#279 – Alien Debate: Sara Walker and Lee Cronin

The following is a conversation with Sara Walker and Lee Cronin. They have each been on this podcast once before individually and now for their second time they're here together. Sara is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist, Lee is a chemist, and if I may say so, the real life manifestation of Rick from Rick and Morty. They both are interested in how life originates and develops both life here on earth and alien life.

Including intelligent alien civilizations out there in the cosmos. They are colleagues and friends who love to explore this agree and debate nuanced points about alien life, and so we're calling this an alien debate. If you 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 a seriousness and rigor they deserve, so that I hope to do with this conversation and future ones like it. Our world is shrouded in mystery. We must first be humble to acknowledge this and then be bold and diving in and trying to figure things out anyway.

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I'm a huge fan of yours. I should say thank you to Sarah for wearing really awesome boots. We'll probably overlay a picture later on. Why the hell didn't you dress up? I don't know. I think I met you pre-pink. I just decided I was boring and I needed to make a statement and red was too bright so I went pink salmon pink. I think you were always pink. You just found yourself in 2017.

There's an amazing photo of him where there's like everybody in their black gown and he's just wearing the pink pants. That wasn't a wagon in university. It's totally nuts. 100 year anniversary they got me to give it the plenary and they didn't find the outfit for me so they were wearing 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 it. Big full screen slow motion.

All right, let's talk about aliens. We'll find places we disagree in places we agree. Life, intelligence, caution, sense 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 lots to learn probably more than you two talking to somebody that's 90 so. Yeah, so I think they absolutely would. So whatever the phenomena is that is human.

There will be an inkling of the same kind of phenomenal within aliens pieces and that 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.

And I'm going to define a lot of terms one of them is interesting. Yes, that's very interesting to try to define Ali. What do you think are humans interesting for aliens? What let's take it from our perspective we want to go find aliens is a species quite desperately. So if we put the show on the other foot of course we're interesting but I'm wondering and assuming that we're at the right technological capabilities go searching for aliens.

And that's interesting. So what I mean is if there needs to be a massive leap in technology that we don't have. How will aliens prioritize coming to earth and other places but I do think that they would come and find us because they want to find out about our culture. What things are universal. What about I mean I'm a chemist so I say what is the chemistry universal right are the creatures that we're going to find making all this commotion are they made of the same stuff.

What does their science look like. Are they off planet yet. I guess there's so I think that Neil to grass Tyson is being slightly pessimistic and maybe trying to play the tune that the universe is vast and it's not worth them coming here. I don't think that.

But I just worry that maybe we we don't have the ability to talk to them we don't have the universal translator we don't have the right physics but sure they should come we are interesting I want to know if they exist it would make it 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 he said we humans want to visit. Like we're longing to connect with aliens why is that can you expect that is an obvious thing that we should be like what are we hoping to understand. By meaning aliens exactly it asking as an introvert is like I asked myself the solid time why why go out and afraid and I to meet people.

What do you hope you think 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 certain are certainly are but maybe there's a number of classes there are the those aliens that have not you made contact with other aliens like us.

Those aliens have made contact with just one other alien and maybe it's an anticlimax and slime right and aliens that have made contact with not just one set of intelligent species but several that must be amazing actually literally there are some place in the universe there must be one alien civilizations not make contact with not one but two other intelligence civilizations.

So they must be thinking about there must be entire degree courses on aliens thinking about aliens and cultural universal cultural norms. Do you think they will survive the meeting and by the way lead did respond saying that's all the universe wants. So Sarah said thinking about aliens think about aliens. We 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. 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 the discussions about alien life which is a really big challenge so I usually when I'm trying to think about these problems I don't try to think about us as humans but us as an example of phenomena that exists in the universe that we have yet to explain.

And it doesn't seem to be the case that if I think about the features I would argue our most universal about that phenomenon that there's any reason to think that a first encounter 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 from a contingency point of view I want to know how many ways this is a universe build structures build memories right that and then I want to know if those memories can interact with each other and if you have to.

Different origins of life in the origins of intelligence and then these things become conscious surely want to go 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 want to go and find out a map and surely curiosity is a property that evolution has made on earth and I can't see any reason that it won't happen elsewhere because curiosity probably exists because we want to find innovations in the environment we want to use that information to help.

Technology and also curiosity is like planning for the future are they going to fight us are they are we going to be able to trade with them so I think that Neil is 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 round slide category maybe no no we maybe we could think is a bit odd right look at Instagram Twitter all these people taking selfies I mean does the universe is the ultimate state of consciousness thinking beings that take feligar sauce themselves and upload them to an inter web with other thinking beings looking at each other's photos so I think that they will be.

I did not say there's anything wrong with it consciousness matter first at a scale yeah selfies yeah like the mirror test scale yeah I do think that curiosity is really the driving force why we have our technology right if we weren't curious we wouldn't go out left the cave so I think that.

So I think that nils got it completely wrong in fact actually of course they'd want to come here doesn't mean they are coming here we've seen evidence for that I guess we can argue about that right but I think that we want I desperately I know that Sarah does too but I won't speak for you you're here you can I desperately want to have missions to look for life in the solar system right now I want to map life over the solar system and then I want to understand how we can go and find life as quickly as possible at the nearest stars.

And also at the same time do it in the lab just to compensate you know so you sure yeah I was just one more point on this if you think about sort of what's driven the most like features of our own evolution is a species you could and try to map that to alien species I always think like optimism is what's going to get us for this.

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 looks expand out into the cosmos but if you just look at how we're doing it and how we talk about it so is our future and space is always you know built from narratives of optimism and so it seems to me that if intelligence does get out in the universe that it's going to be more optimism curiosity driving it the more 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 half full kind of person but is it obvious the curiosity not obvious but what do you think is curiosity and more powerful forcing the universe then violence and the will to power so because you said you frame curiosity as a way to also plan on how to avoid violence which is an interesting frame you have curiosity.

But I could also argue that violence is a pretty productive way to operate in the world which is like that's one way to protect yourself the best defense is offense. I'm not qualified to answer this but I'll have a go I think that's not what I'm right. That's the summary of this podcast.

I would yeah maybe I would let's call it violence by call it a ratio so if you think about the way evolution works all the way I was obviously called that same with the work so if you say you you build pro curiosity allows you to open up avenues new graphs right so new features you can play what what the ability to raise those things allows you to start again and does some pruning so the universe I think curiosity gets you first curiosity gets you rockets something and it gets you robots.

It can make drugs it gets you poetry and art and communication and then you know I often think wouldn't it be great and bureaucracy to have another world war not literally a world war now please no world not war but a the equivalent so we get remove all the admin bureaucracy right all the admin violence get rid of it and start again you know what I mean because you get layers and you get redundant systems built so actually a reset so let's call it violence a reset in some aspects of our.

Culture and our technology allows us to then build more important things without the because how many you know how many cookies do I have to click on how many think how many how many extra clicks I do I have in the future of my life that I could remove in that a bit of a reset would would allow us to to to start again and maybe that's how I suppose I encounter aliens will be maybe they will fight with us and say yeah

we know this excited by you we thought we'll just get rid of you so they might want to reset earth yeah why not to be like let's see how the evolution runs again this seems like a they've uh there's nothing new happening here they're observing for a while this is just not let's keep him more fun let's start with a fish again.

I like you equated violence to resetting your cookies I suppose that's the kind of violence in this this model world where words or violence resetting cookies 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 but so what is life so 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 what the phenomenon we call life and then it should explain certain attributes and you end up having a really different framing than way people usually talk so the way I talk about it three different ways

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.

That's my favorite so can I yeah can I add on to that you see the physics one again the physics of existence yeah the physics of existence I don't know what to call it you know like if you think of all the things that could exist only certain things do exist and I think life is basically the universe's mechanism of bringing things into physically existing in the in the moment now.

Yeah what's another one we were debating this the other day so if you think about universe that has nothing in it that's kind of hard to conceive of right because this is where the physicists really go wrong they think of a universe of nothing in it they can't and you think existence is really hard to think not exactly yeah and then you think of universe with everything in it.

That's really hard and you just you just have this white blob right this is everything but the fact we have to discrete stuff in the universe beyond say planets so you got stars space planets stuff right the boring stuff but I would define life will 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 the fact that the universe has discrete things and it is completely mind blowing if you think about it for one second the fact there's any objects at all and there's because for me the object is a proxy for a machine that built it some information.

Being moved around actuation sensing getting resource and building these objects so for me everyone's been obsessing about the machine but I'm like forget the machine let's see the objects the you know and I think in a way that assembly theory we realize maybe a few months ago that assembly theory actually does account for the soul in the objects not mystically like say.

The old rex morphic resonance or liveness is not a monodology seeing souls in things but when you see an object and I 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 but the barrier between life and non life is a crewing enough memories to then actuate so.

That means is there are contingency there are things that happen in the universe get trapped these memories then have a causal effect on the future and then when you get those concentrated in a machine you're actually able in real time able to integrate. The past. The present with the future and do stuff that's when you are most alive.

So you're being the machine yes wait a minute what why is the object so one one of the ways to define life that Sarah said simple machines creating complex machines so there's a million questions there so how how the hell does a simple machine create a complex machine.

So this is what we're talking about the beginning to have a minimum replicate a so 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 to be some variability otherwise it's not going to get more functional so you need that at 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 on can give you additional function.

And to be able to acquire more stuff to exist so existence is weird but the fact that there is existence is why there is life and that's why I realized a few days ago that there must be it that's why alien life must be everywhere because there is existence. Is there like a conservation of cheeky stuff happening 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 complex more powerful than the things it creates.

So how can you get complexity from simplicity. So the way you get complexity from simplicity is that you I would this I'm just making this up but this is kind of my notion that you have a large volume of stuff so you're able to get seats if you like random cues from the environment so you just use those objects to basically right on your tape ones and zeros whatever.

And that is necessarily rich complex okay but it has a low assemblyness but even though it has a high assembly number we can talk about that but then when you start to then integrate that all into 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 as a concept you hate but I also hate which is entropy but.

People are more familiar with entropy than what we talk about in assembly theory and also the idea that like say physics as we know it involves objects that don't exist across time or as we would say low memory objects so one of the key distinctions that that. Low memory objects yeah so physics is all low memory objects but that the physicist creators of low memory objects or manipulators of low memory objects absolutely it's a very nice way putting it okay so I go. Sorry to keep it around.

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 an 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 the.

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. And started the beginning what is assembly theory Lee sent me some slides is a there's a big sexy paper coming out probably maybe I don't know.

We've finished it almost almost that's also summary of science we're almost done yeah what almost I think we're ready to start an interesting discussion with our peers right you're the machine that created the object and we'll see what the object takes us.

So what what is assembly theory yeah well I think I think the easiest way for people to understand is to think about assembly and molecules although the theory is very general doesn't just apply to molecules and this was really leads insights so it's kind of funny that I'm explaining it but i'm. Okay i'm ready i'm ready you tell me where I get the check my marks minus but it's your very.

And then you can take all the ways for more like a summary you can take all the ways of building up the original molecule so there's all these paths that you can assemble it and the sort of rules are assembly is 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.

So we had this conjecture that if that minimal number of steps was sufficiently large it would indicate that you required a machine or system that had information about how to assemble that specific object because the combinatorial space of possibilities is getting exponentially large as the assembly and X is increasing.

So 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 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 and we can talk more about that part of it but the point I want to make about it is there is always this intuition that I had that there should be some complexity threshold in the universe above which you would start to say whatever physics governs life actually becomes operative.

And I think about it a little bit like we have planks constant which you know like and we have the fine structure constant and then this sort of assembly threshold is basically another sort of potentially constant of nature might depend on specific features of the system might but which we debate about sometimes but but then when you're past that you have you have to have some other explanation and the current explanations we have physics because now you're in high memory.

The thing is actually require time for them to exist and time becomes a physical very well 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 it's it's so when I think of all the things in this room you know 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 grass and most of the creativity in the biosphere is because a lot of the objects that exist now are huge in their structure across time for a billion years of evolution to get to us. Is it possible to look at me and infer the history that led to me if you as a human you as an individual might be hard you as a representative of a population of objects that have high assembly with similar causal history and structure.

That you can communicate with IE other humans you can offer a lot probably also with 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 one thing to add I mean it's not just about the object for the objects occur and not just objects for high assembly number because you can have random things have a high semi number they must have.

There must be a number of identical copies so you know you're getting away from the random because you could take a snapshot this is why it's like a entropy I love entropy when you use correctly but the problem of entropy you have to have a labeler. And so you can labels the beginning in the end start and finish you know where what you can do an assembly 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. And I had to produce the assembly equation so we came up with the assembly equation I had just imagine this so you have a string where actually makes me makes me trying to remember it was so did my head in for a long time yeah because I couldn't.

If you just have a string of say words say you know serious of words series of letters so you just have a a b b b c c d d d and you and you find that object and you just just have four a four b's four c's four d's together boom then. And that really that you measured that you physically measure 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 season four c's we don't see them.

In the real world used to infer them and I really got stuck with that because there's a problem to try and work out what's the difference between a long you know.

A physical object in this assembly space objects that we realized the best way to put that is inferring time that so although we can't infer your entire history we know at some point the four a's were made the four b's was made the four season made the four d's were made and they all got added together and that's one really interesting thing that's come out the theory.

But the killer will be knew we were going beyond and beyond standard complexity theory is incredibly successful is that we realized we can start to measure these things for real across domains. So the assembly index is actually intrinsic property of all stuff that you can break 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 when you buy domains.

If test is so she out of computers complexity of memes you know memes yeah what was that ideas yeah I mean so what ideas are objects in a similar series yeah. There are physical things they're just features of the causal graph I mean the fact that 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 it simply space when I started working on origins of life I was writing about something called top down causation which a lot of like philosophical.

Philosophers are interested in people that worry about the mind body problem but the whole idea is you know if we have you know the microscopic world of physics is causally complete it seems like there's no room for higher level causes like our thoughts to actually have any impact on the world. And that didn't that seems problematic when you get to studying life in mind because it does seem that quote unquote emergent properties do matter to matter. And so.

And then there's this other sort of paradoxical situation where information looks like it's disembodied so we talk about information like it can just move from any physical system to any other physical system and it doesn't require. Or like you don't have to specify anything about the substrate to talk about information and then there's also 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 theories 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 their features of the overlapping assembly space.

So they look abstract because they're not part of the current structure but they're part of the structure if you thought about it as like the philosophical concept of a hyper object and object that's too big in time for us actually to resolve. And so I think information's physical is just physical in time not in space.

To hyper object to difficult for us to resolve so we're supposed to think about of life as this thing that stretches through time and there's a causation chain that led to that thing. And then you're trying to measure something with the assembly index about the assembly index is the ordering the or like you can think of it as like a partial ordering of all the things that can happen.

So in thermodynamics we coarse green things by temperature and pressure and assembly theory we coarse 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. Not at average because can't you just read it with that question. Oh not not 3d could catch you always 3d for the thing.

I'm in the heart. No because I had such fights so Sarah's team and my team are writing this paper at the moment and so funny. I think we kind of share the at the beginning you were like no that's not right. Oh yes right and we're doing this for a bit. And then the problem is we build a theory and build the intuition there's some certain features right of the theory that almost felt like I was being religious about say right you have to do this.

