I don't know what it's like to be an alien.
I would like to know.
Two alien civilizations co-existent on a planet.
What's that look like exactly?
When you see them and they see you, you're assuming they have vision.
They have the ability to construct in 3D and in time.
There's a lot of assumptions we're making.
What human level intelligence has done is quite different.
It's not just that we remember states that the universe has existed in before.
It's that we can imagine ones that have never existed and we can actually make
them come into existence.
So you can travel back in time sometimes.
Yes.
You travel forward in time to travel back.
Yes.
The following is a conversation with Sarah Walker and Lee Cronin.
They have each been on this podcast once before individually and now for their
second time they're here together.
Sarah is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist.
Lee is a chemist.
And if I may say so, the real life manifestation of Rick from Rick and Morty.
They both are interested in how life originates and develops both life here on
earth and alien life, including intelligent alien civilizations out there in the cosmos.
They are colleagues and friends who love to explore, disagree and debate nuanced
points about alien life.
And so we're calling this an alien debate.
Very few questions to me are as fascinating as what do aliens look like?
How do we recognize them?
How do we talk to them?
And how do we make sense of life here on earth in the context of all possible
life forms that are out there?
Treating these questions with the seriousness and rigor they deserve.
So that I hope to do with this conversation and future ones like it.
Our world is shrouded in mystery.
We must first be humble to acknowledge this and then be bold in diving in and trying
to figure things out anyway.
This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Sarah Walker and Lee Cronin.
First of all, welcome back, Sarah.
Welcome back, Lee.
You guys, I'm a huge fan of yours.
You're incredible people.
I should say thank you to Sarah for wearing really awesome boots.
We'll probably overlay a picture.
We'll probably overlay a picture later on, but why the hell didn't you dress up, Lee?
No, I'm just kidding.
This is me dressed up.
You were saying that you're pink.
That your thing is pink.
My thing is black and white, the simplicity of it.
Where's the pink?
When did it hit you that pink is your color?
I became pink about, I don't know, actually, maybe 2017?
Did you know me when you first-
I think I met you pre-pink.
Yeah, yeah.
So about 2017, I think, I just decided, obviously,
I just decided I was boring and I needed to make a statement.
And red was too bright, so I went pink, salmon pink.
Well, I think you were always pink.
You just found yourself in 2019.
There's an amazing photo of him where there's like everybody in their black gown
and he's just wearing the pink pants.
Oh, that wasn't a wagon in university.
It's totally nuts.
100 year anniversary, they got me to give the plenary
and they didn't find the outfit for me.
So they were all wearing these silly hats and these gowns
and there was me dressed up in pink, looking like a complete idiot.
We're definitely going to have to find that picture
and overlay a big full-screen slow motion.
All right, let's talk about aliens.
We'll find places we disagree and places we agree.
Life, intelligence, consciousness, universe, all of that.
Let's start with a tweet from Neil deGrasse Tyson,
stating his skepticism about aliens wanting to visit Earth.
Quote, how egocentric of us to think that space aliens who have mastered interstellar
travel across the galaxy would give, pardon the French,
would give a shit about humans on Earth.
So let me ask you, would aliens care about visiting Earth,
observing, communicating with humans?
Let's take a perspective of aliens.
Maybe Sarah, first, are we interesting in the whole spectrum of life in the universe?
I'm completely biased, at least as far as I think right now
we're the most interesting thing in the universe.
So I would expect based on the intrinsic curiosity that we have
and how much I think that's deeply related to the physics of what we are,
that other intelligent aliens would want to seek out examples of the phenomena they are
to understand themselves better.
And I think that's kind of a natural thing to want to do.
And I don't think there's any kind of judgment on it being a lesser being or not.
It's like saying you have nothing to learn by talking to a baby.
You have less to learn, probably more than you do talking to somebody that's 90.
Yeah, so I think they absolutely would.
So whatever the phenomena is that is human, there would be an inkling of the same kind
of phenomena within alien species and they would be seeking that same.
I think there's got to be some features of us that are universal.
And I think the ones that are most interesting, and I hope I live in an interesting universe,
are the ones that are driven by our curiosity and the fact that our intelligence allows us
to do things that the universe wouldn't be able to do without things like us existing.
We're going to define a lot of terms.
One of them is interesting.
Yes.
That's a very interesting term to try to define.
What do you think are humans interesting for aliens?
Well, let's take it from our perspective.
We want to go find aliens as a species quite desperately.
So if we put the shoe on the other foot, of course we're interesting.
But I'm wondering, and assuming that we're at the right technological capability to go
searching for aliens, then that's interesting.
So what I mean is, if there needs to be a massive leap in technology that we don't have,
how will aliens prioritize coming to Earth and other places?
But I do think that they would come and find us, because they'd want to find out
about our culture, what things are universal.
What about, I mean, I'm a chemist, I would say, well, is the chemistry universal, right?
Are the creatures that we're going to find making all this commotion,
are they made of the same stuff?
What does their science look like?
Are they off-planet yet?
I think that Neil deGrasse Tyson is being slightly pessimistic and maybe trying to
play the tune that the universe is vast, and it's not worth them coming here.
I don't think that, but I just worry that maybe we don't have the ability to talk to them,
we don't have the universal translator, we don't have the right physics.
But sure, they should come.
We are interesting.
I want to know if they exist.
It would make it easy if they just came.
So again, I'm going to use your tweets, like it's Shakespeare, and analyze it.
So Sarah tweeted, thinking about aliens, thinking about aliens.
So how much do you think aliens are thinking about other aliens, including humans?
So you said we humans want to visit, like we're longing to connect with aliens.
Why is that?
Can you introspect that?
Is that an obvious thing that we should be like, what are we hoping to understand
by meeting aliens?
Exactly.
Asking as an introvert, it's like, I ask myself this all the time, why go out on a Friday night
to meet people?
What are you hoping to find?
I think the curiosity.
So when I saw Sarah put that tweet, I think I answered it actually as well,
which was we are thinking about trying to make contact.
So they almost certainly are.
But maybe there's a number of classes.
There are those aliens that have not yet made contact with other aliens, like us.
Those aliens have made contact with just one other alien.
And maybe it's an anti-climax and slime.
And aliens that have made contact with not just one set of intelligent species, but several.
That must be amazing, actually.
Literally, there is some place in the universe.
There must be one alien civilization, it's not made contact with not one,
but two other intelligent civilizations.
So they must be thinking about it.
There must be entire degree courses on aliens, thinking about aliens and universal cultural norms.
Do you think they will survive the meeting?
And by the way, Lee did respond saying that's all the universe wants.
So Sarah said, thinking about aliens, thinking about aliens.
Lee said, that's all the universe wants.
And then Sarah responded, cheeky universe we live in.
So cheeky is a cheeky version of the word interesting, all of which we'll try to define mathematically.
Cheeky might be harder than interesting.
Because there's humor in that, too.
Yes.
I think there's a mathematical definition of humor, but we'll talk about that in a bit.
Oh, interesting.
Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
So if you're a graduate student alien looking at multiple alien civilizations,
do you think they survive the encounters?
I think there's a tendency to anthropomorphize a lot of discussions about alien life,
which is a really big challenge.
So usually when I'm trying to think about these problems, I don't try to think about us as humans,
but us as an example of phenomena that exists in the universe that we have yet to explain.
And it doesn't seem to be the case that if I think about the features,
I would argue are most universal about that phenomena, that there's any reason to think
that a first encounter with another lineage or example of life would be antagonistic.
I think, yeah, and I think there's this kind of assumption.
I mean, going back to Neil deGrasse Tyson's quote, I mean, it kind of bothers me because there's a,
I mean, I'm a physicist, so I know we have a lot of egos about how much we can describe the world,
but that there's this like, because we understand fundamental physics so well,
we understand alien life and we can kind of extrapolate and I just think that we don't.
And the quest there is really, you know, really to understand something totally new
about the universe and that thing just happens to be us.
I agree. I agree. There's something else more profound. I think Neil is just being,
again, he's just trying to stir the pot. I would say from a contingency point of view,
I want to know how many ways does the universe build structures, build memories, right?
And then I want to know if those memories can interact with each other.
And if you have two different origins of life and then origins of intelligence and then these
things become conscious, surely you want to go and talk to them and figure out
what commonalities you share. And it might be that we're just unable to conceive of what they're
going to look like. They're just going to be completely different, you know, infrastructure.
But surely we'll want to go and find out a map and surely curiosity is a property that evolution
has made on earth. And I can't see any reason that won't happen elsewhere because curiosity
probably exists because we want to find innovations in the environment. We want to use
that information to help our technology. And also curiosity is like planning for the future.
Are they going to fight us? Are we going to be able to trade with them? So I think that Neil's
just, I don't know, maybe, you know, I mean, give a shit. That's really, I think that's
really down on earth, right? How would aliens categorize humans, do you think?
How would we? So let's put the other way around. Slime category? Maybe. No, no, no. Maybe we could
think it's a bit odd, right? Look at Instagram, Twitter, all these people taking selfies. I mean,
does the universe is the ultimate state of consciousness, thinking beings that take photographs
themselves and upload them to an internet with other thinking beings looking at each other's
photos. So I think that they will be... What's wrong with that? I did not say there was anything
wrong with it. Consciousness manifested at scale. Yeah. Selfies on Instagram. It's like the mirror
test at scale. Yeah. I do think that curiosity is really the driving force of why we have our
technology, right? If we weren't curious, we wouldn't go out left the cave. So I think that,
so I think that Neil's got it completely wrong, in fact, actually. Of course,
they'd want to come here. It doesn't mean they are coming here. We've seen evidence for that.
I guess we can argue about that, right? But I think that we want... I desperately, and I know
that Sarah does too, but I won't speak for you. You're here. You can... I desperately want to have
missions to look for life in the solar system right now. I want to map life over the solar system.
And then I want to understand how we can go and find life as quickly as possible
at the nearest stars and also at the same time do it in the lab just to compensate.
Right. So you're sure? Yeah. I just want to point on this. If you think about sort of what's
driven the most features of our own evolution as a species, you could... And try to map that to
alien species. I always think optimism is what's going to get us furthest. And so I think a lot
of people always think that it's like war and conflict is going to be the way that alien species
will expand out into the cosmos. But if you just look at how we're doing it and how we talk about
it, so is our future in space is always built from narratives of optimism. And so it seems to me
that if intelligence does get out in the universe, that it's going to be more optimism and curiosity
driving it than war and conflict because those things end up crushing you. So there might be
some selective filter. Of course, this is me being an optimist. I'm a half full kind of person, but...
Is it obvious that curiosity... Not obvious, but what do you think is curiosity a more powerful
force in the universe than violence and the will to power? Because you said you frame curiosity as a
way to also plan on how to avoid violence, which is an interesting frame of curiosity. But I could
also argue that violence is a pretty productive way to operate in the world, which is like...
That's one way to protect yourself. The best defense is offense.
I'm not qualified to answer this, but I'll have a go. I think... That's the summary of this podcast.
Yeah, but maybe... Let's not call it violence, but I call it erasure. So if you think about
the way evolution works all the way... Obviously, call it assembly theory, but I won't... So if you
say you build... Curiosity allows you to open up avenues, new graphs, right? So new features you
can play. What the ability to erase those things allows you to start again and do some pruning.
So the universe, I think curiosity gets you furthest. Curiosity gets you rockets at land. It
gets you robots that can make drugs. It gets you poetry and art and communication. And then,
I often think, wouldn't it be great in bureaucracy to have another world war, not literally a world
war now, please, no world war, but the equivalent so we can remove all the admin bureaucracy,
right? All the admin violence, get rid of it and start again. Do you know what I mean? Because
you get layers and you get redundant systems built. So actually, a reset, let's not call it
violence, a reset in some aspects of our culture and our technology allows us to then build more
important things without the... Because how many cookies do I have to click on? How many
how many extra clicks do I have in the future of my life that I could remove and a bit of
a reset would allow us to start again. And maybe that's how I suppose our encounter with aliens
will be. Maybe they will fight with us and say, we're not as excited by you as we thought. We'll
just get rid of you. So they might want to reset Earth. Yeah. Why not? They'll be like, let's see
how the evolution runs again. This seems like there's nothing new happening here. They're
observing for a while. Let's keep it more fun. Let's start with a fish again. I like how you
equated violence to resetting your cookies. I suppose that's the kind of violence in this
modern world where words are violence, resetting cookies. I don't know where that came from.
That's poetic, really. Okay. So let's talk about life. What is life? What is non-life?
What is the line between life and non-life? And maybe at any point, we can pull in ideas of
assembly theory. Like how do we start to try to define life? And for people listening,
so Sarah identifies as a physicist and Lee identifies as a chemist. Of course,
they are very interdisciplinary in nature in general. So what is life?
Yeah. I'm a little asking that question because it's so absurdly big.
I know. I love it. It's my absolute favorite question in the whole universe.
So I think I have three ways of describing it right now. And I like to say all three of them
because people latch on to different facets of them. And so the whole idea of what Lee and I are
trying to work on is not to try to define life, but to try to find a more fundamental theory that
explains the phenomena we call life. And then it should explain certain attributes. And you
end up having a really different framing than the way people usually talk. So the way I talk
about it, three different ways. Life is how information structures matter across space and time.
Life is, I don't know, this one's from you, actually simple machines constructing more
complex machines. And the other one is the physics of existence, so to speak, which is
life is the mechanism the universe has to explore the space of what's possible.
So that's my favorite. So can I add on to that? Okay, can you see the physics one again?
Physics of existence. Yeah, the physics of existence. I don't know what to call it.
You know, if you think of all the things that could exist, only certain things do exist. And I
think life is basically the universe's mechanism of bringing things into physically existing in
the moment now. Yeah. And what's another one? We were debating this the other day. So
if you think about a universe that has nothing in it, that's kind of hard to conceive of, right?
Because this is where physicists really go wrong. They think of a universe with nothing in it. They
can't. And you think that existence is really hard to think. Yeah. And then you think of a universe
with everything in it. That's really hard. And you just have this white blob, right? This is
everything. But the fact we have discrete stuff in the universe beyond, say, planets, so you've got
stars, space, planets stuff, right? The boring stuff. But I would define life or say that life is
where there are architectures, any architectures, and we should stop fixating on what the bill is
building the architectures to start with. And the fact that the universe has discrete things,
and it is completely mind blowing. If you think about it for one second, the fact there's any
objects at all. Because for me, the object is a proxy for a machine that built it, some information
being moved around, actuation, sensing, getting resource, and building these objects. So for
me, everyone's been obsessing about the machine. But I'm like, forget the machine. Let's see the
objects. And I think in a way that assembly theory, we realized maybe a few months ago,
that assembly theory actually does account for the soul in the objects, not mystically like, say,
Sheldrecht's morphic resonance or Leibniz's monodology, seeing souls in things. But when you
see an object, and I've said this before, but this object is evidence of thought. And then there's a
lineage of those objects. So I think what is fascinating is that you put it much more elegantly,
but the barrier between life and non-life is accruing enough memories to then actuate.
So, so what that means is there are contingency, there are things that happen in the universe get
trapped, these memories then have a causal effect on the future. And then when you get those
concentrated in a machine, and you're actually able in real time, able to integrate the past,
the present, with the future and do stuff, that's when you are most alive.
You being the machine? Yes. Wait a minute, why is the object, so one of the ways to define life
that Sarah said, is simple machines creating complex machines. So there's a million questions
there. So how the hell does a simple machine create a complex machine?
By mutation. So this is what we were talking about at the beginning, you have a minimum
replicator as a molecule. So this is what I was trying to convince Sarah of the mechanism,
get there years ago, I think, but then you've been building on it and saying,
you have a small, you have a molecule that can copy itself. But then that has, there has to be
some variability. Otherwise, it's not going to get more functional. So you need to add bits on.
So you have a minimum molecule that can copy itself, but then it can add bits on and that
can be copied as well. And those add ons can give you additional function
to be able to acquire more stuff to exist. So existence is weird. But the fact that there is
existence is why there is life. And that's why I realized a few days ago, that there must be,
that's why alien life must be everywhere, because there is existence.
Is there like a conservation of cheeky stuff happening? So like, how can you keep injecting
more complex things? Like, doesn't the machine that creates the object need to be as or more
powerful than the things it creates? So how can you get complexity from simplicity?
So the way you get complexity from simplicity is that you, I would, this, I'm just making this up,
but this is kind of my notion that you have a large volume of stuff. So you're able to get
seeds if you like random cues from the environment. So you just use those objects to basically
write on your tape, ones and zeros, whatever. And that is, that is necessarily rich, complex.
Okay. But it has a low assembliness, but even though it has a high assembly number,
we can talk about that. But then when you start to then integrate that all into a smaller volume,
as over time, and you become more autonomous, you then make the transition. I don't know what
you think about that. I think the easiest way to think about it is actually, which I know is a
concept you hate, but I also hate it, which is entropy, but people are more familiar with entropy
than what we talk about in assembly theory. And also the idea that, like, say physics as we know it
involves objects that don't exist across time, or as we would say, low memory objects. So one of the
the key distinctions that that low memory objects, yeah, so physics is all physicists are low memory
objects, but physicists are creators of low memory objects or manipulators of low memory objects.
Absolutely. It's a very nice way of putting it. Okay, so I got it. Sorry to keep interrupting.
No, it's fine. I like it too. It's very funny. But I think it's a good way of phrasing it,
because I think, you know, this kind of idea we have in assembly theory is that, you know,
physics as we know it has basically removed time as being a physical observable of an object.
And the argument I would make is that when you look at things like water bottles or us,
we're actually things that exist that have a large extent in time. So we actually have a
physical size in time. And we measure that with something called the assembly index
in molecules, but presumably everyone should have sort of a, do you want to explain what assembly?
Yeah, let's, you know what? Let's step back and start at the beginning. What is assembly theory?
Please send me some slides. There's a big sexy paper coming out probably. Maybe, I don't know.
We've almost finished it.
Almost, almost finished it.
That's also a summary of science. We're almost done.
Yes. Well, no, no, we're almost done.
It's the history of science. We are ready to start an interesting discussion with our peers.
Right. You're the machine that created the object and we'll see what the object takes us.
All right. So what is assembly theory? Yeah. Well, I think the easiest way for people to
understand it is to think about assembly in molecules, although the theory is very general.
It doesn't just apply to molecules. And this was really Lee's insight. So it's kind of funny that
I'm explaining it, but... Or mark you.
Okay. All right. I'm ready. I'm ready. I'm ready. You can tell me where I get the check marks minus,
but... It's your theory as well.
Yeah, I know. But imagine a molecule and then you can break the molecule part into
elementary building blocks. They happen to be bombs. And then you can think of all the ways
for molecular assembly theory. You can think of all the ways of building up the original
molecules. So there's all these paths that you can assemble it. And the sort of rules or assemblies
you can use pieces that have been generated already. So it has this kind of recursive property to it.
And so that's where kind of memory comes into assembly theory. And then the assembly index
is the shortest path in that space. So it's supposed to be the minimal amount of history
that the universe has to undergo in order to assemble that particular object.
And the reason that this is significant is we figured out how to measure that
with a mass spec in the lab. And we had this conjecture that if that minimal number of steps
was sufficiently large, it would indicate that you required a machine or a system that had
information about how to assemble that specific object because the combinatorial space of
possibilities is getting exponentially large as the assembly index is increasing.
So just sorry to interrupt, but so that means there's a sufficiently high assembly index
that if observed in an object is an indicator that something life-like created it,
or is the object itself life-like? Both. But you might want to make the distinction
that a water bottle is not life, but it would still be a signature that you were in that domain
of physics and that I might be alive. So there will be potentially a lot of arguments about
where the line at which assembly index does interesting stuff start to happen.
The point is we can make all the arguments, but it should be experimentally observable.
And Lee can talk more about that part of it. But the point I want to make about it is
there was always this intuition that I had that there should be some complexity threshold in the
universe above which you would start to say whatever physics governs life actually becomes
operative. And I think about it a little bit like we have Planck's constant, and we have the
fine structure constant. And then this sort of assembly threshold is basically another sort of
potentially constant of nature. It might depend on specific features of the system,
which we debate about sometimes. But then when you're past that, you have to have some other
explanation than the current explanations we have in physics, because now you're in high memory.
The things actually require time for them to exist, and time becomes a physical variable.
The path to the creation of the object is the memory. So you need to consider that.
Yeah, but the point is that's a feature of the object. So when I think of all the things in
this room, we see the projection of them as a water bottle, but assembly theory would say that
this is a causal graph of all the ways the universe can create this thing. That's what it is as an
object. And we're all interacting a causal graph. And most of the creativity in the biosphere is
because a lot of the objects that exist now are huge in their structure across time,
four billion years of evolution to get to us.
Is it possible to look at me and infer the history that led to me as a human?
You as an individual might be hard. You as a representative of a population of objects that
have high assembly with similar causal history and structure that you can communicate with,
i.e. other humans, you can infer a lot probably.
Yeah, also with them.
Which we do genomically even. I mean, it's not like we have a lot of information in us,
we can reconstruct histories from assembly saying something slightly deeper.
Yeah, one thing to add, I mean, it's not just about the object, but the objects occur and
not just objects with a high assembly number, because you can have random things that have
a high assembly number. There must be a number of identical copies.
So you know you're getting away from the random, because you could take a snapshot.
This is why I hate entropy. I love entropy when used correctly.
But the problem with entropy is you have to have a labeler.
And so you can label the beginning and the end, the start and the finish, you know,
where what you can do in assembly is say, oh, I have a number of objects in abundance.
They all have these features. And then you can infer.
And one of the things that we debated a lot, particularly during lockdown, because I almost
went insane trying to crush the produce the assembly equations, we came up with the assembly
equation I had. Just imagine this. So you have this string where, oh, actually it makes me
make me sick trying to remember it. It was so it did my head in for a long time.
Yeah, because I couldn't. So if you just have a string of say words, say, you know,
series of words, series of letters. So you just have a a a b b b c c c d d d.
And you and you find that object and you just just have four A's, four B's, four C's, four D's
together. Boom. Then, and that really that you measured that you physically measured that string
of letters. Then what you could do is you can infer sub graphs of maybe the four A's,
the four B's, the four C's and four C's, but you don't see them in the real world,
you just infer them. And I really got stuck with that because there's a problem to try and work
out what's the difference between a long, you know, physical object and the assembly space
of the objects that we realized. The best way to put that is infer in time. So although we
can't infer your entire history, we know at some point the four A's were made, the four B's were
made, the four C's were made, the four D's were made, and they all got added together. And that's
one really interesting thing that's come out of the theory. But the killer, when we knew we were
going beyond standard complexity theories, was incredibly successful, is that we realized we
could start to measure these things for real across domains. So the assembly index is actually
intrinsic property of all stuff that you can break into components, particularly molecules are good
because you can break them up into smaller molecules, into atoms. The challenge will be
making that more general across all the domains, but we're working on it right now. And I think
the theory will do that. So components, domains, so you're talking about basically measuring the
complexity of an object in what, biology, chemistry, physics, that's what you mean by domains.
