality from one object to the other
and say right does 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 so
to link on it
i would i would call that a living
conscious thing potentially eyes as a
human allegedly but your would you
as a person trying to define life
if you passed the turing test are you a
life form
one of the reasons i walked up to the
robot was um
because i wanted to meet the robot right
right so
i
it felt like i was
and 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 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 in
particular robots we build is really
interesting because
um basically
they exist as objects in our future in
some sense like we're a much older
evolutionary lineage
than robots are but we're all part of
the same causal chain
and presumably
you know they're
kind of in 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
in a full manifestation of whatever it
is that they're gonna become
um
and you know the the more uh the example
the walking robot was super interesting
but they also had a dolphin that they
put in the pool at the cocktail party at
mars and it looked just like a real
dolphin swimming in the pool
and um
and you know it's in this kind of
uncanny valley because and i was having
this conversation um
with a gentleman mutu who was super
perceptive but he was basically saying
like it made him feel really
uncomfortable
um
and i think often
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 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
the way that a biologically evolved
thing would you're basically making the
philosophical zombie argument become
real
yeah and and basically building reality
into a simulation because you've made
everything
quote unquote fake in some sense you've
replaced everything with an emu a
physical simulation of it so as opposed
to being excited by the
possibility of creating
something new you're
um terrified of being humans being
replaced i was just trying to run like
what would be the absolute
you know thought experiment but i don't
i don't think that scenario would
actually play out i guess what i i think
is weird for why we feel this kind of
uncanny valley interacting with
something like the robot dolphin is
we're looking at an object we know is
kind of in the future in the sense of
like if everything's ordered in time but
it's borrowing from a structure that we
have common history with and it's
basically copying
in a kind of superficial way things from
one
part of the causal chain to another
yeah
well that's that's the video
every believed it was real
they look so real
um
and obviously the technology was was
developed for movies so
well i think we're confusing our
emotional response and understanding the
causal chain of how we got there right
because a philosophical zombie argument
thinks about um
objects just appearing right that you're
facsimiled in some way whereas there is
that cause what the chain of events that
caused the uh dolphin to be built went
for a human being yeah would uh
philosophical zombies still have a high
assembly index yeah
because it came it can't be
philosophical zombies can't like like
boltzmann brains just can't appear out
of nowhere well i guess my question
would be in that that scenario where you
build all the robots and replace
everything on earth with robots would
the with the biosphere be as creative
under that scenario or not yeah 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 the there are one of the
big missing things that i think that
we're both looking for right it's a cute
robot but but the points there is that
um the biosphere won't be as creative if
you did it right now no of course i
think that's why but
but in the future
it 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 forward a lot and
so gpt3 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 really though
because
isn't that what love is being fooled
like what why why are you not giving
much value to the emotional connection
with objects with with robots with
humans emotion is that thing which
happens when you're when you're
the uh
the fun your expectation function is 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
look i'm i'm sorry emotion is that but
but i think love is just fulfilling your
purpose
no but okay i mean look like look like
whatever that means that's not i mean
so yeah okay so when are you happiest
it's like when you're all right all
right let me go back if you want to if
you want me to follow your bliss let me
define love quickly okay go for it in
terms of assembly space right okay
excellent i didn't think i'd be doing
this today okay wait until assembly
theory 101 is taught and the second
lecture is assembly theory of love
but actually but look but
it's being surprised the expectation is
being broken i'm just i'm not no go for
it i don't know 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 but love is more complex is love
is a very complex set of emotions
together and logical stuff but if you've
got this
thing this person that's on this causal
chain that has this empathy for this
other thing
love is being able to project ahead in
your assembly space
and work out what you're 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
that's what that 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
it's an expression of love though that's
not what it's like to feel love like
feeling love is like
i like i think it's like when you're
aligned with things that you feel like
are your purpose or your reason for
existing
so if you have those feelings
uh towards the robot
why is that rope i mean
because you said like the aj will build
an agi but it won't there'll be a
fundamental difference between aging
right we'll build it it's going to
emerge from our technology so i think