Like good assembly assembly theorist does this does this and Sarah's postdoc Daniel and my postdoc Amber check and they were both brilliant. But they were like no we don't we don't buy that it is they were like well Leo actually I thought you're the first to say that you know you can't you if you can't explain it doesn't you can't do experiment that doesn't exist. And that saved me and I said to Abyshek. Abyshek's my postdoc in Glasgow Daniel is Sarah's postdoc in ASU.

I was like I have the experiment or data so when I basically take the molecules and chop them up in the mass back. The assembly number is never the average is always the shortest it's intrinsic property and then the penny drop for Abyshek's okay.

So I had these things that we had to believe to start with or to trust and then we've done the math and it came out and they now have the shortest path actually it's up explains why the shortest path here's why the shortest path is important not the average.

Short path needs 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 out of seeing the universe when I find those features I know the universe has had a coherent memory.

And it's basically a life and and so that means it gives you the lower bound so that's like of course there's going to be other parts we can be more ridiculous right we can 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 short 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 let's say I've got two different objects a and B and they both have different short paths to get them.

But then if you want to make a and B together they will have a compromise in the joint assembly space they might that might be a 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 and that's right and the pizza to get a scratch yeah so there's a lot of ways. There's the shortest way and they're you take the full spectrum of ways in this probably an average like duration for a new to make an apple pie.

Is the average interest thing still if you measure the average length of the path to assemble a thing does that tell you something about the way nature usually does it versus something fun and about the object which I think is what you're aiming out 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 are existing in the ecosystem or technology.

And and that and no and there has to be more paths explored because then you can happen upon other memories and then condense them down I'm not making too much sense but if you look and say let's just say I mean maybe we're going to get to any civilizations later right but I I would argue very strongly that alien civilization a and alien civilization B.

And 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 showed 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 a

assembly theory to infer the their language their technology and other bits and bobs and the shortest path will help you do that quickly. All Aliens in the cause of the 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 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 Ali there's there's not different classes of causality graphs right the universe doesn't just say like here you get the red causality graph and you get the blue one is basic ingredients and their geographical constraint or constrained space or time or something like that.

There constraint and time because only by the virtue of the fact that you need enough time to have passed for some things to exist so the universe has to be big enough in time for some things so just the one point on the shortest path versus the average path which I think we 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 assemblies 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 can only communicate with things as as we was saying if you have some overlap in the past history so if you had an alien species that had absolutely no overlap then there would be no means of communication but as we become you know as we progress further and further in time and more things become possible because the assembly spaces are larger.

Because you can have a larger assembly space in terms of index and also just the size of the space because it's exponentially growing then more things can happen in the future and the example I like to give is actually when we made first contact with gravitational waves because you know that's an alien phenomenon that's been permeating our plate not alien in life and by alien like something we had never.

New 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. History relativity and then a hundred years of technological development to even quote unquote see that phenomena. So the okay to see that phenomena our cause a graph has to start intersecting yeah we needed the idea to emerge first the abstraction right and then we had to build the technical.

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 can start overlapping eventually yeah so the interesting feature of that graph is there was an event you know 1.4 billion years away of a black hole merger that we detected on our detector and you know now suddenly we're connected through this communication channel with this distant event in our universe that you know if you think about 1.4 billion years ago it was happening on this plane.

Or even further back in time that you know there's common physics underlying all those events but even for those two events to communicate with. I understand what you were going on about the other week. Yeah I'm sorry. But it's your causal grass or not. Well let's just say now our causal grass are overlapping in the deep past.

I totally missed it. You made a connection with it now I do like that 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 so. Oh I get it now. No it's right I was able to comprehend what you were talking about when saying the channel communicating to the past but what you're saying is we were able to infer what happened 1.4 billion years ago.

We don't take to the gravity wave I mean I think it's amazing that you know that time we were even we were just becoming multicellular right. It's like insane and then we we progress the multicellular larry through to technology and build the detector and then for you know and then we just extrapolate backwards so. So although we haven't didn't do anything back to the graph back in time we understood this existence then overlap going forward and that. Well that's because our graphs are larger.

That means that has a consequence one of the things I was trying to say is I kind of 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 the construct the object that's construct being constructed by the process.

It's based in that memory and those memories and add on and add on and add on so as it becomes more competent and life is about taking those memories and compressing them increasing their autonomy. And and so I think that you know like the cell that we have in biology on earth is our way of doing that that really the maximum ability to take memories and to act on the future. Oh I think that's mathematics.

No mathematics doesn't exist no but that's the point the point is that abstractions do exist there real physical things we call them. Okay abstractions but the point about mathematics that I think is so I don't I don't just agree that I think your object first and I'm information first but I think I'm I'm only information first in the sense that I think the thing that we need to explain is why what abstractions are and what they are as physical things because of all all of human history.

And I think that's what I thought that there were these properties that are disembodied exists 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 I think that's 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.

So what is math exactly it's a nice simplification at this simple description of what so we have a computer scientist a physicist in the chemist here. I think the chemist is going to define math and you guys can correct me go for it I would say let let let me and honestly we're ready. I think the ability to to label objects and and place them into classes and 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 in object 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 object so I think there is a transition to information that goes when you go from stuff to object.

Yeah information is emergent and then you know the information is actionable memories from the universe so when when memories become actionable that's information but there's always memory but it's not actionable yeah and then it's not information great actionable is what you can create you can use it if you can't use it then it's not information if you can't

transmit it if you if it doesn't have any causal consequence was 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 calls yeah yeah we can this is happening no happening requires information

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 tech mark and and is very playful and say like the universe universe just math with the universe is just math then we may as well not bother having any conversation

because the conversation really written we just met with the future so you can just give us the conversations happened already so I think the problem is that mathematicians are so successful labeling stuff and so successful understanding of stuff through those labels they forget that actually there the those labels had to emerge and that information had to be built on those memories so memory in the universe so constraints graph when they become actionable and the graph can loop back on itself or interact with other graphs and they can intersect

those memories become actionable and therefore their information and I think you just changed my son my my mind on something pretty big but I don't have a pen so I can't 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 left to go through the nonsense we have to go through here's literally the way to do it stuff always comes first for them when stuff builds the abstraction the abstract can be then teleported onto one of the

abstractions is the looping back yeah power okay am I make it I don't know I got stuck yeah so first a God made stuff and after that when you start to be able to form abstractions that's one of God is the memory week the universe can remember God is the memory the universe can remember otherwise there's not way did you statement hundreds of years from what is that me what did he was mean by this don't don't just my my one line is I

I was a didn't it was just a 10 seconds to come up I don't know what it means what does it mean okay wait we need to how do we get on to this we were time causality mathematics so what is mathematics in this picture of stuff objects memory and information is what what is that is mathematics it's the most efficient labeling scheme that you can apply to lots of different graphs labeling scheme doesn't make it sound useful can I try yeah sure please if you rejected my definition of mathematics on

shocks but it's correct go sorry excellent no I mean I think I think we have a problem right because we we can't not be like we're stuck in the car 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 this guy is blue you might say is it global blue is it is your blue what color blue do you mean and you have a harder time visualizing what I actually mean so mathematics carries a lot of

things and it's copy 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 is think about like Newton's law of gravitation it's actually it's a it's a compressed regularity of a bunch of phenomena that we observe in the universe but then it will

be a combination 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 in that particular abstraction and in this case like launch satellites to space or send people to Mars or whatever it is so so if you look at us from the outside and you say what is it for physical systems to invent a thing called mathematics and then to use and and then and then it to become a physical observable mathematics is kind of like the universally

applicable information that allows a new possibility spaces to be open in the future because it allows this kind of ability to map one physical system to another and actually understand that the general

principle. So is it helping the overlap of causal graphs then by mapping. Oh I think that's the explanation for what it is in terms of the physical theory of assembly would be some feature 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 and we're

in totally untyred 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 we share length so we have languages that we can we can make interoperable and and so whether you're speaking I don't know all the different dialects of Chinese all the different

types of English at French German whatever you can interconvert them the interesting thing about mathematics now is that everybody on planet every human being and computers and share that common language that language was constructed by a process in time so what I'm trying to say is assembly invented math is those those pro right from the you know mathematics didn't occur it didn't exist before life abstraction was invented by life right that doesn't mean that the

universe wasn't capable of mathematical things wait wait a minute can we just ask that that old famous question is math invented or discovered so when you say assembly invented or whatever you mean just some ways of mathematical theory but sorry right we argue exactly are we arguing that's what sounds like are we discovering no well yes and no I would say you

called mathematics a language I would say that I'm pretty sure that there are some very common seeds of mathematics in the universe right and actually not the way we are finding now is not discovered it's invented and but even though I think those two terms are very triggering and I don't think

necessarily useful because I think that what people do the mathematicians that say our 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 create and make a thought did I make that piece of art or did I discover discover it like inventing the airplane did I invent the airplane let's stick with the airplane the airplanes

a good one I let's say I'm I did I discover the airplane one in a way the universe discovered the airplanes just chucked a load of atoms together and load around them human beings want to solve a name we we discover the airplane in the space of all of the possibilities but here's the thing when the space of

possibilities is so vast infinite almost and you're able to actualize one of those in an object and you are inventing it so in mathematics because there are infinite number of theorems the fact you're actually pulling there's no difference between inventing a mathematical structure and inventing the

airplane they're the same thing but that doesn't mean that now the airplane exists in the universe is something weird about the universe that you know so I think that the more this is the thing that I think 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 is but everything then is invented it's just more or less invented absolutely

okay first 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 think about the difference to invent a discover 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 theories we don't want to have external observers there's been this long tradition and physics of trying to describe the universe from the outside and not the inside and the universe has to generate everything itself if you do it from the assembly theory describes how the universe builds itself they take you

15 seconds to say that yeah I'm too to come up with that also no I've thought about before okay good line is a it's like you're making fun again no I'm not making fun I'm having fun there's a different that's good all right I'm you

she's inventing 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

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 this assume the so when you see them and they see you you're assuming they have vision they have the ability to construct in 3d and in time there's a lot of assumptions 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 words see we mean visually they show up to a

party and say 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 can't be so big that you don't even realize that's an entity okay but all the kinds of detection too I would make it more abstract and go down I was thinking this morning about how to rewrite the iris see 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 but 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 reencode our receiver in that way what's more basic than zeros and ones well it's really difficult to get that causal chain because we're so so let's embrace the idea of zero for a moment it took human beings long

time to come up with the idea of zero now now you've got the idea of zero you can't throw away it's so useful to discover the idea to discover an event I don't know we took a long time so it's invented that's right yeah I think zero was invented exactly so it's not given the aliens know what zero is the one massive assumption it's a useful it's a useful discovery that you're saying if you break the cause of chain there might be some other

more efficient way of I want to meet him and ask him for a shortcut but you won't be able to ask him until well so I interrupted you and I think you're making good point I was just going to say well look thank you sorry rather than saying please internet tweet at him for the rude interruptions

I'm sorry no it's okay maybe it's change how do we say oh I don't know what it's like to be an alien I would like to know what is the full spectrum of what aliens might look like to us now that we've laid this all on on the table of like all right so there has to be some overlap and this

causal chain and lead to them what are we what are we looking for what do you think we should be looking for so you met you mentioned mass spec measuring certain objects that aliens could create or our aliens themselves show up to a planet or maybe not a planet or maybe what the what the hell is the basic object we're trying to measure our cells of brain assembly index of let's cut ourselves a break this is assume that they are they

they they metabolize they've got an energy source and they've they've there are a size that we can recognize let's give ourselves a break because there could be aliens that are so big we recognize we're seeing them there might be aliens that are so small we don't yet have the ability to you know

we don't microscopes they can see you know far enough away is that they just won't be able to see them so that's a good range so let's just make a range let's just be very anthropocentric and say we're going to look at aliens roughly our size and technology our size because we know it's possible north right I mean a reasonable thing to do would be to to find exoplanets that in the same zone as earth in terms of heat and stuff

and then say hey if there's that same kind of gravity same type of stuff we could reasonably assume that the alien life there might use a similar kind of physical infrastructure and then we're good so then then you're then then your question becomes really relevant say right let's use vision sound touch and so okay that's really nice so that if there's a lot of aliens out there

if there's a good likelihood if you match to the planet that they're going to be in the same spatial and temporal operating in the same spatial temporal domain as humans okay within that what what do they look like visually what do they sound like what are they oh god this sounds creepy tastes like what are they oh smell like smell like that sounds like our clubhouse and he's like can we have sex of aliens which was basically me saying but it wasn't actually about sex it was about is our

chemistry compatible right is there some yeah yeah can go in can we yeah are they edible too they can be edible too they could be very edible they could be delicious I that's why I want to see some aliens right because I think are there I think evolution I mean evolution exploits symmetry right because why why generate memory why generate storage the need for storage space when you can use symmetry so

and symmetry is quite maybe quite effective in allowing you to mechanically design stuff right so maybe could you could be reasonable to assume that aliens could have they could be bipedal they could be symmetric in the same way might have a couple of eyes also couple of sensors mean we can make make them perhaps there's this whole zoo of different aliens out there will never get to be able to classify some of the

weird aliens we can't interact with because they have made such weird stuff yeah but we are just going to look at we're going to find aliens that look most like us why not because those are the first ones were 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 you know like one of the arguments that you can make about wildlife emerges in chemistry is

because chemistry is the first scale in terms of like you know 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 so you imagine you have two planets and they're they're cooking some geochemistry you know our planet invented one kind of biochemistry and presumably as you start building up the complexity of the molecules

the chances of the overlap in those trajectories those causal chains being built up is probably very low and it gets lower and lower as it gets farther advanced along its evolutionary path so I think it's very difficult to imagine predicting the technologies that aliens are going to have I mean it's so it's you're looking at basically planets have kind of convergent chemistry but there's some variability and then you're looking basically at the

outgrowth into the possibility space 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 is this is going to be trash I think I would come back to the air see by the air see by message sent from the air see by telescope built by Drake I think and and say

can how's the recebo spelled AR ECI B.O. yes thank you guys and there we go they're good up there that's this telescope that sent the message that you're so that message was sent where it was beamed a beam to a star of specific star and it was sent out many years ago and what they did so this is why I was pushing on binary is a binary message I think it's a semi prime length number of characters so I think 27 E3 by 23 I think and it basically

represents human bit proton binary human beings DNA male and female and it's it's really cool what I'm just wondering if it could be done not making any of the cause made assumptions alien speak binary yeah make that assumption why not just assume that if the difference between physics chemistry and biology is the amount of memory is instead that's recordable by the substrates then surely the universal thing

my I'm going to make some sacrilegious statement which I think is pretty awesome for people to argue with so this is a we're looking at an image where it's the the entirety of the message yeah encoded in binary

and then there's a probably interpretation of different parts of that image there's a there's a person there's a green parts it looks like for people just listening like a tetra game of tetras encoding in minimal ways a bunch of cool information probably representing all of us so the top it's

how to count and then all goes all the way down teaching chemistry and then just says but it makes so many assumptions and I think if we can actually so look I think I mean Sarah is much more eloquent expressing this but I'll have a go and you can correct it if you want which is like come we one of things that Sarah has had a profound effect on the way I look at the origin of life and this is one the reason 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 well I would do perhaps if I had is I was send out lots of probes away from earth to have this magic way of communicating with aliens get them quite far away from earth plausibly deniable and then send out the message that would then attract all the

