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

00:00:00.000 | I don't know what it's like to be an alien.

00:00:01.760 | I would like to know.

00:00:03.160 | Two alien civilizations coexisting on a planet.

00:00:05.760 | What's that look like exactly?

00:00:07.240 | When you see them and they see you, you're assuming they have vision, they have the ability

00:00:12.040 | to construct in 3D and in time.

00:00:14.680 | That's a lot of assumptions we're making.

00:00:16.600 | What human level intelligence has done is quite different.

00:00:19.840 | It's not just that we remember states that the universe has existed in before, it's that

00:00:24.200 | we can imagine ones that have never existed and we can actually make them come into existence.

00:00:29.320 | You can travel back in time sometimes.

00:00:32.200 | Yes.

00:00:33.200 | You travel forward in time to travel back.

00:00:36.440 | Yes.

00:00:39.000 | The following is a conversation with Sarah Walker and Lee Cronin.

00:00:42.240 | They have each been on this podcast once before individually and now for their second time

00:00:48.400 | they're here together.

00:00:50.080 | Sarah is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist.

00:00:54.080 | Lee is a chemist and if I may say so, the real life manifestation of Rick from Rick

00:01:00.160 | and Morty.

00:01:01.680 | They both are interested in how life originates and develops both life here on earth and alien

00:01:07.800 | life including intelligent alien civilizations out there in the cosmos.

00:01:13.320 | They are colleagues and friends who love to explore, disagree and debate nuanced points

00:01:18.760 | about alien life and so we're calling this an alien debate.

00:01:24.760 | Very few questions to me are as fascinating as what do aliens look like?

00:01:29.120 | How do we recognize them?

00:01:30.740 | How do we talk to them?

00:01:32.260 | And how do we make sense of life here on earth in the context of all possible life forms

00:01:37.040 | that are out there?

00:01:38.840 | Treating these questions with the seriousness and rigor they deserve is what I hope to do

00:01:44.120 | with this conversation and future ones like it.

00:01:48.320 | Our world is shrouded in mystery.

00:01:50.040 | We must first be humble to acknowledge this and then be bold in diving in and trying to

00:01:55.240 | figure things out anyway.

00:01:57.520 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:01:59.520 | To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

00:02:03.040 | And now dear friends, here's Sarah Walker and Lee Cronin.

00:02:08.760 | First of all, welcome back Sarah, welcome back Lee.

00:02:11.160 | You guys, I'm a huge fan of yours, you're incredible people.

00:02:13.640 | I should say thank you to Sarah for wearing really awesome boots.

00:02:17.360 | We'll probably overlay a picture later on, but why the hell didn't you dress up Lee?

00:02:21.680 | No, I'm just kidding.

00:02:22.680 | This is me dressed up.

00:02:23.680 | You were saying that you're pink, that your thing is pink, my thing is black and white,

00:02:28.480 | the simplicity of it.

00:02:30.400 | Where's the pink?

00:02:31.400 | When did it hit you that pink is your color?

00:02:34.400 | I became pink about, I don't know actually, maybe 2017?

00:02:41.560 | Did you know me when you first-

00:02:42.560 | I think I met you pre-pink.

00:02:43.560 | Yeah, yeah.

00:02:44.560 | So about 2017, I think, I just decided I was boring and I needed to make a statement and

00:02:50.480 | red was too bright, so I went pink, salmon pink.

00:02:53.320 | Well, I think you were always pink, you just found yourself in 2017.

00:02:59.200 | There's an amazing photo of him where there's like everybody in their black gown and he's

00:03:02.520 | just wearing the pink pants.

00:03:03.520 | Oh, that was at the Wagon and University-

00:03:05.200 | It's totally nuts.

00:03:06.200 | 100th year anniversary, they got me to give the plenary and they didn't find the outfit

00:03:10.440 | for me, so they were all wearing these silly hats and these gowns and there was me dressed

00:03:13.800 | up in pink looking like a complete idiot.

00:03:16.120 | We're definitely going to have to find that picture and overlay it, big full screen, slow

00:03:21.160 | motion.

00:03:22.160 | All right, let's talk about aliens.

00:03:23.760 | We'll find places we disagree and places we agree.

00:03:27.440 | Life, intelligence, consciousness, universe, all of that.

00:03:31.640 | Let's start with a tweet from Neil deGrasse Tyson stating his skepticism about aliens

00:03:37.520 | wanting to visit Earth.

00:03:39.680 | Quote, "How egocentric of us to think that space aliens who have mastered interstellar

00:03:45.440 | travel across the galaxy would give," pardon the French, "would give a shit about humans

00:03:53.520 | on Earth."

00:03:54.520 | So let me ask you, would aliens care about visiting Earth, observing, communicating with

00:03:59.200 | humans?

00:04:00.200 | Let's take a perspective of aliens, maybe Sarah, first.

00:04:05.160 | Are we interesting in the whole spectrum of life in the universe?

00:04:11.040 | - I'm completely biased, at least as far as I think right now, we're the most interesting

00:04:14.560 | thing in the universe.

00:04:16.480 | So I would expect, based on the intrinsic curiosity that we have and how much I think

00:04:24.120 | that's deeply related to the physics of what we are, that other intelligent aliens would

00:04:28.880 | want to seek out examples of the phenomena they are to understand themselves better.

00:04:34.540 | And I think that's kind of a natural thing to want to do, and I don't think there's any

00:04:38.160 | kind of judgment on it being a lesser being or not.

00:04:42.120 | It's like saying you have nothing to learn by talking to a baby.

00:04:45.200 | You have lots to learn, probably more than you do talking to somebody that's 90.

00:04:49.280 | So I think they absolutely would.

00:04:51.520 | - So whatever the phenomena is that is human, there would be an inkling of the same kind

00:04:57.160 | of phenomena within alien species, and they would be seeking that same--

00:05:00.760 | - I think there's gotta be some features of us that are universal, and I think the ones

00:05:04.320 | that are most interesting, and I hope I live in an interesting universe, are the ones that

00:05:10.840 | are driven by our curiosity and the fact that our intelligence allows us to do things that

00:05:18.720 | the universe wouldn't be able to do without things like us existing.

00:05:22.920 | - We're gonna define a lot of terms.

00:05:24.380 | One of them is interesting.

00:05:25.380 | - Yes.

00:05:26.380 | - That's a very interesting term to try to define.

00:05:29.280 | Lee, what do you think?

00:05:30.760 | Are humans interesting for aliens?

00:05:33.840 | - Let's take it from our perspective.

00:05:34.840 | We wanna go find aliens as a species quite desperately.

00:05:37.840 | So if we put the shoe on the other foot, of course we're interesting.

00:05:41.480 | But I'm wondering, and assuming that we're at the right technological capabilities to

00:05:46.160 | go searching for aliens, then that's interesting.

00:05:49.160 | So what I mean is, if there needs to be a massive leap in technology that we don't have,

00:05:55.800 | how will aliens prioritize coming to Earth and other places?

00:05:58.920 | But I do think that they would come and find us, 'cause they'd wanna find out about our

00:06:03.680 | culture, what things are universal.

00:06:06.680 | What about, I mean, I'm a chemist, so I would say, "Well, is the chemistry universal?"

00:06:10.320 | Are the creatures that we're gonna find making all this commotion, are they made of the same

00:06:14.880 | stuff?

00:06:17.660 | What does their science look like?

00:06:20.520 | Are they off planet yet?

00:06:23.400 | So I think that Neil deGrasse Tyson is being slightly pessimistic and maybe trying to play

00:06:29.920 | the tune that the universe is vast and it's not worth them coming here.

00:06:35.280 | I don't think that, but I just worry that maybe we don't have the ability to talk to

00:06:40.920 | them, we don't have the universal translator, we don't have the right physics.

00:06:43.840 | But sure, they should come.

00:06:45.480 | We are interesting.

00:06:46.480 | I wanna know if they exist.

00:06:47.480 | It would make it easier if they just came.

00:06:50.880 | - So again, I'm gonna use your tweets like it's Shakespeare and analyze it.

00:06:56.360 | So Sarah tweeted, "Thinking about aliens, thinking about aliens."

00:07:02.000 | So how much do you think aliens are thinking about other aliens, including humans?

00:07:07.480 | So you said, "We humans want to visit, we're longing to connect with aliens."

00:07:15.440 | Why is that?

00:07:16.440 | Can you introspect that?

00:07:17.440 | Is that an obvious thing that we should be, what are we hoping to understand by meeting

00:07:21.680 | aliens, exactly?

00:07:24.000 | Something as an introvert, it's like I ask myself this all the time, why go out on a

00:07:28.280 | Friday night to meet people?

00:07:30.520 | What are you hoping to find?

00:07:31.520 | - I think the curiosity, so when I saw Sarah put that tweet, I think I answered it actually

00:07:34.880 | as well, which was, "We are thinking about trying to make contact."

00:07:39.040 | So they almost certainly are, but maybe there's a number of classes.

00:07:43.600 | There are those aliens that have not yet made contact with other aliens, like us.

00:07:49.240 | Those aliens have made contact with just one other alien and maybe it's an anticlimax and

00:07:53.120 | slime, and aliens that have made contact with not just one set of intelligent species, but

00:07:59.400 | several.

00:08:00.400 | That must be amazing actually.

00:08:01.400 | Literally, there are some place in the universe, there must be one alien civilization that's

00:08:05.080 | not made contact with not one, but two other intelligent civilizations.

00:08:10.720 | So they must be thinking about it.

00:08:12.160 | There must be entire degree courses on aliens, thinking about aliens and universal cultural

00:08:20.240 | norms.

00:08:21.560 | - Do you think they will survive the meeting?

00:08:24.640 | And by the way, Lee did respond saying, "That's all the universe wants."

00:08:28.680 | So Sarah said, "Thinking about aliens, thinking about aliens."

00:08:31.920 | Lee said, "That's all the universe wants."

00:08:34.440 | And then Sarah responded, "Cheeky universe we live in."

00:08:38.760 | So cheeky is a cheeky version of the word interesting, all of which we'll try to define

00:08:43.560 | mathematically.

00:08:44.560 | - Cheeky might be harder than interesting.

00:08:46.760 | - 'Cause there's humor in that too.

00:08:48.800 | - Yes.

00:08:49.800 | - I think there's a mathematical definition of humor, but we'll talk about that in a bit.

00:08:53.120 | - Oh, interesting.

00:08:54.120 | - Yeah, sure there is, yeah.

00:08:55.120 | - So if you're a graduate student alien looking at multiple alien civilizations, do you think

00:09:01.120 | they survive the encounters?

00:09:03.560 | - I think there's a tendency to anthropomorphize a lot of the discussions about alien life,

00:09:08.160 | which is a really big challenge.

00:09:10.200 | So usually when I'm trying to think about these problems, I don't try to think about

00:09:15.440 | us as humans, but us as an example of phenomena that exists in the universe that we have yet

00:09:19.560 | to explain.

00:09:21.800 | And it doesn't seem to be the case that if I think about the features I would argue are

00:09:28.240 | most universal about that phenomena, that there's any reason to think that a first encounter

00:09:32.640 | with another lineage or example of life would be antagonistic.

00:09:40.440 | I think, yeah.

00:09:42.760 | And I think there's this kind of assumption, I mean, going back to Neil deGrasse Tyson's

00:09:47.880 | quote, I mean, it kind of bothers me because there's a, I mean, I'm a physicist, so I know

00:09:52.840 | we have a lot of egos about how much we can describe the world, but that there's this

00:09:57.280 | like, because we understand fundamental physics so well, we understand alien life and we can

00:10:01.920 | kind of extrapolate.

00:10:02.920 | And I just think that we don't, and the quest there is really to understand something totally

00:10:08.960 | new about the universe and that thing just happens to be us.

00:10:11.640 | - I agree, I agree.

00:10:12.800 | There's something else more profound.

00:10:13.880 | I think Neil is just being, again, he's just trying to stir the pot.

00:10:17.840 | I would say from a contingency point of view, I want to know how many ways does the universe

00:10:23.360 | build structures, build memories, right?

00:10:26.520 | And then I want to know if those memories can interact with each other.

00:10:30.040 | And if you have two different origins of life and then origins of intelligence, and then

00:10:35.000 | these things become conscious, surely you want to go and talk to them and figure out

00:10:39.880 | what commonalities you share.

00:10:41.560 | And it might be that we're just unable to conceive of what they're going to look like.

00:10:44.960 | They're just going to be completely different infrastructure, but surely we'll want to go

00:10:49.480 | and find out a map and surely curiosity is a property that evolution has made on earth.

00:10:55.160 | And I can't see any reason that it won't happen elsewhere because curiosity probably exists

00:11:00.240 | because we want to find innovations in the environment.

00:11:03.800 | We want to use that information to help our technology.

00:11:08.840 | And also curiosity is like planning for the future, are they going to fight us?

00:11:12.280 | Are we going to be able to trade with them?

00:11:15.320 | So I think that Neil's just, I don't know, maybe, you know, I mean, give a shit.

00:11:19.440 | That's really, I think that's really down on earth, right?

00:11:22.760 | How would aliens categorize humans, do you think?

00:11:26.240 | How would we?

00:11:27.240 | So let's put it the other way around.

00:11:28.240 | Slime category?

00:11:29.240 | Maybe, no, no, no.

00:11:30.760 | Maybe we could, the thing is a bit odd, right?

00:11:33.400 | Look at Instagram, Twitter, all these people taking selfies.

00:11:36.880 | I mean, does the universe, is the ultimate state of consciousness thinking beings that

00:11:41.680 | take photographs themselves and upload them to an internet with other thinking beings

00:11:45.240 | looking at each other's photos?

00:11:47.080 | So I think that they will be-

00:11:49.600 | - What's wrong with that?

00:11:50.600 | - I did not say there was anything wrong with it.

00:11:53.680 | - It's consciousness manifested at scale, selfies on Instagram.

00:11:57.480 | - Yeah, it's like the mirror test at scale.

00:12:00.000 | - Yeah, I do think that curiosity is really the driving force of why we have our technology,

00:12:05.600 | right?

00:12:06.600 | If we weren't curious, we wouldn't have left the cave.

00:12:08.640 | So I think that Neil's got it completely wrong, in fact, actually.

00:12:14.720 | Of course they'd want to come here.

00:12:16.320 | It doesn't mean they are coming here.

00:12:18.040 | We've seen evidence for that.

00:12:19.440 | I guess we can argue about that, right?

00:12:22.120 | But I think that we want, I desperately, and I know that Sarah does too, but I won't speak

00:12:26.800 | for you, you're here.

00:12:28.400 | I desperately want to have missions to look for life in the solar system right now.

00:12:32.560 | I want to map life over the solar system.

00:12:34.920 | And I want to understand how we can go and find life as quickly as possible at the nearest

00:12:38.880 | stars and also at the same time do it in the lab just to compensate.

00:12:44.560 | So sure.

00:12:45.560 | - Yeah, just one more point on this.

00:12:47.480 | If you think about sort of what's driven the most features of our own evolution as a species

00:12:52.920 | you could, and try to map that to alien species.

00:12:55.040 | I always think optimism is what's gonna get us furthest.

00:12:58.220 | And so I think a lot of people always think that it's like war and conflict is gonna be

00:13:02.280 | the way that alien species will expand out into the cosmos.

00:13:06.200 | But if you just look at how we're doing it and how we talk about it, it's always our

00:13:09.880 | future in space is always built from narratives of optimism.

00:13:14.480 | And so it seems to me that if intelligence does get out in the universe that it's gonna

00:13:19.360 | be more optimism and curiosity driving it than war and conflict because those things

00:13:23.240 | end up crushing you.

00:13:25.620 | So there might be some selective filter.

00:13:28.080 | Of course, this is me being an optimist.

00:13:29.480 | I'm a half full kind of person, but.

00:13:32.000 | - Is it obvious that curiosity, not obvious, but what do you think?

00:13:36.200 | Is curiosity a more powerful force in the universe than violence and the will to power?

00:13:43.440 | So 'cause you said you framed curiosity as a way to also plan on how to avoid violence,

00:13:50.200 | which is an interesting framing of curiosity.

00:13:52.680 | But I could also argue that violence is a pretty productive way to operate in the world,

00:14:00.600 | which is like, that's one way to protect yourself.

00:14:02.640 | The best defense is offense.

00:14:05.840 | - I'm not qualified to answer this, but I'll have a go.

00:14:07.880 | I think violence, let's not talk about violence.

00:14:10.720 | - That's the summary of this podcast.

00:14:12.240 | - I would, yeah, maybe, let's not call it violence, but I call it erasure.

00:14:17.560 | So if you think about the way evolution works, or the way, obviously corporate assembly theory,

00:14:24.480 | so if you say you build, curiosity allows you to open up avenues, new graphs, right?

00:14:29.200 | So new features you can play.

00:14:32.960 | What the ability to erase those things allows you to start again and do some pruning.

00:14:37.600 | So the universe, I think curiosity gets you furthest.

00:14:40.400 | Curiosity gets you rockets that land, it gets you robots that can make drugs, it gets you

00:14:44.920 | poetry and art and communication.

00:14:48.680 | And then, I often think, wouldn't it be great in bureaucracy to have another world war,

00:14:53.480 | not literally a world war now, please no world war, but the equivalent so we could get, remove

00:14:57.920 | all the admin bureaucracy, right, all the admin violence, get rid of it and start again.

00:15:01.920 | Do you know what I mean?

00:15:03.400 | Because you get layers and you get redundant systems built.

00:15:06.320 | So actually, a reset, let's not call it violence, a reset in some aspects of our culture and

00:15:14.640 | our technology allows us to then build more important things without the, 'cause how many,

00:15:20.520 | you know, how many cookies do I have to click on?

00:15:22.240 | How many things, how many extra clicks do I have in the future of my life that I could

00:15:27.120 | remove and a bit of a reset would allow us to start again.

00:15:33.200 | And maybe that's how, I suppose, our encounter with aliens will be.

00:15:37.320 | Maybe they will fight with us and say, "Oh, we're not as excited by you as we thought,

00:15:41.240 | we'll just get rid of you."

00:15:42.240 | - Or they might wanna reset Earth.

00:15:44.160 | - Yeah, why not?

00:15:45.160 | - To be like, let's see how the evolution runs again.

00:15:47.440 | This seems like they've, there's nothing new happening here.

00:15:51.840 | They're observing for a while, this is just not, let's keep it more fun.

00:15:56.040 | Let's start with a fish again.

00:15:57.720 | I like how you equated violence to resetting your cookies.

00:16:03.800 | I suppose that's the kind of violence in this modern world where words are violence, resetting

00:16:09.240 | cookies.

00:16:10.240 | - I don't know where that came from.

00:16:12.320 | - That's poetic, really.

00:16:13.920 | Okay, so let's talk about life.

00:16:17.800 | What is life?

00:16:19.480 | What is non-life?

00:16:21.100 | What is the line between life and non-life?

00:16:23.680 | And maybe at any point we can pull in ideas of assembly theory.

00:16:28.160 | How do we start to try to define life?

00:16:30.120 | And for people listening, so Sarah identifies as a physicist and Lee identifies as a chemist.

00:16:37.920 | Of course, they are very interdisciplinary in nature in general.

00:16:44.960 | So what is life?

00:16:45.960 | Sarah.

00:16:46.960 | - Yeah.

00:16:47.960 | - I love asking that question 'cause it's so absurdly big.

00:16:52.040 | - I know, I love it.

00:16:54.200 | It's my absolute favorite question in the whole universe.

00:16:57.080 | So I think I have three ways of describing it right now.

00:17:00.680 | And I like to say all three of them 'cause people latch on to different facets of them.

00:17:04.080 | And so the whole idea of what Lee and I are trying to work on is not to try to define

00:17:08.080 | life but to try to find a more fundamental theory that explains what the phenomena we

00:17:11.480 | call life.

00:17:12.480 | And then it should explain certain attributes.

00:17:14.280 | And you end up having a really different framing than the way people usually talk.

00:17:17.400 | So the way I talk about it, three different ways.

00:17:20.880 | Life is how information structures matter across space and time.

00:17:25.400 | Life is, I don't know, this one's from you actually, simple machines constructing more

00:17:31.040 | complex machines.

00:17:33.080 | And the other one is the physics of existence, so to speak, which is life is the mechanism

00:17:38.720 | the universe has to explore the space of what's possible.

00:17:42.720 | That's my favorite.

00:17:43.720 | - So can I, yeah, yeah, can I add on to that?

00:17:46.560 | - Okay, can you say the physics one again?

00:17:49.720 | - The physics of existence.

00:17:50.720 | - Yeah, the physics of existence.

00:17:52.160 | I don't know what to call it.

00:17:53.880 | If you think of all the things that could exist, only certain things do exist.

00:17:57.520 | And I think life is basically the universe's mechanism of bringing things into physically

00:18:02.740 | existing in the moment now.

00:18:04.880 | - Yeah.

00:18:05.880 | - Yeah, and what's another one?

00:18:08.600 | - We were debating this the other day.

00:18:09.800 | So if you think about a universe that has nothing in it, that's kind of hard to conceive

00:18:15.640 | of, right?

00:18:16.640 | Because, and this is where physicists really go wrong.

00:18:18.360 | They think of a universe with nothing in it, they can't.

00:18:20.960 | And you think--

00:18:21.960 | - So nonexistence is really hard to think of.

00:18:23.240 | - Yeah, and then you think of a universe with everything in it, that's really hard.

00:18:28.400 | And you just have this white blob, right?

00:18:30.320 | This is everything.

00:18:31.320 | But the fact we have discrete stuff in the universe beyond, say, planets, so you've got

00:18:36.320 | stars, space, planet stuff, right?

00:18:38.640 | The boring stuff.

00:18:40.640 | But I would define life or say that life is where there are architectures, any architectures,

00:18:47.280 | and we should stop fixating on what is building the architectures to start with.

00:18:52.320 | And the fact that the universe has discrete things in it is completely mind-blowing.

00:18:57.880 | If you think about it for one second, the fact there's any objects at all, and there's,

00:19:04.880 | because for me, the object is a proxy for a machine that built it, some information

00:19:12.960 | being moved around, actuation, sensing, getting resource, and building these objects.

00:19:20.280 | So for me, everyone's been obsessing about the machine, but I'm like, forget the machine,

00:19:25.800 | let's see the objects.

00:19:27.480 | And I think in a way that assembly theory, we realized maybe a few months ago that assembly

00:19:32.400 | theory actually does account for the soul in the objects, not mystically like, say,

00:19:38.000 | Geldreich's morphic resonance or Leibniz's monodology, seeing souls in things.

00:19:43.000 | But when you see an object, and I've said this before, but this object is evidence of

00:19:47.600 | thought and then there's a lineage of those objects.

00:19:51.320 | So I think what is fascinating is that, you put it much more elegantly, but the barrier

00:19:57.360 | between life and non-life is accruing enough memories to then actuate.

00:20:02.760 | So what that means is there are contingency, there are things that happen in the universe

00:20:06.080 | that get trapped, these memories then have a causal effect on the future.

00:20:10.320 | And then when you get those concentrated in a machine, and you're actually able in real

00:20:13.760 | time, able to integrate the past, the present with the future, and do stuff, that's when

00:20:20.280 | you are most alive.

00:20:22.840 | - You being the machine.

00:20:23.840 | - Yes.

00:20:24.840 | - Wait a minute, why is the object, so one of the ways to define life that Sarah said

00:20:30.840 | is simple machines creating complex machines.

00:20:34.360 | So there's a million questions there.

00:20:37.480 | So how the hell does a simple machine create a complex machine?

00:20:40.920 | - By mutation.

00:20:41.920 | So this is what we were talking about at the beginning, you have the minimum replicator,

00:20:45.560 | so a molecule.

00:20:46.560 | So this is what I was trying to convince Sarah of the mechanism, get there years ago I think,

00:20:49.880 | but then you've been building on it and saying, you have a molecule that can copy itself,

00:20:55.920 | but then there has to be some variability, otherwise it's not gonna get more functional.

00:20:59.960 | So you need to add bits on.

00:21:01.960 | So you have a minimum molecule that can copy itself, but then it can add bits on, and that

00:21:06.040 | can be copied as well, and those add-ons can give you additional function to be able to

00:21:13.080 | acquire more stuff to exist.

00:21:15.920 | So existence is weird, but the fact that there is existence is why there is life, and that's

00:21:21.480 | why I realized a few days ago that there must be, that's why alien life must be everywhere,

00:21:27.540 | because there is existence.

00:21:28.920 | - Is there like a conservation of cheeky stuff happening?

00:21:33.840 | So like, how can you keep injecting more complex things?

00:21:37.680 | Like, doesn't the machine that creates the object need to be as or more powerful than

00:21:46.200 | the things it creates?

00:21:48.560 | So how can you get complexity from simplicity?

00:21:51.920 | - So the way you get complexity from simplicity is that you, I'm just making this up, but

00:21:57.800 | this is kind of my notion, that you have a large volume of stuff, so you're able to get

00:22:01.320 | seeds, if you like, random cues from the environment, so you just use those objects to basically

00:22:08.480 | write on your tape, ones and zeros, whatever, and that is necessarily rich, complex, okay,

00:22:17.840 | but it has a low assembly-ness, but even though it has a high assembly number, we can talk

00:22:21.680 | about that, but then when you start to then integrate that all into a smaller volume,

00:22:26.560 | and over time, and you become more autonomous, you then make the transition.

00:22:33.040 | I don't know what you think about that.

00:22:34.760 | - I think the easiest way to think about it is actually, which I know is a concept you

00:22:39.880 | hate, but I also hate, which is entropy, but people are more familiar with entropy than

00:22:43.360 | what we talk about in assembly theory, and also the idea that, like, say physics as we

00:22:48.880 | know it involves objects that don't exist across time, or as Lee would say, low-memory

00:22:54.560 | objects.

00:22:55.560 | So one of the key distinctions that-- - Low-memory objects.

00:22:59.560 | - Yeah, so physics is all-- - Physicists are low-memory objects.

00:23:03.560 | - Low-memory objects.

00:23:04.560 | - Quick clip.

00:23:05.560 | - Physicists are creators of low-memory objects, or manipulators of low-memory objects.

00:23:09.800 | - Yep, absolutely.

00:23:10.800 | - It's a very nice way of putting it.

00:23:12.600 | Okay, sorry, go ahead.

00:23:13.600 | - Yeah, no, sorry.

00:23:14.600 | - Sorry to keep interrupting.

00:23:15.600 | - No, no, no, it's fine.

00:23:16.600 | I like it, too, it's very funny, but I think it's a good way of phrasing it, because I

00:23:20.880 | think this kind of idea we have in assembly theory is that physics as we know it has basically

00:23:26.760 | removed time as being a physical observable of an object, and the argument I would make

00:23:33.160 | is that when you look at things like water bottles or us, we're actually things that

00:23:38.000 | exist that have a large extent in time, so we actually have a physical size in time,

00:23:44.720 | and we measure that with something called the assembly index in molecules, but presumably

00:23:50.640 | everyone should have sort of a, do you wanna explain what assembly?

00:23:54.960 | - Yeah, you know what?

00:23:56.560 | Let's step back and start at the beginning.

00:23:59.720 | What is assembly theory?

00:24:00.720 | Lee sent me some slides.

00:24:02.880 | There's a big, sexy paper coming out probably, maybe, I don't know.

00:24:07.520 | - We've almost finished it.

00:24:10.560 | - Almost, almost finished it.

00:24:11.720 | - That's also a summary of science.

00:24:13.720 | We're almost done.

00:24:14.720 | - Yes.

00:24:15.720 | - Well, no, no, we're almost done.

00:24:16.720 | - It's the history of science.

00:24:17.800 | - We are ready to start an interesting discussion with our peers.

00:24:21.360 | - Right, you're the machine that created the object, and we'll see what the object takes

00:24:25.760 | us.

00:24:26.760 | All right, so what is assembly theory?

00:24:28.640 | - Yeah, well, I think the easiest way for people to understand it is to think about

00:24:34.120 | assembly in molecules, although the theory is very general.

00:24:36.520 | It doesn't just apply to molecules, and this was really Lee's insight, so it's kind of

00:24:40.000 | funny that I'm explaining it, but--

00:24:41.800 | - I'll mark you.

00:24:42.800 | - Okay, all right, I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready.

00:24:43.800 | You have to tell me where I get the check marks minus, but--

00:24:47.560 | - It's your theory as well, so--

00:24:48.560 | - Yeah, I know, but imagine a molecule, and then you can break the molecule apart into

00:24:54.840 | elementary building blocks.

00:24:55.840 | They happen to be bonds, and then you can think of all the ways, for molecular assembly

00:24:59.320 | theory, you can think of all the ways of building up the original molecule, so there's all these

00:25:02.800 | paths that you can assemble it, and the sort of rules of assembly is you can use pieces

00:25:07.480 | that have been generated already, so it has this kind of recursive property to it, and

00:25:12.360 | so that's where kind of memory comes into assembly theory, and then the assembly index

00:25:16.840 | is the shortest path in that space, so it's supposed to be the minimal amount of history

00:25:21.760 | that the universe has to undergo in order to assemble that particular object, and the

00:25:25.960 | reason that this is significant is Lee figured out how to measure that with a mass spec in

00:25:32.520 | the lab, and we had this conjecture that if that minimal number of steps was sufficiently

00:25:37.560 | large, it would indicate that you required a machine or a system that had information

00:25:41.640 | about how to assemble that specific object, because the combinatorial space of possibilities

00:25:45.000 | is getting exponentially large as the assembly index is increasing.

00:25:49.120 | - So just, sorry to interrupt, but so that means there's a sufficiently high assembly

00:25:53.920 | index that if observed in an object, is an indicator that something lifelike created

00:26:04.040 | it, or is the object itself lifelike?

00:26:06.960 | - Both, but you might wanna make the distinction that a water bottle's not life, but it would

00:26:12.880 | still be a signature that you were in that domain of physics, and that I might be alive,

00:26:18.520 | so-- - So there would be potentially

00:26:21.120 | a lot of arguments about where the line, at which assembly index does interesting stuff

00:26:27.840 | start to happen.

00:26:28.840 | - The point is, we can make all the arguments, but it should be experimentally observable,

00:26:32.840 | and Lee can talk more about that part of it, but the point I wanna make about it is, there

00:26:36.720 | was always this intuition that I had that there should be some complexity threshold

00:26:41.160 | in the universe above which you would start to say whatever physics governs life actually

00:26:45.800 | becomes operative, and I think about it a little bit like we have Planck's constant,

00:26:50.560 | and we have the fine structure constant, and then this sort of assembly threshold is basically

00:26:55.800 | another sort of potentially constant of nature, it might depend on specific features of the

00:27:01.760 | system, which we debate about sometimes, but then when you're past that, you have to have

00:27:09.040 | some other explanation than the current explanations we have in physics, 'cause now you're in high

00:27:12.320 | memory, things actually require time for them to exist, and time becomes a physical variable.

00:27:20.280 | - The path to the creation of the object is the memory, so you need to consider that.

00:27:25.440 | - Yeah, but the point is, that's a feature of the object, so when I think of all the

00:27:32.320 | things in this room, we see the projection of them as a water bottle, but assembly theory

00:27:38.320 | would say that this is a causal graph of all the ways the universe can create this thing,

00:27:41.960 | that's what it is as an object, and we're all interacting a causal graph, and most of

00:27:46.200 | the creativity in the biosphere is because a lot of the objects that exist now are huge

00:27:50.720 | in their structure across time, four billion years of evolution to get to us.

00:27:54.960 | - Is it possible to look at me and infer the history that led to me?

00:28:01.600 | - If you, you as an individual, might be hard, you as a representative of a population of

00:28:08.560 | objects that have high assembly, with similar causal history and structure, that you can

00:28:12.560 | communicate with, i.e. other humans, you can infer a lot probably.

00:28:15.760 | - Yeah, also with a-- - Which we do, genomically even, I mean,

00:28:18.640 | it's not like, we have a lot of information in us, we can reconstruct histories from,

00:28:23.360 | probably saying something slightly deeper.

00:28:24.840 | - One thing to add, I mean, it's not just about the object, but the objects that occur,

00:28:28.120 | and not just objects with high assembly number, because you can have random things that have

00:28:32.240 | a high assembly number, but they must have, there must be a number of identical copies,

00:28:36.120 | so you know you're getting away from the random, because you could take a snapshot, this is

00:28:40.280 | why, it's not like I hate entropy, I love entropy, I mean, use correctly, but it's about

00:28:45.000 | the problem of entropy, you have to have a labeler, and so you can label the beginning

00:28:49.960 | and the end, the start and the finish, you know, what you can do in assembly is say,

00:28:53.840 | oh, I have a number of objects in abundance, they all have these features, and then you

00:28:58.520 | can infer, and one of the things that we debated a lot, particularly during lockdown, because

00:29:03.080 | I almost went insane trying to crush the, produce the assembly equation, so we came

00:29:07.160 | up with the assembly equation, I had, just imagine this, so you have this string, where,

00:29:12.480 | oh, actually it makes me sick trying to remember, it was so, it did my head in for a long time.

00:29:18.760 | - Dramatic.

00:29:19.760 | - Yeah, because I couldn't, so if you just have a string of say, words, say, you know,

00:29:24.960 | a series of words, a series of letters, so you just have A, A, A, B, B, B, C, C, C, D,

00:29:29.120 | D, D, and you find that object, and you just have four A's, four B's, four C's, four D's,

00:29:34.760 | together, boom, then, and that, you measured that, you physically measured that string

00:29:39.480 | of letters, then what you could do is you can infer sub-graphs of maybe the four A's,

00:29:46.080 | the four B's, the four C's, and the four C's, but you don't see them in the real world,

00:29:50.080 | you just infer them, and I really got stuck with that, because there's a problem, to try

00:29:55.080 | and work out what's the difference between a long, you know, physical object and the

00:30:00.480 | assembly space of the objects, so that we realised the best way to put that is infer

00:30:04.240 | in time, that, so although we can't infer your entire history, we know at some point

00:30:09.120 | the four A's were made, the four B's were made, the four C's were made, the four D's

00:30:13.080 | were made, and they all got added together, and that's one really interesting thing that's

00:30:17.720 | come out of the theory, but the killer, when we knew we were going beyond standard complexity

00:30:25.920 | theories, it was incredibly successful, is that we realised we could start to measure

00:30:30.880 | these things for real across domains, so the assembly index is actually an intrinsic property

00:30:36.580 | of all stuff that you can break into components, particularly molecules are good, because you

00:30:43.320 | can break them up into smaller molecules, into atoms, the challenge will be making that

00:30:49.240 | more general across all the domains, but we're working on it right now, and I think the theory

00:30:52.440 | will do that.

00:30:53.440 | - So components, domains, so you're talking about basically measuring the complexity of

00:30:58.920 | an object in what, biology, chemistry, physics, that's what you mean by domains?

00:31:06.240 | - Complexity of tests, complexity of computers, complexity of memes, you know.

00:31:10.520 | - Memes?

00:31:11.520 | - Yep.

