Alien Debate: Sara Walker and Lee Cronin | Lex Fridman Podcast #279
i don't know what it's like to be an alien i would like to know two alien civilizations coexisting on a planet what's that look like exactly when you see them and they see you you're assuming they have vision they have the ability to construct in 3d and in time there's a lot of assumptions we're making what human level intelligence has done is quite different it's not just that we remember states that the universe has existed in before it's that we can imagine ones that have never existed and we can actually make them come into existence so you can travel back in time sometimes yes you travel forward in time to travel back yes the following is a conversation with sarah walker and lee cronin they have each been on this podcast once before individually and now for their second time they're here together sarah is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist lee is a chemist and if i may say so the real-life manifestation of rick from rick and morty they both are interested in how life originates and develops both life here on earth and alien life including intelligent alien civilizations out there in the cosmos they are colleagues and friends who love to explore disagree and debate nuance points about alien life and so we're calling this an alien debate very few questions to me are as fascinating as what do aliens look like how do we recognize them how do we talk to them and how do we make sense of life here on earth in the context of all possible life forms that are out there treating these questions with the seriousness and rigor they deserve is what i hope to do with this conversation and future ones like it our world is rather than mystery we must first be humble to acknowledge this and then be bold and diving in and trying to figure things out anyway this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's sarah walker and lee cronin first of all welcome back sarah welcome back lee you guys i'm a huge fan of yours you're incredible people i should say thank you to sarah for wearing uh really awesome boots we'll probably overlay a picture later on but why the hell didn't you dress up please no this is me dressed up you were saying that you're pink like your thing is pink my thing is black and white the simplicity of it where's the pink when when did the pink when did it hit you that pink is your car i became pink about i don't know actually maybe 2017. you know did you know me are you when you first i think i met you pre-pink yeah yeah so about about 2017 i think i just decided i was boring and i needed to make a statement and red was too bright so i went pink salmon pink well i think you were always pink you just found yourself in 2017. there's an amazing photo of him where there's like everybody in their black gown and he's just wearing the pink pants oh that wasn't the wagon in university it's totally nuts 100 year anniversary they got me to give the plenary and they didn't they didn't find that outfit for me so they're all wearing these silly hats and these gowns and there was me dressed up in pink looking like a complete idiot we're definitely going to have to find that picture and overlay big full screen slow motion all right let's talk about aliens we'll find places we disagree in places we agree life intelligence consciousness universe all of that let's start with a tweet from neil degrasse tyson stating his skepticism about aliens wanting to visit earth quote how egocentric of us to think that space aliens who have mastered interstellar travel across the galaxy would give pardon the french uh would give a about humans on earth so let me ask you would aliens care about visiting earth observing communicating with humans let's take a perspective of aliens maybe sarah uh first are we interesting in the whole spectrum of life in the universe i'm completely biased at least as far as i think right now we're the most interesting thing in the universe um so i would expect um based on the intrinsic curiosity that we have and how much i think that's deeply related to the physics of what we are that other intelligent aliens would want to seek out examples of the phenomena they are to understand themselves better and i think that's kind of a natural thing to want to do and i don't think there's any kind of judgment on it being a lesser being or not it's like saying you have nothing to learn by talking to a baby uh you have less to learn probably more than you two talking to somebody that's 90. so um yeah so i think they absolutely would so whatever the phenomena is that is human there will be an inkling of the same kind of phenomenal within alien species and then we'll be seeking that same i think there's got to be some features of us that are universal and i think the ones that are most interesting and i hope i live in an interesting universe are the ones that are driven by our curiosity and the fact that our intelligence allows us to do things that the universe wouldn't be able to do without things like us existing we're going to define a lot of terms one of them is interesting yes that's very interesting term to try to define uh lee what what do you think are humans interesting for aliens well let's take it from our perspective we want to go find aliens as a species quite desperately so if we put the shoe on the other foot of course we're interesting but i'm wondering um and assuming that we're at the right technological capability to go searching for aliens then that's interesting so what i mean is if there needs to be a massive leap in technology that we don't have how will aliens prioritize coming to earth and other places but i i do think that they would come and find us because they want to find out about our culture what things are universal it what about i mean i'm a chemist i would say well is the chemistry universal right are the creatures that we're going to find making all this commotion are they made of the same stuff um what does their science look like um are they off planet yet um i guess there's so i i think that neil degrasse tyson is being slightly pessimistic and maybe trying to play the tune that the universe is vast and it's not worth them coming here i don't think that but i just worry that maybe we we don't have the ability to talk to them we don't have the universal translator we don't have the right physics but sure they should come we are interesting i want to know if they exist it would make it easier if they just came [Laughter] so again i'm going to use uh your tweets like it's shakespeare and analyze it so sarah tweeted uh thinking about aliens thinking about aliens so how much do you think aliens are thinking about other aliens including humans so you said we humans want to visit like we're longing to connect with aliens why is that can you introspect that is that an obvious thing that we should be like what are we hoping to understand by meeting aliens exactly asking as an introvert it's like i ask myself this all the time why go out on a friday night to meet people what are you hoping for i think curiosity so when i saw sarah put that tweet i think i answered it actually as well which was uh we are thinking about trying to make contact so they almost certain are certain certainly are but maybe there's a number of classes there are the those aliens that have not yet made contact with other aliens like us those aliens have made contact with just one other alien and maybe it's an anti-climax and slime all right and aliens that have made contact with not just one set of intelligent species but several that must be amazing actually literally there is some place in the universe there must be one alien civilization to not make contact with not one but two other intelligent civilizations so they must be thinking about there must be entire um degree courses on aliens thinking about aliens and cultural uh universal cultural norms do you think they will survive the meeting and by the way lee did respond saying that's all the universe wants so sarah said thinking about aliens thinking about aliens they said that's all the universe wants and then sarah responded cheeky universe we live in so cheeky is a is a cheeky version of the word interesting all of which will try to define uh mathematically he might be harder than interesting because there's humor in that too yes i think there's a mathematical definition of humor but we'll talk about that yeah so if you're a graduate student alien looking at multiple alien civilizations uh do you think they survive the encounters i think there's a tendency to anthropomorphize a lot of discussions about alien life which is a really big challenge so i usually when i'm trying to think about these problems i don't try to think about um us as humans but us as an example of phenomena that exists in the universe that we have yet to explain um and it doesn't seem to be the case that if i think about the features i would argue are most universal about that phenomena that there's any reason to think that a first encounter with another lineage or example of life would be antagonistic um i think yeah and and i think there's this kind of assumption i mean going back to neil degrasse tyson's uh quote i mean it kind of bothers me because there's a i mean i'm a physicist so i know we have a lot of egos about how much we can describe the world but that there's this like because we understand fundamental physics so well we understand alien life and we can kind of extrapolate and i just think that we don't um and the quest there is really you know really to understand something totally new about the universe and that thing just happens to be us i agree i agree there's something else more profound i think neil is just being again he's just trying to stir the pot i would say from a from a contingency point of view i want to know how many ways does the universe build structures build memories right that and then i want to know if those memories can interact with each other and if you have to um different origins of life and then origins of intelligence and then these things become conscious surely you want to go and talk to them and figure out what commonalities you share and it might be that we're just unable to conceive of what they're going to look like they're just going to be completely different you know infrastructure but surely we'll want to go and find out a map and surely curiosity is a property that evolution has made on earth and i can't see any reason that it won't happen elsewhere because curiosity probably exists because we want to find innovations in the environment we want to use that information to help our technology and also curiosity is like planning for the future are they going to fight us are they are we going to be able to trade with them so i think that neil's just i don't know maybe you know i mean give a that's really i think that's really down on earth right how would aliens categorize humans do you think how would weak so let's put the other way around slime category maybe no no no we maybe we could the thing is a bit odd right look at instagram twitter all these people taking selfies i mean does the universe is the ultimate state of consciousness thinking beings that take photographs themselves and upload them to an interweb with other thinking beings looking at each other's photos so um i think that they will be wrong with that yeah i did not say there was anything wrong with it consciousness manifested at scale yeah selfies yeah instagram like the mirror test at scale yeah i do think that curiosity is really the driving force why we have our technology right if we weren't curious we wouldn't go out left the cave so i think that um so i think that neil's got it completely wrong in fact actually of course they'd want to come here it doesn't mean they are coming here we've seen evidence for that i guess we can argue about that right but i think that um we want i desperately and i know that sarah does too but i won't speak for you you're here you can i desperately want to have missions to look for life in the solar system right now i want to map life over the solar system and then i want to understand how we can go and find life as quickly as possible at the nearest stars and also at the same time do it in the lab just to compensate you know so sure yeah just one more point on this if you think about sort of what's driven the most like features of our own evolution as a species you could and try to map that to alien species i always think like optimism is what's going to get us furthest and so i think a lot of people always think that it's like war and conflict is going to be the way that alien species will expand out into the cosmos but if you just look at how we're doing it and how we talk about it zoe's our future and space is always you know built from narratives of optimism and so it seems to me that if intelligence does get out in the universe that it's going to be more optimism and curiosity driving it than warren conflict because those things end up crushing you um so there might be some selective filter uh of course this is me being an optimist i'm a half half full kind of person but is it obvious that curiosity not obvious but what do you think is curiosity a more powerful force in the universe than violence and the will to power so uh because you said you frame curiosity as a way to also plan on how to avoid violence which is an interesting frame of curiosity but i i could also argue that violence is a pretty productive way to uh operate in the world which is like that's one way to protect yourself the best defense is offense um i'm not qualified to answer this but i'll have a go i think violent let's not talk about violence that's the summary of this podcast i would yeah but maybe i would let's call it violence but i call it erasure so if you think about um the way evolution works all the way uh um obviously talk about assembly's theory but so if you say you you build pro curiosity allows you to open up avenues new graphs right so new features you can play what what the ability to erase those things allows you to start again and do some pruning so the universe i think curiosity gets you further curiosity gets you rockets that land it gets you robots that can make drugs it gets you poetry and art and communication and then you know i often think wouldn't it be great in bureaucracy to have another world war not literally a world war now please no world war but a the equivalent so we get remove all the admin bureaucracy right all the admin violence get rid of it and start again do you know what i mean because you get layers and you get redundant systems built so actually a reset let's call it violence a reset in some aspects of our um culture and our our technology allows us to then build more important things without the because how many you know how many cookies do i have to click on how many think how many how many extra clicks i do i have in the future of my life that i could remove and a bit of a reset would would allow us to to uh to start again and maybe that's how i suppose our encounter with aliens will be maybe they will fight with us and say uh he went on as excited by you so we thought we'll just get rid of you so they might want to reset earth yeah why not to be like let's see how the evolution runs again this seems like they've uh uh there's nothing new happening here they're observing for a while this is just not let's keep it more fun let's start with the fish again i like how you equated violence to um resetting your cookies yeah i suppose that's the kind of violence in this modern world where wards are violence resetting cookies i don't know where that came from i'm completely yeah that's poetic uh really okay so let's talk about life what is life what is non-life what is the line between life and non-life and maybe at any point we can pull in ideas of assembly theory like how do we start to try to define life and for people uh listening so sarah identifies as a physicist and lee identifies as a chemist of course they are very interdisciplinary in nature in general but um so what is life yeah yeah i love asking that question because it's so absurdly big i know i love it um it's my absolute favorite question the whole universe um so i think i have three ways of describing it right now um and i like to say all three of them because people latch onto different facets of them and so the whole idea of what lee and i are trying to work on is not to try to define life but to try to find a more fundamental theory that explains what the phenomena we call life and then it should explain certain attributes and you end up having a really different framing than way people usually talk so the way i i talk about it three different ways um life is how information structures matter across space and time um life is uh i don't know this one's from you actually simple machines constructing more complex machines and the other one is the physics of existence so to speak which is life is the mechanism the universe has to explore the space of what's possible um that's my favorite so can i yeah yeah can i add on to that okay can you say the physics one again uh oh the physics of existence yeah the physics of existence i don't know what to call it you know like if you think of all the things that could exist only certain things do exist and i think life is basically the universe's mechanism of bringing things into physically existing in the in the moment now yeah yeah well what's what's another one we were debating this the other day so if you think about universe that has nothing in it that's kind of hard to conceive of right because and this is where physicists really go wrong they think of a universe with nothing in it they can't and you think non-existence is really hard to think yeah and then you think of universe with everything in it that's really hard and and you just you just have this white blob right this is everything but the fact we have to discrete stuff in the universe beyonce planet so you've got stars space planet stuff right the boring stuff but i would define life or say that life is where there are architectures any architectures and we should stop fixating on what bill is building the architectures to start with and the fact that the universe has discrete things and it is completely mind-blowing if you think about it for one second the fact there's any objects at all that and there's because for me the the object is a proxy for a machine that built it some information um being moved around actuation sensing getting resource and building these objects so for me everyone's been obsessing about the machine but i'm like forget the machine let's see the objects the you know and i think in a way that assembly theory we realized maybe a few months ago that assembly theory actually does account for the soul in the objects not mystically like say sheldrick's morphic resonance or leibniz's monodology seeing souls and things but when you see an object and i've said this before but this object is evidence of thought and then there's a lineage of those objects so i think what is fascinating is that um you put it much more elegantly but but the barrier between life and non-life is accruing enough memories to then actuate so so what that means is there are contingency there are things that happen in the universe get trapped these memories then have a causal effect on the future and then when you get those concentrated in a machine and you're actually able in real time able to integrate the past the present with the future and do stuff that's when you are most alive are you being the machine yes wait a minute why is the object so one one of the ways to define life uh that sarah said is simple machines creating complex machines so there's a million questions there so how how the hell does a simple machine create a complex machine mutation so this is what we're talking about at the beginning you have the minimum replicator so molecule so this is what i was trying to convince sarah if the mechanism get there years ago i think but then you've been building on it and saying you have a small you have a molecule that can copy itself but then that be a has there has to be some variability otherwise it's not going to get more functional so you need to add bits on so you have a minimum molecule that can copy itself but then it can add bits on and that can be copied as well and those add-ons can give you additional function um to be able to acquire more stuff to exist so existence is weird but the fact that there is existence is why there is life and that's why i realized a few days ago that there must be that's why alien life must be everywhere because there is existence is there like a conservation of cheeky stuff happening so like how can you keep injecting more complex things like um doesn't the machine that creates the object need to be as or more complex more powerful than the things it creates so how can you get complexity from simplicity so the way you get complexity from simplicity is that you i would this i'm just making this up but this is kind of my notion that you have a large volume of stuff so you're able to get um seeds if you like random cues from the environment so you just use those objects to basically write on your tape ones and zeros whatever and that is that is necessarily rich complex okay but it has a low assembliness but even though it has a higher assembly number we can talk about that but then when you start to then integrate that all into a smaller volume as over time and you become more autonomous you then make the transition i don't know what you think about that i think the easiest way to think about it is actually which i know is a concept you hate but i also hate which is entropy but people are more familiar with entropy than what we talk about in assembly theory um and also the idea that like say physics as we know it um involves objects that don't exist across time or as we would say low memory objects um so one of the the key distinctions that that low memory objects yeah so physics is all physicists are low memory memory objects physicists are creators of low memory objects or manipulators of low memory objects absolutely that's a very nice way putting okay sorry guys yeah sorry to keep in trouble no it's fine um i like it too it's very funny um but i think it's a good way of phrasing it because i i think you know this kind of idea we have an assembly theory is that um you know physics as we know it has basically removed time as being a physical observable of an object and the argument i would make is that when you look at things like water bottles or us we're actually things that exist that have a large extent in time so we actually have a physical size and time and we measure that with something called the assembly index in molecules but presumably everyone should have sort of a uh do you want to explain what assembly yeah let's you know what let's step back and and start at the beginning what is assembly theory lee send me some slides there's a there's a big sexy paper coming out probably maybe i don't know we've almost finished it um almost almost that's like that's also a summary of science we're almost done yes we're almost done the history of science we are ready to start an interesting discussion with our peers right you're the machine that created the object and we'll see where the object takes all right so what what is assembly theory um yeah well i think i think the easiest way for people to understand it is to think about um assembly in molecules although the theory is very general doesn't just apply to molecules and this was really leased in sight so it's kind of funny that i'm explaining it but um okay i'll mark you okay all right ready i'm ready i'm ready tell me where i get the check marks minus but it's your theory as well yeah i know but ima imagine a molecule um and then and then you can you know break the molecule apart into elementary building blocks they happen to be bonds and then you can think of all the ways for molecular assembly theory you can think about all the ways of building up the original molecule so there's all these paths that you can assemble it and the sort of rules or assembly is you can use pieces that have been generated already so it has this kind of recursive property to it um and so that's where kind of memory comes into assembly theory and then the assembly index is the shortest path in that space so it's supposed to be the minimal amount of history that the universe has to undergo in order to assemble that particular object and the reason that this is significant is we figured out how to measure that with a mass spec in the lab and we had this conjecture that if that minimal number of steps was sufficiently large it would indicate that you required a machine or a system that had information about how to assemble that specific object because the