aliens and then basically work out if they were friend or foe and how will they want to hang out the message is being something has to do with the memories yes like the assembly version of our sebo 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

what whether that you would agree with that no I I wanted to raise a different point which is which is about the fact that we can't see the aliens yet because we haven't gotten the technology and presumably we think assembly theory is the right way of doing it but I don't think that we know

how to go from the kind of data you're describing Lex like you know visual data or smell to construct the assembly spaces yet and in some ways I think that the problem of life detection really is the same problem

at the foundations of AI that we don't understand how to get machines to see causal grass to see reality in terms of causation and so I 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

it might write an essay on it is you know people talk about the great filter right and which is again this like doomsday thing that you know people want to say there's no aliens out there because something terrible happened to them and it matters whether that's in our in our past or our future

as to the longevity of our species presumably which is why people find it interesting but I think it's not it's not a physical filter it's not like things go extinct I think it's literally we don't have the technology to see them 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 like there's so much of the universe we can't see and then basically what we have done as a species is outsource our physical perceptions to technology building microscopes based on our eyes you know and building

seismometers based on our sense of feelings like feel earthquakes and things and AI is basically returning 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 you can 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 a example of life evolving on a planet over billions of years has to acquire certain amount of knowledge and technology to actually recognize the phenomena that it is well that that's the sense I have is uh you talk with

physicists engineers in general that there's this kind of idea that we have most of the tools already just to hear the signal but to me it feels like we don't have any of the tools to see the signal that's that's the biggest like to hear we don't have the tools to really hear to see

yeah aliens everywhere we just don't have the exactly yeah I'm well how that's I mean I got this in part actually because you were like you know last time I was here was like look at the carpet you know could it like if you had alien detector or the car carpet be aliens I mean I think we really

don't uh I it would be but aliens would nevertheless have a high assembly index or produce things of high assembly index yeah yeah yeah and those things are high assembly index uh you have to have a detector that can recognize high assembly index in all its forms yeah yes that's it that's it take data construct assembly space yes patterns basically so one way to think about high assembly index is interesting patterns uh all basic ingredients I can give you an example uh because I mean

in molecules we've been talking about in objects but we're also trying to do it in um spatial trajectories like imagine you're just um like I I always get bothered by the fact that like when you look at birds flocking you can describe that with like a simple boys model or like you know people use

spin glass to describe animal behavior and those are like really simple physics models yet you're looking at a system that you know has agency and there's intelligence in those birds and I and basically like you can't help but think there must be some statistical signatures of the fact that

they're those are that's a group of agents versus you know like I don't know you know the physics example maybe like I don't know brownie emotion or something um and so what we're trying to do is actually apply assembly to trajectory data to try to say there's a minimal amount of um causal

history to build up certain trajectories for observed agents that's like an agency detector for behavior do you think do you think it's possible to do some like like boys or uh those kinds of things like artificial like cellular tomatah play with those ideas with assembly um with assembly theory

have you found any useful really simple mathematical um like simulation tools that allow you to play with these concepts so like one of course you're doing mass spec in this physical space with with chemistry but it just seems what me computer science person maybe it seems easier to just

I agree with you and sexier in terms of uh tweeting visual information on uh twitter or instagram more importantly um to play like here's an organism of a low assembly index and here's an organism of a high assembly index and let's watch them create more and more memories uh and more and

more complex objects and so like a math math if you get to observe what that looks like to build up an intuition what assembly index is like we are building a toolkit right now so I think it's a really good idea but what we've got to do is I'm kind of still obsessed with the infrastructure

required and the one of the reasons why I was pushing on information and mathematics when human beings when human being we take a lot of the infrastructure for granted and and I think we have to strip that back a bit for going forward but you're absolutely right I would agree that I think

the the fact that we exist in the universe is like I can see there are lots of people who don't disagree with the statement but I don't think I don't think Sarah will but I don't I don't know the fact that objects exist I don't think anyone on earth can disagree the objects can exist

elsewhere right but they will disagree that life can exist elsewhere but what perhaps I'm trying to say is that the the the acquisition the universe's ability to acquire memory is the very first step for building life and that must be that's so easy to happen so therefore alien life

is everywhere because all alien life is is uh those memories being compressed and minimized and the alien equipment of the cell working so I think that we will build new technologies to find aliens um but we do not we need to understand what we are first and and how we go through from physics

to chemistry to biology the most interesting thing as you say to these two organisms different assemblies is one you get into biology biology gets more and more weird more and more contingent physics is probably the chemistry is less weird because the rules of chemistry is small

in 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 well assembly theory just helps you appreciate that and so once we get there my dream is that we are just going to be able to suddenly

are I mean I mean I 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 an ale but I think that once we crack it we'll be able to use assembly theory plus telescopes to find aliens

do you have sir do you have disagreements with Lee on the number of aliens that are out there so and do actually yeah well and what they look like so any of the things we've been talking about is they're um new ones oh it's always nice to discover uh wisdom through new us

disagreement yeah I don't I don't wholly disagree but I think um but I do think I disagree it's kind of there's nuance there um but but we can disagree no it's fine um it is nuanced right so you made the point earlier that you think um you know once we discover what alien like what life is

we'll see alien life everywhere um and I think I agree on some levels in the sense that I think the physics that governs us as universal but I I don't know how far I would go to say just say that we're a likely phenomena because we don't understand all of the features of the transition

at the original life which which we would say in assembly as you go from uh the no memory physics to uh there's like a 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 um so there's a principle of increasing assemblyness or that goes back to what I was saying at the very beginning about the physics of the possible that the universe basically gets in this mode of trying to make as much possibilities as possible um now

how often that transition happens that you get the kind of cascading effect that we get in our biosphere I think we don't know if we did we would know the like who to 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 uh thought experiment I have which I I don't like um but I did have it um which is um you know if life emerges on one planet and you get this real high density of things that can exist on that

planet is it sort of dominating the density of creation that the universe can actually generate so like if you're thinking about counting entropy right like the universe has a certain amount of stuff in it and then you know assembly is kind of like an entropic principle it's not entropy but

the idea is that now transformations among stuff are the actual physical histories of things now become things that you have to count as far as saying that these things exist and we're increasing the number of things that exist and uh and if you think about that cosmologically maybe earth is

sucking up all the life potential of the whole universe I don't know but I was that can you talk about that a little bit why can anyone geographical region suck up the creative capacity of the universe um 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 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 I just think that you remind this fascinating yeah I think these sort of um like counterfactual thought experiments are really good when you're trying to build new theories because you have to think through all the consequences and then there are people that want to try to account for say the degrees of freedom on our planet in cosmological

inventories of you know talking about the entropy of the universe and you know and when we're thinking about like cosmological arrow of time and things like that now I think those are pretty superficial proposals as they stand now but assembly would give you a way of counting it and then the question is if there's a certain maximal capacity of the universe's speed of generating stuff which we always has this argument that assembly is about time the universe is generating more states really what

it's generating is more assembly possibilities and then dark energy might be one manifestation of that that the universe is accelerating its expansion because that makes more physical space and what's happening on our planet is it's accelerating in the expansion of possible things that exist and maybe the universe just has a maximal rate of what it can do to generate things and then if there is a maximal rate maybe only a certain number of planets can actually do that or there's

a trade off about the pace of growth on certain planets versus others. I have a million questions there would you have thoughts on just a quick yeah I'll just say something very quick. It's a thought experiment. No it's good I think I get it 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 the 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 magical one yeah we're sorry I'm a real one there will be a memory detector did see selection so you could you could get to exoplanets and say that exoplanet looks like there's lots of selection going on there maybe there's evolution and maybe

there's going to be life so I'm just trying to say it's narrow down the regions of space where you say there's definitely evidence of memory as high assembly there or not the high assembly because that would be life but of select the where where it's capable of happening and then we're then

that would also help us frame the search for aliens I don't know how likely it's to make the transition to cells and all the other things I think you're right but I think that is yeah we just need to get more data well I didn't like the thought experiment because I don't like the idea that if the universe has a maximum limit on the amount of it can generate per unit time that our existence actually preclude in the existence of other things I just say one thing but I think that's probably

true anyway because the resource limitations so I don't I don't like your thought experiment because I think it's wrong because no no no I do like thought experiment so what you try to say is like there is a chain of events that goes back that's manifestly culminated with life on earth

and you're not saying that life isn't possible elsewhere say that there has been these number of things contingent things that have happened that have allowed life to merge here that doesn't mean that life can't emerge elsewhere but you're saying that these the intersection

of events may have may be concentrated here right and I think there's not exactly it's more like like you know if you you look at say the causal graphs are fundamental maybe spaces in 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 structuring causal graphs right so this is how the universe is unfolding and maybe there's a cap on the rate of generation like the there's only so much stuff that gets made per update of the universe and then if there's

a lot of stuff being made in a particular region that happens to look the same locally spatially that's an after effect of the fact that the whole causal graph is updating like it's it it's yeah I don't I don't know that I think that that doesn't work I don't think it works either but

I don't have a good argument in my mind about but I do like the idea of the capacity that the universe because you got a number of states yeah we can come back to it well let me ask real quick like why does different like local pockets of the universe start remembering stuff how does memory

emerge exactly so at the origin of the universe I was very forgetful that's when the physicists were happiest there's low 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 which is this how does this the

temporal stickiness so objects emerge I'm gonna take a very chemo centric point of view because I can't imagine any other way of doing it you you could think of other ways maybe you're 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 if you've got particles colliding in a box let's just take a some in or some elements in a box those elements can combine in a combinatorial set of way so there's a combinatorial explosion of the number of molecules or minerals

or solid objects bonds being made because there's such a large number the population of different objects that are possible this goes back to assembly theory where assembly theory there's four types of universes right so you've got basically a and this is what one was up earlier where

one universe where you've just got everything is possible so you can take all the atoms and combine them and make everything then you've got basically what is the assembly commentorial where you basically have to accrue information in steps then you've got assembly observed right and then you've got

the object assembly going back so what that means what I'm trying to say is like if you can take atoms and make bonds let's say you take a nitrogen atom and add it to a carbon atom you find a amino acid then you add another carbon atom on in a particular chemical 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 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 it makes sense.

In its beginning to flourish at the chemistry level yeah so the physicists have no like not enough yeah the physics I mean they're like desperately begging or the physicists will blame freedom yeah and heterogeneous components to play with yeah that's exactly it but you think

about that sir. I mentioned already I think it's significant that whatever physics governs life emerges actually in chemistry it's not relevant at the subatomic scale or even at the atomic scale it's in well atomic scale because chemistry but like when you get into this this combinatorial

diversity that you get from combining things on the periodic table that's when selection actually matters or the fact that some things can exist and others can't exist actually starts to matter so I think of it like you don't you don't study gravity inside the atomic nucleus you study it

in terms of large scale structure of the universe or black holes or things like that and whatever we're talking about as physics of information or physics of assembly becomes relevant at a certain scale of reality and and the transition that you're talking about I would think of is just when you

get a sufficient density in terms of the assembly space of like the relationship of the overlap and and the assembly space which is like a feature of common memory there is this transition to assembly dominated physics whatever that is oh like when we're talking about and we're trying

to map out exactly what that transition looks like we're pretty sure you know of some of its features but we haven't done all of that do you think if you were there in the early universe you would have been able to predict the emergence of chemistry 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 is actually physical in the system and you have to have enough time for or features of that structure to exist what let me push back on that we got what isn't that isn't there somewhere in the universe that's like a shortest path that's been the stretches all the way

to the beginning yeah that's building some giant monster maybe yeah yeah so so you can't predict as much memory as the largest assembly object in the universe yeah right but like so you can't predict you can't predict any deeper than that no right so like that I guess I'm saying is

like what intuition do you have about complexity living in the world that you'd have today right because you you just you can I mean I guess how long um well you put it in for fun like isn't there going to be at some point because there's a there's a heat death in the universe isn't

it going to be a point of the most of the highest assembly of object with the highest probability being generated when is the universe going to be the most fun and can we free ourselves and then live then exactly and will you know when you're having the most fun that this is the

best time you're you're in your prime or you're going to do what everyone does which is deny that you're in your prime and the best ears are still out of you I don't know what option do you have um I I mean there's a lot 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 be a it's not I would say it's a really boring bit but it's really important for a cosmologist that

that universes have gone through I was at least mowing or proposed this maybe that there is this the basic universe evolves you've got the wrong constants we'll start again and the most productive constants where you can allow particles to form in a certain way get propagates the next

universe we go again so as she selects and goes all the way back and these cycle of universes and now this universe has been selected because um life can occur and it carries on now but I've really butchered that there's 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 um can you still man the case that we humans are alone in the universe where are the highest assembly index object in the universe yeah I can I

guess sad though I mean so from as a possible yes it's possible let's assume well we we know I mean it's possible so let me so okay so there is a particular set of elements on earth in a particular ratio and the right gravitational constant and the right viscosity you know of

staff being out of move around the right distance from our Sun right number of events we have a moon the earth is rotating the late heavy bombardment produced a lot of broad in the right stuff and um and Mars was cooking up camp you know the right molecules first so it was habitable before

earth it was actually doing the combinatorial search and before Mars kind of became unhabitable it it ceded earth with the right molecular replicators and there was just the right stuff on earth and that's how the miracle of life occurred although I find I'm very uncomfortable with that because

actually because life came so quickly in the earth's past but that doesn't mean that life is easy elsewhere it just might mean that that the the because chemistry is actually not a long-term thing chemistry can happen quickly so maybe going on with a steel manning of the argument to say

actually the fact that life emerged quickly doesn't mean that life is easy it just means that the chemistry was right on earth and earth is very special and that's why there's no life anywhere else in the universe yeah so Sarah mentioned this kind of cascading thing so what if that's the

reason we're lucky is that we got to have a rare cascading of 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 it 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 at Sarah and I have working on because we have some joint funding for this where we're saying that

the universe can get sticky really quickly now of course we're being very and for concentric we're using laboratory tools we're using theory but actually the phenomena of selection the process of heterogeneous developing heterogeneous in AOT 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 begin becoming good basinists for this for the origin of life and the emergence of life to finding out what kind of chemistry is really need to look for and I'm becoming increasingly

confident we'll be out doing 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 Hage-On-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 superchamia konde 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 origin 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 origin life event even if you're not observing it you can talk about the probability but we hopefully life is not exponentially rare and we would then be able to

evolve in an automated system alien life in the lab and if we can do that then we understand the physics as well as we understand what we can do in particle accelerators so keep expanding physically the simulation the physical simulation until something happens yeah or build a big

enough volume of chemical experiments and evolve them so if you say volume you mean like literally volume I mean physical volume in terms of space but I actually mean volume in terms of the combinatorial space of chemistry so how do you nicely control the combinatorial exploration the search space

no such 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 we're really well wish you carry on do this I should pretend the physics be the physicist you be the chemist no so the way to do it is I will always play a joke

because I like writing grants to ask for you know money to do cool stuff but the and I years ago I started wanting to build so I actually wanted to where the so I built this robot in my lab called the computer which is this robot you can program to do chemistry now it's a pro I made a programming

language for the computer and made it operate 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 this is ridiculous why are you wanting to make oh it's really hard it takes forever

you're not a very good origin of life chemist anyway why would we give you any money and so I turned it around and said can you can instead can you give me money to make robots to make molecules are interesting in a moment yeah that okay you can do that and that's so actually the

funny thing is the computer project which I have in my lab which is very briefly it's just basically it's like literally an automated test tube and we've made a programming language for the test tube which is cool 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 nanochap very small channels in device where you can basically have all the pipes lit dumped 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 yeah yeah it goes

back to night that tweet 91 1981 the computer we're looking at a tweet from Lee in 1981 the computer was a distant dream in oh wow this is the scientist looking back at his the young boy who dreamed in 2018 it was realized spelled in a British way realized um yeah I'm so sad but

but no so now the system that does the physical manifestation or whatever the programming language um the spec uh tells you to do yeah well in 1981 I got my first computer ZX81 what was the computer ZX81 ZX81 Sinclair ZX81 it was um and I got a chemistry set

and I like I like the chemistry set and I like the computer and I just wanted to put them together I thought wouldn't be cool if I could use the computer to control the chemistry set and um and obviously that was insane and I was like you know you know eight years old right nine years

up going on nine years old and um and then I I I invented the computer just because I wanted to build this origin of life grid right which is like literally a billion test tubes connected together in real time and real space basically throwing a chemical dice dice, throw dice, throw dice, throw

dice you're gonna get lucky um and that's what we I think Sarah and I have been thinking very deeply about because um you know there's more money being spent on the the the origin of the gravity or looking at the Higgs boson than the origin of life right and the origin of life is the

