In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, we talk with astrophysicist and author of the new book, "The Big Bang Theory: How We Found Life," Dr. Carl Sagan. We talk about how life came about, how it came to be, and what it means for our understanding of the universe and the origin of life. We also talk about some of the things we know about life in general, and how it might explain the existence of life on our planet, and why we should care about it. This episode was produced and edited by Caitlin Kenney and Alex Blumberg. Our theme music was made by Micah Vellian and our ad music was written and performed by Mark Phillips. Additional music was produced by Haley Shaw. The show was mixed and produced by Matthew Boll and Matthew Boll. Special thanks to our sponsor, Ajinomoto, for producing the music for this episode and for the use of the theme song "Goodbye Outer Space" by Sisyphus and the music used in the intro and outro music from the album "Outer Space Junk" by Fountains of Creation, courtesy of Epitaph Records, recorded live at the Electric Light Orchestra, recorded in Los Angeles, CA. Thank you to all the fans who submitted questions and suggestions. You can expect weekly episodes every Monday, Wednesday nights at 7pm Eastern Standard Time, and on Thursday nights at 8pm Pacific Standard Time. Thanks again for listening to the Joe Rogans Podcast by day, and Saturday nights at night at 7/7/9/8/10/11 at 8/11/13/14/15/16? by Joe's Garage, and Good Morning, Joe's Podcast by Night, all day, by night at 3/16/17/17, all day at 5/18/19/19? by 7/27/28/30/28? Thanks for listening out there! Joe's Note: Thank you so much for all the love and support? - Thank you for all your support and support, Joe & Joe's Podcast by Nightlife Podcast by Day, by Nightingales - Joe's Day, by Mr. & Nightlife? Thank You, Joe and Nightlife, by Sr. & Dayday, by Mrs. Mckinnon? -- Thank you, Mr. Pizzi & Co?
00:00:26.000Assembly theory is born out of an interest in solving the origin of life and finding aliens.
00:00:30.000So that's sort of the motivation I think is really important to be clear about that to start because it introduces some kind of radical reconceptions of the way we think about fundamental physics, at least I think so.
00:00:41.000But the key idea of the theory is that the universe cannot generate complexity outside of living processes.
00:00:47.000And so we have a way of formalizing what seems kind of intuitively obvious that the universe doesn't generate complex objects for free.
00:00:55.000And we do this with this idea of assembly theory of thinking about the assembly space, which is like the space of all constructible objects.
00:01:03.000And you can talk about the complexity in that space as a minimal number of steps for making an object.
00:01:08.000And if you see objects that require a lot of steps to make them and they're in high abundance, life is the only thing that can make them.
00:01:55.000So I'm actually really interested in understanding to what degree we can consider minerals on our planet alive or artifacts of life.
00:02:04.000But we haven't formalized the theory entirely for minerals yet.
00:02:08.000So I think that one of the sort of key results we have so far is actually quantifying in molecules a complexity boundary above which if a molecule is so complex that we can say it's definitively of life and we've experimentally verified Measuring this property of assembly of molecules to say these are derived from life.
00:02:26.000These are, you know, and that there's a clear boundary.
00:02:30.000For minerals, we haven't done that yet because we're still formalizing the theory and the kind of measurements we need to take.
00:02:34.000But I expect there to be a boundary that planets can make some kinds of crystal complexity, but not all of it that we see on this planet.
00:02:43.000So what's the conventional definition of life?
00:02:49.000Yeah, so there's a lot of debate about what definitions of life should hold, but the one that is usually cited by astrobiologists is life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.
00:03:01.000And I've memorized it because I find it so annoying.
00:03:24.000And it's actually like all the words in it are annoying in some sense.
00:03:28.000So the first one is that life is chemical.
00:03:30.000I've never really thought about chemistry being the defining feature of life.
00:03:33.000I think you have to Separate out that life emerges, at least as we understand it, from a chemical soup on a planet, right?
00:03:40.000So it emerges in chemistry, but it doesn't mean it's a chemical phenomena.
00:03:44.000And the sort of analogy from the physicist's conception of nature I could draw there is we don't think that gravity is a phenomena of rocks.
00:03:51.000Gravity represents some universal physics in our universe.
00:03:54.000And so when we're thinking about, you know, planets and things, we don't think that they obey the laws of gravity because they're made of rocks.
00:04:03.000We understand that there's some property called mass that's much more abstract and applies to everything.
00:04:09.000It emerges in chemistry, but there are some informational properties, these things about how life generates complex structures and how it does that so uniquely.
00:04:18.000That is universal physics that happens to emerge in chemistry.
00:04:24.000And I think you need to recognize that if you're going to talk about like technology and artificial intelligence and like are they alive or not?
00:04:30.000Because they're very different than, you know, like what's happening inside a cell.
00:05:15.000So the way that I think about it is to think about life not in terms of individuals but lineages.
00:05:21.000So, you know, there's a lineage of how information has been structuring the material world, what we talk about in assembly theory in terms of all of the configurations of objects created on our planet over four billion years.
00:05:32.000And that's a process that's continuous with objects making other objects.
00:05:39.000And there's no reason that that should stop with biological forms of life and it just moves into technology.
00:05:44.000So I like this idea that we're the reproductive organs though.
00:05:49.000Because I always think about like societies and like global integrated systems as being living things and we're just like component parts of them.
00:05:58.000When you look at traffic from overhead and you compare it to blood moving through arteries, it's really kind of extraordinary.
00:06:05.000Because if you see the ebb and flow of the white lights and the red taillights back and forth, and then you see blood cells moving through a person's body, it's Kind of similar.
00:07:11.000It is hard for us because we're so much wanting to think about ourselves as individuals and like the apex of all of the evolutionary processes, not to think about ourselves as part of systems that are much larger than us.
00:07:22.000And I think it's critically important that we kind of change our reference frame on that because we're also seeing right now with like We're good to go.
00:07:50.000Yet that process is also what gives us our agency.
00:07:55.000I've often said that if an alien race that was completely outside of our understanding of life and our understanding of biology, if they observed us and they'd say, well, what is this dominant species doing?
00:08:13.000We do a lot of things, but ultimately those things, even war, which is essentially about acquiring money and resources, we use those resources and that money to make better things.
00:08:24.000And in engaging in war, you're constantly advancing technology to have an advantage over the universe, so you're making better things.
00:08:30.000Everything is making better things, which, when you scale it up, ultimately will lead to another life form.
00:08:56.000I think because I think being overly optimistic can leave blind spots but part of the reason that I imbue so much optimism in my work is like I think we need more optimistic narratives about the future because so many people are really bleak.
00:09:25.000Which I, you know, maybe that's just sort of a scapegoat.
00:09:27.000I don't have to worry about those things because someone else is.
00:09:29.000But I think actually there's something rather deep there that like the things that we're trying to work through at this moment in history are being worked through.
00:09:35.000My fear about those kind of thoughts is when I worry about things and I say, well, I don't have to worry because society's working through it.
00:09:42.000I also say, yeah, but someone's probably not and they're enhancing the actual threat so they could profit off of it.
00:11:06.000And it never ends until we create sentient life, I think.
00:11:11.000Yeah, so part of your argument is sort of our materialistic culture is about building newer and better things and eventually this is like sort of just more fundamental to the process of life.
00:11:21.000I think this pathology of materialism, this thing that has possessed so many people where they live their entire lives to acquire things to impress other people, which is a huge number of people that are involved specifically in finance, like all the amphetamine people,
00:11:37.000all the people that like to do coke and fucking look at my boat.
00:12:28.000And, you know, like the way my wife looks at dresses and stuff, it's like she's looking at the way I look at other forms of art, things that I like.
00:12:47.000Yeah, and I think you're right to point that this is like maybe hinting at something deeper.
00:12:52.000So, you know, with this assembly theory stuff, my original motivation was really to get at, you know, what fundamentally explains life in the universe.
00:13:01.000And, you know, to me, the thing that life does that no other physical system does is creativity.
00:13:07.000And Life is a mechanism for the universe generating things it couldn't generate otherwise.
00:13:13.000And so one way to think about that is there's this huge possibility space of things that could exist, and there's just not enough resource or time for all of them to exist.
00:13:21.000So by a planet constructing things like us over time, it actually sort of maximizes the number of weird things that can be made.
00:13:31.000I like this idea that we're actually really literally the universe's mechanism of expressing creativity and making things possible that would not be possible without things like us.
00:13:43.000Do you know who Terrence Howard is, the actor?
00:13:50.000A brilliant guy who has some crazy ideas.
00:13:52.000But one of the craziest ideas he has is that whenever a planet gets far enough away from the Sun, it will generate life and then that life will give birth to people.
00:14:12.000And that as these civilizations become more advanced, they're going to have to deal with the fact that the planet is further and further away from the sun.
00:14:19.000Like over the course of hundreds of millions of years, the climate will change, things will become cooler.
00:14:24.000They're going to have to figure out a way to develop some sort of an artificial atmosphere or some way of sustaining.
00:14:31.000Along with, of course, biological things that will change with the animal as it adapts.
00:14:38.000I don't really think that humans, like ourselves, as currently constructed, are a universal phenomenon.
00:14:47.000I think we're pretty special to this planet, but I think there are certain attributes of humans that Like, you know, the theory of computation and its universality that, like, we invented in the last century that might be universal to any intelligent species that emerges on any planet.
00:15:03.000So I think it's really hard to say, like, what here is universal to other places versus, yeah.
00:15:32.000So I think it's easy to speculate on what we think life on other worlds will be like.
00:15:37.000And we tend to do it from a very anthropocentric lens where we'll say, It will be like us.
00:15:42.000And, you know, even professional astrobiologists will do the same kind of thought experiments, and they'll say, oh, well, the geochemistry on a planet should give rise to things like DNA and proteins, and so we should look for those in the universe.
00:15:52.000And I think that's really underestimating how large the space of possibilities actually is.
00:15:58.000So when you're thinking about the emergence of life, is the only way to do it, I mean it can't be the only way it has to emerge with certain temperatures the way ours has in water.
00:16:11.000It seems like there could be a wide variety of possibilities that things could adapt to whatever particularly unique environment that this planet provides.
00:16:21.000Given a sustainable temperature and given enough resources that it can survive that we could have...
00:16:40.000When my friend Remy Warren, he used to host a show called Apex Predator.
00:16:44.000And what essentially the show was about was like examining...
00:16:47.000Apex Predators and their particular adaptation they have for their environment and seeing like what a human can imitate like what are these things that they do and he said Octopus by far was the most bizarre thing to dive into.
00:17:02.000I mean not literally but like yeah, but yeah, no, no, I totally agree I mean they independently evolved a nervous system so and like and you know like they're crazy and I think they're the most alien thing on this planet from us as far as like trying to look at comparable intelligence and really understanding a different evolutionary trajectory.
00:17:22.000Also like how they can take their body and completely morph it to look like coral.
00:18:36.000I've been taking my kids since they were really little.
00:18:38.000It's one of the dopest places because you go in there and there's sharks swimming around and all these incredible fish and people are diving in there with them and it's enormous.
00:18:48.000So we went on a tour of it, and one of the things they showed us was their jellyfish habitat.