00:31:12.520 | - What is that, ideas?

00:31:13.520 | - Yeah, I mean, so one of the--

00:31:15.520 | - Ideas are objects in assembly theory.

00:31:17.160 | - Yeah.

00:31:18.160 | - They are.

00:31:19.160 | - They're physical things, they're just features of the causal graph, I mean, the fact I can

00:31:21.440 | talk to you right now is because we're exchanging structure of our assembly space.

00:31:27.380 | - So conversation is the exchanging structures in assembly space, what is assembly space?

00:31:35.240 | - When I started working on Origins of Life, I was writing about something called top-down

00:31:39.080 | causation, which a lot of philosophers are interested in, and people that worry about

00:31:43.000 | the mind-body problem, but the whole idea is, if we have, the microscopic world of physics

00:31:49.840 | is causally complete, it seems like there's no room for higher-level causes, like our

00:31:54.280 | thoughts to actually have any impact on the world, and that seems problematic when you

00:31:59.480 | get to studying life and mind, because it does seem that, quote-unquote, emergent properties

00:32:04.360 | do matter to matter.

00:32:09.200 | And then there's this other sort of paradoxical situation where information looks like it's

00:32:12.480 | disembodied, so we talk about information like it can just move from any physical system

00:32:16.280 | to any other physical system, and it doesn't require, like, you don't have to specify anything

00:32:21.960 | about the substrate to talk about information.

00:32:24.480 | And then there's also, the way we talk about mathematics is also disembodied, right, like

00:32:29.080 | the platonic world of forms, and I think all of those things are hinting that we really

00:32:35.560 | don't know how to think about abstractions as physical things, and really, I think what

00:32:42.720 | assembly theory is pointing to is what we're missing there is the dimension of time, and

00:32:47.320 | if you actually look at an object being extended across time, what we call information and

00:32:53.000 | the things that look abstract are things that are entangled in the histories of those objects.

00:32:57.680 | They're features of the overlapping assembly space.

00:33:00.200 | So they look abstract 'cause they're not part of the current structure, but they're part

00:33:06.080 | of the structure if you thought about it as the philosophical concept of a hyperobject,

00:33:10.120 | an object that's too big in time for us to actually to resolve.

00:33:14.120 | And so I think information's physical, it's just physical in time, not in space.

00:33:19.240 | - Too hyperobject, too difficult for us to resolve, so we're supposed to think about

00:33:24.880 | of life as this thing that stretches through time, and there's a causation chain that led

00:33:30.160 | to that thing, and then you're trying to measure something with the assembly index about--

00:33:37.040 | - The assembly index is the ordering, you could think of it as a partial ordering of

00:33:41.960 | all the things that can happen.

00:33:44.000 | So in thermodynamics, we coarse-grain things by temperature and pressure.

00:33:48.320 | In assembly theory, we coarse-grain by the number of copies of an object and the assembly

00:33:52.960 | index, which is basically, if you think of the space of all possible things, it's like

00:33:56.560 | a depth of how far you've gone into that space and how much time was required to get there.

00:34:00.600 | - In the shortest possible version.

00:34:04.320 | Not average, 'cause can't you just 3D--

00:34:07.080 | - You're gonna kill me with that question.

00:34:10.920 | - Not 3D, can't you always 3D print the thing?

00:34:13.720 | - That's like stabbing in the heart.

00:34:15.240 | - No, because I had such fights, so Sarah's team and my team are writing this paper at

00:34:18.960 | the moment, and--

00:34:19.960 | - It's so funny.

00:34:21.480 | - I think we kinda share the, at the beginning you were like, "No, that's not right, oh yeah,

00:34:24.480 | that's right," and we're doing this for a bit.

00:34:26.320 | And then the problem is when you build a theory and build the intuition, there's some certain

00:34:30.400 | features of the theory that almost felt like I was being religious about, saying, "Right,

00:34:35.760 | you have to do this.

00:34:36.760 | A good assembly theorist does this, does this, does this."

00:34:40.760 | And Sarah's post-doc Daniel and my post-doc Abhishek, and they were both--

00:34:44.960 | - We're both brilliant.

00:34:45.960 | - They're brilliant, but they were both like, "No, we don't buy that."

00:34:49.440 | And I was like, "It is, is."

00:34:51.920 | They were like, "Well, Lee, actually, I thought you were the first to say that if you can't

00:34:56.960 | explain it, and you can't do an experiment, that it doesn't exist."

00:35:00.400 | And that saved me, and I said to Abhishek, Abhishek's my post-doc in Glasgow, Daniel

00:35:03.720 | is Sarah's post-doc in ASU, I was like, "I have the experimental data, so when I basically

00:35:09.720 | take the molecules and chop them up in the mass spec, the assembly number is never the

00:35:14.000 | average, it's always the shortest, it's an intrinsic property."

00:35:16.920 | And then the penny dropped for Abhishek, he said, "Okay."

00:35:18.960 | 'Cause I had these things that we had to believe to start with, or to trust, and then we've

00:35:23.560 | done the math, and it comes out, and they now have the shortest path, actually, it's

00:35:27.040 | up, it explains why the shortest path.

00:35:29.360 | Here's why the shortest path's important, not the average.

00:35:33.040 | Shortest path needs you to identify when the universe has basically got a memory, not an

00:35:37.800 | average.

00:35:38.800 | So what you wanna be able to do is to say, "What is the minimum number of features that

00:35:43.880 | I want to be able to see in the universe?

00:35:45.620 | When I find those features, I know the universe has had a coherent memory, and is basically

00:35:52.280 | alive."

00:35:54.320 | And so, that gives you the lower bound.

00:35:56.840 | So that's like, of course there's gonna be other paths, we can be more ridiculous, right?

00:36:01.240 | We can have other paths, but it's just the minimum.

00:36:03.560 | So probabilistically, at the beginning, because assembly theory was built as a measure for

00:36:08.760 | biosignatures, I needed to go there.

00:36:12.000 | And then I realized it was intrinsic, and then Sarah realized it was intrinsic, and

00:36:15.820 | these hyperobjects were coming, and we were kind of fusing that notions together.

00:36:19.980 | And then the team were like, "Yeah, but if I have enough energy, and I have enough resources,

00:36:25.740 | I might not take the shortest path.

00:36:27.060 | I might go a bit longer.

00:36:28.060 | I might take a really long path, because it allows me then to do something else."

00:36:33.220 | So what you can do is, let's say I've got two different objects, A and B, and they both

00:36:38.340 | have different shortest paths to get them, but then, if you want to make A and B together,

00:36:43.940 | they will have a compromise.

00:36:44.940 | So in the joint assembly space, that might be an average, but actually it's the shortest

00:36:49.740 | way you can make both A and B with a minimum amount of resource in time.

00:36:54.780 | So suddenly you then layer these things up, and so the average becomes not important,

00:36:59.860 | but as you literally overlap those sets, you get a new shortest path.

00:37:05.460 | And so what we realized time and time again when we're doing the math, the shortest path

00:37:09.220 | is intrinsic, is fundamental, and is measurable, which is kind of mind-blowing.

00:37:13.460 | - So what we're talking about, some basic ingredients, maybe we'll talk about that,

00:37:19.460 | what those basic ingredients could be, and how many steps, when you say shortest path,

00:37:23.940 | how many steps it takes to turn those basic ingredients into the final meal.

00:37:32.300 | So what's the shortest way to make a pizza?

00:37:35.020 | - Or a pie.

00:37:36.020 | - Or a pie.

00:37:37.020 | - An apple pie.

00:37:38.020 | - An apple pie, that's right.

00:37:39.020 | - And a pizza and a pie together.

00:37:40.020 | - From scratch.

00:37:41.020 | - Yeah.

00:37:42.020 | - So there's a lot of ways.

00:37:45.140 | There's the shortest way, and you take the full spectrum of ways, and there's probably

00:37:49.620 | an average duration for a noob to make an apple pie.

00:37:56.500 | Is the average interesting still?

00:37:58.460 | If you measure the average length of the path to assemble a thing, does that tell you something

00:38:05.100 | about the way nature usually does it, versus something fundamental about the object, which

00:38:14.020 | I think is what you're aiming at with the assembly index.

00:38:16.460 | - Yeah, I mean look, we all have to quantify things.

00:38:19.540 | The minimum path gives you the lower bounds, you know you're detecting something, you know

00:38:22.580 | you're inferring something.

00:38:24.180 | The average tells you about really how the objects are existing in the ecosystem or the

00:38:29.620 | technology, and there has to be more paths explored, because then you can happen upon

00:38:38.860 | other memories, and then condense them down.

00:38:41.220 | I'm not making too much sense, but if you look at, say, let's just say, I mean maybe

00:38:45.260 | we're gonna get to alien civilizations later, right?

00:38:47.380 | But I would argue very strongly that alien civilization A and alien civilization B, they're

00:38:54.300 | different assembly spaces, so they're kind of gonna be a bit messed up if they happen

00:38:57.860 | upon one another, only when they find some joint overlap in their technology, 'cause

00:39:02.420 | if aliens come to us and they don't share any of the causal graph we've showed, but

00:39:06.900 | hopefully they share the periodic table, and bonds and things, that we're gonna have to

00:39:12.100 | really think about the language to talk to us aliens by inferring, by using assembly

00:39:17.500 | theory to infer their language, their technology, and other bits and bobs, and the shortest

00:39:24.580 | path will help you do that quickly.

00:39:25.940 | - All right, so all aliens in this causality graphs have a common ancestor in the--

00:39:32.340 | - If the building blocks are the same, which means they live in the same universe as us.

00:39:35.780 | - So this is the assumption.

00:39:36.780 | - It depends on how far back in time you go, though.

00:39:38.580 | But the universe has all the same building blocks.

00:39:42.140 | - Yeah.

00:39:43.140 | - And we have to assume that.

00:39:45.900 | So there's not different classes of causality graphs, right?

00:39:53.580 | The universe doesn't just say, here, you get the red causality graph, and then you get

00:39:58.740 | the blue one.

00:39:59.740 | These basic ingredients, and they're geographically constrained, or constrained in space or time,

00:40:04.740 | or something like that.

00:40:06.220 | - They're constrained in time, 'cause only by the virtue of the fact that you need enough

00:40:11.860 | time to have passed for some things to exist.

00:40:14.720 | So the universe has to be big enough in time for some things.

00:40:17.300 | So just to one point on the shortest path versus the average path, which I think we'll

00:40:20.260 | get to this, is you had a nice way of saying it's like the minimal compression is the shortest

00:40:24.980 | path for the universe to produce that.

00:40:26.740 | But it's also like the first time in the ordering of events that you might expect to see that

00:40:31.060 | object.

00:40:32.660 | But the average path tells you something about the actual steps that were realized, and that

00:40:39.460 | becomes an emergent property of that object's interaction with other objects.

00:40:43.860 | So it's not an intrinsic feature of that object, it's a feature of the interactions with other

00:40:47.620 | things.

00:40:48.620 | And so one of the nice features of assembly is you've basically gotten rid of, you just

00:40:51.660 | look at the things that exist, and you've gotten rid of the mechanisms for constructing

00:40:54.900 | them in some sense.

00:40:56.340 | Like the machines are not as important in the current construction of the theory, although

00:41:03.140 | I would like to bridge it to some ideas about constructors.

00:41:08.140 | But then you can only communicate with things as Lee was saying if you have some overlap

00:41:13.620 | in the past history.

00:41:15.160 | So if you had an alien species that had absolutely no overlap, then there would be no means of

00:41:19.620 | communication.

00:41:21.380 | But as we progress further and further in time, and more things become possible because

00:41:27.500 | the assembly spaces are larger, because you can have a larger assembly space in terms

00:41:32.000 | of index and also just the size of the space, because it's exponentially growing, then more

00:41:36.580 | things can happen in the future.

00:41:38.340 | And the example I like to give is actually when we made first contact with gravitational

00:41:42.700 | waves, because that's an alien phenomenon that's been permeating our planet, not alien

00:41:47.660 | in life, but alien, like something we had never knew existed.

00:41:52.100 | It's been like, there's gravitational waves rippling through this room right now.

00:41:57.540 | But we had to advance to the level of Einstein writing down his theory of relativity, and

00:42:03.300 | then 100 years of technological development to even quote unquote see that phenomena.

00:42:08.620 | - So the, okay, to see that phenomena, our causal graph had to start intersecting.

00:42:15.420 | - Yeah, we needed the idea to emerge first, the abstraction, right?

00:42:19.100 | And then we had to build the technology that could actually observe features of that abstraction.

00:42:23.820 | - So the nice promising thing is over time the graph can grow so it can start overlapping

00:42:28.900 | eventually.

00:42:29.900 | - Yeah, so the interesting feature of that graph is there was an event 1.4 billion years

00:42:34.020 | away of a black hole merger that we detected on our detector, and now suddenly we're connected

00:42:41.660 | through this communication channel with this distant event in our universe that if you

00:42:46.220 | think about 1.4 billion years ago what was happening on this planet, or even further

00:42:49.900 | back in time, that there's common physics underlying all those events, but even for

00:42:55.580 | those two events to communicate with-- - Now I understand what you were going on

00:42:58.020 | about the other week.

00:42:59.020 | - Yeah, I'm sorry.

00:43:00.020 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:43:01.020 | - It's a really abstract example, but it's sort of--

00:43:03.260 | - Your causal graphs are now overlapping.

00:43:05.100 | - Yeah, so, well, let's just say now our causal graphs are overlapping in the deep past.

00:43:09.500 | - Oh, I like it, so you made it-- - I totally missed it.

00:43:12.300 | - Oh, well, the 1.6 billion.

00:43:13.820 | - You made a connection with it.

00:43:14.820 | No, I do like that.

00:43:15.820 | - No, you can tell me what your epiphany is now, that's good.

00:43:18.620 | - Because I was-- - And I should get the jokes before 30 seconds

00:43:21.140 | after, so.

00:43:22.140 | - Oh, I get it now.

00:43:23.820 | - No, it's all right, I was slow.

00:43:25.900 | - The joke came two minutes ago.

00:43:27.260 | - I'm slow on the uptake here.

00:43:28.580 | - I wasn't able to comprehend what you were talking about when saying the channel communicating

00:43:32.260 | to the past, but what you're saying is we were able to infer what happened 1.4 billion

00:43:38.620 | years ago.

00:43:40.380 | We detected the gravity wave.

00:43:41.660 | I mean, I think it's amazing that at that time we were just becoming multicellular,

00:43:46.060 | right?

00:43:47.060 | It's like insane.

00:43:48.540 | And then we progressed from multicellularity through to technology and built the detector

00:43:55.260 | and then we just extrapolate backwards.

00:43:58.980 | So although we didn't do anything back to the graph back in time, we understood its

00:44:02.740 | existence and overlapped going forward.

00:44:04.540 | - Well, that's because our graphs are larger.

00:44:06.500 | - Yeah, but that means that has a consequence.

00:44:09.300 | One of the things I was trying to say is I think, I don't know, Sarah might be, she can

00:44:15.540 | correct me, information first and I'm a object first kind of guy.

00:44:19.740 | So I mean, there's things that get constructed, there has to be this transition in random

00:44:23.660 | constructions.

00:44:25.420 | So when the object that's being constructed by the process bakes in that memory and those

00:44:32.220 | memories then add on and add on and add on.

00:44:35.700 | So as it becomes more competent in life is about taking those memories and compressing

00:44:40.740 | them increasing their autonomy.

00:44:43.860 | And so I think that, you know, like the cell that we have in biology on earth is our way

00:44:47.580 | of doing that, that really the maximum ability to take memories and to act on the future.

00:44:52.580 | - Oh, I think that's mathematics.

00:44:55.700 | - No, mathematics doesn't exist.

00:44:58.140 | - No, but that's the point.

00:44:59.500 | The point is that abstractions do exist.

00:45:02.060 | They're real physical things.

00:45:03.180 | We call them abstractions, but the point about mathematics that I think is, so I don't disagree.

00:45:10.660 | I think you're object first and I'm information first, but I think I'm only information first

00:45:15.140 | in the sense that I think the thing that we need to explain is what abstractions are and

00:45:20.660 | what they are as physical things because of all of human history, we've thought that there

00:45:24.820 | were these properties that are disembodied exist outside of the universe.

00:45:29.900 | And really they do exist in the universe and we just don't understand what their physics

00:45:34.260 | is.

00:45:35.260 | So I think mathematics is a really good example.

00:45:36.820 | We do theoretical physics with math, but imagine doing physics of math and then thinking about

00:45:43.180 | math as a physical object and math is super interesting.

00:45:46.340 | I think this is why we think it describes reality so well because it's the most copyable

00:45:49.820 | kind of information.

00:45:50.980 | It retains its properties when you move it between physical media, which means that it's

00:45:54.900 | very deep and so it seems to describe the universe really well, but it probably is because

00:45:59.900 | it's information that's very deep in our past and it's just, we invented a way of communicating

00:46:06.220 | it very effectively between us.

00:46:09.460 | Isn't math more fundamental?

00:46:11.420 | Isn't the assembly of the graph, isn't basically, I'm going to sound, I sound completely boring.

00:46:16.380 | It's like math, assembly theory invented math, but it did.

00:46:19.660 | It has to be.

00:46:21.780 | Okay.

00:46:22.780 | So what, what is, uh, what is math exactly?

00:46:29.140 | It's a, uh, a nice simplification, a simple description of what?

00:46:38.140 | So we have a computer scientist, a physicist and the chemist here.

00:46:40.740 | Walk into a bar.

00:46:42.060 | I think the chemist is going to define math and you guys can correct me.

00:46:45.660 | Go for it.

00:46:46.660 | I would say, lay it honestly.

00:46:49.660 | We're ready.

00:46:50.940 | I think the ability to, um, to label objects and, uh, and place them into classes and then

00:46:57.540 | do operations on the objects is what math is.

00:47:01.100 | So on that point, what does it mean to be object first versus information first?

00:47:07.060 | So what, what's the difference between object and information when you get to that low fundamental

00:47:11.220 | level?

00:47:12.220 | Well, I might change my view.

00:47:14.060 | So I'm stuff first, the stuff.

00:47:16.580 | And then when stuff becomes objects, it has to invent information and then the information

00:47:22.660 | acts on more stuff and becomes more objects.

00:47:24.900 | So I think there is a transition to information that occurs when you go from stuff to objects.

00:47:29.780 | I just mean time though.

00:47:31.660 | Information is emergent.

00:47:32.660 | Not emergent.

00:47:35.140 | Information is actionable memories from the universe.

00:47:40.480 | So when, when memories become actionable, that's information.

00:47:44.900 | But there's always memory, but it's not actionable.

00:47:47.460 | Yeah.

00:47:48.700 | And then it's not information.

00:47:49.700 | Great.

00:47:50.700 | And actionable is what you can create.

00:47:52.380 | You can use it.

00:47:53.740 | If you can't use it, then it's not information.

00:47:55.580 | If you can't transmit it, if you, if it doesn't have any causal consequence.

00:47:59.180 | Falls in the forest.

00:48:00.420 | I don't understand why is that not information?

00:48:03.620 | It's not information.

00:48:04.620 | It's, it's, um, it's, uh, it's stuff happening, but it's not, it's not causal.

00:48:10.180 | Yeah.

00:48:11.180 | Yeah.

00:48:12.180 | We can, this is cool.

00:48:13.180 | But it's happening.

00:48:14.180 | It requires information.

00:48:15.180 | No, no, no, no, no.

00:48:16.180 | Stuff is always happening.

00:48:18.180 | No, this is where the physicists get and the mathematicians get themselves in a loop because

00:48:21.940 | I think the universe, I mean, I think say Max Tegmark and, and is very playful and say

00:48:28.180 | like the universe, universe, just math.

00:48:30.180 | Well, the universe is just math.

00:48:31.500 | Then we might as well not bother having any conversation because the conversation already

00:48:34.980 | written, we just might as well go to the future and say, can you just give us the conversations

00:48:37.540 | happened already?

00:48:38.780 | So I think the problem is that mathematicians are so successful at labeling stuff and so

00:48:43.820 | successful understanding of stuff through those labels.

00:48:46.340 | They forget that actually those labels had to emerge and that information had to be built

00:48:51.980 | on those memories.

00:48:52.980 | So memory in the universe, so constraints graph, when they become actionable and the

00:48:57.820 | graph can loop back on itself or interact with other graphs and they can intersect those

00:49:03.100 | memories become actionable and therefore their information.

00:49:06.020 | And I think you just changed my son, my, my mind on something pretty big, but I'd have

00:49:10.540 | a pen so I can't write, I'm going to write it down later, but roughly the idea is, is

00:49:14.580 | like you've got these, these two graphs of objects of stuff that you have memories and

00:49:20.660 | then when they intersect and then they can act on each other, that's maybe the mechanism

00:49:25.580 | by which information is then, so then you can then abstract.

00:49:29.380 | So when one graph can then build another graph and say, Hey, you don't have to go through

00:49:33.340 | the nonsense we had to go through.

00:49:34.940 | Here's literally the way to do it.

00:49:36.340 | Stuff always comes first, but then when stuff builds the abstraction, the abstraction can

00:49:40.140 | be then teleported onto other stuff.

00:49:42.220 | Abstractions is the looping back.

00:49:43.220 | Yeah.

00:49:44.220 | Or, okay.

00:49:45.220 | Am I making, I dunno, I got stuck.

00:49:47.820 | Yeah.

00:49:48.820 | So first a God made stuff.

00:49:52.460 | Then after that, when you start to be able to form abstractions, that's when God is the

00:49:57.460 | memory week, the universe can remember.

00:50:00.720 | God is the memory of the universe can remember.

00:50:03.460 | Otherwise there's no way.

00:50:04.460 | Did you deciphering that statement hundreds of years from now?

00:50:08.020 | What does that mean?

00:50:09.020 | I'm not going to get into this.

00:50:10.020 | Hey, look, don't, don't diss my, my one liners.

00:50:12.580 | It took me 15 seconds to come up.

00:50:16.300 | I don't know what it means.

00:50:17.780 | What does it mean?

00:50:18.780 | Okay.

00:50:19.780 | Wait, we need to, how do we get onto this?

00:50:24.540 | We were a time causality mathematics.

00:50:30.720 | So what is mathematics in this picture of stuff, objects, memory, and information is

00:50:43.160 | what, what exactly is mathematics?

00:50:45.080 | It's the most efficient labeling scheme that you can apply to lots of different graphs.

00:50:49.960 | Labeling scheme doesn't make it sound useful.

00:50:52.520 | Can I try?

00:50:53.520 | Yep.

00:50:54.520 | Sure.

00:50:55.520 | Please.

00:50:56.520 | Have you rejected my definition of mathematics?

00:50:57.520 | I'm shocked.

00:50:58.520 | Yeah, no, I'm sorry.

00:50:59.520 | But it's correct.

00:51:00.520 | I'm sorry.

00:51:01.520 | Excellent.

00:51:02.520 | No, I mean, I think, I think we have a problem, right?

00:51:06.440 | Because we, we can't not be us, like we're stuck in the shells we are and we're trying

00:51:10.720 | to observe the world.

00:51:11.720 | And so mathematics looks like it has certain properties.

00:51:13.880 | And I guess the thought experiment I find is useful is to try to imagine if you were

00:51:18.280 | outside of us looking at us as physical systems using mathematics, what would be the specific

00:51:23.280 | features you associate to the property of understanding mathematics and being able to

00:51:29.420 | implement it in the universe, right?

00:51:33.400 | And when you do that, mathematics seems to have some really interesting properties relative

00:51:37.360 | to other kinds of abstraction we might talk about, like language or artistic expression.

00:51:43.200 | One of those properties is the one I mentioned already, that is really easy to copy between

00:51:47.200 | physical media.

00:51:48.200 | So if I give you a mathematical statement, you almost immediately know what I mean.

00:51:51.960 | If I tell you the sky is blue, you might say, is it gold ball blue?

00:51:54.880 | Is it azure blue?

00:51:55.880 | What color blue do you mean?

00:51:56.880 | And you have a harder time visualizing what I actually mean.

00:52:00.360 | So mathematics carries a lot of meaning with it when it's copied between physical systems.

00:52:03.480 | It's also the reason we use it to communicate with computers.

00:52:07.040 | And then the second one is it retains its property of actually what it can do in the

00:52:12.080 | universe when it's copied.

00:52:13.920 | So the example I like to give there is think about like Newton's law of gravitation.

00:52:19.680 | It's actually, it's a compressed regularity of a bunch of phenomena that we observe in

00:52:24.680 | the universe.

00:52:25.680 | And then that information actually is a causal in a sense that it allows us to do things

00:52:29.800 | we wouldn't be able to do without that particular knowledge and that particular abstraction.

00:52:33.520 | And in this case, like launch satellites to space or send people to Mars or whatever it

00:52:36.520 | is.

00:52:39.320 | So if you look at us from the outside and you say, what is it for physical systems to

00:52:42.840 | invent a thing called mathematics and then to use and then it to become a physical observable,

00:52:51.800 | this is kind of like the universally copyable information that allows new possibility spaces

00:52:58.400 | to be open in the future because it allows this kind of ability to map one physical system

00:53:02.440 | to another and actually understand that the general principles.

00:53:05.280 | - So is it helping the overlap of causal graphs then by mapping?

00:53:11.320 | - Oh, I think that's the explanation for what it is in terms of the physical theory of assembly

00:53:16.000 | would be some feature of the structure of the assembly spaces of causal graphs and their

00:53:20.920 | relationship to each other.

00:53:22.200 | So for example, and I mean, this is things that we're gonna have to work out over the

00:53:26.400 | next few years.

00:53:27.400 | I mean, we're in totally uncharted conceptual territory here, but as is usual diving off

00:53:33.920 | the deep end.

00:53:35.480 | But I would expect that we would be able to come up with a theory of like, why is it that

00:53:39.800 | some physical systems can communicate with each other?

00:53:43.200 | Like language.

00:53:44.200 | Language is basically because we're objects extended over time and some of the history

00:53:48.560 | of that assembly space actually overlaps.

00:53:51.160 | And when we communicate, it's because we actually have shared structure in our causal history.

00:53:54.640 | - Let me have another quick go at this, right?

00:53:56.520 | So I think we all agree.

00:53:57.520 | So I think we take mathematics for granted because we've gone through this chain, right?

00:54:04.840 | We all share a language now, okay?

00:54:06.440 | And we can, well, we share, so we have languages that we can make interoperable.

00:54:12.560 | And so whether you're speaking, I don't know, all the different dialects of Chinese, all

00:54:17.640 | the different dialects of English, French, German, whatever, you can interconvert them.

00:54:22.520 | The interesting thing about mathematics now is that everybody on planet Earth, every human

00:54:26.160 | being and computers share that common language.

00:54:29.960 | That language was constructed by a process in time.

00:54:33.480 | So what I'm trying to say is assembly invented math is those right from the, you know, mathematics

00:54:38.560 | didn't exist before life.

00:54:42.040 | Abstraction was invented by life, right?

00:54:44.240 | That doesn't mean that the universe wasn't capable of mathematical things.

00:54:47.400 | - Wait, wait a minute.

00:54:48.400 | Can we just ask that old famous question, is math invented or discovered?

00:54:52.920 | So when you say assembly invented or whatever, it means-

00:54:56.840 | - Well, someone might refer to assembly as a mathematical theory, but sorry.

00:55:01.240 | - Right.

00:55:02.240 | - Are we arguing?

00:55:03.240 | - Exactly.

00:55:04.240 | - Are we arguing now?

00:55:05.240 | - That's what it sounds like.

00:55:06.240 | Are we discovering mathematics?

00:55:07.240 | - No.

00:55:08.240 | Well, yes and no.

00:55:09.240 | I would say-

00:55:10.240 | - And you call mathematics a language that you're developing.

00:55:13.360 | - I'm pretty sure that there are some very common seeds of mathematics in the universe,

00:55:19.000 | right?

00:55:20.000 | But actually a lot of the mathematics that we are finding now is not discovered, it's

00:55:25.680 | invented.

00:55:26.680 | But even though, I think those two terms are very triggering and I don't think they're

00:55:30.480 | necessarily useful because I think that what people do, the mathematicians that say, "Oh,

00:55:35.800 | mathematics was discovered," because they live in a universe where there is no time

00:55:40.560 | and it just all exists.

00:55:42.040 | But what I'm saying is, and I think in the same way you can create, let's say I'm going

00:55:46.800 | to go and create and make a piece of art.

00:55:51.520 | Did I make that piece of art or did I discover it?

00:55:56.160 | Like inventing the airplane.

00:55:57.560 | Did I invent the airplane?

00:55:58.560 | Let's stick with the airplane.

00:55:59.560 | The airplane is a good one.

00:56:00.560 | Let's say, did I discover the airplane?

00:56:03.280 | Well in a way, the universe discovered the airplane because it just chucked a load of

00:56:05.680 | atoms together and a load of random human beings, one day stuff, and then we discovered

00:56:09.880 | the airplane in the space of possibilities.

00:56:12.280 | But here's the thing, when the space of possibilities is so vast, infinite almost, and you're able

00:56:20.720 | to actualise one of those in an object, then you are inventing it.

00:56:24.680 | So in mathematics, because there are infinite number of theorems, the fact you're actually

00:56:28.680 | pulling, there's no difference between inventing a mathematical structure and inventing the

00:56:33.520 | airplane.

00:56:34.520 | They're the same thing.

00:56:35.520 | But that doesn't mean that now the airplane exists in the universe, there's something

00:56:38.800 | weird about the universe.

00:56:41.280 | So I think that the more, this is the thing that I, you probably, the more memory required

00:56:46.960 | for the object, the more invented it is.

00:56:50.380 | So when a mathematical theorem needs more bytes to store it, the more invented it is

00:56:56.640 | and the less bytes, the more discovered it is.

00:57:00.120 | - But everything then is invented.

00:57:02.160 | It's just more or less invented.

00:57:03.960 | - Absolutely.

00:57:04.960 | - Okay.

00:57:05.960 | - The universe has to generate everything as it goes.

00:57:06.960 | - Yeah.

00:57:07.960 | And it wasn't there in the beginning.

00:57:11.160 | And the way we're thinking it, when you're thinking about the difference between invented

00:57:14.920 | and discovered is because we're throwing away all the memory.

00:57:18.560 | So if you start to think in terms of causality and time, then those things become the same.

00:57:24.000 | Everything is invented.

00:57:25.000 | - And the idea is to make everything intrinsic to the universe.

00:57:28.280 | So I think one of the features of assembly theory is we don't want to have external observers.

00:57:32.280 | There's been this long tradition in physics of trying to describe the universe from the

00:57:35.200 | outside and not the inside.

00:57:37.880 | And the universe has to generate everything itself if you do it from the inside.

00:57:41.440 | - Assembly theory describes how the universe builds itself.

00:57:44.640 | - Did it take you 15 seconds to say that?

00:57:48.920 | To come up with that also?

00:57:49.920 | - No, I've thought of that before.

00:57:50.920 | - Okay.

00:57:51.920 | That's a good line.

00:57:52.920 | - Are you making fun of me?

00:57:53.920 | - No, I'm not making fun.

00:57:54.920 | I'm having fun.

00:57:55.920 | There's a difference.

00:57:56.920 | - Oh, that's good.

00:57:57.920 | All right.

00:57:58.920 | - She's inventing fun.

00:57:59.920 | - I'm not all intimidated.

00:58:00.920 | - Yes.

00:58:01.920 | - And there's a causal history to that fun.

00:58:05.080 | So you mentioned that there's no way to communicate with aliens until there's overlap in the causal

00:58:12.080 | graph.

00:58:14.960 | Communication includes being able to see them?

00:58:18.800 | And like what are we, this is the question is, is communication any kind of detection?

00:58:26.520 | And if so, what do aliens look like as you get more and more overlap on the causal graph?

00:58:33.200 | You're assuming, let's assume that, so when you see them and they see you, you're assuming

00:58:39.680 | they have vision, they have the ability to construct in 3D and in time.

00:58:44.000 | That's a lot of assumptions we're making.

00:58:45.880 | - What detection?

00:58:46.880 | All right, let's step back.

00:58:47.880 | So yes, okay, you're right.

00:58:49.280 | So when in the English language, when we say the word see, we mean visually, they show

00:58:53.560 | up to a party and it's like, oh wow, that's an alien.

00:58:56.460 | That's visual, that's 3D, that's okay.

00:59:00.040 | And that's also assuming scale, spatial scale of something that's visible to you.

00:59:05.720 | So it can't be microscopic or it can't be so big that you don't even realize that's

00:59:09.680 | an entity.

00:59:10.680 | Okay, but other kinds of detection too.

00:59:14.120 | - I would make it more abstract and go, I was thinking this morning about how to rewrite

00:59:18.480 | the Arecibo message in assembly theory and also to abandon binary.

00:59:23.280 | 'Cause I don't think aliens necessarily, why should they have binary?

00:59:27.360 | They have some basic elements with which to do information exchange.

00:59:32.440 | - Let's make it more fundamental, more universal.

00:59:37.280 | So we need to think about what is the universal way of making a memory and then we should

00:59:40.800 | re-encode Arecibo in that way.

00:59:43.640 | - What's more basic than zeros and ones?

00:59:45.840 | - Well, it's really difficult to get out of that causal chain because we're so, so let's

00:59:49.560 | erase the idea of zero for a moment.

00:59:51.840 | It took human beings a long time to come up with the idea of zero.

00:59:55.040 | Now you've got the idea of zero, you can't throw it away.

00:59:56.880 | - That's so useful.

00:59:57.880 | - To discover the idea of zero.

00:59:59.200 | - To discover or invent.

01:00:00.200 | - I don't know, but it took a long time, so it was invented, that's right.

01:00:04.920 | - Yeah, I think zero was invented, exactly.

01:00:07.400 | So it's not a given that aliens know what zero is.

01:00:10.520 | - They just have to warn.

01:00:12.760 | - Massive assumption.

01:00:13.760 | - It's a useful discovery.

01:00:16.200 | You're saying if you break the causal chain, there might be some other more efficient way

01:00:19.760 | of representing.

01:00:20.760 | - That's why I wanna meet him and ask him.

01:00:23.320 | Or a shortcut, but you won't be able to ask him until--

01:00:27.800 | - So I interrupted you and I think you're making a good point.

01:00:29.920 | I was just gonna say, well look--

01:00:31.080 | - Thank you.

01:00:32.080 | - Sorry.

01:00:33.080 | (laughing)

01:00:34.080 | Rather than saying--

01:00:35.080 | - Please internet, tweet at him for the rude interruptions.

01:00:37.360 | Oh, go ahead, I'm sorry.

01:00:39.040 | - No, it's okay.

01:00:40.360 | Maybe it's change.

01:00:41.360 | How do we, so, oh, I don't know what it's like to be an alien.

01:00:46.000 | I would like to know.

01:00:47.600 | - What is the full spectrum of what aliens might look like to us?

01:00:52.600 | Now that we've laid this all on the table of like, all right, so there has to be some

01:00:58.920 | overlap in this causal chain that led to them.