I think the biggest question or not the biggest question it is a big question let's put it that way it is the biggest question you're okay saying that okay all right it is it's not possible once you figure out the origin of life that that's not going to solve um that's not actually gonna solve

the question of what is life like is isn't because you're kind of putting a lot of yeah I think that's the same problem but you're you're putting is it possible that you're putting too many um too much bets into this origin part maybe the origin thing isn't isn't there always a turtle

underneath the turtle isn't a stack of turtles because then if you create it in the lab maybe you need some other stuff well that's nothing but the origin like you you like in the lab there's still memory yeah yes right the experiment is already the product of evolution right in some

maybe you've really deep way not an obvious way in some very deep way so maybe uh the haters are always going to be like well you have to reconstruct the fold you have to build it for us the haters are not aware of that argument uh well no I know I know I just I just think that if we create life

in the lab it's not obvious that you'll get to the deep deep understanding of necessarily um what is the line between life and non-life no I think so let well there's so much here I'm just like playing devil so much here but let me play devil's have back in a previous conversation right and say um

uh yeah I will why not when I've got time go sell your automata yes sell your automata these these very very simple things where your color squares um black or white and implement rules and play them in time and you can get these very very complex patterns coming out you know there's

nice rules they're cheering complete rules and um and um I would argue that so automata are that are don't really exist on their own they have to exist on a in a computing device if that whether it's computing devices a piece of paper an abstraction a mathematician drawing a grid or um

a a a framework now so I would argue so it's the A's are beautiful things simple going complex but the complexity is all borrowed from the lithography the not numbers right now let's take that same argument with the um the chemistry experiment origin of life cat what you need to be able to do

is go and I'm inspired to do this to go out and look for C.A.'s occurring nature you know let's kind of let's find some um some C.A.'s that just emerge in our universe and for people just start to interrupt for people um just listening in general think what we're looking at um is a sellier

automata where again as we described there is just binary black or white square squares and they only have local information and they they're born and they die and you would think nothing interesting would emerge but actually what we're looking at is something that I believe is called

glider guns uh or or a glider gun which is uh moving objects in this multi-cell space that look like their organisms that have much more information that have much more complexity than the individual building components you know in fact look like they have a long term memory uh well while the

individual components don't seem like they have any memory at all yes the argument here is um that has to exist on all this layer of infrastructure right and they look simple and then what I would make the argument I would make a value you say what I think C.A.'s are really simple and everywhere

it's safe show me how the immersion substrate now this goes to the origin of life where or machine I don't think we want to do the origin of life just any origin is good so what we do so we literally have our sand shaker so shake the sand like massive grid of chemistry experiments shaking sand shaking whatever and then because we know what we've put in so we know where how we've cheated and the same way we see A we know how we've cheated we know what the micro we know the number of operations

needed we know how big a grid we want to get this if we could then say okay how can we um generate this recipe in the lab and make a life form what were the what contingency did we need to put in and we're upfront about how we cheated okay say oh you had to shake it was it periodic planet

rotates it's tried comes in and out so and then we can start to basically say okay how difficult is it for these features to be found and then we could look for excellent planets and other features so I think Sarah's absolutely right we want to explain to people with cheating in fact we

have to cheat no one has given I'm good at writing grants or used to be I'm not very good right now keep getting rejected but I writing a grant for a planet and a hundred million years no grant funder is going to give me that but maybe money to make a I kind of a grid a computer grid

origin of life can be 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 what what what what you're you said it very confidently so yeah is it possible

and why would it be very difficult like what's your intuition there I think it's very difficult right now because we don't know the physics but if you go based on principles of assembly theory and you think every molecule is actually a very large causal graph not just the molecule

then you have to simulate all the features of those causal graphs and I think it becomes computationally intractable you might as well just build the experiment because you have in the physical space you have all the objects with all the memories yes and in the computer you'd have

to copy them reconstruct yes that's a beautifully put and I would say that lots of people you just don't have enough resource it's easier to actually do the physical experiment because the that we are literally I review the physical experiment almost like a computational experiment

we're just out sort it's just basically we're just outsourcing all the matrix and algebra on your point about the experiment being also an example of life it's almost like you want to design it's like you know all of us are um lineages of propagating information across time

and so everything we do becomes part of life because it's part of that causal chain so it's like you want to try to pinch off as much as you can of the information from your causal chain that goes into the experiment but you can't pinch off all of it to move it to like a different timeline

it's always going to be part of your timeline but at least if you can control how much information you put in you can try to see how much does that particular trajectory you set up start generating its own assembly so you you know where it starts and then you want to try to see it take off on

its own when you try to pinch it off as much as possible got it quick pause bathroom break yes all right cool and now we're back all right we talked about the early days of the universe when there was just stuff in no memory not even causality I think Lee at least implied the causalities

immersion somehow we could discuss this what happened before this all originated what's outside the universe divide by zero okay so it's not it's not relevant not understandable is it useful to even ask the question no just because it's so hard no it's not hard it's just not a question

if I can't do an experiment or even think of experiment the question doesn't exist well no you can't think of a lot of experiments no offense what I mean is my can't because your causality graph is like this is what we're talking about it's like what there is limits to your ability

to construct experiments I agree but I'm I was trying I'd be facetious I'm not trying to make a point as I think that if you if there is a causal bottleneck through which information can't propagate in principle then it's very hard to ask to think of an experiment even in principle

even one that's beyond my my mediocre intellect right which is fine I'm happy to accept that but this is one of the things I actually do think there was something before the big bang because I'm I would say that I think the big bang just couldn't occur and create time time create the big

bang but there was time before the big bang yeah there was no space for those time yeah yeah but I mean I'm just making that stuff up just to make all the physicists happy but I think it's it that would using that would make them happy because they would be quite upset actually why would

they be upset because they would say that time like time can exist before the big bang yeah I mean this goes back to an argument that you might not want to do have the argument here I I was talking to Sarah earlier today about argument we had about time a long time ago yeah I'm going to talk

time and time and what I would but 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 was you can use to measure when things happen but that doesn't mean because you can't measure something that states aren't being created and so you might locally refer to the big bang and the big bang occurs at some point in when those states were there probably there

had to be enough states for the big bang to occur and then but I I think that there is something wrong with our kept conception of how the universe was created in the big bang because we don't really get time and because again you know I don't want to become boring and sound like a broken

record but but 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 useful measuring device for experiments but also time is an idea okay but let me first ask Sarah what do you think

is 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 a universe so and going back to like the physics of existence we exist locally in the space of all things that could exist and we can infer certain properties of the structure of where we exist locally and one of the properties

that we've inferred in the past is that there is a thing we call the big bang there's some signatures of our local environment that indicate that there was a very 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 when you start losing all the memory in the objects it 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 recenter 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 they don't look like they don't look like the projections in our mind there's something else.

And something you said just gave an idea to go back to your question if there was I mean something if something caused the big bang if there was some memory or some artifact of that then of course it's to answer your question's worth going back to that because that would imply there is something beyond that barrier that filter and that's what you were saying I guess right?

Right I'm agnostic to what exists outside the universe I just don't think that like I think the most interesting things for us to be doing are finding explanations that allow us to do more like that optimism so I tend to draw the boundary on questions I ask as being scientific ones because I find that that's where the most creative potential is to impact the future trajectory of what

we're doing on this planet. It's interesting to think about the big bang is basically from our current perspective of what we're able to detect it's the time when things were forgotten. Yes. It's the time of the reset from our limited perspective and so the question is is it useful to ever study the thing that was forgotten or should we focus just on the memories that are still there?

Well the point I was trying to make about the experiment is I was trying to say both things and I think perhaps yes from the portfolio point of view if you could then imagine what was forgotten and then work forwards you will have different consequences so then it becomes testable.

So I'm as long as we can find tests and it's definitely worth thinking about what I don't like is when physicists say what happened before the big bang and before before before without giving me any credible conjecture about what we would what how would we know the difference but the way of framed it is quite nice I like that it's like what 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. Something that has to exist. Oh so you like I mean you like the shortest path like this God need. No no I mean I like you can go back to like time sequinist and arguments for the existence of God but I think I think most of the interesting theological arguments are always about whether something has to exist or there was a first thing that had exist but I think there's a lot of logical loopholes in those kind of arguments.

Well so God here meaning the machine that creates, that generates the stuff. But good God so what I was trying to say earlier is not just the universe. Yeah well yeah well but I there's a difference between I said I imagine like a black box like a machine yeah that's then I would be more comfortable calling that God 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 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 the 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 my and our minds. Right. Particularly a people who have who have religious faith they believe in but let's then take your but you're talking a little bit more about 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 me. Well you don't know that he didn't exist in the beginning. So like this could be us in our minds trying to recall like just what listen to gravitational waves detecting gravitational waves it's the same thing as us trying to go back further and further into our memories to try to understand the machines that make up the makeup us.

So it's possible that we're trying to grasp at possible kind of what kind of machines could create. There's always a tweet there's always a tweet the universe is a computer than God must have built it. Computers need creators there you go and then Yoshibok replied since there's something rather than nothing perhaps existence is the default. If existence is the default that many computers exist creator gods are necessary computers and necessarily computers to I'm very confused

by that but that's an interesting idea that existence is a default versus not existence. I agree with that but the rest is leave response perhaps this reasoning is incomplete. That's that's how scientists talk to us each other on Twitter apparently which or 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 the mech if God is a mechanism did so I might actually agree but then the thing is lots of people seem more see God is more than a mechanism for me God could be the causal graph in a semifere they creates all the stuff of the memories we know and the fact that we can even relate to each other is because we have the same we share that heritage and why we love each other or we like to see God in each other is

it's just we can we can we know we have a shared existence. So if the God is the mechanism that created this whole thing I think a lot of people see God you know in religious sense as a as that mechanism also being able to communicate with the objects it creates and if it's just the

mechanism we won't be able to create with object communicate with objects it creates it can only create you can't like interact with the there's versions of God that create the universe and then left you know yeah like spark for some for some religions but the first spark yeah 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 like software and hardware being separate or the way new and wrote his laws that there was some you know like they exist outside the universe they're not

actually a feature of the universe they don't have to merge out of the universe itself. So I think if you if you merged your two views then it gets back to the God as the universe and then I think that the deeper question is why does it seem like there's meaning and purpose and if I think about the features of the universe that give it the most meaning and purpose those are the the what we

would call the living components of the universe. So if you wanted to say God is a physically real thing which you were saying is like an emergent property of our minds but I would just say you know the way the universe creates meaning and purpose there is really a physics there it's not like a elucary thing and that is just what what the physics of life is. Is it possible that we've forgotten much of the mechanisms that created the universe? So like is so basically you know

whatever if God is that mechanism we just leave parts of that behind. Well but the universe is constantly generating itself so if God is that mechanism it would be that that would still be acted today. I don't believe I like I'm agnostic but if I if I recall would call the things I believe in God in the way that some people talk about God I would say that God is you know like in the

like universe now it's not an absent thing. I'm you I'm so I think there's a mislabeling here because you're I mean I mean I'm a professional idiot eventually but but I should put that in your CV. Yeah professionally but that recreationally or amateur but professionally. I think for it. I would say if you were talking about God I mean again I'm way out way out my death here and I'm almost feeling comfortable. Yeah but 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 your human like intelligence and yeah 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. Okay so you at the very least you have to flick the universe into existence and then other features might include ability to interact with that universe in interesting ways and then how do you interact with the universe 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 lonely I mean it could be just a teenager and another just playing a video game. Yeah maybe well I was going to say I mean I I don't see this is referring to our origin of life engine. It's like I I don't believe in God

but it doesn't mean I don't want to be one right. Well I want to make a universe and make a life form but that maybe that maybe rude to people who have you know dear religious beliefs. What I mean by that is isn't if we are able to create an entirely new life form different chemistry different culture. What does it make up and makes us goop 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 mean they're in the positive sense that there's a magic that's why I love robotics is you instill life into something and that makes you a few godlike in a sort of positive way like the creator is a positive thing. Yeah exactly. And a small scale and then goddess would be a creator at the largest possible scale I suppose. Okay you mentioned offline the

assembled tron assembly tron assembly tron. Yep what's an assembly tron these are the this an early idea of something you're thinking about. So Sarah's team I think Sarah's team are interested in them. I'm just using AI to understand life my team is and I'm and I'm think wondering if we could apply the principles of assembly theory that is the causal structure that you get with the assembly theory and hybridize it and make a new type of neuron if you like.