00:20:24.000But I think it's really important to be, like, honest about the fact that we don't know and just, like, put it out there.
00:20:28.000Because it's very tempting to speculate.
00:20:31.000But I think, you know, the more I think about how large the universe really is, and I don't even mean physically large, like, you know, like, you can look at the Hubble Deep Field and you can see, you know, 10,000 galaxies at, like, the size of your, like, Pen tip on the night sky and you're like,
00:20:46.000oh my god, the universe is a huge place.
00:20:48.000But if you go into a chemistry lab and you ask a chem informatician how many molecules there are, they can't even estimate how many molecules there are.
00:21:00.000There's one molecule, I usually use an example, it's called Taxol, which is an anti-cancer drug.
00:21:05.000And if you wanted to make every permutation of that molecular structure and every three-dimensional shape you could with those atoms, It would fill 1.5 universes in volume.
00:21:22.000And then if you want to get to technological artifacts or biological forms, like the space that we live in is so exponentially large, it's unimaginable.
00:21:30.000And to think that other life out there would traverse the same path I think the universe is far larger in the kind of living things that could exist than we can even imagine.
00:21:55.000Like, I mean, if you want to think about, like, you know, you've got this, like, crazy stuff on your desk and you took the atoms in those things and you thought about all the ways that you could arrange them, it would fill universes of interesting artifacts.
00:22:10.000Like, why is this the aesthetic humans chose?
00:22:12.000I mean, it's kind of cool, but, you know, like, it's crazy to think about how much stuff could exist but doesn't exist because it wasn't selected and evolution didn't build it over time.
00:22:33.000And so on your question about humans and our specialness, I think what is special about us is we're actually capable of imagining Some of that space and not just imagining it but constructing it with our technology.
00:22:45.000That was your point about societies and things.
00:22:47.000So there is something special about quote-unquote human level intelligence or whatever is going on in the human brain.
00:22:52.000I don't know if it, whatever that thing is, I think is pretty universal and pretty deep about the structure of reality.
00:22:58.000I don't know if it would be in something that's like a human on another planet.
00:23:03.000But I think our ability to abstract, imagine and create is probably universal.
00:23:09.000There's another thing about us that I think is bizarre, and it speaks to this concept.
00:23:15.000There's a theory about the creation of human beings, right?
00:23:19.000That human beings, the wackiest one of all, is that human beings are the product of accelerated evolution.
00:23:36.000Well, when I think about it, one of the things that intrigues me is I'm a lover of nature and I'm completely fascinated by how animals interact with each other.
00:23:48.000I mean, I can watch nature documentaries all day long.
00:23:55.000Because when something happens and someone brings a turtle to an island where it doesn't belong or when someone brings a goat to a place that doesn't belong or Australia, which is a fantastic example, there's like so many animals that are non-native invasive species.
00:24:11.000These Asiatic buffalos, there's millions of them.
00:24:14.000They have to fly overhead and shoot them down with helicopters because there's so many of them.
00:24:22.000I mean, if there's an animal that doesn't live in sync with its environment in nature and overwhelms the boundaries and seems to exist in some different sort of space than everything else, everything else there's sort of a balance between predator and prey resources and birth rates.
00:24:39.000There's all this sort of Symbiotic interaction with nature, with a natural world.
00:24:47.000Like, we're just dumping shit into the ocean and killing all the fish and polluting the sky and driving in our cars and flying in our planes and still talking about climate change and, you know, injecting people with chemicals and trying to make more babies.
00:25:03.000Yeah, we're also doing a lot of good for the planet.
00:25:42.000I think part of the challenge is actually thinking about the levels of organization that biology has.
00:25:49.000So what I mean is like You know, individuals are not actually the problem what you're describing.
00:25:53.000It would be like human societies are the problem and humans have because we have societies and, you know, organization that enable us to do these things like we're able to, you know, take over all these environments and things.
00:26:04.000But I like the way I think about life is much more at the planetary scale.
00:26:08.000So for me, you know, going all the way back to the origin of life.
00:26:12.000You know, life doesn't happen just in one environment.
00:26:16.000And it's really like a planetary scale transition.
00:26:19.000Like something happened on our planet with enough geochemical environments mixing to mediate this global transition.
00:26:24.000And when you look at the evolution of life, you get these kind of hierarchies where like cells evolved and then multicellular organisms like cephalopods and plants and fungi and us.
00:26:35.000And then we get things that build societies like ant colonies or human societies.
00:26:41.000It just seems to me it's like it's a natural progression of the evolutionary process to build more complex systems at larger collective scales that are having more impact on the planet and restructuring more of it.
00:26:53.000And, you know, if life wants to get off this planet, it has to go through something like us.
00:26:57.000So I don't think, you know, I think we can look at it from the, you know, couple hundred year timescale and say these things are terribly negative and predator, prey, this, that, and the other thing.
00:27:06.000But if you look at it over the billions years timescale, there's a really different picture that emerges about what we are and what we're doing.
00:27:12.000Isn't it a fascinating thought, though, that you immediately, and we all do, go to if life gets off this planet?
00:27:21.000So that seems to be something that we have baked into us.
00:27:23.000We have this idea of exploring the universe.
00:27:26.000So wouldn't something else have that, too?
00:27:28.000And if something else had that, and it was a hundred million years more advanced than us, and it found us still throwing shit at each other and beating each other to death with sticks, wouldn't it come in and go...
00:28:07.000I think that's a problem, but I don't know that that's one that can be solved.
00:28:10.000So this issue of, you know, trying to treat every living entity, you know, in sort of a quality, like, I don't actually think it's possible.
00:28:19.000Well, you can't because they won't do that to you.
00:28:21.000No, but you can't even, like, you have to eat something, right?
00:28:24.000So, like, if you value plants more than animals and you want to eat plants, then you're valuing, you know, like, you're making value statements.
00:28:33.000But, like, you know, plants are, you know, like, they're still alive when you eat them.
00:31:07.000But Lily, he invented a sensory deprivation tank, and one of the things that he would do with a sensory deprivation tank, he was trying to...
00:31:15.000Create an environment where your body, in the physical senses of the body, don't influence the mind at all, so there's more resources for the mind.
00:31:24.000And he was setting up these tanks next to dolphin tanks and taking LSD and trying to communicate with dolphins.
00:31:30.000I have heard about these studies, yeah.
00:31:30.000He did a lot of really wild things with dolphins, but none of it really...
00:31:38.000Yeah, I think there's a lot of progress in animal communication, but I think we're very far from understanding whether animals are communicating at all like us and in what ways.
00:31:49.000We might be very limited in thinking that this is the only way.
00:31:53.000Well, it's like your point about anthropocentrizing.
00:31:56.000We have our bubble, we think about the world this way, and the human way is the only way and the right way, and we put our notions of intelligence on other species, and if they don't match, we think they're not intelligent.
00:32:09.000Also, we're thinking about this animal, like an orca or a dolphin, with a 40% larger cerebral cortex.
00:32:16.000And why are we discounting the possibility of some sort of telepathic communication?
00:32:21.000Like that sounds and frequencies are attached to feelings, and that there's something going on that's not like, I love you, like in words, but some sort of expression that's different than our concept of language.
00:32:35.000Yeah, I would say it's certainly possible that they're communicating things that are emotional or much more intelligent than we give them credit for just like with their patterns of speech because they're pretty complex.
00:33:04.000If we wanted to evolve and we wanted to stay alive and gather resources, we had to figure out a way to keep the animals from eating us, right?
00:33:57.000All the examples you're giving, we don't really understand what it's like to be another species or even to be another human, quite honestly.
00:34:04.000And I think if we had a deep understanding of the nature of life, these kind of questions would be much easier.
00:34:10.000I mean, when you want to talk about a psychedelic experience, imagine if VR could put you...
00:34:17.000I mean, if there was some sort of an integrated VR that gets to, like, a real, like, matrix sort of state where it allows you to have the thought processes of a being for a short amount of time.
00:34:29.000Like, if they could record octopus thought process...
00:35:07.000I mean, their way of expressing their personality, so to speak, or like their morphology is like, you know, like their shape is like their expression of their behavior, right?
00:35:18.000Like animals can move around in an environment, but a plant just grows.
00:35:41.000But we have a hard time even with plants not anthropocentrizing with the kind of experiments we want to do to learn how they're intelligent because they're using a lot of animal-based experimental programs to try to test plant intelligence and they probably don't fit plant intelligence because their intelligence is so different.
00:35:57.000So it's really hard to say what kinds of properties they actually have.
00:36:01.000And so, if we think about the wide potential for variability in terms of planets out there in the known universe, you would imagine that there'd probably be a lot of intelligent animals that would find some sort of Goldilocks thing like dolphins had.
00:38:01.000Because our world and the structure of doing a thing that you probably do not want to do for most of your day, to pay off debt for something that you really didn't need, education that you turned out to don't use, and all this different stuff that keeps...
00:38:16.000It's very difficult for people in this environment, especially urban environments that we've...
00:38:24.000Whereas people that live in hunter-gatherer tribes and people that live subsistence lifestyles in particular, they report much higher levels of satisfaction and happiness, less depression.
00:38:37.000I think debt's really hard because you're constantly aspiring to things.
00:38:42.000Even I still have student loan debt from...
00:38:45.000You know, it's just like, it's like, you want to do, you want to be, yeah, you just, you take on debt, you try to do something, but yeah, it's pretty bad.
00:38:52.000There was a Vice series a long time ago, back when Vice, like, was really first starting out, and it was a Vice guide to travel, and they went to visit this guy who lives in the Arctic Circle, and he's been there since, like, the 1970s.
00:39:05.000I think he went out there initially as a logger.
00:39:07.000He's one of the last few people to have a It's nice for like six hours.
00:40:20.000Which seems like, for us, we're like, oh my god, that sounds terrible.
00:40:24.000But does that really sound more terrible than going to a job at some corporation that doesn't give a shit about you, that will cut you if the stock is down?
00:40:33.000And you've dedicated 25 years of your life to this company and all of a sudden you're gone and now you don't know what to do and you're on unemployment.
00:40:38.000You're like, what did I do with my life?
00:41:24.000So when you start studying all these things and thinking about life and thinking about the various possibilities of life, what's the lowest single-celled organism?
00:41:38.000How long ago do we think that that emerged?
00:41:41.000I think current estimates are that life, like the oldest fossils that we can identify and like tracing back genomically about 3.8 billion years ago.
00:41:51.000So essentially somewhere around a billion or so years that we can find from the time Earth was formed?
00:42:57.000You know, the sort of canonical ones that you'll hear about are usually like the RNA world that life started with an RNA molecule, which like RNA is still in our bodies today.
00:43:06.000So like DNA, most people are probably familiar with, gets translated, like transcribed into RNA and then the RNA is what's used to make proteins.
00:43:15.000So RNA, you know, kind of does a dual role.
00:43:19.000So people think, oh, maybe it happened early on and it was the first life.
00:43:23.000And then there's like other hypotheses like hydrothermal vents and, you know, sort of energy first approaches to origins of life that like we had some metabolism that was organizing.
00:43:32.000But all of these are really speculative, and I think the issue is that we're trying to take molecules that are in modern living systems and trying to understand how they can emerge in a prebiotic environment on early Earth and not really thinking about how the Earth...