01:01:03.960 | What are we looking for?

01:01:05.320 | What do you think we should be looking for?

01:01:07.040 | So you mentioned mass spec, measuring certain objects that aliens could create, or are aliens

01:01:13.040 | themselves.

01:01:14.040 | We show up to a planet, or maybe not a planet, or maybe, what the hell is the basic object

01:01:20.360 | we're trying to measure--

01:01:21.360 | - Well let's call ourselves a bright--

01:01:22.360 | - What's the index of?

01:01:23.360 | - Let's call ourselves a break.

01:01:24.360 | Let's assume that they are, they're metabolized, they've got an energy source, and they're

01:01:30.600 | a size that we can recognize.

01:01:32.800 | Let's give ourselves a break, 'cause there could be aliens that are so big we won't recognize

01:01:37.240 | we're seeing them.

01:01:38.240 | There might be aliens that are so small we don't yet have the ability to, you know, we

01:01:41.000 | don't have microscopes that can see far enough away that just won't be able to see them.

01:01:45.200 | - So what's a good range?

01:01:46.560 | - So let's just make a range, let's just be very anthropocentric and say we're gonna look

01:01:50.840 | for aliens roughly our size, and technology our size, because we know it's possible on

01:01:55.640 | Earth, right?

01:01:56.640 | I mean a reasonable thing to do would be to find exoplanets that are in the same zone

01:02:00.360 | as Earth in terms of heat and stuff, and then say, hey, if there's that same kind of gravity,

01:02:06.480 | same kind of stuff, we could reasonably assume that the alien life there might use a similar

01:02:13.400 | kind of physical infrastructure, and then we're good.

01:02:16.840 | So then your question becomes really relevant, say, right, let's use vision, sound, touch.

01:02:23.480 | - So okay, that's really nice.

01:02:24.960 | So if there's a lot of aliens out there, there's a good likelihood if you match to the planet

01:02:32.440 | that they're going to be in the same spatial and temporal, operating in the same spatial

01:02:38.240 | and temporal domain as humans.

01:02:41.160 | Given that, what do they look like visually?

01:02:48.080 | What do they sound like?

01:02:49.080 | What do they, oh God, this sounds creepy, taste like?

01:02:53.080 | What do they smell like?

01:02:56.000 | - It sounds like our clubhouse, and it's like, can we have sex with aliens?

01:02:59.440 | Which was basically me saying--

01:03:00.840 | - Passionate, passionate love.

01:03:01.840 | - But it wasn't actually about sex, it was about, is our chemistry compatible, right?

01:03:04.960 | Is there some--

01:03:05.960 | - Yeah.

01:03:06.960 | - Yeah, can we, yeah.

01:03:09.880 | Are they edible too?

01:03:10.880 | - Yeah, they could be very edible, they could be delicious.

01:03:12.880 | - That's why I wanna see some aliens, right?

01:03:14.840 | Because I think evolution, I mean, evolution exploits symmetry, right?

01:03:21.720 | Because why generate memory, why generate storage, the need for storage space when you

01:03:26.160 | can use symmetry?

01:03:28.640 | And symmetry is maybe quite effective in allowing you to mechanically design stuff, right?

01:03:33.120 | So maybe you could be reasonable to assume that aliens could have, they could be bipedal,

01:03:39.920 | they could be symmetric in the same way, might have a couple of eyes, or a couple of senses.

01:03:45.240 | We can make them, perhaps, there's this whole zoo of different aliens out there, and we'll

01:03:49.200 | never get to be able to classify some of the weird aliens we can't interact with, because

01:03:53.360 | they have made such weird stuff.

01:03:55.160 | But we are just going to look at, we're gonna find aliens that look most like us, why not?

01:04:00.480 | - 'Cause those are the first ones we're likely to see.

01:04:02.520 | - Yeah.

01:04:03.520 | - Yeah.

01:04:04.520 | - But I think it's really hard to imagine what the space of aliens is, because the space

01:04:08.400 | is huge, because one of the arguments that you can make about why life emerges in chemistry

01:04:13.200 | is because chemistry is the first scale in terms of building up objects from elementary

01:04:19.200 | objects, that the number of possible things that could exist is larger than the universe

01:04:24.320 | can possibly make all at once, right?

01:04:27.880 | So imagine you have two planets, and they're cooking some geochemistry.

01:04:32.080 | Our planet invented one kind of biochemistry, and presumably, as you start building up the

01:04:37.160 | complexity of the molecules, the chances of the overlap in those trajectories, those causal

01:04:41.760 | chains being built up, is probably very low.

01:04:45.360 | And it gets lower and lower as it gets further advanced along its evolutionary path.

01:04:49.200 | So I think it's very difficult to imagine predicting the technologies that aliens are

01:04:53.320 | gonna have.

01:04:54.320 | I mean, it's so, you're looking at basically, planets have kind of convergent chemistry,

01:04:59.760 | but there's some variability, and then you're looking basically at the outgrowth into the

01:05:02.920 | possibility space for chemistry.

01:05:04.200 | - So do you think we would detect the technology, the objects created by aliens before we detect

01:05:10.040 | the aliens?

01:05:11.040 | - Possibly.

01:05:12.040 | - So when you're talking about measuring assembly index, don't you think we would detect the

01:05:17.680 | garbage first?

01:05:19.360 | Like at the outskirts of alien civilizations, this is gonna be trash.

01:05:26.120 | - I think I would come back to Arecibo.

01:05:28.080 | The Arecibo message sent from the Arecibo telescope built by Drake, I think, and Sagan.

01:05:33.600 | How's Arecibo spelled?

01:05:34.600 | - A-R-E-C-I-B-O.

01:05:35.600 | - Yes, thank you.

01:05:36.600 | - And there we go, they've got it up there.

01:05:40.200 | - That's the telescope that sent the message that you're talking about.

01:05:42.640 | - So that message was sent where?

01:05:45.640 | - It was beamed at a star, a specific star, and it was sent out many years ago.

01:05:52.440 | And what they did, so this is why I was pushing on binary, it's a binary message.

01:05:56.920 | I think it's a semi-prime length number of characters, so I think 73 by 23, I think.

01:06:04.120 | And it basically represents human bit proton, binary, human beings, DNA, male and female.

01:06:10.920 | And it's really cool.

01:06:12.760 | But I'm just wondering if it could be done not making any, 'cause it made assumptions

01:06:20.680 | that aliens speak binary.

01:06:22.080 | Why make that assumption?

01:06:24.320 | Why not just assume that if the difference between physics, chemistry, and biology is

01:06:28.600 | the amount of memory that's recordable by the substrate, then surely the universal thing,

01:06:36.920 | my I'm gonna make some sacrilegious statement, which I think is pretty awesome for people

01:06:41.600 | to argue with.

01:06:42.600 | - So this is, we're looking at an image where it's the entirety of the message encoded in

01:06:48.480 | binary, and then there's probably interpretation of different parts of that image.

01:06:54.240 | There's a person, there's green parts.

01:06:58.000 | It looks like for people just listening like a game of Tetris.

01:07:01.760 | So it's encoding in minimal ways a bunch of cool information probably.

01:07:06.160 | - Representing all of us.

01:07:07.160 | - So at the top it's kind of teaching us how to count, and then it all goes all the way

01:07:09.760 | down teaching you chemistry, and then just says, but it makes so many assumptions.

01:07:14.160 | And I think if we can actually, so look, I think, I mean Sarah's much more eloquent expressing

01:07:19.760 | this, but I'll have a go and you can correct it if you want.

01:07:22.040 | Which is like, one of the things that Sarah has had a profound effect on the way I look

01:07:28.040 | at the origin of life, and this is one of the reasons why we're working together, because

01:07:32.560 | we don't really care about the origin of life.

01:07:34.240 | We wanna make life, make aliens, and find aliens.

01:07:37.780 | Make aliens, find aliens.

01:07:38.840 | I think we might have to make aliens in the lab before we find aliens in the universe,

01:07:42.400 | right?

01:07:43.400 | I think that would be a cool way to do it.

01:07:45.520 | So what is it about the universe that creates aliens?

01:07:48.400 | Well it's selection through assembly theory, creating memories.

01:07:52.680 | Because when you create memories you can then command your domain, you can basically do

01:07:58.120 | stuff.

01:07:59.120 | You can command matter.

01:08:00.920 | So we need to find a way, by understanding what life is, of how the minimal way to command

01:08:05.600 | matter, how that would emerge in the universe, and if we want to communicate, I mean maybe

01:08:10.400 | we don't want to necessarily uniformly communicate.

01:08:13.760 | What I would do perhaps if I had, is I would send out lots of probes away from Earth that

01:08:18.320 | have this magic way of communicating with aliens.

01:08:20.120 | Get them quite far away from Earth, plausibly deniable, and then send out the message that

01:08:25.760 | would then attract all the aliens, and then basically work out if they're a friend or

01:08:29.160 | foe and how they wanna hang out.

01:08:30.600 | The messages being something that has to do with the memories?

01:08:33.440 | Yes.

01:08:34.440 | Like the assembly version of Arecibo, so that everyone in the universe understands what

01:08:39.660 | life is.

01:08:41.080 | So aliens need to work out what they are.

01:08:43.440 | Once they've worked out what they are, they then can work out how to encode what they

01:08:46.400 | are, and then they can go out and send messages.

01:08:48.680 | It's like the universal, the Rosetta Stone for life in the universe is working out how

01:08:55.960 | the memories are built.

01:08:56.960 | I don't know if, Sarah, you have any, well, whether you would agree with that.

01:09:02.880 | No, I wanted to raise a different point, which is about the fact that we can't see the aliens

01:09:09.280 | yet 'cause we haven't gotten the technology.

01:09:11.960 | And presumably we think assembly theory is the right way of doing it, but I don't think

01:09:15.680 | that we know how to go from the kind of data you're describing, Lex, like visual data or

01:09:20.280 | smell to construct the assembly spaces yet.

01:09:23.360 | And in some ways, I think that the problem of life detection really is the same problem

01:09:28.440 | at the foundations of AI that we don't understand how to get machines to see causal graphs,

01:09:35.160 | to see reality in terms of causation.

01:09:38.000 | And so I think assembly and AI are gonna intersect in interesting ways, hopefully.

01:09:44.040 | But the sort of key point, and I've been trying to make this argument more recently, and might

01:09:49.840 | write an essay on it, is people talk about the great filter, right?

01:09:53.640 | Which is, again, this doomsday thing that people wanna say there's no aliens out there

01:09:57.760 | 'cause something terrible happened to them.

01:10:00.480 | And it matters whether that's in our past or our future as to the longevity of our species,

01:10:05.640 | presumably, which is why people find it interesting.

01:10:08.240 | But I think it's not a physical filter.

01:10:10.840 | It's not like things go extinct.

01:10:11.960 | I think it's literally we don't have the technology to see them.

01:10:15.800 | And you could see that with microscopes.

01:10:16.800 | I mean, we didn't know there were microbes on this table for, or tables for thousands

01:10:20.600 | of years, or telescopes.

01:10:21.600 | Like, there's so much of the universe we can't see.

01:10:23.560 | And then basically what we have done as a species is outsource our physical perceptions

01:10:28.040 | to technology, building microscopes based on our eyes, and building seismometers based

01:10:33.640 | on our sense of feelings, like feel earthquakes and things.

01:10:36.320 | And AI is basically we're trying to outsource what's actually happening in our thinking

01:10:39.600 | apparatus into machines now, into technological devices.

01:10:43.400 | And maybe that's the key technology that's gonna allow us to see things like us and see

01:10:47.440 | the universe in a totally different way.

01:10:48.760 | - But you kinda mentioned the great filter.

01:10:50.160 | Do you think there's a way through technology to stop being able to see stuff?

01:10:53.960 | So can you take a step backwards?

01:10:55.760 | - I think so, yeah.

01:10:56.760 | - Did you imply that with the great, so like--

01:10:58.480 | - Well, no, I mean, I think there's a great perceptual filter in the sense that a example

01:11:04.840 | of life evolving on a planet over billions of years has to acquire a certain amount of

01:11:09.280 | knowledge and technology to actually recognize the phenomena that it is.

01:11:14.520 | - Well, that's the sense I have, is when you talk with physicists, engineers in general,

01:11:21.000 | there's this kind of idea that we have most of the tools already just to hear the signal.

01:11:27.680 | But to me it feels like we don't have any of the tools to see the signal.

01:11:32.600 | - No, we don't know what we're doing, yeah, I agree.

01:11:34.280 | - That's the biggest, like to hear.

01:11:35.880 | We don't have the tools to really hear, to see.

01:11:39.560 | - Aliens are everywhere, we just don't have the--

01:11:41.160 | - Exactly.

01:11:42.160 | - Yeah, well, that's--

01:11:43.160 | - I mean, I got this in part, actually, 'cause you were like, last time I was here, you were

01:11:48.200 | like, "Look at the carpet."

01:11:49.200 | Could it, like if you had an alien detector, would the carpet be aliens?

01:11:52.600 | I mean, I think we really don't.

01:11:54.080 | - So it would be, but the aliens would nevertheless have a high assembly index, or produce things

01:11:59.640 | of a high assembly index.

01:12:01.320 | And those things of a high assembly index, you have to have a detector that can recognize

01:12:06.960 | high assembly index in all its forms.

01:12:09.280 | - Yeah.

01:12:10.280 | - Yes.

01:12:11.280 | - That's it, that's it.

01:12:12.280 | - Take data, construct assembly space.

01:12:13.600 | - Yeah.

01:12:14.600 | - Those patterns, basically, so one way to think about high assembly index is interesting

01:12:18.760 | patterns, of basic ingredients.

01:12:21.520 | - I can give you an example, 'cause I mean, in molecules we've been talking about, in

01:12:25.400 | objects, but we're also trying to do it in spatial trajectories.

01:12:29.160 | Like imagine you're just, like I always get bothered by the fact that when you look at

01:12:34.480 | birds flocking, you can describe that with a simple Boy's Model, or people use spin glass

01:12:38.880 | to describe animal behavior, and those are really simple physics models.

01:12:41.920 | Yet you're looking at a system that you know has agency, and there's intelligence in those

01:12:48.360 | birds.

01:12:49.360 | And basically, you can't help but think there must be some statistical signatures of the

01:12:54.000 | fact that that's a group of agents, versus, you know, like, I don't know, the physics

01:12:59.720 | example, maybe like, I don't know, Brownian motion or something.

01:13:03.840 | And so what we're trying to do is actually apply assembly to trajectory data, to try

01:13:06.880 | to say there's a minimal amount of causal history to build up certain trajectories for

01:13:12.000 | observed agents, that's like an agency detector for behavior.

01:13:15.600 | - Do you think it's possible to do some, like, Boids, or those kinds of things, like artificial,

01:13:21.840 | like cellular automata, play with those ideas with assembly theory?

01:13:28.400 | Have you found any useful, really simple mathematical, like, simulation tools that allow you to play

01:13:36.620 | with these concepts?

01:13:37.620 | So like, one, of course, you're doing math spec in the physical space with chemistry,

01:13:44.480 | but it just seems, well, I mean, computer science person, maybe, it seems easier to

01:13:48.360 | just-- - I agree with you.

01:13:49.640 | - And sexier in terms of tweeting visual information on Twitter or Instagram, more importantly,

01:13:57.800 | to play like, here's an organism of a low assembly index, and here's an organism of

01:14:02.160 | a high assembly index, and let's watch them create more and more memories, and more and

01:14:08.040 | more complex objects.

01:14:09.440 | And so like, and mathematically, you get to observe what that looks like, to build up

01:14:13.560 | an intuition of what assembly index is like.

01:14:15.880 | We are building a toolkit right now, so I think it's a really good idea, but what we've

01:14:20.000 | gotta do is, I'm kind of still obsessed with the infrastructure required, and one of the

01:14:24.720 | reasons why I was pushing on information and mathematics, when human beings, when human

01:14:29.880 | beings, we take a lot of the infrastructure for granted, and I think we have to strip

01:14:34.280 | that back a bit for going forward.

01:14:35.960 | But you're absolutely right, I would agree that, I think the fact that we exist in the

01:14:40.720 | universe, this is, like, I can see that lots of people would disagree with this statement,

01:14:45.160 | but I don't think, I don't think Sarah will, but I don't know.

01:14:48.520 | The fact that objects exist, I don't think anyone on Earth will disagree that objects

01:14:54.000 | can exist elsewhere, right?

01:14:55.960 | But they will disagree that life can exist elsewhere.

01:14:58.520 | But what perhaps I'm trying to say is that the acquisition, the universe's ability to

01:15:04.720 | acquire memory, is the very first step for building life, and that must be, that's so

01:15:12.540 | easy to happen, so therefore alien life is everywhere, 'cause all alien life is, is those

01:15:19.840 | memories being compressed and minimized, and the alien equivalent of the cell working.

01:15:24.920 | So I think that we will build new technologies to find aliens, but we need to understand

01:15:31.200 | what we are first, and how we go from physics to chemistry to biology.

01:15:36.640 | The most interesting thing, as you say, to these two organisms, different assemblies,

01:15:41.760 | is when you get into biology, biology gets more and more weird, more and more contingent.

01:15:47.000 | Physics is, chemistry is less weird, 'cause the rules of chemistry are smaller than the

01:15:50.400 | rules of biology, and then going away to physics, where you have a very nicely tangible number

01:15:57.420 | of ways of arranging things.

01:16:00.440 | And I think assembly theory just helps you appreciate that.

01:16:04.040 | And so once we get there, my dream is that we are just gonna be able to suddenly, I mean,

01:16:09.160 | I may be just being really arrogant here, I don't mean to be arrogant, it's just, again,

01:16:12.360 | I've just got this hammer called assembly, and everything's a nail, but I think that

01:16:16.440 | once we crack it, we'll be able to use assembly theory plus telescopes to find aliens.

01:16:22.520 | - Do you have, Sarah, do you have disagreements with Lee on the number of aliens that are

01:16:27.720 | out there?

01:16:28.720 | - I do, actually, yeah, well.

01:16:30.760 | - And what they look like, so any of the things we've been talking about, is there nuanced,

01:16:36.760 | it's always nice to discover wisdom through nuanced disagreement.

01:16:42.960 | - Yeah, I don't wholly disagree, but I think, but I do think I disagree, it's kind of, there's

01:16:49.920 | nuance there.

01:16:50.920 | But Lee made-- - You can disagree.

01:16:52.760 | - No, it's fine, it is nuanced, right?

01:16:55.760 | So you made the point earlier that you think, you know, once we discover what life is, we'll

01:17:02.040 | see alien life everywhere.

01:17:04.560 | And I think I agree on some levels in the sense that I think the physics that governs

01:17:07.600 | us is universal, but I don't know how far I would go to say that we're a likely phenomena,

01:17:12.720 | 'cause we don't understand all of the features of the transition at the origin of life, which

01:17:18.480 | we would just say in assembly is you go from the no-memory physics to, there's like a critical

01:17:25.520 | transition around the assembly index where assemblyness starts to increase, and that's

01:17:28.920 | what we call the evolution of the biosphere and complexification of the biosphere.

01:17:33.000 | So there's a principle of increasing assemblyness, or that goes back to what I was saying at

01:17:35.880 | the very beginning about the physics of the possible, that the universe basically gets

01:17:40.280 | in this mode of trying to make as much possibilities as possible.

01:17:45.080 | Now how often that transition happens that you get the kind of cascading effect that

01:17:50.640 | we get in our biosphere, I think we don't know.

01:17:53.120 | If we did, we would know the likelihood of life in the universe.

01:17:55.600 | And a lot of people wanna say life is common, but I don't think that we can say that yet

01:17:58.280 | till we have the empirical data, which I think you would agree with.

01:18:01.440 | But then there's this other kind of thought experiment I have, which I don't like, but

01:18:06.560 | I did have it, which is if life emerges on one planet and you get this real high density

01:18:12.840 | of things that can exist on that planet, is it sort of dominating the density of creation

01:18:17.760 | that the universe can actually generate?

01:18:19.360 | So if you're thinking about counting entropy, the universe has a certain amount of stuff

01:18:23.080 | in it, and then assembly is kind of like an entropic principle, it's not entropy.

01:18:29.160 | But the idea is that now transformations among stuff or the actual physical histories of

01:18:35.360 | things now become things that you have to count as far as saying that these things exist

01:18:40.080 | and we're increasing the number of things that exist.

01:18:44.000 | And if you think about that cosmologically, maybe Earth is sucking up all the life potential

01:18:47.600 | of the whole universe, I don't know.

01:18:49.480 | But I have-- - How's that, can you explain that a little

01:18:51.320 | bit?

01:18:52.320 | Why can any one geographical region suck up the creative capacity of the universe?

01:18:57.920 | - It's just like, I know it's a ridiculous thought, I don't actually agree with it, but

01:19:01.720 | it was just a thought experiment.

01:19:02.720 | - I love that you can have thoughts that you don't like and don't agree with, but you have

01:19:07.560 | to think through them anyway.

01:19:09.280 | - Yeah.

01:19:10.280 | - The human mind is fascinating.

01:19:12.000 | - Yeah, I think these sort of counterfactual thought experiments are really good when you're

01:19:16.640 | trying to build new theories, 'cause you have to think through all the consequences.

01:19:20.120 | And there are people that wanna try to account for, say, the degrees of freedom on our planet

01:19:25.200 | in cosmological inventories of talking about the entropy of the universe and when we're

01:19:31.040 | thinking about cosmological arrow of time and things like that.

01:19:33.440 | Now, I think those are pretty superficial proposals as they stand now, but assembly

01:19:36.720 | would give you a way of counting it.

01:19:38.440 | And then the question is, if there's a certain maximal capacity of the universe's speed of

01:19:43.160 | generating stuff, which Lee always has this argument that assembly is about time, the

01:19:47.960 | universe is generating more states.

01:19:49.460 | Really what it's generating is more assembly possibilities.

01:19:53.120 | And then dark energy might be one manifestation of that, that the universe is accelerating

01:19:57.520 | its expansion because that makes more physical space.

01:20:00.200 | And what's happening on our planet is it's accelerating in the expansion of possible

01:20:04.160 | things that exist, and maybe the universe just has a maximal rate of what it can do

01:20:07.860 | to generate things.

01:20:09.500 | And then if there is a maximal rate, maybe only a certain number of planets can actually

01:20:13.200 | do that, or there's a trade-off about the pace of growth on certain planets versus others.

01:20:17.600 | - I have a million questions there, but do you have thoughts on--

01:20:20.400 | - Yeah, just a quick, yeah, I'll just say something very quick.

01:20:22.400 | - I love that experiment.

01:20:23.400 | - No, it's good, I think I get it, I think I get it.

01:20:25.000 | So what I want to say is, when I mean aliens are everywhere, I mean memories are the prerequisite

01:20:34.040 | for aliens via selection and then concentration of selection when selection becomes autonomous.

01:20:40.440 | So what I would love to do is to build, say, a magical telescope that was a memory--

01:20:44.920 | - Magical.

01:20:45.920 | - A magical one, yeah, sorry, or a real one, that would be a memory detector to see selection.

01:20:51.480 | So you could get to exoplanets and say, "That exoplanet looks like there's lots of selection

01:20:55.240 | going on there.

01:20:56.640 | Maybe there's evolution and maybe there's gonna be life."

01:20:58.840 | So what I'm just trying to say is narrow down the regions of space.

01:21:01.080 | We can say, "There's definitely evidence of memory as high assembly there," or not high

01:21:05.920 | assembly 'cause that would be life, but where it's capable of happening, and then that would

01:21:12.440 | also help us frame the search for aliens.

01:21:14.360 | I don't know how likely it is to make the transition to cells and all the other things.

01:21:18.920 | I think you're right, but I think that we just need to get more data.

01:21:23.320 | - Well, I didn't like the thought experiment 'cause I don't like the idea that if the universe

01:21:26.680 | has a maximal limit on the amount it can generate per unit time, that our existence is actually

01:21:30.960 | precluding the existence of other things.

01:21:32.200 | - Well, I'll just say one thing--

01:21:33.200 | - But I think that's probably true anyway 'cause of the resource limitations.

01:21:35.680 | - So I don't like your thought experiment because I think it's wrong.

01:21:38.600 | Well, no, no, no, I do like the thought experiment.

01:21:41.600 | So what you're trying to say is there is a chain of events that goes back that's manifestly

01:21:46.280 | culminated with life on Earth, and you're not saying that life isn't possible elsewhere.

01:21:50.160 | You say that there has been these number of contingent things that have happened that

01:21:53.800 | have allowed life to emerge here.

01:21:56.800 | That doesn't mean that life can't emerge elsewhere, but you're saying that the intersection of

01:22:00.000 | events may be concentrated here, right?

01:22:04.240 | - Not exactly.

01:22:06.320 | It's more like if you look at, say, the causal graphs are fundamental, maybe space is an

01:22:12.960 | emergent property, which is consistent with some proposals in quantum gravity, but also

01:22:17.000 | how we talk about things in assembly theory.

01:22:19.280 | Then the universe is causal graphs generating more structure in causal graphs, right?

01:22:24.280 | So this is how the universe is unfolding.

01:22:26.320 | And maybe there's a cap on the rate of generation, like there's only so much stuff that gets

01:22:31.960 | made per update of the universe.

01:22:34.800 | And then if there's a lot of stuff being made in a particular region that happens to look

01:22:38.760 | the same locally, spatially, that's an after effect of the fact that the whole causal graph

01:22:44.280 | is updating.

01:22:45.280 | - Yeah, I don't know that.

01:22:49.160 | I think that that doesn't work.

01:22:51.000 | - I don't think it works either, but I don't have a good argument in my mind about.

01:22:53.840 | - But I do like the idea of the capacity, 'cause you've got the number of states.

01:22:57.320 | Yeah, we can come back to it.

01:22:58.840 | - Well, let me ask real quick.

01:23:00.760 | Why does different local pockets of the universe start remembering stuff?

01:23:07.680 | How does memory emerge exactly?

01:23:10.600 | So at the origin of the universe, it was very forgetful.

01:23:16.240 | That's when the physicists were happiest, those low memory objects, which is like ultra

01:23:22.440 | low memory objects, which is what the definition of stuff.

01:23:27.320 | So how does memory emerge?

01:23:31.120 | How does the temporal stickiness of objects emerge?

01:23:37.560 | - I'm gonna take a very chemocentric point of view, because I can't imagine any other

01:23:43.200 | way of doing it.

01:23:44.560 | You could think of other ways, maybe.

01:23:47.520 | But I would say heterogeneity in matter is where the memory.

01:23:53.520 | So you must have enough different ways of rearranging matter for there to be a memory.

01:23:58.660 | So what that means is if you've got particles colliding in a box, let's just take some elements

01:24:04.980 | in a box, those elements can combine in a combinatorial set of ways.

01:24:10.360 | So there's a combinatorial explosion of the number of molecules or minerals or solid objects,

01:24:15.600 | bonds being made.

01:24:17.240 | Because there's such a large number, the population of different objects that are possible, this

01:24:22.400 | goes back to assembly theory, where assembly theory, there's four types of universes, right?

01:24:27.240 | So you've got basically, and this is what was up earlier, where one universe where you've

01:24:32.880 | just got everything is possible, so you can take all the atoms and combine them and make

01:24:36.320 | everything.

01:24:37.600 | Then you've got basically what is the assembly combinatorial, where you basically have to

01:24:43.840 | accrue information in steps.

01:24:46.080 | Then you've got assembly observed, right?

01:24:49.320 | And then you've got the object assembly going back.

01:24:51.580 | So what I'm trying to say is if you can take atoms and make bonds, let's say you take a

01:24:56.200 | nitrogen atom and add it to a carbon atom, you find an amino acid, then you add another

01:25:00.200 | carbon atom on it in a particular configuration, then another one, all different molecules,

01:25:04.280 | they all represent different histories.

01:25:07.880 | So I would say for me right now, the most simple route into life seems to be through

01:25:13.600 | recording memories and chemistry.

01:25:16.200 | But that doesn't mean there can't be other ways, there can't be other emergent effects,

01:25:20.800 | but I think if you can make bonds and lots of different bonds, and those molecules can

01:25:26.360 | have a causal effect on the future.

01:25:29.560 | So imagine a box of atoms, and then you combine those atoms in some way, so you make molecule

01:25:35.800 | A from a load of atoms, and then molecule A can go back to the box and influence the

01:25:44.040 | box.

01:25:46.240 | Then you make A prime or AB or ABC, and that process keeps going and that's where the memories

01:25:52.660 | come from, is that heterogeneity in the universe from bonding.

01:25:56.480 | I don't know if that makes any sense.

01:25:58.960 | - They're beginning to flourish at the chemistry level.

01:26:04.720 | So the physicists have no, like not enough.

01:26:09.360 | They're like desperately begging for more freedom and heterogeneous components to play

01:26:20.400 | with.

01:26:21.400 | - Yeah, that's exactly it.

01:26:22.400 | - What do you think about that, Sarah?

01:26:24.760 | - I mentioned already, I think it's significant that whatever physics governs life emerges

01:26:28.960 | actually in chemistry.

01:26:30.220 | It's not relevant at the subatomic scale or even at the atomic scale.

01:26:35.160 | It's in, well, atomic scale 'cause chemistry.

01:26:38.100 | But when you get into this combinatorial diversity that you get from combining things on the

01:26:43.160 | periodic table, that's when selection actually matters, or the fact that some things can

01:26:48.600 | exist and others can't exist actually starts to matter.

01:26:52.200 | So I think of it like you don't study gravity inside the atomic nucleus.

01:26:57.200 | You study it in terms of large-scale structure of the universe or black holes or things like

01:27:00.680 | that.

01:27:01.680 | And whatever we're talking about as physics of information or physics of assembly becomes

01:27:05.520 | relevant at a certain scale of reality.

01:27:09.320 | And the transition that you're talking about, I would think of as just when you get a sufficient

01:27:13.600 | density in terms of the assembly space of like the relationship of the overlap and the

01:27:19.800 | assembly space, which is like a feature of common memory, there is this transition to

01:27:26.200 | assembly-dominated physics, whatever that is.

01:27:29.400 | Like when we're talking about, and we're trying to map out exactly what that transition looks

01:27:32.840 | like.

01:27:33.840 | We're pretty sure of some of its features, but we haven't done all of the--

01:27:37.800 | - Do you think if you were there in the early universe, you would have been able to predict

01:27:41.040 | the emergence of chemistry and biology?

01:27:43.320 | And I ask that because at this stage as humans, do you think we can possibly predict the length

01:27:50.600 | of memory that might be able to be formed later on in this pocket of the universe?

01:27:57.040 | Like how complex is, what is the ceiling of assembly?

01:28:02.880 | - I think as much time as you have in the past is how much you can predict in the future.

01:28:06.480 | 'Cause that is actually physical in the system and you have to have enough time for features

01:28:13.800 | of that structure to exist.

01:28:14.800 | - Wait, let me push back on that.

01:28:17.800 | Isn't there somewhere in the universe that's like a shortest path that's been, that stretches

01:28:22.400 | all the way to the beginning?

01:28:23.720 | - Yeah.

01:28:24.720 | - That's building some giant monster?

01:28:26.200 | - Maybe, yeah.

01:28:27.200 | - Yeah, so you can't predict the monster.

01:28:28.760 | - The universe has as much memory as the largest assembly object in the universe.

01:28:32.480 | - Yeah.

01:28:33.480 | - Right, but so you can't predict--

01:28:35.400 | - You can't predict any deeper than that, no.

01:28:37.680 | - Right, so I guess what I'm saying is like what intuition do you have about complexity

01:28:43.560 | living in the world that you'd have today, right?

01:28:46.680 | 'Cause you just, you can, I mean I guess how long, does it get more fun?

01:28:54.560 | Isn't there gonna be at some point, 'cause there's a heat death in the universe, isn't

01:28:58.120 | there going to be a point of the most, of the highest assembly of object with the highest

01:29:04.840 | probability being generated?

01:29:06.600 | - When is the universe gonna be the most fun and can we freeze ourselves and then live

01:29:09.840 | then?

01:29:10.840 | - Exactly.

01:29:11.840 | And will you know when you're having the most fun that this is the best time, you're in

01:29:15.880 | your prime?

01:29:16.880 | Are you going to do what everyone does which is deny that you're in your prime and the

01:29:20.120 | best years are still ahead of you?

01:29:23.320 | - What option do you have?

01:29:26.480 | I mean the problem is there's lots of really interesting features here.

01:29:31.360 | I just want to mention one thing that might be, is I do think assembly theory applies

01:29:35.320 | all the way back to subatomic particles and I also think that cosmological selection might

01:29:40.480 | have been actually, there might have been, I would say it's a really boring bit, but

01:29:43.920 | it's really important if you're a cosmologist that universes have gone through.

01:29:47.720 | Was it Lee Smolin who proposed this maybe?

01:29:49.760 | That there is this, that basically the universe evolves, you've got the wrong constants, we'll

01:29:53.840 | start again and the most productive constants where you can allow particles to form in a

01:29:58.200 | certain way, propagate to the next universe and we go again.

01:30:01.240 | So actually selection goes all the way back and there's these cycles of universes and

01:30:04.800 | now this universe has been selected because life can occur and it carries on.

01:30:10.480 | But I've really butchered that.

01:30:12.640 | There's a much more--

01:30:13.640 | - So there's some aspect where through the selection process there's parameters that

01:30:18.360 | are being fine-tuned and we happen to be living in one where there's some level of fine-tuning.

01:30:22.980 | Is there, given that, can you still man the case that we humans are alone in the universe?

01:30:31.480 | We're the highest assembly index object in the universe.

01:30:35.000 | - Yeah I can, I guess.

01:30:36.000 | It's sad though.

01:30:37.000 | I mean, so from a--

01:30:38.320 | - Is it possible?

01:30:39.320 | - Yes, it's possible.

01:30:41.680 | Let's assume, well we know, I mean it's possible.

01:30:47.600 | So let me, so okay, so there is a particular set of elements on Earth in a particular ratio

01:30:55.080 | and the right gravitational constant and the right viscosity of stuff being able to move

01:31:00.800 | around, the right distance from our sun, right number of events where we have a moon, the

01:31:07.840 | Earth is rotating, the late heavy bombardment produced a lot of, brought in the right stuff

01:31:16.000 | and Mars was cooking up the right molecules first so it was habitable before Earth.

01:31:23.120 | It was actually doing the combinatorial search and before Mars kind of became unhabitable,

01:31:30.280 | it seeded Earth with the right molecular replicators and there was just the right stuff on Earth

01:31:36.240 | and that's how the miracle of life occurred.

01:31:41.000 | So I find I'm very uncomfortable with that because actually, because life came so quickly

01:31:48.240 | in the Earth's past.

01:31:50.960 | But that doesn't mean that life is easy elsewhere.

01:31:55.700 | It just might mean that, 'cause chemistry is actually not a long-term thing.

01:32:00.480 | Chemistry can happen quickly so maybe going on with the steel manning of the argument

01:32:04.160 | to say actually the fact that life emerged quickly doesn't mean that life is easy.