I mean there are causal neural networks out there but they are they are not quite the architecture like why I would like I would like to associate memory bits with basically I'd like to make a rather than having an asick for neural networks I want to make an asick for assembly networks right and so can you say that again assembly networks so what what is a sort of like a a thing with an input and output and it's like a neural network type of thing what does it do

exactly what's the input what's the output. So in this case say if you're talking about a general neural network I mean in general neural neural network you can train it on also any sort of data right depending on the the framework whether it's like text or image data or whatnot

and that's fine but there's no causal structure associated with that data now just imagine rather than you know make this they wouldn't classify a difference between cat and good dog right classic cat and dog neural network what about if the system understood the assembly space

it created the cat and the dog and rather than guessing what was happening and training on those images and not understanding those features it because you almost like you could imagine doing going back a step and doing and and and training going back a step and doing the training going

back a step back a step back a step and and I wonder if that is actually the origin of intelligence or how we'll crack intelligence because we need to because we'll we'll create the entire graph of events and and be able to kind of look at calls and effect across those graphs I'm explaining it really badly but it's it's a gene of an idea and I'm guessing very smart very rich people in AI already doing this. I'm trying to not generate cats and dogs but trying to generate

things of higher assembly index. Yeah and I think and and also using causal graphs in neural networks and machine learning and deep learning maybe building a new architecture I'm just wondering is there something we can get out of 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 could map that physical structure in 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 and biology which is ridiculous but um because goals are real things they're just posts selected so you can talk about goals after the fact

um you know once a goal emerges in the universe that physical entity has a goal but but Lee and I came up with a test for like a touring test for goal directed behavior based on the idea of assembly like we have to formalize it still but I I would like to write a paper on it but like

the basic idea is like if you like if you had two systems that were completely equivalent um you know like in the instantaneous like physical experimental setup so we have to figure out how to do this um but there was something that would be different in their future um and there

was a symmetry breaking you observe in the present based on that possibility that future outcome then you could say that that system had some representation of some kind of goal in mind about what it wanted to do in the future um and I so so goals are interesting because they don't

exist as instantaneous things they exist across time which is one of one of the reasons that assembly theories may be more naturally uh able to account for the existence of goals um so goals are the the only existent time or they manifest themselves in time through um you said symmetry

breaking so it's it's almost like imagine like if representations in your mind are real right and you you can imagine future possibilities but imagine everything else is physically equivalent and the only thing that you actually change your decision based on is what you model as being the

future outcome then somehow that representation in your mind of the future outcome becomes causal to what you're doing now so it's kind of like retro causal effect but it's not actually retro causal it's just that your your assembly space is actually includes those possibilities as as part of

the structure it's just you're not observing all the features the assembly space in the current moment what 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 uh and it's easier to envision with like Legos for

example is if you're thinking about an assembly space you can't observe the entire assembly space in any instant in time so if you imagine a stack of Legos and you want to look at the assembly space of a stack of Legos you have to break the Legos apart and then you look and then you look at all the possible ways of building up the original object so now you have in your mind the goal of building that object and you have all the possible ways of doing it and those are actual physical

features of that object but that object doesn't always exist what exists is the possibility of generating it right and the possibilities are always infinite uh well for that particular object you know like you know it has a well-defined assembly space and I guess what I'm saying is that object is the assembly space but you actually have to unpack that object across time to view that feature of it it's only an observable across time the term goal is such a important and difficult to explain

concept right because what you want is a way it's like um I think only conscious beings can have conscious goals everything else is doing selection and but selection does invent goals and in a way that um the the way that biology reinterprets the past in the present is kind of help that is you

to understand there was a goal in the past now right it's kind of like goals only exist back in time so first of all um only conscious beings can have conscious goals I'm not even going to touch that one why why go for it come on well we're the line between conscious goals and uh non-conscious goals

exactly right and it also maybe just on top of that you said a touring test for gold directed behavior what's what's what's what's the what's the touring what what is the touring test potentially look like so if you've got two objects we were thinking about this so we were we actually got

some funding to work to go on two teams so I'm trying to do in part of this is I'm trying to do a bit of theory and Sarah's teaching me a bit of theory and Sarah's trying to design experiments and I'm teaching experiments because I think it's really good for us to have that to say um when would uh

so that's good I like this this I'm sure we usually dandana essay yeah and I can explain why we wouldn't want to call it a touring test after but yeah yeah so dandana wrote this really nice essay about herding cats and free will inflation the title is so brilliant the actual title I think so 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 got two objects on a hill side okay and it just happens to be snowy hill and let's just say you see an object get rolling down the hill

or you you you and the rock rolls downhill let's start goes to the end how did that objects had to go 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 the trajectory so some updating going on then the only way you could really do that is you have to put the skier

back to the top of the hill again they tend to start ruffling 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 minds for you me as 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're like we need to somehow instantiate the skier and the rock in an experiment and then say okay when is the object when it's so for an object to have a goal it has to have an update it has

to have some sensing and some kind of you know in-built actuation to respond to the environment and and then we just have to iterate on that and maybe Sarah you can inferly in the cheering test part well yeah I guess the motivation for me was slightly different so I get really frustrated about

conversations about consciousness that 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 they're it must have causal consequences so the way I would ask the question of consciousness is not you know what it is

like intrinsically but if if things have intrinsic experience is there any observable difference from the outside about the the kind of causation that that physical system would enact and 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've 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 lot 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 unconscious so touring basically didn't want to do that you just wanted the machine that could

emulate and trick you into having the behavior but never dealt with the internal experience because he didn't know how to do that and I guess I was wondering is there a way to set up the experiment where you could actually test for that for imagination that led to the that there was something

internal going on some kind of inner world as people say but I or you could say you know like it actually is an agent it's making decisions it has an internal representation 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 substrate. Do you think it's possible to do that kind of thing one of the compelling things about the touring test is that you know defining intelligence defining any complicated concept as

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 try to do the touring test for gold erectedness is literally takes some objects that clearly don't have any

internal representation grains of sand blowing on the beach or something right and I don't know a crab wandering around on the beach and then generating an experiment where we literally the experiment generates an entity that literally has no internal representation to sand people like a drop these are oil droplets actually what got in mind 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 that 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 we how many is there what what's because you have to have a large number of crabs what is

what is your theory say is there a mathematical we're working on it I mean this is literally limit crab limit there's literally I there's literally what's the hurting cats have to do or that's random wait what's cats in the title by Daniel Denet hurting cats and the free will

inflation so I what is hurting cats mean what is free will inflation mean so this I love this essay because it explained to me how I could live in the deterministic universe but have free will but have freedom you know and because and also it helped me explain that

the time needed to be a real thing in this universe so what basically damn 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 it 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 what does in assembly theory the expansion of the universe look like what what are we what are we talking about why is why

why does the expansion universe give you more possibilities of novelty and cool stuff so for me I don't think about the universe in terms of big bang and space I think about in terms of the big the big memory expansion that you have one you only have the ability to store one

bit of information so then you can't do very much so what the universe has been doing since the since forever it's been creating more it's been increasing the size of its ram okay so it's like one megabyte two megabyte three megabyte four megabytes all the way up and so the more ram you have

the more you can remember about the past then we shall allow you to do cooler things in the future so if you can remember how to launch a rocket then you might be able to imagine how to land a rocket and then relaunch relan and carry on because and so the the you able you able to expand the space

and remember the past and so that's why I think it's very important but not a perfect memory it's it's an interesting question whether there's some forgetting that happens it might increase how is the expansion of the forgetting at some point accelerate faster than the remembering

I think that that's a very important thing that Bob your intelligence does and we're going to learn a 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 no no I just wanted to I think that there is a

a great deal to be gained from having the ability to remember things but then when you forget them you can then have it you can basically do the simulation again and work out if you get to that compressed representation so there's in cycles so cycles of memory remembering and forgetting

are probably important but they shouldn't be excused to have a met universe of 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 concept should be to understand both physically impossible it's physically impossible it's predicting a fair coin toss I don't know what he's talking about but there's pictures of puppets controlling puppets let me ask you there's a there's a few things I want

to ask but we brought up time quite a bit you guys tweet about time quite a bit what is time and all this we kind of mentioned in a bunch is it not important at all in terms of is just the word should we be talking about causality mostly like sir what do you think is uh

we've talked about like memories is that the fundamental thing that we should be thinking about and and time is just a useful measurement device or something like that well there's different concepts of time right so I think in assembly theory when we're talking about time we're talking

about the ordering of things so that's the causal graph part and so then the fundamental structure of the universe is that there is a certain ordering uncertain things can't happen to other things happen but usually when we colloquially talk colloquially talk about time we're talking about the

flow of time um and I guess we and I were actually debating about the system morning so in talking on it walking on the river here which is a very lovely spot for talking about time um but that the you know that when the universe is updating it's transitioning between things that exist now and

things that exist now um uh that's really the flow of time uh so there's there's there's you have to separate out those concepts at bare minimum and then there's also an arrow of time that people talk about in physics which is that time doesn't appear to have a directionality in fundamental physics

but it does um to us right like we can't go backwards in time and usually we you know that would be explained in physics in terms of um well there's a cosmological arrow of time but there's also the thermodynamic arrow of time of increasing entropy um but what we would say in assembly

theory is that there is a clear directionality that the universe only runs in one direction which is why some things it's easy to make if the universe runs in 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 in backwards

which is why the laws of physics that we have now look the way they do because they involve objects that have no memory but when you get to things like us it becomes very clear that the universe has a directionality associated to it so it's not reversible at all it's the um no man ever steps in

the same river I just have to bring that out because you want to under river no man ever steps in the same river twice before it's not the same river and he's not the same man uh so the it's not reversible any of the same no but reversibility is an emergent property right so we think of the

reversibility of laws as being fundamental and the irreversibility is being emergent but I think what we would say from how we think about it and it's certainly a season the case for our perception of time but also you know what's happening in biological evolution you can make things reversible

but it requires work to do it and it requires certain machines to run it forward and backward and uh kiarim our letter was working some interesting ideas on constructor theory related to that which is totally different side of ideas isn't so you can travel back in time sometimes yes you

could reconsider not you can't travel actually back in time but you could reconstruct yeah you travel forward in time you're always moving forward in time but you can cycle through like I mean I can clarify what you said quickly you travel forward in time to travel back yes

thank you that really clear well no what what what's there saying you don't go back in time you recreate what happened in the past in the future and inspect it again so in that local pocket of time it's as if you travel back in time so I don't how's that in that traveling back in time because you're

not going back to yourself back in time you are you're creating that in future 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 I was trying to look up today when I first we first had this

discussion and I was talking to Sarah on Skype and say by the way time because time is the fundamental thing in the universe she almost hung up on 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 touring machines in order to make it reversible you have to store memory to run the process backwards so time is always running forward in that time because you have to write the memory you can erase the memory but the point it when you go

back to zero right but the whole point is that in order to have a process that even runs in both directions you have to start talking about memory to store the information to run it backwards I got it so you can't really then or you can't have exactly how it was in the past you exactly

you have extra stuff extra baggage always okay a really important thing I want to say on this I think if I try and get it right I just say that if you can think that the universe is expanding in terms of the number of boxes that it has to store states right and this is where the direction out of

the universe comes from everything comes from you could erase what's in those boxes but the fact you've now got so many boxes at time now in this present is more of those boxes than they were in the past see but the boxes aren't physical boxes they it's not space I mean that's the why is the

number of boxes always expanding it's very hard to imagine this because we live in space yeah 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 we can call it as well maybe you can call it God but let's call it a state creator where the universe is expanding in the number of states it has why are you saying it's

expanding though is that obvious there's expanding because that's where the because we we that's the source of novelty it's a source of novelty and it also explains why the universe is not predictable I think it's not predictable well it's I just like interrupting I'm sorry it's fun

as you're struggling I'm struggling because it's but I'm trying to be as concrete as possible not sound like I'm insane yeah and I'm not insane it's it's obvious because you did I'm a chemist so as a chemist I grew into the world understanding irreversibility all like irreversibility is all I

knew and when people start telling me the universe is actually reversible it's a magic trick we can use time to do it so what I mean is the the the second law is really the magical but why does it need to be magical the universe is just asymmetric all I'm saying is universe is asymmetric

in the state production and we can erase those states but we just have more computational power so what I'm saying is that the universe is deterministic horizon this is one of the reasons we can't live in a simulation by the way the irreversibility 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's parcel to also then

prove that it's always expanding in the state space those are things that to be have to be proven that's what work and experiments for yeah and you're trying to like by looking at the sliver of reality show that there's always novelty being generated yeah because if we go

and live in a universe that the conventional physicist would live in it's a big lookup table of stuff and everything exists I want to prove that that book is that book doesn't exist it's continuously being added pages on so all I'm saying if the universe is a book we started the universe at the

beginning only had no pages and they have one page another page another page whereas the physicists would now say all the pages exist and we could imprintsable 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 in this view of the universe is generating novelty and getting greater and greater assembly structures built Sarah yes okay done next question why what's the source of free will in this well so I think it depends on what you mean by free will um

but yeah well please I think I think what I'm interested in as far as the from phenomena free will is do we have individual autonomy in agency and you know when I do things is it really me or is it my atoms that did it and that's the part that's interesting to me I guess there's also

the determinism versus random as part but the way I think about it is like each of us are like a thread or like an you know assembly space through you know this this giant possibility space and it's like we're moving on our own trajectory through that space and that is defined by our

history so we're sort of causally contingent on our past but also because of the sort of intersection of novelty generation it's not completely predetermined by the past and so then you have the causal control of the determinism part that you are your causal history and there's

some determinism from that past but there's also room for creativity and I think it's actually necessary that something like free will exist if the universe is going to be as creative as possible because if I were uh all intelligent being inventing a universe and I wanted it to have

maximal number of interesting things happen again we should come up with the metric of interesting um but generating yes I know generating um you know maximal possibilities then I went want the agents to have free will because it means that they're more individual like they uh like each entity actually is a different causal force in the universe and it's intrinsic and

local property of that system. There's a greater number of distributed agents like you always creating more more individuality kind of I would say you're creating more causal power but so causal power the word consciousness is the causal power somehow correlated with consciousness.

I mean that's why I have this conception of consciousness being related to imagination because the more that we can imagine can happen on the more counterfactual possibilities you have in mind the more you can actually implement and somehow free will is also at the intersection of the counterfactual becoming the actual um so 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 you know aim at certain things I'm saying but I think the language is really imprecise so I'm not the best way to it's really interesting like what is imagination and what is it uh

what role does it play in the human experience in in experience of any yes I love imagination I think it's like the most amazing uh thing we do but I guess one way I would think about it is we talked about the transition to life being the universe acquiring memory and

life does something really interesting just think about biology generally it remembers states of the past to adapt to things that happen in the future so so the longer life has evolved on this planet the deeper that past is the more memory we have the more kinds of organisms and things but

what human level intelligence has done is quite different it's not just that we remember states that the universe has existed in before it's that we can imagine ones that have never existed and we can actually make them come into existence and I think that's the most unique feature about the transition to whatever we are from what life on this planet has been doing for the last four billion years and I think and I think it's deeply related to the phenomena we call consciousness.

