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.
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Because the nice thing is if, when you do compression in computer science, we're wandering a bit here, but it's kind of worth wondering, I think in you, you, um, assume you have instantaneous access to all the information in the memory. Yeah. In assembly theory, you say, no, you don't get access to that memory until you've done the work.
And then when you don't access that memory, you can have access, but not to the next one. And this is how in assembly theory, we talk about the four universes, the assembly universe, the assembly possible, and the assembly contingent, and then the assembly observed. And they're all scales in this combinatorial universe.
Yep, so the assembly universe is like anything goes. It's just combinatorial kind of explosion in everything. So that's the biggest one? That's the biggest one. It's massive.
Yeah.
So, yeah, so assembly universe, everything goes. Yep. Assembly possible, laws of physics come in, in this case in chemistry bonds. In assembly, so that means... Those are actually constraints, I guess. Yes. And they're the only constraints. They're the constraints of the base. So the way to look at it, you've got all your atoms, they're quantized, you can just bung them together.
So then you can become a kind of... So in the way in computer science speak, I suppose the assembly universe is just like no laws of physics. Things can fly through mountains beyond the speed of light. In the assembly possible, you have to apply the laws of physics, but... you can get access to all the motifs instantaneously with no effort. So that means you could make anything.
Then the assembly contingent says, no, you can't have access to the highly assembled object in the future until you've done the work in the past on the causal chain. And that's really the really interesting shift where you go from assembly possible to assembly contingent. That is really the key thing in assembly theory that says you cannot just have instantaneous access to all those memories.
You have to have done the work somehow. The universe has to have somehow built a system that allows you to select that path rather than other paths. And then the final thing is, the assembly observed is basically us saying, oh, these are the things we actually see. We can go backwards now and understand that they have been created by this causal process. Yeah.
Yeah. That's the thing that does the selection. You could think about it in terms of a von Neumann constructor versus a selection, a ribosome, a Tesla plant assembling Teslas. The difference between the assembly universe in Tesla land and the Tesla factory is Tesla Everyone says, no, Tesla's are just easy. They just spring out. You know how to make them all.
The Tesla factory, you have to put things in sequence and out comes a Tesla.
Yes, this is really nice. Super important point is that when I talk about the universe having a memory or there's some magic, it's not that. It's that tells you that there must be a process encoded somewhere in physical reality, be it a cell, a Tesla factory, or something else that is making that object. I'm not saying there's some kind of
woo woo memory in the universe you know morphic resonance or something i'm saying that there is an actual causal process that is being directed constrained in some way um so it's not kind of just making everything yeah but lee what's the factory that made the factory
This is the question. Well, it's the first interesting question that I want to answer out of four. I think the factory emerges in the interplay between the environment and the objects that are being built. And here, let me, I'll have a go at explaining to you the shortest path. So why is the shortest path important?
Imagine you've got, I'm going to have to go chemistry for a moment and then abstract it. So imagine you've got, a given environment that you have a budget of atoms you're just flinging together and the objective of those atoms that have been flung together in say molecule A have to make they decompose so molecules decompose over time so the molecules decompose
in this environment, in this magic environment, have to not die, but they do die. They have a half-life. So the only way the molecules can get through that environment out the other side, let's pretend the environment is a box, you can go in and out without dying, and there's just an infinite supply of atoms coming, or, well, a large supply,
The molecule gets built, but the molecule that is able to template itself being built and survives in the environment will basically reign supreme. Now, let's say that molecule takes 10 steps and it's using a finite set of atoms. Now, let's say another molecule, smart-ass molecule we'll call it, comes in and can survive in that environment. and can copy itself, but it only needs five steps.
The molecule that only needs five steps, because both molecules are being destroyed, but they're creating themselves faster they can be destroyed, you can see that the shortest path reigns supreme. So the shortest path tells us something super interesting about the minimal amount of information required to propagate that motif in time and space.
And it's just like a kind of, it seems to be like some kind of conservation law.
Yeah. Yes and no, because there are other things. So in the limit, yes, because you want to tell the difference between things that have required a factory to build them and just random processes. But you can find instances where the shortest path isn't taken for an individual object, an individual function. And people go, ah... that means the shortest path isn't right.
And then I say, well, I don't know. I think it's right still because, so of course, because there are other driving forces. It's not just one molecule. Now, when you start to, now you start to consider two objects, you have a joint assembly space and it's not, now it's a compromise between not just making A and B in the shortest path.
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