combinatorial space of possibilities is getting exponentially large as the assembly index is increasing so it's just sorry to interrupt but so that means there's a sufficiently high assembly index that if observed in an object is an indicator that something life like created it or is the object itself life like um both but you might want to make the distinction that a water bottle is not life but it would still be a signature that you were in that domain of physics and i might be alive so um so there will be potentially a lot of arguments about where the line at which assembly index uh does interesting stuff start to happen the point is we can make all the arguments but it should be experimentally observable and and we can talk more about that part of it but the point i want to make about it is there was always this intuition that i had that there should be some complexity threshold in the universe above which you would start to say whatever physics governs life actually becomes operative and i think about it a little bit like we have planks constant which you know and we have the fine structure constant and then this sort of assembly threshold is basically another sort of uh potentially constant of nature it might depend on specific features of the system like but um which we debate about sometimes but um but then when you're past that you have you have to have some other explanation than the current explanations we have in physics because now you're in high memory um uh the things actually require time for them to exist and time becomes a physical variable the the path to the creation of the object is the memory yeah so you need to consider that yeah but the but the point is that's a feature of the object so it's it's it so when i think of all the things in this room uh you know we see the the projection of them as a water bottle but assembly theory would say that this is a causal graph of all the ways the universe can create this thing that's what it is as an object and we're all interacting uh causal graphs and most of the creativity in the biosphere is because a lot of the objects that exist now are huge in their structure across time four billion years of evolution to get to us is it possible to look at me and infer the history that led to me you as an individual might be hard you as a representative of a population of objects that have high assembly with similar causal history and structure that you can communicate with i.e other humans you can refer a lot probably yeah we'll stay with them which we do genomically even i mean it's not like like we have a lot of information and that's we can reconstruct histories from assembly is saying something slightly deeper yeah one thing to add i mean it's not just about the object but the objects occur and not just objects for a high assembly number because you can have random things that have a high assembly number they must have there must be a number of identical copies so you know you're getting getting away from the random because you could take a snapshot this is why it's not i hate entropy i love entropy when used correctly but it's about the problem of entropy you have to have a labeler and so so you can label the beginning and the end to start and the finish you know what you can do in assembly is say oh i have a number of objects in abundance they all have these features and then you can infer and one of the things that we debated a lot particularly during lockdown because i almost went insane trying to crush the produce the assembly equation so we came up with the assembly equation i had just imagine this so you have this string where oh actually it makes me makes me sick trying to remember it was so it did my head in for a long time yeah because i couldn't so if you just have a string of say words say you know a series of words series of letters so you just have a aaa bbb ccc ddd and you and you find that object and you just just have four a's four b's four c's four d's together boom then and that really that you measured that you physically measured that string of letters then what you could do is you can infer sub graphs of maybe the four a's the four b's the four c's and four c's we don't see them in the real world you just infer them and i really got stuck with that because there's a problem to try and work out what's the difference between a long you know a physical object in this assembly space of objects that we realized the best way to put that is infer in time that so although we can't infer your entire history we know at some point the four a's were made the four b's was made the four c's were made in four d's were made and they all got added together and and that's one really interesting thing that's come out the theory about the the killer when we knew we were going beyond um and beyond standard complexity theories was incredibly successful is that we realized we could start to measure these things for real across domains so the assembly index is actually an intrinsic property of all stuff that you can break into components particularly molecules are good because you can break them up into smaller molecules into atoms the challenge will be making that more general across all the domains but we're working on it right now and i think the theory will do that so components domains so you're talking about basically measuring the complexity of an object in what biology chemistry physics that's what you mean by domains uh like if tesla's sociology computers complexity of memes you know memes yep what was that ideas yeah i mean so one of the ideas are objects and assemblies areas they're just pictures of the causal graph i mean the fact i can talk to you right now is because we're exchanging structure of our assembly space uh so conversation is the uh exchanging structures in assembly space what is assembly space when i started working on origins of life i um i was writing about something called top down causation which a lot of like philosophers philosophers are interested in and people that worry about the mind body problem but the whole idea is you know if we have um you know the microscopic world of physics is causally complete it seems like there's no room for higher level causes like our thoughts to actually have any impact on the world and that didn't that seems problematic when you get to studying life in mind because it does seem that quote-unquote emergent properties do matter to matter um and so um and then there's this other sort of paradoxical situation where information looks like it's disembodied so we talk about information like it can just move from any physical system to any other physical system and it doesn't require um like you don't have to specify anything about the substrate to talk about information and then there's als also the way we talk about mathematics is also disembodied right like the platonic world of forms and i think all of those things are hinting that we really don't know how to think about abstractions as physical things um and really i think what assembly theory is pointing to is what we're missing there is the dimension of time and if you actually look at an object being extended across time what we call information and the things that look abstract are things that are entangled in the histories of those objects they're features of the overlapping assembly space so they look abstract because they're not you know part of the current structure but they're part of the structure if you thought about it as like the philosophical concept of a hyper object an object that's too big in time for us to actually to resolve and so i think information is physical it's just physical in time not in space too hyper object too difficult for us to resolve so we're supposed to think about of life as this thing that stretches through time and there's a causation chain that led to that thing and then you're trying to measure something with the assembly index about the assembly index is the ordering the or like um you could think of it as like a partial ordering of all the things that can happen um so in in thermodynamics we course grain things by temperature and pressure in assembly theory we coarse grain by the number of copies of an object and the assembly index which is basically if you think about the space of all possible things it's like a depth of how far you've gone into that space and how much time was required to get there in the shortest possible version not average because can't you just 3d with that question oh not not not 3d can't you always 3d print the thing in the heart no because i had such fight so sarah's team and my team are writing this paper at the moment and it's so funny i think we kind of share the at the beginning you were like no that's not right oh yes right and we're doing this for a bit and then the problem is when you build a theory and build the intuition there's some certain features right of the theory that almost felt like i was being religious about saying right you have to do this a good assembler assembly theorist does this does this does this and sarah's postdoc daniel and my postdoc ambershek and they were both both brilliant they're brilliant but they were like now we don't we don't buy that and i was like it is is they were like well lee actually um i thought you're the first to say that you know you can't if you can't explain it it doesn't and you can't do an experiment that doesn't exist and that saved me and i said to abhishek whoever takes my postdoc in glasgow daniel was sarah's postdoc in asu i was like i have the experimental data so when i basically take um the molecules and chop them up in the mass spec the assembly number is never the average it's always the shortest it's an intrinsic property and then the penny dropped for abhishek said okay so i had these things that we had to believe to start with or to trust and then we've done the math and it came out and they now have the shortest path actually it's up that explains why the shortest path here's why the shortest path is important not the average the shortest path needs you to identify when the universe has basically got a memory not an average so what you want to do is to say what is the minimum number of features that i want to be able to see in the universe when i find those features i know the universe has had a coherent memory and it's basically a life and and so that means it gives you the lower bound so that's like of course there's going to be other paths we can be more ridiculous right we can have other parts but it's just the minimum so probabilistically at the beginning because assembly theory was built as a measure for biosignatures i needed to go there and then i realized it was intrinsic and then sarah realized it was intrinsic and these hyper objects were coming and we were kind of fusing that notions together and then the team were like yeah but if i have enough energy and i have enough resources i might not take the shortest path i might go a bit longer i might take a really long path because it allows me then to to do something else so what you do is let's say i've got two different objects a and b and they both have different shortest paths to get them but then if you want to make a and b together they will have a compromise so in the joint assembly space they might that might be an average but actually it's the shortest way you can make both a and b with a minimum amount of resource in time so suddenly you then layer these things up and so the average becomes not important but it's a as you literally overlap those sets you get a new shortest path and so what we realize time and time again when we're doing the math the shortest path is intrinsic is fundamental and is measurable which is kind of mind-blowing so what we're talking about some basic ingredients so maybe we'll talk about that what those basic ingredients could be and how many step when you say shortest path how many steps it takes to turn those basic ingredients into the final meal so how to make a p what's the shortest way to make a pizza pie an apple pie that's right and a pizza and a pie together scratch yeah uh so there's a lot of ways um there's the shortest way and then you know you take the full spectrum of ways and there's probably an average uh like duration for a noob to make an apple pie is the average interesting still if you measure the average length of the path to assemble a thing does that tell you something about the way nature usually does it versus um something fundamental about the object which i think is what you're aiming at with the assembly index yeah i mean look we all love to quantify things the minimum path gives you the lower bounce you know you're detecting something you know you're inferring something the average tells you about really how the objects are are existing in the ecosystem or the technology and and that and though and there has to be more paths explored because then you can um happen upon other memories and then condense them down i'm not making too much sense but if you look at say let's just say i mean maybe we're going to get to alien civilizations later right but i i would argue very strongly that alien civilization a and alien civilization b um they're different assembly spaces so they're kind of going to be a bit messed up if they happen upon one another only when they find some joint overlap in their technology because if aliens come to us and we they don't share any of the causal graph we've shown but hopefully they share the periodic table and some other and bonds and things that we're going to have to really think about the language to talk to us aliens by inferring by using assembly theory to infer um the their language their technology and other bits and bobs and the shortest path will help you do that quickly all right so all all aliens in these causality graphs have a common ancestor in the if the building blocks are the same which means they live in the same universe as us so this depends on how far back in time you go though but the universe has all the same building blocks yeah and like we have to assume that so at least there's there's not different classes of causality graphs right no the universe doesn't just say like here you get the the red causality gravity you get the blue one these basic ingredients and they're geographically constrained or constrained in space or time or something like that they're constrained in time because uh only by the virtue of the fact that um you need enough time to have passed for some things to exist so the universe has to be big enough in time for some things so just so one point on the shortest path versus the average path which i think will get to this is um you had a nice way of saying it's like the minimal compression is the shortest path for the universe to produce that but it's also like the first time in the in the ordering of events that you might expect to see that object but the average path tells you um something about the actual steps that were realized and that becomes an emergent property of that object's interaction with other objects so it's not an intrinsic feature of that object it's the future of the interactions with other things and so one of the nice features of assembly is you've basically gotten rid of you just look at the things that exist and you've gotten rid of the mechanisms for constructing them in some sense like the machines are not um as important in the current construction of the theory although i would like to bridge it to some ideas about constructors um but then um you could only communicate with things as as lee was saying if you have some overlap in the past history so if you had an alien species that had absolutely no overlap then there would be no means of communication but as we become you know as we progress further and further in time and more things become possible because the assembly spaces are larger because you can have a larger assembly space in terms of index and also just the size of the space because it's exponentially growing then more things can happen in the future and the example i like to give is actually um when we made first contact with gravitational waves um because uh you know that's an alien phenomena that's been permeating our plate not alien in life phenom by alien like something we had never knew existed it's been you know like we're you know there's gravitational waves rippling through this room right now um but we had to advance to the level of einstein writing down um his theory of relativity and then 100 years of technological development to even quote unquote see that phenomena so the okay to see that phenomena our causal graph have to start intersecting yeah we needed the idea to emerge first the abstraction right and then we had to build the technology that could actually observe features of that abstraction so the the nice promising thing is over time the graph can grow so it can start overlapping eventually yeah so the interesting feature of that graph is there was an event you know 1.4 billion years away of a black hole merger that we detected on our detector and you know now suddenly we're connected through this communication channel with this distant event in our universe that you know if you think about 1.4 billion years ago what was happening on this planet or even further back in time um that you know there was common physics underlying all those events but even for those two events to communicate i understand what you were going on about the other week yeah i'm sorry it's a really abstract example but um but your causal graphs are not overlapping well let's just say now our causal graphs are overlapping in the deep past yeah you made a connection with it no i do like that no no you can tell me what your epiphany is now that's good because i was and i should get the jokes before 30 seconds after oh i get it now i wasn't able to comprehend what you were talking about with saying the channel communicating to the past but what you're saying is we were able to infer what happened 1.4 billion years ago we detected the gravity wave i mean i think it's amazing that you know at that time we weren't even we were just becoming multicellular right it's like insane and then we we we progress from multicellular clarity through to technology technology and build the detector and then for you know and then we'll just extrapolate backwards so so i although we haven't didn't do anything back to the graph back in time we understood his existence then overlapped going forward and that well that's because our graphs are larger yeah but that means that has a that has a consequence one of the things i was trying to say is like i'm i'm i'm i think i don't know sarah might be she can correct me information first and i'm a object first kind of guy so i mean there's things that get constructed there has to be this transition in random constructions so when the the constructing the object is construct being constructed by the process bakes in that memory and those memories then add on and add on and add on so as it becomes more competent and life is about taking those memories and compressing them increasing their autonomy and and so i think that you know like the cell that we have in biology on earth is our way of doing that that really the maximum ability to take memories and to act on the future oh i think that's mathematics um no mathematics doesn't exist no but that's the point the point is that abstractions do exist they're real physical things we call them okay abstractions but the point about mathematics that i think is so i i don't i don't disagree i think you're object first and i'm information first but i think i'm i'm only information first in the sense that i think the thing that we need to explain is why what abstractions are and what they are as physical things because of all all of human history we've thought that there were these properties that are disembodied exist outside of the universe and really they do exist in the universe and we just don't understand what their physics is so i think mathematics is a really good example we do theoretical physics with math but imagine doing physics of math and then thinking about math as a physical object and math is super interesting i think this is why we think it describes reality so well because it's the most copyable kind of information it retains its properties when you move it between physical media which means that it's very d and so it seems to describe the universe really well but it probably is because it's information that's very deep in our past and it's just we invented a way of communicating it very effectively between us isn't math more fundamental isn't as the assembly of the graph isn't basically a i'm gonna sell i sound completely boring it's like math assembly theory invented math but it did it has to be okay [Music] [Applause] so what what is uh what is math exactly it's a uh a nice simplification at this simple description of what so we have a computer scientist a physicist in the chemist here why i can do a bar i think the chemist is going to define math and you guys can correct me go for it i would say lay it honestly we're ready i think the ability to um to label objects and and place them into classes and then do operations on the objects is what math is so on that point what does it mean to be object first versus information first so what what's the difference between object and information when you get to that low fundamental level well i might change my view so i'm stuff first the stuff and then when stuff becomes objects it has to invent information and then the information acts on more stuff and becomes more objects so i think there is a transition to information that occurs when you go from stuff to objects yeah information is emergent not emergent information is actionable memories from the universe so when when memories become actionable that's information but there's always memory but it's not actionable yeah and then it's not information great and actionable is what you can create you can use it if you can't use it then it's not information if you can't transmit it if you if it doesn't have any causal consequences in the force i don't understand why is that not information it's not information it's it's um it's uh stuff it's stuff happening but it's not it's not cause yeah yeah we can this is happening no not happening requires information no no no no stuff is always happening no this is where the physicists get and the mathematicians get themselves in a loop because they think the universe i mean i think uh say max tegmark and and is very playful and say like the universe universe just meth well the universe is just math then we might as well not bother having any conversation because the conversation already written we just never go to the future and say can you just give us the conversation it's happened already so i think the problem is that mathematicians are so successful labeling stuff and so successful understanding of stuff through those labels they forget that actually the those labels had to emerge and that information had to be built on those memories so memory in the universe so constraints graph when they become actionable and the graph can loop back on itself or interact with other graphs and they can intersect those memories become actionable and therefore their information and i think you just changed my son my my mind on something pretty big but i don't have a pen so i can't i'm gonna write it down later but roughly the idea is it's like you've got these these two graphs of objects of stuff they have memories and then when they intersect and then they can act on each other that's maybe the mechanism by which information is then so then you can then abstract so one when one graph can then build another graph and say hey you'll have to go through all the nonsense we had to go through here's literally the way to do it staff always comes first but then when staff builds the abstraction the abstraction can be then teleported onto other stuff directions is the looping back yeah power okay am i making i don't know i got stuck yeah so first a god made stuff and after that when you start to be able to uh form abstractions that's when the god is the memory of the universe can't remember otherwise there's no way did you just differ in that statement hundreds of years from now what does that mean what did the humans mean by this hey look don't don't diss my my one-liners 15 seconds to come up i don't know what it means what does it mean okay wait we need to how do we get on to this we were uh time causality mathematics so what is mathematics in this uh picture of stuff objects memory and um information is what is accurate mathematics it's the most efficient labeling scheme that you can apply to lots of different graphs well the labeling scheme doesn't make it sound useful can i try yeah sure please have you rejected my definition of mathematics i'm