Yeah I was going to I mean just agree with that I think that consciousness is the ability to generate those counterfactuals now whether you can say you know are there degrees of consciousness I mean and I mean I I mean I'm I'm sorry panpsychists but electrons don't have counterfactuals although

they do have some kind of they are able to search a space in pathways but but I think that there is a very concrete concrete there's a very specific property that humans have and I'm and I don't know if it's unique to humans I mean maybe dogs can do it and and 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 it for a specific reason and so look the one of the reasons why I came to the conclusion that time was fundamental was actually because Sarah and I had completely different the

most heated debate on scape-chair ever no no no no we had to stop it no I know it goes back to the free will thing so I I think that although I've changed my view a bit because there's some really interesting physicists out there talks about how the measurement problem in in in Newtonian space but

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 and yeah I mean this is really boring because like this is like this is a well-trotten path but I'll 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 and Sarah's a physicist I think she believe and I believe can show that the most of the laws we have a deterministic to some degree quantum mechanics onto Newtonian stuff and yet there's Sarah

turning me she believes in free will I'm like you're believe systems broken here right because you you're demanding free will in a deterministic universe and and then I've really realized that I agreed with her that I do think that free will is a thing because we are able to search for

novelty and then that's where I came to the conclusion that time universe is expanding in terms of novelty and it goes back to that down then essay they were talking about the free will inflation free will so you are you have so the past it did not exist in the past the past exists in the

present what I mean is like you are the there was no past there is only present so I mean you are the sum total there everything that's occurs in the past is it is manifestly here in the present and then you have this little echo state in your consciousness because you're able to you're

able to imagine something without actualization but the fact you imagine it that occurs in electrons and potassium ion 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 the new this thing and program it and then you physically then go and do it so that changes the future sorry what's imagination does it require the past does it require the future does it require memory does it it's imagination does it only exist in the moment so imagination is

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 try and work out what you want to do in the future and then you go and make that happen so there the imagination is this it's like imagine asking what imagination is about asking what surfing is you can see you can surfboard surfer wave coming in when you're on that wave and you're

surfing that's where the imagination is I think I think imagination is just accessing things that aren't the present moment in the present moment so like I can I'm sitting here and I'm looking at the table and I can imagine the river 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 right but they don't have to be things that actually happened in your past and I think this gets back to assembly theory like the

the way I would think about imagination from an assembly theoretic standpoint is I'm a giant causal graph and I exist in a present moment as a particular configuration of Sarah and but there's a lot of I carry a lot of evolutionary baggage I have that whole causal history and I can

access parts of it now when you talk about getting to something as complex as us having as large assembly spaces us there's ways of like there's a lot of things in that causal graph that have ever actually never existed in the past history of the universe because like the universe got big enough to contain the three of us in this room in time but not all the features of each one of us individually have come into existence as physical objects we would recognize as individual objects

this goes back to your point that we actually have to explain why 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 Jisin 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 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 invalidate 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 candidate

in physics would be well you could trace all of that back to the initial condition in the universe but the whole point of science is I can imagine doing the experiment and I can do it and then I can do it again and again and again all over again to you imagination somehow fundamentally

generative of novelty yes that's not like the universe could have predicted the things you imagined imagination super so coming back to novelty I think novelty can exist outside of imagination but it's super charged it is another transition I think I mean I would say I mean this may be a boring

statement but I would say that's fact they're sorry I'm not sure it's a hard these are hard questions yeah I mean I think the fact that objects exist is yet another proof that that time is fundamental and novelty exists right because I think again if you ask the physicist to write down in the

infinite bible of the universe it's called at the bible the the Mac you know it may book yeah well that book that we're at the mathematical universe whether you're a max tech mark or Sean Carroll or Frank Wilcheck or Stephen Wolfram okay yeah I like that book yeah I love it too lots of

pretty pictures it's really interesting that they they cope with the enormity of the universe by saying well it's all their mathematics it all exists right and and I would say that there's why I'm excited about the future the universe because it it although it is somehow dependent upon the past

it is not constrained just by the past which is kind of mad yeah that's what free willers it's not constrained by the past is dependent on the past this moment it's not just dependent this moment is the past 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 cause or control in the future I realize this the other week yeah yeah so what happened the what 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 you shape your future again so you but you have much more freedom to interpret your past to act in the present to change your future then you do to

change your future I may sound weird so I'm saying everybody imagine your past think about your past reinterpret your past in the nicest way you can then imagine what you can do next or imagine your past in a more negative way what you do next and look at those two kind of factures they're

different yeah it's fast I mean Daniel Conner talks about this the most of our life is lived in our memories and it's interesting because you can essentially in imagination choose the life you live so maybe free will exist in imagination choices are made in your imagination and that's results in

you base capable to control how the future on roles because you're like imagining like reinterpreting constantly the things that happen to you exactly see you there if you want to increase your amount of free will those people that have most I don't think everyone has equal amounts of agency

because of because of our sad sad constraints where they're where they're you know happenstance with health economic born born in a certain place right but you're those of us that have the ability to go back and reinterpret our past and and and use that to change the future are the ones

exert most agency in the present and I I want to I want to achieve higher degrees of agency and enable everyone else to do that as well to have more fun in the universe then we'll hit that peak now that's like maximum fun I don't think there's ever going to be a maximum I think it's the

wonderful thing about the future is always going to be more fun yeah do you I think again go back to um to Twitter I think you lead tweeted something about being a life maximalist that you want to maximize the number of life the the amount of life in the universe so and you know that's the

more general version of that goal is to maximize the amount of fun in the universe because life is a subset of fun there are all kinds of I suppose they're either correlated or exactly equal I don't know anyway uh 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 an sort of unquestionable way this extremely strong and arguable way we've made contact with aliens Sarah what would it look like obviously the

the the the space of possibilities is is huge here but if you were to kind of look into the future what would that look like would it be inklings of UFOs here and there that slowly unravel a mystery or 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 are feeling but like the

discussion right now is sort of at the level of modern mythology aliens are are mythos in modern culture and and when you treat it like that then then I want to think about when do things that we traditionally only regularize through mythology actually become things that become standard knowledge

so you know like it used to be you know variations in the climate were described by some kind of gods or something and now it's like you know our technology picks up an anomaly or someone sees something we say 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 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're to understand that there is weather yes you have to construct

a mythology around that yes it's something that's controllable right like this is a mythology basically as like baby knowledge right it could be that you know although there's lots of there's lots of alien sight up so-called alien sightings right so there is a number of

things you can do you could just dismiss them and say they're not true they're kind of made up or you say well there's some because there's something interesting here right we keep seeing of commonality right we see the same phenomena again and again again also this is interesting

about human imagination even if they are there's not say made up but misappropriated kind of other inputs the fact the human consciousness is capable of imagining it contact with aliens does that not tell us about something about where we are in our position in our culture in our technology

it doesn't know 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 we just you know we're just not able to capture them coherently or there's a big conspiracy and you know there's an area 51 and there are lasers everywhere and there's that

um or I'm I'm kind of in favor the idea that maybe humanity is waking up to the idea that we aren't alone in the universe and we're just running the simulation and we're seeing some evidence you know we don't we don't know what life is yet we are we do have some anomalies out there

we can't explain everything um and over time um you know we will start to unpack that one very plausible thing we might do which might be boring for the average alien um in the observable believes that aliens are as in intelligent aliens are visiting earth it could be that we might go to the

outer solar system and find a new type of life that has completely new chemistry bring these cells back to earth where you can say my hand on earth here's RNA DNA and proteins and look cells self-replicating from Titan we got this new set of molecules new set of cells and we feed

it stuff and it grows that for me if we were able to do that which would be like the the most that would be my UFO science 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

uh uh 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 is between the two of you is the biggest disagreement about aliens alien life out there is it from from the basic framework of thinking about what is

life to maybe what aliens look like to alien civilizations to your foresightings what would you think so I would say the biggest one is that um the emergence of life does not have to be um it can't just happen once on the planet that it could be two or more life forms present on

the planet at once and I think Sarah doesn't agree with that I think that's like logically inconsistent that's really polite I'm gonna say it's nonsense so it would be because you think that yeah I'll likely that so the idea that what is what does it look like let's imagine uh two alien

civilizations coexist in on a planet what does that look like exactly so I would say um I think I've got to get around your argument okay yeah let's say let's say that on this planet there's just like there's lots of available chemistry and one life form gets emerged is based on carbon and

interacts and there's like there's an ecosystem based on carbon and there's an orthogonal um and so it's planetary phenomena which is what you I think right but there's also one that goes on silicon and and because there's enough energy and there's enough stuff that these life forms

might not actually necessarily compete um evolutionarily yeah but they would have to not interact at all because they're going to be co-constructing each other's causal chain I think that's where you just got me yeah so there's no so there's no overlap in terms of their causal chains or very limited

overall 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 I think I think I think let's go do I I think that but look as you see we disagree so and I think Sarah actually has convinced me because of that that life is a

planetary for not the emotional life of planetary phenomena and and actually um because of the way evolution selection works then nothing occurs in isolation the causal chains interact so there is a common there's a consensus model for life on the earth but you don't think you can place aliens

from elsewhere onto the can't you just uh place multiple alien civilizations I won't plan it right but I think uh so you can take two origin life events that were independent and co-mingle them but I don't think when you're talking about when you when you when you look at the interaction of that

structure it's it it's like the same idea as like an experiment being an example of life right that's a really abstract and subtle concept and I guess what I'm saying is life is information propagating through matter so once you start having things interacting they in some sense

co-mingle and they become part of the same chain so there is a co-mingling starts quickly yeah proceeds we proceed to co-mingle quickly right right so you you could say so the question is then the more interesting question is are there two distinct origins events and I still think that

there's reasons that on a single planet you would have one origins event because of the time scales of cycling of geochemistry on a planet and also the fact that I don't think that the origin of life happens in a pool and like radiates outward through evolutionary processes I think it's a multi-scale phenomenon it happens at the level of individual molecules interacting collections of molecules interacting an entire planetary scale cycles so life as we know it has always been multi-scale

and there's I'm brilliant examples of individual mutations at the genome level changing global climate right so there's a tight coupling between things that happen at you know the largest scale our planetary scale and the smallest scale that life mediates but it still might be difficult

within something you would call as a single civil alien civilization you know difference there's species and stuff but I think what yeah I can't man 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 right right so there's like island like literally islands that you can evolve different kinds of turtles and stuff yeah and they can so I guess what I'm saying is

weird if you look at the structure of two interacting living things populations and you look in their past and they have independent origins for their causal chain then you would say one was alien you know they have different independent origins events but if you look at their future by

virtue of the fact they're interacting their causal chains have become co-mingled so that and then in the future they they they are not independent 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 it yeah so the question we're all interested in is how many independent origins of a complexifying causal chain are there in the universe see but is the idea of origin is easy for you to define because like

um what is that when the two when the species split in the evolutionary process and you get like um a dolphin versus a human or Neadrathal versus Homo sapien that isn't there they make a distinction here quickly so I think um so I interrupt um what we're saying I mean I mean I mean I mean

Sarah what we won that argument because she was I think she's right that um once the causal chains interact and going forward so we're talking about number of things this go all the way back before origin of life origin of life on earth on earth chemistry emerges there's so there's all

these I would say there's probably mechanistically the chemistry is desperately trying to find anyway to get replicated is the ribosome kind of was really rubbish at the beginning and it's just competed compete it compete 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 the what I was trying to why interrupted you is say that once evolution has started using that technology then you can speciate and I was trying to and I think what Sarah said was convinced me of because I was

like no we can have lots of different chemistry shadow bias fear 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's like dolphins humans everything on earth but when you're looking at

aliens or alien life there's not going to be two different types of chemistry because they compete they compete and interact and cooperate because the causal chains overlap one might kill the other one might combine with the other and then you go on and then you have this kind of this average

and sure there might be respiration it might be have two types of emerging chemistry it almost looks like the origin of life on earth required two different pre-life forms the peptide world and the RNA world somehow they got together and by combining you got the ribosome and that was the minimum

competent entity for evolution and would all alien civilizations have an evolutionary process on a planet so like that's one of the almost it's almost a definition of life to create all those memories you have to have something 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's 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 I somebody was tweeting about this recently but

like you know how much stuff had to die yeah maybe it was you yeah yeah so we were talking we're talking about life yeah and I guess a lot of murder had to occur right so selection means things had to be weeded out right so what we can celebrate that death makes way for too long yeah

I mean it and also you know one of the most interesting features of major extinction events in the history of our planet is how much novelty emerged immediately after right so and of course you know a lot of people make arguments we wouldn't be here of the dinosaurs and go extinct so

in some ways we can attribute our existence to all of that but I guess I was just wondering 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 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 Athermore was showing these seals because of climate change some seals were falling off a cliff and how tragic that was I was like saying my son that's pretty cool look at look at the

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 with 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 it get you how many if you think about the caterpillar become the chrysalis and then the butterfly getting out

how many if that suffering we call it suffering if that process of pruning had not occurred we have no butterflies so none of the butterfly beauty in the world without all that pruning so pruning is required but we shouldn't amplify and feel sorry for the biological entities

because that'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 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 a title I didn't say that

but I just insert I have a hard time with it though I think that we put it it's kind of yes but it's the reality of it's the reality of it is beautiful you know there's an Instagram account called nature's 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 we die alone so I live alone too so gas be thing I don't know we evolve together where's the together the together is the murder the population is the sex the 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 is you know like like this whole like you know the like certain things can coexist so the universe is trying to maximize existence but there's some things that just aren't the most productive

productive trajectory together but it doesn't mean that they don't exist on another timeline or another chain somewhere else like I like and maybe you would call that like then some kind of multi-versa things but what am I saying I think you can't I just you can't go down the left I'm

just making stuff up no you know no better I don't understand it is it logical when we need we know I know I know if you look at bacteria if you look at virus I mean just just the number of organisms that are constantly like looking at bacteria they're just dying nonstop right right

so when this goes back to the conversation about God I mean like there's the whole thing about like why is the universe in able suffering individuals don't exist right in the village so for this I think you if you think about life as an entity on earth right let's just just go back a second I

mean I like to be ludicrous for a second I don't exist you don't exist right but you but the actions you do the productive evolution exists right the objects you create exist quantitatively in the real world if you then understand life on earth or alien life or any life in the universe

as this integrated entity where you need you need cells in your body to die otherwise you'd just get really big and you would be at walk around right so you know you do yeah yeah so yeah yeah so I think the patterns that persist not the physical thing and of course we you know we have

we have we place immense values on fellow human beings and I'm majestic professor does like other individual human beings or now you're talking in third person too I know happens right so death that would you say I mean because you said evolution is a fundamental part of life so death is a

fundamental part of life yeah it might right now it might not be in the future we might hack some aspects of death because I'm with all the different ways but isn't there I think Sarah mentioned like this life density is that can't that become a problem like too much too too much bureaucracy too

much a baggage builds up like you need to keep a race okay that we dissipate I like I don't think of like like I'm not so fixed on ourselves as individuals and agents and we were talking about this lesson actually over dinner but like you know an individual persists for a certain amount of time

but what you want to do like if you're really concerned with immortality is not to live indefinitely as an individual but maximize your causal impact so like what are the traces of you that are left and and you're still a real I always think of Einstein like for a period of time he was a real

physical thing we would identify as a human and now we just see echoes of that human in all of the ways that we talk about his you know causal impact of frankly great is another great example how many easter eggs could you leave in the future yeah so I guess the the question is how much do

you want to control the localization of a certain features of say a prop a packet of propagating information we might call person and keep them localized to one individual physical structure do you want to you know is there a time when that just becomes a dissipated feature of the society

that it once existed in and I'm okay with the dissipated future because I just think that makes more room for more creativity in the future so you mentioned engineering life in the lab let me take you to computer science world what about robots so is it possible to engineer see you 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 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 life transition that presumably early society feel about it's going to give you the most and interesting or deepest insights into the physics but presumably everything that we do

and build is an example of life and the question is just how much do you want to take from things that we have now and put them into like examples of life and copy them into machines I saw that there was this tweet again I think you're at the Mars conference and you were hanging out with a humanoid

robot yes that was a fun one making lots of new friends at Mars 2020 do you guys color match on ahead of time with the robot or did that accidentally happen accidentally I went up and I wanted to say hi for the voice would that be the correct name for the color I think so we didn't color

coordinator outfits well you didn't maybe the robot 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 I did the perfect

there's a lidar no I mean I think I was just deeply interested because what was sorry to interrupt it was it manual control was it actually stabilizing itself oh no it was walking around oh nice yeah nice it was pretty impressive I mean actually that there's some videos online of Jeff Bezos

walking with one of those across the lawn nearby there so yeah so I wasn't invited yeah but um there you go see that's incredible wasn't it yeah see you look at the walking robot where did the idea for walking come from was invented by evolution right and us as human beings able

to conceptualize and design an engineer the causal 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 transition that