00:43:50.000And the geochemistry on the Earth had to evolve into a living system.
00:43:53.000So it had, like, selection had to happen, evolution had to happen before life.
00:43:58.000And this is sort of the critical gap that we're really missing, is, like, what is that mechanism?
00:44:02.000And that's where assembly theory is supposed to be coming in, is trying to give us a mechanism for how chemical systems can evolve before we even have a living cell, for example.
00:44:10.000And, like, in trying to iterate what those missing stages are, because we just don't know what they look like right now.
00:44:15.000Well, also, like, what would the evolutionary advantage of becoming a cell be?
00:44:20.000I think, well, so that's a great question, but one of the problems with this area is we don't know what questions to ask.
00:44:28.000So I actually don't know that that's the right question.
00:44:30.000I think when you think about it much more deeply about the physics of life and the way that we've been describing it already, if you think physics, like what life is doing as a mechanism, In the universe is maximizing the amount of stuff that gets to exist, for example.
00:44:43.000There's this whole world of complex objects that cannot exist unless there's a living architecture that can select and constrain the space to make something like this instead of the universes of other things those atoms could be arranged in.
00:44:55.000So if you think that there's something that deep and that fundamental about the nature of life, the origin of life transition has something to do with the emergence of systems that basically can persist.
00:45:07.000They can survive against this sort of random chemical noise, like the chemical soup is just a mess of things being created and destroyed, created and destroyed.
00:45:14.000And you get something that basically can reinforce its own existence enough to keep existing and then building more complex stuff.
00:45:21.000And that's really the origin life transition is pretty simple to say like that, but trying to build an experiment and understand the sort of chemical architecture that mediates that transition is quite hard and that's where we're at right now.
00:45:31.000And so experiments are being done to try?
00:45:35.000So that's my collaborator Lee Cronin is a chemist and he's totally brilliant and actually him and I are probably, you know, I don't know, like what we're trying to do is a little bit crazy.
00:45:52.000He's doing the experimental stuff, but the sort of idea we had in mind is like, I'll write a book, try to get the ideas out there, get people excited about thinking about this space, and he'll start a company that will digitize chemistry and try to raise the funds to actually do the experiments.
00:46:05.000So he's trying to build the technology and experiments that's built on this platform he has for...
00:46:10.000Building robots that basically do the chemistry for you.
00:46:13.000And the idea being, if we could build a large enough experiment, we could search that huge space of chemistry, a little bit like a search algorithm for chemistry, and then be able to look in chemical space and try to discover aliens in an original life experiment on Earth.
00:46:30.000And so that's what we're trying to do.
00:46:36.000Imagine if you guys, if someone does something like this, maybe it's you, maybe it's someone else, someone does something like this and creates an artificial life form and then starts manipulating that life form and evolving that life form through some extraneous processes.
00:46:54.000So, I mean, there are benefits to that, right?
00:46:56.000So Lee's company, Chemify, is a digital chemistry company, and their stated aim is to be able to 3D print any molecule on demand, right?
00:47:04.000So this has huge impact for the pharmaceutical industry.
00:47:06.000But, like, the real goal is to make an artificial life form in the lab.
00:47:09.000But that also has huge impact for humanity because you imagine that...
00:47:13.000Now you have the ability to study in this other system all of these other kinds of chemistries, like what can you do for like antibiotic discovery or pharmaceutical drug discovery or even psychedelic drug discovery, people like that.
00:47:26.000But, you know, like there's a crazy amount of new technology.
00:47:30.000And new insights fundamentally to come out of that.
00:47:33.000But I also don't think that we're really going to understand these other kind of technologies that we're building.
00:47:38.000Like when we're thinking about artificial intelligence and like, is that alive or not?
00:47:41.000Unless we solve this chemical problem of what life is, because I think the chemical problem is much harder, but much more direct as far as like understanding the fundamental nature of life when you solve it in an experimental program.
00:47:59.000It'll be alien biology that we evolve in the lab.
00:48:02.000And I actually think this is how we're going to make first contact with alien life because I think we won't recognize it unless we understand what it is.
00:48:10.000What ethical concerns would arise when you take a thing, like, let's say, let's advance this whole process a few hundred years from now, and you've created artificial life, you've created this thing that doesn't exist anywhere else, and then instead of it being subject to natural selection as a vehicle for its advancement,
00:48:31.000instead, we just start fucking with it.
00:48:34.000And then it gets to a point where there's an ethical concern, like, hey, this thing's about to get smarter than us.
00:48:39.000I think there's ethical concerns right along the way.
00:48:42.000And I don't know that I know immediate answers to those.
00:48:46.000So, you know, it's kind of like this is the part where it's a little existentially traumatic to work on these kind of problems.
00:48:51.000So I have a friend that's a philosopher, Ben Bratton, and he says the best kind of like ideas are the ones that are like equally like really exciting and horrifying.
00:49:00.000And you want to work on those ideas because you don't know what its future is going to be.
00:49:03.000And I tend to be on the optimistic side.
00:49:05.000I think we need to solve this problem because I think we have this sort of existential crisis in some sense that humanity is facing because we don't understand what we are.
00:49:13.000We don't understand what our technologies are doing.
00:49:15.000We don't understand what our long-term future holds.
00:49:17.000We don't even understand all the life around us on this planet.
00:49:21.000I think that the lens through which we will look at the kind of ethical things that you're talking about will be radically different because the knowledge itself will have transformed us.
00:49:29.000So I can't even anticipate what those kind of dialogues are going to be like.
00:49:32.000Imagine if like instead of just wondering about cephalopods and plants and stuff on this conversation, we actually had a fundamental understanding.
00:49:39.000Of what it is to be other life forms and life as a, you know, as part of the fundamental structure of reality and like participatory in actually like what the universe builds.
00:49:51.000And you have that kind of understanding.
00:49:53.000I think it radically changes the way that we conceptualize who we are and what we're doing.
00:49:58.000And I don't, you know, I don't know what that looks like.
00:50:02.000And we would assume that if we continue, especially down the path of AI and quantum computing, they are probably going to solve a lot of these problems.
00:50:10.000Yeah, I think we're flying blind in those areas, though, really, especially AI. I mean, I think that that's pretty obvious that, you know, there's a huge amount of debate about the nature of intelligence in these artificial algorithms.
00:50:21.000I certainly think that they're life, but I think they're life in the sense that the lineage of information necessary to train a large language model, for example, you know, requires a planet to evolve something like us and evolve language and then enough data about that language to train the model.
00:50:35.000So it's a direct descendant, like you were saying, like, you know, or technologies or babies.
00:51:10.000Yeah, and you were asking about quantum information.
00:51:12.000Yes, and that when computing power is massively increased and you have a sentient artificial intelligence that essentially has all the information that we have of Every human being, every database, everything all over the world, but yet far more capable of processing this and advancing these things that maybe it'll have a more complex understanding of what life is.
00:51:33.000Yeah, so I think there's a sort of subtlety here when you're talking about artificial intelligence and whether it could compete with natural intelligence.
00:51:41.000So this is sort of the canonical debate about the nature of artificial intelligence.
00:51:45.000But I think we really underestimate what chemistry can do.
00:51:50.000And I think some of the most powerful computers on this planet are still chemical.
00:51:53.000And if we actually understand chemistry better, you know, with these kind of new digital chemistry technologies, the kind of compute we can get out of chemistry might actually out-compete silicon in the long run.
00:52:12.000But this gets into the blurry area of like, are you human anymore?
00:52:15.000Like, if you have a chip in your brain and you're like being a cephalopod and then you morph into like, you know, being, you know, on your own desktop, like, are you still human?
00:52:26.000Well, that's what I always say about if you go back to Australopithecus and explain to him airplanes and cell phones, but you can't be Australopithecus anymore.
00:52:34.000I'd be like, whoa, I don't want to stop being me.
00:52:37.000Wouldn't that be the same reaction that they have?
00:52:45.000I don't want to be some gray dude with a giant head and big black eyes, but maybe that's what we become.
00:52:49.000Yeah, I think also intergenerationally we're already doing that.
00:52:52.000So like the sort of, you know, people will always talk about how kids are more comfortable with technology than their parents or grandparents were.
00:53:12.000And so they are quote unquote alien, not really alien, but like they're really fundamentally different in a lot of ways.
00:53:18.000And I think it's okay to recognize that.
00:53:20.000Like that's, you know, part of the progression of understanding and the fact that the world is changing.
00:53:26.000And if we're looking at it from generation to generation, let's scale that up a thousand years or a hundred thousand years or a million years.
00:53:55.000I mean, I think we're already seeing signs of that, right?
00:53:58.000Like, people's, like, fear of leaving their cell phone behind.
00:54:01.000You know, it's like an extensible brain.
00:54:03.000So, like, we're all pretty much attached to our cell phone already.
00:54:05.000So, when you just, you know, you can imagine in a generation or two, it's more comfortable just to have that inside your body so then you don't lose it.
00:55:08.000And then you could research things and find out things.
00:55:11.000And then when bandwidth started increasing and then you started to be able to watch videos and YouTube comes along.
00:55:17.000There's obviously a lot of nonsense on things like YouTube, but how many people have become educated on so many different things because of YouTube?
00:56:39.000You don't know what the historical moments are right now.
00:56:42.000We cite things that we think are historical, and I don't think that they are.
00:56:46.000Sometimes it's really interesting because people imagine the future, you know, being radically different than the present.
00:56:52.000But Ken Liu is a science fiction author.
00:56:55.000He's got this great take that like, if you want to actually predict the future, look at the things that haven't changed in centuries or haven't changed in decades.
00:57:02.000And those things are likely still to persist and be the same.
00:57:05.000And so like, like when he was talking about this, he had a picture of like, you know, some futuristic thing from like the 1930s.
00:57:10.000And there was like a maid in like the black outfit with the white thing.
00:57:13.000And they're like, Which of these things is still around?
00:57:47.000And I also think we're aware of how much of an impact technology, in particular, the internet has had on us, but probably not as much as someone who's studying history will be aware of it.
00:58:04.000Yeah, and I love talking with historians, especially about the ideas I work on, right?
00:58:07.000So one of the sort of fundamental ideas in assembly theory, which is really radical in some sense from a perspective of physics, but just generally, is that history is actually embedded in objects.
00:58:17.000So I actually think any evolved structure has a physical size.
00:58:23.000It might be sitting on the desk, but it also has a size in time.
00:58:26.000And this is actually like a fundamental feature of the physics of life that living objects, the things that life creates, are large in time.
00:58:34.000And this kind of idea has been sitting around humanity for millennia that like, Contingency history might still be alive in the present, but we don't really think about that in a fundamental way.
00:58:47.000So, you know, like I was talking with Thomas Moynihan, who's a historian, was just saying that there's so many threads through history that kind of point to this idea being like, you know, super interesting and very relevant.
00:58:58.000And so when you think about like the future history, are they going to be like, oh, they finally realized these kind of things were true?
00:59:04.000And I think about this with the history of physics.
00:59:06.000It's kind of crazy at what generation we started realizing certain things.
00:59:10.000Like, when did humanity first start abstracting and building mathematics?
