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
Well, humans have always been afraid of our technologies though, right? So it's kind of a fascinating thing that every time we invent something we don't understand, it takes us a little while to catch up with it.
Yeah, we love being traumatized.
We want to learn more. And then when we learn more, it traumatizes us. You know, I never thought about it this before, but I think this is one of the reasons I love what I do is because it traumatizes me all the time. That sounds really bad. But what I mean is like, I love the shock of like realizing that like coming to understand something in a way that you never understood it before.
I think it seems to me when I see a lot of the ways other people react to new ideas that they don't feel that way intrinsically. But for me, that's like, that's why I do what I do. I love that feeling.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm trying to embody that because I think you have to live the physics to understand it. But there's a great quote about Einstein. I don't know if this is true or not, that he once said that he could feel a light beam in his belly. And I think – but I think like you got to think about it though, right?
Like if you're a really deep thinker and you're really thinking about reality that deeply and you are part of the reality that you're trying to describe, like you feel it. You really feel it.
Yes. It's a constant, constant descent into madness.
Yeah, you know you don't know.
I rely on other people to tell me. Actually, this is very funny because I have these conversations with my students often. They're worried about going crazy.
The origin of life is like this boundary that the universe can only cross if If a structure that emerges can reinforce its own existence, which is self-reproduction, autocatalysis, things people traditionally talk about, but it has to be able to maintain its own existence against this sort of randomness that happens in chemistry and this randomness that happens in the quantum world.
And like it's in some sense the emergence of like a deterministic structure that says, you know, I'm going to exist and I'm going to keep going. But, you know, pinning that down is really hard. We have ways of thinking about it in assembly theory that I think are pretty rigorous.
And one of the things I'm really excited about is trying to actually quantify in an assembly theoretic way when the original life happens. But the basic process I have in mind is, is a system that has no causal contingency, no constraints of objects basically constraining the existence of other objects or allowing the existence of other objects.
And so that sounds very abstract, but you can just think of a chemical reaction can't happen if there's not a catalyst, for example, or a baby can't be born if there wasn't a parent. So there's a lot of causal contingency that's necessary for certain things to happen. So- You think about this sort of unconstrained, random system. There's nothing that reinforces the existence of other things.
So the sort of resources just get washed out in all of these different structures, and none of them exist again. Or they just, you know, they're not very complicated if they're in high abundance. And some random events allow some things to start reinforcing the existence of a small subset of objects.
And if they can do that, you know, like just molecules basically recognizing each other and being able to catalyze certain reactions, there's this kind of transition point that happens where,
where unless you get a self-reinforcing structure, something that can maintain its own existence, it actually can't cross this boundary to make any objects in high abundance without having this sort of past history that it's carrying with us and maintaining the existence of that past history.
And that boundary point where objects can't exist unless they have the selection and history in them is what we call the original life. And pretty much everything beyond that boundary is holding on for dear life to all of the causation and causal structure that's basically put it there. And it's carving its way through this possibility space into generating more and more structure.
And that's when you get the open-ended cascade of evolution. But that boundary point is really hard to cross. And then what happens when you cross that boundary point and the way objects come into existence is also like really fascinating dynamics because, you know, like as things become more complex, the assembly index increases. I can explain all these things.
Sorry, you can tell me what you want to explain. I mean, explain what people will want to hear. Sorry, I have like a very vivid visual in my brain and it's really hard to articulate it.
Showing 121–140 of 510 · page 7 of 26
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