shocked yeah no i'm sorry um but it's correct oh i'm sorry excellent um no i mean i think um i think we have a problem right because we we can't not be us like we're stuck in the shells we are and we're trying to observe the world and so mathematics looks like it has certain properties and i guess the thought experiment i find is useful is to try to imagine if you were outside of us looking at us as physical systems using mathematics what would be the specific features you associate to the property of understanding mathematics and being able to implement it in the universe right and um and when you do that mathematics seems to have some really interesting properties relative to other kinds of abstraction we might talk about like language or artistic expression one of those properties is the one i mentioned already that is really easy to copy between physical media so if i give you a mathematical statement you almost immediately know what i mean if i tell you the sky is blue you might say is it cobalt blue is it is your blue what color blue do you mean and you have a harder time visualizing what i actually mean so mathematics carries a lot of meaning with it when it's copied between physical systems it's also the reason we use it to communicate with computers um and then the second one is it retains its property of actually what it can do in the universe when it's copied so the example i like to give there is is think about like newton's law of gravitation um it's actually it's a it's a compressed regularity of a bunch of uh phenomena that we observe in the universe but then it'll that information actually is a causal in a sense that it allows us to do things we wouldn't be able to do without that particular knowledge and that particular abstraction and in this case like launch satellites to space or send people to mars or whatever it is um so so if you look at us from the outside and you say what is it for physical systems to invent a thing called mathematics and then to use uh and and then and then it to become a physical observable mathematics is kind of like the universally copyable information that allows uh new possibility spaces to be open in the future because it allows this kind of ability to map one physical system to another and actually understand that the general principles yeah so is it helping the uh overlap of causal graphs then by mapping oh well i think that's the explanation for what it is in terms of the physical theory of assembly would be some feature of the structure of the assembly spaces the causal graphs and their relationship to each other so for example and i mean this is things that we're going to have to work out over the next few years i mean we're in totally uncharted conceptual territory here um but as is usual diving off the deep end um but i would expect that we would be able to come up with a theory of like why is it that some physical systems can communicate with each other like language language is basically because we're objects extended over time and some of the history of that assembly space actually overlaps and when we communicate it's because we actually have shared structure in our causal history so let me have another quick go at this right so i think we all agree so i think um we take mathematics for granted because we've gone through this chain right of you know um we all we all share a language now okay and we can well we share length so we have languages that we can we can make interoperable and and so whether you're speaking i don't know all the different dialects of chinese all the different dialects of english french german whatever you can interconvert them the interesting thing about mathematics now is that everybody on planet earth every human being and computers um share that common language that language was constructed by a process in time so what i'm trying to say is assembly invented math is those those pro right from the you know mathematics didn't occur it didn't exist before life abstraction was invented by life right that doesn't mean that the universe wasn't capable of mathematical things wait wait a minute can we just ask that that old famous question is math invented or discovered so when you say assembly invented or whatever uh you you it means this is simply a mathematical theory but sorry right are we arguing exactly are we arguing that that's what it sounds like i we discovering no well yes and no i would say you called mathematics a language i would say developing like i'm pretty sure that um there are some very common seeds of mathematics in the universe right but actually not the mathematics that we are finding now is not discovered it's invented and but even though i think those two terms are very triggering and i don't think they're necessarily useful because i think that what people do the mathematicians that say oh mathematics was discovered because they live in a universe where there is no time and it just all exists but what i'm saying is and i think in the same way you can create let's say i'm going to go and create and make a piece of art did i make that piece of art or did i escape discover it like inventing the airplane did i invent the airplane let's stick with the airplane the airplane's a good one i let's say i'm i did i discovered the airplane well in a way the universe discovered the airplane because it just chucked a load of atoms together a load of random human beings won't do stuff and they we we discovered the aeroplane in the space of possibilities but here's the thing when the space of possibilities is so vast infinite almost and you're able to actualize one of those in an object and you are inventing it so in mathematics because there are infinite number of theorems the fact you're actually pulling there's no difference between inventing a mathematical structure and inventing the airplane they're the same thing but that doesn't mean that now the airplane exists in the universe there's something weird about the universe that you know so i think that the more this is the thing that i you probably the more memory required for the object the more invented it is so when a mathematical theorem has a hazard needs more bytes to store it the more invented it is and the less bites the more discovered is but everything then is invented it's just more or less invented absolutely okay has to generate everything as it goes yeah and it wasn't there in the beginning and the way we're thinking it when you're thinking about the difference between invented discovered is because we're throwing away all the memory yeah so if you start to think in terms of causality and time then those things become the same everything is invented and the idea is to make everything intrinsic to the universe so i think one of the features of assembly theory is we don't want to have external observers there's been this long tradition in physics of trying to describe the universe from the outside and not the inside and the universe has to generate everything itself if you do it from the inside assembly theory describes how the universe builds itself did it take you 15 seconds to say that yeah to come up with that also no i've thought about that before okay a good line it's like are you making funny no i'm not making fun i'm having fun there's a difference oh that's good all right i'm you know she's inventing i'm not all intimidated and there's a causal history to that fun um you mentioned that there's no way to communicate with aliens until there's overlap in the causal craft communication includes being able to see them and like what are we this is the question is um is communication any kind of detection and if so what do aliens look like as you get more and more overlap on the cause of gravity you're assuming let's assume that so when you see them when they see you you're assuming they have vision they have the ability to construct in 3d and in time there's a lot of assumptions we're making what detection all right let's step back so yes okay you're right so when in the english language when we say the word see we mean visually they show up to a party it's like oh wow that's an alien that's visual that's 3d that's okay and that's also assuming scale spatial scale of something that's visible to you so it can't be microscopic or it can't be so big that you don't even realize that's an entity okay um but other kinds of detection too i would make it more abstract and go down i was thinking this morning about how to rewrite the arecibo message in assembly theory and also to abandon binary because i don't think aliens necessarily why should they have binary well they have some basic elements with which to to do information exchange let's make it more fundamental more universal so we need to think about what is a universal way of making a memory and then we should re-encode arecibo in that way what's more basic than zeros and ones well it's really difficult to get out that causal chain because we're so let's raise the idea of zero for a moment it took human beings a long time to come up with the idea of zero now now you've got the idea of zero you can't throw it away it's so useful to discover the idea yeah to discover an event i don't know but it took a long time so it was invented that's right yeah i think zero was invented so exactly so it's not a given that aliens know what zero is that that's the one the massive assumption it's a useful it's a useful discovery that you're saying if you break the causal chain there might be some other more efficient way of representing why i want to meet him and ask him for a shortcut but you won't be able to um ask him until what so i interrupted you and i think you're making a good point i was just going to say well look thank you sorry rather than saying he's internet tweet at him for the rude interruptions okay i'm sorry no it's okay um maybe it's change how do we so oh i don't know what it's like to be an alien i would like to know what is the full spectrum of what aliens might look like to us now that we've laid this all on on the table of like all right so there has to be some overlap and this uh causal chain that led to them what are we what are we looking for what do you think we should be looking for so you met you mentioned mass spec measuring certain objects that aliens could create or are aliens themselves um we show up to a planet or maybe not a planet or maybe what what the what the hell is the basic object we're trying to show ourselves assembly index of let's cut ourselves a break let's assume that they are they they're metabolized they've got an energy source and they're they've there are a size that we can recognize let's give our cut ourselves a break because there could be aliens that are so big we don't recognize we're seeing them there might be aliens that are so small we don't yet have the ability to you know we have microscopes we can see you know far enough away that just wouldn't be i see them so that's a good range so let's just make a range let's just be very am for eccentric and say we're gonna look for aliens roughly our size and technology our size because we we know it's possible on earth right i mean a reasonable thing to do would be to to find exoplanets that in the same zone as earth in terms of heat and stuff and then say hey if there's that same kind of gravity same type of stuff we could reasonably assume that the alien life there might use a similar kind of physical infrastructure and then we're good so then then you'll then then your question becomes really relevant and say right let's use vision sound touch and and so okay that's really nice so that if there's a lot of aliens out there if there's a good likelihood if you match to the planet that they're going to be in the same spatial and temporal operating in the same spatial temporal domain as humans okay within that what wha what did they look like visually what do they sound like uh what are they oh god this sounds creepy tastes like what is it oh it smells like smell like that sounds like our clubhouse and he's like can we have sex with aliens which was basically me saying passionate love but it wasn't actually about sex it was about is our chemistry compatible right is there some yeah so yeah yeah can can we um yeah are they edible too they could be very edible they could be delicious that's why i want to see some aliens right because i think are there i think evolution um i mean evolution exploits symmetry right because why why generate memory why generate storage the need for storage space when you can use symmetry so and symmetry is quite maybe quite effective in allowing you to mechanically design stuff right so maybe alien it could you could be reasonable to assume that aliens could have they could be bipedal they could be symmetric in the same way might have a couple of eyes or a couple of sensors well we can make make that and perhaps there's this whole zoo of different aliens out there and we'll never get to be able to classify some of the weird aliens we can't interact with because they have made such weird stuff yeah but we are just going to look at we're going to find aliens that look most like us why not because those are the first ones we're likely to see yeah yeah but i i think it's really hard to imagine what the space of aliens is because the space is huge because you know like one of the arguments that you can make about why life emerges in chemistry is because chemistry is the first scale in terms of like you know building up objects from elementary objects um that the number of possible things that could exist is larger than the universe can possibly make all at once right so um so you imagine you have two planets and they're cooking some geochemistry you know our planet invented one kind of biochemistry and presumably as you start building up the complexity of the molecules the chances of the overlap in those trajectories those causal chains being built up is probably very low um and it gets lower and lower as it gets further advanced along its evolutionary path so i think it's very difficult to imagine predicting the technologies that aliens are going to have i mean it's it's so it's you're looking at basically planets have kind of convergent chemistry but there's some variability and then you're looking basically at the outgrowth into the possibility space chemistry so do you think it would detect the the technology the objects created by aliens before we detect the aliens possibly so when you're talking about measuring assembly index um don't you think we would detect the garbage first like at the outskirts of alien civilizations is this is going to be trash [Music] i think i would come back to arecibo the arecibo message sent from the arecibo telescope built by drake i think and and sagan how's arecibo spelled a-r-e-c-i-b-o yes thank you yeah and there we go out there that that's the telescope that sent the message that you're doing so that message was sent where it was beamed it beamed at a star of a specific star um and it was sent out many years ago um and what they did so this is why i was pushing on binary is a binary message i think it's a semi-prime number of characters so i think 20 73 by 23 i think and it basically represents human bit proton um binary human beings dna male and female and it's it's really cool but i'm just wondering if um it could be done not making any because he's made assumptions that aliens speak binary make that assumption why not just assume that if the difference between physics chemistry and biology is the amount of memory that's instead that's recordable by the substrate then surely the universal thing my i'm going to make some sacrilegious statement which i think is pretty awesome um for people to argue with so this is uh we're looking at an image where it's the the entirety of the message encoded in binary and then there's a probably interpretation of different parts of that image there's a there's a person um there's green parts it looks like for people just listening like a tetra game of tetris so it's encoding in minimal ways a bunch of cool information probably representing all of us so the top it's kind of teaching us how to count and then all goes all the way down teaching you chemistry and then just says but it makes so many assumptions and i think if we can actually so i think i mean sarah's much more eloquent expressing this but i'll have a go and you can correct it if you want which is like um we one of the things that sarah has had a profound effect on the way i look at the origin of life and this is one of the reasons why we're working together because we don't really care about the origin of life we want to make life make aliens and find aliens make aliens find aliens i think we might have to make aliens in the lab before we find aliens in the universe right i think that would be a cool way to do it so what is it about the universe that creates a aliens well it's selection through assembly theory creating memories because when you create memories you can then command your domain you can basically do stuff you can command matter so we need to find a way by understanding what life is of how the minimal way to command matter how that would emerge in the universe and be if we want to communicate i mean maybe we don't want to necessarily uniformly communicate um what i would do perhaps if i had is i would send out lots of probes away from earth that have this magic way of communicating with aliens get them quite far away from earth plausibly deniable and then send out the message that would then attract all the aliens and then basically work out if they're a friend or foe and how they want to hang out the messages being something has to do with the memory yes like the the assembly version of arecibo so that everyone in the universe that has been understands what life is so aliens need to work out what they are once they've worked out what they are they then can work out how to encode what they are and then they can go out and send messages it's like the universal um the rosetta stone for life in the universe is working out how the memories are built i don't know if sarah you have any well um whether that you would agree with that no i i i wanted to raise a different point which is about the fact that we can't see the aliens yet because we haven't gotten the technology and presumably we think assembly theory is the right way of doing it but i don't think that we know how to go from the kind of data you're describing lex like you know visual data or smell to construct the assembly spaces yet and in some ways i think that the problem of life detection really is the same problem at the foundations of ai that we don't understand how to get machines to see causal graphs to see reality in terms of causation um and so i i think assembly and ai are going to intersect in interesting ways hopefully um but the the sort of key point and i've been trying to make this argument more recently um and might write an essay on it is you know people talk about the great filter right and which is again this like doomsday thing that you know people want to say there's no aliens out there because something terrible happened to them um and it matters whether that's in our in our past or our future as to the longevity of our species presumably which is why people find it interesting but i think it's not it's not a physical filter it's not like things go extinct i think it's literally we don't have the technology to see them um and you can see that with microscopes i mean we didn't know there were microbes on this table for our tables for thousands of years or telescopes like there's so much of the universe we can't see and then basically what we have done as a species is outsource our physical perceptions to technology building microscopes based on our eyes um you know and building seismometers based on our sense of feelings like feel earthquakes and things and ai is basically we're trying to outsource what's actually happening in our thinking apparatus into machines now into technological devices and maybe that's the key technology that's going to allow us to see things like us and see the universe in a totally different way but you kind of mentioned the great filter do you think there's a way through technology to stop being able to see stuff so can you take step backwards i think so yeah did you imply that with the great so like well no i mean i think there's a great perceptual filter in the sense that a a example of life evolving on a planet over billions of years has to acquire a certain amount of knowledge and technology to actually recognize the phenomena that it is well that's the sense i have is uh i mean you talk with physicist engineers in general that there's this kind of idea that we have most of the tools are ready just to hear the signal but to me it feels like we don't have any of the tools to see the segment yeah i agree that's that's the biggest like to hear we don't have the tools to really hear to see yeah are everywhere we just don't have the the um yeah i mean well oh that's i mean i got this in part actually because you were like you know that last time i was here was like look at the carpet you know could it like if you had an alien detector where the carpet be aliens i mean i think we really don't i i would be both the aliens would nevertheless have a high assembly index or produce things like high assembly yeah yeah yeah and those things have a high assembly index uh you have to have a detector that can recognize high assembly index in all its forms yeah yes that's it that's it take data construct assembly space yes patterns basically so one way to think about high assembly index is interesting patterns uh of basic ingredients i can give you an example because i mean molecules we've been talking about in objects but we're also trying to do it in um spatial trajectories like imagine you're just um like i i always get bothered by the fact that like when you look at birds flocking you can describe that with like a simple boys model or like you know people use spin glass to describe animal behavior and those are like really simple physics models yet you're looking at a system that you know has agency and there's intelligence in those birds and i and basically like you can't help but think there must be some statistical signatures of the fact that they're those that's a group of agents versus you know like i don't know you know the physics example maybe like i don't know brownie emotion or something um and so what we're trying to do is actually apply assembly to trajectory data to try to say there's a minimal amount of um causal history to build up certain trajectories for observed agents that's like an agency detector for behavior do you do you think it's possible to do some like like voids or those kinds of things like artificial like cellular automata play with those ideas with assembly um with assembly theory have you found any useful really simple mathematical um like simulation tools that allow you to play with these concepts so like one of course you're doing mass spec in this physical space with with chemistry but it just seems well i mean computer science person maybe it seems easier to just i agree with you and sexier in terms of uh tweeting visual information on uh twitter or instagram more importantly um to play like here's an organism of a low assembly index and here's an organism of a high assembly index and let's watch them create more and more memories uh and more and more complex objects and so like and mathematically you get to observe what that looks like to build up an intuition what assembly index is like we are building a toolkit right now so i think it's a really good idea but what we've got to do is i'm kind of still obsessed with the infrastructure required and one of the reasons why i was pushing on information and mathematics when human beings when human being we take a lot of the infrastructure for granted and and i think we have to strip that back a bit for going forward but you're absolutely right i would agree that i think the fact that we exist in the universe this is like i can see there are lots of people disagree with the statement but i don't think i don't think sarah will but i don't know the fact that objects exist i don't think anyone on earth can just will disagree that objects can exist elsewhere right but they will disagree that life can exist elsewhere but what perhaps i'm trying to say is that the the the acquisition the universe's ability to acquire memory is the very first step for building life and that must be that's so easy to happen so therefore alien life is everywhere because all alien life is is uh those memories being compressed and minimalized and the alien equivalent of the cell working so i think that we will build new technologies to find aliens um but we do not we need to understand what we are first and and how we go from physics to chemistry to biology the most