Complexity of tests. Sociology. Complexity of computers. Complexity of memes. Memes. What
is that, ideas? Yeah, I mean, so one of them. Ideas are objects in assembly theory, though.
They're physical things. They're just pictures of the causal graph. I mean,
the fact that I can talk to you right now is because we're exchanging structure of our assembly
space. So conversation is the exchanging structures in assembly space. What is assembly
space? When I started working on Origins of Life, I was writing about something called top-down
causation, which a lot of philosophers are interested in and people that worry about the
mind-body problem. But the whole idea is, if we have the microscopic world of physics
is causally complete, it seems like there's no room for higher level causes, like our thoughts
to actually have any impact on the world. And that seems problematic when you get to studying
life in mind because it does seem that quote-unquote emergent properties do matter to matter.
And then there's this other sort of paradoxical situation where information looks like it's
disembodied. So we talk about information, like it can just move from any physical system to any
other physical system. And it doesn't require, like you don't have to specify anything about the
substrate to talk about information. And then there's also the way we talk about mathematics
is also disembodied, right? Like the platonic world of forms. And I think all of those things are
hinging that we really don't know how to think about abstractions as physical things.
And really, I think what assembly theory is pointing to is what we're missing there is the
dimension of time. And if you actually look at an object being extended across time,
what we call information and the things that look abstract are things that are entangled in the
histories of those objects. They're features of the overlapping assembly space. So they look
abstract because they're not, you know, part of the current structure, but they're part of the
structure. If you thought about it as like the philosophical concept of a hyper object, an object
that's too big in time for us to actually to resolve. And so I think information is physical,
it's just physical in time, not in space. To a hyper object too difficult for us to resolve.
So what we're supposed to think about of life is this thing that stretches through time and
there's a causation chain that led to that thing. And then you're trying to measure something with
the assembly index about properties of that. The assembly index is the ordering, the order,
like you could think of it as like a partial ordering of all the things that can happen.
So in thermodynamics, we coarse grain things by temperature and pressure. In assembly theory,
we coarse grain by the number of copies of an object and the assembly index, which is basically,
if you think of the space of all possible things, it's like a depth of how far you've gone into
that space and how much time was required to get there. In the shortest possible version.
The shortest possible version. It's not average, because can't you just 3D?
You're going to kill me with that question. Oh, not 3D. Can't you always 3D print the thing?
It's like cabin in the heart. No, because I had such fights. So Sarah's team and my team are writing
this paper at the moment. And it's so funny. I think we kind of share the at the beginning,
you were like, no, that's not right. Oh, that's right. And we're doing this for a bit. And then
the problem is we build a theory and build the intuition. There's some certain features, right,
of the theory that almost felt like I was being religious about saying, right, you have to do
this. A good assembly, assembly theorist does this, does this, does this. And Sarah's postdoc,
Daniel, and my postdoc, Abhishek, and they were both brilliant. They're brilliant. But they were
like, no, we don't, we don't buy that. And I was like, it is, they were like, well, Lee, actually,
I thought you're the first to say that, you know, you can't, if you can't explain it,
it doesn't, and you can't do an experiment that doesn't exist. And that saved me. And I said
to Abhishek, Abhishek's my postdoc in Glasgow, Daniel is Sarah's postdoc in ASU. I was like,
I have the experimental data. So when I basically take the molecules and chop them up in the mass
spec, the assembly number is never the average is always the shortest. It's an intrinsic property.
And then the penny drop for Abhishek said, okay, because I had these things that we had to
believe to start with or to trust. And then we've done the math and it comes out and they now
have the shortest path. Actually, it's up that explains why the shortest path.
Here's why the shortest path is important, not the average shortest path needs you to
identify when the universe is basically got a memory, not an average. So what you want to be
able to do is to say, what is the minimum number of features that I want to be able to see in the
universe? When I find those features, I know the universe has had a coherent memory and is
basically alive. And so that gives you the lower bound. So that's like, of course, there's going
to be other paths, we can be more ridiculous, right? We can have other parts, but it's just the
minimum. So probabilistically, at the beginning, because assembly theory was built as a measure
for biosignatures, I needed to go there. And then I realized it was intrinsic. And then Sarah
realized it was intrinsic and these hyper objects were coming. And we were kind of fusing that
notions together. And then the team were like, Yeah, but if I have enough energy, and I have enough
resources, I might not take the shortest path, I might go a bit longer, I might take a really long
path, because it allows me then to do something else. So what you do is they say I've got two
different objects, A and B, and they both have different shortest paths to get them. But then,
if you want to make A and B together, they will have a compromise. So in the joint assembly space,
they might that might be an average, but actually, it's the shortest way you can make both A and B
with a minimum amount of resource in time. So suddenly, you then layer these things up.
And so the average becomes not important. But it's a, as you literally overlap those sets,
you get a new shortest path. And so what we realized time and time again, when we're doing
the math, the shortest path is intrinsic, is fundamental, and is measurable, which is kind
of mind blowing. So what we're talking about some basic ingredients, maybe we'll talk about that,
what those basic ingredients could be, and how many steps, when you say shortest path,
how many steps it takes to turn those basic ingredients into the final meal. So how to make
a, what's the shortest way to make a pizza? Or a pie, an apple pie. Yeah. An apple pie,
that's right. And the pizza and a pie together. Or a scratch. Yeah. So there's a lot of ways.
There's the shortest way, and then you take the full spectrum of ways, and there's probably an
average, like duration for a noob to make an apple pie. Is the average interesting still?
If you measure the average length of the path to assemble a thing, does that tell you something
about the way nature usually does it? Versus something fundamental about the object, which I
think is what you're aiming at with the assembly index. Yeah. I mean, look, we all have to quantify
things. The minimum path gives you the lower bounds. You know you're detecting something,
you know you're inferring something. The average tells you about really how the objects are existing
in the ecosystem or the technology. And there has to be more paths explored, because then you can
happen upon other memories and then condense them down. I'm not making too much sense. But if you
look at say, let's just say, I mean, maybe we're going to get to alien civilizations later, right?
But I would argue very strongly that alien civilization A and alien civilization B,
they're different assembly spaces. So they're kind of going to be a bit messed up if they
happen to come on another. Only when they find some joint overlap in their technology, because if
aliens come to us and we, they don't share any of the causal graph we've shared, but hopefully they
share the periodic table and some other and bonds and things that we're going to have to really think
about the language to talk to us aliens by inferring by using assembly theory to infer
their language, their technology and other bits and bobs. And the shortest path will help you
do that quickly. All right. So all all aliens in the causality graphs have a common ancestor
in the if the building blocks are the same, which means they live in the same universe as us.
So in this, it depends on how far back in time you go, though, but the universe has all the same
building blocks. Yeah. And like, we have to assume that. So at least there's there's not
different classes of causality graphs, right? No. The universe doesn't just say like, here,
you get the the red causality graph, you get the blue one, these basic ingredients and they're
geographically constrained or constrained in space or time or something like that.
They're constrained in time because only by the virtue of the fact that
you need enough time to have passed for some things to exist. So the universe has to be
big enough in time for some things. So just a one point on the shortest path versus the average
path, which I think we'll get to this is you had a nice way of saying it's like the minimal compression
is the shortest path for the universe to produce that. But it's also like the first time in the
in the ordering of events that you might expect to see that object. But the average path tells you
something about the actual steps that were realized. And that becomes an emergent property
of that objects interaction with other objects. So it's not an intrinsic feature of that object,
it's a feature of the interactions with other things. And so one of the nice features of assembly
is you basically gotten rid of you just look at the things that exist and you've gotten rid of the
mechanisms for constructing them in some sense, like the machines are not as important in the
current construction of the theory, although I would like to bridge it to some ideas about constructors.
But then you could only communicate with things as as Lee was saying, if you have some overlap in
the past history. So if you had an alien species that had absolutely no overlap, then there would
be no means of communication. But as we become, you know, as we progress further and further in
time, and more things become possible, because the assembly spaces are larger, because you can
have a larger assembly space in terms of index and also just the size of the space because it's
larger than more things can happen in the future. And the example I like to give is actually when
we made first contact with gravitational waves, because, you know, that's an alien phenomena
that's been permeating our planet, not alien in life phenomenon, but alien like something we had
never knew existed. It's been, you know, like we're, you know, there's gravitational waves
rippling through this room right now. But we had to advance to the level of Einstein writing down
his theory of relativity, and then a hundred years of technological development to even quote,
unquote, see that phenomena. So the, okay, to see that phenomena, our causal graph had to start
intersecting. Yeah, we needed the idea to emerge first, the abstraction, right? And then we had
to build the technology that could actually observe features of that abstraction. So the nice
promising thing is, over time, the graph can grow so we can start overlapping eventually.
Yeah. So the interesting feature of that graph is there was an event, you know, 1.4 billion years
away of a black hole merger that we detected on our detector. And, you know, now suddenly we're
connected through this communication channel with this distant event in our universe, that, you know,
if you think about 1.4 billion years ago, what was happening on this planet, or even further back
in time, that, you know, there is common physics underlying all those events, but even for those
two events to communicate with me, I understand what you were going on about the other week.
Yeah, I'm sorry. This is a really abstract example, but, but it's sort of-
Your causal graphs are not overlapping. Yeah. So, well, let's just say now our causal graphs are
overlapping in the deep past. Yeah. No, I like it. So you made it. Oh, the 1.6 billion. Yeah.
You made a connection with it. No, I do like that. No, no, no, you can tell me what your
epiphany is now. This is good. Because I was- And I should get the jokes before 30 seconds after.
Oh, I get it now. All right? No, it's all right. I was slow on the uptake here. I wasn't able to
comprehend what you were talking about when saying the channel communicating to the past,
but what you're saying is we were able to infer what happened 1.4 billion years ago.
We detected the gravity wave. I mean, I think it's amazing that, you know, at that time, we
weren't even, we were just becoming multicellular, right? It's like insane. And then we progressed
from multicellularity through to technology and built the detector and then we just extrapolate
backwards. So although we didn't do anything back to the graph back in time, we understood
there's existence then overlapped going forward. Well, that's because our graphs are larger.
Yeah, but that means that has a consequence. One of the things I was trying to say is I think,
I don't know, Sarah might be, she can correct me, information first. And I'm a
object first kind of guy. So I mean, as things that get constructed, there has to be this transition
in random constructions. So when the constructing the object that's construct being constructed by
the process, bakes in that memory and those memories then add on and add on and add on.
So as it becomes more competent and life is about taking those memories and compressing them,
increasing their autonomy. And so I think that, you know, like the cell that we have in biology
on Earth is our way of doing that, that really the maximum ability to take memories and to act on
the future. Oh, I think that's mathematics. No, mathematics doesn't exist. No, but that's the
point. The point is that abstractions do exist. They're real physical things. We call them
abstractions. But the point about mathematics that I think is, so I don't disagree. I think
you're object first and I'm information first. But I think I'm only information first in the
sense that I think the thing that we need to explain is what what abstractions are and what
they are as physical things because of all all of human history. We've thought that there were
these properties that are disembodied exist outside of the universe and really they do exist in the
universe and we just don't understand what their physics is. So I think mathematics is a really
good example. We do theoretical physics with math, but imagine doing physics of math and then think
about math as a physical object. And math is super interesting. I think this is why we think it
describes reality so well because it's the most copyable kind of information. It retains its
properties when you move it between physical media, which means that it's very deep. And so it seems
to describe the universe really well, but it probably is because it's information that's very
deep in our past. And it's just we invented a way of communicating it very effectively between us.
Isn't math more fundamental? Isn't the assembly of the graph, isn't basically,
I'm gonna say, I sound completely boring. It's like math, assembly theory invented math,
but it did. It has to be. Okay. So what is math exactly? It's a nice simplification,
a simple description of what? So we have a computer scientist, a physicist and a chemist here.
Walking to a bar. I think the chemist is going to define math and you guys can correct me.
Go for it. Let's lay it honestly. We're ready. I think the ability to label objects and
place them into classes and then do operations on the objects is what math is.
So on that point, what does it mean to be object first versus information first?
So what's the difference between object and information when you get to that low fundamental
level? Well, I might change my view. So I'm stuff first, the stuff. And then when stuff becomes
objects, it has to invent information. And then the information acts on more stuff and becomes
more objects. So I think there is a transition to information that occurs when you go from stuff
to object. Information is emergent. Not emergent. Information is actionable memories from the
universe. So when memories become actionable, that's information. But there's always memory,
but it's not actionable. Yeah. And then it's not information. And actionable is what you can create.
You can use it. If you can't use it, then it's not information. If you can't transmit it,
if it doesn't have any causal consequence falls in the forest, I don't understand.
Why is that not information? It's not information. It's it's, it's stuff. It's stuff happening,
but it's not, it's not causal. Yeah, yeah, we can, this is happening. No, no, no, no. Stuff is
always happening. No, this is where the physicists get and the mathematicians get themselves in a
loop because they think the universe, I mean, I think, say, Max Tecmark and is very playful and
say like the universe, universe just math, well, the universe is just math, then we might as well
not bother having any conversation because the conversation already written, we just might as
well go to the future and say, can you just give us the conversations happened already?
So I think the problem is that mathematicians are so successful at labeling stuff and so successful
understanding the stuff through those labels, they forget that actually they're the those labels
had to emerge and that information had to be built on those memories. So memory in the universe,
so constraints, graph, when they become actionable and the graph can loop back on itself or interact
with other graphs and they can intersect, those memories become actionable and therefore their
information. And I think you just changed my mind on something pretty big, but I don't have a pen,
so I can't write, I'm going to write it down later, but roughly the idea is, is like you've got these,
these two graphs of objects of stuff, they have memories and then when they intersect
and then they can act on each other, that's maybe the mechanism by which information is then,
so then you can then abstract. So one, when one graph can then build another graph and say, hey,
you don't have to go through the nonsense we had to go through, here's literally the way to do it.
Stuff always comes first, but then when stuff builds the abstraction, the abstractions can be
then teleported onto other stuff. And the abstractions is the looping back power. Okay. Am I making,
I don't know, I've got stuck. Yeah. So first, a God made stuff. And after that, when you start
to be able to form abstractions, that's when, God is the memory the universe can remember.
God is the memory the universe can remember. Otherwise there's no, wait, did you deciphering
that statement hundreds of years from now? What does that mean? What does he mean by this? Hey, look,
don't diss my one-liners. No, I wasn't dissing it. It took me 15 seconds to come up. I don't know
what it means. What does it mean? Okay, wait, we need to, how do we get onto this? We were
time causality mathematics. So what is mathematics in this picture of stuff,
objects, memory, and information? What is that because mathematics?
It's the most efficient labeling scheme that you can apply to lots of different graphs.
Well, good labeling scheme doesn't make it sound useful.
Can I try? Yep, sure, please. Have you rejected my definition of mathematics? I'm shocked.
Yeah, no, I'm sorry. But it's correct. Go on, sorry.
Excellent. No, I mean, I think we have a problem, right? Because we can't not be us,
like we're stuck in the shells we are, and we're trying to observe the world. And so
mathematics looks like it has certain properties. And I guess the thought experiment I find is useful
is to try to imagine, if you were outside of us looking at us as physical systems using mathematics,
what would be the specific features you associate to the property of
understanding mathematics and being able to implement it in the universe, right? And when
you do that, mathematics seems to have some really interesting properties relative to other
kinds of abstraction we might talk about, like language or artistic expression. One of those
properties is the one I mentioned already that is really easy to copy between physical media. So
if I give you a mathematical statement, you almost immediately know what I mean. If I tell
you the sky is blue, you might say, is it gold ball blue? Is it your blue? What color blue do you
mean? And you have a harder time visualizing what I actually mean. So mathematics carries a lot of
meaning with it when it's copied between physical systems. It's also the reason we use it to communicate
with computers. And then the second one is it retains its property of actually what it can do
in the universe when it's copied. So the example I like to give there is think about like Newton's
law of gravitation. It's actually a compressed regularity of a bunch of phenomena that we
observe in the universe. But then that information actually is a causal in a sense that it allows
us to do things we wouldn't be able to do without that particular knowledge and that particular
abstraction. And in this case, like launch satellites to space or send people to Mars or
whatever it is. So if you look at us from the outside and you say, what is it for physical
systems to invent a thing called mathematics and then to use and then it to become a physical
observable, mathematics is kind of like the universally copyable information that allows
new possibilities spaces to be opened in the future because it allows this kind of ability
to map one physical system to another and actually understand that the general principles.
So is it helping the overlap of causal graphs then by mapping? Oh, I think that's the explanation
for what it is in terms of the physical theory of assembly would be some feature of the structure of
the assembly spaces of causal graphs and their relationship to each other. So for example,
and I mean, this is things that we're going to have to work out over the next few years. I mean,
we're in totally uncharted conceptual territory here. But as is usual, diving off the deep end.
But I would expect that we would be able to come up with a theory of like,
why is it that some physical systems can communicate with each other like language.
Language is basically because we're objects extended over time and some of the history
of that assembly space actually overlaps. And when we communicate, it's because we actually
have shared structure in our causal history. Let me have another quick go at this, right?
So I think we all agree. So I think we take mathematics for granted because we've gone
through this chain, right? Of, you know, we all, we all share a language now, okay? And we can,
well, we share lang, so we have languages that we can, we can make interoperable.
And, and so whether you're speaking, I don't know, all the different dialects of Chinese,
all the different dialects of English, French, German, whatever, you can interconvert them.
The interesting thing about mathematics now is that everybody on planet Earth, every human being
and computers share that common language. That language was constructed by a process in time.
So what I'm trying to say is assembly invented math is those, those right from the, you know,
mathematics didn't occur, didn't exist before life, abstraction was invented by life, right?
That doesn't mean that the universe wasn't capable of mathematical things.
Wait, wait a minute. Can we just ask that, that old famous question is math invented or
discovered. So when you say assembly invented, or whatever, you, you, it means it's just,
assembly is a mathematical theory, but sorry. Right. Are we arguing?
Exactly. Are we arguing now? That's what it sounds like. Are we discovering?
No. Well, yes and no, I would say,
and you call mathematics a language. I would say that, like, I'm pretty sure that there,
there are some very common seeds of mathematics in the universe, right?
But actually, not the mathematics that we are finding now is not discovered, it's invented.
And, but even though I think there's two terms are very triggering, and I don't think they're
necessarily useful, because I think that what people do, the mathematicians that say, oh,
mathematics was discovered, because they live in a universe where there is no time and it just
all exists. But what I'm saying is, and I think in the same way you can create, let's say I'm
going to go and create and make a piece of art. Did I make that piece of art? Or did I discover it?
Like inventing the airplane. Did I invent the airplane? Let's stick with the airplane. The
airplane is a good one. Let's say I'm, I did, did I discover the airplane? Well, in a way,
the universe discovered the airplane, because it's just chucked a load of atoms together,
a load of random human beings want to do stuff and they, we, we discovered the airplane in the
space of possibilities. But here's the thing, when the space of possibilities is so vast,
infinite, almost, and you're able to actualize one of those in an object, then you are inventing it.
So in mathematics, because there are infinite number of theorems, the fact you're actually
pulling, there's no difference between inventing a mathematical structure and inventing the
airplane. They're the same thing. But that doesn't mean that now the airplane exists in the universe
is something weird about the universe. That, you know, so I think that the more, this is the thing
that you probably, the more memory required for the object, the more invented it is. So when a
mathematical theorem has a, has a, needs more bytes to store it, the more invented it is and the
less bytes, the more discovered it is. But everything then is invented. It's just more or less
invented. Absolutely. Okay. The universe has to generate everything as it goes. Yeah. And it
wasn't there in the beginning. And the way we're thinking it, when you're thinking about the
difference between invented and discovered is because we're throwing away all the memory.
Yeah. So if you start to think in terms of causality and time, then those things become the
same. Everything is invented. And the idea is to make everything intrinsic to the universe. So I
think one of the features of assembly theory is we don't want to have external observers. There's
been this long tradition in physics of trying to describe the universe from the outside and not
the inside. And the universe has to generate everything itself if you do it from the inside.
Assembly theory describes how the universe builds itself.
They'll take you 15 seconds to say that. Yeah. And do it to come up with that also.
No, I've thought of that before. Okay. It's a good line. It's a, it's like.
Are you making fun again? No, I'm not making fun. I'm having fun. There's a difference.
Oh, that's good. All right. She's inventing fun. I'm not all intimidated. And there's
a causal history to that fun. You mentioned that there's no way to communicate with aliens until
there's overlap in the causal graph. Communication includes being able to see them.
And like what are we, this is the question is, is communication any kind of detection? And if so,
what do aliens look like as you get more and more overlap on the causal graph?
You're assuming, let's assume that, so when you see them and they see you,
you're assuming they have vision, they have the ability to construct in 3D and in time,
there's a lot of assumptions we're making. What detection? All right. Let's step back.
So yes. Okay. You're right. So when in the English language, when we say the word C,
we mean visually, they show up to a party and it's like, oh, wow, that's an alien.
That's visual. That's 3D. That's, okay. And that's also assuming scale, spatial scale of
something that's visible to you. So it can't be microscopic or it can't be so big that you
don't even realize that's an entity. Okay. But other kinds of detection too.
I would make it more abstract and go, I was thinking this morning about how to rewrite
the IROC by message in assembly theory and also to abandon binary. Because I don't think
aliens necessarily, why should they have binary? Well, they have some basic elements
with which to do information exchange. Let's make it more fundamental, more universal.
So we need to think about what is the universal way of making a memory? And then we should
re-encode our ACBO in that way. What's more basic than zeros and ones?
Well, it's really difficult to get out of that causal chain because we're so,
so let's raise the idea of zero for a moment. It took human beings a long time to come up with
the idea of zero. Now, now you got the idea of zero. You can't throw away. It's so useful.
To discover the idea of zero. To discover or invent.
I don't know, but it took a long time. So it was invented. That's right.
Yeah. I think zero was invented. It's exactly. So it's not given that aliens know what zero is.
It just has the one massive assumption. It's a useful discovery that you're saying,
if you break the causal chain, there might be some other more efficient way of representing.
That's why I want to meet him and ask him for a shortcut. But you won't be able to
ask him until... So I interrupted you and I think you're making good point. I was just
going to say, well, look, sorry, rather than saying... Please internet. Tweet at him for
the rude interruptions. Go ahead. I'm sorry. No, it's okay. Maybe it's change. How do we say...
I don't know what it's like to be an alien. I would like to know.
What is the full spectrum of what aliens might look like to us?