00:59:13.000Or when did we build mechanical clocks and start recognizing that we could track things at the level of seconds?
00:59:42.000The world's first mechanical clock, water-driven spherical birds, was invented by Yijing, a Buddhist monk, and 725 AD. Is there a photo of what that looks like?
01:00:40.000And then the sort of subsequent human knowledge that comes out of timekeeping precision is things like the laws of gravitation, which we wouldn't understand.
01:00:49.000Newton and Galileo couldn't have done what they did in their generation unless mechanical clocks existed before they did.
01:02:26.000They just tried to figure out a way to make these things work.
01:02:31.000Over time, more and more accurate, more and more precise, and what they've gotten it down to now is extraordinary.
01:02:38.000But show it the tourbillon movement, because it's bananas.
01:02:41.000When you see what those look like in some of these tourbillon watches, they go for hundreds of thousands of dollars for a watch.
01:02:48.000Just because of the complexity of the gears, and then they also have clear windows over the movement so you can stare at it while it's doing its thing.
01:03:42.000So the fact that you're doing this with seconds, I mean, the precision involved in making sure that every gear and every spring represents a second so perfectly with no deviation that it's a half a second over 24 hours.
01:04:13.000So the idea is that it's not affected by gravity, but it doesn't improve accuracy.
01:04:16.000The same gravity-fighting effect as tourbillon mechanism in fact has been proven that tourbillons offer no more accuracy than a traditional escapement on a wristwatch.
01:04:59.000And as you move it around, that's what causes it to have the power to keep going.
01:05:03.000So as you're wearing it throughout the day, and then there's some that you do wind.
01:05:09.000I just had a morbid thought that you could tell how long someone was dead for by like how many seconds off that watch is because it wasn't wound up anymore.
01:05:16.000Sort of, but you'd only tell within, you know, 12 hours.
01:05:59.000The Rolex is known to be 48 hours, the power reserve.
01:06:03.000Police were able to determine the date of death within a reasonable margin of error by subtracting the watch's power reserve from the date that was displayed on the watch when it was found.
01:06:12.000According to his Rolex watch, Ronald Platt was murdered on July 20th, 1996. The problem with that is a lot of people don't set their date correctly, so that wouldn't hold up in court.
01:06:20.000It seems like, how do you know the guy was accurate with his date?
01:06:57.000But these different ones, like they'll have one – I have one that I gave to Lex.
01:07:02.000That's an Omega, and it has a moon on it.
01:07:07.000And so it has a moon-faced thing where there's a high-resolution photograph of the moon, and as the moon rises and moves through the sky, it becomes a full moon, and a half moon, a quarter moon, it shows it on the watch.
01:07:22.000So you have to go to a website, you find out what the moon phase is, you set the moon phase for where the watch is, and then you set the time and the date on the watch, and then it stays in sync.
01:09:03.000And when you think about what could possibly become of advanced life if we could exist in, you know, just stay alive and advance another million years, which doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility.
01:09:34.000There's all these tropes about machines completely replacing biological life, and I just don't think that's a realistic possibility either.
01:09:41.000And again, it goes back to looking at the history of life on Earth.
01:09:45.000There's no technology that life invented That was completely replaced if subsequent architecture was built on it.
01:09:54.000So I always think about the ribosome, which mediates the translation in a cell, as one of the most important and oldest technologies on our planet.
01:10:01.000We don't think about molecules as technologies, but life had to invent that thing, and it's still here.
01:10:06.000And there's billions of ribosomes on this planet, and they're kind of the engines of existence in some sense because cells require them to function.
01:10:14.000And so I think a lot of the stuff that we're building now, like it's an interesting question what's going to be around billions of years from now.
01:10:20.000I don't think that we as humans have invented any technology that will last that long.
01:10:24.000But I do think the idea that we're not going to be replaced because we are like sort of a key part of the infrastructure of what comes next is compelling to me based on looking at the history of life on Earth.
01:10:37.000Yeah, we may not be replaced, but we probably won't remain the same.
01:10:42.000When we do integrate, if we do have some sort of a technological cyborg existence, what does that look like?
01:10:49.000Well, the question of, like, what does it mean to integrate, though?
01:10:52.000So, like, already in this discussion, we've been talking about, like, being in a society or not in a society.
01:10:57.000And the lifestyle of a human and what a human is is fundamentally different if you're an individual living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle on your own versus if you're living in a modern society and you have all this technological aid and this, like, social constraints imposed on you that you have to hold a nine-to-five job and you have to have an income and all these other things,
01:11:54.000And I think the way we make distinctions with animals, like feral pigs versus domesticated pigs and things along those lines, we think of them as different things.
01:12:06.000And you could say there's superficial physical resemblances, but I think those are kind of superficial.
01:12:12.000I think it's fundamentally different to be a wild species versus a domesticated one, or a wild human, so to speak, versus a domesticated human.
01:12:21.000And I think when you look at that guy who lives in Antarctica, or in the Arctic Circle rather, and you compare him to like the saddest overweight gamer who's drinking Mountain Dew all day.
01:12:49.000One of them is walking through the mountains with a rifle looking for caribou, and the other one is just calling Uber Eats.
01:12:55.000And I suspect that, like, even the way they feel about the world is totally different, right?
01:12:59.000So it's not just, like, obviously the physiological differences manifest in, like, mental differences about, like, the acuity of their mental architecture, how they feel about their environment and, like, what's happening to them.
01:13:11.000How much, if any, do you pay attention to the UFO, UAP world?
01:13:16.000I don't pay too much attention to it, to be quite honest.
01:13:22.000I think, for me, it's not very exciting, to be honest.
01:13:29.000I'm much more interested in understanding fundamentally what life is and I think the UFO discussion really hasn't afforded me a deeper understanding of the problems I'm interested in solving.
01:13:40.000So I don't pay too much attention to it.
01:13:42.000I think it's much more interesting as a cultural discussion and like some of these things that we've also been talking about, like augmented humans and all these other things, it's like there's a lot of discussions happening Culturally that I think are preparing us for the next phase.
01:13:56.000And so I kind of see the UFO discussion as being one like, you know, we culturally need to understand how we want to think about alien life, what it is, how we intersect with it.
01:14:05.000And so there needs to be a lot of discussions about the nature of that problem and people interested in believing in that problem.
01:14:13.000But I don't really see a lot intellectually for me personally coming out of that discussion.
01:14:50.000And like individual knowledge versus shared knowledge.
01:14:53.000And I think what science, like, you know, you can question the sort of academic establishment and the way that we do science and it's very dogmatic and all those things.
01:15:00.000And I can agree with a lot of those criticisms.
01:15:03.000But science fundamentally is about shared knowledge and the ability to like, Have a joint conversation about something we both understand and to be able to use that to do things like, you know, the laws of gravitation are things that we can easily state and we can build satellites and new technologies out of that knowledge.
01:15:18.000And I think, you know, the discussion on alien life is fundamentally about new knowledge that we need to have about how the universe works.
01:15:24.000And that's going to come from a lot of different places.
01:15:27.000But for me, I don't see the UFO discussion fundamentally advancing.
01:15:32.000It's just raising some of the mystery about, you know, certain experiences people have had, but not in a way that allows us to really answer the question of what is an alien.
01:15:41.000There's also a fundamental problem of accuracy of information and how much of this whistleblower stuff is nonsense.
01:16:01.000So I don't like people telling people how to think.
01:16:03.000And I think what I see in the UFO discussion a lot that actually makes me stay out of that community is a lot of people that claim authority on knowledge and then they claim they can't share the knowledge.
01:16:22.000Yeah, that's what people should be doing.
01:16:25.000I don't trust people when they claim to have absolute knowledge they can't share with people.
01:16:31.000The only thing that gives me pause is the possibility that they're dealing with top secret programs that could get them in great trouble and would limit their access to this technology.
01:16:59.000Yeah, but I think that's like a sort of also standard play that like, you know, if the government needs to keep knowledge a secret, suddenly it becomes more valuable, right?
01:17:07.000I don't even necessarily think it's the government as much as I think it's the government and military contractors.
01:17:14.000So if you have some sort of technology that is literally out of this world and you're trying to figure out how it works, it's within your best interest to keep that as secret as possible.
01:18:06.000So this is the very beginning of Fear Factor and right after 9-11 and we were out there in the desert and you see this thing, it's near Palmdale, and you see this thing fly overhead and it's like, it looks like something Batman owns.
01:18:42.000It's cool, but it's designed to kill people really quick.
01:18:46.000It's designed to sneak in and mess people up and then get out of there without anybody knowing you're there.
01:18:51.000That's literally what it is, a stealth bomber.
01:18:54.000Yeah, but I do find it exciting that so many people want to talk about UFOs and are, like, really excited about the possibilities for aliens.
01:19:00.000The thing is, like, my point is, I mean, was that Einstein's quote?
01:19:08.000Sufficient technology is indistinguishable from magic.
01:19:44.000And if I think about the possibility of something even more advanced than us coming here and manipulating us, the same way we're willing to take a chance in creating artificial life in a laboratory, if we're willing to do that, if they're so much more advanced than us that they think we're just these silly territorial apes...
01:20:01.000So why is it always a narrative that they're so much more advanced?
01:20:23.000They've gone so far in one area that is so perplexing, which is deep space travel and vast distances of space and time, and that they've conquered that.
01:20:34.000So the closest planets that we think we have Goldilocks zones are how far away?
01:21:18.000Well, we're also assuming that speed is you're taking an object and you're moving that object through some method of propulsion to a new place.
01:21:27.000Instead of moving the space around it...
01:21:30.000Folding that and having it instantaneously travel from one point to point, which is the way the real super eggheads describe the potential future, like long distance space travel.
01:21:42.000Based on sort of extensions of current theories of gravity, but yeah.
01:21:46.000And, you know, obviously extrapolating greatly our ability to generate power, right?
01:21:50.000But if they did figure out a way to get here, they would probably be so unimpressed with us, especially if they caught us a few hundred years ago, you know, and we're basically like making stupid houses and burning coal and riding horses.
01:22:13.000I mean, just the idea that we have come so far in such a short period of time, you would just imagine that if that keeps going, it's going to get to the point where everything expands exponentially and the ability to travel through space will be on the list.
01:22:38.000But the challenge with these kind of like thought experiments is we're always applying today's standard and understanding to long term futures.
01:22:44.000And if you imagine that we go through this process of, you know, creating the kind of technologies that you're describing, we will be so fundamentally different in the process, we'll be having a different discussion.
01:22:54.000And we won't be able to reason about what that looks like based on the way that we think about things now.
01:22:58.000So I think this kind of, you know, I've never really been a fan of like these sort of, you know, survival of the fittest, predator, prey, like the aliens are just going to be so much more advanced than us and come and take over everything kind of narratives because it just doesn't seem to be, first off, it's not consistent with what we actually observe because we don't observe aliens yet.
01:23:16.000And second off, it doesn't seem consistent with the trajectory of what we're doing overall, especially if you think about us not individually but like much more as just like a biosphere evolving into a technologic, like a technosphere.
01:23:52.000The way we've integrated with each other digitally through cell phones and through social media and interaction online, there will be another level of that that is exponentially more bizarre.