01:32:08.400 | It just means that the chemistry was right on Earth and Earth is very special and that's

01:32:14.120 | why there's no life anywhere else in the universe.

01:32:16.720 | - Yeah, so Sarah mentioned this kind of cascading thing.

01:32:21.760 | So what if that's the reason we're lucky is that we got to have a rare cascading of, like

01:32:29.840 | an accelerating cascading effect in terms of the complexity of things?

01:32:34.560 | Like maybe most of the universe is trying to get sticky with the memory and it's not

01:32:40.240 | able to really form it and then we got really lucky in that.

01:32:43.160 | And it has nothing, like there's a lot of Earth-like conditions, let's say, but it's

01:32:47.720 | just you really, really have to get lucky on this.

01:32:51.800 | - But I'm doing experiments right now.

01:32:54.200 | In fact, experiments that Sarah and I are working on 'cause we have some joint funding

01:32:57.440 | for this where we're seeing that the universe can get sticky really quickly.

01:33:01.520 | Now of course we're being very anthropocentric, we're using laboratory tools, we're using

01:33:06.200 | theory, but actually the phenomena of selection, the process of developing heterogeneity, we

01:33:14.400 | can do in the lab.

01:33:15.400 | We're just seeing the very first hints of it.

01:33:17.840 | And wouldn't it be great if we can start to pin down a bit more precisely, becoming good

01:33:26.400 | Bayesianists for this, for the origin of life and the emergence of life, to finding out

01:33:30.760 | what kind of chemistries we really need to look for.

01:33:33.640 | And I'm becoming increasingly confident we'll be able to do that in the next few years.

01:33:38.080 | Make life in the lab or make some selection in the lab from inorganic stuff, from sand,

01:33:43.400 | from rocks, from dead stuff, from moon.

01:33:45.440 | Wouldn't it be great to get stuff from the moon, put it in our origin of life experiment

01:33:51.120 | and make moon life and restrict ourselves to interesting self-replicating stuff that

01:33:56.560 | we find on the moon?

01:33:57.560 | - Sarah, what do you think about this approach of engineering life in order to understand

01:34:03.000 | life?

01:34:04.000 | So building life in the machine.

01:34:05.720 | - Yeah, so, I mean, Lee and I are trying right now to build a vision for a large institute

01:34:14.760 | or experimental program, basically, to do this problem.

01:34:17.480 | But I think of it as like, we need to simulate a planet.

01:34:21.080 | So like the Large Hadron Collider was supposed to be simulating conditions just after the

01:34:25.120 | Big Bang.

01:34:26.120 | Lee's built a lot of technology in his lab to do these kind of selection engines.

01:34:30.240 | But the question you're asking is how many experiments do you need to run?

01:34:35.080 | What volume of chemical space do you need to explore before you actually see an event?

01:34:40.720 | And I like to make an analogy to one of my favorite particle physics experiments, which

01:34:43.720 | is Super Kamiokande that's looking for the decay of the proton.

01:34:46.640 | So this is something that we predicted theoretically, but we've never observed in our universe.

01:34:51.560 | And basically what they're doing is every time they don't see a proton decay event,

01:34:55.360 | they have a longer bound on the lifetime of a proton.

01:34:57.840 | So imagine we built an experiment with the idea in mind of trying to simulate planetary

01:35:03.000 | conditions, physically simulate.

01:35:04.480 | You can't simulate original life in a computer.

01:35:06.320 | You have to do it in an experiment.

01:35:09.000 | Simulate enough planetary conditions to explore the space of what's possible and bound the

01:35:13.200 | probability for an original life event.

01:35:15.160 | Even if you're not observing it, you can talk about the probability.

01:35:17.600 | That we hopefully, life is not exponentially rare and we would then be able to evolve in

01:35:27.240 | an automated system alien life in the lab.

01:35:31.800 | And if we can do that, then we understand the physics as well as we understand what

01:35:35.520 | we can do in particle accelerators.

01:35:37.520 | So keep expanding physically the simulation, the physical simulation until something happens.

01:35:44.280 | Yeah, or just build a big enough volume of chemical experiments and evolve them.

01:35:48.480 | When you say volume, you mean like literally volume.

01:35:50.760 | I mean physical volume in terms of space, but I actually mean volume in terms of the

01:35:54.800 | combinatorial space of chemistry.

01:35:57.920 | How do you nicely control the combinatorial exploration, the search space?

01:36:03.080 | Such that it's always like you keep grabbing the low hanging fruit.

01:36:07.880 | Yeah.

01:36:08.880 | How do you build a search engine for chemistry?

01:36:10.600 | I think you explained it really well.

01:36:11.600 | We should carry on doing this.

01:36:12.600 | We should pretend the physics, be the physicist, you be the chemist.

01:36:15.240 | So the way to do it is, I will always play a joke because I like writing grants to ask

01:36:22.840 | for money to do cool stuff.

01:36:26.320 | Years ago I started wanting to build, so I actually wanted to wear the, so I built this

01:36:31.200 | robot in my lab called the computer, which is this robot you can program to do chemistry.

01:36:36.760 | Now it's a pro, I made a programming language for the computer and made it operate chemical

01:36:42.800 | equipment.

01:36:43.800 | Originally I wrote grants to say, "Hey, I want to make an origin of life system and

01:36:49.340 | no one would give me any money for this.

01:36:51.760 | This is ridiculous.

01:36:52.760 | Why are you wanting to make it?

01:36:54.640 | It's really hard.

01:36:55.640 | It takes forever.

01:36:56.640 | You're not a very good origin of life chemist anyway.

01:36:58.520 | Why would we give you any money?"

01:37:00.560 | And so I turned it around and said, "Can you, can instead, can you give me money to

01:37:04.440 | make robots, to make molecules that are interesting?"

01:37:07.160 | And everyone went, "Yeah, okay, you can do that."

01:37:10.880 | And that's, so actually the funny thing is the computer project, which I have in my lab,

01:37:17.200 | which is very briefly, it's just basically, it's like literally an automated test tube

01:37:20.960 | and we've made a programming language for the test tube, which is cool, has come, has

01:37:26.400 | literally came from this.

01:37:28.680 | I went to my lab one day, I said, "I want to make a search engine to get the origin

01:37:31.680 | of life because I don't have a planet."

01:37:33.680 | And I thought about doing in a microfluidic format.

01:37:36.280 | So microfluidic is very nano, very small channels in device where you can basically have all

01:37:41.040 | the pipes lit up, produced by lithography, and you can have a chamber maybe say between

01:37:46.120 | say 10 and a hundred microns in volume.

01:37:48.640 | And we slot them all together like Lego and we can make an origin of life system.

01:37:53.000 | And I could never get it to work.

01:37:55.880 | And I realized I had to make, do chemistry at the kind of test tube level.

01:38:01.320 | And what you want to be able to do, yeah, it goes back to that tweet in 1981.

01:38:06.520 | - 1981, the computer, we're looking at a tweet from Lee.

01:38:10.280 | In 1981, the computer was a distant dream.

01:38:13.160 | And oh wow, this is the scientist looking back at his, the young boy who dreamed.

01:38:19.360 | In 2018, it was realized, spelled in a British way, realized.

01:38:24.320 | - Yeah, I'm starting to feel sad, but not.

01:38:27.960 | So now there's a system that does the physical manifestation or whatever the programming

01:38:32.280 | language, the spec tells you to do.

01:38:36.920 | - Yeah, well in 1981, I got my first computer, ZX81.

01:38:40.120 | - What was the computer?

01:38:42.040 | - ZX81.

01:38:43.040 | - ZX81.

01:38:44.040 | - Sinclair ZX81.

01:38:46.120 | It was, and I got a chemistry set and I liked the chemistry set and I liked the computer

01:38:53.320 | and I just wanted to put them together.

01:38:54.920 | I thought, wouldn't it be cool if I could just use the computer to control the chemistry

01:38:57.840 | set?

01:38:58.840 | And obviously that was insane.

01:39:00.560 | And I was like, you know, eight years old, right?

01:39:04.440 | Nine years old, getting on nine years old.

01:39:06.960 | And then I invented the computer just because I wanted to build this origin of life grid,

01:39:14.920 | right?

01:39:15.920 | Which is like literally a billion test tubes connected together in real time and real space,

01:39:21.200 | basically throwing a chemical die, dice, throw dice, throw dice, throw dice.

01:39:24.880 | You're going to get lucky.

01:39:26.600 | And that's what we, I think Sarah and I have been thinking very deeply about.

01:39:30.680 | Because there's more money being spent on the origin of the gravity or looking at the

01:39:37.440 | Higgs boson than the origin of life, right?

01:39:39.720 | And the origin of life is the, I think the biggest question or not the biggest question.

01:39:44.960 | It is a big question.

01:39:45.960 | Let's put it that way.

01:39:46.960 | - It is the biggest question.

01:39:47.960 | You're okay saying that.

01:39:48.960 | - Okay, all right.

01:39:50.040 | - Isn't it possible once you figure out the origin of life that that's not going to solve,

01:39:56.040 | that's not actually going to solve the question of what is life?

01:40:00.400 | Like isn't it?

01:40:01.400 | Because you're kind of putting a lot of-

01:40:02.800 | - Yeah, I think that's the same problem.

01:40:04.720 | - But you're putting, is it possible that you're putting too many, too much bets into

01:40:10.960 | this origin part?

01:40:12.240 | Maybe the origin thing isn't, isn't there always a turtle underneath the turtle?

01:40:16.640 | Isn't it a stack of turtles?

01:40:18.320 | Because then if you create it in the lab, maybe you need some other stuff.

01:40:21.600 | - Well, that's not the thing, but the origin-

01:40:24.440 | - Like in the lab, there's still memory.

01:40:26.960 | - Yeah.

01:40:27.960 | Yes.

01:40:28.960 | - Right.

01:40:29.960 | - The experiment is already the product of evolution.

01:40:31.640 | - Right.

01:40:32.640 | In some maybe really deep way, not an obvious way, in some very deep way.

01:40:36.160 | So maybe the haters are always going to be like, well, you have to reconstruct the fold.

01:40:42.080 | You have to build it from scratch.

01:40:43.080 | - Fortunately for us, the haters are not aware of that argument.

01:40:46.080 | - Well, no, I know.

01:40:47.640 | - We're the one making that argument usually, but yeah.

01:40:51.080 | - I just think that if we create life in the lab, it's not obvious that you'll get to the

01:40:56.720 | deep, deep understanding of necessarily what is the line between life and non-life.

01:41:02.760 | - No, I think so.

01:41:03.760 | Look, there's so much here.

01:41:05.000 | - I'm just like playing devil's advocate.

01:41:06.400 | - So much here, but let me play devil's advocate back in a previous conversation, right?

01:41:10.560 | And say, yeah, I will.

01:41:12.600 | Why not?

01:41:13.600 | We've got time.

01:41:14.600 | - Yeah, let's go.

01:41:15.600 | - Cellular automata.

01:41:16.600 | - Yes.

01:41:17.600 | - Cellular automata, these very simple things where you color squares black or white and

01:41:24.960 | implement rules and play them in time.

01:41:26.880 | And you can get these very, very complex patterns coming out.

01:41:31.000 | There's nice rules, there are Turing complete rules.

01:41:35.200 | And I would argue that cellular automata don't really exist on their own.

01:41:41.640 | They have to exist in a computing device.

01:41:45.160 | If that, whether it's computing devices, a piece of paper, an abstraction, a mathematician

01:41:48.080 | drawing a grid or a framework.

01:41:53.680 | Now, so I would argue CAs are beautiful things, simple going complex, but the complexity is

01:41:59.360 | all borrowed from the lithography, the numbers.

01:42:02.680 | Right, now let's take that same argument with the chemistry experiment, origin of life.

01:42:11.240 | What you need to be able to do is go out, and I'm inspired to do this, to go out and

01:42:14.200 | look for CAs that occur in nature.

01:42:17.800 | You know, let's kind of, let's find some CAs that just emerge in our universe.

01:42:24.480 | - And for people, just to interrupt, for people just listening and in general, I think what

01:42:29.640 | we're looking at is a cellular automata where again, as Lee described, there is just binary

01:42:36.200 | black or white squares, and they only have local information, and they're born and they

01:42:41.720 | die.

01:42:42.920 | And you would think nothing interesting would emerge, but actually what we're looking at

01:42:46.560 | is something that I believe is called glider guns, or a glider gun, which is moving objects

01:42:54.560 | in this multi-cell space that look like they're organisms that have much more information,

01:43:01.320 | that have much more complexity than the individual building components, in fact look like they

01:43:06.760 | have a long-term memory.

01:43:10.040 | While the individual components don't seem like they have any memory at all, which is

01:43:14.560 | fascinating.

01:43:15.560 | - Yes, the argument here is that has to exist on all this layer of infrastructure, right,

01:43:20.240 | and though it looks simple.

01:43:21.720 | And then what I would make, the argument I would make if I were you, say, well I think

01:43:24.960 | CAs are really simple and everywhere, is say, show me how they emerge in a substrate.

01:43:29.680 | Now let's go to the origin of life, or machine.

01:43:32.600 | I don't think we want to do the origin of life, just any origin is good.

01:43:36.640 | So what we do, so we literally have our sand shaker, shake the sand, like massive grid

01:43:41.180 | of chemistry experiments, shaking sand, shaking whatever.

01:43:45.400 | And then because we know what we've put in, so we know how we've cheated, and the same

01:43:48.840 | way with CA, we know how we've cheated, we know the number of operations needed, we know

01:43:52.400 | how big a grid we want to get this.

01:43:54.740 | If we could then say, okay, how can we generate this recipe in the lab and make a life form,

01:44:03.720 | what contingency did we need to put in, and we're up front about how we cheated, okay,

01:44:09.480 | say oh you had to shake it, it was periodic, planet rotates, stride comes in and out.

01:44:15.880 | So and then we can start to basically say, okay, how difficult is it for these features

01:44:21.560 | to be found, and then we can look for exoplanets and other features.

01:44:25.360 | So I think Sarah's absolutely right, we want to explain to people we're cheating.

01:44:29.360 | In fact, we have to cheat.

01:44:30.820 | No one has given, I'm good at writing grants, well I used to be, I'm not very good right

01:44:33.800 | now, I keep getting rejected, but writing a grant for a planet in 100 million years,

01:44:38.140 | no grant funder is gonna give me that, but maybe money to make a kind of a grid, a computer

01:44:43.460 | grid, origin of life computer grid.

01:44:47.000 | In physical space.

01:44:48.320 | And just do it.

01:44:49.320 | - So Sarah said something, which is you can't simulate the origin of life in a computer,

01:44:56.420 | so like in simulation, why not?

01:45:00.220 | You said it very confidently, so is it possible?

01:45:05.200 | And why would it be very difficult?

01:45:06.800 | What's your intuition there?

01:45:08.880 | - I think it's very difficult right now 'cause we don't know the physics, but if you go based

01:45:13.840 | on principles of assembly theory and you think every molecule is actually a very large causal

01:45:18.180 | graph, not just the molecule, then you have to simulate all the features of those causal

01:45:22.100 | graphs, and I think it becomes computationally intractable, you might as well just build

01:45:25.520 | the experiment.

01:45:27.140 | - 'Cause you have, in the physical space, you have all the objects with all the memories,

01:45:32.860 | and in the computer, you would have to copy them or reconstruct them.

01:45:36.700 | - That's beautifully put, and I would say that lots of people, you just don't have enough

01:45:43.340 | resources.

01:45:45.380 | It's easier to actually do the physical experiment because we are literally, I would view the

01:45:50.460 | physical experiment almost like a computational experiment.

01:45:54.380 | It's just basically we're just outsourcing all the matrix.

01:45:57.780 | - And on your point about the experiment being also an example of life, it's almost like

01:46:04.460 | you wanna design, it's like all of us are lineages of propagating information across

01:46:09.820 | time, and so everything we do becomes part of life because it's part of that causal chain.

01:46:14.240 | So it's like you wanna try to pinch off as much as you can of the information from your

01:46:17.980 | causal chain that goes into the experiment, but you can't pinch off all of it to move

01:46:22.240 | it to a different timeline.

01:46:23.760 | It's always gonna be part of your timeline, but at least if you can control how much information

01:46:27.020 | you put in, you can try to see how much does that particular trajectory you set up start

01:46:31.540 | generating its own assembly.

01:46:33.900 | So you know where it starts, and then you wanna try to see it take off on its own when

01:46:38.780 | you try to pinch it off as much as possible.

01:46:42.380 | - Got it.

01:46:43.860 | Quick pause, bathroom break.

01:46:45.420 | - Yes.

01:46:46.420 | - All right, cool.

01:46:47.700 | And now we're back.

01:46:49.660 | All right, we talked about the early days of the universe when there was just stuff

01:46:54.420 | and no memory, not even causality.

01:46:57.240 | I think Lee at least implied that causality is emergent somehow.

01:47:00.680 | We could discuss this.

01:47:02.100 | What happened before this all originated?

01:47:07.580 | What's outside the universe?

01:47:09.140 | - Defined by zero.

01:47:11.620 | - Okay, so it's not relevant, not understandable.

01:47:16.500 | Is it useful to even ask the question?

01:47:18.660 | - No.

01:47:19.660 | - Just because it's so hard?

01:47:22.020 | - No, it's not hard.

01:47:23.020 | It's just not a question.

01:47:24.980 | If I can't do an experiment or even think of an experiment, the question doesn't exist.

01:47:28.900 | - Well, no, you can't think of a lot of experiments, no offense.

01:47:34.260 | - What I mean is if I can't--

01:47:35.260 | - 'Cause your causality graph is like, this is what we've been talking about.

01:47:40.540 | There is limits to your ability to construct experiments.

01:47:45.660 | - I agree, but I'll be facetious and I'll try to make a point.

01:47:49.380 | I think that if there is a causal bottleneck through which information can't propagate

01:47:58.660 | in principle, then it's very hard to think of an experiment, even in principle, even

01:48:04.980 | one that's beyond my mediocre intellect, which is fine.

01:48:09.420 | I'm happy to accept that.

01:48:11.020 | But this is one of the things I actually do think there was something before the Big Bang

01:48:14.780 | 'cause I would say that I think the Big Bang just couldn't occur and create time.

01:48:19.780 | Time created the Big Bang.

01:48:21.420 | - So there was time before the Big Bang?

01:48:23.380 | - Yeah.

01:48:24.380 | - There was no space, but there was time?

01:48:26.380 | - Yeah.

01:48:27.380 | Yeah.

01:48:28.380 | But I mean, I'm just making that stuff up just to make all the physicists happy, but

01:48:31.100 | I think it's--

01:48:32.100 | - Do you think that would make them happy?

01:48:33.940 | 'Cause they would be quite upset, actually.

01:48:35.940 | - Why would they be upset?

01:48:37.340 | - 'Cause they would say that time can't exist before the Big Bang.

01:48:41.740 | - Yeah, I mean, this goes back to an argument that you might not want to have the argument

01:48:45.500 | here.

01:48:46.500 | I was talking to Sarah earlier today about an argument we had about time a long time

01:48:50.500 | ago.

01:48:51.500 | - Yeah.

01:48:52.500 | - A long time in time.

01:48:53.500 | And what I would, it's like, I think there is this thing called time or state creation.

01:48:57.260 | The universe is creating states and it's outside of space, but they create space.

01:49:02.180 | So what I mean is, you can imagine there are states being created all the time and there

01:49:06.300 | is this thing called time, time as a clock, which you can use to measure when things happen.

01:49:12.700 | But that doesn't mean, because you can't measure something, that states aren't being created.

01:49:17.380 | And so you might locally refer to the Big Bang and the Big Bang occurred at some point

01:49:25.460 | in when those states were there.

01:49:27.820 | Probably there had to be enough states for the Big Bang to occur.

01:49:31.340 | And then, but I think that there is something wrong with our conception of how the universe

01:49:36.380 | was created and the Big Bang, because we don't really get time.

01:49:41.060 | Because again, I don't want to become boring and sound like a broken record, but time is

01:49:47.420 | a real thing.

01:49:49.120 | And until I can really explain that more elegantly, I'm just going to get into more trouble.

01:49:54.260 | - We're going to talk about time, because time is a useful measuring device for experiments,

01:49:59.540 | but also time is an ideal, okay.

01:50:02.340 | But let me first ask Sarah, what do you think?

01:50:04.940 | Is it a useful question to ask what happened before the Big Bang?

01:50:08.740 | Is it a useful question to ask what's outside the universe?

01:50:15.140 | - So I would think about it as the Big Bang is an event that we reconstructed as probably

01:50:20.420 | happening in the past of our universe, based on current observational data.

01:50:24.420 | And so the way I like to think about it is, we exist locally in something called a universe.

01:50:33.180 | So and going back to like the physics of existence, we exist locally in the space of all things

01:50:37.980 | that could exist.

01:50:39.320 | And we can infer certain properties of the structure of where we exist locally.

01:50:43.660 | And one of the properties that we've inferred in the past is that there is a thing we call

01:50:50.180 | the Big Bang.

01:50:51.180 | And we have signatures of our local environment that indicate that there was a very low information

01:50:58.620 | event that started our universe.

01:50:59.900 | I think that's actually just an artifact of the structure of the assembly space that when

01:51:07.180 | you start losing all the memory in the objects, it looks like what we call a Big Bang.

01:51:13.440 | So I think it makes sense to talk about where you are locally.

01:51:16.260 | I think it makes sense to talk about counterfactual possibilities, what could exist outside the

01:51:21.220 | universe in the sense that they become part of our reasoning, and therefore part of our

01:51:25.620 | causal chain of things that we can do.

01:51:28.660 | So like the multiverse in my mind exists, but it doesn't exist as a multiverse of possible

01:51:33.820 | universes.

01:51:34.820 | It exists as an idea in our minds that allows us to reason about how physics works, and

01:51:38.540 | then to do physics differently because we reason about it that way.

01:51:42.240 | So I always like to recenter it on things exist, but they don't always exist like we

01:51:48.440 | think they exist.

01:51:50.540 | So when we're thinking about things outside the universe, they absolutely exist because

01:51:54.260 | we're thinking about them, but they don't look like the projections in our minds.

01:51:59.900 | They're something else.

01:52:00.900 | And something you said just gave me an idea.

01:52:02.180 | So I'll go back to your question.

01:52:04.820 | If there was caught, I mean, if something caused the Big Bang, if there was some memory

01:52:10.740 | or some artifact of that, then of course, to answer your question, it's worth going

01:52:14.240 | back to that because that would imply there is something beyond that barrier, that filter.

01:52:19.780 | And that's what you were saying, I guess.

01:52:20.780 | Right.

01:52:21.780 | I'm agnostic to what exists outside the universe.

01:52:23.860 | I just don't think that.

01:52:24.860 | Like I think the most interesting things for us to be doing are finding explanations that

01:52:28.820 | allow us to do more, like that optimism.

01:52:32.760 | So I tend to draw the boundary on questions I ask as being scientific ones because I find

01:52:38.540 | that that's where the most creative potential is to impact the future trajectory of what

01:52:42.900 | we're doing on this planet.

01:52:43.900 | It's interesting to think about the Big Bang is basically from our current perspective

01:52:48.660 | of what we're able to detect, it's the time when things were forgotten.

01:52:52.820 | Yes.

01:52:53.820 | It's the time to reset from our limited perspective.

01:52:58.660 | And so the question is, is it useful to ever study the thing that was forgotten?

01:53:03.980 | Or should we focus just on the memories that are still there?

01:53:08.460 | The point I was trying to make about the experiment is I was trying to say both things.

01:53:11.920 | And I think perhaps yes, from the following point of view, if you could then imagine what

01:53:16.260 | was forgotten and then work forwards, you will have different consequences.

01:53:20.980 | So then it becomes testable.

01:53:22.780 | So as long as we can find tests, and it's definitely worth thinking about, what I don't

01:53:26.900 | like is when physicists say what happened before the Big Bang and before, before, before,

01:53:31.300 | without giving me any credible conjecture about how would we know the difference.

01:53:38.380 | The way you framed it is quite nice.

01:53:39.700 | I like that.

01:53:40.700 | It's like, what have we forgotten?

01:53:43.660 | Is there a room for God in assembly theory?

01:53:47.980 | Who's God?

01:53:49.580 | I like arguments for a necessary being better than God.

01:53:52.820 | Well I think I said it earlier.

01:53:53.820 | What's a necessary being?

01:53:54.820 | Like something that has to exist.

01:53:57.220 | Oh, so you like, I mean, you like the shortest path.

01:54:01.220 | Like does God need?

01:54:02.220 | No, no, no.

01:54:03.220 | I mean, well you can go back to like Thomas Aquinas and arguments for the existence of

01:54:08.340 | God, but I think most of the interesting theological arguments are always about whether something

01:54:14.020 | has to exist or there was a first thing that had to exist.

01:54:17.300 | But I think there's a lot of logical loopholes in those kinds of arguments.

01:54:20.300 | So God here meaning the machine that creates, that generates the stuff.

01:54:30.180 | So what I was trying to say earlier is that-

01:54:31.620 | Isn't that just the universe?

01:54:32.620 | Yeah, yeah.

01:54:33.620 | Well, yeah, well, but there's a difference between, I imagine like a black box, like

01:54:38.860 | a machine.

01:54:39.860 | Yeah.

01:54:40.860 | That's, then I would be more comfortable calling that God, because it's a machine.

01:54:45.260 | You go into a room and there's a thing with a button.

01:54:47.260 | Yeah, I don't like the great programmer in the sky version.

01:54:50.020 | Yeah, but if it's more kind of, like I don't like to think of, if you look at a cellular

01:54:56.780 | automata, if it's the cells and the rules, that doesn't feel like God that generates

01:55:05.020 | a bunch of stuff.

01:55:06.340 | But if there's a machine that runs the cellular automata and set the rules, then that feels

01:55:14.260 | like God.

01:55:15.260 | That sort of, in terms of terminology.

01:55:19.300 | So I wonder if there's like a machine that's required to generate this universe.

01:55:23.420 | It's very sort of important for running this in the lab.

01:55:26.940 | So as I said earlier, I think I said this earlier, that I can't remember the phrase,

01:55:30.900 | but something like, I mean, does God exist in our universe?

01:55:34.540 | Yes.

01:55:35.540 | Where does God exist?

01:55:36.540 | God at least exists in the abstraction in our minds, particularly of people who have

01:55:42.860 | religious faith they believe in.

01:55:45.100 | But let's then take your, but you're talking a little bit more about generic, say, well,

01:55:49.300 | is there a mechanism beyond the universe you're calling God?

01:55:51.900 | I would say God did not exist at the beginning, but he or she does now.

01:55:59.900 | Because I'm saying the mechanism-

01:56:00.900 | Well, you don't know that he didn't exist in the beginning.

01:56:03.600 | So like this could be us in our minds trying to, like just what, listening to gravitational

01:56:10.060 | waves, detecting gravitational waves.

01:56:12.220 | It's the same thing as us trying to go back further and further into our memories to try

01:56:18.540 | to understand the machines that make up us.

01:56:23.420 | So it's possible that we're trying to grasp at possible kind of, what kind of machines

01:56:30.260 | could create.

01:56:32.620 | There's always a tweet.

01:56:34.180 | There's always a tweet.

01:56:35.860 | If the universe is a computer, then God must have built it because computers need creators.

01:56:41.260 | There you go.

01:56:43.380 | And then Joshe Bach replied, "Since there's something rather than nothing, perhaps existence

01:56:49.660 | is the default."

01:56:50.660 | Hmm.

01:56:51.660 | "If existence is the default, then many computers exist.

01:56:56.860 | Creator gods are necessary computers, unnecessarily computers too."

01:57:00.660 | I'm very confused by that.

01:57:01.940 | But that's an interesting idea that existence is the default versus non-existence.

01:57:05.780 | I agree with that, but the rest is-

01:57:07.660 | And then Lee responds, "Perhaps this reasoning is incomplete."

01:57:12.860 | That's how scientists talk trash to each other on Twitter, apparently.

01:57:16.420 | Which part don't you agree with?

01:57:18.820 | When he said, "If existence is the default, then many computers exist," this comes back

01:57:22.580 | to the inventor and discovery argument.

01:57:26.300 | I would say the universe at the beginning wasn't capable of computation because there

01:57:31.980 | wasn't enough technology, enough states.

01:57:34.940 | So what you're saying is if God is a mechanism...

01:57:38.660 | So I might actually agree, but then the thing is lots of people see God as more than a mechanism.

01:57:44.580 | For me, God could be the causal graph in assembly theory that creates all the stuff and the

01:57:48.980 | memories we know.

01:57:49.980 | And the fact that we can even relate to each other is because we have the same...

01:57:53.860 | We share that heritage.

01:57:54.860 | And why we love each other or we like to see God in each other is it's just...

01:58:02.140 | We know we have a shared existence.

01:58:04.860 | So if God is the mechanism that created this whole thing, I think a lot of people see God

01:58:10.180 | in a religious sense as that mechanism also being able to communicate with the objects

01:58:16.620 | it creates.

01:58:18.340 | And if it's just the mechanism, we won't be able to communicate with the objects it creates.

01:58:23.660 | It can only create.

01:58:24.660 | It can't interact with the...

01:58:28.420 | Well, there's versions of God that create the universe and then left.

01:58:32.260 | You know?

01:58:33.260 | Yeah, like spark.

01:58:35.420 | For some religions, but...

01:58:36.420 | The first spark, yeah.

01:58:37.420 | Yeah, but I think I liked your analogy of the machine and the rules, right?

01:58:42.420 | But I think part of the problem is, I mean, we have this conception that we can disentangle

01:58:49.900 | the rules from the physical substrate, right?

01:58:51.740 | And that's the whole thing about software and hardware being separate or the way Newton

01:58:55.180 | wrote his laws that there was some...

01:58:57.380 | They exist outside the universe.

01:58:58.380 | They're not actually a feature of the universe.

01:58:59.900 | They don't have to emerge out of the universe itself.

01:59:03.180 | So I think if you merge your two views, then it gets back to the God is the universe.

01:59:08.620 | And then I think the deeper question is, why does it seem like there's meaning and purpose?

01:59:13.300 | And if I think about the features of the universe that give it the most meaning and purpose,

01:59:18.020 | those are what we would call the living components of the universe.

01:59:21.140 | So if you wanted to say God is a physically real thing, which you were saying is like

01:59:25.380 | an emergent property of our minds, but I would just say, the way the universe creates meaning

01:59:30.540 | and purpose, there is really a physics there.

01:59:32.900 | It's not like a illusory thing.

01:59:35.060 | And that is just what the physics of life is.

01:59:39.220 | Is it possible that we've forgotten much of the mechanisms that created the universe?

01:59:44.620 | Mm-hmm.

01:59:45.620 | Yes.

01:59:46.620 | So basically, whatever God is that mechanism, we just leave parts of that behind.

01:59:52.300 | Well, but the universe is constantly generating itself.

01:59:54.780 | So if God is that mechanism, it would be that that would still be active today.

01:59:59.340 | I'm agnostic, but if I recall the things I believe in God in the way that some people

02:00:06.620 | talk about God, I would say that God is in the universe now.

02:00:12.340 | It's not an absent thing.

02:00:16.380 | So I think there's a mislabeling here because you're, I mean, I'm a professional idiot,

02:00:24.940 | actually.

02:00:25.940 | But-

02:00:26.940 | You should put that on your CV.

02:00:29.940 | Yeah.

02:00:30.940 | Professionally.

02:00:31.940 | Not recreationally or amateur, but professionally.

02:00:34.820 | I think I would say if you were talking about God, I mean, again, I'm way out, way out

02:00:39.700 | my depth here and I'm almost feeling, you know, I feel quite uncomfortable articulating,

02:00:43.420 | but I'll try.

02:00:44.420 | For me, a lot of people that think of God as a consciousness, a reasoning entity that

02:00:49.180 | actually has causal power and you're-

02:00:53.140 | Human like intelligence.

02:00:54.140 | And you're, and so you're like, then you're saying like gravity could be God or time could

02:00:58.340 | be God.

02:00:59.340 | I mean, I think for me, my conception of time is probably as fundamental as God because it

02:01:04.860 | gave rise to human intelligence and consciousness in which we can have this abstract notion

02:01:09.800 | of God.

02:01:12.140 | So I think that you're maybe talking about God in a very mechanistic kind of unsophisticated

02:01:18.460 | sense, whereas other people would say that God is more sophisticated and got all this,

02:01:22.380 | you know, feelings and love and, you know, and this abstracting ability.

02:01:27.180 | So is that what, or do you mean that?

02:01:29.500 | Do you mean God as in this conscious entity that decided to flick the universe into existence?

02:01:36.260 | Well, one of the features that God would have is the ability to flick the universe into

02:01:44.820 | existence.

02:01:45.820 | I, you know, like Windows 95, I don't know if God is Windows 95 or Windows XP or Windows

02:01:52.620 | 10.

02:01:53.620 | I don't know the full feature set.

02:01:55.780 | So the very least you have to flick the universe into existence.

02:02:00.080 | And then other features might include ability to interact with that universe in interesting

02:02:06.620 | ways.

02:02:07.820 | And then how do you interact with the universe in interesting ways?

02:02:11.780 | You have to be able to speak the language of its different components.

02:02:15.320 | So in order to interact with humans, you have to know how to act human-like.

02:02:24.980 | So I don't know, but it seems like whatever mechanism created the universe might want

02:02:37.220 | to also generate local pockets of mechanisms that can interact with that.

02:02:42.760 | Like inject.

02:02:43.760 | Like God was lonely?

02:02:46.020 | Yeah, it was lonely.

02:02:47.420 | I mean, it could be just a teenager and another just playing a video game.

02:02:51.740 | Yeah, maybe.

02:02:52.740 | I mean, I don't, so this is referring to our origin of life engine.

02:02:57.340 | It's like, I don't believe in God, but that doesn't mean I don't want to be one.

02:03:00.860 | Right.

02:03:01.860 | Because I want to make a universe and make a life form.

02:03:04.580 | But that may be rude to people who have, you know, dear religious beliefs.

02:03:08.700 | What I mean by that is, if we are able to create an entirely new life form, different

02:03:15.780 | chemistry, different culture, what does it make up?

02:03:21.100 | By that definition, it makes us gods, right?

02:03:22.980 | Well, there is.

02:03:23.980 | I mean, like when you have children, you're like one of the magical things of that is

02:03:28.180 | you're kind of mini gods.

02:03:29.540 | I mean, first of all, from a child's perspective, parents are gods for quite a while.

02:03:35.340 | And then, I mean, in a positive sense, there's a magic to it.

02:03:39.540 | That's why I love robotics, is you instill life into something.

02:03:43.640 | And that makes you feel god-like in a sort of positive way.

02:03:50.180 | Being a creator is a positive feeling.

02:03:52.140 | Yeah, exactly.

02:03:53.140 | And a small scale.

02:03:54.140 | And then god would be a creator at the largest possible scale, I suppose.

02:03:59.900 | Okay.

02:04:00.900 | You mentioned offline the Assembletron.