you guys all are doing the same thing i
just said that gpt that we do not
correctly capture the causal chain that
we have within gpg
yeah
don't you think it captures because gpt3
is fundamentally trained
on a
corpus of knowledge
you know like the internet don't you
think it it gets better and better
better capturing the memory of all them
it will be better at fooling you and at
some point you won't care
but when it comes i my guess this is as
quick as i was getting to right before
we got i got in the love trap
i love trap yeah it was like
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 gpthree 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 or if you take um gpt3 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 agi yeah but i don't know if you
need
um
i don't know if there's any limitations
gpt gpt
and
not being able to be cross domain the
number one problem is um it's
instantiated in a resource limited
substrate um that we don't in silicon um
it is tr is tr the 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
why um why do you use language exactly i
might disagree with that quite
fundamentally actually um but i don't i
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 it's a bit like saying could
i facsimile you or sarah into a new
human being right and and let's just say
i could copy all your atoms in the
positions of all your atoms the
electrons
into
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 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 another copy sarah
another 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 but it
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 either 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 that's so cool it looks the
same interact then there'll be this
battle of like right we're going to tell
the difference we're going to we're
going to basically keep nudging lex and
artificial lex until we get
in novelty from one and we'll kill the
other one
and i think thank you we're not novelty
is a fuzzy concept that's the whole
problem of novelty so i will define
novelty it's not fuzzy novelty is the
ability
um for you to create
um architectures
that are
um or create an architecture so let's
say you've got corpus of architectures
known you can write down you've got some
distance measure and then i create a new
one and the distance measures so far
away from what you'd expected
there's no linear algebra we're going to
get this 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 a
macro level thing over the scale of
trajectories or longer term decisions 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 nobody would notice
the difference
they might not
and the universe the earth won't notice
the difference the universe won't notice
the universe would notice the difference
no the universe doesn't know about his
novelty that's being generated that's
the whole point of well no but this is
what selection is right it's like taking
nearly equivalent ones and then deciding
like the universe selects right so what
whatever selection is select some things
to persist in time yeah i'm going to
select the artificial one someone still
likes that one better well you're mixing
up two arguments here so look let's go
back a second what are you basing this
argument on like i'm just saying that i
kind of
don't think cause at least said that
it's not possible
like if you uh
the the if you copy every single
molecule in a person's body that's not
going to be the same person
that that they won't have the same
assembly index they won't have it 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
let me restate it it is not possible to
copy somebody
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 a different position in space
you're distinguishable yeah the other
thing always how unique are you just
about the position in space really sure
but then how much does that light
translation of lex well that's
i see but
but no wait wait a minute
is part of the definition of something
being interesting is how much it affects
the future
yes yes
but let me come back don't you agree but
let me up you disagree one point quickly
that you were making sure i think i
probably agree yeah if there's two
lectures 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 lex but another one no
let's get that but let's get there's a
point a very important point here
because he's he's ducking and diving
between this i so so if i faximilied you
into a robot then it would you your
robot might be
would be a representation of you now but
fundamentally be boring because you'll
go and have other ideas if however you
built an architecture that itself was
capable of generating novelty you would
diverge in your causal chain and you
both be equally interesting to interact
with yeah 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 do you think
there's something no no there is no
ghost in the machine
and i want there to be one
i want the same thing you want sorry i
know you want that as a human because
everything you just said makes you feel
more special i want to be certain no no
no screw my specialness i just want to
be surprised
if i negoroba can surprise you if i if
you can produce an algorithm
instantiated in a row what surprised me
i will
i will i will i will
i will have one of those robots it'll be
brilliant but they won't surprise me
but why why is it a problem to think
that humans are special
maybe it's not the special you're right
it's the better than yes
because then you start to not recognize
the magic in other life forms that you
either have created or you have observed
because i just think there's magic and
uh
legged robots moving about and they are
full of surprises yeah so this is
nationality
yeah so i'm a little
uh i know where you like cellular
automata right but the specialness in