01:24:03.000It's probably going to take place with Neuralink and similar type technologies that we're going to integrate with each other and communicate telepathically and communicate with large groups of people telepathically.
01:24:16.000And I think Isn't it amazing that things that were once myths become fact through technology?
01:24:22.000I think this is just absolutely amazing like how much our ancestors thought about these things that they called magic and like we're making you know like actual physical reality through technology.
01:24:32.000We had the gentleman who received the first Neuralink implant here.
01:24:37.000We talked to him about what it's like.
01:24:39.000I look at him like, this is, you're the future.
01:24:43.000We're probably all going to have something similar to that in our bodies.
01:24:48.000And then eventually we're going to go, why do we have these fragile feet when you can have these immense deluxe carbon fiber feet that allow you to run over hot coals and not feel a thing?
01:25:03.000But we're very connected to our biological existence.
01:25:09.000But my thought is that our biological existence comes with all the baggage of all the human reward systems that have been put in place in order to ensure our survival.
01:26:42.000Like, so we have like our severe friends or like people that we find socially acceptable.
01:26:46.000And then like, pretty much anybody outside of that space is like beyond our cognitive horizon.
01:26:51.000And we just can't treat them as people anymore.
01:26:53.000And I find this very perplexing and, you know, about a bit of an issue in making the kind of transition that you're talking about that we just like can't even see each other as humans.
01:27:12.000And that permeates so much of modern society right now.
01:27:14.000It's hard to look at anybody and see them as a person.
01:27:17.000And I think that's baked into us, first of all, because we all evolved in tribal groups of very small numbers of people, which is where Dunbar's number comes from, right?
01:27:26.000We only have a certain amount of people that we can keep intimately connected to in our minds.
01:27:30.000Yeah, and our social networks are much larger than that now, so most of the people in our network we can't actually humanize.
01:27:35.000Well, it's even worse if you're famous because you don't remember anybody's name.
01:27:40.000And then you have all kinds of people that have a parasocial relationship with you and, like, they think they know you and they don't know you.
01:27:45.000Especially me because I do this, right?
01:27:51.000But it's also I feel like that sort of connection with people.
01:27:57.000This is what I'm what anybody who's doing any sort of a podcast or something like that is kind of doing is like a one way version of what I think is going to exist universally on the planet.
01:28:10.000I think actually the thing that I find really interesting about the podcasting space is this kind of like very intimate conversation, but it's technologically mediated and shared, right?
01:28:21.000And I think that's exactly what you're talking about.
01:28:23.000And so like this transition phase and like why are podcasting becoming so popular, I think is because it's part of this kind of transition that we're all undergoing.
01:28:31.000There's also an unusual authenticity in having access to individual minds without influence of producers and directors and a bunch of different people.
01:28:41.000So like this conversation in particular, I had zero conversations with any person before I got you on.
01:28:49.000I had a text message that I sent to my friend who's the booking guy.
01:31:33.000That alone makes us go, well, we have this bizarre idea in our head of how things progress based on our current understanding of the world we live in right now.
01:31:46.000History is a predictive science, which is like a weird thing, but like people don't like think about this, but like, you know, you have to have theories of the past and then test it against the record, right?
01:31:55.000So it's not really any different than any other domain of knowledge where we're trying to make predictions and test them against current data.
01:32:01.000It's just like history, for some reason, we think it actually happened.
01:32:04.000Therefore, like there's one narrative, but it's usually constructed based on what we know and we're learning all the time.
01:32:09.000Well, also the problem in- And we forget all the time.
01:32:11.000The collapse of that civilization, the burning of the Library of Alexandria, all the records lost.
01:32:16.000So they probably had written down how they did everything.
01:32:20.000And some assholes came along and burnt everything.
01:32:28.000When I first heard about the Library of Alexandria, I was like, that was heartbroken.
01:32:34.000I was like, can you even imagine what was lost?
01:32:36.000If we knew what they knew, the amount of advancement...
01:32:40.000Just Egypt, just that one part of Africa where they figured out how to do some things that to this day, 4,500 plus years later, we are perplexed.
01:33:19.000A study published Monday in a journal PLOS. One researcher proposed that ancient people may have relied on water to build the step pyramid.
01:33:28.000The suspect hydraulic system may have helped lift stones from the center of the pyramid.
01:33:35.000So, like, we're still trying to figure out what they did.
01:33:39.000So, long before I got into science, like, one of the first places I actually encountered in astronomy was, like, reading about the Orion mystery when I was, like, in fifth grade.
01:33:47.000And I, like, I was, like, got obsessed with it for a little while about, like, whether the chambers and the pyramids were actually aligned with the stars and stuff.
01:33:56.000There's a guy named Christopher Dunn, who's an engineer, and he has the wildest theory.
01:34:01.000He thinks that the construction of the pyramid, and this is, by the way, both maligned by some archaeologists, completely dismissed, but also embraced by younger archaeologists.
01:34:16.000So this theory is that the way the Great Pyramid was set up was not set up as a tomb, but was set up as some sort of a way to generate electricity.
01:34:27.000And that there was a chamber, a subterranean chamber, and that this chamber had something in it that was like pounding on the stone and creating a certain vibration.
01:34:42.000These shafts that they had access to that had – they know these shafts existed and they know the structure of these shafts and these shafts that existed in the marble or whatever the stone, granite rather, and they would fill these shafts up with some sort of chemicals.
01:34:59.000And then at the end of the shaft was limestone, and so the limestone is porous, and the limestone allows the gases to escape from all these chemicals and contain itself inside this chamber.
01:35:10.000This chamber is constantly being vibrated, and then there are these pathways that lead up to what they're calling the King's Chamber, which is this insane structure.
01:35:19.000It's one of the most perplexing things about the pyramid, because these are immense stones that are positioned— I mean, they're just a phenomenal piece of architecture.
01:35:26.000And then in those, they have shafts that go straight out into space that he thinks is gathering gamma rays.
01:35:33.000And so the gamma rays are interacting with this hydrogen that's being created by these chemicals and the vibrations and that all these things are used to generate electricity.
01:35:42.000And this is why there's a gold capstone on the top of the period and smooth limestone on the outside.
01:35:47.000It's a nutty theory, but this guy's a brilliant man.
01:37:03.000I mean, there's all kinds of interesting questions you can ask about that kind of stuff, even in like deep time.
01:37:08.000So, you know, one of my colleagues, Adam Frank, had this paper on like the Silurian hypothesis, which is like the idea that there was like intelligent beings around the time of dinosaurs, like a dinosaur race, and like how would you actually look in the geological record for it?
01:37:21.000And so, like, people can work out the mathematics of, like, you know, what would be the traces of these, you know, like, if the Egyptians had this capability or if, you know, there were intelligent species that emerged on the planet long before humans and had enough technology, say, to, like, have radioactive waste or anything.
01:37:37.000Like, you can actually, like, bound, you know, like, what would we actually see in the record.
01:37:42.000So it is possible still to constrain this stuff.
01:37:48.000So I've been raised in a tradition scientifically of entertaining any idea as long as it's something that we can actually test and measure.
01:37:58.000And so I guess for me, I think some of the most creative ideas in science are things that people completely didn't expect.
01:38:08.000Well, I mean, I think Einstein's a great example.
01:38:12.000You know, like, he was one of the few people that took seriously that the speed of light, you know, is constant.
01:38:18.000Like, we take that for granted now, but everybody thought that was kind of ridiculous and the experiments must be wrong because there's no way that the speed of light could be constant.
01:38:25.000And he was like, no, the laws of nature are invariant.
01:38:28.000And this invariance also implies that the speed of light could be invariant because it's a law of nature.
01:38:33.000And then he was able to derive relativity from that and that has all kinds of, you know, radical consequences about the way that we think about space and time and, you know, the fact that time is, you know, like, it's actually a relative concept.
01:38:46.000At least simultaneity is a relative concept.
01:38:48.000I think there's many concepts of time in physics.
01:38:53.000But like quantum mechanics is another.
01:38:55.000Like if you actually look at the observational evidence and you try to build a theory from the observational evidence, you get to like really interesting spaces that are completely different than what you thought.
01:39:05.000And so it's easy to have theories and creative ideas.
01:39:07.000It's actually harder to go from the observational constraints and work into a theory that's consistent with all of those.
01:39:14.000And that's actually where most of our more radical conceptions and foundational shifts come from.
01:39:20.000And so that's why I'm actually particularly excited about what we're doing with assembly theory as an example, because what we're trying to do there is say, if life is actually a real property of the physical world, like whatever we call life, it'll have to be redefined, then we should be able to have a measurable consequence.
01:39:37.000And the way we talk about that is actually to measure this complexity of molecules, assembly of molecules, Which you can go in the lab and measure with standard instrumentation like a mass spec and an NMR and infrared.
01:39:47.000Like you can measure this property of a molecule.
01:39:51.000And then you can derive all kinds of weird shit from that.
01:39:54.000And I think this has been the tradition of physics in general, but science also more broadly, that, you know, the reason that we get so convinced about things and they work is because we're working backward from what we observe and measure.
01:40:06.000And then we test it against what we can observe and measure.
01:40:09.000And the things that happen with reality are far stranger than the things that we could dream up, which is why I love it.
01:40:15.000It's just crazy, like, the kind of ideas you get out of that process.
01:40:19.000Well, it's just the process that allows you and I to be staring at each other.
01:40:22.000First of all, the fact that we can see each other is crazy.
01:40:52.000So, like, the idea of, you know, like, when life first emerged on the planet, nothing could see, but it evolved later.
01:40:57.000And it is something that is fairly consistent.
01:41:00.000And even if you think about our technology, so I always think about the progression of biology into technology.
01:41:04.000It is fascinating also that a lot of our technologies that allow us to understand the world are technologies of sight, like telescopes and microscopes.
01:41:12.000And, you know, like we think we knew life on this planet and then we invented the microscope.
01:41:16.000And it's like, you know, just you don't need that much more resolution.
01:41:18.000And you can suddenly see that this table is completely covered in cells, for example, that we didn't know were there.
01:41:27.000It's like we evolved from cells billions of years ago.
01:41:29.000It took us billions of years to evolve into an intelligence that could build a technology and then look and be like, oh, biology's made out of cells.
01:41:37.000And then if you think you understand any of it, the people that understand subatomic particles are like, hold my beer.
01:42:12.000I feel like we're just emerging from it the same way the ability to see things was this emerging technology, this emerging ability that probably changed everything, right?
01:42:23.000The ability to actually recognize distances and to see objects and recognize them.
01:42:30.000That is this emergent phenomenon that we sort of take for granted because we have But there could be other things like that that have not emerged yet.
01:43:01.000But there's also like phone rings and it was a person you were talking about that you haven't talked to in forever, and all of a sudden they feel you and they call you.
01:43:08.000There's something trippy to that, that maybe not every time, not maybe repeatable, but occasionally you catch it.
01:43:17.000Occasionally there's this connection that seems to emerge.
01:43:19.000And I always wonder if that's an emergent form of a new ability that human beings will eventually possess.
01:43:29.000But I think the first one is, I think we forget often that we are all connected by a common history.
01:43:37.000And so a lot of the features about like, why is it that we can be sitting here having this conversation?
