Lee Cronin
speaker
545 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2023
last heard Jun 2024
Lee Cronin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
um determined to try and crack the the non-life to life transition looking at networks and molecules and that might help us think about it the mechanism but certainly the future is bigger than the past in in my conception of the universe and some conception of the universe and by the way that's not obvious right that's what was just kind of the future being bigger than the past
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That one is a big one. That one's a really big one. I think so. But I think it's entirely... Because look, we have the second law. And right now, I mean, we don't need the second law if the future's bigger than the past. It follows naturally. So why are we retrofitting all these sticking plasters onto our reality to hold onto a timeless universe?
But isn't that really exciting?
Yeah, it's kind of crazy, but obvious. I mean, I suppose it sounds obvious, yeah, if it's true. But the nice thing is you can... So the reason why assembly theory turned me on to that was that let's just start in the present and look at all the complex molecules and go backwards in time and understand how evolutionary processes gave rise to them. It's not at all obvious that taxol...
which is one of the most complex natural products produced by biology, was going to be invented by biology. It's an accident. You know, taxol is unique to Earth. There's no taxol elsewhere in the universe. And taxol was not decided by the initial conditions. It was decided by this kind of interplay between the... So the past simply... is embedded in the present.
It gives some features, but why the past doesn't map to the future one-to-one is because the universe is too big to contain itself. That gives space for creativity, novelty, and some things which are unpredictable.
I think that this falls into the Brouwer-Hilbert trap. So how do you get a cellular automata to produce a complexity? You have a computer, you generate a display, and you map the change of that in time. Mm-hmm. There are some CAs repeat, like functions.
It's fascinating to me that for pi, there is a formula where you can go to the millionth decimal place of pi and read out the number without having to go there. But there are some numbers where you can't do that. You have to just crank through. Whether it's Wolframian computational irreducibility or some other thing, it doesn't matter. But these CAs...
That complexity, is that just complexity or a number that is basically you're mining that number in time? Is that just a display screen for that number, that function?
No, because the complexity on Earth has a copy number and an assembly index associated with it. That CA is just a number running.
Well, it does in the human, where we're looking at humans producing different rules, but then it's nested on selection. So those CAs are produced by selection. Yeah. I mean, the CA is such a fascinating pseudo complexity generator. What I would love to do is understand, quantify the degree of surprise in a CA and write it long enough.
Mm-hmm.
But what I guess that means is we have to instantiate, we have to have a number of experiments where we're generating different rules and running them time steps. But, ah, got it. CAs are mining novelty in the future by iteration, right? And you're like, oh, that's great, that's great. You didn't predict it. Some rules you can predict what's going to happen. Other rules you can't.
So for me, if anything, CAs are evidence that the universe is too big to contain itself. Because otherwise you'd know what the rules are going to do forever more.
Yeah.
You need... Three things. You need the initial conditions, you need the rules, and you need time, iteration to mine it out. Without the coordinate, you can't get it out.
And you can't predict it from initial conditions. If you could, then it'd be fine.
I think it's, yeah, you have to have the resource. Yeah. Because time is a fundamental resource. And yeah, I'm becoming, I think I had a major epiphany about randomness, but I keep doing that every two days and then it goes away again. It's random. You're a time fundamentalist. You should be as well. If you believe in free will, the only conclusion is time is fundamental.
Otherwise, you cannot have free will. It logically follows.
Looking backwards in time, and that's correct. The universe is.
Showing 381–400 of 545 · page 20 of 28
← Previous
Next →