interesting thing as you're saying between these two organisms different assemblies is when you get into biology biology gets more and more weird more and more contingent where physics is pro chemistry is less weird because the rules of chemistry are smaller than the rules of biology and then going away to physics where you have a very nicely tangible number of ways of arranging things and i think assembly theory just helps you appreciate that and so once we get there my dream is that we are just going to be able to suddenly are i mean i'm i mean i'm maybe just being really arrogant here i don't mean to be arrogant it's just again i've just got this hammer called assembly and everything's nail but i think that once we crack it we'll be able to use assembly theory plus telescopes to find aliens do you have sarah do you have disagreements with lee on the number of aliens that are out there so and actually yeah well and what they look like so any of the things we've been talking about is there um nuanced oh it's always nice to discover uh wisdom through nuance disagreement yeah i i don't i don't wholly disagree but i think um but i do think i disagree it's kind of there's nuance there um but but you can disagree no it's fine um it is nuanced right so you made the point earlier that you think um you know once we discover what alien like what life is we'll see alien life everywhere um and i think i agree on some levels in the sense that i think the physics that governs us is universal but i i don't know how far i would go to say to say that we're a likely phenomenon because we don't understand all of the features of the transition at the original life which which we would just say in assembly as you go from uh the no memory physics to uh there's like a critical transition around the assembly index where assembliness starts to increase and that's what we call the evolution of the biosphere and complexification of the biosphere so there's a principle of increasing assembliness or that goes back to what i was saying at the very beginning about the physics of the possible that the universe basically gets in this mode of trying to make as much possibilities as possible um now how often that transition happens that you get the kind of cascading effect that we get in our biosphere i think we don't know if we did we would know the likelihood of life in the universe and a lot of people want to say life is common but i don't think that we can say that yet so we have the empirical data which i think you would agree with but then there's this other kind of thought experiment i have which i i don't like um but i did have it um which is um you know if life emerges on one planet and you get this real high density of things that can exist on that planet is it sort of dominating the density of creation that the universe can actually generate so like if you're thinking about counting entropy right like the universe has a certain amount of stuff in it and then you know assembly is kind of like an entropic principle it's not entropy but the idea is that now transformations among stuff or the actual physical histories of things now become things that you have to count as far as saying that these things exist and we're increasing the number of things that exist and uh and if you think about that cosmologically maybe earth is sucking up all the life potential of the whole universe i don't know but how's that can you explain that a little bit why can any one geographical region suck up the creative capacity of the universe um just like i i know it's a ridiculous thought i don't i don't actually agree with it but it was just the thought i love that you can have thoughts that you don't like and don't agree with but you have to think through them anyway yeah the human mind is fascinating yeah i i think these sort of um like counter factual thought experiments are really good when you're trying to build new theories because you have to think through all the consequences and there are people that want to try to account for say the degrees of freedom on our planet in cosmological inventories of you know talking about the entropy of the universe and you know and when we're thinking about like cosmological arrow of time and things like that now i think those are pretty superficial proposals as they stand now but assembly would give you a way of counting it and then the question is if there's a certain maximal capacity of the universe's speed of generating stuff which lee always has this argument that assembly is about time the universe is generating more states really what it's generating is more assembly possibilities and then dark energy might be one manifestation of that that the universe is accelerating its expansion because that makes more physical space and what's happening on our planet is it's accelerating in the expansion of possible things that exist and maybe the universe just has a maximal rate of what it can do to generate things and then if if there is a maximal rate maybe only a certain number of planets can actually do that or there's a trade-off about the pace of growth on certain planets versus others i have a million questions there would you have you have thoughts and just a quick yeah i'll just say something very quickly no it's good i think i get it i think i get it so um all i want to say is when i mean aliens are everywhere i mean memories are the prerequisite for aliens via selection and then concentration of selection when selection becomes autonomous so what i would love to do is to build say a magical telescope that was a memory a magical one yeah or a real one there would be a memory detector to see selection so you could you could get to exoplanets and say that exoplanet looks like there's lots of selection going on there maybe there's evolution and maybe there's going to be life so what i'm trying to say is narrow down the regions of space where you say there's definitely evidence of memory as high assembly there or not the high assembly because that would be life but if select this where where it's capable of happening and then we've then that would also help us frame the search for aliens i don't know how likely it is to make the transition to cells and all the other things i think you're right but i think that is yeah we just need to get more data well i didn't like the thought experiment because i don't like the idea that if the universe has a maximal limit on the amount it can generate per unit time that our existence is actually precluding the existence of other things i'll just say one thing but i think that's probably true anyway because the resource limitations so i don't like your thought experiment because i think it's wrong because well no no no i do like thor express so what you're trying to say is like there is a chain of events that goes back that's manifestly collimated with life on earth and you're not saying that life isn't possible elsewhere say that there has been these number of things contingent things that have happened that have allowed life to merge here um that doesn't mean that life can't emerge elsewhere but you're saying that these the intersection of events may have may be concentrated here right um and i think that's not exact not exactly it's more like um like uh you know if you you look at say the causal graphs are fundamental maybe space is an emergent property which is consistent with some proposals in quantum gravity but also how we talk about things in assembly theory then the universe is causal graphs generating more structure in clausal graphs right so this is how the universe is unfolding and maybe there's a cap on the rate of generation like the there's only so much stuff that gets made per update of the universe and then if there's a lot of stuff being made in a particular region that happens to look the same locally spatially that's an after effect of the fact that the whole causal graph is updating like it's it it uh yeah i don't i don't know that i think that that doesn't work i don't think it works either but i don't have a good argument in my mind about but i do like the idea of the capacity the universe because you've got the number of states yeah we can come back to it well let me ask real quick like why does uh different like local pockets of the universe start remembering stuff how does memory uh emerge exactly so at the origin of the universe i was very forgetful that's when the physicists were happiest as low memory objects um which is like ultra low memory objects which is what the definition of stuff okay so how does memory emerge how does which is this how does this the temporal stickiness so objects emerge um i i i i'm going to take a very chemocentric point of view because i can't imagine any other way of doing it you you could think of other ways maybe um but i would say heterogeneity in matter is where the memory so you must have enough different ways of rearranging matter for there to be a memory so what that means is if you've got particles colliding in a box let's just take a um some in or some elements in a box those elements can combine in a combinatorial set of ways so there's a commentary explosion of the number of molecules or minerals or solid objects bonds being made because there's such a large number the population of different objects that are possible this goes back to assembly theory where assembly theory there's four types of universes right so you've got basically a um and this is what one was up earlier where one universe where you've just got everything is possible so you can take all the atoms and combine them and make everything then you've got basically what is the assembly combinatorial where you basically have to accrue information in steps then you've got um assembly observed right and then you've got the object assembly going back so what that mean what i'm trying to say is like if you can take atoms and make bonds let's say you take a nitrogen atom and add it to a carbon atom you find an amino acid then you add another carbon atom on in a particular configuration then another one all different molecules they all represent different histories so i would say for me right now the most simple route into life seems to be through recording memories and chemistry but that doesn't mean there can't be other ways and can't be other emergent effects but i i think if you can make bonds and lots of different bonds and they those molecules can have a causal effect on the future so imagine a box of atoms and then then you combine those atoms in some way so you make molecule a from load of atoms and then molecule a can go back to the box and influence the box then you make a prime or a b or abc and that process keeps going and that's where the memories come from is that heterogeneity in the universe from bonding i don't know if it makes anything and it's beginning to flourish at the chemistry level yeah so the physicists have no no no like not enough yeah the phys i mean they're like desperately begging well the physicist would claim freedom yeah uh and heterogeneous components to play with yeah that's exactly it what do you think about that sarah i mentioned already i think it's significant that whatever physics governs life emerges actually in chemistry it's not relevant at the subatomic scale or even at the atomic scale it's in well atomic scale because chemistry but like when you get into this this combinatorial diversity that you get from combining things on the periodic table that's when selection actually matters or the fact that some things can exist and others can't exist actually starts to matter so i think of it like you don't you don't study gravity inside the atomic nucleus you study it in terms of large scale structure of the universe or black holes or things like that and whatever we're talking about as physics of information or physics of assembly becomes relevant at a certain scale of reality and um and the transition that you're talking about i would think of is just when you get a sufficient density in terms of the assembly space of like the relationship of the overlap and and the assembly space which is like a feature of common memory there is this transition um to assembly dominated physics whatever that is oh like when we're talking about and we're trying to map out exactly what that transition looks like we're pretty sure you know of some of its features but we haven't done all of that do you think if you were there in the early universe you would have been able to predict the emergence of chemistry and biology and i asked that because at this stage as humans do you think we can possibly predict the length of memory that's that might be able to be formed later on in this pocket in the universe like how how complex is uh what is the ceiling of assembly i think as much time as you have in the past is how much you can predict in the future because that it's actually physical in the system and you have to have enough time for uh features of that structure to exist wait let me push back on that wait god what isn't that isn't there somewhere in the universe that's like a shortest path that's been that stretches all the way to the beginning yeah that's building some giant monster maybe yeah yes so the universe has as much memory as the largest assembly object in the universe yeah right but like so you can't predict you can't predict any deeper than that no right so like that i guess i'm saying is like what intuition do you have about complexity living in the world that you'd have today right because you you just you can i mean i guess how long um does it get more fun like isn't there going to be at some point because there's a there's a heat death in the universe isn't it going to be a point of the most uh of the highest assembly of object with the highest probability being generated when is the universe going to be the most fun and can we freeze ourselves and then live then exactly and will you know when you're having the most fun that this is the best time you're in your prime are you going to do what everyone does which is deny that you're in your prime and the best years are still ahead of you i don't know what option do you have um uh i i i mean the problem is with there's a lots of lots of really interesting features here i just want to mention one thing that might be is i do think assembly theory applies all the way back to subatomic particles and i also think that cosmological selection might have been actually there there might be it's not i would say it's a really boring bit but it's really important for a cosmologist that the universes have gone through was it lee smolin who proposed this maybe that there is this that basically universe evolves you've got the wrong constants we'll start again and the most productive constants where you can allow particles to form in a certain way get propagated to the next universe we go again so actually selection goes all the way back and there's these cycle of universes and now this universe has been selected because um life can occur and it carries on but i've i've really butchered that there's a much more so this is some aspect where through the selection process there's parameters that are being fine-tuned and we happen to be living in one where there's some level of fine-tuning is there given that um can you still man the case that we humans are alone in the universe we are the highest assembly index object in the universe yeah i can i guess sad though i mean so from is it possible yes it's possible let's assume well we we know i mean it's possible so let me so okay so there is a particular set of elements on earth in a particular ratio and the right gravitational constant and the right viscosity you know of staff being able to move around the right right distance from our sun right number of offense where we have a moon um the earth is rotating um the late heavy bombardment produced a lot of brought in the right stuff and um and mars was cooking up cam you know the right molecules first so it was habitable before earth was literally doing the combinatorial search and before mars kind of became unhabitable it it seeded earth with the right molecular replicators and there was just the right stuff on earth and that's how the miracle of life occurred although i find i'm very uncomfortable with that because actually because life came so quickly in the earth's past but that doesn't mean that life is easy elsewhere it just might mean that that the the because chemistry is actually not a long-term thing chemistry can happen quickly so maybe going on with a steel manning of the argument to say actually the fact that life emerged quickly doesn't mean that life is easy it just means that the chemistry was right on earth and earth is very special and that's why there's no life anywhere else in the universe yeah so sarah mentioned this kind of cascading thing so what if that's the reason we're lucky is that we got to have a rare cascading of um like accelerating cascading effect in terms of the complexity of things so like maybe most of the universe is trying to get sticky with the memory and it's not able to really form it and then we got really lucky in that and it has nothing like there's a lot of earth like conditions let's say but it's just you really really have to get lucky on this but i'm doing experiment i'm doing experiments right now in fact experiments that sarah and i are working on because we have some joint funding for this where we're seeing that the universe can get sticky really quickly now of course we're being very anthropocentric we're using laboratory tools we're using theory but actually the phenomena of selection the process of heterogen developing heterogeneity we can do in the lab we're just seeing the very first hints of it and it wouldn't it be great if um we can start to pin down a bit more precisely um begin because becoming good bayesianists for this for the origin of life and the emergence of life to finding out what kind of chemistries we really need to look for and i'm becoming increasingly confident we'll be able to do that in the next few years make life in the lab or make some selection in the lab from inorganic stuff from sand from rocks from dead stuff from moon wouldn't it be great to get stuff from the moon put it in our origin of life experiment and make moon life and restrict ourselves to interesting self-replicating stuff that we find on the moon well sarah what do you think about this approach of engineering life in order to understand life so building life in the in the machine yeah so i mean lee and i are trying right now to build a vision for a large institute or experimental program basically to do this problem but i think of it as like we need to simulate a planet so like the large hadron collider was supposed to be simulating conditions just after the big bang lee built a lot of technology in his lab to do these kind of selection engines but the question you're asking is how many experiments do you need to run what volume of chemical space do you need to explore before you actually see an event and i like to make an analogy to one of my favorite particle physics experiments which is super kami akande that's looking for the decay of the proton so this is something that we predicted theoretically but we've never observed in our universe and basically what they're doing is every time they don't see a proton decay event they have a longer bound on the lifetime of a proton so imagine we built an experiment with the idea in mind of trying to simulate planetary conditions physically simulate you can't simulate original life in the computer you have to do it in an experiment simulate enough planetary conditions to explore the space what's possible and bound the probability for an original life event even if you're not observing it you can talk about the probability but we hopefully life is not exponentially rare and we would then be able to evolve in an automated system alien life in the lab and if we can do that then we understand the physics as well as we understand what we can do in particle accelerators so keep expanding physically the simulation the physical simulation until something happens yeah or just build build a big enough volume of chemical experiments and and evolve them just say volume you mean like literally volume i mean uh physical volume in terms of space but i actually mean volume in terms of the combinatorial space of chemistry so how do you nicely control the combinatorial exploration the search space such that it's always like you keep grabbing the low-hanging fruit yeah how do you build a search engine for chemistry well we should carry on doing this i should pretend the physics be the physicist you'd be the chemist no so the way to do it is um i will always play a joke because i i i like writing grants um uh to ask for you know money to do cool stuff but and i years ago i started wanting to build so i actually wanted the weather so i built this robot in my lab called the computer which is this robot you can program to do chemistry um now it's a pro i made a programming language for the computer and made it operate chemist chemical equipment um originally i wrote grants to say hey i want to make an origin of life system and no one would give me any money for this this isn't what is ridiculous why are you wanting to make oh it's really hard it takes forever you're not a very good origin of life chemist anyway why would we give you any money and so i turned around and said can we you can instead can you give me money to make robots to make molecules are interesting and everyone went yeah okay you can do that uh um and that's so actually the funny thing is the computer um project which i have in my lab which is very briefly it's just basically it's like literally an automated test tube and we've made a programming language for the test tube which is cool um um has come as literally came from this i went to my lab one day said i want to make a search engine to get the origin of life because i don't have a planet and i thought about doing in a microfluidic format so microfluidic is very nano very small channels in device where you can basically have all the pipes produced by lithography and you can have a chamber maybe say between say 10 and 100 microns in volume and we slot them all together like lego and we can make an origin of life system and i i could never get it to work um and i realized i had to make do chemistry at the kind of test tube level and what you want to be able to do yeah yeah it goes back tonight that tweet 1981 1981 the computer we're looking at a tweet from lee in 1981 the computer was a distant dream and oh wow this is the scientist looking back it is the young boy who dreamed in 2018 it was realized spelled in a british way realized um so now there's a system that does the physical manifestation or whatever the programming language um the spec uh tells you to do yeah well in 1981 i got my first computer zx81 what was the computer zx81 zx81 sinclair zx81 it was um and i got a chemistry set and i like i like the chemistry set and i like the computer and i just wanted to put them together i thought wouldn't be cool if i could use use the computer to control the chemistry set and um and obviously that was insane and i was like you know eight years old right nine years going on nine years old and um and then i i i invented the computer just because i wanted to build this origin of life grid right which is like literally a billion test tubes connected together in real time and real space basically throwing a chemical dye dice throw dice through a dice for a dice you're gonna get lucky um and that's what we i think sarah and i have been thinking very deeply about because um you know there's more money being spent on the the the origin of the gravity or looking at the higgs boson than the origin of life right and the origin of life is the i think the biggest question or not the biggest question it is a big question let's put it that way the biggest question you're okay saying that okay all right isn't it possible once you figure out the origin of life that that's not going to solve um that's not actually going to solve the question of what is life like is isn't it because you're kind of putting a lot of yeah i think that's the same problem but you're putting is it possible that you're putting too many um too much bets into this origin part maybe the origin thing isn't isn't there always a turtle underneath the turtle isn't it a stack of turtles because then if you create it in the lab maybe you need some other stuff well that's nothing but they already like you like in the lab there's still memory yeah yes right the experiment is already the product of evolution right in some maybe really deep way not an obvious way it's a very deep way yeah so maybe uh the haters are always going to be like well you have to reconstruct the full do you have to build it fortunately for us