Now that we've laid this all on the table of like, all right, so there has to be some overlap and
this causal chain that led to them. What are we looking for? What do you think we should be looking
for? So you mentioned mass spec measuring certain objects that aliens could create or are aliens
themselves. We show up to a planet or maybe not a planet or maybe what the hell is the basic
object we're trying to measure the assembly index of? Let's cut ourselves a break. Let's
assume that they're metabolized. They've got an energy source and they're a size that we can
recognize. Let's give our cut ourselves a break because there could be aliens that are so big
we won't recognize we're seeing them. There might be aliens that are so small we don't have the
ability to... We don't have microscopes that can see far enough away that just won't be able to see
them. So what's a good range? So let's just make a range... Let's just be very anthropocentric and
say we're going to look for aliens roughly our size and technology our size because we know it's
possible on Earth, right? I mean, a reasonable thing to do would be to find exoplanets that in the
same zone as Earth in terms of heat and stuff and then say, hey, if there's that same kind of gravity,
same type of stuff, we could reasonably assume that the alien life there might use a similar
kind of physical infrastructure and then we're good. So then your question becomes really
relevant and say, right, let's use vision, sound, touch. That's really nice. So if there's a lot
of aliens out there, there's a good likelihood if you match to the planet that they're going to be
in the same spatial and temporal... Operating in the same spatial temporal domain as humans.
Okay. Within that, what do they look like visually? What do they sound like? What do they... Oh,
God, this sounds creepy. Taste-like. What do they... Oh, smell-like, smell-like. That sounds like our
clubhouse. We was like, can we have sex of aliens? Which was basically me saying... Passionate,
passionate love. But it wasn't actually about sex. It was about, is our chemistry compatible,
right? Are they edible too? They could be very edible. They could be delicious.
That's why I want to see some aliens, right? Because I think evolution exploits symmetry,
right? Because why generate memory? Why generate storage, the need for storage space when you
can use symmetry? And symmetry is quite maybe quite effective in allowing you to mechanically
design stuff, right? So maybe you could be reasonable to assume that aliens could have...
They could be bipedal. They could be symmetric in the same way.
Might have a couple of eyes or a couple of senses. I mean, we can make them. Perhaps
there's this whole zoo of different aliens out there and we'll never get to be able to classify
some of the weird aliens we can't interact with because they have made such weird stuff.
But we are just going to look at... We're going to find aliens that look most like us. Why not?
Because those are the first ones we're likely to see.
Yeah. Yeah. But I think it's really hard to imagine what the space of aliens is because
the space is huge. Because one of the arguments that you can make about why life emerges in
chemistry is because chemistry is the first scale in terms of building up objects from
elementary objects, that the number of possible things that could exist is larger than the universe
can possibly make all at once, right? So you imagine you have two planets and they're cooking
some geochemistry. Our planet invented one kind of biochemistry. And presumably, as you start
building up the complexity of the molecules, the chances of the overlap in those trajectories,
those causal chains being built up, is probably very low. And it gets lower and lower as it gets
further advanced along its evolutionary path. So I think it's very difficult to imagine predicting
the technologies that aliens are going to have. I mean, you're looking at basically,
planets have kind of convergent chemistry, but there's some variability. And then you're looking
basically at the outgrowth into the possibility space for chemistry.
So do you think we would detect the technology, the objects created by aliens before we detect
the aliens? Possibly. So when you're talking about measuring assembly index, don't you think we would
detect the garbage first? Like at the outskirts of alien civilizations, this is going to be trash.
I think I would come back to Arecibo. The Arecibo message sent from the Arecibo telescope built by
Drake, I think, and Sagan. How's Arecibo spelled?
A-R-E-C-I-B-O. Yes, thank you. And there we go, they've got it up there.
That's the telescope that sent the message that you're talking about.
So that message was sent where? It was beamed at a star, a specific star,
and it was sent out many years ago. And what they did, so this is why it's pushing on binary,
it's a binary message. I think it's a semi-prime length number of characters, so I think 27E3
by 23, I think. And it basically represents human bit, proton, binary, human beings, DNA,
male and female. And it's really cool. But I'm just wondering if it could be
done not making any, because it made assumptions that aliens speak binary.
Why make that assumption? Why not just assume that if the difference between physics, chemistry,
and biology is the amount of memory that's recordable by the substrates, then surely
the universal thing, I'm going to make some sacrilegious statement which I think is
pretty awesome for people to argue with. So this is, we're looking at an image where it's the
entirety of the message encoded in binary, and then there's probably interpretation of
different parts of that image. There's a person, there's green parts, it looks like for people
just listening like a Tetris, a game of Tetris. So it's encoding in minimal ways,
a bunch of cool information probably.
Representing all of us.
So at the top, it's kind of teaching us how to count, and then it all goes all the way down,
teaching you chemistry, and then just says, but it makes so many assumptions. And I think
if we can actually, I think, I mean, Sarah's much more eloquent expressing this, but I'll
have a go and you can correct it if you want, which is like, one of the things that Sarah has
had a profound effect on the way I look at the origin of life. And this is one of the reasons
why we're working together, because we don't really care about the origin of life. We want to
make life, make aliens and find aliens, make aliens, find aliens. I think we might have to
make aliens in the lab before we find aliens in the universe, right? I think that would be a cool
way to do it. So what is it about the universe that creates aliens? Well, it's selection
through assembly theory, creating memories, because when you create memories, you can then
command your domain, you can basically do stuff, you can command matter. So we need to find a way
by understanding what life is of how the minimal way to command matter, how that would emerge in
the universe. And being if we want to communicate, I mean, maybe we don't want to necessarily
uniformly communicate. What I would do, perhaps if I had is I would send out lots of probes
away from Earth to have this magic way of communicating with aliens, get them quite
a far away from Earth, plausibly deniable, and then send out the message that would then attract
all the aliens and then basically work out if they're a friend or foe and how they want to hang
out. The message is being something has to do with the memories. Yes. Like the assembly version
of our SIBO, so that everyone in the universe that has been understands what life is. So aliens
need to work out what they are. Once they've worked out what they are, they then can work out
how to encode what they are, and then they can go out and send messages. It's like the universal,
the Rosetta Stone for life in the universe is working out how the memories are built. I don't
know, Sarah, you have any, well, whether that you would agree with that? No, I wanted to raise a
different point, which is about the fact that we can't see the aliens yet because we haven't gotten
the technology. And presumably we think assembly theory is the right way of doing it, but I don't
think that we know how to go from the kind of data you're describing, Lex, like visual data or smell,
to construct the assembly spaces yet. And in some ways, I think that the problem of life detection
really is the same problem at the foundations of AI, that we don't understand how to get machines to
see causal graphs to see reality in terms of causation. And so I think assembly and AI are
going to intersect in interesting ways, hopefully. But the sort of key point, and I've been trying
to make this argument more recently, and might write an essay on it, is people talk about the
great filter, which is, again, this doomsday thing that people want to say, there's no aliens out
there because something terrible happened to them. And it matters whether that's in our past or our
future as to the longevity of our species, presumably, which is why people find it interesting.
But I think it's not a physical filter. It's not like things go extinct. I think it's literally,
we don't have the technology to see them. And you could see that with microscopes. I mean,
we didn't know there were microbes on this table for our tables for thousands of years
or telescopes. There's so much of the universe we can't see. And then basically what we have
done as a species is outsource our physical perceptions to technology, building microscopes
based on our eyes, and building seismometers based on our sense of feelings, like feel
earthquakes and things. And AI is basically we're trying to outsource what's actually happening in
our thinking apparatus into machines now into technological devices. And maybe that's the
key technology that's going to allow us to see things like us and see the universe in a totally
different way. But you kind of mentioned the great filter. Do you think there's a way through
technology to stop being able to see stuff? So can you take step backwards? I think so, yeah.
Did you imply that with the great, so like? Well, no, I mean, I think there's a great
perceptual filter in the sense that a example of life evolving on a planet over billions of years
has to acquire a certain amount of knowledge and technology to actually recognize the phenomena
that it is. Well, that's the sense I have is when you talk with physicists, engineers in general,
there's this kind of idea that we have most of the tools already to hear the signal.
But to me, it feels like we don't have any of the tools to see the signal.
Yeah, I agree. That's the biggest, like to hear. We don't have the tools to really hear, to see.
Yeah. Aliens are everywhere. We just don't have the...
Exactly. Yeah. Well, that's... I mean, I got this in part, actually, because you were like,
you know, last time I was here, you were like, look at the carpet. You know, could it like,
if you had an alien detector, would the carpet be aliens? I mean, I think we really don't...
So it would be both aliens would nevertheless have a high assembly index or produce things
of high assembly index. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And those things of a high assembly index,
you have to have a detector that can recognize high assembly index in all its forms.
Yeah. Yes. That's it. That's it. Take data, construct assembly space.
Yeah. Those patterns, basically. So one way to think about high assembly index is
interesting patterns of basic ingredients. I can give you an example,
well, because I mean, in molecules, we've been talking about in objects, but we're also trying
to do it in spatial trajectories. Like, imagine you're just... I always get bothered by the fact
that when you look at birds flocking, you can describe that with like a simple boys model or
like, you know, people use spin glass to describe animal behavior. And those are like really simple
physics models. Yet you're looking at a system that you know has agency and there's intelligence
in those birds. And basically, like, you can't help but think there must be some statistical
signatures of the fact that they're... That's a group of agents versus, you know, like, I don't
know, you know, the physics example, maybe like, I don't know, Brownian motion or something.
And so what we're trying to do is actually apply assembly to trajectory data to try to say there's
a minimal amount of causal history to build up certain trajectories for observed agents
that's like an agency detector for behavior. Do you think it's possible to do some like, like,
Boids or those kinds of things, like artificial, like cellular automata, play with those ideas with
assembly... With assembly theory. Have you found any useful, really simple mathematical
like simulation tools that allow you to play with these concepts? So like one, of course,
you're doing mass spec in the physical space with chemistry, but it just seems, well,
I mean, computer science person, maybe, it seems easier to just... I agree with you.
And sexier in terms of tweeting visual information on Twitter or Instagram, more importantly,
to play like, here's an organism of a low assembly index and here's an organism of a
high assembly index. And let's watch them create more and more memories and more and more complex
objects. And so like, in mathematics, you get to observe what that looks like to build up an
intuition what assembly index is like. We are building a toolkit right now. So I think it's
a really good idea. But what we've got to do is I'm kind of still obsessed with the infrastructure
required. And one of the reasons why I was pushing on information and mathematics when human beings,
when human being, we take a lot of the infrastructure for granted. And I think we have
to strip that back a bit for going forward. But you're absolutely right. I would agree that
but I think the fact that we exist in the universe is like, I can see that lots of people
would disagree with the statement. But I don't think Sarah will, but I don't know. The fact
that objects exist, I don't think anyone on Earth will disagree that objects can exist elsewhere,
right? But they will disagree that life can exist elsewhere. But what perhaps I'm trying to say is
that the, the acquisition, the universe's ability to acquire memory is the very first step for
building life. And that must be that's so easy to happen. So therefore, alien life is everywhere
because all alien life is is those memories being compressed and minimized and the alien
equivalent of the cell working. So I think that we will build new technologies to find aliens.
But we need to understand what we are first and how we go through from physics to chemistry to
biology. The most interesting thing, as you say, to these two organisms, different assemblies,
there's one you get into biology, biology gets more and more weird, more and more contingent,
physics is chemistry is less weird, because the rules of chemistry is small and the rules
of biology and then going away to physics where you have a very nicely tangible number of ways
of arranging things. And I think assembly theory just helps you appreciate that. And so once we
get there, my dream is that we are just going to be able to suddenly are, I mean, I'm, I mean,
I'm maybe just being really arrogant here. I'm not mean to be arrogant. It's just, again, I've
just got this hammer called assembly and everything's a nail. But I think that once we crack it,
we'll be able to use assembly theory plus telescopes to find aliens.
Do you have, Sarah, do you have disagreements with Lee on the number of aliens that are out
there? And what they look like. So any of the things we've been talking about is they're
nuanced. It's always nice to discover wisdom through nuanced disagreement.
Yeah. I don't, I don't wholly disagree, but I think, but I do think I disagree. It's kind of,
there's nuance there. But, but we disagree. No, it's fine. It is nuanced, right? So you made
the point earlier that you think, you know, once we discover what alien light, what life is,
we'll see alien life everywhere. And I think I agree on some levels in the sense that I think
the physics that governs us is universal. But I don't know how far I would go to say to say that
we're a likely phenomena, because we don't understand all of the features of the transition
at the origin of life, which we would just say in assembly, as you go from the no memory physics
to there's like a critical transition around the assembly index where
assembliness starts to increase. And that's what we call the evolution of the biosphere
and complexification of the biosphere. So there's a principle of increasing
assembliness where that goes back to what I was saying at the very beginning about the physics
of the possible that the universe basically gets in this mode of trying to make as much
possibilities as possible. Now, how often that transition happens, that you get the
kind of cascading effect that we get in our biosphere, I think we don't know if we did,
we would know the likelihood of life in the universe. And a lot of people want to say life
is common, but I don't think that we can say that yet. So we have the empirical data,
which I think you would agree with. But then there's this other kind of
thought experiment I have, which I don't like, but I did have it, which is, you know,
if life emerges on one planet and you get this real high density of things that can exist on
that planet, is it sort of dominating the density of creation that the universe can
actually generate? So like, if you're thinking about counting entropy, right,
like the universe has a certain amount of stuff in it, and then, you know,
assembly is kind of like an entropic principle. It's not entropy. But the idea is that now
transformations among stuff or the actual physical histories of things now become things
that you have to count as far as saying that these things exist, and we're increasing the
number of things that exist. And if you think about that cosmologically, maybe Earth is sucking
up all the life potential of the whole universe, I don't know. But I-
How's that, can you explain that a little bit? Why can anyone geographical region suck up
the creative capacity of the universe? Just like, I know it's a ridiculous thought. I don't,
I don't actually agree with it, but it was just a thought experiment.
I love that you can have thoughts that you don't like and don't agree with, but you have to think
through them anyway. Yeah, I just- The human mind is fascinating.
Yeah, I think these sort of counterfactual thought experiments are really good when
you're trying to build new theories, because you have to think through all the consequences.
And there are people that want to try to account for, say, the degrees of freedom on our planet
in cosmological inventories of, you know, talking about the entropy of the universe.
And, you know, and when we're thinking about like cosmological era of time and things like
that. Now, I think those are pretty superficial proposals as they stand now, but assembly would
give you a way of counting it. And then the question is, if there's a certain maximal capacity
of the universe's speed of generating stuff, which Leo always has this argument that assembly is
about time, the universe is generating more states, really what it's generating is more
assembly possibilities. And then dark energy might be one manifestation of that, that the
universe is accelerating its expansion because that makes more physical space. And what's
happening on our planet is it's accelerating in the expansion of possible things that exist.
And maybe the universe just has a maximal rate of what it can do to generate things.
And then if there is a maximal rate, maybe only a certain number of planets can actually
do that, or there's a trade-off about the pace of growth on certain planets versus others.
I have a million questions there. Do you have thoughts on-
Just a quick, yeah, I'll just say something very quick.
It's a thought experiment.
No, that's good. I think I get it. I think I get it.
So what I want to say is, when I mean aliens everywhere, I mean memories are the prerequisite
for aliens via selection and then concentration of selection when selection becomes autonomous.
So what I would love to do is to build, say, a magical telescope that was a memory-
A magical one.
A magical one. Yeah, sorry, a real one. There would be a memory detector to see selection.
So you could get to exoplanets and say, that exoplanet looks like there's lots of selection
going on there. Maybe there's evolution and maybe there's going to be life.
So what I'm trying to say is narrow down the regions of space where you say,
there's definitely evidence of memory as high assembly there, or not high assembly,
because that would be life, but it's capable of happening.
And then that would also help us frame the search for aliens.
I don't know how likely it is to make the transition to cells and all the other things.
I think you're right, but I think that we just need to get more data.
Well, I didn't like the thought experiment because I don't like the idea that if the
universe has a maximal limit on the amount it can generate per unit time, that our existence
is actually precluding the existence of other things.
But I think that's probably true anyway, because of the resource limitations.
So I don't like your thought experiment because I think it's wrong.
I do like the thought experiment. So what you're trying to say is,
there is a chain of events that goes back that's manifestly
culminated with life on Earth. And you're not saying that life isn't possible the
way I say that there has been these number of contingent things that have happened that have
allowed life to merge here. That doesn't mean that life can't emerge elsewhere,
but you're saying that the intersection of events may be concentrated here.
Not exactly. It's more like, if you look at, say, the causal graphs are fundamental,
maybe space is an emergent property, which is consistent with some proposals in quantum gravity,
but also how we talk about things in assembly theory, then the universe is causal graphs
generating more structure in causal graphs. So this is how the universe is unfolding.
And maybe there's a cap on the rate of generation. There's only so much stuff that gets made per
update of the universe. And then if there's a lot of stuff being made in a particular
region that happens to look the same locally, spatially, that's an after effect of the fact
that the whole causal graph is updating. Yeah, I don't know that. I think that doesn't work.
I don't think it works either, but I don't have a good argument in my mind about.
But I do like the idea of the capacity, the universe, because you've got a number of states.
Yeah, we can come back to it.
Well, let me ask real quick. Why does different local pockets of the universe start remembering
stuff? How does memory emerge exactly? So at the origin of the universe, it was very forgetful.
That's when the physicists were happiest. There's low memory objects, which is like
ultra low memory objects, which is what the definition of stuff. Okay. So how does memory
emerge? How does the temporal stickiness of objects emerge? I'm going to take a very
chemo-centric point of view because I can't imagine any other way of doing it. You could
think of other ways maybe. But I would say heterogeneity in matter is where the memory...
So you must have enough different ways of rearranging matter for there to be a memory.
So what that means is if you've got particles colliding in a box, let's just take some elements
in a box. Those elements can combine in a combinatorial set of ways. So there's a combinatorial
explosion of the number of molecules or minerals or solid objects, bonds being made.
Because there's such a large number, the population of different objects that are possible,
this goes back to assembly theory where assembly theory, there's four types of universes.
And this is what was up earlier, where one universe where you've just got everything
is possible. So you can take all the atoms and combine them and make everything. Then you've
got basically what is the assembly combinatorial, where you basically have to accrue information
in steps. Then you've got assembly observed, and then you've got the object assembly going back.
So what I'm trying to say is if you can take atoms and make bonds, let's say you take a nitrogen
atom and add it to a carbon atom, you find an amino acid, then you add another carbon atom on
in a particular configuration, then another one, all different molecules, they all represent
different histories. So I would say for me right now, the most simple route into life seems to be
through recording memories and chemistry. But that doesn't mean there can't be other ways and
can't be other emergent effects. But I think if you can make bonds and lots of different bonds,
and they, those molecules can have a causal effect on the future. So imagine a box of atoms,
and then then you combine those atoms in some way. So you make molecule
A from load of atoms, and then molecule A can go back to the box and influence the box.
Then you make A prime or AB or ABC, and that process keeps going, and that's where the memories
come from. Is that heterogeneity in the universe from bonding? I don't know if that makes any sense.
And it's beginning to flourish at the chemistry level. So the physicists have no, no, like not
enough. Yeah. They're like desperately begging for more freedom and heterogeneous components to
play with. Yeah. That's exactly it. What do you think about that, Sarah? I mentioned already,
I think it's significant that whatever physics governs life emerges actually in chemistry. It's
not relevant at the subatomic scale or even at the atomic scale. It's in, well, atomic scale
because chemistry. But when you get into this combinatorial diversity that you get from combining
things on the periodic table, that's when selection actually matters or the fact that some things can
exist and others can't exist actually starts to matter. So I think of it like you don't study
gravity inside the atomic nucleus. You study it in terms of large-scale structure of the universe
or black holes or things like that. And whatever we're talking about as physics of information
or physics of assembly becomes relevant at a certain scale of reality. And the transition
that you're talking about, I would think of as just when you get a sufficient density in terms
of the assembly space of like the relationship of the overlap and the assembly space, which is like
a feature of common memory, there is this transition to assembly-dominated physics,
whatever that is. Oh, like when we're talking about, and we're trying to map out exactly what
that transition looks like, we're pretty sure, you know, if some of its features, but we haven't
done all of that. Do you think if you were there in the early universe, you would have been able
to predict the emergence of chemistry and biology? And I ask that because at this stage, as humans,
do you think we can possibly predict the length of memory that's, that might be able to be formed
later on in this pocket of the universe? Like how, how complex is a, what is the ceiling of assembly?
I think as much time as you have in the past is how much you can predict in the future,
because that it's actually physical in the system. And you have to have enough time for
features of that structure to exist. Wait, let me push back on that. Wait,
isn't that, isn't there somewhere in the universe that's like a shortest path that's been,
that stretches all the way to the beginning? Yeah. That's building some giant monster?
Right. Maybe, yeah. Yeah. So you can't predict. The universe has as much
memory as the largest assembly object in the universe. Yeah. Right. But like, so you can't
predict. You can't predict any deeper than that. No. Right. So like that, I guess what I'm saying is
like, what intuition do you have about complexity living in the world that you'd have today?
Right. Cause you just, you can, I mean, I guess how long does it get more fun? Like,
isn't there going to be at some point, cause there's a, there's a heat death in the universe.
Isn't there going to be a point of the most, of the highest assembly of object with the highest
probability being generated? When is the universe going to be the most fun and can we freeze ourselves
and then live then? Exactly. And will you know when you're having the most fun that this is the
best time you're in your prime? Are you going to do what everyone does, which is deny that you're
in your prime and the best years are still ahead of you? I don't know. What option do you have?
I mean, the problem is there's a lots of, lots of really interesting features here. I just want
to mention one thing that might be, is I do think assembly theory applies all the way back to subatomic
particles. And I hear also think that cosmological selection might have been actually, there might
have been a, it's not, I would say it's a really boring bit, but it's really important for a cosmologist
that the universes have gone through. Was it Lee Smolin who proposed this? Maybe that there is this,
the basic universe evolves. You've got the wrong constants. We'll start again. And the most productive
constants where you can allow particles to form in a certain way, propagate to the next universe
may go again. So actually selection goes all the way back. And these are the cycle of universes.
And now this universe has been selected because life can occur and it carries on. But I've really
butchered that. There is a much more-
So some aspect where through the selection process, there's parameters that are being
fine-tuned and we happen to be living in one where there's some level of fine-tuning.
Is there, given that, can you still man the case that we humans are alone in the universe?
We are the highest assembly index object in the universe?
Yeah, I can, I guess. Sad though. I mean, so from a-
Is it possible?
Yes, it's possible. Let's assume, well, we know, I mean, it's possible. So let me,
so okay, so there is a particular set of elements on Earth in a particular ratio
and the right gravitational constant and the right viscosity, you know,
of staff being able to move around, the right distance from our Sun,
the right number of events where we have a moon, the Earth is rotating,
the late heavy bombardment produced a lot of, brought in the right stuff.