01:43:42.000You know, obviously, we both have to speak the same language, but we also have to emerge from the same evolutionary architecture, have the same kinds of sensory apparatus to like to be able to communicate with each other.
01:43:54.000And so, you know, I think about life as these kind of, you know, like these structures that are emerging over time and generating novel, you know, things.
01:44:06.000But like the whole temporal relation, this idea of like objects being in time means that they're connected through time.
01:44:12.000So, you know, like if you assume a living object actually has a time and size, it means that like every living object in this planet is not really a distinct object.
01:44:44.000And so we think things are just happening, you know, spontaneously and like there's some magic behind it where really all it is is contingency and causation.
01:44:52.000But I think the other thing that is interesting about what you're saying, which we already touched on a little bit, is these kind of stories that there's ancient myths.
01:45:04.000I'm a huge Joseph Campbell fan and thinking about the history of mythology.
01:45:08.000But we've had these myths for most of human history, and there's been a lot of recurring motifs in them about telepathy, psychics, miracles.
01:45:22.000And it's super interesting to see how some of them are becoming, you know, like embodied through our technology, like, like the things that we imagine, like, are we're making real.
01:45:32.000And that's the part that's interesting to me.
01:45:42.000So it's not impossible that people that are psychic at quote-unquote could exist.
01:45:48.000But I think what will happen is the stories that we're telling become embodied in the observations that we're making and the things that we're actually implementing in the world.
01:45:58.000But I don't know that historically I would say...
01:46:08.000When I say I don't believe in magic, it's not that I don't believe that people have personal knowledge or things, but I think what's more important is when those things become shareable, they actually become things that we can use collectively, and I'm much more interested in that kind of knowledge.
01:46:23.000So it's not that I don't value mysticism or the kind of personal narratives that people have about experiences.
01:46:34.000I think those are incredibly valuable and I think that we need those stories in our culture.
01:46:37.000It's just for me, I'm much more interested in when do we make those kinds of things regularized in the way that we understand them as really fundamental properties and we can use them and we can share that information.
01:46:51.000That's what I like about science because it's like, it's like shareable deep thoughts that are universally usable.
01:47:16.000He wrote Legend of Bagger Vance and a bunch of other great movies.
01:47:20.000He wrote this book called The War of Art.
01:47:23.000The book is essentially like a guidebook for creative types to avoid procrastination resistance and to develop a structure that allows you to sit down in your desk at a very specific time every day and summon the muse.
01:47:37.000And this idea has persisted throughout time.
01:47:43.000I'm sure you've had ideas that have come to you like, where does that even come from?
01:48:32.000I mean, I think the unconscious is a real thing.
01:48:34.000The reason I'm bringing it up is like so many people are really interested in consciousness and then, you know, like really focused on that.
01:48:41.000But part of the reason that, you know, like where creativity comes from and like part of this idea of using intuition to guide how you think about the world I think is like there's so much happening in your brain that you're just not even consciously aware of.
01:48:53.000And I think a lot of the information processing architecture and like where like I've kind of resigned myself to like almost all of my thinking is my unconscious brain and I should just like leave it there.
01:49:03.000And if I get an idea emerging out of it, it seems like it came from nowhere.
01:49:07.000But it's just it's I'm just not consciously aware of all the processing in my brain.
01:49:10.000I also wonder if the term consciousness is connected far too much to language.
01:49:16.000Because, right, we think of things that we can describe with language and processes that we examine with language, words that we attribute to specific objects and specific tasks and things that we do.
01:49:30.000And then there's this other thing that's going on.
01:49:36.000These sort of subconscious things are very conscious.
01:49:39.000They're conscious, but they're not attached to language.
01:49:43.000And so when we're interacting with people on a conscious level, we're communicating constantly through words.
01:49:49.000So we have sounds that we make, and these represent things, and we all understand them, and so we use this as a way to express this thing that's going on with this thought process, the consciousness.
01:50:25.000And I love working on deep foundational questions because I think when you talk about these deep ideas and you talk, and maybe this is also why people like psychedelics, because if you're not trained at the sort of frontier of intellectual debate,
01:50:41.000where do you have these kind of experiences?
01:50:43.000But the kind I'm talking about is you have really thought about how reality works and you have an architecture in your mind about what you think is.
01:50:50.000Is fundamental about the nature of reality because you're asking this particular scientific question.
01:50:55.000And I think some of my best discussions with some of my colleagues have been, you know, those kind of discussions and you really realize how people's brains are so different.
01:51:25.000Well, I think it's hard to report, though, because people don't even know they don't have an inner voice, or people don't know they do have an inner voice, because you don't know what it's like to be in someone else's mind, so everybody just thinks their mind is normal.
01:51:42.000Well, this is one of the things I'm really excited about, these neural enhancement technologies, because I think we really underestimate the diversity of human minds.
01:51:51.000It might be the most diverse things on this planet are actually just what's going on in our heads.
01:54:01.000So whatever that is, where some people love the taste of hot dogs, some people think they're disgusting, and they like, whatever, broccoli.
01:55:05.000And like people that have a major shift in that, like I read this Oliver Sacks story once about this person got hit in the head and then they could only see the world in black and white.
01:55:12.000And how existential that experience was transitioning.
01:55:56.000Yeah, I like to, you know, when I started thinking about how people think differently, I was like, I think I was listening to a podcast running one day, and it's like, you know, like, imagine an apple and now taste the apple.
01:56:05.000And I was like, I can imagine an apple, I can see an apple in my brain, and I can bite in the apple, but I cannot taste it.
01:56:24.000But it's a weird thing about my brain, but I don't know how common that is.
01:56:29.000But I think everybody has things like that.
01:56:31.000And if we just do experiments with our own minds, it's kind of interesting to probe the boundary of things you take for granted that you think you can do or you can visualize and you just can't.
01:56:43.000Well, the sense of smell we take for granted because everybody has it.
01:56:46.000And obviously there's an evolutionary advantage in terms of food being rotten and there's a bunch of different factors, gases that are poisonous.
01:58:10.000Well, our sensory perception that evolved biologically only took us so far.
01:58:15.000But obviously we're sitting here talking about neutrinos because we have built technologies that can detect their existence and validate that they're there.
01:58:23.000And then we have theories that would be consistent with what you're just saying.
01:58:26.000So the ways that we see the world, I guess my point is, are not just the biological ones, but they're becoming enhanced by technology in all sorts of ways.
01:58:34.000And theories and explanations are part of that technological infrastructure, which is why we can talk about that.
01:58:38.000Our gravitational waves, for example, is another one.
01:58:48.000But we also know that that's entirely based on mass, right?
01:58:52.000So we also know that gravity, the more weight you have on you, the harder it is for you to get around because you're being pulled, which is bizarre.
01:59:07.000So you change your physical structure by adding weight.
01:59:11.000That's what weightlifting is too, right?
01:59:13.000You're changing your physical structure and your ability to move through space and time by resisting constantly.
01:59:19.000So developing these biological tools to get past gravity.
01:59:23.000Well, I think it's amazing how much of the physical world you can get a sense of by simple things like that.
01:59:31.000We really do live in a physical reality.
01:59:34.000I know some people want to think we live in a simulation, but there's a real physical world.
01:59:38.000And I think we only kind of misconceive of it as a simulation because so much of our environment now is architected by human minds that it seems not real, but it is real.
01:59:47.000So you don't subscribe to the possibility of simulation theater?
01:59:54.000It doesn't seem like it's a better explanation than any other current explanation for how the universe works.
02:00:00.000So, you know, I put the simulation, argument, intelligent design, and even sort of the current laws of physics on kind of equal footing as far as their ability to explain why the universe exists the way it does.
02:00:11.000Because what all three theories do is they basically push explanation to the boundary and And in physics, we do that by saying there was an initial state of the universe that was low entropy, and the laws of physics have described what it's done ever since, but you can't explain where the universe came from.
02:00:25.000And in intelligent design, it's like the universe is designed by some being, but where did that thing come from?
02:00:35.000And in the simulation argument, it's just the great programmer in the sky made us.
02:00:39.000And I think, you know, the nuance there is, like, if any entities like us could evolve that could build simulations, then it's far more likely that we live in a simulation.
02:00:49.000But I think you still have to assume a physical reality that evolves the capability of building simulations.
02:01:01.000Yeah, I just, I don't understand why people are so confident in stating that, like Elon said, the chances of it not being a simulation are in the billions.
02:01:09.000It's like one in billions that we are not in a simulation.
02:01:16.000Well, I think it's easy to throw numbers out there, though, and not have them be founded in anything.
02:01:21.000There has to have been a thing before the simulation existed in order for that thing to create the simulation, for the simulation to emerge.
02:01:28.000It's super interesting also to me that a lot of the people that are proponents of the simulation argument tend to be in the tech world.
02:01:33.000And so I think it's in their favor to think that it's great to think that...
02:01:38.000Computers are like gods and to build this kind of mysticism around these technologies.
02:01:43.000But if you really want an explanation for what simulations are, there has to be a continuity between the physical world and the simulation.
02:01:50.000You have to be able to explain how it is that computation emerged on a planet and simulations became possible on our planet.
02:02:02.000So I think I'm much more interested in like what is the unification of the virtual and the physical and like how can you think about them as similar kinds of systems than to just say the universe is a simulation therefore I'll tell why the universe exists.
02:02:53.000Well, not only that, but the craziest theory of all is the primary theory of the creation of the universe itself, which is the Big Bang Theory, which is the absolute nuttiest theory that's ever existed.
02:03:03.000Everything that exists came out of something so small, was smaller than the head of a pin, and then in one massive moment, it creates the universe itself.
02:03:12.000And that's one that universally is agreed upon.
02:03:27.000I mean, but I think, you know, when you're trying to understand how reality works, it should surprise you.
02:03:33.000And it should have counterintuitive properties.
02:03:36.000I mean, I think that's how we really know we're learning things.
02:03:38.000And I'm also of the perspective that I think any theory can be replaced by a better one.
02:03:43.000Any explanation is not an ultimate explanation.
02:03:45.000So we're constantly learning more and we're constantly refining our ideas.
02:03:50.000Is that a problem in science in that when people have espoused a very particular idea of how the world works, they have a hard time backing off of that?
02:04:03.000I think scientists have a hard time doing that.
02:04:05.000And so I confront this a lot in my work because the kind of ideas we're proposing are new and They say very different things than sort of the standard canon would say.
02:04:18.000We're seeing structure that isn't part of the way that people talk scientifically about the nature of life or its fundamental properties.
02:04:25.000And what I see is a lot of resistance to new ideas because people think things are already explained.
02:04:48.000You'll get really prominent physicists, too, being like, oh, you get the first replicator on the planet, and then you get life.
02:04:55.000And the real hard problems are like...
02:04:57.000You know, the long-term future of the universe and things.
02:04:59.000And I think we're just reasoning based on assuming absolute knowledge sometimes when we don't have absolute knowledge.
02:05:06.000Do you think that some of that Well, some of that sort of trying to define things in a definite way that we do know it, we understand it, is in response to some religious ideas about the creation of life and that they propose that these scientific riddles have been solved because if you leave them open,
02:05:25.000that kind of opens the door to the possibility of a creator or of intelligent design and they want to kind of rush to say, no, we figured it out.