I think you know there are a number of problems we want to do make life in the lab great then we're going to make life in the lab we want to suddenly start to make intelligent life or life that can solve start to solve abstract problems and then we want to make life that is conscious okay in that

order I think it has to happen that order you know this getting towards this artificial general intelligence I think that artificial general intelligence can't exist in a vacuum it has to have a causal change all the way back to Luca right yeah and so the question I think I really like the

question is to say what are we how is how is our pursuit of more and more life like I know you want to and you like robots you want to project into them you want to interact with them you you I think you would want if you have a robot dog and a robot dog does everything expect a normal dog

and you can't tell a difference you're not really going to ask the question anymore if it's a real dog or not or you've got a personality you're interacting with it and so I think what would be interesting would be to kind of understand the computational architecture how that evolves because

you could then you know teleport the personality from one object to the other and say right is it act the same and I think that as we go along we're going to get better and better at integrating our consciousness into machines well let me ask you that question just so

that to link on it I would I would call that a living conscious thing potentially eyes as a human allegedly but you're would you as a person trying to define life if you pass the touring test are you a life form one of the reasons I walked up to the robot was because I wanted to meet the robot

right so I it felt like I was in a I I I base a lot of my interaction with reality on emotion and feeling but like like how do you feel about an interaction and I always love your point about like is it enough to have that shared experience with a robot right so so walking up to it does it

feel like you're interacting with a living thing and it did to an extent but in some degrees it feels like you're interacting with a baby living thing so I think our relationship with technology in particular robots we build is really interesting because basically they exist as objects in our

future in some sense like where much older evolutionary lineage than robots are but we're all part of the same causal chain and presumably you know they're kind of in their infancy so it's almost like you're looking at the future of life when you're looking at them but it hasn't really

become life in in a full manifestation of whatever it is that they're going to become and you know the more the example of the walking robot was super interesting but they also had a dolphin that they put in the pool at the cocktail party at Mars and it looked just like a real dolphins

swimming in the pool and and you know it's in this kind of uncanny valley because and I was having this conversation with a gentleman in Moutou who was super perceptive but he was basically saying like it made him feel really uncomfortable and I think the dolphin yeah and I think a lot of people

would have that response and I guess my point about it is it is kind of interesting because you're basically trying to make a thing that you think is non-living mimic a living thing and so so the thought experiment I would want to run in that case is imagine we replaced every living thing on

earth with a robot equivalent like all the dolphins yeah 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 and basically building reality into a simulation because you've made everything quote unquote fake in some sense you've replaced everything with an emul a physical simulation of it so as opposed to being excited by the possibility of creating something new you're

terrified of being humans being replaced I was just trying to run like what would be the absolute you know thought experiment but I don't I don't think that scenario would actually play out I guess what I I think is weird for why we feel this kind of uncanny valley interacting with something like

the robots dolphin is we're looking on an object we know is kind of in the future in the sense of like if everything's ordered in time but it's borrowing from a structure that we have common history with and it's basically copying in a kind of superficial way things from one part of the causal chain

to another yeah well that's that's a video I really believed it was real they look so real um and obviously the technology was was developed for movies so well I think we're confusing our emotional response and understanding the causal chain of how we got there right because the

philosophical dot zombie argument thinks about objects just appearing right that you're facsimileed in some way whereas there is the cause of the chain of events that caused the dolphin to be built with with for human being it would for self-gas armies still have a higher assembly index

yeah because it came it can't be philosophical zombies can't like like Boltzmann brains just can't appear out of nowhere well I guess my question would be in that that scenario where you built all the robots and replaced everything on earth with robots with the with the biosphere BS creative under

that scenario or not yeah and so are there are there quantitative differences you would notice over time and it's not obvious either way right it's not obvious right now because we don't really we don't understand we haven't built into machines how we work so that's I think that there are one of the

big missing things that I think I that we're both looking for this robot it's a cute robot but the point Sarah is that the biosphere won't be as creative if you did it right now no of course so I think that's why I didn't like it but in the future it we will be able to solve the problem of

origin of life intelligence and consciousness because they exist in physical substrates we just don't understand enough about the material substrate and the causal chain but I'm very confident we will get to an AGI but it won't be what people think it won't be solution won't be a we'll get

fooled a lot and so GPT-3 is getting better at falling us and GPT-153 might really fool us but it won't have the magic we're looking for it won't be a creative but it will help us understand the differences between really though because is that what lovers being fooled like what why are you

not giving much value to the emotional connection with objects with robots with humans emotion is that thing which happens when you're when you're the the fun your expectation function is is dashed and something else happens right I mean that's what emotion is is that what love is too yeah

yeah you were expecting one thing and something else happened yeah I don't know I don't think that's true either well what is it then I think no emotion look I'm sorry emotion is that but but the so I think love is just fulfilling your purpose no but I can we look like look like whatever that means that's all I mean really I'm so you're okay so but when are you happiest is like when you're all right all right let me

go back if you want if you want me to follow your bliss let me define love quickly okay go for it in terms of assembly space right okay I couldn't think I'll be doing this today okay wait till assembly theory 101 is taught in the second lecture is assembly theory of love no but actually but look but

is being surprised the expectations being broken no go for it I'm not I want to hear you know an emotional being but I would say so let's talk so we'll talk about emotion but love is more complex is love is a very complex set of emotions together and logical stuff but if you've got this

thing this person it's on this causal chain that has this empathy for this other thing love is being able to project ahead in your assembly space and work out what you're the person you in love with has a need for and to do that for them without selflessly right because you can project

ahead what they're going to need and they are there and you maybe you can see someone is going to fall over and you catch them before they fall over or maybe you can anticipate that someone's going to be hungry and without helping you you just help them that's what sounds like empathy

but it's more complex than that right it's more complex it's more about not just empathy it's understanding it's about kind of sharing that experience expression of love though that's not what it's like to feel love of like feeling love is like I like I think it's like when you're aligned

with things that you feel like are your purpose or your reason for existing so if you have those feelings towards the robot why is that rope I mean because you said that the agent will build an AGI but it won't there'll be a fundamental difference in AGI and you build it's going to merge

from our technical I think you guys are doing the same thing I just said that GPT that we do not correctly capture the causal chain that we have within GPT yeah within I think it captures because GPT 3 is fundamentally trained on a corpus of knowledge you know I like the internet

don't you think it gets better and better and better capturing the memory of all of them it will be better at falling you and at some point you won't care but when it comes I my guess this is a quick as well I was getting to right before we got I got in the love trap love trap it was like

the Conan in the love trap you know that's a good good thing it makes it sad okay sad assembly space of sad no is that so sure that 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 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 that connections across multiple domains is what you need for a GI yeah but I don't know if you need that I don't know if there's any limitations to GPT GPT and not being able to be cost domain the number one problem is instantiated and resource

limited substrate and that we don't in silicon it is try it is true the the architect 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 what why why you use language exactly I might disagree with that quite fundamentally actually but I don't I'm not sure I understand how I make a coherent argument for that but my feeling is

that there is there are there is comprehension in reality in our consciousness below language and and we use those for language for all sorts of expressions and we don't yet understand that there's a gap we will get there but I'm saying wouldn't it be interesting is it a bit like saying

could I facsimile you or Sarah into a new human being right and and let's just say like a copy all your atoms into the positions of all your atoms the electrons into into this other person they would be you the answers 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 in your past we have to have a faithful record for if you want another copy of Lex you have to do exact thing one another copy Sarah one other copy Lee the exact

past has to be replicated let me push back on that a little bit that's maybe from an assembly theory perspective but it I don't think it's that difficult to recreate a version of me like a clone that would make everybody exactly equally as happy like they wouldn't care which one and like

there's two of me and then they get to pick which one and they'll kill you the one they'll be fine as long as they're forced to kill they'll be fine but here's what happened is let's say we make artificial Lex and it was like wow so cool it looks the same interact then they'll be this battle

of like right we're gonna tell the difference we're gonna we're gonna 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 we're not novelty is a fuzzy concept that's the this whole problem of novelty so I will define

novelty it's not as fuzzy novelty is the ability for you to create architectures that are a creating architecture so let's say you've got a corpus of architectures known you can write down you've got some distance measure and then I create a new one and the distance measure so far

away from what you'd expected is there's no linear algebra we're gonna get there'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 you're arguing about free will like you wouldn't be able to know it was it doesn't work instantaneously

it's not like a micro level thing but more macro level thing over the scale of trajectories or longer term decisions so if you think that the novelty manifests over those longer time scales it might be the two Lexes diverge quite a bit over certain timescales of their behavior

even though nobody would notice the difference they might not and the universe the earth won't notice the difference the universe won't notice the universe would notice the difference no the universe doesn't know but it's novelty this being generated it's the whole point of

well 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 gonna select the artificial one so it's gonna like that one better but you're mixing

up two arguments here so look let's go back a second that's what are you facing this argument on my I'm just saying that I kind of don't think because at least said that it's not possible like if you if you copy every single molecule in a person's body that's not going to be the same person

that that they won't have the same assembly index it won't have it won't be the same person and I just don't I think copying you can compress not only do I disagree with that I just I think you can even compress a person down to some where you can fool the universe I'm saying

I will let me restate it it is not possible to copy somebody on because you unless you copy the causal history also you can't have two identical I mean actually I really like the idea that everything in the universe is unique so even if like there were two lectures I know you like

that idea because you're human 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 in all their positions the other you would be there and you have a different position in space and you're distinguishable

yeah the other thing I was going to how unique are you just to buy the position in space really sure but then how is that like translation of Lex what that's not an interesting I see but but would not wait wait a minute it's part of the definition of something being interesting is

how much it affects the future yes yes but let me come back but let me come back to you disagree one point quickly that you would make sure I think I probably agree yes if there's two lexas right there's a robot lex that you just basically it's a it's a it is a charade it's a facsimile it's just

coded to emulate you and you roll about lex but I would know let's get there but let's get there's a very important point here because he's he's ducking and diving between this I so so if I facsimile due into a robot then it would you would your robot might be would be a representation of you now

but fundamentally be boring because you go and have other ideas if however you built an architecture there's itself as capable of generating novelty you would diverge in your causal chain and you're both equally interesting to interact with yeah we don't know that mechanism all I'm trying to say is

we don't yet know that mechanism we do not know the mechanism that generates novelty and at the moment in our ais we are emulating we are not generating you don't think we're sneaking up on that do you think there's a fun there is no ghost in the machine and I want there to be one I want

the same thing you want sorry I was I know you want that as a human because everything you just said makes you feel more special I want to be such a no no screw my specialist I just want to be surprised if I you think a robot can surprise you if I if you can produce an algorithm instantiate

and robot surprise me I will I will I will I will I will have one of those robots we 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 write 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 and uh legate robots moving about and they are full of surprises yeah so this is yeah so I'm a little I know what you like cellular automata right but the the

specialness in your robot comes from the robot assist that built it yeah it's part of the lineage yeah and so that's fine I'm happy with that that's what I felt like looking at the standing robot was I was looking at four billion years of evolution yeah right if it wasn't yeah

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 uh the way the neural network is conceived right now is gray and it's lovely

and it'll be brighter and we will argue forever but you want to know wouldn't it be great if I said look I know how invent an architecture and I can give it a soul now what I mean by a soul is some I know for real that there is internal reference soon as I not fake internal reference and if we

could generate that mechanism for internal reference that's why I'll go direct direct that's why you have to we can do that get that goal direct you would love that robot more than the one that's just made to look like it does because you'll have more fun with it because you better generate search

other problems get more novelty hell you better fall in love with that robot for real but not the one that's faking it what about fake it till you make it well I think a lot of people find love with with with with with fake yeah humans it's nice to it's nice to fall in love with something that's

full of novelty yes I you know 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 because but I just don't think that novelty generation is such a special

okay there's like mathematical novelty or something like that and then there's just humans being surprised and I think we're easily surprised that's fine but that's that but you don't think that's a good that's a good that's good I'm happy to be surprised but not globally surprised because

someone else but I really want I was why I'm a scientist I really want to be the first to be surprised about something and the first thing in the first in the universe to create that novelty and to know for sure that that novelty has never occurred anywhere else that's a real buzz right

that's so weird to really know that I you have to have a really big look up day right yeah you're never going to be know for sure right that's that's one of the hard things about being and scientists searching for this type of novelty maybe that's why mathematics mathematicians love

discovery but actually they are creating and then when they to create a new mathematical structure that they can then they you can you can write code to work out whether there's whether that structure exists before that that's almost why I would love to have been a mathematician from that regard to

invent new math that really I know pretty much for sure to not exist does not exist anywhere else in the universe it's so contingent right but this gets into like you are you set 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 the problem that we all have which I think is what Lexus pushing against is if I build the experiment you don't know what you put into it so you don't know it like if you unless you can quantify everything you put in

all of your agency all the boundary conditions you don't know if you somehow biased it in some way so is the novelty actually intrinsic to that experiment or to that robot or is it something you gave it but you didn't realize it's going to be it's going to asymptote towards that right you're

never going to know for sure but you can start to take out you know you can use good Bayesian approaches and just keep updating and updating and updating until your point towards the purposes of that you want to bound on how much novelty generation could be yeah 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 running joke of like y Lexus single this could be a good part for so what you're looking for in a robot partner is ability to generate novelty and that's I suppose you would say it's a good definition of intelligence too 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 correct enough novelty like there's this some kind of a hierarchy of novelty in the universe well I think novel tea is like things surprise you right so it's a very passive thing but I guess I would

remember by creating creativity is I think it's much more active like you think there's like a mechanism of like the things that exist or generating the creativity novelty seems to be there some spontaneous production and it has it's completely decoupled from the things that exist no I

understand I think that's really creativity is the mechanism and novelty is the observable yeah novelty could just be surprise 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 about cool right let's go you got surprise

which is basically I don't I mean I'm surprised all the time because I don't read very much I'm pretty dumb I was like oh wow this yeah I often used to invent new scientific you know ideas and I was really surprised by that and then when looking at the literature properly and it's there so

surprise that's the extent that you don't have full information creativity the act of pushing on that kind of on the causal structure and novelty which is measuring that degree right so and I think that's pretty well defined in that regard so you want your robot you mean

and in the end this why actually the way the internet and the printing press share some I actually think creativity has dropped a bit since the create since the internet because everyone's just just you know just regurgitating stuff but of course now it's beginning to accelerate again

because everyone is using this tool to be creative and boom it's exploding I think that's what happens when you create these new technologies that's really that's really helpful there's a difference to the novelty and surprise okay I was I think I was thinking about surprise if you give

me a toy that surprises me for a bit it'd be great robot surprises me you know experiment that surprises you know I mean that's why I love doing experiments because I'm I can't it's still exciting yeah surprises exciting yeah even negative surprise like some people love drama in

relationships like it's like with why the hell what why'd you do this that can be exciting I could imagine companies selling updates to their their companion robots that just basically generate negative surprise just to just spice things up a bit yeah it's the push and pull that's that's

one of the components of love as you said love is a complicated thing oh beauty I want to mention this because you're also tweeted I think this was Sarah not might have been Lee I don't remember but it was a survey published in nature showing that scientists find 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 he showed the full plot and there's simplicity elegans hidden order in our logic of system 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 yeah or shapes or shapes please and colors and then now physicist obviously love simplicity of all else simplicity elegans 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 I it's because I think about how explanations become causal to our future so I have this whole philosophy that the theories we build in the way we describe reality should be have the largest breadth of possibilities for the future of

what we can accomplish so in some sense it's not like outcomes 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 that's 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

heristic 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 the assembly theory what is the the thing that made you