And Mars was cooking up, you know, the right molecules first. So it was habitable before Earth,
it was literally doing the combinatorial search. And before Mars kind of became unhabitable,
it, it seeded Earth with the right molecular replicators. And there was just the right stuff
on Earth. And that's how the miracle of life occurred. Although I find I'm very uncomfortable
with that because actually, because life came so quickly in the Earth's past.
But that doesn't mean that life is easy elsewhere. It just might mean that that the,
the, the, because chemistry is actually not a long term thing, chemistry can happen quickly.
So maybe going on with the steel manning of the argument to say, actually,
the fact that life emerged quickly doesn't mean that life is easy. It just means that the chemistry
was right on Earth. And Earth is very special. And that's why there's no life anywhere else in the
universe. Yeah. So Sarah mentioned this kind of cascading thing. So what if that's the reason
we're lucky is that we've got to have a rare cascading of like accelerating cascading effect
in terms of the complexity of things. So like maybe most of the universe is trying to get
sticky with the memory and it's not able to really form it. And then we got really lucky in that.
And it has nothing, like there's a lot of Earth like conditions, let's say, but it's just,
you really, really have to get lucky on this. But I'm doing experiments. I'm doing experiments
right now. In fact, experiments that Sarah and I are working on because we have some joint funding
for this, where we're seeing that the universe can get sticky really quickly. Now, of course,
we're being very anthropocentric, we're using laboratory tools, we're using theory, but actually
the phenomena of selection, the process of heterogene, developing heterogeneity,
we can do in the lab. We're just seeing the very first hints of it. And it wouldn't it be great
if we can start to pin down a bit more precisely, becoming good Bayesianists for this for the origin
of life and the emergence of life, defining out what kind of chemistry is we really need to look
for. And I'm becoming increasingly confident we'll be able to do that in the next few years.
Make life in the lab or make some selection in the lab, from inorganic stuff, from sand,
from rocks, from dead stuff, from moon, wouldn't be great to get stuff from the moon,
put it in our origin of life experiment and make moon life and restrict ourselves to
interesting self replicating stuff that we find on the moon.
Sarah, what do you think about this approach of engineering life in order to understand life?
So building life in the machine?
Yeah, so I mean, Lee and I are trying right now to build a vision for a large
institute or experimental program basically to do this problem. But I think of it as like,
we need to simulate a planet. So like the Large Hadron Collider was supposed to be
simulating conditions just after the Big Bang. Lee's built a lot of technology in his lab to
do these kind of selection engines. But the question you're asking is how many experiments
do you need to run? What volume of chemical space do you need to explore before you actually
see an event? And I like to make an analogy to one of my favorite particle physics experiments,
which is super kamiakande that's looking for the decay of the proton. So this is something that
we predicted theoretically, but we've never observed in our universe. And basically what
they're doing is every time they don't see a proton decay event, they have a longer bound
on the lifetime of proton. So imagine we built an experiment with the idea in mind of trying to
simulate planetary conditions, physically simulate, you can't simulate original life
in the computer, you have to do it in an experiment. Simulate enough planetary conditions
to explore the space of what's possible and bound the probability for an original life event.
Even if you're not observing it, you can talk about the probability. But we hopefully, life is
not exponentially rare, and we would then be able to evolve in an automated system,
alien life in the lab. And if we can do that, then we understand the physics as well as we
understand what we can do in particle accelerators. So keep expanding physically the simulation,
the physical simulation, until something happens. Yeah, or just build a big enough volume of chemical
experiments and evolve them. So if they say volume, you mean like literally volume? I mean physical
volume in terms of space, but I actually mean volume in terms of the combinatorial space of
chemistry. So how do you nicely control the combinatorial exploration, the search space,
such that it's always like you keep grabbing the low hanging fruit.
Yeah, how do you build a search engine for chemistry?
I think it's very well, we should carry on doing this. I should pretend to be the physicist,
you be the chemist. No, so the way to do it is I will always play a joke because I like writing
grants to ask for money to do cool stuff. And years ago, I started wanting to build,
so I actually wanted to wear the, so I built this robot in my lab called the computer, which is
this robot you can program to do chemistry. Now it's a pro, I made a programming language for
the computer and made it operate chemist chemical equipment. Originally, I wrote grants to say,
hey, I want to make an origin of life system. And no one would give me any money for this.
They said, what's this ridiculous? Why are you wanting to make, oh, it's really hard, it takes
forever. You're not a very good origin of life chemist anyway, why would we give you any money?
And so I turned it around and said, can you, can instead, can you give me money
to make robots to make molecules are interesting? And everyone went, yeah,
okay, you can do that. And that's, so actually, the funny thing is the computer
project, which I have in my lab, which is very briefly, it's just basically, it's like,
literally an automated test tube. And we've made a programming language for the test tube,
which is cool. Has come as literally came from this, I went to my lab one day, so I want to
make a search engine to get the origin of life because I have a planet. And I thought about
doing in a microfluidic format. So microfluidic is very nano chat, very small channels in device
where you can basically have all the pipes produced by lithography. And you can have a
chamber maybe say between say 10 and 100 microns in volume. And we slot them all together like
Lego. And we can make an origin of life system. And I could never get it to work. And I realized
I had to make do chemistry at the kind of test tube level. And what you want to be able to do,
you know, it goes back to that tweet, 1981, 1981, the computer, we're looking at a tweet
for Lee. In 1981, the computer was a distant dream. And, oh, wow, this is the scientist looking back
it is the young boy who dreamed. In 2018, it was realized spelled in a British way realized.
Yeah, I'm sorry. So now there's a system that does the physical manifestation or whatever
the programming language of the spec tells you to do. Yeah, when 1981, I got my first computer,
ZX81. What was the computer? ZX81 ZX81 Sinclair ZX81. It was and I got a chemistry set.
And I like, I like the chemistry set. And I like the computer. And I just wanted to put them
together. I thought wouldn't be cool if I could use the computer to control the chemistry set.
And, and obviously that was insane. And I was like, you know, you know, eight years old,
right, nine years old, going on nine years old. And, and then I, I invented the computer
just because I wanted to build this origin of life grid, right, which is like,
literally a billion test tubes connected together in real time and real space,
basically throwing a chemical dye, dice, throw dice, throw dice, throw dice, you're going to get
lucky. And that's what we I think Sarah and I have been thinking very deeply about because,
you know, there's more money being spent on the, the, the origin of the gravity or
looking at the Higgs boson than the origin of life, right? And the origin of life is the,
I think the biggest question, or not the biggest question, it is a big question.
Let's put it that way. It is the biggest question. You're okay saying that.
Isn't it possible once you figure out the origin of life that that's not going to solve,
that's not actually going to solve the question of what is life? Like, isn't it because you're
kind of putting a lot of, yeah, I think it's the same problem, but you're putting, is it possible
that you're putting too many, too much bets into this origin part? Maybe the origin thing isn't,
isn't there always a turtle underneath the turtle? Isn't it a stack of turtles? Because then
if you create it in the lab, maybe you need some other stuff.
Well, that's not the thing about the origin. Like you, like in the lab, there's still memory.
Yeah. Yes. Right.
The experiment is already at the product of evolution.
Right. And some may be really deep way and not an obvious way and some very deep way.
So maybe the haters are always going to be like, well,
you have to reconstruct the fold. You have to build it from scratch.
Fortunately for us, the haters are not aware of that argument.
Well, no, I know, I know.
You're the one making that argument usually.
I just think that if we create life in the lab, it's not obvious that you'll get to the
deep, deep understanding of necessarily what is the line between life and non-life.
No, I think so. There's so much here.
I'm just like playing devil.
So much here, but let me play devil's advocate back in a previous conversation, right? And say,
yeah, I will. Why not? I've got time.
Yeah, let's go.
Seller Automata. Seller Automata, these very, very simple things where you color squares,
black or white and implement rules and play them in time.
And you can get these very, very complex patterns coming out.
There's nice rules. They're Turing complete rules.
And I would argue that Seller Automata don't really exist on their own.
They have to exist in a computing device.
If that, whether it's computing devices, a piece of paper and abstraction and mathematician
drawing a grid or a framework.
Now, so I would argue CAs are beautiful things, simple, going complex,
but the complexity is all borrowed from the lithography, the numbers.
Right. Now, let's take that same argument with the chemistry experiment origin of life.
Cat, what you need to be able to do is go out, and I'm inspired to do this,
to go out and look for CAs occur in nature.
You know, let's kind of, let's find some CAs that just emerge in our universe.
And for people just to start to interrupt, for people just listening and in general,
I think what we're looking at is a Seller Automata, where again, as we described,
there is just binary black or white squares, and they only have local information,
and they're born and they die.
And you would think nothing interesting would emerge, but actually what we're looking at
is something that I believe is called glider guns or a glider gun, which is moving objects
in this multi-cell space that look like they're organisms that have much more information,
that have much more complexity than the individual building components,
in fact, look like they have a long-term memory, while the individual components
don't seem like they have any memory at all, which is fascinating.
The argument here is that has to exist on all this layer of infrastructure,
right, and though it looks simple.
And then what I would make, the argument I would make if I were you, say,
well, I think CAs are really simple and everywhere, is say, show me how they emerge and substrate.
Now, let's go to the origin of life, or machine.
I don't think we want to do the origin of life, just any origin is good.
So we do, so we literally have our sand shaker, shake the sand,
like massive grid of chemistry experiments, shaking sand, shaking whatever.
And then because we know what we've put in, so we know how we've cheated,
and the same way with CA, we know how we've cheated, we know what the number of operations
needed, we know how big a grid we want to get this.
If we could then say, okay, how can we generate this recipe in the lab and make a life form?
What contingency did we need to put in?
And we're upfront about how we cheated, okay?
Say, oh, you had to shake it.
It was a periodic, planet rotates, it's tried, comes in and out.
So, and then we can start to basically say, okay, how difficult is it for these features
to be found, and then we can look for exoplanets and other features.
So I think Sarah's absolutely right.
We want to explain to people we're cheating.
In fact, we have to cheat.
No one has given, I'm good at writing grants, or I used to be,
I'm not very good right now, I keep getting rejected,
but writing a grant for a planet in 100 million years, no grant fund there is going to give me that.
But maybe money to make a kind of a grid, a computer grid, origin of life, computer grid.
In physical space.
In physical space, and just do it.
So Sarah said something which is you can't simulate the origin of life in a computer.
So like in simulation, why not?
You said it very confidently, so is it possible, and why would it be very difficult?
Like what's your intuition there?
I think it's very difficult right now, because we don't know the physics.
But if you go based on principles of assembly theory, and you think every molecule is actually a very long one,
a very large causal graph, not just the molecule, then you have to simulate all the features of those causal graphs.
And I think it becomes computationally intractable.
You might as well just build the experiment.
Because you have in the physical space, you have all the objects with all the memories.
Yes.
And in the computer, you would have to copy them or reconstruct them.
Yes.
Yeah, that's a beautiful put.
And I would say that lots of people, you just don't have enough resources.
It's easier to actually do the physical experiment, because we are literally,
I would view the physical experiment almost like a computational experiment.
We're just outsourcing, basically we're just outsourcing all the matrix algebra.
On your point about the experiment being also an example of life, it's almost like you want to design,
it's like, you know, all of us are lineages of propagating information across time.
And so everything we do becomes part of life, because it's part of that causal chain.
So it's like you want to try to pinch off as much as you can of the information from your causal chain
that goes into the experiment, but you can't pinch off all of it to move it to like a different timeline.
It's always going to be part of your timeline.
But at least if you can control how much information you put in, you can try to see
how much does that particular trajectory you set up start generating its own assembly.
So you know where it starts, and then you want to try to see it take off on its own
when you've tried to pinch it off as much as possible.
Got it. Quick pause, bath and break.
Yes.
All right, cool. And now we're back. All right, we talked about the early days of the universe
when there was just stuff and no memory, not even causality.
I think Lee at least implied the causality is emergent somehow.
We could discuss this. What happened before this all originated?
What's outside the universe?
2.5 by 0.
Okay. So it's not relevant, not understandable. Is it useful to even ask the question?
Because it's so hard?
No, it's not hard. It's just not a question. If I can't do an experiment or even think of
an experiment, the question doesn't exist.
Well, no, you can't think of a lot of experiments. No offense.
Because your causality graph is like, this is what we've been talking about.
There is limits to your ability to construct experiments.
I agree, but I was trying to be facetious and I'll try to make a point because I think that
if there is a causal bottleneck through which information can't propagate in principle,
then it's very hard to ask, to think of an experiment, even in principle, even one that's
beyond my mediocre intellect, right? Which is fine. I'm happy to accept that.
But this is one of the things I actually do think there was something before the Big Bang,
because I would say that I think the Big Bang just couldn't occur and create time.
Time created the Big Bang.
There was time before the Big Bang.
Yeah.
There was no space for those times.
Yeah. But I mean, I'm just making that stuff up just to make all the physicists happy.
But I think it's-
Do you think that would make them happy? Because they would be quite upset, actually.
Why would they be upset?
Because they would say that time can't exist before the Big Bang.
Yeah. I mean, this goes back to an argument that you might not want to have the argument here.
I was talking to Sarah earlier today about an argument we had about time a long time ago.
Yeah. A long time and time. And what I would- It's like, I think there is this thing called
time or state creation. The universe is creating states and it's outside of space,
but they create space. So what I mean is you can imagine there are states being created all the
time and there is this thing called time. Time is a clock, which you can use to measure when
things happen. But that doesn't mean because you can't measure something that states aren't being
created. And so you might locally refer to the Big Bang. And the Big Bang occurred at some point
in when those states were there. Probably there had to be enough states for the Big Bang to occur.
But I think that there is something wrong with our conception of how the universe was created
in the Big Bang because we don't really get time. Because again, I don't want to become
boring and sound like a broken record, but time is a real thing. And until I can really explain
that more elegantly, I'm just going to get into more trouble. We're going to talk about time because
time is a useful measuring device for experiments, but also time is an idea. Okay. But let me first
ask Sarah, what do you think? Is it a useful question to ask what happened before the Big
Bang? Is a useful question to ask what's outside the universe? So I would think about it as the
Big Bang is an event that we reconstructed as probably happening in the past of our universe
based on current observational data. And so the way I like to think about it is we exist locally
in something called the universe. So and in going back to like the physics of existence,
we exist locally in the space of all things that could exist. And we can infer certain
properties of the structure of where we exist locally. And one of the properties that we've
inferred in the past is that there is a thing we call the Big Bang. There's some signatures of
our local environment that indicate that there was a very low information event that started
our universe. I think that's actually just an artifact of the structure of the assembly space
that when you start losing all the memory in the objects, it looks like what we call a Big Bang.
So I think it makes sense to talk about where you are locally. I think it makes sense to talk
about counterfactual possibilities. What could exist outside the universe in the sense that they
become part of our reasoning and therefore part of our causal chain of things that we can do.
So like the multiverse in my mind exists, but it doesn't exist as a multiverse of
possible universes. It exists as an idea in our minds that allows us to reason about how physics
works and then to do physics differently because we reason about it that way. So I always like to
re-center it on things exist, but they don't always exist like we think they exist. So when
we're thinking about things outside the universe, they absolutely exist because we're thinking about
them, but they don't look like the projections in our mind. There's something else.
And something you said just gave me an idea to go back to your question. If
there was, I mean, if something caused the Big Bang, if there was some memory or some
artifact of that, then of course, to answer your question, it's worth going back to that
because that would imply there is something beyond that barrier, that filter.
Yeah.
And that's what you were saying, I guess, right?
Right. I'm agnostic to what exists outside the universe. I just don't think that. I think the
most interesting things for us to be doing are finding explanations that allow us to
do more like that optimism. So I tend to draw the boundary on questions I ask as being scientific
ones because I find that that's where the most creative potential is to impact the future
trajectory of what we're doing on this planet.
The interesting thing about the Big Bang is basically from our current perspective of what
we're able to detect, it's the time when things were forgotten.
Yes.
It's the time to reset from our limited perspective. And so the question is,
is it useful to ever study the thing that was forgotten?
Or should we focus just on the memories that are still there?
Well, the point I was trying to make about the experiment is I was trying to say both things.
And I think perhaps, yes, from the pot following point of view, if you could then imagine what
was forgotten and then work forwards, you will have different consequences. So then it becomes
testable. So as long as we can find tests, and it's definitely worth thinking about,
what I don't like is when physicists say, what happened before the Big Bang and before,
before, before, without giving me any credible conjecture about what we would,
how would we know the difference? But the way you framed it is quite nice. I like that.
It's like, what have we forgotten?
Is there a room for God in assembly theory? Who's God?
I like arguments for a necessary being better than God.
Well, I think I said it earlier.
What's a necessary being?
Like something that has to exist.
Oh, so you like, I mean, you like the shortest path, like does God need?
No, no, no. I mean, I, well, you can go back to like Thomas Aquinas and arguments for
the existence of God. But I think, I think most of the interesting theological arguments
are always about whether something has to exist or there was a first thing that had
exist. But I think there's a lot of logical loopholes in those kind of arguments.
Well, so God here meaning the machine that creates, that generates the stuff.
But God, so what I was trying to say earlier, isn't that just the universe?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, yeah. Well, but I, there's a difference between, I said, I imagine like a black box,
like a machine. Yeah.
That's, then I would be more comfortable calling that God because it's the machine.
You go into a room and there's a thing with a button.
Yeah. I don't like the great programmer in the sky version.
Yeah. But if it's more kind of, like I don't like to think of, if you look at a cellular automata,
if it's the cells and the rules, that doesn't feel like God that generates a bunch of stuff.
But if there's a machine like that does, that runs the cellular automata and set the rules,
then that feels like God, that sort of, in terms of terminology.
So I wonder if there's like a machine that's required to generate this universe.
That's very sort of important for running this in the lab.
So as I said earlier, I think I said this earlier that I can't remember the phrase,
but something like, I mean, does God exist in our universe? Yes.
Where does God exist? God at least exists in abstraction in our minds,
right? Particularly the people who have religious faith they believe in.
But let's then take your, but you're talking a little bit more about generic say, well,
is there a mechanism beyond the universe you're calling God? I would say God
did not exist at the beginning, but he or she does now.
Because I'm saying the... Well, you don't know that he didn't exist in the beginning.
So like this could be us in our minds trying to just listen to gravitational waves,
detecting gravitational waves. It's the same thing, us trying to
go back further and further into our memories to try to understand the machines that make up
us. And so it's possible that we're trying to grasp at possible kind of,
what kind of machines could create? There's always a tweet. There's always a tweet.
If the universe is a computer, then God must have built it. Because computers need creators.
There you go. And then Yosha Bach replied, since there's something rather than nothing,
perhaps existence is the default. If existence is the default that many computers exist,
creator gods are necessary computers and necessarily computers too. I'm very confused
by that. But that's an interesting idea that existence is the default versus non-existence.
I agree with that, but the rest is... And Lee responds, perhaps this reasoning is incomplete.
That's how scientists talk trash each other on Twitter apparently. Which part don't you agree with?
When he said if existence is the default, then many computers exist. This comes back to the
inventor and discovery argument. I would say the universe at the beginning wasn't capable
of computation because there wasn't enough technology, enough states. So what you're
saying is if God is a mechanism... So I might actually agree, but then the thing is lots of
people see God as more than a mechanism. For me, God could be the causal graph in assembly theory
that creates all the stuff that the memories we know. And the fact that we can even relate to
each other is because we share that heritage and why we love each other or we like to see
God in each other. We know we have a shared existence.
If the God is the mechanism that created this whole thing, I think a lot of people see
God in a religious sense as that mechanism also being able to communicate with the objects it
creates. And if it's just the mechanism, we won't be able to communicate with the objects it creates.
It can only create. It can't interact with the... There's versions of God that create the universe
and then left. Yeah, like spark. For some religions, but... The first spark, yeah.
But I think I liked your analogy of the machine and the rules, right? But I think part of the problem
is you... I mean, we have this conception that we can disentangle the rules from the physical
substrate, right? And that's the whole thing about software and hardware being separate,
or the way Newton wrote his laws, that there was some... They exist outside the universe.
They're not actually a feature of the universe. They don't have to merge out of the universe itself.
So I think if you merged your two views, then it gets back to the God as the universe. And then
I think the deeper question is why does it seem like there's meaning and purpose? And if I think
about the features of the universe that give it the most meaning and purpose, those are what we
would call the living components of the universe. So if you wanted to say, God is a physically real
thing, which you were saying is like an emergent property of our minds. But I would just say,
you know, the way the universe creates meaning and purpose, there is really a physics there.
It's not like a illusory thing. And that is just what the physics of life is.
So is it possible that we've forgotten much of the mechanisms that created the universe?
So basically, you know, whatever God is that mechanism, we just leave parts of that behind.
Well, but the universe is constantly generating itself. So if God is that mechanism, it would be
that that would still be acted today. I'm agnostic, but if I would call the things I believe in God
in the way that some people talk about God, I would say that God is, you know, like in the
like universe now, it's not an absent thing. So I think there's a mislabeling here, because you're,
I mean, I mean, I'm a professional idiot, I'm actually, but should put that on your CV.
Professionally, not recreationally or amateur, but professionally.
But I think I would say if you were talking about God, I mean, again, I'm way out,
way out of my depth here. And I'm almost feeling, you know, I feel quite uncomfortable articulating,
but I'll try. For me, a lot of people that think of God as a consciousness of reasoning entity that
actually has causal power. And you're human like intelligence. And you're, and so you're like,
then you're saying like gravity could be God or time could be God. I mean, I think for me,
for my conception of time is probably as fundamental as God, because it gave rise to human
intelligence and consciousness in which we can have this abstract notion of God. So I think that
you're maybe talking about God in a very mechanistic kind of unsophisticated sense, whereas other
people say that God is more sophisticated and got all this, you know, feelings and love and,
you know, and this abstracting ability. So is that what, or do you mean that? Do you mean
God as in this conscious entity that decided to flick the universe into existence?
Well, one of the features that God would have is the ability to flick the universe into existence.
I, you know, like Windows 95, I don't know if God is Windows 95 or Windows XP or Windows 10.
I don't know the full feature set. So the very least you have to flick the universe into existence.
And then other features might include ability to interact with that universe in interesting ways.
And then how do you interact with the universe in interesting ways? You have to be able to
speak the language of its different components. So in order to interact with humans, you have to
know how to act human-like. So, so I don't, I don't know.
But it seems like whatever mechanism created the universe might want to also generate
local pockets of mechanisms that can interact with that. Like, inject.
God was lonely. Yeah, it was long. I mean, it could be just a teenager and another
just playing a video game. Yeah, maybe. Well, I was going to say, I mean, I, I don't,
so this is referring to our origin of life engine. It's like, I don't believe in God,
but that doesn't mean I don't want to be one. Right. Because I want to make a universe and
make a life form. But that maybe, that may be rude to people who have, you know, dear religious
beliefs. What I mean by that is, isn't it, if we are able to create an entirely new life form,
different chemistry, different culture, what does it make up and makes us good by that definition?
