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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And I think it's really important to recognize that because if you want to ask a question of why does life emerge in chemistry, well, life emerges in chemistry because life is the physics of how the universe selects what gets to exist. And those things get created along historically contingent pathways and memory and all the other stuff that we can talk about.
But the universe has to actually make historically contingent choices in chemistry because it can't exhaust all possible molecules.
Oh, if it's not chemical. So I think some of the things that have evolved on our biosphere, I would call as much alive... as chemistry, as a cell, but they seem much more abstract. So for example, I think language is alive, I think, or at least life. I think memes are, I think- You're saying language is life.
Life maybe not, maybe not alive, but I don't, I actually don't know where I stand exactly on that. I've been thinking about that a little bit more lately, but mathematics too. And it's interesting because people think that math has this platonic reality that exists outside of our universe. And I think it's a feature of our biosphere and it's telling us something about the structure of ourselves.
And I find that really interesting because when you would sort of internalize all of these things that we noticed about the world and you start asking, well, what did these look like if I was, you know, something outside of myself observing these systems that we're all embedded in, what would that structure look like?
And I think we look really different than the way that we talk about what we look like to each other. Yeah.
I think it's the fact that it's open-ended in some sense. It's another open-ended combinatorial space and the recursive properties of it allow creativity to happen. which is what you see with the revolution in the last century with Gödel's theorem and Turing. And there's clear places where mathematics notices holes in the universe.
Yeah.
Definitely not chemical. I mean, chemistry is one substrate.
Well, specifically it's Darwinian evolution.
And I think Darwinian evolution is a problem, but the reason that that definition is a problem is not because evolution is in the definition, but because the implication is that evolution you know, that most people would want to make is that an individual is alive.
And the evolutionary process, at least the Darwinian evolutionary process, most evolutionary processes, they don't happen at the level of individuals. They happen at the level of populations. So again, you would be saying something like what we saw with the self-sustaining definition, which is that populations are alive, but individuals aren't because populations evolve and individuals don't.
And obviously, maybe you're alive because your gut microbiome is evolving, but Lex as an entity right now is not evolving by canonical theories of evolution. In assembly theory, which is attempting to explain life, evolution is a much broader thing. So
Yes. You're constructing yourself all the time. Assembly theory is about construction and how the universe selects for things to exist.
That's fine too. But, but this again gets back to, so, um, so I think what all of the, you know, like we can nitpick at definitions. I don't think it's like incredibly helpful to do it, but the reason for, for me.
Yeah, it is fun. It is really fun. And actually I do, I do think it's useful in the sense that when you see the way, the you either have to keep forcing in your like sort of conception of life you want to have, or you have to say, all these definitions are breaking down for a reason. Maybe I should adopt a more expansive definition that encompasses all the things that I think and our life.
And so for me, I think life is the process of how information structures matter over time and space. And an example of life is what emerges on a planet and, you know, yields an open-ended cascade of generation of structure and increasing complexity. And this is the thing that life is. And any individual is just a particular instance of these lineages that are, you know, structured across time.
And so we focus so much on these individuals that are these short temporal moments in this larger causal structure that actually is the life on our planet. And I think that's why these definitions break down because they're not general enough. They're not universal enough. They're not deep enough. They're not abstract enough to actually capture that regularity.
Yeah, it's like Aristotle focusing on heavy things falling because they're earth-like and things floating because they're air-like. It's the wrong thing to focus on.
I think we're missing most of what we are. So one of the issues, I've been thinking about this really viscerally lately. It's weird when you do theoretical physics because I think it literally changes the structure of your brain and you see the world differently, especially when you're trying to build new abstractions.
Showing 41–60 of 510 · page 3 of 26
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