the haters are not aware of that argument well no i know i know you're the one making that argument usually but yeah i just think that if we create life in the lab it's not obvious that you'll get to the deep deep understanding of necessarily um what is the line between life and non-life no i think so there's so much here i'm just saying god playing devil so much here but let me play devil's advocate back in a previous conversation right and say um uh yeah i will why not we're not we've got time school seller automata yes celery all thomas are these these very very um simple things where you color squares um black or white and implement rules and play them in time and you can get these very very complex patterns coming out you know there's nice rules there are two and complete rules and um and um i would argue that cellular automata are that are don't really exist on their own they have to exist on a in a computing device if that whether it's computing devices a piece of paper an abstraction a mathematician drawing a grid or um a a a framework now so i would argue cas are beautiful things simple going complex but the complexity is all borrowed from the lithography the not numbers right now let's take that same argument with the um the chemistry experiment origin of life cat what you need to be able to do is go and i'm inspired to do this to go out and look for cas occur in nature you know let's kind of let's find some um some cas that just emerge in our universe and for people just decide to interrupt for people um just listening and in general i think what we're looking at um is a cellular automata where again as lee described there is just binary black or white squares and they only have local information and they they're born and they die and you would think nothing interesting would emerge but actually what we're looking at is something that i believe is called glider guns uh or or a glider gun which is uh moving objects in this multi-cell space that look like they're organisms that have much more information that have much more complexity than the individual building components in fact look like they have a long-term memory uh well while the individual components don't seem like they have any memory at all yeah it's just fascinating the argument here is um that has to exist on all this layer of infrastructure right and though it looks simple and then what i would make the argument i would make a value say well i think cas are really simple and everywhere is safe show me how they emerge and substrate now let's go to the origin of life where or machine i don't think we want to do the origin of life just any origin is good so we do so we literally have our sand shaker shake the sand like massive grid of chemistry experiments shaking sand shaking whatever and then because we know what we've put in so we know where how we've cheated and the same way with ca we know how we've cheated we know what the micro we know the number of operations needed we know how big a grid we want to get this if we could then say okay how can we um generate this recipe in the lab and make a life form what were the what contingency did we need to put in and we're up front about how we cheated okay say oh you had to shake it was it periodic planet rotates it's tried comes in and out so and then we can start to basically say okay how difficult is it for these features to be found and then we can look for exoplanets and other features so i think sarah's absolutely right we want to explain to people we're cheating in fact we have to cheat no one has given i'm good at writing grants i used to be i'm not very good right now keep getting rejected but i writing a grant for a planet and 100 million years no grant fund there is going to give me that but maybe money to make a a kind of a grid a computer grid origin of life computing into this space in physical space and just do it so sarah said something which is you can't simulate the or engine of life in a in a computer so like in simulation why not what what were your you said it very confidently so yeah is it possible and why would it be very difficult like what's your intuition there i think it's very difficult right now because we don't know the physics but if you go based on principles of assembly theory and you think every molecule is actually a very large causal graph not just the molecule then you have to simulate all the features of those causal graphs and i think it becomes computationally intractable you might as well just build the experiment because you have in the physical space you have all the objects with all the memories yes and in the computer you would have to copy them and reconstruct yes that's a beautifully put and i would say that lots of people you you just don't have enough resources it's easier to actually do the physical experiment because we are literally i would view the physical experiment almost like a computational experiment we're just outsourcing it's just basically we're just outsourcing all the matrix and algebra on your point about the experiment being also an example of life it's almost like you want to design it's like you know all of us are lineages of propagating information across time and so everything we do becomes part of life because it's part of that causal chain so it's like you want to try to pinch off as much as you can of the information from your causal chain that goes into the experiment but you can't pinch off all of it to move it to like a different timeline it's always going to be part of your timeline but at least if you can control how much information you put in you can try to see how much does that particular trajectory you set up start generating its own assembly so you you know where it starts and then you want to try to see it take off on its own when you try to pinch it off as much as possible got it quick pause bath break yes all right cool and now we're back all right we talked about the early days of the universe when there was just stuff and no memory not even causality i think lee at least implied the causality's immersion somehow we could discuss this what happened before this all originated what's outside the universe divided by zero okay so it's not it's not relevant not understandable is it useful to even ask the question because it's so hard no it's not hard it's just not a question if i can't do an experiment or even think of experiment the question doesn't exist well no you can't think of a lot of experiments no effects what i mean is your causality graph is like this is what we've been talking about it's like there is limits to your ability to construct experiments i agree but i'm i'm i was trying to be facetious and i'm trying to make a point i think that if you if there is a causal bottleneck through which information can't propagate in principle then it's very hard to ask to think of an experiment even in principle even one that's beyond my my mediocre intellect right which is fine i'm happy to accept that but this is one of the things i actually do think there was something before the big bang because i'm i would say that i think the big bang just couldn't occur and create time time created the big bang but uh there was time before the big bang yeah there was no space but those times yeah yeah but i mean i'm just making that stuff up just to make all the physicists happy but i think it's dad would you think that would make them happy because they would be quite upset actually and why would they be upset because they would say that like time can't exist before yeah i mean this goes back to an argument that you might not want to have the argument here i i was talking to sarah earlier today about an argument we had about time a long time ago time and time and what i would it's like i think there is this thing called time or state creation the universe is creating states and it's outside of space but they create space so what i mean is you can imagine there are states being created all the time and there is this thing called time time is a clock which you can use to measure when things happen but that doesn't mean because you can't measure something that states aren't being created and so you might locally refer to the big bang and the bing bang occurred at some point in when those states were there probably there had to be enough states for the big bang to occur um and then but i i i think that there is something wrong with our conception of how the universe was created in the big bang um because we don't really get time and because again you know i don't want to become boring and sound like a broken record but but um time is a real thing and until i can really explain that more elegantly i'm just going to get into more trouble we're going to talk about time because uh time is useful measuring device for experiments but also time is as an idea all that okay but let me first ask sarah is like what what do you think is it a useful question to ask what happened before the big bang is a useful question ask what's outside the universe so i would think about it as the big bang is an event that we reconstructed as probably happening in the past of our universe based on current observational data and so the way i like to think about it is we exist locally in something called the universe um so and and going back to like the physics of existence we exist locally in the space of all things that could exist and we can infer certain properties of the structure of where we exist locally and one of the properties that we've inferred in the past is that there is a thing we call the big bang there's some signatures of our local environment that indicate that there was a very um low information uh event that started our universe i think that's actually just an artifact of the structure of the assembly space that when you when you start losing all the memory in the objects it it looks like what we call a big bang um so i think it makes sense to talk about where you are locally i think it makes sense to talk about counterfactual possibilities what could exist outside the universe in the sense that they become part of our reasoning and therefore part of our causal chain of things that we can do um so like the multiverse in my mind exists but it doesn't exist as a multiverse of possible universes it exists as an idea in our minds that allows us to reason about how physics works and then to do physics differently because we reason about it that way um so i always like to re-center it on things exist but they don't always exist like we think they exist um so when we're thinking about things outside the universe they absolutely exist because we're thinking about them but they don't look like they don't look like the projections in our minds they're something else something you said just gave me an idea to go back to your question if there was court i mean some if something caused the big bang if there was some memory or some artifact of that then of course it's to answer your question it's worth going back to that because it that would imply there is something beyond that barrier that filter yeah and that's what you were saying i guess right i'm agnostic to what exists outside the universe i just don't think that like i think the most interesting things for us to be doing are finding explanations that allow us to do more like like that optimism so i tend to draw the boundary on questions i ask as being scientific ones because i find that that's where the most creative potential is to impact the future trajectory of what we're doing on this planet the interesting thing about the big bang is basically from our current perspective of what we're able to detect it's the time when things were forgotten yes it's the time the reset from our limited perspective and so the question is is it useful to ever study the thing that was forgotten um or should we focus just on the on the memories that are still there well the point i was trying to make with experiment is i was trying to say both things and i think perhaps yes from the pot following point of view if you could then imagine what was forgotten and then work forwards you will have different consequences so then it becomes testable so i'm as long as we can find tests and it's definitely worth thinking about what i don't like is when physicists say what happened before the big bang and before before before without giving me any credible um conjecture about what we would what how would we know the difference but the way you've framed it is quite nice i like that it's like what what have we forgotten is there room for god in assembly theory who's god i like arguments for a necessary being better than god well i think i said it earlier like something that has to exist oh so you like i mean you like the shortest path like does god need no no i i mean well you can go back to like thomas aquinas and arguments for the existence of god but i think i think most of the interesting theological arguments are always about whether something has to exist or there was a first thing that had exist but i think there's a lot of logical loopholes in those kind of organs well so god here meaning the machine that creates that generates the stuff because god so what i was trying to say earlier isn't that just the universe yeah yeah well yeah well but i there's a difference between i i should i imagine like a black box like a machine yeah that's then i would be more comfortable calling that god because it's a machine you go into a room and there's a thing with a button yeah i don't like the great programmer in the sky version can i yeah but if it's more kind of uh um like i don't like to think of if you look at a cellular automata if it if it's the cells and the rules that doesn't feel like god that generates a bunch of stuff but if there's a machine like uh that does that runs the cellular automata and set the rules then that feels like god that the other sort of in terms of terminology so i wonder if there's like a machine that's required to generate this universe that's very sort of important for running this in the lab so as i said earlier i think i said this earlier that i can't remember the phrase but something like i mean does god exist in our universe yes where does god exist exhaust god at least exists in the abstraction in my in our minds particularly people who have who have religious faith they believe in but let's then take your but you're talking a little bit more about generics say well is there a mechanism beyond the universe you're calling god i would say god did not exist at the beginning but he or she does now because i'm saying the mix well you don't know if he didn't exist in the beginning so like uh this could be us in our minds trying to like just listening to gravitational waves detecting gravitational waves it's the same thing us trying to uh go back further and further into our memories to try to understand the machines that make up that make up us and so it's possible that we're trying to um grasp that possible kind of what kind of machines could create uh there's a there's always a tweet there's always a tweet uh if the universe is a computer then god must have built it because computers need creators there you go and then uh yoshibok replied since there's something rather than nothing perhaps existence is the default if existence is the default then many computers exist creator gods are necessary computers unnecessarily computers too i'm very confused by that but that's an interesting idea that existence is a default versus non-existence i agree with that but the rest is the response perhaps this reasoning is incomplete that's that's how scientists talk trash each other on twitter apparently uh which part don't you agree with uh when he said if existence is default then many computers exist this comes back to the inventor and discovery argument i would say the universe at the beginning wasn't capable of computation because there wasn't enough technology enough states so what you're saying is the mec if god is a mechanism so i might actually agree but then the thing is lots of people seem more see god is more than a mechanism for me god could be the causal graph and assembly theory that creates all the stuff that the memories we know and the fact that we can even relate to each other is because we have the same we share that heritage and why we love each other or we like to see god in each other is it's just we know we have a shared existence so that if the god is the mechanism that created this whole thing i think a lot of people see god you know in a religious sense as a as that mechanism also being able to communicate with the objects it creates and if it's just the mechanism it won't be able to create with the object uh communicate with the objects it creates it can only create you can't like interact with the uh there's versions of god that create the universe and then left you know yeah like spark for some for some religions but the first spark yeah yeah but i i think i liked your analogy of the machine and the rules right but um i think part of the problem is you i mean we have this conception that we can disentangle the rules from the physical substrate right and that's the whole thing about like software and hardware being separate or the way newton wrote his laws that there was some you know like they exist outside the universe they're not actually a feature of the universe they don't have to emerge out of the universe itself so i think if you if you merged your two views then it gets back to the god is the universe and then i think the the deeper question is why does it seem like there's meaning and purpose and if i think about the features of the universe that give it the most meaning and purpose those are the the what we would call the living components of the universe so if you wanted to say god is a physically real thing which you were saying is like an emergent property of our minds but i would just say you know the way the universe creates meaning and purpose there is really a physics there it's not like a illusory thing and that is just what what the physics of life is um is it is it possible that we've forgotten much of the mechanisms that created the universe so like is so basically you know whatever if god is that mechanism we just leave parts of that behind well but the universe is constantly generating itself so if god is that mechanism it would be that that would still be active today i don't belie like i'm agnostic but if i if i if i recall would call the things i believe in god in the way that some people talk about god i would say that god is you know like in the like universe now it's not an absent thing are you i'm so i think there's a mislabeling here because you're i mean from i mean i'm a professional idiot um actually but but you should put that on your cv yeah yeah professionally but not recreationally or amateur but professionally but i think for it i would say if you were talking about god i mean again i'm way out way out of my death and i almost feel uncomfortable yeah but i feel quite uncomfortable articulating but i'll try for me a lot of people that think of god as a consciousness a reasoning entity that actually has causal power and you're just human like intelligence and you're and so you're like then you're saying like gravity could be god or time could be god i mean i think for me for my conception of time is probably as fundamental as god because it gave rise to human intelligence and consciousness in which we can have this abstract notion of god um so i i think that you're maybe talking about god in a very mechanistic kind of unsophisticated sense whereas other people say that god is more sophisticated and got all this you know feelings and love and you know and this abstracting ability so is that what or do you mean that do you mean god as in this conscious entity that decided to flick the universe into existence well one of the features that god would have is the ability to flick the universe into existence i you know like windows 95 i don't know if god is windows 95 or windows xp or windows 10 i don't know the full feature set okay so you at the very least you have to flick the universe into existence and then other features might include ability to interact with that universe in interesting ways and then how do you interact with the universe interesting ways you have to be able to speak the language of its different components so in order to interact with humans you have to um know how to act human-like so so i don't i don't know but it seems like whatever mechanism created the universe might want to also generate local pockets of mechanisms that can interact with that inject god was lonely yeah it was long i mean it could be just a teenager and another just playing a video yeah maybe well i was gonna say i mean i i don't so this is referring from our origin of life engine it's like i i don't believe in god but that doesn't mean i don't want to be one right i want to make a universe and make a life form but that maybe that may be rude to people who have you know dear religious beliefs what i mean by that is isn't it if we are able to create an entirely new life form different chemistry different culture what does it make up and makes us good by that definition it makes us gods right well there is i mean like when you have children you're like one of the magical things of that is you're kind of mini gods i mean first of all uh from a child's perspective parents are gods for quite a while and then you i mean they're they're in the positive sense there's a magic to that's why i love robotics is you instill life into something and that makes you um feel god like in a sort of positive way being a creator is a positive creator yeah exactly and a small scale and then god is would be a creator at the largest possible scale i suppose okay you mentioned offline the assembledtron assemblytron assemblytron yep uh what what's an assemblytron these are the there's an early idea of something you're thinking about um so sarah's team uh well i think sarah's team are interested in um under using ai to understand life my team is and i'm and i'm think wondering if we could apply the principles of assembly theory that is um the causal structure that you get with assembly theory and hybridize it and make a new type of neuron if you like i mean there are causal neural networks out there but they are they are not quite the architecture like what i would like i would like to associate memory bits with um basically i'd like to make a rather than have an asic for neural networks i want to make it asic for assembly networks right and um so can you say that again assembly networks uh uh so what what is a like a a thing with an input and output and it's like a neural network type of thing what does it do exactly what's the input what's the output so in in this case so if you're talking about a general neural network i mean in general neural network you can train it on all sort any sort of data right depending on the the framework whether it's like um text or or image data or whatnot and that's fine but there's no causal structure associated with that data now just imagine rather than you know let's say we're going to classify a difference between cat and good dog right classic cat and dog neural network what about if the system understood the assembly space it created the cat and the dog and rather than guessing what was happening and training on those images and not understanding those features you almost like you could imagine doing a going back a step and doing an and training going back a step and doing the training going back a step back a step back a step and and i wonder if that is actually the origin of intelligence or how we'll crack intelligence because we need to because we'll we'll create the entire graph of events and and be able to kind of look at calls and effect across those graphs i'm explaining it really badly but it's it's a gene of an idea and i'm guessing very smart very rich um people in ai are already doing this trying to not generate cats and dogs but trying to generate things of high assembly index yeah and i think that i think and and also using causal graphs in neural networks and machine learning and deep learning maybe building a new architecture i'm just wondering is there something we can get out assembly theory allows us to rebuild current machine learning architectures to give more give causation more cheaply i mean i don't know if that's what you we've been inventing this for a little while but we're trying to finish the theory paper first before we do anything else yeah you also want to have um say goal directed behavior in neural networks then assembly theory is a good framework for doing that danielle's been thinking about that a lot yeah and i think it's a really interesting idea that you can map concepts from how neural networks learn to thinking about goal directed behavior as a learning