02:04:03.140 | Assemblytron.

02:04:04.140 | Assemblytron.

02:04:05.140 | Yep.

02:04:06.140 | What's an Assemblytron?

02:04:07.140 | This is an early idea of something you're thinking about.

02:04:12.660 | So Sarah's team, well, I think Sarah's team are interested in using AI to understand life.

02:04:19.540 | My team is.

02:04:20.540 | And I'm wondering if we could apply the principles of assembly theory, that is, the causal structure

02:04:27.980 | that you get with assembly theory, and hybridize it and make a new type of neuron, if you like.

02:04:34.700 | I mean, there are causal neural networks out there, but they are not quite the architecture

02:04:40.500 | like what I would like.

02:04:41.860 | I would like to associate memory bits with, basically, I'd like to make a, rather than

02:04:48.180 | have an ASIC for neural networks, I want to make an ASIC for assembly networks.

02:04:53.900 | Can you say that again?

02:04:57.540 | Assembly networks.

02:05:00.540 | So what is a thing with an input and an output, and it's like a neural network type of thing,

02:05:07.620 | what does it do exactly?

02:05:08.620 | What's the input?

02:05:09.620 | What's the output?

02:05:10.620 | So in this case, if you're talking about a general neural network, I mean, in general

02:05:13.980 | neural network, you can train it on any sort of data, depending on the framework, whether

02:05:20.420 | it's like text or image data or whatnot.

02:05:26.060 | And that's fine, but there's no causal structure associated with that data.

02:05:31.420 | Now just imagine, rather than, let's say we're going to classify a difference between cat

02:05:35.380 | and dog, classic cat and dog neural network.

02:05:38.220 | What about if the system understood the assembly space that created the cat and the dog.

02:05:45.540 | And rather than guessing what was happening and training on those images and not understanding

02:05:50.100 | those features, you almost like, you could imagine going back a step and doing the training.

02:05:59.420 | Going back a step and doing the training.

02:06:01.160 | Going back a step, back a step, back a step.

02:06:03.420 | And I wonder if that is actually the origin of intelligence or how we'll crack intelligence.

02:06:09.100 | Because we need to, because we'll create the entire graph of events and be able to kind

02:06:16.820 | of look at cause and effect across those graphs.

02:06:19.100 | I'm explaining it really badly, but it's a gene of an idea and I'm guessing very smart,

02:06:24.700 | very rich people in AI are already doing this.

02:06:29.700 | Trying to not generate cats and dogs, but trying to generate things of high assembly

02:06:34.460 | index.

02:06:35.460 | - Yeah, and I think, and also using causal graphs in neural networks and machine learning

02:06:41.700 | and deep learning, maybe building a new architecture.

02:06:44.300 | I'm just wondering, is there something we can get out of assembly theory allows us to

02:06:47.660 | rebuild current machine learning architectures to give causation more cheaply.

02:06:54.860 | I mean, I don't know if that's what you, we've been inventing this for a little while, but

02:06:58.740 | we're trying to finish the theory paper first before we do anything else.

02:07:01.540 | - Yeah, you also want to have say goal-directed behavior in neural networks, then assembly

02:07:06.940 | theory is a good framework for doing that.

02:07:08.740 | Daniel's been thinking about that a lot.

02:07:10.540 | And I think it's a really interesting idea that you can map concepts from how neural

02:07:15.540 | networks learn to thinking about goal-directed behavior as a learning process, that you're

02:07:20.220 | learning a specific goal.

02:07:21.340 | The universe is learning a goal when it generates a particular structure and that you could

02:07:24.580 | map that physical structure in a neural network.

02:07:27.260 | - How, what's the goal?

02:07:31.980 | - Well in a neural network, you're designing the goal in biology.

02:07:37.300 | I mean, people are not supposed to use teleological language in biology, which is ridiculous,

02:07:44.060 | 'cause goals are real things.

02:07:45.220 | They're just post-selected.

02:07:46.420 | So you can talk about goals after the fact.

02:07:51.220 | Once a goal emerges in the universe, that physical entity has a goal.

02:07:55.260 | So Lee and I came up with a test for, like a Turing test for goal-directed behavior based

02:08:00.620 | on the idea of assembly.

02:08:01.620 | Like we have to formalize this still, but I would like to write a paper on it.

02:08:04.660 | But like the basic idea is like if you had two systems that were completely equivalent,

02:08:12.820 | you know, like in the instantaneous like physical experimental setup, so Lee has to figure out

02:08:16.820 | how to do this.

02:08:18.380 | But there was something that would be different in their future.

02:08:21.940 | There was a symmetry breaking you observe in the present based on that possibility of

02:08:25.260 | that future outcome.

02:08:26.660 | Then you could say that that system had some representation of some kind of goal in mind

02:08:30.900 | about what it wanted to do in the future.

02:08:33.580 | And so goals are interesting because they don't exist as instantaneous things.

02:08:38.820 | They exist across time, which is one of the reasons that assembly theories may be more

02:08:43.180 | naturally able to account for the existence of goals.

02:08:48.260 | So goals are, they only exist in time or they manifest themselves in time through, you said

02:08:57.220 | symmetry breaking.

02:08:58.700 | So it's almost like, imagine like if representations in your mind are real, right?

02:09:05.660 | And you can imagine future possibilities, but imagine everything else is physically

02:09:09.900 | equivalent and the only thing that you actually change your decision based on is what you

02:09:14.860 | model as being the future outcome.

02:09:17.540 | Then somehow that representation in your mind of the future outcome becomes causal to what

02:09:21.780 | you're doing now.

02:09:22.780 | So it's kind of like retrocausal effect, but it's not actually retrocausal.

02:09:26.020 | It's just that your assembly space is actually includes those possibilities as part of the

02:09:32.260 | structure.

02:09:33.260 | It's just, you're not observing all the features of the assembly space in the current moment.

02:09:35.780 | Well, the possibilities exist, but they don't become a goal until they're realized.

02:09:42.220 | So one of the features of assembly space that's super interesting, and it's easier to envision

02:09:46.740 | with like Legos, for example, is if you're thinking about an assembly space, you can't

02:09:51.260 | observe the entire assembly space in any instant in time.

02:09:54.100 | So if you imagine a stack of Legos and you want to look at the assembly space of a stack

02:09:57.700 | of Legos, you have to break the Legos apart and then you look at all the possible ways

02:10:03.140 | of building up the original object.

02:10:05.660 | So now you have in your mind the goal of building that object and you have all the possible

02:10:09.380 | ways of doing it.

02:10:10.880 | And those are actual physical features of that object, but that object doesn't always

02:10:14.700 | exist.

02:10:15.700 | You don't have the possibility of generating it.

02:10:17.740 | And the possibilities are always infinite.

02:10:20.580 | Well for that particular object, it has a well-defined assembly space.

02:10:25.540 | And I guess what I'm saying is that object is the assembly space, but you actually have

02:10:29.700 | to unpack that object across time to view that feature of it.

02:10:33.420 | It's only an observable across time.

02:10:35.260 | The term goal is such an important and difficult to explain concept, right?

02:10:42.140 | Because what you want is a way, it's like, I think only conscious beings can have conscious

02:10:47.060 | goals.

02:10:49.620 | Everything else is doing selection.

02:10:51.900 | But selection does invent goals and in a way that the way that biology reinterprets the

02:10:57.500 | past in the present is kind of helps you to understand there was a goal in the past now,

02:11:05.140 | right?

02:11:06.140 | It's kind of like goals only exist back in time.

02:11:09.440 | So first of all, only conscious beings can have conscious goals.

02:11:17.220 | I'm not even going to touch that one.

02:11:19.420 | Why?

02:11:20.420 | Go for it, come on.

02:11:23.420 | The line between conscious goals and non-conscious goals, exactly.

02:11:29.220 | And also maybe just on top of that, you said a Turing test for goal-directed behavior.

02:11:36.740 | What does a Turing test potentially look like?

02:11:39.180 | So if you've got two objects, we were thinking about this.

02:11:40.940 | So we actually got some funding to work together on two teams.

02:11:43.900 | So I'm trying to do, and part of this is I'm trying to do a bit of theory and Sarah's teaching

02:11:48.460 | me a bit of theory and Sarah's trying to design experiments and I'm teaching experiments.

02:11:52.140 | I think it's really good for us to have that to say, when would a, so that's good.

02:11:58.500 | I like this, I'm sure we're using Dan Dennett essay.

02:12:02.580 | And I can explain why we wouldn't want to call it a Turing test after.

02:12:05.180 | So Dan Dennett wrote this really nice essay about herding cats and free will inflation.

02:12:11.620 | I love the title, the title is so brilliant.

02:12:13.620 | I think that's the actual title.

02:12:14.620 | That's the title, yeah.

02:12:15.620 | Herding cats and free will inflation.

02:12:17.620 | Yeah, something like that.

02:12:18.940 | I mean, it's not, maybe not.

02:12:20.420 | And so if you've got a, let's imagine you've got two objects on a hillside, okay.

02:12:26.140 | And this happens to be a snowy hill.

02:12:28.260 | And let's just say you see an object go rolling down the hill, or you, and it rolls down the

02:12:34.060 | hill, but the start goes to the end.

02:12:36.780 | How do you know that object's had a goal?

02:12:38.020 | Now you unveil the object and you'll see it's actually a skier and the skier starts at the

02:12:42.660 | top and goes down the bottom.

02:12:44.620 | Great.

02:12:45.740 | Then you look at the rock, rock rolls down the hill and goes to the bottom.

02:12:48.820 | How can you tell the difference between the two?

02:12:51.300 | So, and what Dan says is like, well, this is clear the skier's in control and the, because

02:12:57.300 | they're adjusting the trajectory.

02:12:58.700 | So there's some updating going on.

02:13:00.300 | Then the only way you could really do that is you put the skier back to the top of the

02:13:03.340 | hill again, they would tend to start roughly in the same space and probably go take all

02:13:07.780 | that complex set of trajectories and end up pretty much at the same finish point, right?

02:13:12.060 | With plus or minus a few metres.

02:13:13.620 | Whereas if it was just a random rock going down to random trajectory, that wouldn't happen.

02:13:18.260 | And so what Sarah and I were kind of doing when we were writing this grant, we were like,

02:13:22.420 | we need to somehow instantiate the skier and the rock in an experiment and then say, okay,

02:13:29.260 | when does the object, when it, so for an object to have a goal,

02:13:33.180 | it has to have an update, it has to have some sensing and some kind of, you know, inbuilt

02:13:37.580 | actuation to respond to the environment.

02:13:42.820 | And then we just have to iterate on that.

02:13:44.340 | And maybe Sarah, you can then fill in the Turing test part.

02:13:46.980 | Well, yeah, I guess the motivation for me was slightly different.

02:13:50.060 | So I get really frustrated about conversations about consciousness as most people do.

02:13:54.660 | You know, a lot of people are, which is not necessarily related to free will directly

02:13:58.900 | or to this goal-directed behaviour, but I think there's a whole set of bundled and related

02:14:03.460 | topics here.

02:14:04.460 | But I think for me, I was, you know, everybody's always interested in explaining intrinsic

02:14:09.740 | experience and quantifying intrinsic experience.

02:14:12.460 | And there's all sorts of problems with that because you can never actually be another

02:14:16.580 | physical system.

02:14:17.580 | So you can't know what it's like to be another physical system.

02:14:20.520 | So I always thought there must be some way of getting at this problem about if an agent

02:14:24.740 | or an entity is conscious or at least has internal representations, and those are real

02:14:29.420 | physical things, that it must have causal consequences.

02:14:34.780 | So the way I would ask the question of consciousness is not, you know, what is it like intrinsically,

02:14:40.900 | but if things have intrinsic experience, is there any observable difference from the outside

02:14:45.620 | about the kind of causation that that physical system would enact in?

02:14:50.620 | And for me, the most interesting thing that humans do is have imagination.

02:14:53.900 | So like we can imagine rockets centuries before we build them.

02:14:57.500 | They've become real physical things because we imagine them.

02:15:00.780 | And people might disentangle that from conscious experience, but I think a lot of the sort

02:15:03.780 | of imagination we do is actually a conscious process.

02:15:07.060 | So then this becomes a question of if I were observing systems and I said one had an internal

02:15:13.700 | representation, which is slightly different than a conscious experience, obviously, so

02:15:17.900 | I'm entangling some concepts, but it's a loose set of thought experiments.

02:15:23.500 | Can I set them up in a physically equivalent situation?

02:15:28.580 | Would it be the case that there would be experimental observables associated with it?

02:15:34.860 | And that became the idea of trying to actually measure for internal representation or conscious.

02:15:40.140 | So Turing basically didn't want to do that.

02:15:42.460 | He just wanted a machine that could emulate and trick you into having the behavior, but

02:15:46.140 | never dealt with the internal experience because he didn't know how to do that.

02:15:51.260 | And I guess I was wondering, is there a way to set up the experiment where you could actually

02:15:56.100 | test for that?

02:15:57.820 | For imagination that led to the-

02:16:00.980 | That there was something internal going on, some kind of inner world as people say, or

02:16:06.620 | you could say, it actually is an agent.

02:16:10.100 | It's making decisions.

02:16:11.500 | It has an internal representation.

02:16:14.020 | And whether you say that's experience or not is a different thing, but at least the feature

02:16:18.060 | that there's some abstraction it's doing that's not obvious from looking at the physical substrate.

02:16:23.260 | Do you think it's possible to do that kind of thing?

02:16:25.340 | One of the compelling things about the Turing test is that defining intelligent, defining

02:16:30.740 | any complicated concept as a thing, like observing it from the surface and not caring about what's

02:16:38.940 | going on deep inside because how do you know?

02:16:42.820 | That's the point.

02:16:43.820 | So the idea is exactly that.

02:16:45.060 | So what we're trying to do with the Turing test for goal-directedness is literally take

02:16:49.980 | some objects that clearly don't have any internal representation, grains of sand blowing on

02:16:53.900 | the beach or something, right?

02:16:56.300 | And I don't know, a crab wandering around on the beach and then generating an experiment

02:17:00.700 | where we literally, the experiment generates an entity that literally has no internal representation

02:17:06.420 | to sand.

02:17:07.940 | These are oil droplets actually, what I've got in mind, a robot that makes oil droplets.

02:17:11.740 | But then what we want to try and do is train the oil droplets to be like crabs, give them

02:17:16.340 | an internal representation, give them the ability to integrate information from the

02:17:21.900 | environment.

02:17:22.900 | So they remember the past, are in the present and can imagine a future.

02:17:31.140 | And in a very limited way, their kind of game engine, their limited simulation of the world

02:17:36.220 | allows them to then make a decision.

02:17:38.340 | They're objects across time.

02:17:40.420 | So then you would run a bunch of crabs, like over and over and over and over?

02:17:44.700 | How many crabs, Lee?

02:17:46.460 | Is there, what's, because you have to have a large number of crabs, what does your theory

02:17:51.180 | say?

02:17:52.180 | Is there a mathematical?

02:17:53.180 | We're working on it.

02:17:54.180 | I mean, this is literally-

02:17:55.180 | Limit, crab limit.

02:17:56.180 | There's literally a-

02:17:57.180 | Excellent.

02:17:58.180 | There's literally a-

02:17:59.180 | What's the herding cats have to do?

02:18:00.180 | Oh, that's random.

02:18:01.180 | Wait, what's cats in the title by Daniel Dennett, Herding Cats and the Free Will Inflation?

02:18:06.900 | So I-

02:18:07.900 | What does herding cats mean?

02:18:09.060 | What does free will inflation mean?

02:18:10.940 | So this, I love this essay because it explained to me how I can live in a deterministic universe,

02:18:18.900 | but have not free will, but have freedom, you know?

02:18:24.700 | And also it helped me explain that time needed to be a real thing in this universe.

02:18:31.020 | So what basically Dan was saying here is like, how do you, how do these cats appear to just

02:18:36.060 | do what they want?

02:18:37.740 | Right?

02:18:38.740 | And if you live in a deterministic universe, why do the cats do these things?

02:18:43.300 | You know, aren't they just, isn't it all obvious?

02:18:46.420 | And how does free will inflate the universe?

02:18:48.780 | And for me, I mean, probably I love the essay because my interpretation of the essay in

02:18:53.860 | assembly theory makes complete sense.

02:18:57.900 | Because you need an expanding universe in assembly theory to create novelty that you

02:19:05.060 | search for that then when you find something interesting and you keep doing it because

02:19:09.940 | it's cool and it gives you an advantage, then it appears in the past to be a goal.

02:19:15.540 | So what does in assembly theory, the expansion of the universe look like?

02:19:21.020 | What are we talking about?

02:19:24.460 | Why does the expansion of the universe give you more possibilities of novelty and cool

02:19:29.380 | stuff?

02:19:30.500 | So for me, I don't think about the universe in terms of Big Bang and space.

02:19:34.060 | I think about in terms of the big memory expansion.

02:19:37.900 | You only have the ability to store one bit of information, so then you can't do very

02:19:42.220 | much.

02:19:43.220 | So what the universe has been doing since forever, it's been increasing the size of

02:19:50.300 | its RAM.

02:19:51.300 | Okay?

02:19:52.300 | So it's like one megabyte, two megabyte, three megabyte, four megabytes, all the way up.

02:19:57.660 | And so the more RAM you have, the more you can remember about the past, which allows

02:20:04.940 | you to do cooler things in the future.

02:20:07.220 | So if you can remember how to launch a rocket, then you might be able to imagine how to land

02:20:11.540 | a rocket and then relaunch, re-land and carry on.

02:20:15.100 | And so you're able to expand the space and remember the past.

02:20:21.140 | And so that's why I think it's very important.

02:20:23.740 | But not a perfect memory.

02:20:26.140 | - That's an interesting question, whether there's some forgetting that happens that

02:20:28.900 | might increase.

02:20:30.580 | Is the expansion of the forgetting at some point accelerate faster than the remembering?

02:20:37.100 | - I think that that's a very important thing that probably intelligence does, and we're

02:20:40.980 | gonna learn in machine learning about.

02:20:42.420 | Because you want machine learning right now, or artificial intelligence right now, doesn't

02:20:45.980 | have memory right, but you want the ability to, or not for, if you want to get to human-like

02:20:51.620 | consciousness, you need to have the ability I suppose to remember stuff and then to selectively

02:20:56.380 | forget stuff so you can re-remember it and compress it.

02:20:59.980 | Arguably the way that we come up with new physical laws.

02:21:02.340 | - Cryptocurrency.

02:21:03.340 | - Yeah, sorry, you were confused.

02:21:05.460 | - No, no, it's all right, no, I just wanted to.

02:21:07.500 | - I think that there is a great deal to be gained from having the ability to remember

02:21:15.020 | things, but then when you forget them, you can then have a, you can basically do the

02:21:19.660 | simulation again and work out if you get to that compressed representation.

02:21:24.020 | So that it's in cycles.

02:21:25.420 | So cycles of remembering and forgetting are probably important, but there shouldn't be

02:21:31.540 | an excuse to have a universe with no memory in it.

02:21:34.300 | The universe is gonna remember that it forgot, but just not tell you.

02:21:40.260 | - I'm looking at this paper and it's talking about a puppet controlling a puppet controlling

02:21:45.140 | a puppet controlling a puppet controlling a puppet controlling a puppet, conceptually

02:21:48.700 | easy to understand, but physically impossible, it's physically impossible, it's predicting

02:21:52.580 | a fair coin toss.

02:21:53.580 | I don't know what he's talking about, but there's pictures of puppets controlling puppets.

02:21:58.700 | Let me ask you, there's a few things I wanna ask, but we brought up time quite a bit.

02:22:04.820 | You guys tweet about time quite a bit.

02:22:09.220 | What is time in all of this?

02:22:10.780 | We kind of mentioned it a bunch.

02:22:13.500 | Is it not important at all in terms of, is it just a word?

02:22:17.020 | Should we be talking about causality mostly?

02:22:18.900 | Sarah, what do you think?

02:22:21.580 | We've talked about memories.

02:22:24.220 | Is that the fundamental thing that we should be thinking about and time is just a useful

02:22:28.380 | measurement device or something like that?

02:22:30.700 | - Well there's different concepts of time.

02:22:32.460 | So I think in assembly theory, when we're talking about time, we're talking about the

02:22:34.900 | ordering of things.

02:22:36.300 | So that's the causal graph part.

02:22:38.420 | And so then the fundamental structure of the universe is that there is a certain ordering

02:22:42.740 | and certain things can't happen until other things happen.

02:22:44.780 | But usually when we colloquially talk about time, we're talking about the flow of time.

02:22:51.700 | And I guess Lee and I were actually debating about this this morning.

02:22:54.060 | So in talking on it, walking on the river here, which is a very lovely spot for talking

02:22:58.340 | about time, but that when the universe is updating, it's transitioning between things

02:23:05.100 | that exist now and things that exist now.

02:23:09.500 | That's really the flow of time.

02:23:11.780 | So you have to separate out those concepts at bare minimum.

02:23:15.780 | And then there's also an arrow of time that people talk about in physics, which is that

02:23:20.060 | time doesn't appear to have a directionality in fundamental physics, but it does to us.

02:23:25.300 | We can't go backwards in time.

02:23:26.980 | And usually that would be explained in physics in terms of, well, there's a cosmological

02:23:31.580 | arrow of time, but there's also the thermodynamic arrow of time of increasing entropy.

02:23:36.220 | But what we would say in assembly theory is that there is a clear directionality, the

02:23:39.420 | universe only runs in one direction, which is why some things...

02:23:42.220 | It's easy to make...

02:23:43.220 | If the universe runs in one direction, it's easy to make processes look reversible.

02:23:47.780 | For example, if they have no memory, they're easy to run forward and backwards, which is

02:23:51.260 | why the laws of physics that we have now look the way they do, because they involve objects

02:23:55.620 | that have no memory.

02:23:56.720 | But when you get to things like us, it becomes very clear that the universe has a directionality

02:24:00.500 | associated to it.

02:24:01.500 | So it's not reversible at all.

02:24:04.700 | No man ever steps in the same river.

02:24:06.380 | I just have to bring that up because you're walking on the river.

02:24:08.500 | No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the

02:24:12.900 | same man.

02:24:13.900 | So it's not reversible.

02:24:15.900 | No, but reversibility is an emergent property.

02:24:19.580 | So we think of the reversibility laws as being fundamental and the irreversibility as being

02:24:23.380 | emergent.

02:24:24.380 | But I think what we would say from how we think about it, and certainly it's easy to

02:24:28.060 | give the case for our perception of time, but also what's happening in biological evolution,

02:24:33.540 | you can make things reversible, but it requires work to do it.

02:24:37.380 | And it requires certain machines to run it forward and backward.

02:24:40.780 | And Chiara Marletto is working on some interesting ideas on constructor theory related to that,

02:24:44.380 | which is a totally different set of ideas.

02:24:46.420 | You can travel back in time sometimes.

02:24:49.540 | Yes.

02:24:50.540 | You can't travel actually back in time, but you could reconstruct things that have existed

02:24:57.060 | in the past.

02:24:58.100 | You're always moving forward in time, but you can cycle through.

02:25:00.900 | Can I clarify what you just said?

02:25:03.700 | Yeah, go for it.

02:25:04.700 | Quickly, you travel forward in time to travel back.

02:25:06.460 | Yes.

02:25:07.460 | Thank you.

02:25:08.460 | That really clarified it.

02:25:09.460 | What Sarah is saying is you don't go back in time, you recreate what happened in the

02:25:13.900 | past in the future and inspect it again.

02:25:16.020 | So in that local pocket of time, it's as if you travel back in time.

02:25:19.260 | So how's that not traveling back in time?

02:25:22.460 | Because you're not going back to your same self back in time.

02:25:25.540 | You're creating that in the future.

02:25:27.180 | But everything else is the same as it was in the past.

02:25:30.180 | No, no, no, no.

02:25:31.620 | It's not in registry.

02:25:32.620 | I mean, it goes back to the big question.

02:25:34.140 | I'm saying, I mean, this is something I was trying to look up today when we first had

02:25:39.740 | this discussion and I was talking to Sarah on Skype and said, "By the way, time is the

02:25:44.460 | fundamental thing in the universe."

02:25:45.940 | She almost hung up on me.

02:25:47.460 | Right.

02:25:48.460 | But you can even, I mean, if you want to make an analogy to computation, and I think Charles

02:25:51.620 | Bennett actually has a paper on this about reversible computation and reversible Turing

02:25:56.180 | machines.

02:25:57.180 | In order to make it reversible, you have to store memory to run the process backwards.

02:26:01.420 | So time is always running forward in that.

02:26:04.220 | Because you have to write the memory.

02:26:05.540 | You can't erase the memory.

02:26:06.780 | You can erase the memory, but the point, when you go back to zero, right?

02:26:11.500 | But the whole point is that in order to have a process that even runs in both directions,

02:26:17.500 | you have to start talking about memory to store the information to run it backwards.

02:26:21.740 | I got it.

02:26:22.740 | So you can't really then, you can't have it exactly how it was in the past.

02:26:27.500 | Exactly.

02:26:28.500 | You have extra stuff, extra baggage always.

02:26:30.820 | A really important thing that I want to say on this, I think if I try and get it right,

02:26:34.460 | is to say that if you can think that the universe is expanding in terms of the number of boxes

02:26:41.300 | that it has to store states, right?

02:26:45.420 | And this is where the directionality of the universe comes from, everything comes from.

02:26:49.020 | You could erase what's in those boxes, but the fact you've now got so many boxes at time,

02:26:53.940 | now in this present, there's more of those boxes than there were in the past.

02:26:57.620 | See, but the boxes aren't physical boxes.

02:27:01.620 | It's not space or time.

02:27:03.500 | Why is the number of boxes always expanding?

02:27:05.860 | It's very hard to imagine this because we live in space.

02:27:09.700 | So what I'm saying, which is I think probably correct, is that we just, let's just imagine

02:27:16.300 | for a second, there is a non-local situation, but there are these things called states and

02:27:23.940 | that the universe, irrespective of whether you measure anything, there is a universal,

02:27:30.580 | let's call it a clock or a state creator.

02:27:33.660 | Maybe we can call it, maybe you can call it God, but let's call it a state creator where

02:27:38.180 | the universe is expanding in the number of states it has.

02:27:41.700 | - Why are you saying it's expanding though?

02:27:43.300 | Is that obvious that it's expanding?

02:27:44.740 | - It's obvious because that's where the, because we-

02:27:47.980 | - That's a source of novelty.

02:27:50.440 | - It's a source of novelty and it also explains why the universe is not predictable.

02:27:54.820 | - How do you know it's not predictable?

02:27:57.620 | I just like interrupting you.

02:27:59.020 | Sorry, it's fun.

02:28:00.020 | Because you're struggling.

02:28:01.420 | - I'm struggling because I'm trying to be as concrete as possible and not sound like

02:28:05.420 | I'm insane.

02:28:07.740 | And I'm not insane.

02:28:09.100 | It's obvious because you, I'm a chemist.

02:28:14.180 | So as a chemist, I grew into the world understanding irreversibility.

02:28:20.140 | Irreversibility is all I knew.

02:28:22.460 | And when people start telling me the universe is actually reversible, it's a magic trick.

02:28:27.360 | We can use time to do it.

02:28:28.620 | So what I mean is the second law is really the magical.

02:28:38.740 | But why does it need to be magical?

02:28:40.020 | The universe is just asymmetric.

02:28:41.580 | All I'm saying is the universe is asymmetric in the state production and we can erase those

02:28:47.900 | states, but we just have more computational power.

02:28:50.540 | So what I'm saying is that the universe's deterministic horizon, this is one of the

02:28:56.100 | reasons we can't live in a simulation, by the way.

02:28:59.500 | You can't live in a simulation.

02:29:01.100 | - The irreversibility?

02:29:02.100 | - Yeah, so basically every time you try and simulate the universe, you know, and live

02:29:06.780 | in a simulation, the universe is expanded in states.

02:29:09.020 | You're like, "Oh, damn it.

02:29:10.020 | I need to make my computer bigger again."

02:29:11.540 | And every time you try and contain the universe in the computation, because it's got bigger

02:29:15.260 | in number of states.

02:29:16.820 | And so I'm saying the fact the universe has novelty in it is going to turn out experimentally

02:29:23.620 | to be proof that time, as I've labeled it, is fundamental and exists as a physical thing

02:29:32.640 | that creates space.

02:29:34.380 | - Okay, so if you can prove that novelty is always being created, you're saying that it's

02:29:40.340 | possible to also then prove that it's always expanding in the state space.

02:29:45.620 | Those are things that have to be proven.

02:29:48.260 | - That's what we're working on experiments for, yeah.

02:29:50.140 | - And you're trying to, like, by looking at the sliver of reality, show that there's always

02:29:55.260 | novelty being generated.

02:29:56.820 | - Yeah, because if we go and live in a universe that conventional physicists would live in,

02:30:01.940 | it's a big lookup table of stuff and everything exists.

02:30:05.020 | I want to prove that that book doesn't exist.

02:30:10.100 | It's continuously being added pages on.

02:30:12.380 | That's all I'm saying.

02:30:13.380 | If the universe is a book, we started, the universe at the beginning only had no pages,

02:30:17.660 | or had one page, another page, another page, whereas the physicists would now say all the

02:30:21.220 | pages exist, and we could in principle access them.

02:30:24.580 | I'm saying that is fundamentally incorrect.

02:30:27.260 | - Do you know what's written in this book?

02:30:29.340 | The free will question.

02:30:32.320 | Is there room for free will in this view of the universe as generating novelty and getting

02:30:41.340 | greater and greater assembly structures built?

02:30:45.580 | Sarah?

02:30:46.580 | - Yes.

02:30:47.580 | - Okay.

02:30:48.580 | - Done.

02:30:49.580 | Next question.

02:30:51.700 | - What's the source of free will in this?

02:30:53.540 | - I think it depends on what you mean by free will.

02:30:56.580 | - Yeah, well, please.

02:31:01.020 | - I think what I'm interested in as far as the phenomena of free will is do we have individual

02:31:08.460 | autonomy and agency, and when I do things, is it really me, or is it my atoms that did

02:31:15.020 | it?

02:31:17.940 | That's the part that's interesting to me.

02:31:19.140 | I guess there's also the determinism versus randomness part.

02:31:23.220 | The way I think about it is each of us are a thread or an assembly space through this

02:31:31.900 | giant possibility space, and it's like we're moving on our own trajectory through that

02:31:37.340 | space, and that is defined by our history, so we're sort of causally contingent on our

02:31:41.500 | past.

02:31:42.780 | But also because of the sort of intersection of novelty generation, it's not completely

02:31:49.980 | predetermined by the past.

02:31:52.340 | And so then you have the causal control of the determinism part that you are your causal

02:31:59.020 | history, and there's some determinism from that past, but there's also room for creativity.

02:32:04.580 | And I think it's actually necessary that something like free will exists if the universe is gonna

02:32:09.660 | be as creative as possible, because if I were an all-intelligent being inventing a universe,

02:32:18.260 | and I wanted it to have a maximal number of interesting things happen, again, we should

02:32:23.140 | come up with the metric of interesting, but generating-

02:32:26.860 | - Assembly.

02:32:27.860 | - Yes, I know.

02:32:28.860 | Generating maximal possibilities, then I would want the agents to have free will because

02:32:33.980 | it means that they're more individual, like each entity actually is a different causal

02:32:41.500 | force in the universe, and it's intrinsic and local property of that system.

02:32:46.780 | - There's a greater number of distributed agents, like are you always creating more

02:32:52.420 | and more individuality?

02:32:54.860 | - Kind of.

02:32:55.860 | I would say you're creating more causal power, but-

02:32:58.580 | - So causal power, the word consciousness, is the causal power somehow correlated with

02:33:04.980 | consciousness?

02:33:05.980 | - I mean, that's why I have this conception of consciousness being related to imagination,

02:33:09.220 | 'cause the more that we can imagine can happen, and the more counterfactual possibilities

02:33:13.580 | you have in mind, the more you can actually implement.

02:33:16.460 | And somehow free will is also at the intersection of the counterfactual becoming the actual.

02:33:21.580 | - So can you elaborate on that a little bit, that consciousness is imagination?

02:33:25.820 | - I don't know exactly how to articulate it, and I'm sure people will aim at certain things

02:33:30.620 | I'm saying, but I think the language is really imprecise, so I'm not the best way to-

02:33:35.620 | - It's really interesting, like what is imagination, and what role does it play in the human experience,

02:33:43.220 | in experience of any agent?

02:33:45.300 | - I love imagination, I think it's the most amazing thing we do.

02:33:49.140 | But I guess one way I would think about it is, we talked about the transition to life

02:33:52.900 | being the universe acquiring memory, and life does something really interesting, you just

02:33:57.020 | think about biology generally, it remembers states of the past to adapt to things that

02:34:01.060 | happen in the future.

02:34:02.700 | So the longer life has evolved on this planet, the deeper that past is, the more memory we

02:34:06.340 | have, the more kinds of organisms and things.

02:34:08.980 | But what human level intelligence has done is quite different, it's not just that we

02:34:13.660 | remember states that the universe has existed in before, it's that we can imagine ones that

02:34:18.300 | have never existed, and we can actually make them come into existence.

02:34:22.720 | And I think that's the most unique feature about the transition to whatever we are, from

02:34:27.700 | what life on this planet has been doing for the last four billion years.

02:34:32.100 | And I think it's deeply related to the phenomena we call consciousness.

02:34:34.500 | - Yeah, I was gonna just agree with that, I think that consciousness is the ability

02:34:38.220 | to generate those counterfactuals.

02:34:40.480 | Now whether you can say, are there degrees of consciousness, I mean, I'm sorry, panpsychics,

02:34:47.820 | but electrons don't have counterfactuals, although they do have some, they are able

02:34:51.900 | to search the space and pathways.

02:34:54.180 | But I think that there is a very concrete, there's a very specific property that humans

02:35:02.500 | have, and I don't know if it's unique to humans, I mean, maybe dogs can do it, and birds can

02:35:07.980 | do it, right?

02:35:08.980 | And where they are basically solving a problem, 'cause consciousness was invented, or this

02:35:14.580 | abstraction was invented by evolution for a specific reason.

02:35:19.440 | And so look, one of the reasons why I came to the conclusion that time was fundamental

02:35:24.780 | was actually because Sarah and I had a completely different--

02:35:30.220 | - The most heated debate on Skype chat ever.

02:35:32.420 | - No, no, no, no, we had two--

02:35:33.860 | - None of us stopped it?

02:35:34.860 | - No, no, it goes back to the free will thing.

02:35:37.680 | So I think that, although I've changed my view a bit, because there's some really interesting

02:35:41.960 | physicists out there who talks about how the measurement problem in Newtonian space, but

02:35:48.220 | I don't wanna go there just now because I think I'll mess it up, but briefly, I could

02:35:53.620 | not see how we can have free will.

02:35:56.060 | I mean, this is really boring 'cause this is a well-trodden path, but not so boring,

02:36:01.780 | I suppose it's kind of, we just wanna be precise.