02:05:38.000There have been a lot of reactions to the work that we've been doing, both positive and interacting with people's dogmas in certain ways, so they're very reactionary, and then some people that are much more thoughtful and critical, and then some people that are very not thoughtful but very critical.
02:06:06.000But I think the thing that I've noticed is...
02:06:11.000Is that the way that different communities interact with the ideas are totally different.
02:06:14.000So it's like, you know, the evolutionary biologists, you know, where some of them, not all of them, you can't make blatant statements about any group, you know, really don't understand what we're trying to do.
02:06:23.000And then but the creationists don't either.
02:06:26.000So it's like you're in this weird space and they're dueling with each other because they think they have totally different ideas.
02:06:34.000I have been told that that field is particularly protective of its ideas because it's had to battle with intelligent design for so many decades and really stand its ground.
02:06:46.000And original life is like a really separate community from biology writ large.
02:06:50.000I was even told early in my career When I was a postdoc by a very prominent biologist that I shouldn't work on origins of life.
02:07:00.000I should just pick a standard biology problem.
02:07:02.000And I thought to myself, like, the one problem you want to pick is the one everyone can't answer because that's where you have the most progress.
02:07:08.000So it's just very funny to me that it's often it's swept under the rug as solved or too hard to solve, both simultaneously at the same time.
02:07:18.000It sounds insane to me that someone would tell you not to look into the origin of life.
02:09:22.000So I think, yeah, I think this gets to the idea of like living objects being deep in time because you like and this and I also think a lot about the nature of like abstract things versus physical things.
02:09:34.000And when we think of ideas as being abstract, it's just because, you know, like they're not physical objects yet in the same way that we see these kind of physical objects.
02:09:44.000But they come to our mind in some weird way that doesn't seem like you...
02:09:48.000Look, if I dig a hole, I know I dug that hole.
02:09:51.000I know I stuck that shovel, I exerted effort, I put force, I lifted the dirt out, I made the hole.
02:09:57.000So if someone says, where'd that hole come from?
02:10:08.000I was just laughing with my friends and a thought popped in.
02:10:11.000It wasn't a calculated thing where I worked on it forever and ever.
02:10:16.000It's just it got entered into my mind out of nowhere and then it came out my mouth and everybody laughed and I'm not sure where it came from.
02:11:08.000So you actually have an incredible amount of time in a small volume of space.
02:11:14.000That's what you are as an evolved object.
02:11:16.000At least that's sort of my current thinking with this theory that we're developing and how we're trying to test the transition to life.
02:11:22.000And so where are those things coming from?
02:11:24.000They're coming from the fact that you are an architecture that's deep in time and you have all of this internal space in you.
02:11:29.000That's And if you are reading people's work and interacting with people's research and you're learning things that people have discovered, you're essentially interacting with their time.
02:11:46.000You're looking at all their traces of time and you're doing it over time and that's becoming part of your architecture in time and all of that structure is still in you.
02:11:54.000And the more time you spend on it, the more you'll absorb that.
02:12:09.000You know, I think about time and information kind of being the same thing, but we're just all of that causation bundled up in like these small...
02:12:58.000They don't look like they're in physical space, like knock on wood on the table, but the table is like an object that has like 4 billion years of history in it.
02:13:05.000So it's like the physicality of the table is mostly in time, not space.
02:13:10.000And that's true, I think, for us as living things.
02:13:52.000But this whole thing, if you could watch it take place, I wonder if...
02:13:59.000I've often thought, like, there's so many mysteries of history, but I've almost wondered that if...
02:14:08.000If calculations get to a point, if computers get to a point where they could examine all of the objects in all the places that they are currently in the world and all the force that would cause them to exist and all the history that caused them to exist,
02:14:25.000you could accurately go back and see exactly what happened every step of the way.
02:14:36.000It's an interesting kind of thought experiment about like whether the universe is deterministic and fully predictable.
02:14:42.000And I think in the past, like one of the reasons that we think the laws of physics are deterministic is because in the past you can determine things, but I think the future is undetermined until it happens.
02:14:52.000So it might be possible, but I don't know how much you can reconstruct because things die out, like extinction of entire lines of life or like things disappear, like they don't exist anymore.
02:15:01.000And so I think that you can reconstruct the past, but I don't believe personally in an exact history for the universe.
02:15:07.000Well, if we can reconstruct the past based on our current understanding, which is fairly limited and much greater than it used to be three or four hundred years ago, if we could expand that knowledge for the next thousand, five hundred thousand years ago, whatever it is from now into the future,
02:15:23.000to develop some sort of a computation system, some sort of an ability to have an accurate assessment of everything that took place, And then be able to lay it out how it took place because of all the objects and all the places and all the species that died off and all the records when they do core samples and they understand the iridium content,
02:15:42.000which meant asteroids impacted here and carbon, which is some sort of a fire here.
02:15:47.000And just calculate it out where you can get some accurate...
02:15:53.000But I think in practice, I'm not even sure that's physically possible because as you're like trying to compute everything that the universe has done, you also have to like make sure that that physical thing actually can calculate itself and continue to exist in the future.
02:16:06.000So if you're like there, it's not it's it's it's.
02:16:11.000It's an interesting thought experiment about how much of the universe can be computed.
02:16:15.000But you have to deal with resource bounds.
02:16:17.000And so you have to deal with an actual physical implementation of that computer, and that computer has to be able to persist long enough to do the calculations and have enough energy to do it, which means there has to be things external to the computer.
02:16:42.000I was going to say infinite resolution, but I don't believe in infinities anyway, but like really precise resolution that you could reconstruct everything that has happened in the history of the universe.
02:16:51.000I think our universe forgets things, and I think it does so on purpose because that's part of the, not purpose, but like not in an anthropocentric way.
02:16:58.000But it does so because the act of forgetting things is actually in part how the universe generates novelty.
02:17:05.000If it remembered everything in the past and only those things persisted, like we live in an incredibly boring universe.
02:17:10.000We live in a universe that's constantly creating things and sometimes it, you know, like some of those things can't be generated anymore but it makes more space for other things to be created.
02:17:27.000But I have a really different view of mathematics than most people.
02:17:29.000Like, I think mathematics is a physical system that exists on our planet.
02:17:32.000And I don't believe in, like, a Euclidean world that's, like, a perfect mathematical form.
02:17:36.000I think they're a thing that our biosphere has invented.
02:17:38.000And one of the reasons that we think mathematics is universal...
02:17:41.000It's because it's a language that we understand that actually is information that's embedded in pretty much every object in our environment.
02:17:51.000But it doesn't mean that it has universal reach.
02:17:54.000Yeah, there's some problems with mathematics too, right?
02:17:58.000Eric Weinstein, who's a mathematician, is kind of explaining the number two.
02:18:02.000There's a bunch of different things that are bizarre with math.
02:18:05.000So it almost hints to an incomplete understanding of mathematics, even as we currently know it.
02:18:13.000I mean, you know, it always perplexes me that, you know, people accepted Euclidean geometry as the only form of geometry for, like, 2,000 years.
02:18:20.000I mean, it's, like, literally, like, that was it.
02:18:22.000And then we were like, oh, well, there could be non-Euclidean geometries, and we just never imagined them because, like, they don't reflect our physical environment.
02:18:52.000Well, I worry about this a lot with the nature of the relationship between the theory of computation and assembly theory, for example.
02:18:57.000So, computation is a way that we kind of understand the formalization of mathematical things that we actually can You know, algorithmically do, right?
02:19:08.000So anything that you can calculate, you can compute.
02:19:12.000And so there are obviously, like, uncomputable numbers and things like that, but they live in some abstract, you know, like...
02:19:18.000But anyway, so assembly theory has some features that look like theories of complexity and computation in that, you know, like people talk about a minimal complexity for a computer program as being the way that you talk about complexity, and we talk about a minimal causal history to construct an object...
02:19:35.000But I think what assembly theory is that is a bit different and super interesting is it's NP, like, it's actually hard to compute the assembly index.
02:19:44.000It's harder than classes of computational algorithms that are kind of similar to it.
02:19:48.000But the universe generates these molecules that are computationally incredibly complex, but causally the universe can generate them.
02:19:57.000And so you couldn't compute necessarily on a supercomputer the complexity of a cell.
02:20:05.000Like you're saying, could I reconstruct the whole history?
02:20:07.000Yet the universe can generate that structure.
02:20:09.000So it suggests to me that there's something else going on and the space is actually a lot larger than what you can computationally compress.
02:20:19.000I think that the best language I have for it right now, and I really don't know, like I'm really struggling with this in my work right now, and Lee and I are going back and forth about these things all the time, but is causation.
02:20:32.000And also that the other part about like why the universe is maybe not computable is Is this mechanism of novelty generation?
02:20:40.000If the universe genuinely creates novelty that can't be predicted on prior history, and the future really is not determined, that's just suggesting something fundamentally different than the way that we understand the way the world works right now.
02:20:53.000And I don't know what it is, but I think it has to do with something with causation and something about the physicality of objects.
02:21:16.000I think, I mean, when I think about, like, what life is, like, why does life exist, I think the universe is trying to maximize the number of things that exist.
02:21:24.000Because if you think, like, things exist or they don't, and, you know, like, the universe is the constructor for things to get to exist, like, it's building, all of existence is, you know, like, what physically exists in our universe.
02:21:36.000You know, wouldn't it be great if, like, there was a principle of nature where it's just trying to pack as much existence in as possible?
02:21:42.000Well, it makes sense also if physical things these human beings create and life creates physical things, that that would be the best way to maximize it.
02:21:53.000Yes, which is also why I think we have free will.
02:21:56.000Because if we act independently, we're actually more creative than if we didn't.
02:22:00.000Do you ever butt heads with determinism people?
02:22:51.000I think we do have a tendency to do that.
02:22:54.000I've developed that through having so many conversations with people that I don't see eye to eye with on the podcast of instead of arguing with them, I try to ask them how they think, why they think, the way they think, what is it, challenge a little bit just to try to get a response out of them and try to figure out what is your process and why is it so different than mine.
02:23:12.000Well, that's good for you too because you grow more and you understand more by doing that.
02:23:16.000Doing this thing over the last 15 years has been like the most radical, unexpected education that I could have ever had.
02:23:27.000I think that is something that's really hard is like if you close yourself to ideas that you don't agree with, you're closing off like yourself to potential to grow.
02:23:40.000And these ideas, the problem when we start defending them is like, then we stop looking at them.
02:23:47.000We put them as like a protected thing that we're trying to argue against and we're trying to, instead of invite criticism and some sort of an analysis of our thought process, we're trying to defend it.
02:23:59.000No, so I'm happy professionally also to change my mind all the time.
02:25:44.000For me, so what happened was when I started reading assembly theory, I started to see that there was a really different structure, especially associated with the way information gets embodied in physical objects and the history being physical in the objects.
02:25:59.000This idea that like, you know, you can't, you actually can't, you know, in standard physics, you would say like an emergent thing like us can be reduced to our atoms and all of the fundamental description is down there.
02:26:08.000But what you've done is stripped that physical system of all the time inside of it, right?