process that you're learning a specific goal the universe is learning a goal when it generates a particular structure and that you can map that physical structure into a neural network how what's the goal uh well in a neural network you're designing the goal and um in biology i mean you know people are not supposed to use teleological language in biology which is ridiculous but um uh because goals are real things they're just post-selected so you can talk about goals after the fact um you know once a goal emerges in the universe that physical entity has a goal but but lee and i came up with a test for um like a turing test for goal directed behavior uh based on the idea of assembly when like we have to formalize it still but i i would like to write a paper on it but like the basic idea is like if you like if you had two systems that were completely equivalent um you know like in the instantaneous like physical experimental setup so lee has to figure out how to do this but there was something that would be different in their future um and there was a symmetry breaking you observe in the present based on that possibility that future outcome then you could say that that system had some representation of of some kind of goal in mind about what it wanted to do in the future um and i so so goals are interesting because they don't exist as instantaneous things they exist across time which is one one of the reasons that assembly theories may be more naturally uh able to account for the existence of goals um so goals are they they only exist in time or they manifest themselves in time through um you said symmetry breaking so it's it's almost like imagine like if representations in your mind are real right um and you you can imagine future possibilities but imagine everything else is physically equivalent and the only thing that you actually change your decision based on is what you model as being the future outcome then somehow that representation in your mind of the future outcome becomes causal to what you're doing now so it's kind of like retrocausal effect but it's not actually retrocausal it's just that your your assembly space is actually includes those possibilities as as part of the structure it's just you're not observing all the features the assembly space in the current moment well the possibilities exist but they don't become a goal until they're realized so so one of the features of assembly space that's super interesting and it's easier to envision with like legos for example is if you're thinking about an assembly space you can't observe the entire assembly space in any instant in time so if you imagine a stack of legos and you want to look at the assembly space of a stack of legos you have to break the legos apart and then you look and then you look at all the possible ways of building up the original object so now you have in your mind the goal of building that object and you have all the possible ways of doing it and those are actual physical features of that object but that object doesn't always exist what exists is the possibility of generating it right and the possibilities are always infinite uh well for that particular object you know like you know it has a well-defined assembly space and i guess what i'm saying is that object is the assembly space but you actually have to unpack that object across time to view that feature of it it's only an observable across time the term goal is such a important and difficult to explain concept right because what you want is a way is like um i think only conscious beings can have conscious goals everything else is doing selection and but selection does invent goals and in a way that um the the way that biology reinterprets the past in the present is kind of how allows you to understand there was a goal in the past now right it's kind of like goals only exist back in time so first of all um only conscious beings can have conscious goals i'm not even going to touch that one why well go for it come on what what the line between conscious goals and uh non-conscious goals exactly right and also maybe just on top of that you said a touring test for gold directed behavior what's what's what's it what's the turn what is the touring test potentially look like so if you've got two objects we were thinking about this so we we actually got some funding to work together two teams so i'm trying to do in part of this is i'm trying to do a bit theory and sarah is teaching me a bit of theory and sarah's trying to design experiments and i'm teaching experiments because i think it's really good for us to have that just say um when would a so that's good i like this this i'm sure we use the dandenon essay right on google yeah and i can explain why we wouldn't want to call it a turing test after but yeah yeah so dan dalett wrote this really nice essay about um uh herding cats and free will inflation the title is so pretty it's the actual title i think so hurting cats and free will inflation yeah something like that i mean it's not maybe not and so no i think that's right so if you've got a let's imagine you've got two objects on a hillside okay and this happens to be a snowy hill and let's just say you see an object go rolling down the hill or you you you and the rocker rolls downhill but the start goes to the end how do that objects had a goal now you unveil the object and you'll see it's actually a skier and the skier starts the top and goes down the bottom great then you look at the rock rock rolls down the hill gets to the bottom how can you tell the difference between the two so and what dan says is like well this is clear the skier's in control and the um because they're they're adjusting trajectory so some updating going on then the only way you can really do that is you have to put the skier back to the top of the hill again they would tend to start roughly in the same space and probably go take all that that complex set of trajectories and end up pretty much at the same finish point right with plus or minus view mirrors whereas if it's just a random rock going down random trajectory that wouldn't happen and so what sarah and i were kind of doing when we were writing this grant we're like we need to somehow instantiate the skier and the rock in an experiment and then say okay when does the object when it so for an object to have a goal it has to have an update it has to have some sensing and some kind of you know in-built actuation to respond to the environment and and then we just have to iterate on that and maybe sarah you can then fill in the turing test part well yeah i guess the motivation for me was slightly different so i i get really frustrated about conversations about consciousness as most people do um you know a lot of people are which is not necessarily related to to free will directly or to this goal directed behavior but i think there's a whole set of bundled and related topics here but i think for me i was you know everybody's always interested in explaining intrinsic experience and quantifying intrinsic experience and there's all sorts of problems with that because you can never actually be another physical system so you can't know what it's like to be another physical system um so i always thought there must be some way of getting at this problem about if an agent or an entity is conscious or at least has internal representations and those are real physical things that they're it must have causal consequences so the way i would ask the question of consciousness is not you know what it is like intrinsically but if if things have intrinsic experience is there any observable difference from the outside about the the kind of causation that that physical system would enact in and for me the most interesting thing that humans do is have imagination so like we can imagine rockets centuries before we build them they become real physical things because we imagine them and people might disentangle that from conscious experience but i think a lot of the sort of imagination we do is actually a conscious process so then this becomes a question of if i were observing systems and i said one had an internal representation which is slightly different than a conscious experience obviously so i'm entangling some concepts but it's a loose set of thought experiments then how and i and i set them up in a physically equivalent situation um would it be the case that there would be experimental observables associated with it and that that became the idea of trying to actually measure for internal representation or conscious so turing basically didn't want to do that you just wanted the machine that could emulate and trick you into having the behavior but never dealt with the internal experience because he didn't know how to do that and i guess i was wondering is there a way to set up the experiment where you could actually test for that for imagination the blood to the that there was something internal going on some kind of inner world as people say but i i or you could say you know like it actually is an agent it's making decisions it has an internal representation and whether you say that's experience or not is a different thing but at least the the feature that there's some abstraction it's doing that's not obvious from looking at the physical substrates do you think it's possible to do that kind of thing one of the compelling things about the turing test is that you know defining intelligent defining any complicated concept as um as a thing like observing it from the surface and not caring about what's going on deep inside because how do you know that's the point so the idea is exactly that so what we're trying to do the turing test for goal directedness is literally um take some objects that clearly don't have any internal representation grains of sand blowing on the beach or something right and i know a crab wandering around on the beach and then generating an experiment where we literally the experiment generates an entity that literally has no internal representation to sand be like a drop these are oil droplets actually we've got in mind a robot that makes all droplets but then what we want to try and do is train the oil droplets to be like crabs give them an internal representation give them the ability to integrate information from the environment so they unders they remember the past are in the present and can imagine a future and a very limited way their kind of game engine their limited simulation of the world allows them to then make a decision your objects across time so then you would run a bunch of crabs like over and over and over and over how many crabs lee how many is that what what's because you have to have a large number of crabs what is what does your theory say is there a mathematical we're working on it i mean this is limit crab limit there's literally a excellent there's lit literally what's the herding cats have to do oh that's random wait what's cats in the title by uh daniel dennett hurting cats and the free will inflation so um what does herding cats mean what does free will inflation mean so this i love this essay um because it explained to me how i could live in a deterministic universe um but have not free will but have freedom you know um and beca and also it helped me explain that that time needed to be a real thing in this universe so what basically dan was saying here is like um how do you how do these cats appear to just do what they want right and how if you live in a deterministic universe why do the cats do these things you know aren't they just isn't it all obvious um and how does free will inflate the universe and for me i mean probably i love the essay because my interpretation of the essay in assembly theory makes complete sense um because you need an expanding universe in assembly theory to create novelty that you search for that then when you find something interesting and you keep doing it because it's cool and it gives you an advantage then it appears in the past to be a goal so what what does in assembly theory the expansion of the universe look like what are we what are we talking about why is why why does the expansion universe give you more possibilities of novelty and cool stuff so for me i don't think about the universe in terms of big bang in space i think about in terms of the big the big memory expansion that you have one you only have the ability to store one bit of information so then you can't do very much so what the universe has been doing since the since forever it's been creating more it's been increasing the size of its ram okay so it's like one megabyte two megabytes three megabytes four megabytes all the way up and so the more ram you have the more you can remember about the past then which allows you to do cooler things in the future so if you can remember how to launch a rocket then you might be able to imagine how to land a rocket and then re-launch re-land and carry on because and so the the you able you're able to expand the space and remember the past and so that's why i think it's very important but not a perfect memory it's it's a it's an interesting question whether there's some forgetting that happens it might increase is the expansion of the forgetting at some point accelerate faster than the remembering i think that that's a very important thing that probably intelligence does and we're going to learn in machine learning about because you want machine learning right now or artificial intelligence right now it doesn't have memory right but you want the ability to or not for if you want to get to human-like consciousness you need to have the ability i suppose to remember stuff and then to selectively forget stuff so you can re-remember it and compress it arguably the way that we come up with new physical laws yeah you like it that's it for that yeah sorry you were confronted no no that's all right no i just wanted it i i think that um there is a a great deal to be gained from having the ability to remember things but then when you forget them you can then have a you can basically do the simulation again and work out if you get to that compressed representation so that it's in cycles so cycles of memory remembering and and forgetting are probably important but there shouldn't be excuse to have a universe with no memory in it the universe is going to remember that it forgot but just not tell you i'm i'm looking at the this paper and it's talking about a puppet controlling a puppet controlling a puppet controlling a puppet controlling a puppet controlling a puppet conception easy to understand but physically impossible as physically impossible as predicting a fair coin toss i don't know what he's talking about but there's pictures of puppets controlling puppets um let me ask you there's a there's a few things i want to ask but we brought up time quite a bit you guys tweet about time quite a bit uh what is time in all this we kind of mentioned it a bunch um is it not important at all in terms of uh is it just a word should we be talking about causality mostly like sir what do you think is uh we've talked about like memories is that the fundamental thing that we should be thinking about and and time is just a useful measurement device or something like that well there's different concepts of time right so i think in assembly theory when we're talking about time we're talking about the ordering of things so that's the causal graph part and so then the fundamental structure of the universe is that there is a certain ordering and certain things can't happen till other things happen but usually when we colloquially attack colloquially talk about time we're talking about the flow of time um and i guess lee and i were actually debating about this this morning so and talking on it walking on the river here which is a very lovely spot for talking about time um but that the you know that when the universe is updating it's transitioning between things that exist now and things that exist now that's really the flow of time so there's there's you have to separate out those concepts at bare minimum and then there's also an arrow of time that people talk about in physics which is that time doesn't appear to have a directionality in fundamental physics but it does um to us right like we can't go backwards in time and usually we you know that would be explained in physics in terms of um well there's a cosmological arrow of time but there's also the thermodynamic arrow of time of increasing entropy um but what we would say in assembly theory is that there is a clear directionality the universe only runs in one direction which is why some things it's easy to make if the universe ones and runs in one direction it's easy to make processes look reversible for example if they have no memory they're easy to run forward and backwards which is why the laws of physics that we have now look the way they do because they involve objects that have no memory but when you get to things like us it becomes very clear that the universe has a directionality associated to it so it's not reversible at all it's the um no man ever steps in the same river i just have to bring that out because yeah on the river no man ever steps in the same river twice for it's not the same river and he's not the same man uh so that it's not reversible any of this no no but reversibility is an emergent property right so we think of the reversibility of laws as being fundamental and the irreversibility is being emergent but i think what we would say from how we think about it and certainly sees the case for our perception of time but also you know what's happening in biological evolution you can make things reversible but it requires work to do it and it requires certain machines to run it forward and backward and akira marletto is working some interesting ideas on constructor theory related to that which is totally different set of ideas so you can travel back in time sometimes yes you can not you can't travel actually back in time but you could reconstruct yeah you tried things that have existed in the past you're always moving forward in time but you can cycle through like i i mean i might clarify yeah yeah go for it quickly you travel forward in time to travel back yes that thank you that really clearly what what's sarah saying you don't go back in time you recreate what happened in the past in the future and inspect it again so in that local pocket of time it's as if you travel back in time so i i don't how's that not traveling back in time because you're not going back to your same self back in time you are you're creating that in the future what else is the same as it was in the past no no no no it's not in registry i mean it goes back to the big question i'm saying i mean this is something i was trying to look up today when i first we first had this discussion and i was talking to sarah on skype and i said by the way time because time is the fundamental thing in the universe she's almost hung up on me right but but you can even i mean if you want to make an analogy to computation and i think charles bennett actually has a paper on this like about reversible computation and reversible turing machines in order to make it reversible you have to store memory to run the process backwards so time is always running forward in that because you have to write the memory erase the memory you can erase the memory but the point when you go back to zero right but the whole point is that in order to have a process that even runs in both directions you have to start talking about memory to store the information to run it backwards i got it so you can't really then you can't have it exactly how it was in the past yeah you exactly so you either have extra stuff extra baggage always okay a really important thing i want to say on this i think if i try and get it right to say that if you can think that the universe is expanding in terms of the number of boxes that it has to store states right um and this is where the directionality of the universe comes from everything comes from you could erase what's in those boxes but the fact you've now got so many boxes at time now in the in this present there's more of those boxes than there were in the past see but the boxes aren't physical boxes they why is the number of boxes always expanding it's very hard to imagine this because we live in space so what i'm saying which is i think probably correct is that we just let's just imagine for a second there is a non-local situation but there are these things called states and that the universe um irrespective of whether you measure anything there is a universal let's call it a clock or a state creator maybe we can call it this way maybe you can call it god but let's call it a state creator where the universe is expanding in the number of states it has why are you saying it's expanding though is that obvious that it's expanding it's obvious because that's where the because um we we that's a source of novelty it's a source of novelty and it also explains why the universe is not predictable um and you know it's not predictable well i just like interrupting you i'm sorry it's fun as you're struggling i'm struggling because it's but i'm trying to be as concrete as possible and not sound like i'm insane yeah um and i'm not insane it's it's obvious because you did um i'm a chemist so as a chemist i grew into the world understanding irreversibility all irreversibility is all i knew and when people start telling me the universe is actually reversible it's a magic trick we can use time to do it so what i mean is the the the second law is um really the magical but why does it need to be magical the universe is just asymmetric all i'm saying is the universe is asymmetric in the state production and we can erase those states but we just have more computational power so what i'm saying is that the universe is deterministic horizon this is one of the reasons we can't live in a simulation by the way we can't live in a simulation the irreversibility yeah yeah so basically every time you try and simulate the universe in this you know live in a simulation the universe has expanded in states like oh damn it i need to make my computer bigger again and every time you try and contain the universe in the computation because it's got bigger a number of states and so i'm saying the fact the universe has novelty in it is going to turn out experimentally to be proof that time as i've labeled it is fundamental and exists as a physical thing that creates space okay so if you can prove that novelty is always being created you're saying that it's possible to also then prove that it's always expanding in the state space those are things that to be have to be proven that's what working experiments for yeah and you're trying to like by looking at the sliver of reality show that there's always novelty being generated yeah because if we go and live in a universe that the conventional physicists would live in it's a big lookup table of stuff and everything exists i want to prove that that book is that book doesn't exist it's continuously being added pages on so what i'm saying if the universe is a book we started the universe at the beginning only had no pages and they have all had one page another page another page whereas a physicist will now say all the pages exist and we could in principle access them i'm saying that is fundamentally incorrect do you know what's written in this book the free will question um is there room for free will in this uh in us in this view of the universe is generating novelty and getting greater and greater assembly uh structures built sarah yes okay done next question why what's the source of free will in this well so i i think it depends on what you mean by free will um but yeah well please i think i think what i'm interested in as far as the phenomena of free will is uh do we have individual autonomy and agency and you know when i do things is it really me or is it my atoms that did it um and that's the part that's interesting to me i guess there's also the determinism versus randomness part um but the way i think about it is like each of us are like a thread or like an a you know assembly space through you know this this giant possibility space and it's like we're moving on our own trajectory through that space and that is defined by our history so we're sort of causally contingent on our past but also because of the sort of intersection of novelty generation it's not completely predetermined by the past and so so then you have the causal control of the determinism part that you are your causal history and there's some determinism from that past but there's also room for creativity and i think it's actually necessary that something like free will exists if the universe is going to be as creative as possible because if i were all intelligent being inventing a universe and i wanted it to have maximal number of interesting things happen again we should come