It makes us gods, right? Well, there is. I mean, like when you have children, you're like
one of the magical things of that is your kind of mini gods. I mean, first of all,
from a child's perspective, parents are gods for quite a while. And then you, I mean,
they're, in the positive sense, there's a magic to that. That's why I love robotics,
is you instill life into something. And that makes you feel God like, you know,
sort of positive way. Being a creator is a positive thing.
Creator. Yeah, exactly. And a small scale. And then God is, would be
a creator at the largest possible scale, I suppose. Okay. You mentioned offline the
Assembletron. Assembletron.
Assembletron. Yeah. What's an assembly? These are the,
that's an early idea of something you're thinking about. So Sarah's team, well,
I think Sarah, Sarah's team are interested in using AI to understand life. My team is,
and I'm, and I'm wondering if we could apply the principles of assembly theory, that is,
the causal structure that you get with assembly theory, and hybridize it and make a new type of
neuron, if you like. I mean, there are causal neural networks out there, but they are, they are
not quite the architecture, like what I would like. I would like to associate memory bits with,
basically, I'd like to make a, rather than having an ASIC for neural networks, I want to make an ASIC
for assembly networks. Right. And so can you say that again, assembly networks?
So what, what is a, sort of like a thing with an input and output, and it's like a neural
network type of thing. What does it do exactly? What's the input? What's the output?
So in this case, so if you're talking about a general neural network, I mean,
general neural network, you can train it on also any sort of data, right, depending on the framework,
whether it's like text or, or image data or whatnot. And that's fine. But there's no
causal structure associated with that data. Now, just imagine, rather than, you know,
let's say we're in a classified difference between cat and dog, right, classic cat and dog neural
network. What about if the system understood the assembly space to create the cat and the dog?
And rather than guessing what was happening and training on those images and not understanding
those features, it, you almost like you could imagine doing a, going back a step and doing
and training, going back a step and doing the training, going back a step, back a step, back a
step. And, and I wonder if that is actually the origin of intelligence or how we'll crack
intelligence. Because we need to, because we'll, we'll create the entire graph of events,
and, and be able to kind of look at cause and effect across those graphs. I'm explaining it
really badly, but it's, it's a gene of an idea. And I'm guessing very smart, very rich people
in AI are already doing this. Trying to not generate cats and dogs, but trying to generate
things of high assembly index. Yeah. And I think that, I think, and, and, and also using causal
graphs in neural networks and machine learning and deep learning, maybe building a new architecture,
I'm just wondering, is there something we can get out assembly theory allows us to rebuild
current machine learning architectures to give more, give causation more cheaply? I mean, I don't
know if that's what you're, we've been inventing this for a little while, but we're trying to
finish the theory paper first before we do anything else. Yeah, you also want to have,
say, goal directed behavior in neural networks, then assembly theory is a good framework for
doing that. Daniel's been thinking about that a lot. Yeah. And I think it's a really interesting
idea that you can map concepts from how neural networks learn to think about goal directed
behavior as a learning process, that you're learning a specific goal, the universe is
learning a goal when it generates a particular structure and that you can map that physical
structure into a neural network. What's the goal? Well, in a neural network, you're designing the
goal in, in biology, I mean, you know, people are not supposed to use teleological language
in biology, which is ridiculous, but because goals are real things, they're just post selected.
So you can talk about goals after the fact, you know, once a goal emerges in the universe,
that physical entity has a goal. But, but Lee and I came up with a test for,
like a Turing test for goal directed behavior, based on the idea of assembly, we have to
formalize it still, but I would like to write a paper on it. But like, the basic idea is like,
if you, like if you had two systems that were completely equivalent, you know, like in the
instantaneous, like physical experimental setup, so Lee has to figure out how to do this. But there
was something that would be different in their future. And there was a symmetry breaking you
observe in the present, based on that possibility, that future outcome, then you could say that that
system had some representation of some kind of goal in mind about what it wanted to do in the
future. And I so, so goals are interesting because they don't exist as instantaneous things, they
exist across time, which is one of the reasons that assembly theories may be more naturally
able to account for the existence of goals. So goals are the only existent time,
or they manifest themselves in time through, you said symmetry breaking.
So it's almost like, imagine, like if representations in your mind are real, right?
And you can imagine future possibilities, but imagine everything else is physically equivalent.
And the only thing that you actually change your decision based on is what you model as being the
future outcome. Then somehow that representation in your mind of the future outcome becomes causal
to what you're doing now. So it's kind of like retro causal effect. But it's not actually retro
causal. It's just that your, your assembly space is actually includes those possibilities as part
of the structure. It's just you're not observing all the features, the assembly space in the current
moment. Well, the possibilities exist, but they don't become a goal until they realize.
So, so one of the features of assembly space that's super interesting, and it's easier to envision
with like Legos, for example, is if you're thinking about an assembly space, you can't observe the
entire assembly space in any instant in time. So if you imagine a stack of Legos, and you want to
look at the assembly space of a stack of Legos, you have to break the Legos apart. And then you
look, and then you look at all the possible ways of building up the original object. So now you
have in your mind the goal of building that object, and you have all the possible ways of doing it.
And those are actual physical features of that object, but that object doesn't always exist.
What exists is the possibility of generating it. And the possibilities are always infinite.
Well, for that particular object, you know, like, you know, it has a well defined assembly space.
And I guess what I'm saying is that object is the assembly space, but you actually have to unpack
that object across time to view that feature of it. It's only an observable across time.
The term goal is such a important and difficult to explain concept, right? Because what you want
is a way is like, I think only conscious beings can have conscious goals. Everything else is doing
selection. And but selection does invent goals. And in a way that the way that biology reinterprets
the past in the present is kind of helped you to understand there was a goal in the past now,
right? It's kind of like goals only exist back in time.
So first of all, only conscious beings can have conscious goals. I'm not even going to touch
that one. Why? Well, go for it. Come on. The line between conscious goals and
non conscious goals, exactly. And also maybe just on top of that, you said a touring test
for goal directed behavior. What is a touring test potentially look like?
So if you've got two objects, we were thinking about this. So we actually got some funding to
work together on two teams. So I'm trying to do, and part of this is I'm trying to do a bit of
theory. And Sarah is teaching me a bit of theory. And Sarah is trying to design experiments and I'm
teaching experiments. Because I think it's really good for us to have that. So say, when would I,
so that's good. I like this, this, I'm sure we use the Dan Dennett essay.
Yeah. And I can explain why we wouldn't want to call it a touring test after, but yeah. So Dan
Dennett wrote this really nice essay about herding cats and free will inflation.
Love the title. The title is so brilliant. The actual title. That's the title, yeah. Herding
cats and free will inflation. Yeah, something like that. I mean, it's not maybe not it.
And so, no, I think that's right. So if you've got a, let's imagine you've got two objects on a hill
side. Okay. And it just happens to be a snowy hill. And let's just say you see an object
go rolling down the hill. Or you, you, you, you, and the rock go rolls down the hill,
but the start goes to the end. How do you know objects had a goal? Now you unveil the object
and you'll see it's actually a skier. And the skier starts at the top and goes down the bottom.
Great. Then you look at the rock, rock rolls down the hill, gets the bottom.
How can you tell the difference between the two? So, and what Dan says is like, well, this,
it's clear the skiers in control and the, and because they're adjusting trajectory system
updating going on. Then the only way you can really do that is you have to put the skier
back to the top of the hill again. They tend to start roughly in the same space and probably
go to take all that complex set of trajectories and end up pretty much at the same finish point,
right? With plus or minus few meters. Whereas if it's just a random rock going down to random
trajectory, that wouldn't happen. And so what Sarah and I were kind of doing when we were writing
this grant, we were like, we need to somehow instantiate the skier and the rock in an experiment
and then say, okay, when is the object, when it, so for an object to have a goal, it has to have an
update, it has to have some sensing and some kind of, you know, inbuilt actuation to respond
to the environment. And, and then we just have to iterate on that. And maybe Sarah,
you can infer in the Turing test part. Well, yeah, I guess the motivation for me was slightly
different. So I get really frustrated about conversations about consciousness as most people
do. You know, a lot of people are, which is not necessarily related to, to free will directly
or to this goal directed behavior. But I think there's a whole set of bundled and related topics
here. But I think for me, I was, you know, everybody's always interested in explaining
intrinsic experience and quantifying intrinsic experience. And there's all sorts of problems
with that, because you can never actually be another physical system. So you can't know
what it's like to be another physical system. So I always thought there must be some way of
getting at this problem about if an agent or an entity is conscious, or at least has internal
representations. And those are real physical things that there, it must have causal consequences.
So the way I would ask the question of consciousness is not, you know, what it is like
intrinsically, but if, if things have intrinsic experience, is there any observable difference
from the outside about the kind of causation that that physical system would enact in? And
for me, the most interesting thing that humans do is have imagination. So like we can imagine
rockets centuries before we build them, they become real physical things because we imagine them.
And people might disentangle that from conscious experience, but I think a lot of the sort of
imagination we do is actually a conscious process. So then this becomes a question of if I were
observing systems, and I said, one had an internal representation, which is slightly different than
a conscious experience, obviously. So I'm entangling some concepts, but it's a loose set of thought
experiments. Then how, and I, and I set them up in a physically equivalent situation.
Would it be the case that there would be experimental observables associated with it? And that,
that became the idea of trying to actually measure for internal representation and consciousness.
So Turing basically didn't want to do that. You just wanted the machine that could emulate
and trick you into having the behavior, but never dealt with the internal experience because
he didn't know how to do that. And I guess I was wondering, is there a way to set up the experiment
where you could actually test for that? For imagination that led to the...
That there was something internal going on, some kind of inner world, as people say. But I,
I, or you could say, you know, like it actually is an agent. It's making decisions. It has an
internal representation. And whether you say that's experience or not is a different thing.
But at least the, the feature that there's some abstraction it's doing, that's not obvious from
looking at the physical substrates. Do you think it's possible to do that kind of thing?
One of the compelling things about the Turing test is that, you know, defining intelligent,
defining any complicated concept as, as a thing like observing it from the surface
and not caring about what's going on deep inside. Because how do you know?
That's the point. So the idea is exactly that. So what we're trying to do with the Turing test
for goal directiveness is literally take some objects that clearly don't have an internal
representation, grains of sand blowing on the beach or something, right? And I don't know,
a crab wandering around on the beach. And then generating an experiment where we literally,
the experiment generates an entity that literally has no internal representation to sand, like a,
these are oil droplets, actually, what we've got in mind, a robot that makes oil droplets.
But then what we want to try and do is train the oil droplets to be like crabs. Give them an
internal representation, give them the ability to integrate information from the environment.
So they understand, they remember the past, are in the present, and can imagine a future.
And a very limited way they're kind of game engine, their limited simulation of the world
allows them to then make a decision. Your objects across time.
So then you would run a bunch of crabs, like over and over and over and over.
How many crabs, Lee?
How many, is that what, what's, because you have to have a large number of crabs. What is,
what does your theory say? Is there a mathematical?
We're working on it. I mean, this is limit crab limit.
There's literally a, there's literally, what's the herding cats have to do? Oh, that's random.
Wait, what's cats in the title by Daniel Dennett, herding cats and the free will inflation.
So what does herding cats mean? What does free will inflation mean?
So this, I love this essay, because it explained to me how I can live in a deterministic universe,
but have free will, but have freedom, you know, and because, and also it helped me explain that
time needed to be a real thing in this universe. So what basically Dan was saying here is like,
how do you, how do these cats appear to just do what they want? Right.
And if you live in a deterministic universe, why do the cats do these things?
You know, aren't they just, isn't all obvious? And how does free will inflate the universe?
And for me, I mean, probably I love the essay because my interpretation of the essay
in assembly theory makes complete sense, because you need an expanding universe in assembly theory
to create novelty that you search for that. Then when you find something interesting and you
keep doing it because it's cool and it gives you an advantage, then it appears in the past to be a
goal. So what does in assembly theory, the expansion of the universe look like? What are we talking
about? Why is, why, why does the expansion universe give you more possibilities of novelty and cool
stuff? So for me, I don't think about the universe in terms of big bang in space. I think about in
terms of the big, the big memory expansion that you have one, you only have the ability to store
one bit of information. So then you can't do very much. So what the universe has been doing since
forever, it's been creating more, it's been increasing the size of its RAM. Okay. So it's like
one megabyte, two megabyte, three megabyte, four megabytes all the way up. And so the more RAM you
have, the more you can remember about the past, which allows you to do cooler things in the future.
So if you can remember how to launch a rocket, then you might be able to imagine how to land a
rocket and then relaunch, re-land and carry on. And so you're able to expand the space
and remember the past. And so that's why I think it's very important.
But not a perfect memory. It's an interesting question whether there's some forgetting that
happens or might increase. Is the expansion of the forgetting at some point accelerate faster than
the remembering? I think that that's a very important thing that probably intelligence
does and we're going to learn and machine learning about because you want machine learning right now
or artificial intelligence right now doesn't have memory right, but you want the ability to or not
for if you want to get to human-like consciousness, you need to have the ability, I suppose, to remember
stuff and then to selectively forget stuff so you can re-remember it and compress it. Arguably,
the way that we come up with new physical laws. Yeah, sorry, you were... No, I just wanted to...
I think that there is a great deal to be gained from having the ability to remember things,
but then when you forget them, you can basically do the simulation again and work out if you get
to that compressed representation. So that's in cycles. So cycles of remembering and forgetting
are probably important, but there shouldn't be an excuse to have a universe with no memory in it.
The universe is going to remember that it forgot, but just not tell you.
I'm looking at this paper and it's talking about a puppet controlling a puppet controlling a
puppet controlling a puppet controlling a puppet controlling a puppet. Conceptually,
easy to understand, but physically impossible. It's physically impossible. It's predicting
a fair coin toss. I don't know what he's talking about, but there's pictures of puppets controlling
puppets. Let me ask you... There's a few things I want to ask, but we brought up time quite a bit.
You guys tweet about time quite a bit. What is time in all of this? We kind of mentioned it a
bunch. Is it not important at all in terms of... Is it just a word? Should we be talking about
causality mostly? Like, say, what do you think? We've talked about memories. Is that the fundamental
thing that we should be thinking about in time is just a useful measurement device or something like
that? Well, there's different concepts of time. I think in assembly theory, when we're talking
about time, we're talking about the ordering of things. That's the causal graph part. Then the
fundamental structure of the universe is that there is a certain ordering, and certain things
can't happen until other things happen. But usually when we colloquially talk about time,
we're talking about the flow of time. I guess Lee and I were actually debating about this this
morning and talking on it, walking on the river here, which is a very lovely spot for talking
about time. But when the universe is updating, it's transitioning between things that exist now
and things that exist now. That's really the flow of time. You have to separate out those
concepts at bare minimum. Then there's also an arrow of time that people talk about in physics,
which is that time doesn't appear to have a directionality in fundamental physics, but it does
to us. We can't go backwards in time. Usually that would be explained in physics in terms of,
well, there's a cosmological arrow of time, but there's also the thermodynamic arrow of time of
increasing entropy. But what we would say in assembly theory is that there is a clear directionality.
The universe only runs in one direction, which is why some things... It's easy to make... If the
universe runs in one direction, it's easy to make processes look reversible. For example,
if they have no memory, they're easy to run forward and backwards, which is why the laws of
physics that we have now look the way they do, because they involve objects that have no memory.
But when you get to things like us, it becomes very clear that the universe has a directionality
associated to it. So it's not reversible at all. It's the no man ever steps in the same river. I
just have to bring that out because you walk on the river. No man ever steps in the same river
twice before it's not the same river and he's not the same man. So it's not reversible.
No. No, but reversibility is an emergent property. So we think of the reversibility
of laws as being fundamental and the irreversibility as being emergent. But I think what we would say
from how we think about it, and certainly it's easy to get the case for our perception of time,
but also what's happening in biological evolution, you can make things reversible,
but it requires work to do it. And it requires certain machines to run it forward and backward.
And Chiara Marletto is working some interesting ideas on constructor theory related to that,
which is a totally different set of ideas. So you can travel back in time sometimes?
Yes. You can't travel actually back in time, but you could reconstruct things that have existed
in the past. You're always moving forward in time, but you can cycle through.
Can I clarify what you just said? Yeah, go for it.
Quickly, you travel forward in time to travel back.
Thank you. That really clarified it.
Well, what Sarah is saying is you don't go back in time,
you recreate what happened in the past in the future and inspect it again.
So in that local pocket of time, it's as if you travel back in time.
So I don't, how's that not traveling back in time?
Because you're not going back to your same self back in time.
You are, you're creating that in the future.
But everything else is the same as it was in the past.
No. No, no, no. It's not in registry. I mean, it goes back to the big question.
I'm saying, I mean, this is something I was trying to look up today when I first,
we first had this discussion and I was talking to Sarah on Skype and said, by the way,
time, because time is the fundamental thing in the universe. She's almost hung up on me.
Right. But, but you can even, I mean, if you want to make an analogy to computation,
and I think Charles Bennett actually has a paper on this, like about reversible computation
and reversible Turing machines, in order to make it reversible, you have to store memory
to run the process backwards. So time is always running forward in that.
So you have to write the memory. You can erase the memory.
You can erase the memory, but the point, when you go back to zero, right?
But the whole point is that in order to have a process that even runs in both directions,
you have to start talking about memory to store the information to run it backwards.
I got it. So you, you can't really then,
you can't have it exactly how it was in the past.
Yeah, you exactly. You have extra stuff, extra baggage always.
A really important thing that I want to say on this, I think if I try and get it right,
I just say that if you can think that the universe is expanding in terms of the number of
boxes that it has to store states, right? And this is where the direction that the universe
comes from, everything comes from. You could have raised what's in those boxes, but the fact
you've now got so many boxes at time now in this present, there's more of those boxes than
there were in the past. See, but the boxes aren't physical boxes. It's not space or time.
Why is the number of boxes always expanding?
It's very hard to imagine this because we live in space. So what I'm saying, which is,
I think probably correct, is that we just, let's just imagine for a second,
there is a non-local situation, but there are these things called states and that the universe,
irrespective of whether you measure anything, there is a universal, let's call it a clock,
or a state creator. Maybe you can call it God, but let's call it a state creator,
where the universe is expanding and the number of states it has.
Why are you saying it's expanding though? Is that obvious that it's expanding?
It's obvious because that's where the, because we...
That's a source of novelty.
It's a source of novelty, and it also explains why the universe is not predictable.
How do you know it's not predictable?
Well, it's... I just like interrupting him. So it's fun because you're struggling.
I'm struggling because I'm trying to be as concrete as possible and not sound like I'm
insane. And I'm not insane. It's obvious because you...
I'm a chemist. So as a chemist, I grew into the world understanding irreversibility.
Irreversibility is all I knew. And when people start telling me the universe is actually
reversible, it's a magic trick. We can use time to do it. So what I mean is the second law is
really the magical. But why does it need to be magical? The universe is just asymmetric.
All I'm saying is the universe is asymmetric in the state production.
And we can erase those states, but we just have more computational power.
So what I'm saying is that the universe is deterministic horizon. This is one of the
reasons we can't live in a simulation, by the way. You can't live in a simulation.
The irreversibility?
Yeah. So basically, every time you try and simulate the universe in this, you know,
I live in a simulation, the universe is expanded in states. Like, oh, damn it,
I need to make my computer bigger again. And every time you try and contain the universe
in the computation, because it's got bigger in number of states. And so I'm saying the fact
the universe has novelty in it is going to turn out experimentally to be proof that time,
as I've labeled it, is fundamental and exists as a physical thing that creates space.
Okay. So if you can prove that novelty is always being created, you're saying that it's
possible to also then prove that it's always expanding in the state space. Those are things
that have to be proven. That's what we're working on experiments for, yeah.
And you're trying to, like, by looking at the sliver of reality,
show that there's always novelty being generated?
Yeah. Because if we go live in a universe that the conventional physicists would live in,
it's a big lookup table of stuff and everything exists. I want to prove that that book doesn't
exist. It's continuously being added pages on. So all I'm saying, if the universe is a book,
the universe at the beginning only had no pages or had one page, another page,
another page, whereas the physicists would now say all the pages exist and we could in principle
access them. I'm saying that is fundamentally incorrect.
Do you know what's written in this book, the free will question?
Is there room for free will in this view of the universe is generating novelty
and getting greater and greater assembly structures built, Sarah?
Yes. Done. Next question.
Why, what's the source of free will in this?
Well, I think it depends on what you mean by free will.
Yeah. Well, please.
I think what I'm interested in as far as the phenomena of free will is,
do we have individual autonomy and agency? When I do things, is it really me or is it my atoms
that did it? That's the part that's interesting to me. I guess there's also the determinism
versus randomness part. But the way I think about it is each of us are a thread or an assembly
space through this giant possibility space and it's like we're moving on our own trajectory
through that space and that is defined by our history. We're causally contingent on our past,
but also because of the intersection of novelty generation, it's not completely
predetermined by the past. Then you have the causal control of the determinism part
that you are your causal history and there's some determinism from that past, but there's also
room for creativity. I think it's actually necessary that something like free will exist
if the universe is going to be as creative as possible, because if I were all intelligent
being, inventing a universe, and I wanted it to have maximal number of interesting things happen,
again, we should come up with a metric of interesting. Generating maximal possibilities,
then I would want the agents to have free will because it means that they're
more individual. Each entity actually is a different causal force in the universe
and it's intrinsic and local property of that system. There's a greater number of distributed
agents. Are you always creating more and more individuality?
I would say you're creating more causal power. The word consciousness is the causal power somehow
correlated with consciousness? That's why I have this conception of consciousness being
related to imagination because the more that we can imagine can happen and the more counterfactual
possibilities you have in mind, the more you can actually implement. Somehow free will is also at
the intersection of the counterfactual becoming the actual. Can you elaborate on that a little bit
that consciousness is imagination? I don't know exactly how to articulate it and I'm sure people
will take aim at certain things I'm saying, but I think the language is really imprecise, so I'm
not the best way to... It's really interesting. What is imagination and what is it? What role
does it play in the human experience of any agent? I love imagination. I think it's the most
amazing thing we do, but I guess one way I would think about it is we talked about the transition
to life being the universe, acquiring memory, and life does something really interesting.
Just think about biology generally. It remembers states of the past to adapt to things that
happen in the future. The longer life has evolved on this planet, the deeper that past is, the more
memory we have, the more kinds of organisms and things, but what human level intelligence has
done is quite different. It's not just that we remember states that the universe has existed
in before. It's that we can imagine ones that have never existed and we can actually make them come
into existence. I think that's the most unique feature about the transition to whatever we are
from what life on this planet has been doing for the last four billion years. I think it's
deeply related to the phenomena we call consciousness. I was going to just agree with that.
