David Wallace
speaker
1,940 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 20 Jul
David Wallace’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, compelling but not I think um
Totally unchallengible.
I mean that's a broader question about emergence, isn't it?
I mean I think uh you
You hear a lot said about the autonomy of different levels of science, but we and then people will talk about the extent to which some of our biology is autonomous from physics and things, but and there's obviously some degree to which that's true, certainly it's true methodologically.
But it's also true that there are definitely contexts in which we're confident
that physics will give the right answer for a prediction, even for a complicated biological system.
If I if I take some exquisitely complicated animal
And then I drop it in a volcano.
Um we all know what's gonna happen to it.
Um we don't need to consider
um biology to answer that it will just become incinerated.
Um
Uh, even more so by dropping the middle of a nuclear explosion or something.
And we understand why as well.
We've got a clear story is what's going on.
We and the story says the thing is made up of an extremely complicated tangle
of atoms and molecules and the methods of physics are not very reliable in telling you what that complicated tangle will do, because as we were saying earlier, they're optimized towards quite simple systems.
But we still think that ultimately the laws that govern the system are the laws of physics.
And one of the tells that we think that is if you if you put the system in a case where the complexity comes under control, like you drop it in a fire.
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