up with the metric of interesting um but generating yes i know generating um you know maximal possibilities then i would want the agents to have free will because it means that they're more individual like they are like each entity actually is a different causal force in the universe and it's intrinsic and local property of that system there's a greater number of distributed agents like are you always creating more and more individuality kind of i i would say you're creating more causal power but so cause of power the word consciousness is is the cause of power somehow correlated with consciousness i mean that that's why i have this conception of consciousness being related to imagination because the more that we can imagine can happen and the more counter-factual possibilities you have in mind the more you can actually implement and somehow free will is also at the intersection of the counter factual becoming the actual um so can you elaborate on that a little bit that consciousness in his imagination i don't know exactly how to articulate it and i'm sure people take you know aim at certain things i'm saying but i think the language is really imprecise so i'm not the best way to really it's really interesting like what is imagination and what is it uh what role does it play in the human experience in experience of any yeah i love imagination i think it's like the most amazing uh thing we do but i guess one way i would think about it is we talked about the transition to life being the universe acquiring memory and life does something really interesting just think about biology generally it remembers states of the past to adapt to things that happen in the future so so the longer life has evolved on this planet the deeper that past is the more memory we have the more kinds of organisms and things but what human level intelligence has done is quite different it's not just that we remember states that the universe has existed in before it's that we can imagine ones that have never existed and we can actually make them come into existence and i think that's the most unique feature about the transition to whatever we are from what life on this planet has been doing for the last four billion years and i think it's deeply related to the phenomena we call consciousness yeah i was gonna i mean just agree with that i think that consciousness is the ability to generate those counter factuals now whether you can say you know are there degrees of consciousness i mean and i mean i mean i'm i'm sorry pan psychists but electrons don't have counterfactuals although they do have some kind of they are able to search the space and pathways but but i think that there is a very concrete or concrete there's a very specific property that humans have and i'm and i don't know if it's unique to humans i mean maybe dogs can do it and and and birds can do it right and where they are basically solving a problem because consciousness was invented or this abstraction was invented by evolution for that for a specific reason um and so look the one of the reasons why i came to the conclusion that time was fundamental was actually because sarah and i had completely different the most heated debate on skype chat ever no no no no no i no it goes back to the free will thing so i i think that although i've changed my view a bit because there's some really interesting physicists out there who talks about how the measurement problem in in in newtonian space but i want to go there just now because i think i'll mess it up but briefly um i could not see how the universe how we can have free will and i mean this is really boring because like this is like this is a well trodden path but but it's not so boring i suppose it's kind of we just want to be precise if the universe is deterministic how can we have free will right so uh sarah is a physicist i think she believes but not believe can show that the most of the laws we have are deterministic to some degree quantum mechanics onto newtonian stuff and yet there's serotonin i mean she believes in free will and i'm like you but your belief system is broken here right because you you're demanding free will in a deterministic universe and and then i've realized that i i agreed with her that i do think that free will is a thing because we are able to search for novelty and then that's where i came to the conclusion that time the universe was expanding in terms of novelty and it goes back to that dan dennett essay they were talking about the free will inflation free will so you are you have so the past it did not exist in the past the past exists in the present what i mean is like you are the there was no past there is only present that means you are the sum total although everything that occurs in the past is it is manifestly here in the present and then you have this little echo state in your consciousness because you're able to you're able to imagine something without actualization but the fact you imagine it that occurs in electrons and potassium iron flows in your neural network in your brain maybe consciousness is just the present so so somehow you imagine that and then by imagining oh that's good yeah um i'm gonna make a robot then do this thing and program it and then you physically then go and do it so that changes the future sorry what's imagination does it require the past does it require the future does it require memory does it it's imagination does it only exist in the moment so imagination is yeah probably it's an instantaneous readout of what's going on you can maybe your your subconscious brain has been generating all the all the bits for it but no imagination occurs when you in your game engine you you remember the past and you integrate sensory the present and you try and work out what you want to do in the future and then you go and make that happen so the imagination is this is like imagine asking what imagination is about asking what surfing is you can see you can surfboard surfer wave coming in when you're on that wave and you're surfing that's where the imagination is i think i think imagination is just accessing things that aren't the present moment in the present moment so like i can i'm sitting here and i'm looking at the table and i can imagine the river in things or whatever it was and so it seems to be that it's like it's our ability to access things that aren't present but so conjure up worlds some of them might be akin to something that happened to you recently right but they don't have they don't have to be things that actually happen in your past and i think this gets back to assembly theory like the way i would think about imagination from an assembly theoretic standpoint is i'm a giant causal graph and i exist in a present moment as a particular configuration of sarah and but there's a lot of i carry a lot of evolutionary baggage i have that whole causal history and i can access parts of it now when you talk about getting to something as complex as us having as large assembly space as us there's ways of like there's a lot of things in that causal graph that have ever actually never existed in the past history of the universe because like the universe got big enough to contain the three of us in this room in time but not all the features of each one of us individually have come into existence as physical objects we would recognize as individual objects this goes back to your point that we actually have to explain why why things actually even look like objects and aren't just a smear of mass um and just on the the free will and physics thing when you were talking i was i just want to bring this up because i think it's a really interesting viewpoint that nicholas jizzin has that um you know like we want to use the laws of physics and then say you can't have free will and his point is you have to have free will in order to even choose to set up an experiment to test the laws of physics so in some sense free will should be more fundamental than physics is to because to even do science there's some assumption that the agents have free will and i always thought it was really perplexing that um you know physics wants to remove agency because the idea that i could do an experiment here on this part of earth and then i can move somewhere else and prepare an identically you know identically prepared experiment run an experiment again seems to imply something about the structure of our universe that is not encoded in the laws that we're testing in those experiments so this kind of dream of physics that you can do multiple experiments different locations and then validate each other um you're saying that's uh that's an illusion no i'm saying that requires decision making and free will to be a real thing i think like i think that i think the fact that we can do science is not arbitrary and i think people you know the standard canon in physics would be well you could trace all of that back to the initial condition the universe but the whole point of science is i can imagine doing the experiment and i can do it and then i can do it again and again and again all over the place to you imagination somehow fundamentally generative of novelty yes so it's not like the universe could have predicted the things you imagined imagination super so coming back to novelty i think novelty can exist outside of imagination but it supercharges it it's another transition i think i mean i would say i mean this may be a boring statement but i would say that they're sorry i'm not sure it's a heart these are hard questions yeah i mean i think the fact that objects exist is yet another proof that that time is fundamental and novelty exists right because i think again if you ask a physicist to write down in their infinite bible of the universe let's call it the bible the the you know matebook the mathematical universe whether you're max tag mark or sean carroll or frank wilcheck [Laughter] or or stephen wolfram okay yeah i like that book yeah i love it too lots of pretty pictures it's really interesting that they they cope with the enormity of the universe by saying well it's all their mathematics it all exists right and and i would say that that's why i'm excited about the future of the universe because it it although it is somehow dependent upon the past it is not constrained just by the past which is kind of mad yeah that's what free will is it's not constrained by the past it's dependent on the past this moment it's not just dependent this moment is the past and yet it has the capacity to generate a totally unpredictable future i mean the other thing i would say is super important for human beings right human beings have actually very little causal control in the future i realized this the other week yeah yeah so what happened so this is what i think it is the way by reinterpreting your past i mean talk about from a kind of cognitive psychological cognitive point of view by reinterpreting your past in your current mind you can actually helps you shape your future again so you but you you have much more freedom to interpret your past to act in the present to change your future than you do to change your future it may sound weird so i'm saying everybody imagine your past think about your past reinterpret your past in the nicest way you can then imagine what you can do next or imagine your past in a more negative way and what you do next and look at those two counterfactuals they're different yeah it's fascinating i mean daniel o'connor talks about this that most of our life is lived in our memories it's interesting because you can essentially in imagination choose the life you live so maybe free will exist in imagination choices are made in your imagination and that results in you basically able to control how the future unrolls because you're like imagining like reinterpreting constantly the things that happen to you exactly so you're the if you want to increase your amount of free will those people that have most i don't think everyone has equal amounts of agency because of uh because of our sad sad constraints whether whether you know happenstance with health economic born born in a certain place right but you're those of us that have the ability to go back and reinterpret our past and and and use that to change the future are the ones that exert most agency in the present and i i want to i want to achieve higher degrees of agency and enable everyone else to do that as well to have more fun in the universe then we'll hit that peak maximum fun i don't think there's ever going to be a maximum pop but i think it's the wonderful thing about the future is always always gonna be more fun yeah you i think again going back to um to twitter i think you lee tweeted something about being a life maximalist that you want to maximize the number of life the the amount of life in the universe so and you know that's the more general version of that goal is to maximize the amount of fun in the universe because life is a subset of fun all kinds of i suppose they're either correlated or exactly equal i don't know anyway speaking of fun let me ask you about alien sightings so there's been quite a bit of ufo sightings and all that kind of stuff what do you think would be the first time when humans cite aliens see aliens in a sort of unquestionable way this extremely strong and arguable way we've made contact with aliens sarah what would it look like obviously the the the space of possibilities is is huge here but if you were to kind of look into the future what would that look like would it be inklings of ufos here and there that slowly unravel a mystery or or would it be like an obvious overwhelming signal so i think we have an obsession with making contact with events so uh what i mean by that is you know like people have a ufo sighting they make contact um and i always think you know what's interesting to me about the ufo narratives right now is not that i have a disbelief about what people are experiencing or feeling but like the discussion right now is sort of at the level of modern mythology aliens are our mythos in modern culture and and when you treat it like that then then i want to think about when do things that we traditionally only regularize through mythology actually become things that become standard knowledge so you know like it used to be you know variations in the climate were described by some kind of gods or something and now it's like you know our technology picks up an anomaly or someone sees something we say it's aliens and i think the real thing is it's not contact with events but like first contact is actually contact with knowledge of the phenomena or the explanation and so this is very subtle and very abstract but when does it become something that we actually understand what it is that we're talking about that's first contact it's not would you make the myth would you give credit to the myth the mythology as first contact because i think yes i think it's the rudimentary that we have some understanding that there's a phenomena that we have to understand and regularize so i think right to understand that there is weather yes you have to construct the pathology around that yes it's something that's controllable right yeah like this is i see mythology basically as like baby knowledge right it could be that you know although there's lots of there's lots of alien sight up so-called alien sightings right so there are a number of things you can do you could just dismiss them and say that's not true they're kind of made up or you say well there's some there's something interesting here right we keep seeing the commonality right we see the same phenomenon again and again and again also this is interesting about human imagination even if they are let's not say made up but mis misappropriated kind of other inputs the fact that human consciousness is capable of imagining contact with aliens does that not tell us about something about where we are in our position in our culture and our technology it tells us where in time we are could it be that we're making contact with let's say that so let's say let's take the most miserable version there are no aliens in the universe life is only on earth that then the interpretation of that is we're desperate to kind of understand why we're the only life in the universe right the other one is the other most extreme is that aliens are visiting all the time and we just you know we're just not able to capture them coherently or there's a big conspiracy and you know there's an area 51 and there are lizards everywhere and there's that um or i i'm i kind of in favor of the idea that maybe humanity is waking up to the idea that we aren't alone in the universe and we're just running the simulation and we're seeing some evidence you know we don't we don't know what life is yet we are we do have some anomalies out there we can't explain everything um and over time um you know we will start to unpack that one very plausible thing we might do which might be boring for the average alien um observer or believes that aliens are as in intelligent aliens are visiting earth it could be that we might go to the outer solar system and find a new type of life that has completely new chemistry bring these cells back to earth where you could say in my hand on earth here's rna dna and proteins and look cells self-replicate from titan we've got this new set of molecules new set of cells and we feed it stuff and it grows that for me if we were able to do that which would be like the the most that would be my ufo sighting that's a good test so you feed it and it grows yeah we've made so not until you know how to feed the thing [Music] it grows somehow we can make a comic book you know the tiger that came for tea the alien that came for tea what would you say is between the two of you is the biggest disagreement about aliens alien life out there is it from the basic framework of thinking about what is life to maybe what aliens look like to alien civilizations to a ufo sightings what would you think so i would say the biggest one is that um the emergence of life does not have to be um that can it can't just happen once on the planet that it could be two or more life forms present on the planet at once and i think sarah doesn't agree with that i think that's like logically inconsistent that's really polite you're saying it's nonsense but because you think that yeah how likely is that so the idea that what is what does it look like let's imagine uh two alien civilizations coexisting on a planet what's that look like exactly so i would say um i think i've got to get around your argument okay yeah let's say that say that on this planet there's just like there's lots of available chemistry and one life form gets some emerges based on carbon and interacts and there's a there's an ecosystem based on carbon and there's an orthogonal um and so it's planetary phenomena which is what you i think right but there's also one that goes on silicon and and because there's enough energy and there's enough stuff that these light forms might not actually necessarily compete um evolutionarily yeah but they would have to not interact at all because they're going to be co-constructing each other's causal chains i think that's where you just got me yeah so there's no so there's no overlap in terms of their causal change they're very limited yeah so i think the only way i can get away with that is to say right life can emerge on a planet underneath and uh okay lizard people under the quest of the year i think i think i think let's go d i i i think that but look as you can see we disagree so and i think sarah actually has convinced me because of that that life is a planetary for not the emotional slice of planetary phenomena and and actually um because of the way evolution selection works then nothing occurs in isolation the causal chains interact so there is a common there's a consensus model for life on the earth but you don't think you can place aliens from elsewhere onto the can't you just uh place multiple alien civilizations on one planet right but i think so you can take two original life events that were independent and co-mingle them but i don't think when you're talking about when you when you look at the interaction of that structure it's it it's like the same idea as like an experiment being an example of life right that's a really abstract and subtle concept and i guess what i'm saying is life is information propagating through matter so once you start having things interacting they in some sense commingle and they become part of the same chain so the commingling starts quickly yeah proceeds we proceed to co-mingle quickly right right so you you could say so the question is then the more interesting question is are there two distinct origins events and i still think that there's reasons that on a single planet you would have one origins event because of the time scales of cycling of geochemistry on a planet and also the fact that i don't think that the origin of life happens in a pool and like radiates outward through evolutionary processes i think it's a multi-scale phenomena it happens at the level of individual molecules interacting collections of molecules interacting and entire planetary scale cycles so life as we know it has always been multi-scale and there's i'm brilliant examples of individual mutations at the genome level changing global climate right so there's a tight coupling between things that happen at you know the largest scale our planetary scale and the smallest scale that life mediates but it still might be difficult within something you would call as a single civil alien civilization you know different their species and stuff but i think what yeah they might not be able to communicate but you're asking about life not species right so what's the difference between one living civilization this this is almost like a category question yeah versus species because it can be very different like evolution because there's like island like literally islands that you can involve different kinds of turtles and stuff and they can so i guess what i'm saying is weird if you look at the structure of two interacting living things populations and you look in their past and they have independent origins for their causal chain then you would say one was alien you know they have different independent origins events but if you look at their future by virtue of the fact they're interacting their causal chains have become co-mingled so that and then in the future they they they are not independent um right right so that's why you would even define them as aliens so the structure across time is two examples of life become one example of life because life is the entire structure across time right but there could be a lot of variation with this yeah so the question we're all interested in is how many independent origins of a complexifying causal chain are there in the universe see but is the idea of origin is easy for you to define because like um well when the two when the species split in the evolutionary process and you get like um a dolphin versus a human or neanderthal versus homo sapien that isn't there let me make a distinction here um quickly so i think um sorry to interrupt um what we're saying i mean i mean i mean i mean sarah what we won that argument because she i think she's right that um once the calls will change interact and going forward so we're talking about a number of things let's go all the way back before origin of life origin life on earth on earth chemistry emerges there's so there's all these i would say there's probably mechanistically the chemistry is desperately trying to find anyway get replicators the ribosome kind of was really rubbish at the beginning and they just competed competed competing and got better and better ribosomes and suddenly that was a technology the ribosome is the technology that boom allowed evolution to start so what i was trying to why i interrupted you is say that once evolutionist started using that technology then you can speciate and i was trying to and i think what sarah said was convinced me of because i was like no we can have lots of different chemistry shadow biosphere on earth and she's like no no no you have to have this you have to get to this minimum evolutionary machine and then when that occurs speciation occurs exactly what it's like dolphins humans everything on earth but when you're looking at aliens or alien life um there's not gonna be two different types of chemistry because they compete they compete and interact and cooperate because the causal chains overlap one might kill the other one might combine with the other and then you go on and then you have this kind of this average and sure there might be re-speciation it might be have two types of emerging chemistry it almost looks like the origin of life on earth required two different pre-life forms the peptide world and the rna world somehow they got together