I think that consciousness is the ability to generate those counterfactuals. Now, whether you
can say, are there degrees of consciousness? I'm sorry, panpsychist, but electrons don't
have counterfactuals, although they do have some kind of, they are able to search a space and
pathways. But I think that there is a very concrete, or concrete, there's a very specific
property that humans have. I don't know if it's unique to humans. Maybe dogs can do it and birds
can do it, right? And where they are basically solving a problem, because consciousness was
invented or this abstraction was invented by evolution for a specific reason. And so look,
one of the reasons why I came to the conclusion that time was fundamental was actually because
Sarah and I had a completely different... The most heated debate on Skype chat ever.
No, no, no. It goes back to the free will thing. Although I've changed my view a bit,
because there's some really interesting physicists out there who talks about how the measurement
problem in Newtonian space... I don't want to go there just now, because I think I'll
mess it up. But briefly, I could not see how the universe, how we can have free will. I mean,
this is really boring, because this is a well trodden path. But I'm not so boring. I suppose
it's kind of, we just want to be precise. If the universe is deterministic, how can we have free
will? Right? So, Sarah's a physicist. I think she believe, not believe can show that most of the
laws we have are deterministic to some degree, quantum mechanics onto Newtonian stuff. And yet
there's Sarah telling me she believes in free will. I'm like, your belief system is broken here,
right? Because you're demanding free will in a deterministic universe. And then I've
realized that I agreed with her that I do think that free will is a thing, because we're able
to search for novelty. And then that's where I came to the conclusion that time universe was
expanding in terms of novelty. And it goes back to that Dan Dennett essay that we're talking about,
the free will inflation, free will. So the past, it did not exist in the past, the past exists
in the present. What I mean is like, you are the, there was no past, there is only present.
So I mean, you are the sum total, everything that occurs in the past is manifestly here in the
present. And then you have this little echo state in your consciousness, because you're able to,
you're able to imagine something without actualization. But the fact you imagine it,
that occurs in electrons and potassium, iron flows in your neural network, in your brain.
Maybe consciousness is just the present.
So, so somehow you imagine that. And then by imagining, oh, that's good, yeah.
I'm going to make a robot that do this thing and program it. And then you physically then go and do
it. So that changes the future. Sorry. What's imagination? Does it require the past? Does
it require the future? Does it require memory? Does it? Yes, imagination. Does it only exist
in the moment? So imagination is, well, yeah, probably it's an instantaneous readout of what's
going on. You can maybe your, your subconscious brain has been generating all the, all the bits
for it. But no, imagination occurs when you, in your game engine, you, you remember the past and
you integrate sensory, the present, and you've tried and work out what you want to do in the
future. And then you go and make that happen. So the imagination is this, it's like, imagine,
asking what imagination is about asking what surfing is. You can see, you can surfboard,
surf a wave coming in, when you're on that wave and you're surfing, that's where the imagination
is. I think, I think imagination is just accessing things that aren't the present moment in the
present moment. So like, I can, I'm sitting here and I'm looking at the table and I can imagine
the river and things or whatever it was. And so it seems to be that it's like, it's our ability
to access things that aren't present. But the conjure up worlds, some of them might be akin to
something that happened to you recently. They don't have to be things that actually
happened in your past. And I think this gets back to assembly theory. Like,
the way I would think about imagination from an assembly theoretic standpoint is I'm a giant
causal graph. And I exist in a present moment as a particular configuration of Sarah. And,
but there's a lot of, I carry a lot of evolutionary baggage, I have that whole causal
history and I can access parts of it. Now, when you talk about getting to something as complex
as us, having as large an assembly space as us, there's ways of like, there's a lot of things
in that causal graph that have ever actually never existed in the past history of the universe,
because like the universe got big enough to contain the three of us in this room in time.
But not all the features of each one of us individually have come into existence as physical
objects we would recognize as individual objects. This goes back to your point that we actually
have to explain why things actually even look like objects and aren't just a smear of mass.
And just on the free will and physics thing, when you were talking, I was, I just want to
bring this up because I think it's a really interesting viewpoint that Nicholas Jizen has that,
you know, like we want to use the laws of physics and then say you can't have free will. And his
point is, you have to have free will in order to even choose to set up an experiment to test
the laws of physics. So in some sense, free will should be more fundamental than physics is to,
because to even do science, there's some assumption that the agents have free will.
And I always thought it was really perplexing that, you know, physics wants to remove agency,
because the idea that I could do an experiment here on this part of earth, and then I can move
somewhere else and prepare an identically, you know, identically prepared experiment, run an
experiment again, seems to imply something about the structure of our universe that is not encoded
in the laws that we're testing in those experiments. So this kind of dream of physics that you can do
multiple experiments, different locations and then validate each other. You're saying that's
that's an illusion? No, I'm saying that requires decision making and free will to be a real thing,
I think. Like I think that I think the fact that we can do science is not arbitrary. And I think
people, you know, the standard canon in physics would be, well, you could trace all of that back
to the initial condition of the universe, but the whole point of science is I can imagine doing
the experiment and I can do it, and then I can do it again and again and again all over the planet.
To your imagination, somehow fundamentally generative of novelty. Yes.
So it's not like the universe could have predicted the things you imagined.
The imagination, so coming back to novelty, I think novelty can exist outside of imagination,
but it supercharges it. It's another transition, I think. I mean, I would say,
I mean, this may be a boring statement, but I would say that's right.
I'm not sure these are hard questions. Yeah, I mean, I think the fact that objects exist is
yet another proof that the time is fundamental and novelty exists, right? Because I think, again,
if you ask the physicists to write down in the infinite bible of the universe, let's call it the
bible, the mathematical universe, whether you're on Max Techmark or Sean Carroll or Frank Wilczek
or Stephen Wolfram, okay? I like that book. Yeah, I love it too. It's lots of pretty pictures.
It's really interesting that they cope with the enormity of the universe by saying, well,
it's all their mathematics, it all exists, right? And I would say that that's why I'm excited about
the future of the universe, because it, although it is somehow dependent upon the past, it is not
constrained just by the past, which is kind of mad. Yeah, that's what free will is. It's not
constrained by the past is dependent on the past. This moment is not just dependent. This moment
is the past. And yet it has the capacity to generate a totally unpredictable future.
I mean, the other thing I would say it's super important for human beings, right?
Human beings have actually very little causal control in the future.
I realize this the other week. Yeah, yeah. So what happened? So this is what I think it is,
the way by reinterpreting your past, I mean, talk about from a kind of cognitive,
psychological cognitive point of view, by reinterpreting your past in your current mind,
you can actually help shape your future again. So you have much more freedom to interpret your
past to act in the present, to change your future than you do to change your future.
It may sound weird. So I'm saying everybody, imagine your past, think about your past,
reinterpret your past in the nicest way you can, then imagine what you can do next,
or imagine your past in a more negative way and what you do next. And look at those two
counterfactuals, they're different. Yeah, it's fast. I mean, Daniel Kahneman talks about this,
that most of our life is lived in our memories. It's interesting because you can essentially,
in imagination, choose the life you live. So maybe free will exists in imagination.
Choices are made in your imagination. And that results in you basically able to control
how the future unfolds. Because you're like, imagining, reinterpreting constantly the things
that happen to you. Exactly. So if you want to increase your amount of free will,
those people that have, I don't think everyone has equal amounts of agency,
because of our sad constraints, whether you know, happenstance, health, economic, born in a certain
place, right? But those of us that have the ability to go back and reinterpret our past,
and use that to change the future, are the ones that exert most agency in the present.
And I want to achieve higher degrees of agency and enable everyone else to do that as well,
to have more fun in the universe. Then we'll hit that peak, the maximum fun point.
I don't think there's ever going to be a maximum. I think it's the wonderful thing
about the future is there's always going to be more fun. Yeah. I think, again, going back to
Twitter, I think Yuli tweeted something about being a life maximalist that you want to maximize
the number of life, the amount of life in the universe. And you know, that's the more general
version of that goal is to maximize the amount of fun in the universe, because life is a subset
of fun. They're all kinds of, I suppose they're either correlated or exactly equal. I don't know.
Anyway, speaking of fun, let me ask you about alien sightings. So there's been quite a bit
of UFO sightings and all that kind of stuff. What do you think would be the first time
when humans sight aliens, see aliens in a sort of unquestionable way, this extremely strong
and arguable way we've made contact with aliens? Sarah, what would it look like? Obviously, the
space of possibility is huge here, but if you were to kind of look into the future, what would
that look like? Would it be inklings of UFOs here and there that slowly unravel the mystery,
or would it be like an obvious overwhelming signal? So I think we have an obsession with
making contact with events. So what do I mean by that is, you know, like people have a UFO sighting,
they make contact. And I always think, you know, what's interesting to me about the UFO narratives
right now is not that I have a disbelief about what people are experiencing or feeling, but like
the discussion right now is sort of at the level of modern mythology. Aliens are our mythos in
modern culture. And when you treat it like that, then I want to think about when do things that we
traditionally only regularize through mythology actually become things that become standard
knowledge? So, you know, like it used to be, you know, variations in the climate were described
by some kind of gods or something. And now it's like, you know, our technology picks up an anomaly
or someone sees something, we say it's aliens. And I think the real thing is it's not contact with
events, but like first contact is actually contact with knowledge of the phenomena or the explanation.
And so this is very subtle and very abstract, but when does it become something that we actually
understand what it is that we're talking about? That's first contact. It's not...
Would you make the myth, would you give credit to the myth, the mythology as first contact?
Because you... I think, yes, I think it's the rudimentary that we have some understanding
that there's a phenomena that we have to understand and regularize. So I think...
We have to understand that there is weather. Yes.
You have to construct the pathology on that weather. It's something that's controllable.
Like this is... I see mythology basically as like baby knowledge.
And it could be that, you know, although there's lots of alien sight, so-called alien sightings,
right? So there are a number of things you can do. You could just dismiss them and say,
they're not true. They're kind of made up. Or you say, well, there's something interesting here,
right? We keep seeing a commonality, right? We see the same phenomena again and again and again.
But also there's this interesting thing about human imagination. Even if they are...
Let's not say made up, but misappropriated kind of other inputs. The fact that human consciousness
is capable of imagining in contact with aliens, does that not tell us about something about
where we are in our position, in our culture, in our technology?
It tells us not where in time we are.
Could it be that we're making contact with... Let's say that... So let's say,
let's take the most miserable version. There are no aliens in the universe. Life is only on Earth.
That then, the interpretation of that is we're desperate to kind of understand why we're the
only life in the universe, right? The other one is, the other most extreme is that aliens are
visiting all the time. And we just, you know, we're just not able to capture them coherently.
Or there's a big conspiracy and, you know, there's the Area 51 and there are lizards everywhere.
There's that. Or I'm kind of in favor of the idea that maybe humanity is waking up to the
idea that we aren't alone in the universe and we're just running the simulation and we're seeing
some evidence. You know, we don't know what life is yet. We do have some anomalies out there.
We can't explain everything. And over time, you know, we will start to unpack that.
One very plausible thing we might do, which might be boring for the average alien
observer or believes that aliens are, as in intelligent aliens are visiting Earth,
it could be that we might go to the outer solar system and find a new type of life that has
completely new chemistry. Bring these cells back to Earth, where you could say in my hand,
on Earth, here's RNA, DNA and proteins and look, cells self-replicating from Titan.
We have this new set of molecules, new set of cells, and we feed it stuff and it grows.
That for me, if we were able to do that, which would be like the most, that would be my UFO
sign. That's a good test. So you feed it and it grows. Yeah. We've made, so not until you know
how to feed the thing. It grows somehow. We can make a comic book, you know,
the tiger that came for tea, the alien that came for tea.
What would you say is between the two of you is the biggest disagreement about alien life out there?
Is it from the basic framework of thinking about what is life,
to maybe what aliens look like, to alien civilizations, to UFO sightings, what would you
think? So I would say the biggest one is that the emergence of life does not have to be
that it can't just happen once on the planet, that it could be two or more life forms present
on the planet once. And I think Sarah doesn't agree with that. I think that's like logically
inconsistent. That's really polite. I'm really saying it's nonsense because you think that yeah.
Oh, likely is that. So the idea that what does it look like? Let's imagine two alien civilizations
coexisting on a planet. What's that look like exactly? So I would say I think I've got to get
around your argument. Yeah, let's say on this planet, there's just like, there's lots of available
chemistry and one life form emerges based on carbon and interacts and there's an ecosystem
based on carbon and there's an orthogonal and so it's planetary phenomena, which is what you,
I think, right? But there's also one that carries on silicon. And because there's enough energy and
there's enough stuff that these life forms might not actually necessarily compete
evolutionarily. Yeah, but they would have to not interact at all because they're going to be
co-constructing each other's causal chains. I think that's what you just got me. Yeah. So there's no
overlap in terms of their causal chains or very limited overlap. Yeah. So I think the only way
I can get away with that is to say, right, life could emerge on a planet underneath and, okay.
The lizard people under the crust of the earth. I think, I think, I think, let's go. I think,
but look, as you see, we disagree. So, and I think Sarah actually has convinced me because of
that life is a planetary phenomenon, the emergence of planetary phenomena. And actually,
because of the way evolution selection works, there's nothing occurs in isolation,
the causal chains interact. So there's a consensus model for life on the earth.
But you don't think you can place aliens from elsewhere onto the, can't you just
place multiple alien civilizations on one planet?
Right. But I think, so you can take two original life events that were independent
and commingle them. But I don't think when you're talking about, when you look at the
interaction of that structure, it's, it's like the same idea as like an experiment being an
example of life, right? That's a really abstract and subtle concept. And I guess what I'm saying is
life is information propagating through matter. So once you start having things interacting,
they, in some sense, commingle and they become part of the same chain.
This is why Sarah, the commingling starts quickly. Yeah.
That proceeds, we proceed to commingle quickly. Right. Right. So you, you could say, so the
question is then, the more interesting question is, are there two distinct origins events? And
I still think that there's reasons that on a single planet, you would have one origins event
because of the time scales of cycling, of geochemistry on a planet. And also the fact that
I don't think that the origin of life happens in a pool and like radiates outward through
evolutionary processes, I think it's a multi-scale phenomenon happens at the level of individual
molecules interacting, collections of molecules interacting and entire planetary scale cycles.
So life as we know it has always been multi-scale. And there's, I'm brilliant examples of
individual mutations at the genome level changing global climate, right? So there's a tight coupling
between things that happen at, you know, the largest scale or planetary scale and the smallest
scale that life mediates. But it still might be difficult within something you will call as a
single civil alien civilization, you know, different, there's species and stuff. But I think what,
yeah. And they can't, might not be able to communicate. But you're asking about life,
not species, right? So what's the difference between one living civilization? This is almost
like a category question. Yeah. Versus species, because it can be very different. The way evolution,
because there's like island, like literally islands that you can involve different kinds of turtles
and stuff. And they can. So I guess what I'm saying is. Weird. In different ways. If you look at the
structure of two interacting living things, populations, and you look in their past,
and they have independent origins for their causal chain, then you would say one was alien,
you know, they have different independent origins events. But if you look at their future by virtue
of the fact they're interacting, their causal chains have become commingled. So then in the
future, they are not independent, right? So that's why you would even define them as alien. So
the structure across time is two examples of life become one example of life, because life is the
entire structure across time. Right. But there could be a lot of variation with this. Yeah. So
the question we're all interested in is how many independent origins of a complexifying causal chain
are there in the universe? See, but the idea of origin is easy for you to define. Because like
when the two, when the species split in the evolutionary process, and you get like
a dolphin versus a human, or Neanderthal versus Homo sapiens, isn't there?
They make a distinction here quickly. So I think, sorry to interrupt. What we're saying, I mean,
I mean, I mean, I mean, Sarah, what we won that argument, because I think she's right, that
once the causal chains interact and going forward. So we're talking about a number of things. Let's
go all the way back before origin of life, origin of life on Earth, chemistry emerges. So there's
all these, I would say there's probably mechanistically, the chemistry is desperately trying
to find any way to get replicators. The ribosome kind of was really rubbish at the beginning,
and they just competed, competed, competed, and you got better and better ribosome. Suddenly,
that was a technology. The ribosome is the technology that way, boom, allowed evolution to
start. So what I was trying to, why I interrupted you is say that once evolution has started using
that technology, then you can speciate. And I was trying to, and I think what Sarah said was
convinced me of, because I was like, no, we can have lots of different chemistry, shadow
biosphere on Earth. And she's like, no, no, no, you have to have this, you have to get to this
minimum evolutionary machine. And then when that occurs, speciation occurs, exactly what you say,
dolphins, humans, everything on Earth. But when you're looking at aliens or alien life,
there's not going to be two different types of chemistry, because they compete, they compete
and interact and cooperate, because the causal chains overlap, one might kill the other, one
might combine with the other, and then you go on, and then you have this kind of this average,
and sure, there might be respeciation. It might be have two types of emerging chemistry,
it almost looks like the original life on Earth required two different pre-life forms,
the peptide world and the RNA world, somehow they got together, and by combining, you got the
ribosome, and that was the minimum competent entity for evolution. And would all alien civilizations
have an evolutionary process on a planet? So like, that's one of the almost, it's almost
the definition of life. To create all those memories, you have to have something.
Things have to change in time. Yeah. And then, but there has to be selection.
That's like an efficient, there's no other way to do it. No. Well, never say never, because
soon I'll say that. That's the part that depresses me, though, going back to like,
I don't know, the earlier discussion on violence and things, like, and I don't know where somebody
was tweeting about this recently, but like, you know, how much stuff had to die. Maybe it was you.
Yeah. So we were talking about life, and I guess a lot of murder had to occur.
Right. So selection means things had to be weeded out, right?
So. Well, we can celebrate that. Death makes way for a tool.
Yeah. I mean, it, and also, you know, one of the most interesting features of
major extinction events in the history of our planet is how much novelty emerged immediately
after, right? So, and of course, you know, a lot of people make arguments, we wouldn't be here if
the dinosaurs didn't go extinct. So in some ways, we can attribute our existence to all of that.
But I guess I was just wondering, and sort of like, if I was going to build a universe myself, in the
most optimistic way, would I retain that feature? But it does seem to be a universe.
I think you have to. I mean, I think we're, I think we're probably being over
anthropomorphizing. I remember watching the blue, I think it was the blue planet David
Attenborough was showing these seals and because of climate change, some seals were
falling off a cliff and how tragic that was. I was like, I'm saying my son,
that's pretty cool. Look at, look at those ones down there. They've obviously got some kind of
mutations, some and they're not doing that dark thing. And so that, that, that poor gene will
be weeded out. Of course, at the individual level, it looks tragic. And of course, as human
beings have the ability to abstract and we empathize, we don't want to cause suffering
on other human beings. And we should retain that. But we shouldn't look back in time and say,
you know, how many butterflies had to die? I remember making, how many, if you think about
the caterpillar become the chrysalis and the butterfly getting out, how many, if that suffering,
we call it suffering, if that process of pruning had not occurred, we have no butterflies.
So none of the butterfly beauty in the world without all that pruning. So pruning is required,
but we shouldn't anthropomorphize and feel sorry for the biological entities
because that's, that seems to be backwards way of looking at it. What we should do is project
forward and maybe think about what values we have across our species and our ecosystem and
our fellow human beings. You know, you know, now that we know that animals suffer at some level,
think about humane farming. When we find that plants can, in fact, are conscious and can think
and have pain, then we'll do humane gardening. Until that point, we won't do it, right?
I like this. Famous chemist endorses the majestic nature of murder. That's the title.
I didn't say that. Well, I just insert. I have a hard time with it though. I think the way you put
it is kind of. But it's the reality of, it's the reality of, it is beautiful. You know,
there's an Instagram account called natures metal and I keep following it on following it because
I can't handle it for prolonged periods of time. We evolve together, you dialogue.
Yeah. We evolve together, but you die alone. You live alone too. It's a gaspy thing. I don't know.
We evolve together. Where's the together? The together is the murder and the sex and murder.
My romantic vision of it to try to make me happy, Sarah, instead of sad, Sarah.
I talk in third person when I think very abstractly, sorry.
This whole certain things can coexist so the universe is trying to maximize existence,
but there's some things that just aren't the most productive trajectory together,
but it doesn't mean that they don't exist on another timeline or another chain somewhere else.
Maybe you would call that then some kind of multiverse or things, but what am I saying?
I think you can't go down a level. I'm just making stuff up.
No, you know what? I don't understand. Is it logical when we need?
No, I know. If you look at bacteria, if you look at virus, I mean, just the number of organisms
that are constantly looking at bacteria, they're just dying nonstop. It's like a slaughter.
Well, and this goes back to the conversation about God. I mean, there's a whole thing about
like why is the universe unable to suffering? Individuals don't exist, right? So for this,
I think if you think about life as an entity on earth, right? Let's just go back a second.
I mean, I like that. I'll be ludicrous for a second. I don't exist. You don't exist, right?
But the actions you do, the product of evolution exists, right? The objects you create exist
quantitatively in the real world. If you then understand life on earth or alien life or any
life in the universe as this integrated entity where you need cells in your body to die,
otherwise you'd just get really big and you wouldn't be able to walk around, right? So you do.
Yeah. Yeah. So I think...
It's the patterns that persist, not the physical things.
And of course, we place immense values on fellow human beings. And I'm
majestic professor, does like other individual human beings.
Now you're talking in third person too.
I know. It happens, right?
So death would just say, I mean, because you said evolution is a fundamental part of life.
So death is a fundamental part of life.
Yeah. Right now, it might not be in the future. We might hack some aspects of death
and we'll evolve in different ways.
But isn't there... I think Sarah mentioned like this life density.
Can't that become a problem? Like too much bureaucracy, too much baggage builds up.
Like you need to keep erasing stuff.
I think it's okay that we dissipate. I don't think of it like...
Disappear, yes.
No, but I mean, we're so fixated on ourselves as individuals and agents.
And we were talking about this last night actually over dinner.
But an individual persists for a certain amount of time.
But what you want to do, if you're really concerned with immortality, is not to live
indefinitely as an individual, but maximize your causal impact.
So what are the traces of you that are left?
And you're still a real... I always think of Einstein.
Like for a period of time, he was a real physical thing.
We would identify as a human.
And now we just see echoes of that human in all of the ways that we talk about.
His causal impact or frankly, right, is another great example.
How many Easter eggs could you leave in the future?
So I guess the question is, how much do you want to control the localization of certain features
of say a prop, a packet of propagating information we might call a person
and keep them localized to one individual physical structure?
Or do you want to, you know, is there a time when that just becomes a dissipated feature
of the society that it once existed in?
And I'm okay with the dissipated feature because I just think that makes more room
for more creativity in the future.
So you mentioned engineering life in the lab.
Let me take you to computer science world.
What about robots?
So is it possible to engineer, because you're really talking about
like engineering life at the chemistry level.