02:36:04.220 | If the universe is deterministic, how can we have free will, right?

02:36:08.060 | So Sarah's a physicist, I think she can show that most of the laws we have are deterministic

02:36:16.740 | to some degree, quantum mechanics onto Newtonian stuff, and yet there's Sarah telling me she

02:36:21.380 | believes in free will.

02:36:22.380 | I'm like, your belief system's broken here, right, because you're demanding free will

02:36:29.660 | in a deterministic universe, and then I realized that I agreed with her that I do think that

02:36:38.020 | free will is a thing because we're able to search for novelty, and then that's where

02:36:42.020 | I came to the conclusion that time, the universe is expanding in terms of novelty, and it goes

02:36:46.820 | back to that Dan Dennett essay, they were talking about the free will inflation.

02:36:51.940 | So the past, it did not exist in the past, the past exists in the present.

02:36:58.860 | What I mean is like, there was no past, there is only present.

02:37:03.700 | So that means you are the sum total, everything that occurs in the past is manifestly here

02:37:08.300 | in the present, and then you have this little echo state in your consciousness because you're

02:37:13.740 | able to imagine something without actualization, but the fact you imagine it, that occurs in

02:37:20.140 | electrons and potassium ion flows in your neural network in your brain.

02:37:24.860 | Maybe consciousness is just the present.

02:37:27.900 | So somehow you imagine that, and then by imagining, oh that's good, I'm going to make a robot

02:37:33.860 | do this thing, and program it, and then you physically then go and do it.

02:37:39.180 | So that changes the future.

02:37:42.300 | - What's imagination?

02:37:44.340 | Does it require the past, does it require the future, does it require memory, does it

02:37:49.180 | - It's imagination - Does it only exist in the moment?

02:37:53.180 | - So imagination is, yeah probably it's an instantaneous readout of what's going on.

02:37:59.260 | You can maybe, your subconscious brain has been generating all the bits for it, but no,

02:38:04.740 | imagination occurs when you, in your game engine, you remember the past and you integrate

02:38:10.660 | sensory of the present, and you try and work out what you want to do in the future, and

02:38:14.540 | then you go and make that happen.

02:38:16.180 | So the imagination is, it's like, asking what imagination is about, asking what surfing

02:38:21.380 | is.

02:38:22.540 | You can see, you can surfboard, surfer, wave coming in.

02:38:26.220 | But when you're on that wave and you're surfing, that's where the imagination is.

02:38:31.340 | - I think imagination is just accessing things that aren't the present moment, in the present

02:38:35.780 | moment.

02:38:36.780 | So like I'm sitting here and I'm looking at the table, and I can imagine the river and

02:38:41.020 | things, or whatever it was, and so it seems to be that it's like, it's our ability to

02:38:46.940 | access things that aren't present.

02:38:50.340 | - So conjure up worlds, some of them might be akin to something that happened to you

02:38:56.460 | recently?

02:38:57.460 | - Right, but they don't have to be things that actually happened in your past.

02:39:00.740 | And I think this gets back to assembly theory, like the way I would think about imagination

02:39:04.820 | from an assembly theoretic standpoint is I'm a giant causal graph, and I exist in a present

02:39:11.540 | moment as a particular configuration of Sarah, but there's a lot of, I carry a lot of evolutionary

02:39:18.340 | baggage, I have that whole causal history, and I can access parts of it.

02:39:22.500 | Now when you talk about getting to something as complex as us, having as large an assembly

02:39:26.140 | space as us, there's ways of, like there's a lot of things in that causal graph that

02:39:31.420 | have actually never existed in the past history of the universe, 'cause like the universe

02:39:36.100 | got big enough to contain the three of us in this room in time, but not all the features

02:39:42.980 | of each one of us individually have come into existence as physical objects we would recognize

02:39:49.420 | as individual objects.

02:39:50.420 | This goes back to your point that we actually have to explain why things actually even look

02:39:55.380 | like objects and aren't just a shmear of mess.

02:40:00.940 | And just on the free will in physics thing, when you were talking, I just wanna bring

02:40:05.060 | this up 'cause I think it's a really interesting viewpoint that Nicholas Jisen has that, you

02:40:09.700 | know, like we wanna use the laws of physics and then say you can't have free will, and

02:40:12.820 | his point is you have to have free will in order to even choose to set up an experiment

02:40:17.100 | to test the laws of physics.

02:40:18.260 | So in some sense, free will should be more fundamental than physics is, 'cause to even

02:40:22.380 | do science, there's some assumption that the agents have free will.

02:40:28.500 | And I always thought it was really perplexing that, you know, physics wants to remove agency

02:40:33.900 | because the idea that I could do an experiment here on this part of Earth, and then I can

02:40:37.460 | move somewhere else and prepare an identically, you know, identically prepared experiment,

02:40:41.620 | and then do an experiment again, seems to imply something about the structure of our

02:40:45.260 | universe that is not encoded in the laws that we're testing in those experiments.

02:40:50.020 | - So this kind of dream of physics that you can do multiple experiments, different locations,

02:40:53.700 | and then validate each other, you're saying that's an illusion?

02:40:58.740 | - No, I'm saying that requires decision making and free will to be a real thing, I think.

02:41:04.260 | Like I think the fact that we can do science is not arbitrary, and I think people, you

02:41:09.460 | know, the standard canon in physics would be, well, you could trace all of that back

02:41:12.860 | to the initial condition of the universe, but the whole point of science is I can imagine

02:41:16.800 | doing the experiment and I can do it, and then I can do it again and again and again

02:41:19.700 | all over the planet.

02:41:20.700 | - But to you, imagination is somehow fundamentally generative of novelty.

02:41:24.620 | - Yes.

02:41:25.620 | - So it's not like the universe could have predicted the things you imagined.

02:41:28.980 | - Imagination's super, so coming back to novelty, I think novelty can exist outside of imagination,

02:41:33.340 | but it supercharges it, it's another transition, I think.

02:41:36.340 | I mean, I would say, I mean, this may be a boring statement, but I would say the fact

02:41:39.900 | that--

02:41:40.900 | - I'm not sure, these are hard questions.

02:41:42.740 | - Yeah, I mean, I think the fact that objects exist is yet another proof that time is fundamental

02:41:48.460 | and novelty exists, right?

02:41:50.780 | Because I think, again, if you ask a physicist to write down in their infinite bible of the

02:41:55.180 | universe, let's call it the bible, the--

02:41:57.220 | - The book?

02:41:58.220 | - Yeah, well, I mean--

02:41:59.220 | - That book that we're adding pages to?

02:42:00.220 | - The mathematical universe, whether you're Max Tegmark or Sean Carroll--

02:42:03.580 | - I thought it was a different kind of science.

02:42:04.580 | - Or Steven Wolfram, okay?

02:42:05.580 | - I like that book.

02:42:06.580 | - Yeah, I love it too.

02:42:07.580 | It's lots of pretty pictures.

02:42:08.580 | - It's really interesting that they cope with the enormity of the universe by saying, well,

02:42:09.580 | it's all there, mathematics, it all exists, right?

02:42:10.580 | And I would say that that's why I'm excited about the future of the universe, because

02:42:11.580 | it, although it is somehow dependent upon the past, it is not constrained just by the

02:42:12.580 | fact that it's a part of the universe.

02:42:13.580 | - Yeah, I think that's a really good point.

02:42:14.580 | - Yeah, I think that's a really good point.

02:42:15.580 | - Yeah, I think that's a really good point.

02:42:16.580 | - Yeah, I think that's a really good point.

02:42:17.580 | - Yeah, I think that's a really good point.

02:42:18.580 | - Yeah, I think that's a really good point.

02:42:19.580 | - Yeah, I think that's a really good point.

02:42:45.580 | - I mean, the other thing I would say that's super important for human beings, right?

02:42:56.660 | Human beings have actually very little causal control in the future.

02:43:00.660 | I realized this the other week.

02:43:02.180 | - Oh, the immediate future, you mean.

02:43:03.620 | - Yeah, yeah, so what happened, so this is what I think it is.

02:43:06.260 | The way, by reinterpreting your past, I mean, talk about from a kind of cognitive, psychological

02:43:11.860 | cognitive point of view, by reinterpreting your past in your current mind, you can actually

02:43:18.620 | help you shape your future again.

02:43:22.020 | You have much more freedom to interpret your past, to act in the present, to change your

02:43:27.340 | future than you do to change your future.

02:43:29.540 | It may sound weird, so I'm saying, everybody, imagine your past, think about your past,

02:43:34.420 | reinterpret your past in the nicest way you can, then imagine what you can do next, or

02:43:39.500 | imagine your past in a more negative way, and what you do next, and look at those two

02:43:42.460 | counterfactuals, they're different.

02:43:44.460 | - Yeah, it's fascinating, I mean, Daniel Kahneman talks about this, that most of our life is

02:43:48.060 | lived in our memories, and it's interesting, 'cause you can essentially, in imagination,

02:43:52.660 | choose the life you live.

02:43:53.660 | So maybe free will exists in imagination, choices are made in your imagination, and

02:44:01.220 | that results in you basically able to control how the future unrolls, 'cause you're like,

02:44:07.300 | reinterpreting constantly the things that happen to you.

02:44:11.540 | - Exactly, so if you want to increase your amount of free will, those people that have,

02:44:16.300 | I don't think everyone has equal amounts of agency, because of our sad constraints, where

02:44:22.660 | they're happenstance, health, economic, born in a certain place, right?

02:44:29.660 | But those of us that have the ability to go back and reinterpret our past, and use that

02:44:36.180 | to change the future, are the ones that exert most agency in the present.

02:44:42.900 | And I want to achieve higher degrees of agency, and enable everyone else to do that as well,

02:44:49.300 | to have more fun in the universe.

02:44:52.020 | - Then we'll hit that peak, the maximum fun point.

02:44:54.340 | - I don't think there's ever gonna be a maximum, I think the wonderful thing about the future

02:44:58.700 | is there's always gonna be more fun.

02:45:00.380 | - Yeah, you, I think, again, going back to Twitter, I think you retweeted something about

02:45:07.100 | being a life maximalist, that you want to maximize the number of life, the amount of

02:45:11.620 | life in the universe.

02:45:13.740 | And that's the more general version of that goal, is to maximize the amount of fun in

02:45:19.900 | the universe, 'cause life is a subset of fun, there are all kinds of, I suppose they're

02:45:24.060 | either correlated or exactly equal, I don't know.

02:45:27.260 | Anyway, speaking of fun, let me ask you about alien sightings.

02:45:32.380 | So there's been quite a bit of UFO sightings and all that kind of stuff.

02:45:36.420 | What do you think would be the first time when humans sight aliens, see aliens, in a

02:45:45.860 | sort of unquestionable way?

02:45:49.540 | This extremely strong and arguable way we've made contact with aliens.

02:45:56.820 | Sarah, what would it look like?

02:45:59.460 | Obviously the space of possibility is huge here, but if you were to kind of look into

02:46:05.420 | the future, what would that look like?

02:46:07.300 | Would it be inklings of UFOs here and there that slowly unravel a mystery, or would it

02:46:14.420 | be like an obvious overwhelming signal?

02:46:19.120 | So I think we have an obsession with making contact with events.

02:46:23.220 | So what I mean by that is, people have a UFO sighting, they make contact.

02:46:30.180 | And I always think, what's interesting to me about the UFO narratives right now is not

02:46:36.940 | that I have a disbelief about what people are experiencing or feeling, but the discussion

02:46:41.700 | right now is sort of at the level of modern mythology.

02:46:45.540 | Aliens are our mythos in modern culture.

02:46:49.420 | And when you treat it like that, then I want to think about when do things that we traditionally

02:46:55.660 | only regularize through mythology actually become things that become standard knowledge.

02:47:00.300 | So it used to be variations in the climate were described by some kind of gods or something,

02:47:05.860 | and now it's like our technology picks up an anomaly or someone sees something, we say

02:47:10.020 | it's aliens.

02:47:11.220 | And I think the real thing is, it's not contact with events, but first contact is actually

02:47:16.700 | contact with knowledge of the phenomena or the explanation.

02:47:20.060 | And so this is very subtle and very abstract, but when does it become something that we

02:47:25.180 | actually understand what it is that we're talking about?

02:47:28.500 | That's first contact.

02:47:29.500 | It's not-

02:47:30.500 | Would you make the myth, would you give credit to the myth, the mythology as first contact?

02:47:35.260 | I think, yes.

02:47:36.780 | I think it's the rudimentary that we have some understanding that there's a phenomena

02:47:40.620 | that we have to understand and regularize.

02:47:42.980 | So I think-

02:47:43.980 | To understand that there is weather.

02:47:44.980 | Yes.

02:47:45.980 | You have to construct a mythology around that weather.

02:47:48.300 | Yes.

02:47:49.300 | It's something that's controllable.

02:47:50.300 | Right.

02:47:51.300 | I see mythology basically as like baby knowledge.

02:47:55.180 | Right.

02:47:56.180 | It could be that, although there's lots of alien sight, so-called alien sightings, right?

02:48:03.260 | So there is a number of things you can do.

02:48:04.420 | You could just dismiss them and say they're not true, they're kind of made up.

02:48:07.540 | Or you say, well, there's something interesting here, right?

02:48:09.740 | We keep seeing a commonality, right?

02:48:11.660 | We see the same phenomena again and again and again.

02:48:14.540 | Also there's this interesting thing about human imagination.

02:48:17.540 | Even if they are, let's not say made up, but misappropriated kind of other inputs, the

02:48:23.820 | fact that human consciousness is capable of imagining it contact with aliens, does that

02:48:29.640 | not tell us about something about where we are in our position, in our culture, in our

02:48:32.900 | technology?

02:48:33.900 | It tells us about where in time we are.

02:48:35.500 | Could it be that we're making contact with, let's say that-

02:48:38.780 | So let's say, let's take the most miserable version.

02:48:41.580 | There are no aliens in the universe.

02:48:42.820 | Life is only on Earth.

02:48:44.900 | That then, the interpretation of that is we're desperate to kind of understand why we're

02:48:48.460 | the only life in the universe, right?

02:48:50.580 | The other one is, the other most extreme is that aliens are visiting all the time and

02:48:53.460 | we're just not able to capture them coherently.

02:48:57.220 | Or there's a big conspiracy and there's Area 51 and there are lizards everywhere and there's

02:49:02.780 | that.

02:49:03.780 | Or I'm kind of in favor of the idea that maybe humanity is waking up to the idea that we

02:49:08.540 | aren't alone in the universe and we're just running the simulation and we're seeing some

02:49:13.420 | evidence.

02:49:14.420 | You know, we don't know what life is yet.

02:49:17.140 | We do have some anomalies out there.

02:49:19.840 | We can't explain everything.

02:49:23.220 | And over time, you know, we will start to unpack that.

02:49:28.820 | One very plausible thing we might do, which might be boring for the average alien observer

02:49:35.780 | or believes that aliens, as in intelligent aliens, are visiting Earth, it could be that

02:49:40.140 | we might go to the outer solar system and find a new type of life that has completely

02:49:45.420 | new chemistry.

02:49:46.820 | Bring these cells back to Earth where you could say in my hand, "On Earth, here's RNA,

02:49:51.580 | DNA and proteins and look, cells self-replicating."

02:49:54.820 | From Titan, we have this new set of molecules, new set of cells and we feed it stuff and

02:50:00.060 | it grows.

02:50:01.060 | That, for me, if we were able to do that, would be like the most, that would be my UFO

02:50:08.780 | sign.

02:50:09.780 | That's a good test.

02:50:10.780 | So you feed it and it grows.

02:50:12.780 | Yeah.

02:50:13.780 | We've made, so not until you know how to feed the thing.

02:50:21.660 | It grows somehow.

02:50:22.740 | We can make a comic book, you know, the tiger that came for tea, the alien that came for

02:50:25.780 | tea.

02:50:27.780 | What would you say is between the two of you is the biggest disagreement about aliens,

02:50:33.740 | alien life out there?

02:50:35.940 | Is it from the basic framework of thinking about what is life to maybe what aliens look

02:50:41.540 | like to alien civilizations to UFO sightings?

02:50:46.020 | What would you think?

02:50:47.460 | So I would say the biggest one is that the emergence of life does not have to be, it

02:50:55.740 | can't just happen once on a planet.

02:50:57.580 | That it could be two or more life forms present on a planet at once.

02:51:01.460 | And I think Sarah doesn't agree with that.

02:51:03.500 | I think that's like logically inconsistent.

02:51:07.900 | That's really polite.

02:51:08.900 | You're saying it's nonsense.

02:51:09.900 | But because you think that, yeah.

02:51:11.300 | How likely is that?

02:51:12.300 | So the idea that, what does it look like?

02:51:14.860 | Let's imagine two alien civilizations coexisting on a planet.

02:51:19.660 | What's that look like exactly?

02:51:21.360 | So I would say, I think I've got to get around your argument.

02:51:26.740 | Let's say that on this planet there's lots of available chemistry and one life form emerges

02:51:34.660 | based on carbon and interacts and there's an ecosystem based on carbon.

02:51:39.060 | And there's an orthogonal, and so it's planetary phenomena, which is what you, I think, right?

02:51:45.460 | But there's also one that co-exists on silicon.

02:51:48.460 | And because there's enough energy and there's enough stuff that these life forms might not

02:51:53.780 | actually necessarily compete evolutionarily.

02:51:56.580 | Yeah, but they would have to not interact at all because they're going to be co-constructing

02:52:01.380 | each other's causal chains.

02:52:02.660 | I think that's what you just got me.

02:52:04.100 | So there's no overlap in terms of their causal chains or very limited overlap.

02:52:10.220 | Yeah, so I think the only way I can get away with that is to say, right, life could emerge

02:52:13.420 | on a planet underneath.

02:52:14.420 | The lizard people under the crust of the earth.

02:52:18.620 | I think, I think, I think, let's go, I think, but look, as you can see, we disagree.

02:52:25.060 | And I think Sarah actually has convinced me because of that life is a planetary phenomena,

02:52:30.260 | the emergence of life is a planetary phenomena.

02:52:33.100 | And actually because of the way evolution selection works, that nothing occurs in isolation,

02:52:38.180 | the causal chains interact.

02:52:39.400 | So there is a common, there's a consensus model for life on the earth.

02:52:42.420 | But you don't think you can place aliens from elsewhere onto the, can't you just place multiple

02:52:50.420 | alien civilizations on one planet?

02:52:52.420 | Right, but I think, so you can take two original life events that were independent and co-mingle

02:52:58.580 | them, but I don't think when you're talking about, when you look at the interaction of

02:53:05.220 | that structure, it's like the same idea as like an experiment being an example of life,

02:53:11.340 | right?

02:53:12.340 | It's a very abstract and subtle concept.

02:53:13.340 | And I guess what I'm saying is life is information propagating through matter.

02:53:18.340 | So once you start having things interacting, they in some sense co-mingle and they become

02:53:23.900 | part of the same chain.

02:53:25.900 | - Sarah's a good--

02:53:27.860 | - The co-mingling starts quickly.

02:53:30.820 | We proceed to co-mingle quickly no matter what.

02:53:33.260 | - Right, right.

02:53:34.260 | So you could say, so the question is then, the more interesting question is are there

02:53:38.180 | two distinct origins events?

02:53:39.960 | And I still think that there's reasons that on a single planet you would have one origins

02:53:43.920 | event because of the time scales of cycling of geochemistry on a planet.

02:53:49.700 | And also the fact that I don't think that the origin of life happens in a pool and like

02:53:53.540 | radiates outward through evolutionary processes.

02:53:56.060 | I think it's a multi-scale phenomenon.

02:53:57.580 | It happens at the level of individual molecules interacting, collections of molecules interacting

02:54:02.020 | and entire planetary scale cycles.

02:54:04.260 | So life as we know it has always been multi-scale.

02:54:08.260 | And there's brilliant examples of individual mutations at the genome level changing global

02:54:13.100 | climate.

02:54:14.100 | So there's a tight coupling between things that happen at the largest scale or planetary

02:54:21.020 | scale and the smallest scale that life mediates.

02:54:23.940 | - But it still might be difficult within something you would call as a single alien civilization.

02:54:29.900 | There's species and stuff.

02:54:31.940 | - But I think what--

02:54:32.940 | - Yeah.

02:54:33.940 | - And they might not be able to communicate.

02:54:34.940 | - But you're asking about life, not species, right?

02:54:36.660 | - But what's the difference between one living civilization?

02:54:43.220 | This is almost like a category question.

02:54:45.220 | - Yeah.

02:54:46.220 | - Versus species.

02:54:47.220 | - Right.

02:54:48.220 | - 'Cause it can be very different.

02:54:49.220 | - Right.

02:54:50.220 | - Like evolution, 'cause there's like island, like literally islands that you can evolve

02:54:53.780 | different kinds of turtles and stuff.

02:54:55.500 | - Yeah.

02:54:56.500 | - And they can--

02:54:57.500 | - So I guess what I'm saying is--

02:54:58.500 | - Weird in different ways.

02:54:59.500 | - If you look at the structure of two interacting living things, populations, and you look in

02:55:05.980 | their past and they have independent origins for their causal chain, then you would say

02:55:10.580 | one was alien, they have different independent origins events.

02:55:14.980 | But if you look at their future by virtue of the fact they're interacting, their causal

02:55:18.580 | chains have become co-mingled.

02:55:20.220 | So that in the future, they are not independent.

02:55:24.460 | - Right.

02:55:25.460 | - Right, so that's why you would even define them as alien.

02:55:28.500 | So the structure across time is two examples of life become one example of life because

02:55:33.820 | life is the entire structure across time.

02:55:36.380 | - Right, but there could be a lot of variation within--

02:55:39.300 | - Yeah, so the question we're all interested in is how many independent origins of a complexifying

02:55:46.220 | causal chain are there in the universe?

02:55:49.340 | - But the idea of origin is easy for you to define?

02:55:55.300 | 'Cause like--

02:55:56.300 | - Well--

02:55:57.300 | - When the species split in the evolutionary process and you get like a dolphin versus

02:56:05.260 | a human or Neanderthal versus Homo sapien, isn't there--

02:56:09.900 | - Let me make a distinction here quickly.

02:56:13.020 | So I think, sorry to interrupt, what we're saying, I mean, Sarah won that argument 'cause

02:56:20.420 | I think she's right.

02:56:22.580 | Once the causal chains interact and go forward, so we're talking about a number of things.

02:56:25.860 | Let's go all the way back before origin of life.

02:56:28.020 | Origin of life--

02:56:29.020 | - On Earth.

02:56:30.020 | - On Earth.

02:56:31.020 | Chemistry emerges, so there's all these, I would say there's probably mechanistically,

02:56:35.460 | the chemistry's desperately trying to find any way to get replicators.

02:56:38.540 | The ribosome kind of was really rubbish at the beginning and it just competed, competed,

02:56:42.540 | competed and you got better and better ribosome and suddenly that was the technology.

02:56:46.380 | The ribosome is the technology that boom, allowed evolution to start.

02:56:51.740 | So why I interrupted you is say that once evolution has started using that technology,

02:56:57.940 | then you can speciate and I was trying to, and I think what Sarah was convinced me of

02:57:04.420 | 'cause I was like, no, we can have lots of different chemistry, shadow biosphere on Earth

02:57:08.100 | and she's like, no, no, no, you have to have this, you have to get to this minimum evolutionary

02:57:14.140 | machine and then when that occurs, speciation occurs.

02:57:18.780 | So it's like dolphins, humans, everything on Earth but when you're looking at aliens

02:57:24.860 | or alien life, there's not gonna be two different types of chemistry because they compete and

02:57:30.100 | interact and cooperate because the causal chains overlap.

02:57:33.400 | One might kill the other, one might combine with the other and then you go on and then

02:57:37.260 | you have this kind of, this average and sure, there might be re-speciation.

02:57:42.100 | It might be you have two types of emerging chemistry.

02:57:44.640 | It almost looks like the origin of life on Earth required two different pre-life forms,

02:57:50.180 | the peptide world and the RNA world.

02:57:52.860 | Somehow they got together and by combining, you got the ribosome and that was the minimum

02:57:57.800 | competent entity for evolution.

02:58:00.060 | - And would all alien civilizations have an evolutionary process on a planet?

02:58:06.900 | So that's one of the, it's almost the definition of life.

02:58:10.580 | To create all those memories, you have to have something--

02:58:13.980 | - You have to change in time.

02:58:15.940 | - But there has to be selection.

02:58:19.780 | That's like an efficient, there's no other way to do it.

02:58:22.140 | - No.

02:58:23.140 | Well, never say never because soon as I say that--

02:58:24.980 | - That's the part that depresses me though, going back to like, I don't know, the earlier

02:58:28.820 | discussion on violence and things.

02:58:30.860 | And I don't know where, somebody was tweeting about this recently but like, how much stuff

02:58:35.940 | had to die.

02:58:36.940 | Maybe it was you.

02:58:37.940 | - Yeah.

02:58:38.940 | - Yeah.

02:58:39.940 | So, yeah, sorry.

02:58:40.940 | - So we were talking about life.

02:58:41.940 | - Yeah.

02:58:42.940 | - And I guess a lot of murder had to occur.

02:58:48.420 | - Right, so selection means things had to be weeded out, right?

02:58:52.220 | So--

02:58:53.220 | - Well, we can celebrate that.

02:58:54.220 | Death makes way for the two of us.

02:58:55.660 | - Yeah, I mean, and also, you know, one of the most interesting features of major extinction

02:59:00.140 | events in the history of our planet is how much novelty emerged immediately after, right?

02:59:06.540 | And of course, a lot of people make arguments, we wouldn't be here if the dinosaurs didn't

02:59:09.700 | go extinct.

02:59:10.900 | So in some ways, we can attribute our existence to all of that.

02:59:16.700 | But I guess I was just wondering and sort of like, if I was gonna build a universe myself,

02:59:22.740 | in the most optimistic way, would I retain that feature?

02:59:25.180 | But it does seem to be a universe.

02:59:26.180 | - I think you have to.

02:59:27.180 | I mean, I think we're probably being over-anthropomorphizing.

02:59:31.300 | I remember watching the blue, I think it was the Blue Planet, David Attenborough was showing

02:59:34.700 | these seals and because of climate change, some seals were falling off a cliff and how

02:59:38.780 | tragic that was.

02:59:39.780 | I was like, I was saying to my son, that's pretty cool.

02:59:43.420 | Look at those ones down there, they've obviously got some kind of mutations, some and they're

02:59:46.580 | not doing that daft thing.

02:59:48.140 | And so that poor gene will be weeded out.

02:59:51.380 | Of course, at the individual level, it looks tragic.

02:59:54.900 | And of course, as human beings, we have the ability to abstract and we empathize.

02:59:58.000 | We don't wanna cause suffering on other human beings and we should retain that.

03:00:01.580 | But we shouldn't look back in time and say, you know, how many butterflies had to die?

03:00:08.380 | I remember, if you think about the caterpillar become the chrysalis and then the butterfly

03:00:14.860 | getting out, how many, if that suffering, we call it suffering, if that process of pruning

03:00:20.420 | had not occurred, we have no butterflies.

03:00:22.980 | So none of the butterfly beauty in the world without all that pruning.

03:00:26.820 | So pruning is required, but we shouldn't anthropomorphize and feel sorry for the biological entities

03:00:33.860 | because that seems to be a backwards way of looking at it.

03:00:37.020 | What we should do is project forward and maybe think about what values we have across our

03:00:41.940 | species and our ecosystem and our fellow human beings.

03:00:45.100 | You know, now that we know that animals suffer at some level, think about humane farming.

03:00:51.420 | When we find that plants can in fact are conscious and can think and have pain, then we'll do

03:00:57.340 | humane gardening.

03:00:58.780 | Until that point, we won't do it, right?

03:01:01.140 | I like this.

03:01:03.260 | Famous chemist endorses the majestic nature of murder.

03:01:07.540 | That's the title.

03:01:08.540 | I didn't say that, but okay.

03:01:09.540 | Well, I just inserted it.

03:01:10.540 | I have a hard time with it, though.

03:01:11.540 | I think the way you put it, it's kind of...

03:01:17.860 | But it's the reality of, it is beautiful.

03:01:23.260 | You know, there's an Instagram account called Nature is Metal.

03:01:27.100 | And I keep following it, unfollowing it because I can't handle it for prolonged periods of

03:01:31.940 | time.

03:01:32.940 | We evolve together, you die alone.

03:01:33.940 | Yeah.

03:01:34.940 | We evolve together, but you die alone.

03:01:37.940 | You live alone, too.

03:01:39.500 | It's the Gatsby thing.

03:01:40.780 | I don't know.

03:01:41.900 | We evolve together.

03:01:42.900 | Where's the together?

03:01:43.900 | The together is the murder and the sex.

03:01:45.700 | The population.

03:01:46.700 | Interaction and the population.

03:01:47.700 | Sex and murder.

03:01:48.700 | My romantic vision of it to try to make me happy, Sarah, instead of sad, Sarah, I talk

03:01:52.940 | in third person when I think very abstractly, sorry, is, you know, like this whole, like

03:02:00.100 | certain things can coexist, so the universe is trying to maximize existence, but there's

03:02:03.100 | some things that just aren't the most productive trajectory together, but it doesn't mean that

03:02:09.940 | they don't exist on another timeline or another chain somewhere else.

03:02:15.660 | Maybe you would call that then some kind of multiverse or things, but what am I saying?

03:02:20.660 | I think you can't, you can't go down a level.

03:02:22.780 | I'm just making stuff up to make myself feel better.

03:02:25.700 | I don't understand.

03:02:26.700 | It's illogical.

03:02:27.700 | No, I know, I know.

03:02:28.700 | If you look at bacteria, if you look at virus, I mean, just the number of organisms that

03:02:34.100 | are constantly, like looking at bacteria, they're just dying nonstop.

03:02:37.340 | It's like a slaughter.

03:02:38.340 | Right.

03:02:39.340 | Well, and this goes back to the conversation about God.

03:02:41.020 | I mean, like there's the whole thing about like, why is the universe enables suffering?

03:02:44.780 | Individuals don't exist, right?

03:02:46.580 | So for this, I think if you think about life as an entity on earth, right?

03:02:51.900 | Let's just go back a second.

03:02:53.700 | I mean, I like to, I'll be ludicrous for a second.

03:02:55.700 | I don't exist.

03:02:56.700 | Evolution exists, right?

03:02:58.420 | But the actions you do, the product of evolution exists, right?

03:03:02.580 | The objects you create exist quantitatively in the real world.

03:03:07.600 | If you then understand life on earth or alien life or any life in the universe as this integrated

03:03:12.500 | entity where you need, you need cells in your body to die.

03:03:16.420 | Otherwise you'd just get really big and you wouldn't be able to walk around.

03:03:20.300 | Right?

03:03:21.300 | So you know, you do.

03:03:23.300 | Yeah.

03:03:24.300 | Yeah.

03:03:25.300 | Yeah.

03:03:26.300 | So I think-

03:03:27.300 | It's the patterns that persist, not the physical thing.

03:03:29.420 | And of course we, you know, we have, we have, we place immense values on fellow human beings

03:03:34.260 | and I'm majestic professor does like other individual human beings.

03:03:38.940 | Now you're talking in third person too.

03:03:40.660 | I know, it happens, right?

03:03:41.860 | So death, would you say, I mean, because you said evolution is a fundamental part of life.

03:03:48.180 | So death is a fundamental part of life.

03:03:50.940 | Yeah.

03:03:51.940 | It might right now, it might not be in the future.

03:03:54.300 | We might hack some aspects of death and we'll evolve in different ways.

03:03:58.700 | But isn't there, I think Sarah mentioned like this life density.

03:04:05.100 | Can't that become a problem?

03:04:06.220 | Like too much, too much bureaucracy, too much baggage builds up.

03:04:11.380 | Like you need to keep erasing stuff.

03:04:12.860 | I think it's okay that we dissipate.

03:04:15.580 | Like I don't think of it like-

03:04:16.580 | Dissipate, yes.

03:04:17.580 | No, but I mean like, like we're so fixated on ourselves as individuals and agents.

03:04:23.220 | And we were talking about this last night actually over dinner, but like, you know,

03:04:27.500 | an individual persists for a certain amount of time.

03:04:30.300 | But what you want to do, like if you're really concerned with immortality is not to live indefinitely

03:04:35.260 | as an individual, but maximize your causal impact.

03:04:37.820 | So like, what are the traces of you that are left?

03:04:41.300 | And you're still a real, I always think of Einstein, like for a period of time, he was

03:04:45.980 | a real physical thing where you identify as a human.

03:04:48.860 | And now we just see echoes of that human in all of the ways that we talk about his, you

03:04:53.180 | know, causal impact or frankly, right, is another great example.

03:04:55.940 | How many Easter eggs could you leave in the future?

03:04:58.220 | It's like, oh, I got you.

03:04:59.940 | So I guess the question is how much do you want to control the localization of a certain

03:05:05.380 | features of say a packet of propagating information we might call a person and keep them localized

03:05:12.580 | to one individual physical structure?

03:05:14.580 | Do you want to, you know, is there a time when that just becomes a dissipated feature

03:05:18.580 | of the society that it once existed in?

03:05:22.100 | And I'm okay with the dissipated feature because I just think that makes more room for more

03:05:26.060 | creativity in the future.

03:05:28.300 | - So you mentioned engineering life in the lab.

03:05:31.620 | Let me take you to computer science world.

03:05:36.100 | What about robots?

03:05:38.180 | So is it possible to engineer, 'cause you're really talking about like engineering life

03:05:47.660 | at the chemistry level, but do you think it's possible to engineer life at the like humanoid

03:05:54.860 | level, at the dog level?

03:05:57.700 | Or is that, like at which level can we instill the magic of life into inanimate stuff?

03:06:05.020 | - No, I think you could do it at every level.

03:06:07.220 | I just think that we're particularly interested in chemistry because it's the origin life

03:06:12.900 | transition that presumably, or at least this is how I feel about it, is gonna give you

03:06:16.980 | the most interesting or deepest insights into the physics.

03:06:22.900 | But presumably everything that we do and build is an example of life.

03:06:26.700 | And the question is just how much do you want to take from things that we have now and put

03:06:30.740 | them into like examples of life and copy them into machines?

03:06:35.300 | - I saw that there was this tweet again.

03:06:38.340 | I think you were at the Mars conference and you were hanging out with a humanoid robot.

03:06:42.020 | - Yes.

03:06:43.020 | That was a fun time.

03:06:44.020 | - Making lots of new friends at Mars 2020.

03:06:46.780 | Did you guys color match ahead of time with the robot or did that accidentally happen?

03:06:51.940 | - Accidentally, I went up and I wanted to say hi.

03:06:54.180 | - Torquoise, would that be the correct name for the color?

03:06:57.220 | - I think so.

03:06:58.220 | We didn't color coordinate our outfits.

03:07:00.340 | - Well, you didn't, maybe the robot did.

03:07:02.700 | - The robot probably did.

03:07:03.700 | Much more stylish.

