Sarah Walker
speaker
510 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard Jun 2024
Sarah Walker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
There is a- There is a transition.
I think it's actually abrupt. I've never been able to say that in my entire career before. I've always gone back and forth about whether the original life was kind of gradual or abrupt. I think it's very abrupt.
It snaps. Okay, but- We'll be poetic today. But no, I think there's like a lot of random exploration. And then there's like, and then the structure, the possibility space just collapses on the structure kind of really fast. that can reinforce its own existence because it's basically fighting against non-existence.
I don't know. We can make songs out of all of these.
So there was this website. I forgot what it was. But it's like a neural network that just generates a human face. And it's like this person does not exist. I think that's what it's called, right? So you can just click on that all day. And you can look at people all day that don't exist. All of those people exist in that space of things that don't exist.
Yeah, so the struggle of the quote, the struggle for existence is, you know, that goes all the way back to Darwin's writing about natural selection, right? So like the whole idea of survival of the fittest is everything struggling to exist, this predator-prey dynamic. And the fittest survive. And so the struggle for existence is really what selection is all about. And that's true.
We do see things that do exist competing to continue to exist. But each time that, like, if you think about this space of possibilities and the You know, each time the universe, you know, generates a new structure or like an object that exists generates a new structure along this causal chain. It's generating something that exists that never existed before.
And each time that we make that kind of decision, we're excluding a huge piece of possibilities. And so actually like as this process of increasing assembly index, it's not just that like the space that these objects exist in is exponentially growing, but there are objects in that space that are exponentially receding away from us.
So they're becoming exponentially less and less likely to ever exist. And so existence excludes a huge number of things.
Yeah, it is in part an accident because I think some of the structure that gets generated is driven a bit by randomness. I think a lot of it, you know, so, you know, one of the conceptions that we have in assembly theory is, you know, the universe is random at its base. You can see this in chemistry, like unconstrained chemical reactions are pretty random.
And then, and also quantum mechanics, you know, there's lots of places that give evidence for that. And deterministic structures emerge by things that can causally reinforce themselves and maintain persistence over time. And so we are some of the most deterministic things in the universe.
And so, like, we can generate very regular structure and we can generate new structure along a particular lineage. But the possibility space at the sort of tips, like the things we can generate next, is really huge. So there's some stochasticity in what we actually, you know, generate. instantiate as like the next structures that get built in the biosphere.
It's not completely deterministic because the space of future possibilities is always larger than the space of things that exist now.
So I said before, right now, I think the original life is a continuous process on Earth. I think this idea of combinatorial spaces that our biosphere generates, not just chemistry, but other spaces, often cross this threshold where they then allow themselves to persist with a particular regular structure over time. So language is another one where the space of
you know, possible configurations of the 26 letters of the English alphabet is astronomically large, but we use with very high regularity certain structures. And then we associate meaning to them because of the regularity of like how much we use them, right?
So meaning is an emergent property of the causation and the objects and like how often they recur and what the relationship of the recurrence is to other objects.
Well, this is why you can play with language so much, actually. So words don't really carry meaning. It's just about how you lace them together.
Obviously, as a speaker of a given language, you don't have a lot of room with a given word to wiggle, but you do have a certain amount of room to push the meanings of words. Yeah. And I do this all the time, and you have to do it with the kind of work that I do, because if you want to...
to discover an abstraction, like some kind of concept that we don't understand yet, it means we don't have the language. And so the words that we have are inadequate to describe the things. This is why we're having a hard time talking about assembly theory, because it's a newly emerging idea.
And so I'm constantly playing with words in different ways to try to convey the meaning that is actually behind the words, but it's hard to do.
Showing 221–240 of 510 · page 12 of 26
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