But do you think it's possible to engineer a life at the like humanoid level, at the dog level?
Like the, or is that like, at which level can we instill the magic of life into
inanimate stuff?
No, I think you could do it at every level.
I just think that we're particularly interested in chemistry because it's the
origin of life transition that presumably, or at least that's how I feel about it,
is going to give you the most interesting or deepest insights into the physics.
But presumably everything that we do and build is an example of life.
And the question is just how much do you want to take from things that we have now
and put them into, like, examples of life and copy them into machines?
I saw that there was this tweet again.
I think you were at the Mars conference and you were hanging out with a humanoid robot.
Yes.
That was a fun comment.
Making lots of new friends at Mars 2020.
Did you guys color match ahead of time with the robot or did that accidentally happen?
Accidentally, I went up and I wanted to say hi.
Tour of Boys, would that be the correct name for the color?
I think so.
We didn't color coordinate our outfits.
Well, you didn't, maybe the robot did.
The robot probably did, much more stylish.
So for people who are just listening, there's a picture of Sarah standing next to a humanoid robot.
I guess you like them with a small head and perfect vision.
Actually, no.
I just...
Oh, I did their perfect...
There's a lidar.
No, I mean, I think I was just deeply interested because...
Sorry to interrupt.
Was it manual control?
Was it actually...
Stabilizing itself?
Oh, no, it was walking around.
Oh, nice.
Yeah.
Nice.
It was pretty impressive.
I mean, actually, there's some videos online of Jeff Bezos walking with one of those across the lawn nearby there.
This is great.
Yeah.
So...
I wasn't invited.
Yeah.
But there you go.
See?
That's incredible, isn't it?
Yeah.
So you look at the walking robot, where did the idea for walking come from, what was invented by evolution, right?
And us, as human beings, able to conceptualize and design an engineer, the cause will change.
So that robot is evidence of life.
And so I think what's going to happen is there's the...
We want to find where the spark comes from mechanistically.
How can you literally go from sand to cells?
So that's the first transformation that's going to happen.
How can you literally go from sand to cells?
So that's the first transition, I think, you know, there are a number of problems we want to do.
Make life in the lab.
Great.
Then we want to make life in the lab and we want to suddenly start to make intelligent life or life that can start to solve abstract problems.
And then we want to make life that is conscious.
In that order?
I think it has to happen that order.
You know, getting towards this artificial general intelligence, I think that artificial general intelligence
in a vacuum, it has to have a cause will change all the way back to Luca, right?
And so the question I think I really like the question is to say, what are...
How is our pursuit of more and more lifelike?
I know you want to...
You like robots, you want to project into them, you want to interact with them.
I think you would want...
If you have a robot dog and a robot dog does everything expected of a normal dog and you can't tell a difference,
you're not really going to ask the question anymore if it's a real dog or not.
Or if you've got a personality, you're interacting with it.
And so I think what would be interesting would be to kind of understand the computational architecture, how that evolves,
because you could then teleport the personality from one object to the other and say, right, does it act the same?
And I think that as we go along, we're going to get better and better at integrating our consciousness into machines.
I think that question just said, to linger on it, I would call that a living conscious thing, potentially.
I as a human, allegedly.
But would you, as a person, try to define life?
If you pass the touring test, are you a life form?
One of the reasons I walked up to the robot was because I wanted to meet the robot.
It felt like I was, and I base a lot of my interaction with reality on emotion and feeling,
but how do you feel about an interaction?
And I always love your point about, is it enough to have that shared experience with a robot?
So walking up to it, does it feel like you're interacting with a living thing?
And it did, to an extent.
But in some degrees, it feels like you're interacting with a baby living thing.
So I think our relationship with technology, in particular robots we build, is really interesting because,
basically, they exist as objects in our future, in some sense.
Like we're a much older evolutionary lineage than robots are, but we're all part of the same causal chain.
And presumably, you know, they're kind of in their infancy.
So it's almost like you're looking at the future of life when you're looking at them,
but it hasn't really become life in a full manifestation of whatever it is that they're going to become.
And, you know, the more, the example of the walking robot was super interesting,
but they also had a dolphin that they put in the pool at the cocktail party at Mars,
and it looked just like a real dolphin swimming in the pool.
And, you know, it's in this kind of uncanny valley because, and I was having this conversation
with a gentleman named Mutu who was super perceptive, but he was basically saying,
like, it made him feel really uncomfortable.
And I think...
The dolphin.
Yeah.
And I think a lot of people would have that response.
And I guess my point about it is it is kind of interesting because you're basically trying to make a thing
that you think is non-living mimic a living thing.
And so the thought experiment I would want to run in that case is,
imagine we replaced every living thing on Earth with a robot equivalent, like all the dolphins and things.
And in some sense, then you're making...
If you think that the robots aren't experiencing reality, for example,
in the way that a biologically evolved thing would,
you're basically making the philosophical zombie argument become real.
Yeah.
And basically building reality into a simulation,
because you've made everything quote-unquote fake in some sense.
You've replaced everything with a physical simulation of it.
So as opposed to being excited by the possibility of creating something new,
you're terrified of humans being replaced.
I was just trying to run, like, what would be the absolute, you know, thought experiment.
But I don't think that scenario would actually play out.
I guess what I think is weird for why we feel this kind of uncanny valley interacting with something like the robot dolphin
is we're looking at an object we know is kind of in the future in the sense of, like, if everything's ordered in time.
But it's borrowing from a structure that we have common history with.
And it's basically copying in a kind of superficial way things from one part of the causal chain to another.
Yeah.
Well, that's a video of...
Everybody believed it was real. They look so real.
And obviously, the technology was developed for movies, so...
Well, I think we're confusing our emotional response and understanding the causal chain of how we got there, right?
Because the philosophical zombie argument thinks about objects just appearing, right?
That you're facsimile in some way, whereas there is...
The chain of events that caused the dolphin to be built went for human being.
Yeah, would a philosophical zombie still have a high assembly index?
Yeah.
Because it can't be...philosophical zombies can't, like, like Boltzmann brains, just can't appear out of nowhere.
Well, I guess my question would be in that scenario where you built all the robots and replaced everything on Earth with robots.
Would the biosphere be as creative under that scenario or not?
Yeah.
And so are there quantitative differences you would notice over time?
And it's not obvious either way, right?
It's not obvious right now because we don't understand...
We haven't built into machines how we work.
So that's, I think, one of the big missing things that we're both looking for, right?
This is a robot.
It's a cute robot.
But the point there is that the biosphere won't be as creative if you did it right now.
No, of course.
I think that's why people don't like it.
But in the future, we will be able to solve the problem of origin of life, intelligence and consciousness,
because they exist in physical substrates.
We just don't understand enough about the material substrate and the causal chain.
But I'm very confident we will get to an AGI, but it won't be what people think.
Solution won't be, we'll get fooled a lot.
And so GPT-3 is getting better at fooling us.
And GPT-153 might really fool us, but it won't have the magic we're looking for.
It won't be a creative, but it will help us understand the differences between what we...
Really though?
Because isn't that what love is, being fooled?
Why are you not giving much value to the emotional connection with objects, with robots, with humans?
Emotion is that thing which happens when your expectation function is dashed and something else happens, right?
I mean, that's what emotion is.
Is that what love is too?
Yeah.
You were expecting one thing and something else happened.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I don't think that's true either.
Well, what is it then?
Emotion, look, I'm sorry, emotion is that, but...
No, I think love is just fulfilling your purpose.
No, but look.
Like whatever that means.
I mean, really?
So yeah, okay.
But when are you happiest?
It's like when you're...
All right, all right, let me go back.
If you want me to...
Follow your bliss.
Let me define love quickly.
Okay, go for it.
In terms of assembly space, right?
Excellent.
I didn't think I'd be doing this today.
I can't wait till assembly theory 101 is taught and the second lecture is assembly theory of love.
No, but look, actually, but...
It's being surprised.
The expectation is being broken.
I'm just...
No, go for it.
I want to hear you.
I'm not an emotional being.
But I would say, so let's talk...
So we'll talk about emotion a bit, but love is more complex.
Love is a very complex set of emotions together and logical stuff.
But if you've got this thing, this person that's on this causal chain that has this empathy
for this other thing, love is being able to project ahead in your assembly space and work
out what the person you're in love with has a need for and to do that for them without
selflessly because you can project ahead what they're going to need and they are there
and maybe you can see someone's going to fall over and you catch them before they fall over
or maybe you can anticipate that someone's going to be hungry and without helping you,
you just help them.
That just sounds like empathy.
But it's more complex than that.
It's more complex.
It's more about not just empathy, it's understanding.
It's about sharing that experience.
What's an expression of love though?
That's not what it's like to feel love.
Feeling love is like...
I think it's like when you're aligned with things that you feel like are your purpose
or your reason for existing.
So if you have those feelings towards a robot, why is that rope...
Because you said the AGI will build an AGI, but there'll be a fundamental difference in
AGI.
I don't think we'll build it.
It's going to merge from our technology.
Thank you guys.
We'll argue the same thing.
I just said that GPT...
We do not correctly capture the causal chain that we have.
Within GPT.
Yeah.
Within AGI.
Don't you think it captures...
Because GPT-3 is fundamentally trained on a corpus of knowledge, like the internet.
Don't you think it gets better and better and better capturing the memory of all the...
It will be better at falling you and at some point you won't care.
But when it comes...
My guess, this is a quick...
That's all I was getting to right before we got...
I got in the love trap.
Love trap.
Yeah.
It was like...
Like we cronin' in the love trap.
Yeah.
You know.
Sounds like a good fan name.
It makes it sad.
Okay.
It's sad.
It's the only space of sad.
No.
It's so short.
But I think there are other features that allow...
That we pull on innovation that allow us to do more than what we just see in GPT-3.
So if you're being fooled there.
So I think what I mean is human beings have this ability to be surprising and creative.
Whereas is it dali, this thing, or if you take GPT-3 is not going to create a new verb.
Shakespeare created new verbs.
You're like, wow.
And that required Shakespeare to think outside of language in a different domain.
So I think having the connections across multiple domains is what you need for AGI.
Yeah, but I don't know if you need...
I don't know if there's any limitations to GPT and not being able to be cost domain.
The number one problem is instantiated and resource-limited substrate in silicon.
The architecture is used for training, for learning, it is about falling.
It's not about understanding.
And I think that there is some understanding that we have that is not yet symbolically
representable.
Language, learning language and using language seems to be fundamentally about fooling, not
understanding.
Why do you use language exactly?
I might disagree with that quite fundamentally, actually.
But I'm not sure I understand how I'll make a coherent argument for that.
But my feeling is that there is comprehension in reality, in our consciousness, below language.
And we use those for language for all sorts of expressions.
And we don't yet understand that there's a gap.
We will get there.
But I'm saying, wouldn't it be interesting?
It's a bit like saying, could I facsimile you or Sarah into a new human being?
And let's just say I could copy all your atoms and the positions of all your atoms and electrons
into this other person, they would be you.
The answer is no.
And it's quite easy to show using assembly theory, because actually the feature space
that you have, that graph, the only way to copy you is to create you on that graph.
So everything that's happened to you in your past, we have to have a faithful record for.
If you want another copy of Lex, you have to do the exact thing.
One another copy of Sarah, one another copy of Lee, the exact past has to be replicated.
Let me push back on that a little bit.
That's maybe from an assembly theory perspective, but I don't think it's that difficult to recreate
a version of me, like a clone that would make everybody exactly equally as happy.
Like they wouldn't care which one.
And like there's two of me, and then they get to pick which one and they'll kill either
one.
They'll be fine as long as they're forced to kill.
They'll be fine.
But here's what will happen is, let's say we make artificial Lex, and it was like, wow,
it's so cool.
It looks the same interact.
Then there'll be this battle of like, right, we're going to tell the difference.
We're going to basically keep nudging Lex and artificial Lex until we get in novelty
from one and we'll kill the other one.
And I think thank God.
But we're not, novelty is a fuzzy concept.
That's the whole problem of novelty.
So I will define novelty, it's not fuzzy.
Creativity is the ability for you to create architectures that are, or create an architecture.
So let's say you've got a corpus of architectures known, you can write down, you've got some
distance measure, and then I create a new one and the distance measure, so far away
from what you'd expected is, there's no linear algebra we're going to get there.
It's like, that is creativity, and we don't know how to do that yet on any level.
Well, I was also thinking about like your argument about free will, like you wouldn't
be able to know it was, it doesn't work instantaneously.
It's not like a micro level thing, but more a macro level thing over the scale of trajectories
or longer term decisions.
So if you think that the novelty manifests over those longer timescales, it might be
the two Lexes diverge quite a bit over certain timescales of their behavior, even though-
But nobody would notice the difference.
They might not.
And the universe, the earth won't notice the difference.
The universe won't notice the difference.
The universe would notice the difference.
No, the universe doesn't know about its novelty, that's being generated, that's the whole point
of novelty.
Yeah, but this is what selection is, right?
It's like taking nearly equivalent ones and then deciding like the universe selects, right?
So whatever selection is, select some things to persist in time.
Yeah, it's going to select the artificial one, just because it likes that one better.
Well, you're mixing up two arguments here, so look up, let's go back a second.
Chris, what are you basing this argument on, like?
I'm just saying that I kind of don't think, because at least said that it's not possible,
like if you copy every single molecule in a person's body, that's not going to be the
same person, that they won't have the same assembly index, they won't have, they won't
be the same person.
And I just don't, I think copying, you can compress.
Not only do I disagree with that, I just, I think you can even compress a person down
to some, where you can fool the universe.
I'm saying, let me restate it, it is not possible to copy somebody on, because you, unless you
copy the causal history.
Also, you can't have two identical, I mean, actually I really like the idea that everything
in the universe is unique.
So even if like, there were two lexists.
I know you like that idea, because you're human and you think you're unique.
Yeah, exactly.
But also I can make a logical argument for it, that even if we could copy, you know,
all of your molecules and all their positions, the other you would be there.
And you have a different position in space, you're distinguishable.
Yeah, the other thing I was going to add.
How unique are you, just by the position in space, really?
Sure, but then how much does that light translation of lex, that's not an interesting, I see.
But, but no, wait a minute.
Is part of the definition of something being interesting is how much it affects the future?
Yes.
Yes.
But let me come back to you.
Don't you agree?
But let me come back to you.
Do you disagree?
I think I probably agree.
Yes.
There's two lexists, right?
There's a robot lex that you just basically, it's a, it's a, it is a charade.
It's a facsimile, it's just coded to emulate you.
Are you a robot lex?
I wouldn't know, right?
But let's get there.
That's the point.
That's a very important point here, because he's ducking and diving between this eye.
So if I facsimile you into a robot, then it would, your robot might be, would be a representation
of you now, but fundamentally be boring because you're going to have other ideas.
If however you built an architecture that itself was capable of generating novelty,
you would diverge in your causal chain and you're both be equally interesting to interact
with.
Yeah.
We don't know that mechanism.
All I'm trying to say is we don't yet know that mechanism.
We do not know the mechanism that generates novelty.
And at the moment in our AIs, we are emulating.
We are not generating.
You don't think we're sneaking up on that?
No.
Do you think there's a fun one?
No, no.
And I want there to be one.
I want the same thing.
You want.
Sorry.
I know you want that as a human because everything you just said makes you feel more special.
I want to be, no, no, no, screw my specialness.
I just want to be surprised.
If I think a robot can surprise you, if I, if you can produce an algorithm instantiated
in robots, surprise me, I will, I will, I will, I will, I will have one of those robots
to be brilliant, but they won't, it won't surprise me.
But why, why is it a problem to think that humans are special?
Maybe it's not the special.
You're right.
It's the better than.
Yes.
Because then you start to not recognize the magic in other life forms that you either
have created or you have observed because I just think there is magic in legged robots
moving about and they are full of surprises.
Yeah.
So this is.
Infectionality.
Yeah.
I'm a little, I know where you like cellular automata, right?
But the, the specialness in your robot comes from the roboticist that built it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's part of the lineage.
Yeah.
And so that's fine.
I'm happy with that.
That's what I felt like looking at the standing robot was I was looking at 4 billion years
of evolution.
Yeah.
Right.
If it wasn't, so I think I'm happy.
I mean, I'm happy we're going to coexist.
I'm just saying you're going to get more excitement.
There's something missing in our understanding of intelligence.
Intelligence isn't just training the way the neural network is conceived right now is great
and it's lovely and it'll be better and we will argue forever.
But if you want to know, wouldn't it be great if I said, look, I know how to invent an architecture
and I can give it a soul and what I mean by a soul is some, I know for real that there
is internal reference as soon as I'm not fake internal reference.
And if we could generate that mechanism for internal reference, that's why our goal to
that direction, that's why you have to develop the test for goal directness.
Get that goal directness.
You would love that robot more than the one that's just made to look like it does because
you'll have more fun with it because you better generate other problems, get more novelty.
Hell, you'd be out of fall in love with that robot for real, but not the one that's faking
it.
What about fake it till you make it?
Well, I think a lot of people fall in love with fake humans.
It's nice to fall in love with something that's full of novelty, yes.
I could imagine all kinds of robots that I would want to have a close relationship with.
And I don't mean like sexual, I mean like intimacy, but I just don't think that novelty
generation is such a special, okay, there's mathematical novelty or something like that
and then there's just humans being surprised and I think we're easily surprised.
That's fine.
But you don't think that's a good definition?
No, that's good.
I'm happy to be surprised, but not globally surprised because of someone else.
But I really want, I was why I'm a scientist, I really want to be the first to be surprised
about something and the first thing in the universe to have created that novelty and
to know for sure that that novelty has never occurred anywhere else.
That's a real buzz, right?
Is there a way to really know that?
You have to have a really big look up table.
Right.
But you're never going to be known for sure, right?
That's one of the hard things about being a scientist searching for this type of novelty.
Maybe that's why mathematics, mathematicians love discovery, but actually they are creating
and then when they create a new mathematical structure that they can then, you can write
code to work out whether that structure exists before.
That's almost why I would love to have been a mathematician from that regard to invent
new math that really I know pretty much for sure does not exist anywhere else in the universe
because it's so contingent.
Right.
But this gets into like, you said a few times that I still really don't understand how you
actually plan to do this, to build an experiment that detects how the universe is generating
novelty or that time is the mechanism.
So the problem that we all have, which I think is what Lex is pushing against is if I build
the experiment, you don't know what you put into it.
Unless you can quantify everything you put in, all of your agency, all the boundary conditions,
you don't know if you somehow biased it in some way.
So is the novelty actually intrinsic to that experiment or to that robot or is it something
you gave it, but you didn't realize you could do that?
It's going to asymptote towards that, right?
You're never going to know for sure, but you can start to take out, you know, you can use
good Bayesian approaches and just keep updating and updating and updating until you point
to one sense of purpose.
Bound on how much novelty generation it could be, got it.
So the ability to generate novelty is correlated with high assembly index?
With assembly index?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because the space possibilities is bigger.
So that's the key.
This could be a good, so we're running joke of like why Lex is single, this could be a
good part four.
So what you're looking for in a robot partner is ability to generate novelty.
And that's, I suppose you would say it's a good definition of intelligence too.
Boy is novelty a fuzzy concept.
Is creativity better?
Yeah.
I mean, that's all pretty fuzzy.
It's kind of the same.
Maybe that's why aliens haven't come yet is because we're not creating enough novelty.
Like there's some kind of a hierarchy of novelty in the universe.
Well, I think novelty is like things surprise you, right?
So it's a very passive thing, but I guess I would remember by saying creativity is I
think it's much more active.
Like you think there's like a mechanism of like the things that exist are generating
the creativity.
Novelty seems to be there's some spontaneous production and it has, it's completely decoupled
from the things that exist.
No, I understand.
I think it's really good.
Creativity is the mechanism and novelty is the observable.
Yeah.
Novelty could just be surprised.
Your model of the world was broken and not necessarily in a positive way.
That's surprise.
So there's three things now.
Let's go back to school.
Right.
Let's go.
You've got surprise, which is basically, I mean, I'm surprised all the time because
I don't read very much.
I'm pretty dumb.
I was like, oh, wow.
I often used to invent new scientific ideas and I was really surprised by that.
And then when looking at literature properly and it's there, so surprise, that's to the
extent that you don't have full information.
Creativity, the act of pushing on that kind of on the causal structure and novelty, which
is measuring that degree, right?
So I think that's pretty well defined in that regard.
So you want your robot, I mean, and in the end, that's why actually the way the internet
and the printing press share some, I actually think creativity has dropped a bit since the
internet because everyone's just, you know, just regurgitating stuff.
But of course now it's beginning to accelerate again because everyone is using this tool
to be creative and boom, it's exploding.
I think that's what happens when you create these new technologies.
That's really helpful.
There's a difference between novelty and surprise.
Okay.
I think I was thinking about surprise.
If you give me a toy that surprises me for a bit, it'd be great.
Robot surprises me.
You know.
Experiment that surprises you.
Yeah.
I mean, that's why I love doing experiments because I'm, I can't.
It's still exciting.
Yeah.
Surprise is exciting.
Yeah.
Even negative surprise.
Like some people love drama in relationships.
Like, it's like, why the hell, why did you do this?
That could be exciting.
I could imagine companies selling updates to their companion robots that just basically
generate negative surprise just to just spice things up a bit.
Yeah.
It's the push and pull.
That's, that's one of the components of love.
As you said, love is a complicated thing.
Oh, beauty.
I wanted to mention this because you also tweeted, I think this was Sarah.
No, it might have been Lee.
I don't remember, but it was a survey published in nature showing that scientists find.
That's me.
Yeah.
Anyway, there's a, there's a plot.
This is published in nature of what scientists find beautiful in their work and it separates
biologists and physicists.
It'd be nice if you showed the full plot and there's simplicity, elegance, hidden order,
inner logic of systems, symmetry, complexity, harmony, and so on.
Is there any interesting things that stand out to you?
I think the fact that biologists like complexity and pleasing colors.
Oh, there's pleasing colors on there.
Yeah.
Or shapes.
Or shapes.
And then physicists obviously love simplicity above all else.
Simplicity and elegance.
Yeah.
They love symmetry and the biologists love complexity and, well, they just love a little
bit less.
They love everything a little bit less, but complexity a little bit more.
A little bit more.
That's so interesting.
And pleasing colors or shapes.
Do you think it's a useful, I forget what your tweet was, that this is missing some
of the...
Oh, no, I think, it's because I think about how explanations become causal to our future.
So I have this whole philosophy that the theories we build and the way we describe reality should
be have the largest breadth of possibilities for the future of what we can accomplish.
So in some sense, it's not like Occam's razor is not for simplicity, it's for optimism
or the kind of future you can build.
And so I think, I think you have to think this way when you're thinking about life and
alien life because ultimately we're trying to build, I mean, science is just basically
our narratives about reality and now you're building a narrative that is what we are as
physical systems.