02:26:13.000So elementary particles, they don't require memory for the universe to generate them.
02:26:20.000But things like us require memory and And things that know how to build things like us in order for us to exist.
02:26:26.000And then once we exist, we're encoding all of that history and information in us as objects.
02:26:31.000All of that causation is in us, which means that all of the selection over all the histories to generate us is still part of us and allows us to actually work in this combinatorial space that we can actually generate new structures.
02:26:45.000And that is actually, like, where free will comes from.
02:26:50.000It's basically if you assume you can't reduce things to elementary particles all the time and you actually have time in objects, things become causal agents, actually have some navigability over the combinatorial space of the possibilities they live in that they have some control over.
02:27:20.000But it's like either people think the universe is random and you absolutely have free will and control over everything.
02:27:24.000I think it's fully deterministic and you have no freedom.
02:27:27.000But actually what it is is determinism is built over lineages because things get selected to exist and they become part of the regular structure of our universe.
02:27:35.000So determinism itself is an emergent property and things that are very deterministic like us actually have more causal control over the kind of things that can happen to them but they can't control everything.
02:28:00.000I mean to think that the universe is all like one human concept anyway is too simplistic.
02:28:05.000It's like it's deterministic or it's not deterministic.
02:28:07.000Actually, there are cases where you can model it as being deterministic because you're looking at the past and there are places you cannot model it as being deterministic because you're looking at the future.
02:28:26.000Some of the information's there, like we were talking about before, like, maids will probably still be present 50 years from now, so, like, I might be able to predict some things about the future, but the novelty's really hard.
02:29:52.000I think the issue about why people really want to say free will doesn't exist is because it's not compatible with standard theories in physics.
02:30:09.000And free will lives in the space of whatever physics describes life and mind.
02:30:13.000It doesn't live in the physics of gravitation or the physics of quantum particles.
02:30:17.000Those are totally different areas of physical reality that have nothing to do with you as an evolved structure over 4 billion years that now has agency in the universe.
02:30:27.000You're a different component of physical reality than those theories are describing.
02:30:31.000And I think, you know, we have a tendency to think physics is complete.
02:30:34.000We have done this throughout, like, the history of physics.
02:30:38.000It's like every century, they think the last century did it.
02:31:07.000And I'm just like, are you not like understanding the dichotomy here between what we teach like students and like how we talk about where we are now in history?
02:31:16.000It is crazy that we repeat these problems, repeat these issues over and over and over again.
02:31:23.000And we go, oh, back then they were stupid.
02:31:24.000Don't you think in the future, if you could just look at the history of human beings and what they believed, and don't you think there's got to be some stuff like that right now?
02:31:36.000No, I definitely think fundamental physics has a very bright future of having some really fundamentally earth-shattering...
02:31:47.000Like, ways of thinking about things that I don't even think, like, our current theories are, like, that, like, they're going to be replaced by things even more awesome.
02:32:09.000So it's funny that people want to just accept what previous generations taught them as, like, absolute fact.
02:32:15.000And then not be confronted with the changing times, the changing understanding of the world around us, the changing sets of observations.
02:32:22.000Because I can imagine many thousands of years ago when humans were still being hunter-gatherers, not really thinking we have a lot of causal agency in the world.
02:32:33.000You see the seasons, you have no control over them.
02:32:36.000Obviously, we're born out of this idea that the universe is objective and existing outside of us because of a deep history of not having control.
02:32:45.000But now, in a modern technological society, we see how much of reality we've shaped and changed.
02:32:50.000I don't know how you could hold that view anymore.
02:32:54.000It's very deep in our history that we think these things, but the evidence around us right now is completely to the contrary.
02:33:01.000And this also seems like an emergent property of human beings.
02:33:07.000But I think our ability to abstract and our ability to build technologies based on our abstractions and like what we're doing now is fundamentally different than anything that our biosphere has done over the last four billion years.
02:33:25.000I think it's quite possible there's something else out there that's a little bit more interesting than us.
02:33:29.000Yeah, I'm sure there is, but I don't think that we're ever going to recognize what that thing is until we actually really appreciate what we are.
02:33:42.000Oh, so I just, I think it's not possible for, like, I guess people want to say the universe is infinite in size, and I don't know what that means.
02:33:52.000I think it just is a placeholder of, like, we don't understand.
02:33:56.000So infinity helps in, like, certain theories of physics, like, to actually make your mathematics tractable.
02:34:03.000But to say it's actually, like, a physical thing, to me, is...
02:34:10.000And it doesn't make any sense because I think if you assume, you know, like there's an infinity of things that could exist and that infinity of things exists somewhere, right?
02:34:20.000Like so you have like, you know, Max Tegmark's mathematical universe hypothesis, all mathematical objects exist somewhere and obviously there's like an infinite number of them.
02:34:27.000It doesn't actually explain anything about here.
02:34:30.000Or like, why do we have the things that we have in this universe?
02:34:33.000And I think what infinity is, is it's a feature of humans' imagination to define the space of what's possible.
02:34:42.000And it physically exists as the boundary of that space.
02:34:45.000But it doesn't physically exist out there as a real physical thing.
02:34:51.000There is no infinite possibilities of a multiverse.
02:34:54.000Those are abstractions that exist in human minds that allow us to think about how the world works and reason in what we can actually construct here as far as theories we understand or things we can build.
02:35:06.000But the concept of infinity, if the universe is not infinite, then the universe has a defined boundary.
02:35:52.000One of the most perplexing theories that I've ever heard was the concept of in the center of every galaxy there's a supermassive black hole and that going through that supermassive black hole you will go into another universe.
02:36:13.000Yeah, no, I mean, well, there's a lot of theories about like the multiverse, and I think they're intellectually interesting.
02:36:19.000And they bring interesting philosophy into physics, but I don't know that I can assign physical realism to To anything that we can't observe directly.
02:36:28.000And I would rather take the mathematics and the theories of physics themselves.
02:36:33.000I do these thought experiments about the theoretical physics of theoretical physicists.
02:36:38.000It's like if I were outside of myself and I was watching what I was as a theoretical physicist writing down equations and trying to describe the world, what would those mathematical objects look like as physical things?
02:36:48.000And so this to me is the perspective that I find much more productive because I don't think people have looked at that Through that lens at what mathematics is.
02:36:56.000We tend to take the Euclidean and Plato's cave type paradigm from the ancient Greeks that there's a perfect world of forms and we're just seeing the shadows of this perfect reality.
02:37:07.000And I think the universe is constructing itself and mathematics is a particular thing our universe has constructed that enables things to be possible that wouldn't be possible without mathematics existing.
02:37:18.000The people that are proponents of this concept of infinity and that do believe in it, when you steel man that, what's the best argument for it?
02:37:27.000Well, I think the idea, it's kind of like what you're saying.
02:37:30.000If you take the limit, it actually is consistent with our equations to assume that the universe could be infinite or the time in the future could be infinite.
02:37:41.000And to them, I think it seems like it has some physicality to it.
02:37:47.000But it always seems to me to be a placeholder of the boundary.
02:37:54.000But also it depends on what you think is satisfactory.
02:37:57.000So if you want to believe a multiverse hypothesis and there's sort of an infinite number of realities because you find that more explanatory to assume that everything exists and therefore we're just one thing in that space, some people find that satisfactory.
02:38:11.000I don't find that satisfactory because it doesn't explain why we exist.
02:38:22.000Yeah, but it's a hard set of questions around infinity and mathematics just generally.
02:38:27.000And I find it really fun to think about.
02:38:30.000The multiverse to me is the most bizarre mind experiment because there's no evidence that it exists, but it's a concept that's universally shared a lot and it's debated a lot.
02:38:43.000Some people, they'll pontificate on it, but you might be thinking about nonsense.
02:38:48.000So I think, you know, another reason I don't really think infinity is like a real construct is I really am a big fan of Nick Jissen.
02:38:57.000He's a physicist that's kind of arguing that real numbers aren't real.
02:39:00.000And what he means by that is like if you want to compute a real number and like, you know, we use real numbers like, you know, like they require infinite precision to compute all the digits.
02:39:11.000And, you know, you're assuming a lot of resource for a universe built on real numbers because basically it means anything that you look at, you can look at with infinite resolution.
02:39:20.000And it's probably the case, especially if you think the universe is constructed or even if you believe in a simulation argument, that there has to be a granularity there because the universe has to do these things in finite time with finite resource.
02:39:32.000There isn't evidence that there's infinite time or infinite resource in our universe.
02:39:36.000And therefore, if you want something to actually be physically real, the universe has to be able to implement it.
02:39:42.000The universe cannot implement infinity in finite time.
02:40:15.000But it's like the idea only the present exists.
02:40:17.000So the past is rolled up in the present.
02:40:19.000I think that the past structure exists in the present and the present is now constructing the next moment, right?
02:40:25.000But the space, like the future is expanding.
02:40:29.000It's getting larger and larger and larger because there's so much combinatorial structure, like all these past histories now entwined in the modern structure, that they can now intertwine to make the future bigger and bigger.
02:40:40.000And this is from our current observable position.
02:40:50.000So it's interesting you say that because, you know, most theories of physics are actually constructed with the observer living outside the universe, right?
02:40:57.000So like Newton had this conception of, you know, like you could take a God's eye view, literal God's eye view of the universe and describe it objectively from the outside.
02:41:06.000And all of our theories of physics have this problem.
02:41:08.000This is why quantum mechanics is so existentially hard, because it confronts us with the fact that if you have a physics where the observer is not part of the physics, it leads to really big problems with how we structure theories of physics.
02:41:19.000And this is why there's no one quantum theory.
02:41:22.000There's a whole bunch of interpretations of quantum experiments, and people call those different theories of quantum mechanics.
02:41:28.000But there's no accepted standard interpretation that people would point to and say, This is the theory of quantum mechanics.
02:41:42.000But it's not quite on the same footing as, like, general relativity, which is like a widely accepted theory that describes a set of observations.
02:41:50.000But it's because quantum mechanics has observers and people don't know how to interpret the observer.
02:41:54.000And we don't have a physics that was built from starting from observers like us, things like us that are constructing theories of physics.
02:42:01.000How do we think about the world and put us inside the world?
02:42:04.000And I think a theory of life has to have that property.
02:42:07.000It has to account for the fact that we live inside the universe.
02:42:41.000Isn't it interesting that some people that are at the top of their field still have these bizarre ideas that you just completely disagree with?
02:42:51.000I've had that since, you know, it's very funny because I think sometimes people are like, oh, Sarah, you're really successful in your career.
02:43:06.000I just like I'm deeply curious and I want to understand things.
02:43:10.000And I think, you know, you have to be able to follow what you rationally think and what the evidence is telling you and the questions you think are interesting to answer.
02:43:18.000And I think the thing that I guess I've done is like the questions I want to answer are not ones that people have really taken as seriously as I've taken them because of the reasons that they think they're not answerable or they're already answered.
02:43:29.000And I just see this gaping hole in our understanding of reality that needs to be filled.
02:43:34.000Well, listen, Sarah, I'm glad you're out there.
02:43:45.000It actually is out today called Life as No One Knows It, The Physics of Life's Emergence, where I talk about assembly theory and, you know, like what's needed to solve the physics of life.