your robot
comes from the roboticist that built it
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 co-exist 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
uh the way the neural network is
conceived right now is great and it's
lovely and it'll be brighter and we'll
argue forever but
you want to know wouldn't it be great if
i said look i know how to invent an
architecture and i can give it a soul
and what i mean by a soul
is some i know for
real that there is internal reference
as soon as like not fake internal
reference and if we could generate that
mechanism for internal reference that's
why our goal direction that's why you
have to we can do that
get that goal directing this 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
hell you'll be able to 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 with um with with fake
yep humans yeah it's it's nice to it's
nice to fall in love with something
that's full of novelty yes i
you know i can 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
because but i just don't think that um
novelty generation is such a special
okay there's like mathematical novelty
or something like that and then there's
just humans being surprised and i think
we're easily surprised that's fine but
that's that but you don't think that's a
good deal no that's good i'm happy to be
surprised
um
but not globally surprised because
someone else but i really want i was why
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 that's a way to
really know that i i you have to have a
really big look update
right yeah you're never gonna know for
sure right that's that's one of the hard
things 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 create a new um
mathematical structure that they can
then they you can you can write code to
work out whether there's whether that
structure exists before that 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 to not exit does not exist
anywhere else in the universe because so
contingent right but this gets into like
you are you said a few times but 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 built the experiment
you don't know what you put into it so
you don't know what
like if you 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 so is the novelty actually intrinsic
to that experiment or to that robot or
is it something you gave it but you
didn't realize it's gonna be it's gonna
asymptote towards that right you're
never gonna know for sure but you can
start to take out you know you can use
good bayesian approaches and just keep
updating and updating and updating until
you point to one sense of purposes found
on how much novelty generation could be
yeah got it
so the ability generate novelty is
correlated with high assembly index
with assembly index yeah and yeah
because the space possibilities is
bigger
so
um that's the key this could be a good
so a running joke of like why lex is
single this could be a good part for
uh so 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
boy is novelty a um
a fuzzy concept
is creativity better
yeah i mean that's all pretty fuzzy
it's kind of the same maybe that's why
aliens haven't come yet it's because
we're not creating enough novelty like
there's some kind of a hierarchy of
novelty in the universe well i think
novelties like things surprise you right
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 are
generating the creativity novelty seems
to be there's some spontaneous
production it has it's completely
decoupled from the things that exist no
i i understand i think there's this
really really creativity is the
mechanism and novelty is the observable
yeah
novelty could just be surprising your
model of the world was broken and and
not necessarily in a positive way that's
the prize so there's three things now
let's go back that's cool right let's go
you've got surprise which is basically
i'm i don't i mean i'm surprised all the
time because i don't read very much i'm
pretty dumb i was like oh wow
i often used to invent new scientific
you know ideas and i was really
surprised by that and then when looking
literature properly and it's there so
surprise that's to the extent that you
don't have full information
um creativity the act of pushing
on that um kind of on the causal
structure
and novelty which is measuring that
degree
right so i think that's pretty well
defined in that regard so you want your
robo you mean in the and in the end
that's why actually the way the internet
and the printing press share
some um i actually think creativity has
dropped a bit since it created since the
internet because everyone's just just
you know just regurgitating stuff but of
course now it's beginning to accelerate
again because everyone is using this
tool to be creative
and boom is exploding
so i think that's what happens when you
create these new technologies
that's really that's really helpful
there's a difference between novelty and
surprise okay i was 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 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 yeah surprise is exciting
yeah
even negative surprise like some people
love drama in relationships like
it's like why the hell
why'd you do this
that could be exciting i could imagine
companies selling updates to their their
companion robots that just basically
generate negative surprise just to just
spice things up a bit yeah it's the push
and pull that's 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 also tweeted i think this
was sarah no it might have been lee i
don't remember but it was a survey
published in nature showing that
scientists uh find yeah yeah um
anyway there's a 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 you showed the full plot
and there's simplicity elegance hidden
order
