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
Yes. Lots of wiggle.
Do you wiggle?
No, I like playing with words a lot. You know, it's very funny because I know you talked about this with Lee, but people are so offended by the writing of the paper that came out last fall. And it was interesting because the ways that we use words were not the way that people were interacting with the words.
And I think that was part of the mismatch where we were trying to use words in a new way because we were trying to describe something that hadn't been described adequately before, but we had to use the words that everyone else uses for things that are related.
And so it was really interesting to watch that clash play out in real time for me, being someone that tries to be so precise with my word usage, knowing that it's always going to be vague.
I use it as an experimental platform for that reason.
Like, you know, the rant, like how things, you know, it's like usually based on interest, but I think it would be really nice if you got like 10% of your Twitter feed was random stuff sampled from other places. That'd be kind of fun. True.
Yes. Oh, that would be fantastic.
Yeah. Usually it takes a lot of clicking to find that out. Yeah. So it'd be better if it was sorted. Yeah.
This goes into like the, you know, like, are you on the boundary of insane or not? But, you know, when you think about the structure of the physics of what we are that deeply, it really changes your conception of things. And, you know, going to this idea of the universe...
you know, being kind of small in physical space compared to how big it is in time and like how large we are, it really makes me question about whether there's any other structure that's like this giant crystal in time, this giant causal structure like our biosphere slash technosphere is anywhere else in the universe.
But I think the universe is expanding, right? It's expanding in space, but in assembly theory, it's also expanding in time. And actually, that's driving the expansion in space. And expansion in time is also driving the expansion in the sort of combinatorial space of things on our planet. So that's driving the sort of pace of technology and all the other things.
So time is driving all of these things, which is a little bit crazy to think that the universe is just getting bigger because time is getting bigger. But the sort of visual that gets built in my brain about that is the structure that we're building on this planet is packing more and more time in this very small volume of space, right?
Because our planet hasn't changed its physical size in 4 billion years, but there's a ton of of causation and recursion and time, whatever word you wanna use, information packed into this. And I think this is also embedded in sort of the virtualization of our technologies or the abstraction of language and all of these things. These things that seem really abstract are just really deep in time.
And so what that looks like is you have a planet that becomes increasingly virtualized And so it's getting bigger and bigger in time, but not really expanding out in space. And the rest of space is like kind of moving away from it. Again, it's a sort of exponentially receding horizon.
And I'm just not sure how far into this evolutionary process something gets, if it can ever see that there's another such structure out there.
Virtual as sort of a play on virtual reality. and like simulation theories. But virtual also in a sense of, you know, we talk about virtual particles in particle physics, which, you know, they are very critical to doing calculations about predicting the properties of real particles, but we don't observe them directly. So what I mean by virtual here is virtual reality for me
things that appear virtual, appear abstract, are just things that are very deep in time, in the structure of the things that we are. So if you think about you as a four billion year old object, the things that are part of you, like your capacity to use language or think abstractly or have mathematics are just very, you know, like deep temporal structures.
That's why they look like they're informational and abstract. is because they're existing in this temporal part of you, but not necessarily spatial part.
There's a couple ideas that are embedded here. So one of them comes again from Paul. He wrote this book years ago about the eerie silence and why we're alone. And he concluded the book with this idea of quintelligence or something, but this idea that really advanced intelligence would basically just
Showing 241–260 of 510 · page 13 of 26
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