03:07:04.700 | - So for people who are just listening, there's a picture of Sarah standing next to a humanoid

03:07:10.260 | robot.

03:07:11.260 | I guess you like them with a small head and perfect vision.

03:07:15.140 | - Actually no, I just-

03:07:16.140 | - I did that perfectly.

03:07:17.820 | There's a LIDAR.

03:07:18.820 | - No, I mean, I think I was just deeply interested because-

03:07:22.300 | - Sorry to interrupt.

03:07:24.140 | Was it manual control?

03:07:25.140 | Was it actually stabilizing itself?

03:07:27.260 | - Oh no, it was walking around.

03:07:29.100 | - Oh, nice.

03:07:30.100 | - Yeah.

03:07:31.100 | - Nice.

03:07:32.100 | - It was pretty impressive.

03:07:33.100 | Actually, there's some videos online of Jeff Bezos walking with one of those across the

03:07:36.460 | lawn nearby there.

03:07:38.660 | - It's great.

03:07:40.660 | - Yeah.

03:07:41.660 | - I wasn't invited.

03:07:43.660 | - Yeah, but there you go.

03:07:48.660 | See?

03:07:49.660 | - That's incredible, isn't it?

03:07:52.660 | - Yeah.

03:07:53.660 | - So you look at the walking robot, where did the idea for walking come from?

03:07:57.780 | It was invented by evolution, right?

03:08:00.180 | And us as human beings, able to conceptualize and design and engineer.

03:08:03.580 | The causal chain.

03:08:04.580 | So that robot is evidence of life.

03:08:07.260 | And so I think what's going to happen is we want to find where the spark comes from mechanistically.

03:08:14.680 | How can you literally go from sand to cells?

03:08:17.860 | So that's the first transition that I think, you know, there are a number of problems we

03:08:20.700 | want to do.

03:08:21.700 | Make life in a lab, great.

03:08:24.380 | Then we want to make life in a lab and want to suddenly start to make intelligent life

03:08:28.100 | or life that can start to solve abstract problems.

03:08:31.580 | And then we want to make life that is conscious.

03:08:34.940 | Okay?

03:08:36.100 | - In that order?

03:08:37.100 | - I think it has to happen that order.

03:08:38.740 | You know, getting towards this artificial general intelligence.

03:08:41.620 | I think that artificial general intelligence can't exist in a vacuum.

03:08:45.740 | It has to have a causal chain all the way back to Luca, right?

03:08:49.780 | And so the question I think, I really like the question is to say, what are we, how is,

03:08:57.020 | what is our pursuit of more and more lifelike?

03:08:59.140 | I know you want to, you like robots, you want to project into them, you want to interact

03:09:02.620 | with them.

03:09:03.620 | You, I think you would want, if you have a robot dog and the robot dog does everything

03:09:07.620 | expected of a normal dog and you can't tell the difference, you're not really going to

03:09:10.820 | ask the question anymore if it's a real dog or not, or you've got a personality, you're

03:09:14.420 | interacting with it.

03:09:16.100 | And so I think what would be interesting would be to kind of understand the computational

03:09:21.300 | architecture, how that evolves, because you could then, you know, teleport the personality

03:09:25.100 | from one object to the other and say, right, is it act the same?

03:09:29.620 | And I think that as we go along, we're going to get better and better at integrating our

03:09:35.700 | consciousness into machines.

03:09:37.540 | - Well, let me ask you that question just to linger on it.

03:09:43.060 | I would call that a living conscious thing, potentially, I as a human allegedly, but would

03:09:49.740 | you as a person trying to define life?

03:09:53.820 | If you pass the Turing test, are you a life form?

03:09:57.060 | - One of the reasons I walked up to the robot was because I wanted to meet the robot.

03:10:03.060 | So I, it felt like I was, I base a lot of my interaction with reality on emotion and

03:10:10.780 | feeling, but like, how do you feel about an interaction?

03:10:13.580 | And I always love your point about like, is it enough to have that shared experience with

03:10:16.780 | a robot?

03:10:17.780 | So walking up to it, does it feel like you're interacting with a living thing?

03:10:21.060 | And it did to an extent.

03:10:22.860 | But in some degrees, it feels like you're interacting with a baby living thing.

03:10:27.060 | So I think our relationship with technology in particular, the robots we build is really

03:10:30.820 | interesting because basically they exist as objects in our future in some sense, like

03:10:36.260 | we're a much older evolutionary lineage than robots are, but we're all part of the same

03:10:41.060 | causal chain.

03:10:42.700 | And presumably, you know, they're kind of in their infancy.

03:10:47.460 | So it's almost like you're looking at the future of life when you're looking at them,

03:10:50.940 | but it hasn't really become life in a full manifestation of whatever it is that they're

03:10:56.900 | going to become.

03:11:00.060 | And you know, the more, the example of the walking robot was super interesting, but they

03:11:04.380 | also had a dolphin that they put in the pool at the cocktail party at Mars.

03:11:08.600 | And it looked just like a real dolphin swimming in the pool.

03:11:11.660 | And you know, it's in this kind of uncanny valley because, and I was having this conversation

03:11:18.660 | with a gentleman named Mutu who was super perceptive, but he was basically saying like

03:11:22.500 | it made him feel really uncomfortable.

03:11:25.940 | And I think-

03:11:26.940 | - The dolphin.

03:11:27.940 | - Yeah, and I think a lot of people would have that response.

03:11:29.620 | And I guess my point about it is, it is kind of interesting because you're basically trying

03:11:33.740 | to make a thing that you think is non-living mimic a living thing.

03:11:38.420 | And so the thought experiment I would want to run in that case is imagine we replaced

03:11:42.860 | every living thing on earth with a robot equivalent, like all the dolphins and things.

03:11:47.220 | And in some sense, then you're making, if you think that the robots aren't experiencing

03:11:51.020 | reality for example, in the way that a biologically evolved thing would, you're basically making

03:11:56.900 | the philosophical zombie argument become real.

03:12:00.700 | And basically building reality into a simulation because you've made everything quote unquote

03:12:05.980 | fake in some sense.

03:12:07.420 | You've replaced everything with a physical simulation of it.

03:12:11.020 | - So as opposed to being excited by the possibility of creating something new, you're terrified

03:12:20.260 | of humans being replaced.

03:12:22.380 | - I was just trying to run like what would be the absolute thought experiment, but I

03:12:26.940 | don't think that scenario would actually play out.

03:12:29.460 | I guess what I think is weird for why we feel this kind of uncanny valley interacting with

03:12:34.300 | something like the robot dolphin is we're looking at an object we know is kind of in

03:12:38.500 | the future in the sense of like if everything's ordered in time, but it's borrowing from a

03:12:43.020 | structure that we have common history with.

03:12:45.380 | And it's basically copying in a kind of superficial way things from one part of the causal chain

03:12:50.700 | to another.

03:12:51.700 | Yeah.

03:12:52.700 | - Well, that's a video.

03:12:54.980 | - I never believed it was real.

03:12:57.700 | They look so real.

03:13:00.700 | And obviously the technology was developed for movies.

03:13:04.380 | - But I think we're confusing emotional response and understanding the causal chain of how

03:13:08.220 | we got there, right?

03:13:09.740 | Because the philosophical zombie argument thinks about objects just appearing, right?

03:13:15.060 | That you're facsimiled in some way, whereas there is the causal, the chain of events that

03:13:19.460 | caused the dolphin to be built went for a human being.

03:13:22.300 | - Yeah, would a philosophical zombie still have a high assembly index?

03:13:26.100 | - Yeah.

03:13:27.100 | Because it can't be, philosophical zombies can't like Boltzmann brains just can't appear

03:13:31.940 | out of nowhere.

03:13:32.940 | - Well, I guess my question would be in that scenario where you built all the robots and

03:13:36.060 | replaced everything on earth with robots, would the biosphere be as creative under that

03:13:39.700 | scenario or not?

03:13:40.700 | - Yeah.

03:13:41.700 | - And so are there quantitative differences you would notice over time?

03:13:45.500 | - And it's not obvious either way, right?

03:13:47.460 | - It's not obvious right now because we don't really, we don't understand, we haven't built

03:13:51.380 | into machines how we work.

03:13:53.300 | - So that's I think one of the big missing things that I think that we're both looking

03:13:58.620 | for, right?

03:13:59.620 | - This is a robot, it's a cute robot.

03:14:01.180 | - But the point Sarah is that the biosphere won't be as creative if you did it right now.

03:14:05.500 | - No, of course.

03:14:06.500 | I think that's why people don't like it.

03:14:07.860 | - But in the future, we will be able to solve the problem of origin of life, intelligence

03:14:17.220 | and consciousness because they exist in physical substrates.

03:14:21.200 | We just don't understand enough about the material substrate and the causal chain.

03:14:26.380 | But I'm very confident we will get to an AGI, but it won't be what people think.

03:14:30.180 | It won't be, solution won't be a, we'll get fooled a lot.

03:14:34.140 | And so GPT-3 is getting better at fooling us and GPT-153 might really fool us, but it

03:14:40.060 | won't have the magic we're looking for.

03:14:42.700 | It won't be a creative, but it will help us understand the differences between what we're

03:14:48.900 | - Really though, because isn't that what love is?

03:14:52.140 | Being fooled.

03:14:53.140 | Like what, why, why are you not giving much value to the emotional connection with objects,

03:15:00.140 | with robots, with humans?

03:15:02.340 | Emotion is that thing which happens when your expectation function is dashed and something

03:15:09.500 | else happens.

03:15:10.500 | Right?

03:15:11.500 | I mean, that's what emotion is.

03:15:13.060 | - Is that what love is too?

03:15:14.900 | - Yeah.

03:15:15.900 | - You were expecting one thing and something else happened.

03:15:18.700 | - Yeah.

03:15:19.700 | - I don't know.

03:15:20.700 | - I don't think that's true either.

03:15:21.700 | - Well, what is it then?

03:15:22.700 | I think no, emotion, look, I'm sorry, emotion is that, but that's what we're-

03:15:25.700 | - No, I think love is just fulfilling your purpose.

03:15:27.700 | - No, but I mean, look, look.

03:15:30.140 | - Like whatever that means.

03:15:31.140 | - I mean, really, so, okay.

03:15:32.140 | - But when are you happiest?

03:15:33.140 | It's like when you're-

03:15:34.140 | - All right, all right, all right.

03:15:35.140 | Let me go back.

03:15:36.140 | If you want me to define-

03:15:37.140 | - Follow your bliss.

03:15:38.140 | - Let me define love quickly.

03:15:39.140 | - Okay, go for it.

03:15:40.140 | - In terms of assembly space, right?

03:15:42.140 | - Excellent.

03:15:43.140 | - I didn't think I'd be doing this today.

03:15:45.140 | - I can't wait till assembly theory 101 is taught and the second lecture is assembly

03:15:49.140 | theory of love.

03:15:50.140 | - No, no, but look, well, but actually, but look, but-

03:15:53.740 | - It's being surprised.

03:15:54.740 | The expectation is being broken.

03:15:55.740 | - I'm just, I'm not-

03:15:56.740 | - No, go for it.

03:15:57.740 | I want to hear you-

03:15:58.740 | - I'm not an emotional being.

03:15:59.740 | But I would say, so let's talk, so we'll talk about emotional, but love is more complex.

03:16:04.140 | Love is a very complex set of emotions together and logical stuff.

03:16:07.740 | But if you've got this thing, this person that's on this causal chain that has this

03:16:12.620 | empathy for this other thing, love is being able to project ahead in your assembly space

03:16:18.500 | and work out what the person you're in love with has a need for and to do that for them

03:16:23.940 | without selflessly, right?

03:16:26.660 | Because you can project ahead what they're going to need and they are there and maybe

03:16:29.620 | you can see someone who's going to fall over and you catch them before they fall over.

03:16:33.020 | Or maybe you can anticipate that someone's going to be hungry and without helping you,

03:16:36.980 | you just help them.

03:16:37.980 | That's what love is.

03:16:38.980 | - That just sounds like empathy.

03:16:39.980 | - But it's more complex than that, right?

03:16:42.100 | It's more complex.

03:16:43.100 | It's more about not just empathy, it's understanding, it's about kind of sharing that experience.

03:16:48.220 | - You have an expression of love though.

03:16:49.700 | That's not what it's like to feel love.

03:16:51.340 | Like feeling love is like, I think it's like when you're aligned with things that you feel

03:16:56.740 | like are your purpose or your reason for existing.

03:17:00.660 | - So if you have those feelings towards a robot, why is that robot, I mean, because

03:17:07.780 | you said like the AGI, we'll build an AGI, but there'll be a fundamental difference in

03:17:12.460 | AGI and human.

03:17:13.460 | - I don't think we'll build it, it's going to merge from our technology.

03:17:15.140 | - I think you guys are all arguing the same thing.

03:17:16.980 | I just said that GPT, we do not correctly capture the causal chain that we have.

03:17:23.620 | - Within GPT.

03:17:24.620 | - Yeah, within AI.

03:17:25.620 | - Don't you think it captures, because GPT-3 is fundamentally trained on a corpus of knowledge,

03:17:33.980 | you know, like the internet.

03:17:36.020 | Don't you think it gets better and better and better at capturing the memory of all

03:17:39.700 | of those?

03:17:40.700 | - It will be better at fooling you.

03:17:42.140 | And at some point you won't care.

03:17:44.740 | But when it comes, my guess, this is a quick, this is what I was getting to right before

03:17:48.500 | we got, I got in the love trap.

03:17:51.460 | - Love trap, yeah.

03:17:52.780 | - Lee Cronin in the love trap.

03:17:54.740 | - Sounds like a good band name.

03:17:58.740 | - Sad, okay, sad, assembly space of sad.

03:18:01.780 | No, is that so sure, but I think there are other features that we pull on innovation

03:18:09.020 | that allow us to do more than what we just see in GPT-3.

03:18:12.620 | So if you're being fooled there.

03:18:14.340 | So I think what I mean is human beings have this ability to be surprising and creative,

03:18:19.340 | whereas is it Dali, this thing, or if you take, GPT-3 is not gonna create a new verb.

03:18:28.020 | Shakespeare created new verbs.

03:18:29.660 | You're like, wow.

03:18:31.900 | And that required Shakespeare to think outside of language in a different domain.

03:18:36.700 | So I think having that connections across multiple domains is what you need for AGI.

03:18:41.100 | - Yeah, but I don't know if you need, I don't know if there's any limitations to GPT and

03:18:49.700 | not being able to be cross-domain.

03:18:51.700 | - The number one problem is it's instantiated in a resource-limited substrate in silicon.

03:19:00.860 | The architectures used for training for learning is about fooling.

03:19:04.900 | It's not about understanding.

03:19:07.060 | And I think that there is some understanding that we have that is not yet symbolically

03:19:12.780 | representable.

03:19:13.780 | - Language, learning language and using language seems to be fundamentally about fooling, not

03:19:19.300 | understanding.

03:19:22.060 | Why do you use language exactly?

03:19:24.180 | - I might disagree with that quite fundamentally, actually.

03:19:27.620 | But I don't, I'm not sure I understand how I make a coherent argument for that.

03:19:32.100 | But my feeling is that there is comprehension in reality, in our consciousness below language.

03:19:44.180 | And we use those for language for all sorts of expressions.

03:19:46.780 | And we don't yet understand that there's a gap.

03:19:49.140 | We will get there.

03:19:50.140 | But I'm saying, wouldn't it be interesting, it's a bit like saying, could I facsimile

03:19:53.820 | you or Sarah into a new human being, right?

03:19:58.340 | And let's just say I could copy all your atoms and the positions of all your atoms and electrons

03:20:04.100 | into this other person, they would be you.

03:20:05.980 | The answer is no.

03:20:07.460 | And it's quite easy to show using assembly theory, because actually the feature space

03:20:11.900 | that you have, that graph, the only way to copy you is to create you on that graph.

03:20:16.780 | So everything that's happened to you in your past, we have to have a faithful record for.

03:20:20.020 | If you want another copy of Lex, you have to do the exact thing.

03:20:22.540 | Want another copy of Sarah, want another copy of Lee, the exact past has to be replicated.

03:20:27.340 | - Let me push back on that a little bit.

03:20:28.940 | That's maybe from an assembly theory perspective, but I don't think it's that difficult to recreate

03:20:35.100 | a version of me, like a clone, that would make everybody exactly equally as happy.

03:20:43.260 | Like they wouldn't care which one.

03:20:44.860 | And like there's two of me, and then they get to pick which one, and they'll kill either

03:20:49.820 | one, they'll be fine.

03:20:50.980 | As long as they're forced to kill.

03:20:52.340 | - They'll be fine, but here's what will happen is, let's say we make artificial Lex.

03:20:55.620 | And everyone's like, "Wow, so cool, it looks the same in interact."

03:20:58.940 | Then there'll be this battle of like, "Right, we're gonna tell the difference.

03:21:02.060 | We're gonna basically keep nudging Lex and artificial Lex until we get novelty from one,

03:21:09.300 | and we'll kill the other one."

03:21:11.140 | And I think thank God--

03:21:12.140 | - But you're not, novelty is a fuzzy concept.

03:21:14.620 | That's the whole problem of novelty.

03:21:16.580 | - So I will define novelty, it's not fuzzy.

03:21:19.340 | Novelty is the ability for you to create architectures that are, or create an architecture.

03:21:28.740 | So let's say you've got a corpus of architectures known, you can write down, you've got some

03:21:31.660 | distance measure.

03:21:32.660 | And then I create a new one, and the distance measure's so far away from what you'd expected.

03:21:39.060 | There's no linear algebra gonna get there.

03:21:40.420 | It's like, that is creativity.

03:21:43.420 | And we don't know how to do that yet, on any level.

03:21:47.220 | - Well, I was also thinking about your argument about free will.

03:21:50.020 | You wouldn't be able to know it was, it doesn't work instantaneously.

03:21:53.660 | It's not like a micro level thing, but more a macro level thing over the scale of trajectories

03:21:57.940 | or longer term decisions.

03:21:59.260 | So if you think that the novelty manifests over those longer time scales, it might be

03:22:05.060 | the two Lexes diverge quite a bit over certain time scales of their behavior.

03:22:11.420 | - But nobody would notice the difference.

03:22:15.220 | - They might not.

03:22:17.180 | And the universe, the earth won't notice the difference.

03:22:20.180 | The universe won't notice the difference.

03:22:21.180 | - The universe would notice the difference.

03:22:22.420 | - No, the universe doesn't know about its novelty that's being generated.

03:22:25.540 | That's the whole point of novelty.

03:22:26.940 | - Yeah, but this is what selection is, right?

03:22:29.420 | It's like taking nearly equivalent ones and then deciding, like the universe selects,

03:22:34.380 | right?

03:22:35.380 | So whatever selection is, selects some things to persist in time.

03:22:37.980 | - Yeah, it's gonna select the artificial one, just 'cause it likes that one better.

03:22:41.980 | - But you're mixing up two arguments here.

03:22:43.780 | So let's go back a second.

03:22:44.780 | - What are you basing this argument on, Lex?

03:22:45.780 | - I'm just saying that I kind of don't think, 'cause Lee said that it's not possible, like

03:22:55.940 | if you copy every single molecule in a person's body, that's not going to be the same person.

03:23:02.340 | That they won't have the same assembly index, it won't be the same person.

03:23:06.860 | And I just don't, I think copying, you can compress, not only do I disagree with that,

03:23:13.140 | I think you can even compress a person down to some, where you can fool the universe.

03:23:17.900 | - I'm saying, let me restate it.

03:23:19.980 | It is not possible to copy somebody unless you copy the causal history.

03:23:26.780 | - Also, you can't have two identical, I mean, actually, I really like the idea that everything

03:23:31.180 | in the universe is unique.

03:23:32.180 | So even if there were two Lex's--

03:23:33.740 | - I know you like that idea, 'cause you're human and you think you're unique.

03:23:36.940 | - Yeah, exactly.

03:23:37.940 | But also, I can make a logical argument for it, that even if we could copy all of your

03:23:41.780 | molecules and all their positions, the other you would be there, and you have a different

03:23:45.660 | position in space.

03:23:46.660 | You're distinguishable.

03:23:47.660 | - Yeah, the other thing I was gonna add--

03:23:49.980 | - How unique are you, just by the position in space, really?

03:23:53.060 | - Sure, but then how much does that slight translation of Lex--

03:23:56.340 | - Well, that's not an interesting--

03:23:57.340 | - Affect the future.

03:23:58.340 | - I see, but, no, wait a minute.

03:24:02.540 | Is part of the definition of something being interesting is how much it affects the future?

03:24:07.460 | - Yes.

03:24:08.460 | - Yes.

03:24:09.460 | - But let me come back--

03:24:10.460 | - Don't you agree?

03:24:11.460 | - I disagree.

03:24:12.460 | - One point quickly that you were making.

03:24:13.460 | - Sure, I think I probably agree, yeah.

03:24:15.820 | - There's two Lex's, right?

03:24:16.820 | There's a robot Lex that you just basically, it is a charade, it's a facsimile.

03:24:22.860 | It's just coded to emulate you.

03:24:26.540 | - Are you robot Lex?

03:24:28.580 | - I wouldn't know, right?

03:24:29.580 | - Let's get there.

03:24:30.580 | - That's the point, I wouldn't know.

03:24:31.580 | - But let's get there.

03:24:32.580 | It's a very important point here, because he's ducking and diving between this.

03:24:36.100 | So if I facsimile you into a robot, then your robot might be, would be a representation

03:24:42.860 | of you now, but fundamentally be boring, because you go and have other ideas.

03:24:45.740 | If, however, you built an architecture that itself is capable of generating novelty, you

03:24:50.220 | would diverge in your causal chain, and you'd both be equally interesting to interact with.

03:24:55.160 | We don't know that mechanism.

03:24:56.380 | All I'm trying to say is we don't yet know that mechanism.

03:24:58.600 | We do not know the mechanism that generates novelty, and at the moment, in our AIs, we

03:25:03.740 | are emulating.

03:25:05.360 | We are not generating.

03:25:07.320 | - You don't think we're sneaking up on that?

03:25:08.940 | Do you think it's a fun one?

03:25:09.940 | - No, no.

03:25:10.940 | There is no ghost in the machine, and I want there to be one.

03:25:15.160 | I want the same thing you want.

03:25:16.460 | Sorry, I was interrupted.

03:25:17.460 | - I know you want that as a human, because everything you just said makes you feel more

03:25:21.660 | special than the GPT-2.

03:25:22.660 | - I want to be, no, no, no, screw my specialness.

03:25:24.420 | I just want to be surprised.

03:25:26.180 | If I can--

03:25:27.180 | - You don't think a robot can surprise you?

03:25:28.720 | - If you can produce an algorithm instantiated in a robot to surprise me, I will have one

03:25:36.060 | of those robots.

03:25:37.060 | It'll be brilliant, but it won't surprise me.

03:25:39.340 | - But why is it a problem to think that humans are special?

03:25:44.620 | - Maybe it's not the special, you're right.

03:25:46.020 | It's the better than.

03:25:47.980 | - Yes.

03:25:48.980 | - Because then you start to not recognize the magic in other life forms that you either

03:25:54.100 | have created or you have observed.

03:25:56.400 | I just think there's magic in legged robots moving about, and they are full of surprises.

03:26:03.540 | - Yeah.

03:26:04.540 | - So this--

03:26:05.540 | - And personality.

03:26:06.540 | - Yeah.

03:26:07.540 | So I'm a little--

03:26:08.540 | - I know why you like cellular automata, right?

03:26:11.700 | But the specialness in your robot comes from the roboticist that built it.

03:26:18.060 | - Yeah.

03:26:19.060 | - It's part of the lineage.

03:26:21.060 | - Yeah, and so that's fine.

03:26:22.380 | I'm happy with that.

03:26:23.380 | - That's what I felt like looking at the standing robot was I was looking at four billion years

03:26:26.500 | of evolution.

03:26:27.500 | - Yeah, right.

03:26:28.500 | If it wasn't--

03:26:29.500 | - Yeah.

03:26:30.500 | - So I think I'm happy.

03:26:31.500 | I mean, I'm happy we're gonna coexist.

03:26:32.500 | I'm just saying you're gonna get more excitement.

03:26:33.580 | There's something missing in our understanding of intelligence.

03:26:36.460 | Intelligence isn't just training.

03:26:39.420 | The way the neural network is conceived right now is great, and it's lovely, and it'll be

03:26:42.620 | better, and we'll argue forever.

03:26:44.180 | But you want to know, wouldn't it be great if I said, "Look, I know how to invent an

03:26:48.380 | architecture and I can give it a soul."

03:26:51.580 | And what I mean by a soul is some, I know for real that there is internal reference.

03:26:57.780 | As soon as I, not fake internal reference, and if we could generate that mechanism for

03:27:02.620 | internal reference, that's why our goal direct--

03:27:04.620 | - That's why you have to--

03:27:05.620 | - We can do that.

03:27:06.620 | - Develop a test for goal directness, yeah.

03:27:07.620 | - Get that goal directness.

03:27:08.620 | You would love that robot more than the one that's just made to look like it does because

03:27:13.180 | you'll have more fun with it because you better generate search, other problems, get more

03:27:18.300 | novelty.

03:27:19.300 | You'll fall in love with that robot, for real, but not the one that's faking it.

03:27:24.700 | - What about fake it till you make it?

03:27:26.380 | - Well, I think a lot of people fall in love with fake humans.

03:27:35.260 | It's nice to fall in love with something that's full of novelty, yes.

03:27:39.660 | I could imagine all kinds of robots that I would want to have a close relationship with.

03:27:44.420 | And I don't mean like sexual, I mean like intimacy.

03:27:47.820 | I just don't think that novelty generation is such a special...

03:27:53.420 | Okay, there's like mathematical novelty or something like that, and then there's just

03:27:59.580 | humans being surprised, and I think we're easily surprised.

03:28:02.940 | - That's fine, but that's--

03:28:03.940 | - But you don't think that's a good definition of novelty?

03:28:05.300 | - No, that's good.

03:28:06.300 | I'm happy to be surprised, but not globally surprised 'cause someone else, but I really

03:28:12.820 | want, I was, while I'm a scientist, I really want to be the first to be surprised by something

03:28:17.780 | and the first thing in the universe to create that novelty and to know for sure that that

03:28:23.500 | novelty has never occurred anywhere else.

03:28:26.420 | That's a real buzz, right?

03:28:27.420 | - Is there a way to really know that?

03:28:29.460 | - You have to have a really big look-up table.

03:28:32.220 | You're never gonna know for sure, right?

03:28:34.460 | That's one of the hard things about being a scientist searching for this type of novelty.

03:28:39.060 | Maybe that's why mathematicians love discovery, but actually they are creating, and then when

03:28:45.100 | they create a new mathematical structure that they can then, you can write code to work

03:28:51.860 | out whether that structure exists before.

03:28:54.940 | That's almost why I would love to have been a mathematician from that regard, to invent

03:28:58.500 | new math that really I know pretty much for sure does not exist anywhere else in the universe

03:29:04.300 | 'cause it's so contingent.

03:29:05.300 | - Right, but this gets into, you said a few times, and I still really don't understand

03:29:09.700 | how you actually plan to do this, to build an experiment that detects how the universe

03:29:13.900 | is generating novelty or that time is the mechanism.

03:29:17.180 | The problem that we all have, which I think is what Lex is pushing against, is if I build

03:29:21.380 | the experiment, you don't know what you put into it, so you don't know what, unless you

03:29:27.380 | can quantify everything you put in, all of your agency, all the boundary conditions,

03:29:31.820 | you don't know if you somehow biased it in some way.

03:29:36.300 | Is the novelty actually intrinsic to that experiment or to that robot, or is it something

03:29:40.100 | you gave it, but you didn't realize you gave it?

03:29:42.500 | It's gonna asymptote towards that, right?

03:29:44.420 | You're never gonna know for sure, but you can start to take out, you can use good Bayesian

03:29:49.060 | approaches and just keep updating and updating and updating until you point, to all intents

03:29:53.940 | and purposes-- - So you wanna bound on how much novelty

03:29:56.060 | generation could be.

03:29:57.460 | - Yeah.

03:29:58.460 | - Got it.

03:29:59.460 | - So the ability to generate novelty is correlated with high assembly index, with assembly index?

03:30:04.980 | - Yeah, yeah.

03:30:06.660 | - 'Cause the space of possibilities is bigger.

03:30:11.620 | So that's the key.

03:30:14.620 | This could be a good, so I have a running joke of why Lex is single, this could be a

03:30:18.940 | good part four.

03:30:23.020 | So what you're looking for in a robot partner is ability to generate novelty.

03:30:33.660 | And that's, I suppose you would say, it's a good definition of intelligence, too.

03:30:40.740 | - Boy, is novelty a fuzzy concept.

03:30:47.740 | - Is creativity better?

03:30:48.740 | - Yeah, I mean, that's all pretty fuzzy.

03:30:53.060 | - It's kind of the same.

03:30:54.660 | Maybe that's why aliens haven't come yet, is 'cause we're not creating enough novelty.

03:30:58.380 | There's some kind of a hierarchy of novelty in the universe.

03:31:01.300 | - Well, I think novelty is like, things surprise you, right?

03:31:04.220 | So it's a very passive thing, but I guess what I meant by saying creativity is I think

03:31:08.020 | it's much more active, that you think there's a mechanism of the things that exist are generating

03:31:12.860 | the creativity.

03:31:14.220 | Novelty seems to be there's some spontaneous production, it's completely decoupled from

03:31:18.260 | the things that exist.

03:31:19.260 | - No, I understand.

03:31:20.260 | I think creativity is the mechanism, and novelty is the observable.

03:31:27.540 | - Novelty could just be surprise, your model of the world was broken, and not necessarily

03:31:32.420 | in a positive way.

03:31:33.500 | - That's surprise.

03:31:34.500 | So there's three things now.

03:31:35.500 | Let's go back, that's cool.

03:31:36.500 | You've got surprise, which is basically, I mean, I'm surprised all the time 'cause I

03:31:41.100 | don't read very much, I'm pretty dumb.

03:31:42.540 | I was like, "Oh, wow, this is..."

03:31:44.020 | I often used to invent new scientific ideas, and I was really surprised by that, and then

03:31:48.580 | when I look in literature properly, and it's there.

03:31:50.140 | So surprise, that's to the extent that you don't have full information.

03:31:54.820 | Creativity, the act of pushing on that kind of on the causal structure, and novelty, which

03:32:03.740 | is measuring that degree, right?

03:32:06.620 | So I think that's pretty well defined in that regard.

03:32:09.700 | So you want your robot, I mean, and in the end, that's why actually the way the internet

03:32:13.580 | and the printing press share some, I actually think creativity has dropped a bit since the

03:32:19.740 | internet, because everyone's just regurgitating stuff.

03:32:23.140 | But of course, now it's beginning to accelerate again, 'cause everyone's using this tool to

03:32:27.380 | be creative, and boom, it's exploding.

03:32:31.260 | So I think that's what happens when you create these new technologies.

03:32:34.820 | That's really helpful.

03:32:36.100 | There's a difference between novelty and surprise.

03:32:38.980 | I think I was thinking about surprise.

03:32:41.060 | If you give me a toy that surprises me for a bit, that'd be great.

03:32:44.020 | Robot that surprises me.

03:32:45.020 | An experiment that surprises you.

03:32:46.900 | Yeah, I mean, that's why I love doing experiments, 'cause I can't...

03:32:49.540 | It's still exciting.

03:32:50.540 | Surprise is exciting.

03:32:53.240 | Even negative surprise, like some people love drama in relationships.

03:32:56.580 | It's like, "Why the hell, why'd you do this?"

03:33:01.020 | That can be exciting.

03:33:02.540 | I can imagine companies selling updates to their companion robots that just basically

03:33:06.980 | generate negative surprise, just to spice things up a bit.

03:33:10.140 | Yeah, it's the push and pull.

03:33:12.140 | That's one of the components of love.

03:33:13.980 | As you said, love is a complicated thing.

03:33:16.060 | Oh, beauty, I wanted to mention this, 'cause you also tweeted, I think this was Sarah.

03:33:20.900 | No, it might have been Lee.

03:33:22.140 | I don't remember.

03:33:23.140 | But it was a survey published in Nature showing that scientists find...

03:33:26.860 | That was me, yeah.

03:33:28.860 | Anyway, there's a plot.

03:33:30.860 | This is published in Nature of what scientists find beautiful in their work, and it separates

03:33:37.380 | biologists and physicists.

03:33:38.780 | It'd be nice if you showed the full plot.

03:33:41.860 | And there's simplicity, elegance, hidden order, inner logic of systems, symmetry, complexity,

03:33:47.980 | harmony, and so on.

03:33:49.660 | Is there any interesting things that stand out to you?

03:33:53.060 | I think the fact that biologists like complexity and pleasing colors.

03:33:57.700 | Oh, there's pleasing colors on there?

03:34:00.820 | Yeah, yeah, yeah.

03:34:01.820 | Or shapes.

03:34:02.820 | Or shapes.

03:34:03.820 | And then physicists obviously love simplicity above all else.

03:34:08.140 | Simplicity and elegance.

03:34:09.140 | Simplicity, elegance.

03:34:10.140 | They love symmetry.

03:34:11.140 | And then biologists love complexity.

03:34:15.140 | And well, they just love a little bit less.

03:34:17.940 | They love everything a little bit less, but complexity a little bit more.

03:34:20.900 | A little bit more.

03:34:22.420 | That's so interesting.

03:34:23.420 | And pleasing colors or shapes.

03:34:25.300 | Do you think it's a useful...

03:34:26.300 | I forget what your tweet was, that this is missing some of the...

03:34:29.300 | No, I think it's because I think about how explanations become causal to our future.

03:34:36.580 | So I have this whole philosophy that the theories we build and the way we describe reality should

03:34:44.540 | be have the largest breadth of possibilities for the future of what we can accomplish.

03:34:52.820 | So in some sense, it's not like Occam's razor is not for simplicity, it's for optimism or

03:34:58.180 | the kind of future you can build.

03:35:00.260 | And so I think you have to think this way when you're thinking about life and alien

03:35:05.460 | life because ultimately we're trying to build...

03:35:07.780 | I mean, science is just basically our narratives about reality.

03:35:11.140 | And now you're building a narrative that is what we are as physical systems.

03:35:14.060 | It seems to me it needs to be as positive as possible because it's basically going to

03:35:17.380 | shape the future trajectory where we're going.

03:35:20.180 | And we don't use that as a heuristic in theory building because we think theories are about

03:35:26.020 | predicting features of the world, not causing them.

03:35:28.940 | But if you look at the history of all of the development of human thought, it's caused

03:35:31.940 | the things that happen next.

03:35:33.100 | So it's not just about looking at the world and observing it, it's about actually that

03:35:38.700 | feedback loop that's missing and it's not in any of those categories.

03:35:46.420 | What do you think is the most beautiful idea in the physics of life, in the chemistry of

03:35:53.580 | life, in this... through all your exploration with assembly theory, what is the thing that

03:36:03.940 | made you step back and say, "This idea is beautiful or potentially beautiful"?