inner logic of systems symmetry
complexity harmony and so on um 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 calls on there yeah
yeah yeah yeah or shape or shapes
pleasing
and then physicists obviously love
simplicity
elegance
simplicity elegance yeah they love
symmetry and then biologists love
complexity
and uh well they just love a little bit
less
they love everything a little bit less
the complexity a little bit more a
little bit more
that's so interesting and pleasing
colors are shapes
do you think it's a useful i forget what
your tweet was that this is missing some
of the things oh no i think i it's
because i think about how
um
explanations become causal to our future
so
i have this whole philosophy that um
the theories we build and the way we
describe reality should be
have the largest
breadth of possibilities 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 um
i think you have to think this way when
you're thinking about life and alien
life because ultimately we're trying to
build i mean science is just basically
our narratives about reality 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 um
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 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 and the chemistry
of life
in this um through all your exploration
with assembly theory
what is the um
the thing that made you step back and
say this is this this um
idea is beautiful
or potentially beautiful
for me it's that the universe is a
creative place i guess i i
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 epi phenomena or ad hoc feature
of the universe that we exist but it's
something deep and intrinsic to the
structure of reality
um and to me the most beautiful ideas
that come out of that is that the the
reason we exist is for the universe
to generate more things and to think
about itself and use that as a
mechanism for creating more stuff
um
that's for me uh so like the the life
that
this however uh common it is is an
intrinsic part
as a fundamental part of uh this
universe at least that we live in i
think so i mean it's always interesting
to me because um
you know like we have theories of
quantum mechanics and gravity and
they're supposed to be like our most
fundamental theories right now and they
describe you know things like the
interaction of massive bodies or the way
that um charges accelerate or all these
kind of features
and and they're these really deep
theories and they tell us a lot about
how reality works but they're they're
completely agnostic to our existence and
i just i can't help but think that like
whatever describes us has to be even
deeper than that
um and i i think
incorporating memory i guess yeah
causality whatever the term you want to
use into the physics view of the world
might be that's the easiest way to do it
it's the it's the cleanest so here we go
again with the physicists i'm a
physicist the clean i was going to say
the simplest most elegant way of
resolving all of the kind of ways
that um 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 you want to know where are the
explanatory gaps and this idea that we
have an assembly that time is
fundamental and 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
i've been struck i struggle with
assembly theory for many years 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 none of the language it was
quite hilarious actually because it's
like look i have 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 my life is a universe
developing a memory but not only that
poetically
i could actually go and measure it
and i was like
holy we were just we physically
measured this thing abstra this abstract
thing and we could measure it
and not only could we measure it but we
can then start to quantify the causal
consequences
and because
i mean you know i i think
as a kind of inventing this together
with sarah and her team
i thought there was a quite a high
chance that you know we're doing science
there's such a high probability we're
wrong
you know
on this 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
i said you know this is kind of this is
you've just done this you've just done
that it's it's you know if you've just
re capitulated an old theory
and i 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 a
one thing there is this intrinsic
property of all the objects in the
universe like like i've said before but
you know me holding up this water bottle
is just any other water bottle but it is
a sum total of all the water bottles
that have existed right
and will likely change the future of
water bottles
and for other objects so it's that this
kind of
so for me
assembly theory explains the soul
in stuff mm-hmm
but it is the monology it's not like
sheldrick's morphic resonance where we
have this kind of wooy thing permeating
universe
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 really beautiful when i
and i think that um even if we're
determined to be totally wrong
i think it will help us
help
hopefully understand what life is and go
into tech life elsewhere and make life
in the lab
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 i
came 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 uh so i
think that was cool that we had this
idea and we were playing with it and i
think also that um i 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 um but no it makes me feel
special 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 you know one of my
small objectives in life is to change
the future of the universe in 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 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 as individuals that's yeah all
right but i was going to say packets of
agency i think we all have a profound
impact on the future some more than
