Sara Imari Walker

I have.

I think about it a lot.

Yeah, no, it's okay.

Well, I worry about this a lot with, like, the nature of the relationship between the theory of computation and assembly theory, for example.

So computation is, you know, a way that we kind of understand the formalization of mathematical things that we actually can...

you know, algorithmically do, right?

So anything that you can calculate, you can compute.

And so there are obviously like uncomputable numbers and things like that, but they live in some abstract, you know, like, but anyway, so assembly theory has some features that look like theories of complexity and computation in that, you know, like people will 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, right?

But I think what assembly theory is that is a bit different and super interesting is it's NP like it's it's actually hard to compute the assembly index.

It's harder than classes of computational algorithms that are kind of similar to it.

But the universe generates these molecules that are computationally incredibly complex, but causally the universe can generate them.

And so like you couldn't compute necessarily like on a supercomputer like you know the the complexity of a cell like you're saying like could I reconstruct the whole history yet the universe can generate that structure.

So it suggests to me that there's something else going on in the space is actually a lot larger than what you can computationally compress.

I think that I 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 and also that the the other part about like why the universe is maybe not computable is.

is this mechanism of novelty generation.

If 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.

And 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.

Like objects really do exist.

They really do encode their histories.