03:36:11.780 | - For me, it's that the universe is a creative place.

03:36:14.340 | I guess I want to think, and whether it's true or not, is that we are special in some

03:36:20.260 | way and it's not like an arbitrary, added-on, epiphenomenal or ad hoc feature of the universe

03:36:26.100 | that we exist, but it's something deep and intrinsic to the structure of reality.

03:36:31.260 | And to me, the most beautiful ideas that come out of that is that the reason we exist is

03:36:35.700 | for the universe to generate more things and to think about itself and use that as a mechanism

03:36:42.780 | for creating more stuff.

03:36:47.260 | That's for me.

03:36:48.260 | - So like the life that this, however common it is, is an intrinsic part, is a fundamental

03:36:56.660 | part of this universe, at least, that we live in.

03:36:59.860 | - I think so.

03:37:00.860 | It's always interesting to me because we have theories of quantum mechanics and gravity,

03:37:06.780 | and they're supposed to be our most fundamental theories right now.

03:37:09.820 | And they describe things like the interaction of massive bodies or the way that charges

03:37:14.700 | accelerate or all these kind of features.

03:37:18.220 | And they're these really deep theories, and they tell us a lot about how reality works,

03:37:21.380 | but they're completely agnostic to our existence.

03:37:24.140 | And I can't help but think that whatever describes us has to be even deeper than that.

03:37:29.540 | - And I think incorporating memory, I guess, or causality, whatever the term you want to

03:37:35.660 | use, into the physics view of the world might be taking a step in that direction.

03:37:38.860 | - That's the easiest way to do it.

03:37:40.820 | It's the cleanest, so here we go again with the physicist, I'm a physicist.

03:37:44.300 | The cleanest, I was gonna say the simplest, most elegant way of resolving all of the kind

03:37:48.060 | of ways that we have these paradoxes associated with life.

03:37:53.900 | It's not that life is not, current physics is not incompatible with life, but it doesn't

03:37:59.740 | explain life.

03:38:00.740 | And then you want to know where are the explanatory gaps.

03:38:04.380 | And this idea that we have in assembly that time is fundamental and objects actually are

03:38:10.060 | extended in time and have physical extent in time is the cleanest way of resolving a

03:38:14.180 | lot of the explanatory gaps.

03:38:16.660 | - So I've been, I struggle with assembly theory for many years 'cause I could see this gap.

03:38:23.180 | And I think when I first met Sarah and we realized we were kind of talking about the

03:38:30.940 | same problem, but we understood another language.

03:38:34.620 | It was quite hilarious actually, 'cause it's like, I have no idea what you're talking about,

03:38:37.860 | but I think it sounds right.

03:38:39.780 | So for me, the most beautiful thing about assembly theory is I realized the assembly

03:38:44.580 | theory explains why life is a universe developing a memory, but not only that poetically, I

03:38:50.740 | could actually go and measure it.

03:38:53.500 | And I was like, holy shit, we physically measured this thing, this abstract thing, and we could

03:39:00.420 | measure it.

03:39:01.940 | And not only could we measure it, but we can then start to quantify the causal consequences.

03:39:08.420 | And because, I mean, I think as a kind of inventing this together with Sarah and her

03:39:14.420 | team, I thought there was quite a high chance that, we're doing science, there's such a

03:39:21.260 | high probability we're wrong.

03:39:23.260 | - Every day.

03:39:24.260 | - On this.

03:39:25.260 | And I remember kind of trying to go to hard physicists, mathematicians, complexity theorists,

03:39:34.300 | and everyone just kind of giving me such a hard time about it.

03:39:38.100 | And said, you know, this is kind of, you've just done this, you've just done that, you've

03:39:42.660 | just recapitulated an old theory.

03:39:45.780 | And I was unable, I lacked the language to really explain, and I had to, it was a real

03:39:51.380 | struggle.

03:39:52.380 | So this realization that life, what life does, that physics cannot understand or chemistry,

03:39:58.980 | is the universe develops a memory that's causally actionable, and then we can measure it, but

03:40:04.900 | it isn't just one thing, there is this intrinsic property of all the objects in the universe.

03:40:10.300 | Like I've said before, but me holding up this water bottle, it isn't any other water bottle,

03:40:14.420 | but it is a sum total of all the water bottles that have existed, right?

03:40:19.180 | And will likely change the future of water bottles and for other objects.

03:40:23.660 | So it's this kind of, so for me, assembly theory explains the soul in stuff.

03:40:30.940 | - The monadology.

03:40:32.780 | - But it is, monology is not like Sheldrake's morphic resonance, where we have this kind

03:40:37.020 | of wooey thing permeating the universe.

03:40:39.780 | It's the interaction of objects, of other objects, and some objects have more instantaneous

03:40:44.860 | causal power, that's life, living things, and some objects are the instantaneous output

03:40:52.780 | of that causal power, dead objects, but they're part of the lineage.

03:40:56.500 | And that for me is fascinating and really beautiful, and I think that even if we're

03:41:00.720 | determined to be totally wrong, I think it will help us, help hopefully understand what

03:41:06.980 | life is and go into tech life elsewhere and make life in the lab.

03:41:09.900 | - How does that make you feel, by the way?

03:41:11.700 | Does it make you feel less special, that you're so deeply integrated, interconnected to the

03:41:17.180 | lineage?

03:41:18.180 | - I mean, I can on one level, I just wanted in my life as a scientist, I wanted to have

03:41:21.740 | an interesting idea just once or an original idea.

03:41:25.500 | I mean, it was like, you know, so I think that was cool that we had this idea and we

03:41:31.020 | were playing with it.

03:41:32.020 | I think also that I kind of, I mean, it took me ages to realize that Sarah had also had

03:41:37.460 | the same kind of form, coming towards the same formulation, just from a completely different

03:41:41.300 | point because I, but no, it makes me feel special.

03:41:45.260 | And it also makes me feel connected to the universe.

03:41:47.020 | It also makes me feel not just humble about, you know, being a living object in the universe,

03:41:53.620 | but the fact that it makes me really optimistic about what the universe is going to do in

03:41:56.940 | the future, because we're not just isolated phenomena, we are connected.

03:42:02.780 | I will be able to have, you know, one of my small objectives in life is to change the

03:42:07.380 | future of the universe in some profound way just by existing.

03:42:12.100 | - Yeah, that's not ambitious at all.

03:42:14.540 | - I think it's also good because it makes me feel less lonely because I just realized

03:42:22.660 | I'm not like, I mean, I'm a unique assembly structure, but I have so much overlap with

03:42:26.020 | the other entities I interact with that we're not completely individual, right?

03:42:31.700 | - And yet your existence does have a huge amount of impact on how this whole thing unrolls

03:42:39.820 | on the future of the world.

03:42:41.500 | - As individuals, that's, yeah.

03:42:43.620 | - But I was gonna say--

03:42:44.620 | - Local packets of agency.

03:42:45.820 | - I think we all have a profound impact on the future, some more than others, right?

03:42:49.540 | All human beings, all life.

03:42:50.780 | And I mean, that's why I think it's a privilege in a way for, you know, to say, to assert

03:42:56.140 | some degree of ego and agency.

03:42:59.180 | You know, I'm gonna make a computer or make an origin life machine or we're gonna do this

03:43:02.060 | thing.

03:43:03.060 | But actually, it's just like, you know, life's probably living, if there is a God or there's

03:43:07.380 | a soul in everything, it's probably laughing at us going, "I fool these guys by giving

03:43:11.620 | them ego.

03:43:12.620 | So they strive for this stuff and look what it does for, you know, the assembly space

03:43:16.660 | of the universe."

03:43:18.060 | And there's always a possibility that science can't answer all of it.

03:43:20.700 | So that part's challenging for me.

03:43:23.460 | - There may be a limit to this thing.

03:43:27.140 | Let me ask you a bunch of ridiculous questions and I demand relatively short answers.

03:43:33.380 | Lee, what's the scariest thing you've ever done?

03:43:41.140 | Or what's a scary thing that pops to mind?

03:43:45.260 | - Giving seminars in front of other scientists.

03:43:48.780 | - That's, yeah, that is terrifying.

03:43:50.900 | I could, if I had more time, I would ask you about the most embarrassing, but we'll spare

03:43:56.980 | you.

03:43:57.980 | What about you, Sarah?

03:43:58.980 | Scariest thing up there?

03:44:02.660 | Some of the scary things you've done.

03:44:04.940 | - Actually, the scariest for me was deciding I wanted to get divorced because it was like

03:44:09.620 | a totally radical like...

03:44:11.500 | - Life transformation.

03:44:12.740 | - Yeah, because we had been married for a really long time.

03:44:16.220 | And I think it was just so much like, I realized like so much of my individual agency I didn't

03:44:21.500 | realize I had before.

03:44:22.500 | And that was just really like scary, like empowering scary, but like terrifying.

03:44:26.060 | Like you were living in a kind of one way for your whole life and then you realize your

03:44:29.940 | life could be a different way.

03:44:31.860 | - Yeah, there's a between humans.

03:44:33.780 | I mean, that's the beautiful thing about love is the connection you have, but it's also

03:44:38.700 | becomes a dependency and breaking that, whether it's a mentor, with your parents, your close

03:44:43.420 | friends.

03:44:44.420 | - It's almost like waking up, like just there's a different reality.

03:44:46.860 | Yeah, that was scary.

03:44:48.180 | - Reinventing yourself.

03:44:49.460 | Okay, if you could leave, maybe I'll actually alternate.

03:44:53.940 | Sarah, if you could be someone else for a day, someone alive today, you haven't met

03:44:59.900 | yet, or maybe you could do one who you've met, who would it be?

03:45:04.060 | - Kim Kardashian.

03:45:05.060 | No joke.

03:45:06.060 | The woman's brilliant.

03:45:07.060 | I would be her.

03:45:08.060 | - Yeah, she's brilliant.

03:45:09.060 | - I would just like to experience, like, I just, I think she's got such an interesting

03:45:14.140 | and very deep understanding of social reality.

03:45:16.740 | - But you also said you have a appreciation, a love for fashion.

03:45:20.300 | - I do.

03:45:21.300 | But that's actually the same.

03:45:22.980 | Like I just think it's really interesting because we live in a social reality, which

03:45:25.780 | is completely artificially constructed.

03:45:27.980 | And some people are really genius about moving through that.

03:45:30.180 | And I think she's particularly good at it.

03:45:31.580 | - I wonder if she's good at understanding it, if she's-

03:45:33.860 | - I think it's very deeply intrinsic to her.

03:45:35.660 | So I don't know if she-

03:45:36.660 | - She's like surfing a wave.

03:45:37.660 | - I don't know how much cognitive awareness she has of it or how strategic it is, but

03:45:40.580 | I think it's deeply fascinating.

03:45:42.220 | So I guess that's the first one that comes to mind.

03:45:44.820 | - What about you, Lee?

03:45:45.820 | If you could be somebody for a day?

03:45:47.940 | Don't say Yoshi Bach.

03:45:48.940 | - Don't say Kim Kardashian.

03:45:49.940 | - Yeah, right.

03:45:50.940 | Those two are off the table.

03:45:51.940 | - Off the table.

03:45:52.940 | - No, I was gonna say, I would like to be a, does it have to be here today?

03:45:58.060 | I was gonna say, I'd like to be the latest arm processor.

03:46:02.540 | - Interesting.

03:46:04.100 | - I would like to be the latest arm processor.

03:46:07.620 | I'd like to understand, I would like to know what it feel like to basically-

03:46:14.220 | - You like being objects.

03:46:15.220 | - I like being, I've always obsessed with being objects ever since I was a kid.

03:46:18.620 | - What's the best part of being an arm processor for a day?

03:46:21.140 | - I mean, I'd like to understand how I access my memory, what I anticipate is coming next

03:46:24.820 | in clock cycles.

03:46:26.020 | - What about how it feels like?

03:46:27.420 | - Yeah, I wanna know how it feels like to be-

03:46:29.820 | - To be useful.

03:46:30.820 | - To be, thanks for that.

03:46:31.820 | - All right, if, Lee, if everyone on earth disappeared and it was just you left, what

03:46:44.220 | would your days look like?

03:46:46.060 | What would you do?

03:46:47.060 | Nobody else left to impress, nobody, no, probably can't really do any real science at scale.

03:46:53.500 | What would you do with your remaining days?

03:46:55.980 | - Every possible tool I could and put it in my workshop and just make stuff.

03:47:02.580 | - So try to make stuff.

03:47:04.220 | - Just try and make stuff, make companions, I'd probably not making companions probably,

03:47:07.700 | yeah.

03:47:08.700 | - So in the physical space.

03:47:10.060 | - Yeah.

03:47:11.060 | - What about you, Sarah?

03:47:12.460 | What would you, when you're just left alone on earth, you're the last-

03:47:15.660 | - Are there animals in this scenario?

03:47:17.740 | - No, no living beings.

03:47:19.420 | - No plants?

03:47:20.420 | - No plants.

03:47:21.420 | - Oh, interesting, I was gonna say I would just, I would try to walk the entire planet,

03:47:26.820 | at least all the land mass.

03:47:29.020 | - Well, that's true, so you probably don't know if there's stuff, you could be searching

03:47:35.140 | for plants or other humans or other animals.

03:47:36.700 | - And what would I eat?

03:47:37.700 | - It's a, you just have daily just allotment-

03:47:44.700 | - I would just walk all the time, I think.

03:47:45.700 | - Of soylent.

03:47:46.700 | - I don't know why I-

03:47:47.700 | - Just walk.

03:47:48.700 | - That's just what came to mind.

03:47:49.700 | - You're the explorer.

03:47:50.700 | - I'm the explorer.

03:47:51.700 | - And I guess I would make a goal of covering all of the entire earth, 'cause what else

03:47:55.140 | are you gonna do with your time?

03:47:56.660 | - What's an item on your bucket list, Sarah, that you haven't done yet, but you hope to

03:48:00.620 | do?

03:48:01.620 | Skydiving, travel to space.

03:48:08.460 | - I don't know.

03:48:09.460 | You know, it's funny with my bucket list, I only know it was on my bucket list once

03:48:13.580 | I check it off.

03:48:14.580 | - Once you check it off.

03:48:15.580 | So your bucket list is like a fog, it's like a mystery.

03:48:18.060 | - Yeah.

03:48:19.060 | - You're almost by doing it.

03:48:20.060 | - Yeah, so it's very subconsciously driven.

03:48:22.860 | - So it's in your subconscious in there.

03:48:24.780 | - I think so.

03:48:25.780 | - You're bringing it to the surface.

03:48:26.780 | - I think most of the steering of our agency is in our subconscious anyway, so I just kind

03:48:29.620 | of go with the flow.

03:48:30.620 | But I guess, no, seriously.

03:48:31.620 | - Yeah, no, I get it.

03:48:32.620 | - I don't know, I guess, but I would like to go on a submarine, like to the bottom of

03:48:37.660 | the ocean, I think that'd be really cool.

03:48:39.100 | - To the bottom of the ocean.

03:48:40.460 | Are you captivated by the mystery of the ocean?

03:48:42.620 | Like how low?

03:48:43.620 | - I am, yeah.

03:48:44.620 | - Yeah, what about you, Lee?

03:48:47.940 | What item on your bucket list?

03:48:50.420 | - I don't have a bucket list, but I'll just make one.

03:48:51.900 | I would love to take a computer to the moon or Mars and make drugs off world, be the first

03:48:58.060 | chemist to make drugs off world.

03:49:00.780 | - The first drug manufacturer in space.

03:49:02.620 | - Yeah, why not?

03:49:03.620 | - Do they have to be somehow like be able to habitate, like be able to survive on that

03:49:08.860 | particular space?

03:49:10.700 | Or like what's the connection between being on Mars and doing manufacturing?

03:49:14.340 | I just would like to take the ability to have command and control over chemicals programmatically

03:49:21.860 | off earth to somewhere else in the universe.

03:49:24.180 | - That just seems like you like difficulty engineering problems.

03:49:29.020 | - Before I die, if I can do that, that's great.

03:49:30.020 | - Would you travel to space before you die?

03:49:31.700 | - Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying.

03:49:32.980 | I'd love to go into space, but not just to be a tourist.

03:49:35.820 | I wanna take a scientific experiment in space and do a thing in space that's never been

03:49:39.940 | done before.

03:49:41.500 | - That's a real possibility.

03:49:42.500 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

03:49:43.500 | So that's why there's no point in listing things I can't do.

03:49:48.780 | - All right, what small act of kindness were you once shown that you will never forget?

03:49:56.660 | Small act of kindness, not big.

03:49:59.860 | Somebody was just kind to you, somebody did something sweet.

03:50:03.420 | - When I was a PhD student, someone helped me out with just, I was basically, I needed

03:50:12.620 | a computer, I needed some power, computation power, and someone took pity on me and helped

03:50:16.980 | me and gave me, I was really touched, they didn't have to.

03:50:20.300 | And they were actually quite, they were a disabled scientist, they had other things

03:50:23.820 | to do rather than help some random PhD student, gave me access, taught me a lot of stuff.

03:50:29.260 | - Yeah, actually, when you're a grad student or when you're a student, when you're a student,

03:50:33.460 | the younger it is, the better.

03:50:35.740 | The attention, the support, the love you get from an older person, a teacher, something

03:50:40.780 | like that is super powerful, it's fascinating.

03:50:43.340 | And from the perspective of the teacher, they might not realize the impact I have, but that

03:50:47.860 | little bit, those few words, a little bit of help can have a lot of impact.

03:50:54.380 | What about you, Sarah?

03:50:56.380 | Somebody give you a free Starbucks at some point?

03:50:59.300 | - I love free Starbucks.

03:51:00.500 | I like it when you're in the line at Starbucks and somebody buys your coffee in front of

03:51:04.900 | you and then you buy the next one, I love those.

03:51:06.900 | But that's not my example, but those are great.

03:51:09.180 | - I love that too.

03:51:10.180 | - Okay, and then my kids get all excited when we do it, when we go in.

03:51:12.580 | We're the first ones in line doing it.

03:51:18.060 | I guess I can use a similar example about just being a student.

03:51:23.060 | So Paul Davies is a very well-known theoretical physicist and he was generous enough with

03:51:30.620 | his time to take me on as a postdoc.

03:51:33.060 | But before I became his postdoc, he invited me to a workshop at Arizona State University

03:51:36.940 | Beyond Center and took a walk with me around campus just to talk about ideas after.

03:51:42.300 | And I think there were two things that were completely generous about that.

03:51:48.500 | One is Paul's philosophy is always interacting with young people.

03:51:53.620 | You interact with a mind in the room, it doesn't matter how well-known or whatever.

03:51:58.060 | It's like you evaluate the person for the person.

03:52:01.260 | But he also gave me a book, The Eerie Silence, that he had written and he wrote in it, this

03:52:05.900 | is how E.E. gets to E.T., which was Enantiomeric Excess, which I worked on as a PhD student,

03:52:12.380 | was the origin of homochirality, all the way up to what the book was about, which was Are

03:52:16.100 | We Alone in the Universe and Is There an Intelligent Life Out There?

03:52:19.500 | And it was just so much about the questions I wanted to ask, 'cause it was just everything

03:52:25.900 | about, it was just really, really kind.

03:52:29.180 | - Like that it's okay to ask these questions.

03:52:32.060 | - Yeah.

03:52:33.060 | - And you can actually have strong enough to answer them.

03:52:34.060 | - I think a lot of my career is mostly his encouragement to ask deep questions.

03:52:38.260 | He gave me the space to do it in ways that a lot of previous mentors had.

03:52:42.100 | I've had a good experience with mentors, but it was like go off the deep end, ask the hardest

03:52:47.180 | questions.

03:52:48.180 | And I think that's the best gift you can give somebody.

03:52:49.980 | - What would you, 'cause you're both fascinating minds and non, I would say non-standard in

03:52:57.540 | the best possible way.

03:52:59.060 | Is there advice you can give to young folks how to be non-standard, how to stand out,

03:53:05.500 | novelty, how to generate novelty?

03:53:07.260 | - That's what I want on my tombstone, I have one.

03:53:10.860 | - He generated novelty.

03:53:11.860 | - No, no, how to.

03:53:12.860 | - Oh, how to.

03:53:13.860 | - How still.

03:53:14.860 | I just love doing science, and so when I was younger, I was just wanted to, I mean, I'm

03:53:23.380 | still not sure I'm a real scientist, right?

03:53:25.140 | So I wanna try.

03:53:26.560 | So my advice for the young people is just, if you love asking questions, then don't be

03:53:32.380 | afraid to ask the question, even if it pisses people off, because if you piss people off,

03:53:37.180 | you're probably asking the right question.

03:53:40.100 | What I would say though is don't do what I did, which is just piss everyone off.

03:53:44.620 | Try and work out how to, you know, I think if other people are challenged by your questions,

03:53:52.980 | you will get not only respect, but people will create space for you 'cause you're doing

03:53:58.940 | something really new.

03:54:01.380 | I really try to create space in my academic career with my team, really try and praise

03:54:07.640 | them and push them to do new things.

03:54:09.600 | So my advice is try to do new things, get feedback, and the universe will help you.

03:54:17.260 | - 'Cause the universe likes novelty.

03:54:19.820 | - I think so, I think so, right?

03:54:21.860 | - This one will keep 'em around.

03:54:24.460 | What about you, Sarah?

03:54:26.380 | You too like to ask the really out there big question.

03:54:30.420 | - Yeah, 'cause I have a strong passion for them, so I think it goes back to the love.

03:54:36.300 | Like if you're doing the thing you're supposed to be doing, you should really love it.

03:54:40.620 | So I always tell people that they should do the thing they're most passionate about, but

03:54:43.420 | I think a flip side of that is that's when you become, not to sound cheesy, but like

03:54:49.540 | your best version of yourself.

03:54:51.100 | So I guess like for me, as I become more successful in my career, I feel like I can be more myself

03:54:56.140 | as an individual.

03:54:57.580 | And so there's this, I've always been following the questions I'm most interested in, which

03:55:01.460 | very early on I was discouraged from doing by many people because they thought they were

03:55:05.580 | unanswerable questions.

03:55:06.820 | And I always just thought, well, if no one's even trying to answer them, of course they're

03:55:10.940 | gonna be unanswerable.

03:55:12.460 | And then that was kind of an odd viewpoint.

03:55:13.900 | But the more I found my way in that space, the more I also made a space for myself as

03:55:19.100 | a person, because you're basically generating the niche that you want to exist in.

03:55:25.420 | And so I think that's part of it, is not just to follow your passion, but also think about

03:55:31.580 | like who do you want to be and create that.

03:55:35.060 | Yeah.

03:55:36.060 | Who am I?

03:55:37.060 | Who do you want to be?

03:55:38.060 | I mean, yeah, play temporally with it.

03:55:40.380 | Yeah, who am I now?

03:55:41.860 | Who do I want to be now?

03:55:43.060 | But who do I want to be in the future?

03:55:44.340 | They're not decoupled.

03:55:45.340 | Yeah.

03:55:46.340 | I always wonder if that's like, if I become something, am I finding myself or am I creating

03:55:53.500 | myself?

03:55:54.500 | Yeah.

03:55:55.500 | And I think those are somehow the same kind of thing.

03:55:57.980 | I do feel often like I was always meant to be this kind of thing.

03:56:02.700 | But is that created or discovered?

03:56:06.180 | I don't know.

03:56:07.180 | But basically go towards that direction.

03:56:09.660 | If you were abducted by aliens, Sarah.

03:56:11.980 | Excellent.

03:56:12.980 | I'm waiting.

03:56:13.980 | They can come find me.

03:56:15.380 | They're on a spaceship.

03:56:17.660 | And then they somehow figured out the language you speak and ask you, what are you?

03:56:28.060 | Explain yourself.

03:56:29.320 | Not you, Sarah, but the species.

03:56:33.660 | Life on earth, like we don't have time.

03:56:38.060 | We're busy grad students from another planet.

03:56:42.900 | What's interesting about human civilization?

03:56:45.640 | What's interesting about you?

03:56:47.820 | You specifically too.

03:56:48.820 | They could be very kind of personal and kind of pushy.

03:56:53.820 | And yeah.

03:56:54.820 | How would you begin to describe?

03:56:57.820 | Okay.

03:56:58.820 | I have one.

03:57:00.620 | Because obviously I self-identify as a scientist and a physicist, but intrinsically I feel

03:57:05.500 | more like an artist.

03:57:06.500 | But it's almost like you're an artist that you don't know what you're painting yet.

03:57:10.360 | And I guess I feel like that's humanity.

03:57:13.280 | In some sense, we're creating something I think is profound and potentially very beautiful

03:57:19.520 | in existence of the universe.

03:57:20.960 | But we're just so early.

03:57:25.400 | We're early.

03:57:26.400 | We're young.

03:57:27.400 | We don't know what we're doing yet.

03:57:28.400 | Yeah.

03:57:29.400 | What's with the nuclear weapons is a big question too.

03:57:31.360 | What are you guys?

03:57:32.360 | What are we doing with them?

03:57:34.400 | This creativity that you talk is very nice, but it's...

03:57:37.840 | We're making things that are...

03:57:39.400 | Very destructive and the rockets.

03:57:41.600 | This seems very aggressive.

03:57:43.320 | Yeah.

03:57:44.320 | I know.

03:57:45.320 | This is my blinders on.

03:57:48.320 | I don't know.

03:57:49.320 | I mean, it goes back to the whole conversation about suffering.

03:57:50.880 | I have a hard time regularizing certain aspects of reality into what I want to envision.

03:57:56.720 | And that's obviously problematic.

03:57:58.480 | But nuclear power has also given us a lot of good things.

03:58:03.960 | So both...

03:58:04.960 | That's human nature.

03:58:06.240 | Both human beings and the technology we create has the capacity for evil and the capacity

03:58:10.880 | for good.

03:58:11.880 | Yeah.

03:58:12.880 | And we can't all be good all the time.

03:58:13.880 | I mean, there's this huge misnomer that you need to be liked by everyone universally.

03:58:17.400 | And obviously that's an ideal, but it's physically impossible.

03:58:21.360 | You can't get a group of people in a room and have everyone like each other all the

03:58:24.600 | time.

03:58:25.600 | So I think that kind of tension is actually really important that we have different aesthetics,

03:58:32.360 | different goals, and sometimes conflict comes out of that.

03:58:38.720 | Yeah.

03:58:39.720 | Speaking of which, do you, Lee, and Yosha Bach ever say anything nice to each other?

03:58:43.480 | Or is it always conflict?

03:58:45.520 | We never have conflict.

03:58:46.520 | We argue, but I don't think the arguments are bad.

03:58:50.200 | It's love.

03:58:51.200 | I mean, I think the problem I have...

03:58:52.200 | Not problem.

03:58:53.200 | I think...

03:58:54.200 | Here we go.

03:58:55.200 | And he's not here to defend himself.

03:58:56.200 | No, it's just I don't necessarily understand.

03:58:59.680 | I mean, he's just talking at such a high level.

03:59:03.360 | I'm a dimwit.

03:59:04.360 | So I think a lot of our conflict is not conflict.

03:59:08.160 | We actually have a...

03:59:09.240 | I think...

03:59:10.240 | I mean, I can't speak for Yosha.

03:59:11.240 | I have a deep appreciation for him.

03:59:12.640 | He's brilliant.

03:59:13.680 | But I think I'm kind of frustrated and I'm trying to...

03:59:17.680 | He thinks the universe is a computer and I want to turn the universe into a computer.

03:59:23.760 | Yeah.

03:59:24.760 | That's a small disagreement.

03:59:25.920 | So what would you...

03:59:26.920 | How would you defend your life to an alien when you're being abducted?

03:59:30.520 | Would you focus on the specifics of your life?

03:59:32.520 | No, no, no.

03:59:33.520 | I would be...

03:59:34.520 | I would try to be as random as possible and try and confuse them.

03:59:37.160 | Oh, good.

03:59:38.160 | Good.

03:59:39.160 | Excellent.

03:59:40.160 | That might be the wiser choice.

03:59:41.160 | The Easter eggs in reality.

03:59:42.160 | No, I mean, if aliens abducted me...

03:59:43.160 | Would you play dumb?

03:59:44.160 | No, no.

03:59:45.160 | I would try and be as random as...

03:59:46.160 | I would try and do something that would surprise the hell out of them, which I thought...

03:59:47.160 | I mean, probably risky.

03:59:48.160 | They might kill me.

03:59:49.160 | But I think I would try and be as random as possible.

03:59:50.160 | I would try and be as random as possible.

03:59:51.160 | I would try and do something that would surprise the hell out of them, which I thought...

03:59:53.760 | I mean, probably risky.

03:59:54.760 | They might kill me.

03:59:55.760 | But I think that might be funny.

03:59:56.760 | That might...

03:59:57.760 | Yeah, they might want to study you for prolonged periods of time.

04:00:00.400 | My reasoning is if I wanted to stay alive, okay, so if the thing is, if I wasn't going

04:00:04.440 | back to Earth and the job was to stay alive, if I could be as surprising as possible, they'd

04:00:08.280 | keep me around like a pet, right?

04:00:11.680 | Pet Lee on the alien space ship.

04:00:13.000 | So you'd be okay being a pet?

04:00:14.560 | Well, no, but I mean...

04:00:15.560 | The last human that survives would just be a pet to the aliens.

04:00:19.480 | I don't know.

04:00:20.480 | I think that might be fun because then I might get some feedback from their curiosity.

04:00:26.280 | But yeah.

04:00:27.280 | Let me ask you this question.

04:00:28.720 | Given our conversation has a very different meaning, not a more profound meaning perhaps,

04:00:33.420 | but would you rather lose all of your old memories or never be able to make new ones?

04:00:42.280 | I would have to lose all my old memories.

04:00:46.880 | Again, it's the novelty.

04:00:49.880 | What about you, Sarah?

04:00:52.280 | I'm the same because I don't think...

04:00:54.880 | It's about the future experience, right?

04:00:56.440 | And in some sense, like you were saying earlier, most of our lived experience is actually in

04:01:01.200 | our memories.

04:01:02.200 | So if you can't generate new memories, it's like you're not alive anymore.

04:01:06.560 | That's it.

04:01:08.240 | What comforts you on bad days?

04:01:10.440 | When you look at human civilization, when you look at your own life, what gives you

04:01:14.600 | hope or makes you feel good about what we're doing about life at the small scale of you

04:01:20.680 | as a human and at the big scale of us as a human civilization, maybe the big scale of

04:01:25.520 | the universe?

04:01:27.520 | Children, my kids.

04:01:30.600 | But I also mean that in like a grand sense of like, not a grand, but like future minds

04:01:37.000 | in some sense.

04:01:38.160 | So for me, like the most bleak movie ever, people worry about apocalyptic things like

04:01:42.400 | AI existential risk and climate change, which children of men, the whole premise of the

04:01:46.960 | movie was there can be no children born on the entire planet.

04:01:50.840 | And the youngest person on the planet is like 18 years old or something.

04:01:54.920 | Can you imagine a world without children?

04:01:56.880 | It's just, it's harrowing.

04:01:59.120 | That's the scariest thing.

04:02:00.160 | So I think what gives me hope is always youth and the hope of children and the possibilities

04:02:08.880 | of the future they see.

04:02:10.240 | And they grow up in a completely different reality than adults do.

04:02:14.520 | And I think we have a hard time seeing what their reality actually looks like.

04:02:19.680 | But I think most of the time it's super interesting.

04:02:23.240 | Yeah, they have dreams, they have imagination.

04:02:26.360 | They have this kind of excitement.

04:02:27.880 | It's so cool.

04:02:28.880 | It's so fun to watch.

04:02:31.880 | And yeah, you feel like you're almost getting in the way of all that imagination.

04:02:38.920 | What about you, Lee?

04:02:39.920 | What gives you hope?

04:02:40.920 | So when I go back to my eight year old self, the thing that I dreamed of as my eight year

04:02:46.040 | old self was this world in which technology became programmable and there was internet

04:02:50.440 | and I get information and I would expand my consciousness by just, you know, getting access

04:02:58.440 | to everything that was going on.

04:02:59.880 | And it's happened in my lifetime.

04:03:01.480 | I mean, we really do have that.

04:03:02.880 | I mean, okay, there's some bad things, you know, there's TikTok, everyone just, or whatever,

04:03:06.800 | all the bad things about social media.

04:03:08.240 | But I think, I mean, I can't quite believe my luck being born now.

04:03:17.040 | So amazing.

04:03:18.040 | Being able to program reality in some way.

04:03:20.600 | Yeah.

04:03:21.600 | And the thing that I really find fascinating about human beings is just how ingenious they

04:03:26.800 | are.

04:03:27.800 | I'm, you know, whether it's from my kids, my research group, my peers, other companies,

04:03:35.200 | just how ingenious everyone is.

04:03:37.960 | And I'm pretty sure humanity has a, or our causal chain in which humanity is a vital

04:03:43.760 | part in the future is going to have a lot of fun.

04:03:46.600 | And I'm just, yeah, it's just mind blowing just to watch.

04:03:50.320 | And you know, so humans are ingenious and I hope to help them be more ingenious if I

04:03:55.880 | can.

04:03:56.880 | Well, what gives me hope, what makes me feel good on bad days is the existence of wild

04:04:02.640 | minds like yours, novelty generators, assembly structures that generate novelty and do so

04:04:09.400 | beautifully and then tweet about it.

04:04:12.240 | Sarah, this, I really, really enjoy talking to you.

04:04:15.240 | I enjoy following you.

04:04:16.240 | I'm a huge fan.

04:04:17.240 | Sarah Lee, I hope to talk to you many times in the future, maybe with Yosha Bach.

04:04:21.800 | You're just incredible people.

04:04:22.800 | Thank you for everything you do.

04:04:24.200 | You're awesome.

04:04:25.200 | Thank you for talking today.

04:04:26.200 | I really, really appreciate it.

04:04:27.200 | Thanks.

04:04:28.200 | Yeah, brilliant to be here.

04:04:29.840 | Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sarah Walker and Lee Cronin.

04:04:32.840 | To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

04:04:37.520 | Now let me leave you with some words from Arthur C. Clarke.

04:04:41.280 | Two possibilities exist.

04:04:43.760 | Either we are alone in the universe or we are not.

04:04:49.120 | Both are equally terrifying.

04:04:52.280 | And let me, if I may, add to that by saying that both possibilities, at least to me, are

04:04:58.800 | both terrifying and exciting.

04:05:00.960 | And keeping these two feelings in my heart is a fun way to explore, to wander, to think

04:05:05.920 | and to live, always a little bit on the edge of madness.

04:05:10.400 | Thank you for listening.

04:05:11.400 | I hope to see you next time.

04:05:13.120 | Bye.

04:05:14.120 | Bye.

04:05:15.120 | Bye.

04:05:16.120 | Bye.

04:05:17.120 | Bye.

04:05:18.120 | Bye.

04:05:19.120 | Bye.

04:05:20.120 | Bye.

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

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