others right all human beings all life
and i mean that's why
i think it's a privilege in a way for
you know to say like to assert some
degree of ego and agency
you know i'm going to make a computer or
make an origin life machine or you know
this thing but actually it's just like
you know life's probably living
if there is a god or there's a soul in
everything it's really laughing at us
going
i fool these guys by giving them ego so
they strive for this stuff and look what
it does for you know the assembly space
of the universe and there's always a
possibility that science can't answer
all of it so
that part's challenging for me
there might be a limit to this thing
let me ask you a bunch of ridiculous
questions and i demand
relatively short
answers uh lee what's the scariest thing
you've ever done
okay
yeah or what's a scary thing that pops
to mind
giving lecture giving giving seminars in
front of other scientists
yes yeah that is terrifying i i could if
i were
more time i would ask you about the most
embarrassing but will spare you uh what
about you sarah scariest thing
um
up there
some of the scary things you've done
um
actually the scariest for me was
deciding i want to get divorced because
it was like a totally radical like um
life transformation yeah because we had
been married for a really long time
um and i think it was just so much like
i realized like so much of my individual
agency i didn't realize i had before and
that was just really like scary like
empowering scary but like terrifying
like you were living in a kind of one
way for your whole life and then you
realize your life could be a different
way
and
yeah there is a between humans i mean
that's the
the the the beautiful thing about love
is the the connection you have but it's
also becomes a dependency and breaking
that whether it's a mentor with your
parents do you it's almost like waking
up like like just there's a different
reality yeah that was scary reinventing
yourself
okay if you could uh leave maybe i'll
actually we'll alternate sarah if you
could uh be someone else for a day
someone alive today you haven't met who
haven't met yet or maybe you could do
one who you've met who would it be
kim kardashian
no joke
the woman's brilliant i would just like
to experience i just i think she's got
such an interesting
uh and very deep understanding of social
reality but you also said you have a
appreciation a love for fashion i do
but that but that's actually the same
like 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 or
if she's i think it's very deeply
intrinsic to her so i don't know if
she's 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
uh what about you lee if you could be
somebody
for a day don't say yoshi
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
uh does that have to be here today i was
going to say i'd like to be um
the latest um
uh arm processor
obviously
i would like to be the latest arm
processor i would like to understand
what i would like to know what it feels
like to basically um
you like being objects i like being
always obsessed with being objects ever
since i was a kid what's the best part
of being an armed processor for a day i
mean i'd like to understand how i access
my memory what i anticipate it's coming
next and clock cycles what about how it
feels like yeah i want to know how it
feels like it could be to be useful to
people
i mean thanks for that
all right um if uh leaf everyone
on earth disappeared and it was just you
left what would your days look like what
would you do nobody else left to impress
nobody no probably can't really do any
real science at scale what would you do
with your remaining yeah every possible
tool i could
and put it in my workshop and just make
stuff
as so try to make stuff just try and
make stuff make companions i'm probably
not making companions probably yeah
so in the physical space yeah
what about you sir what would you when
you're just left alone on earth
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 land mass
well this that's true so you probably
don't know
if there's stuff you could be you could
be searching for plants or other humans
what would i eat
it's uh
you just have
daily just
allotment i would just walk all the time
i don't know why i just walk that's just
what came to mind i would just walk
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 um
skydiving i travel to space um
i don't know
you know what's funny with my bucket
list i only know it was on my bucket
list once i check it off once you check
it off so your bucket list is like a fog
it's like a mystery yeah almost by doing
it yeah so it's very subconsciously
driven um so it's in your subconscious
in there and i think you're bringing it
to the surface i think most of the
steering of our agency is in our
subconscious anyway so i just kind of go
with the flow but i guess um
no seriously yeah no i get it
i don't know i guess i would like to go
in a submarine like to the bottom of the
ocean i think that'd be really cool the
bottom of the ocean are you captivated
by the mystery of the ocean like i am
yeah
yeah what about you lee
what uh item on your bucket list
i don't have a bucket list i've just
made on i would love to take a computer
to the moon or mars
and make drugs off the world be the
first chemist to make drugs off world of
the first drug manufacturer in space
yeah why not drop do they have to be
somehow like be able to habitate like to
be able to survive on that particular
space
or
like what's the connection between being
on mars and do makeup i just would like
to be that i'd like to take
um the ability to make have command and
control over chemicals
programmatically off earth to somewhere
else
that just seems like you like difficulty
engineering
problems
before i die if i can do that would you
