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
It's hard to use words to visualize what's in minds. I have such a hard time with this sometimes. Actually, I was thinking in the way over here. I was like, you know, you have pictures in your brain, and then they're hard to put into words. But I realized I always say I have a visual, but it's not actually I have a visual. It's I have a feeling.
Because oftentimes I cannot actually draw a picture in my mind. for the things that I say, but sometimes they go through a picture before they get to words. But I like experimenting with words because I think they help paint pictures.
Yeah, I think so. And I think this is one of the reasons that we have such an ability to abstract as humans because we are so gigantic that like the space that we can go back into is really large. So like the more abstract you're going, like the deeper you're going in that space.
Yes. And this is why the definition of life cannot be the individual. It has to be these lineages because they're all connected. They're interwoven and they're exchanging parts all the time.
Yeah, I think life is very high dimensional. And in fact, I think you can be alive in some dimensions and not in others. Like if you could project all the causation that's in you, in some features of you, you know, very little causation is required and like very little history. And in some features, a lot is. So it's quite difficult to take this really high dimensional perspective.
very deep structure and project it into things that we really can understand and say like this is the one thing that we're seeing because it's not one thing.
Billions of years, yeah.
It's crazy that there's billions of years inside all of us.
Because it's creative, but with us, obviously, like not independently of us. And also because of this sort of lineage view of life. And I think about life often as a planetary scale phenomena, because that's sort of the natural boundary for all of this causation that's bundled in every object in our biosphere. And so for me, it's just sort of the current boundary of how far life
on our planet has pushed into the things that our universe can generate. And so it's the furthest thing. It's the biggest thing. And I think a lot about the nature of life across different scales. And so, you know, we have cells inside of us that are alive and we feel like we're alive, but we don't often think about the societies that we're embedded in.
as alive or a global scale organization of us and our technology on the planet as alive. But I think if you have this deeper view into the nature of life, which I think is necessary also to solve the origin of life, then you have to include those things.
Yeah. This is the hard thing about solving the problem of life, I think, is how many things you have to integrate into building a unified picture of this thing that we want to call life. And a lot of our theories of physics are built on building...
deep regularities that explain a really broad class of phenomenon i think we haven't really traditionally thought about life that way uh but i think to get it at some of these hardest questions like looking for life on other planets or the original life you really have to think about it that way and so most of like my professional work is just trying to understand like every single thing on this planet that might be an example of life which is pretty much everything and then trying to figure out like what's the deeper structure underlying that
Yeah, Schrodinger really tried to... to do what physicists try to do, which is explain things. And his attempt was to try to explain life in terms of non-equilibrium physics, because he thought that was the best description that we could generate at the time. And so he did come up with something really insightful, which was to predict the structure of DNA as an aperiodic crystal.
And that was for a very precise reason that, you know, that was the only kind of physical structure that could encode enough information to actually specify a cell. We knew some things about genes but not about DNA and its actual structure. when he proposed that. But in the book, he tried to explain life as kind of going against entropy.
And so some people talked about it as like Schrodinger's paradox, how can life persist when the second law of thermodynamics is there? But in open systems, that's not so problematic. And really the question is, why can life generate so much order? And we don't have a physics to describe that. And it's interesting, you know, generations of physicists have thought about this problem.
Oftentimes it's like when people are retiring, they're like, oh, now I can work on life. Or they're like more senior in their career and they worked on other more traditional problems. And there's still a lot of impetus in the physics community to think that non-equilibrium physics will explain life. But I think that's not the right approach.
I don't think ultimately the solution to what life is, is there. And I don't really... think entropy has much to do with it unless it's entirely reformulated.
Yes. From randomness.
No. Physics hardly even acknowledges that the universe is random at its base. Yeah, absolutely. you know, he, he formulated laws that had initial conditions and, um, fixed dynamical laws. And that's been sort of become the standard canon of how people think the universe works and how we need to describe any physical system is with an initial condition and a law of motion.
Showing 81–100 of 510 · page 5 of 26
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