It seems to me it needs to be as positive as possible because it's basically going to
shape the future trajectory where we're going.
And we don't use that as a heuristic in theory building because we think theories are about
predicting features of the world, not causing them.
But if you look at the history of all of the development of human thought, it's caused
the things that happen next.
So it's not just about looking at the world and observing it, it's about actually that
feedback loop that's missing and it's not in any of those categories.
What do you think is the most beautiful idea in the physics of life, in the chemistry of
life, in this, through all your exploration with assembly theory, what is the thing that
made you step back and say this idea is beautiful or potentially beautiful?
For me, it's that the universe is a creative place.
I guess I want to think, and whether it's true or not, is that we are special in some
way and it's not like an arbitrary added-on epiphenomenon or ad hoc feature of the universe
that we exist, but it's something deep and intrinsic to the structure of reality.
And to me, the most beautiful ideas that come out of that is that the reason we exist is
for the universe to generate more things and to think about itself and use that as a mechanism
for creating more stuff.
That's for me.
The life that this, however common it is, is an intrinsic part, is a fundamental part
of this universe, at least, that we live in.
I think so.
I mean, it's always interesting to me because we have theories of quantum mechanics and
gravity and they're supposed to be our most fundamental theories right now.
And they describe things like the interaction of massive bodies or the way that charges
accelerate or all these kind of features, and they're these really deep theories and
they tell us a lot about how reality works, but they're completely agnostic to our existence.
And I just, I can't help but think that whatever describes us has to be even deeper than that.
And I think incorporating memory, I guess, of causality, whatever the term you want to
use into the physics view of the world might be taking a step forward.
That's the easiest way to do it.
It's the cleanest, so here we go again with the physicist, I'm a physicist.
The cleanest, I was going to say the simplest, most elegant way of resolving all of the kind
of ways that we have these paradoxes associated with life when you, it's not that life is
not, current physics is not incompatible with life, but it doesn't explain life.
And then you want to know where are the explanatory gaps.
And this idea that we have an assembly, that time is fundamental and objects actually are
extended in time and have physical extent in time is the cleanest way of resolving a lot
of the explanatory gaps.
So I've been, I struggle with assembly theory for many years because I could see this gap.
And I think when I first met Sarah and we realized we were kind of talking about the
same problem, but we were, we understood none of the language, it was quite hilarious actually
because it's like, I've no idea what we're talking about, but I think it's, sounds right.
So for me, the most beautiful thing about assembly theory is I realized the assembly theory explains
why the universe, why life is the universe developing a memory.
But not only that poetically, I could actually go measure it.
And I was like, holy shit, we just, we physically measured this thing, abstract, this abstract
thing and we could measure it.
And not only could we measure it, but we can then start to quantify the causal consequences.
And because, I mean, you know, I think as a kind of inventing this together with Sarah
and her team, you know, I thought there was a quite a high chance that, you know, we're
doing science.
There's such a high probability we're wrong, you know, on this and I remember kind of trying
to go to hard physicists, mathematicians, complexity theorists, and everyone just kind
of giving me such a hard time about it.
And so, you know, this is kind of, this is, you've just done this, you just done that,
it's, you know, you've just recapitulated an old theory.
And I was unable, I lacked the language to really explain.
And I had to, it was a real struggle.
So this realization that life, what life does, that physics cannot understand or chemistry
is a universe develops a memory that's causally actionable.
And then we can measure it, but it isn't just one thing.
There is this intrinsic property of all the objects in the universe, like, like I've said
before, but, you know, me holding up this water bottle isn't any other water bottle,
but it is a sum total of all the water bottles that have existed, right?
And will likely change the future of water bottles and for other objects.
So it's that this kind of, so for me, assembly theory explains the soul in stuff.
The monology.
But it is monology, it's not like Sheldrake's Morphic Resonance, where we have this kind
of wooey thing permeating the universe, it is the interaction of objects with other objects.
And some objects have more instantaneous causal power, that's life, living things.
And some objects are the instantaneous output of that causal power, dead objects, but they
are part of the lineage.
And that for me is fascinating and really beautiful.
And I think that even if we're determined to be totally wrong, I think it will help
us help, hopefully understand what life is and go into tech life elsewhere and make life
in the lab.
How does that make you feel, by the way, does it make you feel less special that you're
so deeply integrated, interconnected to the lineage?
I mean, I came on one level, I just wanted in my life as a scientist, I wanted to have
an interesting idea just once or an original idea.
I mean, it was like, you know, so I think that was cool that we had this idea and we
were playing with it.
And I think also that I kind of, I mean, it took me ages to realize that Sarah had also
had the same kind of form, coming towards the same formulation just from a completely
different point, because I, but no, it makes me feel special, and it also makes me feel
connected to the universe.
It also makes me feel not just humble about, you know, being a living object in the universe,
but the fact that it makes me really optimistic about what the universe is going to do in
the future, because we're not just isolated phenomena, we are connected, I will be able
to have, you know, one of my small objectives in life is to change the future of the universe
in some profound way just by existing.
Yeah, that's not ambitious at all.
I think it's also good that it makes me feel less lonely, because I just realize I'm not
like, I mean, I'm a unique assembly structure, but I have so much overlap with the other
entities I interact with that we're not completely individual, right?
I mean, yet, your existence does have a huge amount of impact on the, how this whole thing
unrolls on the future of the world.
As individuals, that's, yeah, local packets of agency.
I think we all have a profound impact on the future, some more than others, right?
All human beings, all life, and I mean, that's why I think it's a privilege in a way for,
you know, to say, to assert some degree of ego and agency, you know, I'm going to make
a computer or make an original life machine or we can do this thing, but actually it's
just like, you know, life's probably living, if there is a God or there's a soul in everything,
it's really laughing at us going, I fool these guys by giving them ego, so they strive for
this stuff and look what it does for, you know, the assembly space of the universe.
And there's always a possibility that science can't answer all of it, so that part's challenging
for me.
There may be a limit to this thing.
Let me ask you a bunch of ridiculous questions and I demand relatively short answers.
Lee, what's the scariest thing you've ever done?
Or what's the scary thing that pops to mind?
Giving lectures, giving seminars in front of other scientists.
That's, yeah, that is terrifying.
I could, if I had more time, I would ask you about the most embarrassing thing.
But we'll spare you.
What about you, Sarah, scariest thing up there, some of the scary things you've done?
Actually, the scariest for me was deciding I wanted to get divorced because it was like
a totally radical, like...
Life transformation.
Yeah, because we had been married for a really long time.
And I think it was just so much like, I realized like so much of my individual agency I didn't
realize I had before and that was just really like scary, like empowering scary, but like
terrifying.
Like you were living in a kind of one way for your whole life and then you realized your
life could be a different way.
And...
Yeah, there is a between humans.
I mean, that's the beautiful thing about love is the connection you have, but it's also
become the dependency and breaking that whether it's a mentor with your parents, your close
friends.
It's almost like waking up.
Yeah.
Like just there's a different reality.
Yeah.
That was scary.
Reinventing yourself.
Okay.
Maybe else actually we'll alternate, Sarah, if you could be someone else for a day, someone
alive today, you haven't met yet, haven't met yet, or maybe you could do one who you've
met, who would it be?
Kim Kardashian.
Kim Kardashian.
No joke.
The woman's brilliant.
Yeah, she's brilliant.
I would just like to experience, like I just, I think she's got such an interesting and
very deep understanding of social reality.
But you also said you have appreciation of love for fashion.
I do.
But that, but that's actually the same, like I just think it's really interesting because
we live in a social reality, which is completely artificially constructed.
And some people are really genius about moving through that.
And I think she's particularly good at it.
I wonder if she's good at understanding her, if she's.
I think it's very deeply intrinsic to her.
So I don't know if she has.
Right.
She's like surfing away.
How much cognitive awareness she has of it or how strategic it is, but I think it's deeply
fascinating.
So I guess that's the first one that comes to mind.
What about you, Yuli?
If you could be somebody for a day.
Don't say Yosha Bach.
Don't say Kim Kardashian.
Yeah.
Right.
Let's do off the table.
Off the table.
No, I was going to say, I would like to be a, does that have to be here today?
I was going to say, I'd like to be the latest arm processor.
Interesting.
I would like to be the latest arm processor.
I'd like to understand, I would like to know what it feels like to basically.
You like being objects.
I like being, I've always obsessed with being objects ever since I was a kid.
It's the best part of being an arm processor for a day.
I mean, I'd like to understand how I access my memory, what it anticipates coming next
and clock cycles.
What about how it feels like?
Yeah.
I wonder how it feels like to be.
To be useful.
To be.
I mean.
Thanks for that.
All right.
If, Lee, if everyone on earth disappeared and it was just you left, what would your days
look like?
What would you do?
I was just left impressed.
Nobody, no, probably can't really do any real science at scale.
What would you do with your remaining data?
Every possible tool I could and put it in my workshop and just make stuff.
So try to make stuff.
Just try and make stuff.
Make companions.
I'm probably not making companions.
Probably.
Yeah.
So in the physical space.
Yeah.
What about you, sir?
What would you, when you're just left alone on earth, you're the last one.
No animals in this scenario.
Nothing.
No living beings.
No plants.
No plants.
Oh, interesting.
I was going to say, I would just, I would try to walk the entire planet, at least all
the landmass.
Well, that's, that's true.
So you probably don't know if there's stuff you could be, you could be searching for plants
or other humans.
What would I eat?
It's a, you just have daily just allotment.
I would just walk all the time.
Soylent.
I don't know why I just walk.
That's just, you came to mind.
You're the explorer.
I would just walk.
And I guess I would make a goal of covering all of the entire earth.
Cause what else are you going to do with your time?
What's an item on your bucket list, Sarah, that you haven't done yet, but you hope to
do?
Um, skydiving.
Travel to space.
Um, I don't know.
You know what's funny with my bucket list?
I only know it was on my bucket list once I check it off.
So your bucket list is like a fog.
It's like a mystery.
Yeah.
Almost by doing it.
Yeah.
So it's very subconsciously driven.
Um, so it's in your subconscious in there and you're, you're bringing it to the surface.
I think most of the steering of our agencies in our subconscious anyway, so I just kind
of go with the flow.
But I guess, um, no, seriously, I don't know, I guess, but I would like to go in a submarine
like to the bottom of the ocean.
I think that'd be really cool to the bottom of the ocean.
Are you captivated by the mystery of the ocean?
Like how?
Yeah.
Yeah.
What about you, Lee?
What item on your bucket list?
I don't have a bucket list, but I just made one.
I would love to take a computer to the moon or Mars and make drugs off world.
It'd be the first chemist to make drugs off world.
The first drug manufacturer in space.
Yeah.
Why not?
Drugs in space.
Do you have to be somehow like be able to habitat, like be able to survive on that particular
space?
Or like, what's the connection between being on Mars and do many things?
I just would like to be there.
I'd like to take the ability to have command and control over chemicals programmatically
off earth to somewhere else.
That just seems like you like difficulty engineering problems.
Before I die, if I can do that.
Would you travel to space?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's what I'm saying.
I'd love to go into space, but not just to be a tourist.
I want to take scientific experiment in space and do a thing in space that never been done
before.
That's a real possibility.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that's why there's no point in listing things I can't do.
Yeah.
All right.
What small act of kindness were you once shown that you will never forget?
Small act of kindness, not big.
Somebody was just kind to you, somebody did something sweet.
When I was a PhD student, someone helped me out with just, I was basically, I needed a
computer.
I needed some power, computation power, and someone took pity on me and helped me and
gave me, I was really touched.
They didn't have to.
And they were actually quite, they were disabled scientists.
They had other things to do rather than help some random PhD student, gave me access, taught
me a little stuff.
Yeah.
And when you're a grad student or when you're a student, when you're even a student, the
younger it is, the better.
The attention, the support, the love you get from an older person, a teacher, something
like that is super powerful.
It's fascinating.
And like, from the perspective of the teacher, they might not realize the impact they have,
but that little bit, those few words, a little bit of help can have a lot of impact.
What about you, Sarah?
Somebody give you a free Starbucks at some point.
I love free Starbucks.
I like it when you're in the line at Starbucks and somebody buys your coffee in front of you
and then you buy the next one.
I love those.
But that's not my example.
I love that too.
Yeah.
It makes me happy.
And then my kids get all excited when we do it, when we go in for the first ones in line
doing it.
But I guess I can use a similar example about just being a student.
So Paul Davies is a very well-known theoretical physicist and he was generous enough with
his time to take me on as a postdoc.
But before I became his postdoc, he invited me to a workshop at Arizona State University
and the Beyond Center and took a walk with me around campus just to talk about ideas
after.
And I think there were two things that were completely generous about that.
One is Paul's philosophy is always interacting with young people is like you interact with
a mind in the room.
It doesn't matter how well-known or whatever.
It's like you evaluate the person for the person.
But he also gave me a book, The Uri Silence, that he had written and he wrote in it.
This is how EE gets to ET, which was an anti-meric excess, which I worked on as a PhD student
was the original homo-chirality all the way up to what the book was about, which was are
we alone in the universe and is there an intelligent life out there?
And it was just so much about the questions I wanted to ask because it was just everything
about like just it was just really, really kind.
Like that it's okay to ask these questions and you can actually have a strong answer.
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of my career is mostly his encouragement to ask deep questions
like he gave me the space to do it in ways that a lot of previous mentors had.
I mean, I've had a good experience with mentors, but it was like go off the deep end, ask the
hardest questions and I think that's the best gift you can give somebody.
What would you, because you're both fascinating minds and non, I would say, non-standard in
the best possible way.
Is there advice you can give to young folks how to be non-standard, how to stand out,
novelty, how to generate novelty?
That's what I want on my team-state.
I have one.
He generated novelty.
No, no.
How to.
How to.
How, how still.
I just love doing science.
And so when I was younger, I was just a, just wanted to, I mean, I'm still not sure I'm
a real scientist.
Right.
So I want to try.
So my advice for the young people is just if you just, if you love asking questions,
then don't be afraid to ask the question, even if it pisses people off, because if you
piss people off, you're probably asking the right question.
What I would say though is don't do what I did, which is just piss everyone off.
Try and work out how to, you know, I think, if you're, if other people are challenged
by your questions, you will get not only your respect, but people will give you, create
space for you because you're doing something really new.
I really try to create space in my academic career, my team, really try and praise them
and push them to do new things.
So my advice is try to do new things, get feedback, and the universe will help you.
Because the universe likes novelty.
I think so.
I think so.
Right.
If this one will keep them around.
Oh my God.
What about you, Sarah?
Um.
You too like to ask the really out there, because I have a strong passion for them.
So I think, um, uh, it goes back to the love.
Like if you, if you're doing the thing you're supposed to be doing, you should really love
it.
Um, so I always tell people that they should do the thing they're most passionate about.
But I think a flip side of that is that's when you become, uh, in some might like not
to sound cheesy, but like your best version of yourself.
So I guess like for me, as I become more successful in my career, I feel like I can be more myself
as an individual.
And so there's this, I've always been following the questions I'm most interested in, which
very early on I was discouraged from knowing by many people because they thought they were
unanswerable questions.
And I always just thought, well, if no one's even trying to answer them, of course they're
going to be unanswerable.
And then that was kind of an odd viewpoint.
But the more I, I found my way in that space, the more I also made a space for myself as
a person because you're basically generating the niche that you want to exist in.
Um, and so I think, um, I think that's, that's part of it is not just to follow your passion,
but also think about like, who do you want to be and create that?
Yeah.
Who am I?
Who do you want to be?
I mean, yeah, play temporarily with it.
Yeah.
Who am I now?
Who do I want to be now?
But who do I want to be in the future?
They're not decoupled.
Yeah.
I always wonder if that's like, if I become something, am I finding myself or am I creating
myself?
Yeah.
And I think those are somehow the same kind of thing.
I do feel often like I was always meant to be this kind of thing, but, um, is that created
or discovered?
I don't know.
But basically go towards that direction.
If you were abducted by aliens, Sarah, waiting, they would come find me.
They're on a spaceship there.
And then they somehow figured out the language you speak, um, and ask you, what are, what
are you, what is, what explain yourself, not you, Sarah, but the species, what's life
on earth, uh, like we, we don't have time or busy grad students from another, uh, planet.
What, what, what's interesting about human civilization?
What's interesting about you, uh, you specifically to the, they could be very kind of personal
and kind of pushy, um, and yeah, well, how would you, how would you describe?
Okay.
Um, I have one, um, because, you know, like, obviously I self identify as a scientist and
a physicist, but intrinsically, I feel more like an artist, but it's almost like you're
an artist that you don't know what you're painting yet.
Um, and I guess I feel like that's humanity, like in, in some sense we're, we're, we're
creating something I think is profound and, and potentially very beautiful, like existence
of the universe.
But we're just so night, like not night, we're just early or we're early, we're, we're young,
we don't know what we're doing yet.
Yeah.
What's with the nuclear weapons?
There's a big question too.
Like, what are you guys, what are we doing with them?
This creativity that you talk about, it's not very nice, but it's, you're, we're making
things that are like very destructive and like the rockets, what, this seems very aggressive.
Yeah.
I know this is my, my blinders on, um, I don't know.
I, I mean, it goes back to the whole conversation about suffering.
I have a hard time, uh, regularizing certain aspects of a reality into what I want to envision.
And that's obviously problematic, but you know, nuclear power has also given us a lot
of good things.
So, um,
So both that's human nature, both, both human beings and the technology we create has the
capacity for evil and the capacity for good.
Yeah.
And we can't all be good all the time.
I mean, there's like this huge misnomer that you need to be liked by everyone universally.
And obviously that's like an ideal, but it's physically impossible.
You like, you can't get a group of people in the room and have everyone like each other
all the time.
So I think that kind of tension is actually really important, um, that we have different
aesthetics, um, different goals, uh, and, and sometimes conflict comes out of that.
Yeah.
Speaking of which, uh, do you and Yosha Bach ever say anything nice to each other or is
it always conflict?
We never have conflict.
We argue, but I don't, I don't think they argue.
Arguments are bad.
It's love.
I mean, I think the problem I have, not problem, I think here we go and he's not here to defend
himself.
No, I just, I don't necessarily understand the, the, I mean, he's just talking at such
a high level.
Yeah.
You know, I'm, I'm a dimwit.
So I'm like, I spend some, so I think a lot of our conflict is not conflict.
We actually, we actually have a, I think, I mean, I can't speak for Yosha.
I have a deep appreciation for him.
He's brilliant.
But I, I think I'm kind of frustrated and I'm trying to, he thinks the universe is a
computer and I want to turn the universe into a computer.
Yeah.
That's, that's a small disagreement.
So what, what would you, how would you defend your life to an alien when you're being abducted?
Would you focus on the specifics of your life?
No, no, no, I would be, I would try and be as random as possible and try and confuse
them.
Oh, good.
Good.
Excellent.
That might be the wiser choice.
The Easter eggs in reality?
No, I mean, if aliens are doctor, no, no, I would try and be as random as possible.
I would try and do something that would surprise the hell out of them, which I thought, I
mean, they're probably like risking, they might kill me, but I think that might be funny.
That might, yeah, they might want to study you for prolonged periods of time.
My reasoning is if I wanted to stay alive, okay, so if the thing is, if I wasn't going
back to earth and the job was to stay alive, if I could be as surprising as possible, they
would keep me around like a pet, right?
Pet Lee on the aliens principle.
So you'd be okay being a pet?
Well, no, but I mean, the last human that survives would just be a pet to the aliens.
I don't know, but I mean, I think that might be fun because then that might, I might get
some feedback from their curiosity, but yeah.
Let me ask you this question.
Given our conversation has a very different meaning, not a more profound need perhaps,
would you rather lose all of your old memories or never be able to make new ones?
I would have to lose all my old memories.
Again, it's the novelty.
What about you, Sarah?
I'm the same because I don't think like it's about the future experience, right?
And in some sense, like you were saying earlier, most of our lived experience is actually in
our memories, so if you can't generate new memories, it's like you're not alive anymore.
What comforts you on bad days?
When you look at human civilization, when you look at your own life, what gives you
hope?
What makes you feel good about what we're doing about life at the small scale of you as a
human and at the big scale of us as a human civilization, maybe the big scale of the universe?
Children, my kids, but I also mean that in like a grand sense of like, not a grand, but
like future minds in some sense.
So for me, like the most bleak movie ever, people worry about apocalyptic things like
AI existential risk and climate change, which children of men, the whole premise of the
movie was there can be no children born on the entire planet.
And the youngest person on the planet is like 18 years old or something.
Can you imagine a world without children?
It's just, it's harrowing, that's the scariest thing.
So I think what gives me hope is always youth and the hope of children and the possibilities
of the future they see.
And they grow up in a completely different reality than adults do.
And I think we have a hard time seeing what their reality actually looks like.
But I think most of the time it's super interesting.
Yeah, they have dreams, they have imagination, they have this kind of excitement, it's so
cool, so fun to watch.
And yeah, you feel like you're almost getting in the way of all that imagination.
What about you, what gives you hope?
So when I go back to my eight year old self, the thing that I dreamed of as my eight year
old self was this world in which technology became programmable when there was internet
and I get information and I would expand my consciousness by just getting access to everything
that was going on.
And this happened in my lifetime, I mean, really do have that, I mean, okay, there's
some bad things, there's TikTok, everyone just don't, whatever, all the bad things about
social media.
But I think, I mean, I can't quite believe my luck being born now, so amazing.
To be able to program reality in some way.
And the thing that I really find fascinating about human beings is just how ingenious they
are.
You know, whether it's from my kids, my research group, my peers, other companies, just how
ingenious everyone is.
And I'm pretty sure humanity has a, or our causal chain in which humanity is a vital
part in the future is going to have a lot of fun and I'm just, yeah, it's just mind-blowing
just to watch.
And, you know, so humans are ingenious and I hope to help them be more ingenious if
I can.
Well, what gives me hope, what makes me feel good on bad days is the existence of wild minds
like yours, novelty generators, assembly structures that generate novelty and do so beautifully
and then tweet about it.
Uh, Sarah, this, I really, really enjoyed talking to you.
I enjoy following you.
I'm a huge fan.
Sarah Lee, I hope, I hope to talk to you many times in the future, maybe with your Shabak.
You're just incredible people.
Thank you for everything you do.
You're awesome.
Thank you for talking today.
I really, really appreciate it.
Relax.
Thanks.
Yeah, I'm brilliant to be here.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sarah Walker and Lee Cronin.
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
Now, let me leave you with some words from Arthur C. Clarke.
Two possibilities exist, either we are alone in the universe or we are not.
Both are equally terrifying.
And let me, if I may, add to that by saying that both possibilities, at least to me, are
both terrifying and exciting, and keeping these two feelings in my heart is a fun way
to explore, to wander, to think, and to live always a little bit on the edge of madness.
Thank you for listening.
I hope to see you next time.