travel to space before 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 scientific experiment in
space and do a thing in space that never
been done before
that's a real possibility yeah yeah yeah
so that's why there's no point in
listing things i can't do
yes
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 um
someone helped me out with uh
just
i was
basically i needed a computer i needed
some power computation power and someone
just took pity on me and helped me
and gave me so i was really touched they
didn't have to and they were actually
quite um they're a disabled scientist
they had other things to do rather than
help some random phd student gave me
access taught me a lot of stuff
yeah actually when when you're a grad
student or when you're a student when
even a student you know the younger it
is the better
uh the attention the
the support the love you get from from
an older person a teacher or something
like that is super powerful it's
fascinating and like from the
perspective of the teacher they might
not realize the impact they have but
that little bit
those few words uh a little bit of help
can have a have a lot of impact what
about you sarah
um so i'm gonna give you a free
starbucks at some point 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 yeah
uh that's not my example oh those are
great too yeah it makes me happy and now
my kids get all excited when we do it
when we go in for the first ones in line
doing it but um
uh
um i guess i i can use a similar example
about just being a student um
uh so paul davies um is a very well
known theoretical physicist and i um
uh you know he was generous enough with
his time to take me on as a postdoc um
but before i became his postdoc he
invited me to a workshop at arizona
state university in the beyond center
and
um 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
uh
that one is um paul's philosophy is
always interacting with young people is
like you interact with a mind in the
room it doesn't matter um you know how
well known or whatever it's like you you
evaluate the person for the person so um
but he also gave me a book uh the eerie
silence that he had written and he wrote
in it um this is how e e gets to e t
um which was an anatomic excess which i
worked on as a phd student was the
origin of home of chirality um all the
way up to what the book was about which
was are we alone in the universe and is
there intelligent life out there
and it was just
so
much about the questions i wanted to ask
because it's like it was just everything
about like just it was it was just
really really kind
like that it's okay to ask these
questions yeah and you can actually i
mean i think a lot of my career is
mostly his encouragement to ask deep
questions like he gave me the space to
do it in ways that a lot of previous
mentors had i mean i have 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
what would you because you're both
fascinating minds and not i would say
uh 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 that's what i want on my
tombstone i have one um
he he generated novelty no no how to
it's like how to
how still um
i just love doing science and so
when i was younger i was just just
wanted to i mean i'm still not sure i'm
a real scientist right so i want to try
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
if you're if other people are challenged
by your questions
you will get
not only your respect but people will
give you create space for you because
you're doing something really new
i really try to create space in my
academic career my my team
really try and praise them and push them
to do new things so my advice is
try to do new things get feedback
and the universe will help you
because the universe likes novelty i
think so i think so right if this one
will keep them around
what about you sarah um you two like to
ask the really
out there
yeah
uh because i have a strong passion for
them so i think um
uh it goes back to the love like if you
if you're doing the thing you're
supposed to be doing you should really
love it
um 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 uh in some mind
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 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 i found my way in that space the
more i also made a space for myself as a
person because you're basically
generating the niche that you want to
exist in um and so i think um
i think that's
that's part of it is not just to follow
your passion but also think about like
who do you want to be
and create that
yeah who am i who you want to be i mean
yeah play temporally 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
um
is that created or discovered i don't
know but basically go towards that
direction
if you were abducted by aliens sarah
excellent i'm waiting
[Laughter]
there on a spaceship there
and then they somehow figured out the
language you speak
um
and ask you what are what are you
what is what
explain yourself
not you sarah but the species oh
what's
life on earth
uh
like we we don't have time we're busy
grad students from another uh planet i
see what what what's interesting about
human civilization what's interesting
about you
uh you specifically too they could be
very kind of personal and kind of pushy
um
and
yeah
okay um
i have one um because you know like
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 um and i guess
i feel like that's humanity like in in
some sense we're we're creating
something i think is profound and
potentially very beautiful like
existence of the universe but we're just
so
night like not night oh we're just early
we're we're early we're young we don't
know what we're doing yet yeah what's
with the nuclear weapons is the question
too like what are you guys what are we
doing with them this creativity that you