step back and say this is this this idea is beautiful or potentially beautiful for me it's that the universe is a creative place I guess I I want to think and whether it's true or not is that we are special in some way and it's not like an arbitrary added on epiphenomenon or ad hoc

feature 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 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 so like the life that this however common it is it's 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 you know like we have theories of quantum mechanics and gravity and

they're supposed to be like our most fundamental theories right now and they describe you know things like the interaction of massive bodies or the way that charges accelerate or all these kind of features and and they're these really deep theories and they tell us a lot about how

reality works but they're they're completely agnostic to our existence and I just I can't help but think that like whatever describes us has to be even deeper than that and I think incorporating memory I guess yeah because of the whatever the term you want to use into the physics of

the world might be that's the easiest way to do it it's the it's the cleanest so here we go again with the physicists on the physicists the clean I was going to say the simplest most elegant way of resolving all of the kind of ways that we have we have we have these paradoxes associated with life

when you it's not that life is not um current physics is not incompatible with life but it doesn't explain life and then you you want to know where are the explanatory gaps and this idea that we have an assembly that time is fundamental and and objects actually are extended in time

and have physical extent in time is the cleanest way of resolving a lot of the explanatory gaps so I I I've been strong I struggle with assembly theory for many years because I could see this gap um 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 know I don't we talking about but I think it sounds right so for me the most beautiful thing about assembly theory is I realized the assembly theory explains why the universe why life

is a universe developing a memory but not only that poesically I could actually go measure it and I was like holy shit we would just we physically measure this thing I'm this abstract thing and we can measure it and not only could we measure it but we can then start to quantify the

causal consequences um because I mean you know I 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 the 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 there you just done that it's you know if you've just recapitulated an all theory and I and I was

unable I lacked the language to really explain and I had to it was a real struggle so this realisation that life what life does that physics cannot understand or chemistry is the universe develops a memory that's causally actionable and then we can measure it but it isn't just one thing there

is this intrinsic property of all the objects in the universe like like I've said before but you know me holding up this water bottle just any other water bottle but it is a sum total of all the water bottles that have existed right and will likely change the future of water bottles and for

other objects so it's that this kind of so for me assembly theory explains the soul in stuff the borderology but it is a monology is not like showdex morphic resonance where we have this kind of wooey thing permeating universe it is the interaction of objects of other objects and some

objects have more instantaneous causal power that's life living things and some objects are the instantaneous output of that causal power dead objects but they're part of the lineage and that for me is fascinating and they're really beautiful and I and I think that even if we're determined to be totally rotten I think that 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 this makes you feel less special that you're so deeply integrated interconnected to the lineage? I mean I can 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 the same kind of form as coming towards the same formulation just from 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 because it makes me feel less lonely because I just realized I'm not like I mean I'm a unique assembly structure but I have so much overlap with the other entities I interact with that we're not completely individual right. And yet your existence does have a huge amount of impact on the how this whole thing unrolls on the future of the world. As individuals

that's yeah but I was going to say what? Local packets of agency. I think we all have a profound impact on the future some of the 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 I 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 so if there is a god or there's a soul in everything it's what we laughing at is going I fool these guys by giving them ego just 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 things can't answer all of it so that part's challenging for

me. There might be a limit to this thing. Let me ask you a bunch of ridiculous questions and I demand relatively short answers Lee what's the scariest thing you've ever done? Yeah or what's the scary thing that pops the mind? Giving lecture giving seminars in front of other scientists. That's yeah that is terrifying. I could if I would ask you about the most embarrassing but we'll spare you. What about you Sarah? The scariest thing up there some of the scary things you've done.

Actually the scariest for me was deciding I want 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's a between humans I mean that's the beautiful thing what love is the the connection you have but it's also becomes a dependency and breaking that

whether it's a mentor with your parents your de-confrontation. It's so much like waking up like like just there's a different reality yeah that was scary reinventing yourself okay if you could leave maybe I'll actually 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 no joke the woman's brilliant I 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 a appreciation a love for fashion. I do but that's actually the same like I just think it's really interesting because we live in a social reality which is completely artificially constructed and some people are really genius about moving through that and I think she's particularly good at I wonder if she's good at understanding her if she's I think it's very

deeply intrinsic to her so I don't know if she happens. She's like surfing away. How much cognitive awareness she has of it or how strategic it is but I think it's deeply fascinating so I guess that's the first one that comes fine. What about you Lee if you could be somebody for a day I will say you're she back. Don't say Kim Kardashian. Let's do it off the table. off the table. No I was going to say I would like to like to be a what does it have to be here today

I was going to say I'd like to be the latest arm processor. I would like to be the latest arm processor. I'd like to understand what I would like to know what it feel like to basically you like being objects. I like being an other way of obsessed with being objects ever since I was a kid. What's the best part of being an arm processor for a day? I mean I'd like to understand how I access my memory. What anticipates coming next in clock cycles. What about how it feels like?

Yeah I wonder how it feels like to be to be useful to people. Thanks for that. All right if leave everyone on earth disappeared and it was just you left. What would your days look like? What would you do? Nobody else left impressed. Nobody no probably can't really do any real science at scale. What would you do with your remaining days? Yeah every possible tool I could and put it in my workshop and just make stuff. So try to make stuff. Just try to 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 just left alone on earth? You're the animals in this scenario. No living beings. No plants. No plants. Oh interesting. I was going to say I would just I would try to walk the entire planet at least all the land mass. Well that's true so you probably don't know if there's a 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 no but I would just walk all the time. I'm so I don't know why I just walk that's just came to mind or just walk and I guess I would make a goal of covering all of the entire earth because what else are you going to do with your time? What's an item on your bucket list Sarah that you haven't done yet but you hope to do. Skydiving. I traveled the space. 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. I want you to check it off. So your bucket list is like a fog it's like a mystery. Yeah. You're almost by doing it. Yeah so it's very subconsciously driven. So it's in your subconscious in there and I think that I think most of the steering of our agencies in our subconscious anyway so I just kind of go with the flow but I guess um no seriously. Yeah no I get it. I don't know I guess but I would like to go into summering like

to the bottom of the ocean. I think that'd be really cool. To the bottom of the ocean. Are you captivated by the mystery of the ocean? I am. Yeah. Yeah. What about you Lee? What item on your bucket list? I don't have a bucket list but I would love to take a computer to the moon or Mars and make drugs off world. Be the first camera to make drugs off world. The first drug manufacturer in space.

Yeah why not? Drug to do that. You have to be somehow like be able to have a tape like be able to survive on that particular space or like what's the connection between being on Mars and do maybe I just would like to be that I would like to take um the ability to have command and control over chemicals programmatically offer to somewhere else in the universe. That just seems like you like difficulty engineering problems. Before I die if I can do that. Would you travel to space?

Yeah. Yeah that's what I'm saying. I'd love to go into space but not just to be a tourist. I want to take a scientific experiment in space and do a thing in space that never been done before. That's a real possibility. Yeah. Yeah. So that's why there's no point in listing things I can't do. 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, a computation power and someone took pity on me and helped me. I was really touched. They didn't have to and they were actually quite disabled scientists. They were had other things to do rather than help some random PhD student gave me access. They told me a lot of stuff. Yeah. Actually when you're a grad student or when you're 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. That's anything. And like from the perspective of the teacher, they might not realize the impact they have but that little bit of those few words, a little bit of help can have a lot of impact. What about you, sir? Somebody give you a free Starbucks at some point. I love free Starbucks. I like it when you're like in the line at Starbucks

and somebody buys your coffee in front of you and then you buy the next one. I love those. That's not my example. I love that too. It makes me happy. And then my kids get excited when we do it when we go in for the first ones in line doing it. But I guess I can use a similar example about just being a student. So Paul Davies is a very well known theoretical physicist. And I, you know, he was generous enough with his time to take me on as a postdoc.

But before I became his postdoc, he invited me to a workshop at Arizona State University in the beyond center and took a walk with me around campus just to talk about ideas after. And I think there were two things that were completely generous about that. One is Paul's philosophy is always interacting with young people. You interact with a mind in the room. It doesn't matter, how well known or whatever. It's like you evaluate the person for the person.

But he also gave me a book, The Erie Silence that he had written and he wrote in it. This is how EE gets to ET, which was an anti-maric excess, which I worked on as a PhD student. It was the origin of homo chirality all the way up to what the book was about, which was Arrealon in the U.S. and is there intelligent life out there. And it was just so much about the questions I wanted to ask because it's like, it was just everything about like just, it was just really, really kind.

Like that is okay to ask these questions. Yeah. And you, a connection. I mean, I think a lot of my career is mostly his encouragement to ask deep questions. Like he gave me this space to do it in ways that a lot of previous mentors had. I mean, I have, I've had a good experience with mentors, but it was like go off the deep end, ask the hardest questions. And I think that's the best gift you can give somebody. What would you, because you're

both fascinating minds and not, I would say 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 why I want on my tombstone. I have one. He generated novelty. No, no, how to. It's like how to, how still. I just love doing science. And so when I was younger, I was just to 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 challenge by your questions, you will get not only respect, but people will give you create space for you because you're doing something really new. I really try to create space in my academic career, my, my team, really try and praise them and push them to do new things. So my advice is try to do new things, get feedback,

and the universe will help you. Because the universe legs novelty. I think so. I think so. Right. Right. This one will keep them around. What about you, Sarah? You too like to ask the really out there. Yeah. Cause I have a strong passion for them. So I think 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.

So I always tell people that they should do the thing they're most passionate about. But I think a flip side of that is that's when you become in some way, like not so much 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. And so I think, 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, we have played temporarily with it. Yeah, who am I now? Who do I want to be now? But who do I want to be in the future? They're not decoupled. Yeah, I always wonder if that's like, if I become something, am I finding myself or am I creating myself? Yeah. And I think those are somehow the same kind of thing. I do feel often like that I was always meant to be this kind of thing.

But is that created or discovered? I don't know. But basically go towards that direction. Yeah. If you were abducted by aliens, Sarah. Excellent. Waiting. Don't find me. Don't a spaceship there. And then they somehow figured out the language you speak. And ask you, what are what are you? What is what explain yourself? Not you, Sarah, but the species. Oh, what's life on earth? Like we don't have time or busy grad students from another planet.

I see. What what's interesting about human civilization? What's interesting about you? You specifically too. They could be very kind of personal kind of pushy. And yeah, how would you get for the scribe? Okay. I have one. Because you know, like, at 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. And I guess I feel like that's humanity. Like in some sense, we're creating something I think is profound and potentially very beautiful to like existence of the universe. But we're just so night like not night. We're just early. We're early. 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 is not very nice, but it's the

you're making things that are like very destructive and like the rockets. What this seems very aggressive. Yeah. I know. This is my blinders on. I don't know. I mean, it goes back to the whole conversation. I have a hard time regularizing certain aspects of reality into what I want to envision. And that's obviously problematic. But, you know, nuclear power has also given us a lot of good things. So both human nature, both human beings and the technology we create has the capacity for evil

and the capacity to go. Yeah, we can't all be good all the time. I mean, there's like this huge misnomer that you need to be liked by everyone universally. And obviously, that's like an ideal, but it's physically impossible. You 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 that we have different aesthetics, different goals. And sometimes conflict comes out of that.

Yeah. Speaking of which, Dewey and Yoshibach ever say anything nice to each other, or is it always conflict? We never have conflict. We argue. But I don't think they argue arguments are bad. I mean, I think the problem I have, not the problem, I think. Here we go. Isn't that your defendants? No, I just don't necessarily understand. I mean, he's just talking at such a high level. You know, I'm a dimwit. So I'm like, I spend some, so I think a lot of

our conflict is not conflict. We actually have a, I think, I mean, I can't speak for yasha, I have a deep appreciation for it. I mean, brilliant. But I think I'm kind of frustrated. And I'm trying to, he thinks the universe is a computer. And I want to turn the universe into a computer. Yeah. That's the small disagreement. So what would you, how would you defend your life to an alien when you're being abducted? Would you focus on the specifics of your life? No, no, no,

I would be, I would try and be as random as possible or try and confuse them. Oh, good. Good. Excellent. That may be the way there's choice. These are eggs in reality. No, I mean, the Thali is a don't to me. I would, no, no, I would try and be as random as I would try and do something that would surprise the hell out of them. I mean, I probably like risking them, I killed me, but I think that point would be funny.

That may, yeah, they may 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'd keep me around like a pet, right? Pet Lee on the aliens, you'd be okay being a pet. No, but I mean, the last, the last human that survives would just be a pet to the aliens. I don't know, but I mean, I think that might be fun

because they might, might, might, I might get some feedback from their curiosity. But yeah, let me ask you this question. Given our conversation has a very different meaning, not a more profound need, perhaps, but would you rather lose all of your old memories or never be able to make new ones? I would have to lose all my old memories. Again, it's the novelty. What about you, Sarah? I'm the same because I don't think,

like it's about the future experience, right? And in some sense, like you were saying earlier, most of our lived experiences actually in our memories. So if you can't generate new memories, it's like you're not alive anymore. That's it. Yeah. What comforts you on bad days? When you look at human civilization, when you're, you look at your own life, what gives you hope? What makes you feel good about what we're doing about life at the small scale of you as a human and at the big

scale of us as a human civilization, maybe the big scale of the universe. Children, my kids, but I also mean that in like a grand sense of like, not a grand, but like, like, future minds in some sense. So for me, like the most bleak movie ever, you know, people worry about apocalyptic things like AI, existential risk and climate change, which children of men, you know, the whole premise of the movie was there can be no children born on the entire planet.

And the youngest person on the planet is like 18 years old or something. Like, can you imagine a world without children? It's just, it's harrowing. That's the scariest thing. So I think what gives me hope is always youth and the hope of children and the, you know, 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, I think most of the time it's

super interesting. Yeah, they have dreams of imagination. They have this kind of excitement. Yeah. So it's so cool. So fun to watch. And yeah, you feel like you're almost getting in the way. Yeah. Of all that imagination. What about you, Lee? What gives you hope? So, when I go back to my eight year old self, the thing that I dreamed of as my year old self was this world in which technology

became programmable when there was internet and I get information. And I would expand my consciousness by just just, you know, getting access to everything that was going on. And it's happened in my lifetime. I mean, really do have that. I mean, okay, there's some bad things, you know, there's TikTok, everyone just don't, whatever, all the bad things about social media. But I think, um, I mean, I can't quite believe my luck being bored now. So amazing. Be able to program reality

in some way. Yeah. And the thing that I really find fascinating about human beings is that in just how ingeniously they are, I'm, 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 bit 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, yes, just just mind blowing just to watch. And, you know, so humans are

ingenious. And I hope to help them be more ingenious if I can. 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. Sarah, I really, really enjoy talking to you. I enjoy following you on my huge fan. Sarah, Leah, I hope, I hope to talk to you many times in the future. Maybe with your Shabbat,

you're just incredible people. Thank you for everything you do. You're awesome. Thank you for talking today. Really, really appreciate it. Yeah, I'm pretty into being here. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sarah Walker and the Conan. Support this podcast. Please check out our sponsors in the description. Now, let me leave you with some words from Arthur C. Clark. Two possibilities exist. Either we are alone in the universe or

we are not. Both are equally terrifying. And let me, if I may, add to that by saying that both possibilities, at least to me, are both terrifying and exciting. And keeping these two feelings of 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.