talked it sounds very nice but it's
you're seeing we're making things that
are like very destructive and like the
rockets what this seems very aggressive
yeah i know this is my my blinders on um
i don't know i i mean it goes back to
the whole conversation about suffering 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 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 the room and have
everyone like each other all the time so
i think that kind of tension is actually
really important um that we have
different aesthetics
different goals
uh
and
and sometimes
conflict comes out of that yeah speaking
of which do you lee and yoshibach ever
say anything nice to each other or is it
always conflict
we never have conflict we argue but i
don't i don't think they argue arguments
are bad
i mean i think the problem i have yeah
not a problem i think here we go
and he's not here as defendants no i
just i don't necessarily understand
the the what i mean he's just talking at
such a high level yeah you know
i'm i'm a dimwit so i'm like i spend
some so i think a lot of our
conflict is not conflict we actually we
actually have i think i mean i can't
speak for i have a deep appreciation for
him he's brilliant but i 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
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 i would be i would try to be
as random as possible and try and
confuse them oh good
good
excellent that might be the wiser choice
the easter eggs in reality no i mean if
the aliens would die
i would try and be as random as but i
would try and do something that would
surprise the hell out of them which i
thought i mean are probably like brisket
they might kill me but i think that
might be funny that might yeah they
might want to study you for prolonged
periods my reasoning is if i wanted to
stay alive okay so if the thing is if i
wasn't going back to earth and the job
was to stay alive if i could be as
surprising as possible they'd keep me
around like a pet right
pet lee on the aliens you'd be okay
being being a pet well no but i mean the
last the last human that survives would
just be a pet to the alien i i don't
know but i mean i think um that might be
fun because then that might might i
might get some feedback from their
curiosity but yeah let me ask you this
question
given our conversation has a very
different meaning
not
more profoundly perhaps but would you
rather lose all of your old memories
or never be able to make new ones
i would have to
um
lose all my old memories
again it's the novelty
um what about you sarah i'm not saying
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 experience is actually
in our memories so if you can't generate
new memories it's like you're not alive
anymore
that's it
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
the big scale of us is a human
civilization may be the big scale of the
universe
children my kids but i i also mean that
in like a grand sense of like
not a grant but like like
future minds in some sense so for me
like the most bleak movie ever you know
people worry about apocalyptic things
like ai existential risk and climate
change which children of men you know
the whole premise of the movie was there
can be no children born on the entire
planet 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 um
what gives me hope is always youth and
um
the the hope of children and the you
know the possibilities of the future
they see and they grow up in a
completely different reality than adults
do um and i i think we have a hard time
seeing
what their reality actually looks like
but i i think i think most of the time
it's
super interesting yeah they have dreams
of 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 yeah of all that
uh imagination what about you lee what
gives you hope
so when i go back to my eight-year-old
self
the thing that i dreamed of my old self
was this world in which technology
became programmable when there was
internet how do i get information
and i would expand my consciousness by
just
you know um getting access to everything
that was going on and it's happened in
my lifetime and we really do have that i
mean okay there's some bad things you
know there's tick tock everyone just or
whatever all the bad things about social
media but
i think um
i mean i'm i can't quite believe my luck
being born now so amazing
being able to program reality in some
way yeah and the thing that i really
find fascinating about human beings
is that
just how ingenious they are
i'm you know whether it's from my my
kids
my research group my peers
other companies just how ingenious
everyone is
and um and i'm pretty sure humanity has
a v or
our causal chain in which humanity is a
vital part in the future
is going to have a lot of fun and i'm
just yeah it's just it's just
mind-blowing just to watch and you know
so humans are ingenious and i i hope to
help them be more ingenious if i can
well what gives me hope what makes me
feel good on bad days is the existence
of wild
minds like yours novelty generators
assembly structures that generate
novelty
and do so beautifully and then tweet
about it
uh sarah this
i really really enjoy talking to you i
enjoy following you i'm a huge fan
sarah lee i hope i hope to talk to you
many times in the future maybe with your
shabbat you're just incredible people
thank you for everything you do you're
awesome thank you for talking today i
really really appreciate it thank you
yeah it's been brilliant to be here
thanks for listening to this
conversation with sarah walker and lee
cronin to support this podcast please
check out our sponsors in the
description
now let me leave you with some words
from arthur c clarke
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
thank you for listening i hope to see
you
next time
you