and by combining you got the ribosome and that was the minimum competent entity for evolution and would all alien civilizations have an evolutionary process on a planet so like that's one of the almost it's almost the definition of life to create all those memories you have to have something like change in time yeah and then but there has to be selection um that's like an official there's no other way to do it no i don't well never say never because students say that's what that's the part that depresses me though going back to like i don't know the earlier discussion on violence and things like and i i don't know where somebody was tweeting about this recently but like you know how much stuff had to die maybe it was you yeah ah yeah so yes sorry so we were talking we're talking about life yeah and uh i guess a lot of murder had to occur right so selection means things had to be weeded out right so well we can celebrate that death makes way for too long yeah i mean it and also you know one of the most interesting features of major extinction events in the history of our planet is how much novelty emerged immediately after right so and of course you know a lot of people make arguments we wouldn't be here if the dinosaurs didn't go extinct so um in some ways we can attribute our existence to all of that but i guess i was just wondering and sort of like if i was going to build a universe myself in the most optimistic way would i retain that feature but it does seem to be a yeah you have to i mean i think we're i think we're probably being over um anthropomorphizing i remember watching uh the blue i think it was the blue planet david attenborough was showing these seals and because of climate change some seals were falling off a cliff and how tragic it was i was like i'm saying my son that's pretty cool look at look at those ones down there they've obviously got some kind of mutations some and they're not doing that daft thing and so that that that poor gene will be weeded out of course at the individual level it looks tragic and of course as human beings have the ability to abstract and we empathize we don't want to cause suffering on other human beings and we should retain that but we shouldn't look back in time and say you know how many butterflies had to die i remember making with this how many if you think about the caterpillar become the chrysalis and then the butterfly getting out how many if that suffering we call it suffering if that process of pruning had not occurred we have no butterflies so none of the butterfly beauty in the world without all that pruning so pruning is required but we shouldn't amphimorphize and feel sorry for the biological entities but because that's that seems to be a backwards way of looking at it what we should do is project forward and maybe think about what values we have across our species our ecosystem and our fellow human beings you know you know now that we know that animals suffer at some level think about humane farming when we find that plants can in fact are conscious and can think and have pain then we'll do humane gardening until that point we won't do it right i like this famous chemist endorses the majestic nature of murder that's actually that's the title um i didn't say that but it came well i just it's inserted i have a hard time with it though i think the way you put it it's kind of but it it's the reality of it's the reality of it is beautiful um you know there's an instagram account called nature's metal and i i keep following and unfollowing it because i can't handle it for prolonged periods of time we evolve together you die alone yeah we evolved together well you die alone so i you live alone too it's a gatsby thing i don't know we evolved together we're still together the together is the murder the population and the sex i just my romantic vision of it to try to make me happy sarah instead of sad sarah um i talk in third person when i think very abstractly sorry um is um you know like like this whole like you know the like certain things can co-exist so the universe is trying to maximize existence but there's some things that just aren't the most projective productive trajectory together but it doesn't mean that they don't exist on another timeline or another chain somewhere else like i like and maybe you would call that like then some kind of multiverse or things but what am i saying i think you can't i just you can't go down just making stuff up no you're not no matter i don't underst it is illogical and we need we know i know if you look at bacteria if you look at virus i mean just just the number of organisms that are constantly like looking at bacteria they're just dying non-stop right slaughter right so well and this goes back to the conversation about god i mean like there's the whole thing about like why does the universe enable suffering individuals don't exist right in individual so for this i think if you think about life as an entity on earth right let's just let's just go back a second i mean i like to i'll be ludicrous for a second i don't exist you don't exist right um but you but the actions you do the product of evolution exists right the objects you create exist quantitatively in the real world if you then understand life on earth or alien life or any life in the universe there's this integrated entity where you need you need cells in your body to die otherwise you'd just get really big and you wouldn't be able to walk around right so you know you do yeah yeah yeah so yeah so i think the patterns that persist not the physical things and of course we you know we have we have we place and mention values on fellow human beings and i'm my majestic professor does like other individual human beings or now you're talking in third person too i know it happens right so death would you say i mean because you said evolution is a fundamental part of um life so death is a fundamental part of life yeah it might right now it might not be in the future we might hack some aspects of death we could and will evolve in different ways but isn't there i think sarah mentioned like this life density um is it can't that become a problem like too much to too much uh bureaucracy too much of baggage uh builds up like you need to keep erasing okay that we dissipate like i don't think of like like i'm disappearing yes no but i mean like like we're so fixated on ourselves as individuals and agents and we were talking about this last night actually over dinner but like um you know an individual persists for a certain amount of time but what you want to do like if you're really concerned with immortality is not to live indefinitely as an individual but maximize your causal impact so like what are the traces of you that are left i and and you're still a real i always think of einstein like for a period of time he was a real physical thing we would identify as a human and now we just see echoes of that human in all of the ways that we talk about his you know causal impact or frankly right is another great example because how many easter eggs can you leave in the future say hello so i guess the the question is how much do you want to control the localization of certain features of say a prop a packet of propagating information we might call a person and keep them localized to one individual physical structure do you wanna you know is there a time when that just becomes a dissipated feature of the society that it once existed in and i'm okay with the dissipated feature because i just think that makes more room for more creativity in the future so you mentioned engineering life in the lab let me take you to computer science world what about robots so is it possible to engineer see because you're really talking about like engineering life at the chemistry level but do you think it's possible to engineer life at the like humanoid level at the at the dog level like or is that like at which level can we instill the magic of life into uh inanimate stuff no i think you could do it at every level i just think that we're particularly interested in chemistry because it's the origin life transition that presumably or at least is how i feel about it it's going to give you the most and interesting or deepest insights into the physics but presumably everything that we do and build is an example of life and the question is just how much do you want to take from things that we have now and put them into like examples of life and copy them into machines uh i saw that there was this tweet again uh i think you're at the mars conference and you were hanging out with a humanoid robot yes making lots of new friends at mars 2022 did you guys color match ahead of time with the robot or did that accidentally happen accidentally i went up and i wanted to say hi to the boys would that be the correct name for the color i think so we didn't color coordinate our outfits uh well you didn't maybe through what did the robot probably did much more stylish so for people who are just listening there's there's a picture of sarah standing next to a humanoid robot i guess you like them with a small head and perfect vision actually no i just um i did the perfect there's a lighter no i mean i think i was just deeply interested because um what was sorry to interrupt was it manually controlled was it actually uh stabilizing itself oh no it was walking around oh nice yeah nice it was pretty impressive i mean actually there's some videos online of jeff bezos walking with one of those across the lawn nearby there so yeah um so i wasn't invited [Laughter] um yeah but um there you go see that's incredible wasn't it yeah see you look at the walking robot where did the idea for walking come from was invented by evolution right and us as human beings able to conceptualize and design and engineer so the calls will change so that robot is evidence of life and so i think what's going to happen is there's the um we want to find where the spark comes from mechanistically how can you literally go from sand to cells so that's the first transition i think you know there are a number of problems we want to do make life in lab great then when i make life in lab we want to suddenly start to make intelligent life or life that can solve start to solve abstract problems and then we want to make life that is conscious okay in that order i think it has to happen that order you know this getting towards this artificial general intelligence i think that artificial general intelligence can't exist in a vacuum it has to have a causal change all the way back to luca right yeah and so the question i think i really like the question is to say what are we how is how is our pursuit of more and more life like i know you want to you like your robots you want to project into them you want to interact with them you you i think you would want if you have a robot dog and a robot dog does everything expect of a normal dog and you can't tell a difference you're not really going to ask the question anymore if it's a real dog or not or you've got a personality you're interacting with it and so i think what would be interesting would be to kind of understand the computational architecture how that evolves because you could then you know teleport the personality from one object to the other and say right does it act the same and i think that as we go along we're going to get better and better at integrating our consciousness into machines well let me ask you that question just so to link on it i would i would call that a living conscious thing potentially eyes as a human allegedly but your would you as a person trying to define life if you passed the turing test are you a life form one of the reasons i walked up to the robot was um because i wanted to meet the robot right right so i it felt like i was and i i i base a lot of my interaction with reality on emotion and feeling but like like how do you feel about an interaction and i always love your point about like is it enough to have that shared experience with a robot right so so walking up to it does it feel like you're interacting with a living thing and it did to an extent but in some degrees it feels like you're interacting with a baby living thing so i think our relationship with technology in particular robots we build is really interesting because um basically they exist as objects in our future in some sense like we're a much older evolutionary lineage than robots are but we're all part of the same causal chain and presumably you know they're kind of in in their infancy so it's almost like you're looking at the future of life when you're looking at them but it hasn't really become life in in in a full manifestation of whatever it is that they're gonna become um and you know the the more uh the example the walking robot was super interesting but they also had a dolphin that they put in the pool at the cocktail party at mars and it looked just like a real dolphin swimming in the pool and um and you know it's in this kind of uncanny valley because and i was having this conversation um with a gentleman mutu who was super perceptive but he was basically saying like it made him feel really uncomfortable um and i think often yeah and i think a lot of people would have that response and i guess my point about it is it is kind of interesting because you're basically trying to make a thing that you think is non-living mimic a living thing and so so the thought experiment i would want to run in that case is imagine we replaced every living thing on earth with a robot equivalent like all the dolphins and things and in some sense then you're making if you think that the robots aren't experiencing reality for example the way that a biologically evolved thing would you're basically making the philosophical zombie argument become real yeah and and basically building reality into a simulation because you've made everything quote unquote fake in some sense you've replaced everything with an emu a physical simulation of it so as opposed to being excited by the possibility of creating something new you're um terrified of being humans being replaced i was just trying to run like what would be the absolute you know thought experiment but i don't i don't think that scenario would actually play out i guess what i i think is weird for why we feel this kind of uncanny valley interacting with something like the robot dolphin is we're looking at an object we know is kind of in the future in the sense of like if everything's ordered in time but it's borrowing from a structure that we have common history with and it's basically copying in a kind of superficial way things from one part of the causal chain to another yeah well that's that's the video every believed it was real they look so real um and obviously the technology was was developed for movies so well i think we're confusing our emotional response and understanding the causal chain of how we got there right because a philosophical zombie argument thinks about um objects just appearing right that you're facsimiled in some way whereas there is that cause what the chain of events that caused the uh dolphin to be built went for a human being yeah would uh philosophical zombies still have a high assembly index yeah because it came it can't be philosophical zombies can't like like boltzmann brains just can't appear out of nowhere well i guess my question would be in that that scenario where you build all the robots and replace everything on earth with robots would the with the biosphere be as creative under that scenario or not yeah and so are there are there quantitative differences you would notice over time and it's not obvious either way right it's not obvious right now because we don't really we don't understand we haven't built into machines how we work so that's i think the there are one of the big missing things that i think that we're both looking for right it's a cute robot but but the points there is that um the biosphere won't be as creative if you did it right now no of course i think that's why but but in the future it we will be able to solve the problem of origin of life intelligence and consciousness because they exist in physical substrates we just don't understand enough about the material substrate and the causal chain but i'm very confident we will get to an agi but it won't be what people think it won't be solution won't be a we'll get forward a lot and so gpt3 is getting better at falling us and gpt 153 might really fool us but it won't have the magic we're looking for it won't be a creative but it will help us understand the differences between really though because isn't that what love is being fooled like what why why are you not giving much value to the emotional connection with objects with with robots with humans emotion is that thing which happens when you're when you're the uh the fun your expectation function is is dashed and something else happens right i mean that's what emotion is is that what love is too yeah you were expecting one thing and something else happened yeah i don't know i don't think that's true either well what is it then i think no emotion look i'm i'm sorry emotion is that but but i think love is just fulfilling your purpose no but okay i mean look like look like whatever that means that's not i mean so yeah okay so when are you happiest it's like when you're all right all right let me go back if you want to if you want me to follow your bliss let me define love quickly okay go for it in terms of assembly space right okay excellent i didn't think i'd be doing this today okay wait until assembly theory 101 is taught and the second lecture is assembly theory of love but actually but look but it's being surprised the expectation is being broken i'm just i'm not no go for it i don't know i want to hear you i'm not an emotional being but i would say so let's talk so we'll talk about emotion but love is more complex is love is a very complex set of emotions together and logical stuff but if you've got this thing this person that's on this causal chain that has this empathy for this other thing love is being able to project ahead in your assembly space and work out what you're the person you're in love with has a need for and to do that for them without selflessly right because you can project ahead what they're going to need and they are there and maybe you can see someone is going to fall over and you catch them before they fall over or maybe you can anticipate that someone's going to be hungry and without helping you you just help them that's what that sounds like empathy but it's more complex than that right it's more complex it's more about not just empathy it's understanding it's about kind of sharing that experience it's an expression of love though that's not what it's like to feel love like feeling love is like i like i think it's like when you're aligned with things that you feel like are your purpose or your reason for existing so if you have those feelings uh towards the robot why is that rope i mean because you said like the aj will build an agi but it won't there'll be a fundamental difference between aging right we'll build it it's going to emerge from our technology so i think you guys all are doing the same thing i just said that gpt that we do not correctly capture the causal chain that we have within gpg yeah don't you think it captures because gpt3 is fundamentally trained on a corpus of knowledge you know like the internet don't you think it it gets better and better better capturing the memory of all them it will be better at fooling you and at some point you won't care but when it comes i my guess this is as quick as i was getting to right before we got i got in the love trap i love trap yeah it was like but i think there are other features that allow that we pull on innovation that allow us to do more than what we just see in gpthree so if you're being fooled there so i think what i mean is human beings have this ability to be surprising and creative whereas is it dali this thing or or if you take um gpt3 is not going to create a new verb shakespeare created new verbs you're like wow and that required shakespeare to think outside of language in a different domain so i think having that connections across multiple domains is what you need for agi yeah but i don't know if you need um i don't know if there's any limitations gpt gpt and not being able to be cross domain the number one problem is um it's instantiated in a resource limited substrate um that we don't in silicon um it is tr is tr the the architecture is used for training for learning it is about falling it's not about understanding and i think that there is some understanding that we have that is not yet symbolically representable language learning language and using language seems to be fundamentally about fooling not understanding why um why do you use language exactly i might disagree with that quite fundamentally actually um but i don't i i'm not sure i understand how to make a coherent argument for that but my feeling is that there is there are there is comprehension in reality in our consciousness below language and and we use those for language for all sorts of expressions and we don't yet understand that there's a gap we will get there but i'm saying wouldn't it be interesting it's a bit like saying could i facsimile you or sarah into a new human being right and and let's just say i could copy all your atoms in the positions of all your atoms the electrons into into this other person they would be you the answer is no and it's quite easy to show using assembly theory because actually the feature space you have that graph the only way to copy you is to create you on that graph so everything that's happened to you in your past we have to have a faithful record for if you want another copy of lex you have to do the exact thing another copy sarah another copy of lee the exact past has to be replicated let me push back on that a little bit that's maybe from an assembly theory perspective but it i don't think it's that difficult to recreate a version of me like a clone that would make everybody exactly equally as happy like they wouldn't care which one and like there's two of me and then they get to pick which one and they'll kill either one they'll be fine as long as they're forced to kill they'll be fine but here's what will happen is let's say we make artificial legs and it was like wow that's so cool it looks the same interact then there'll be this battle of like right we're going to tell the difference we're going to we're going to basically keep nudging lex and artificial lex until we get in novelty from one and we'll kill the other one and i think thank you we're not novelty is a fuzzy concept that's the whole problem of novelty so i will define novelty it's not fuzzy novelty is the ability um for you to create um architectures that are um or create an architecture so let's say you've got corpus of architectures known you can write down you've got some distance measure and then i create a new one and the distance measures so far away from what you'd expected there's no linear algebra we're going to get this like that is creativity and we don't know how to do that yet on any level well i was also thinking about like your argument about free will like you wouldn't be able to know it was it doesn't work instantaneously it's not like a micro level thing but more a macro level thing over the scale of trajectories or longer term decisions so if you think that the novelty manifests over those longer time scales it might be the two lexes diverge quite a bit over certain time scales of their behavior nobody would notice the difference they might not and the universe the earth won't notice the difference the universe won't notice the universe would notice the difference no the universe doesn't know about his novelty that's being generated that's the whole point of well no but this is what selection is right it's like taking nearly equivalent ones and then deciding like the universe selects right so what whatever selection is select some things to persist in time yeah i'm going to select the artificial one someone still likes that one better well you're mixing up two arguments here so look let's go back a second what are you basing this argument on like i'm just saying that i kind of don't think cause at least said that it's not possible like if you uh the the if you copy every single molecule in a person's body that's not going to be the same person that that they won't have the same assembly index they won't have it won't be the same person and i just don't i think copying you can compress not only do i disagree with that i just i think you can even compress a person down to some where you can fool the universe i'm saying let me restate it it is not possible to copy somebody on because you unless you copy the causal history also you can't have two identical i mean actually i really like the idea that everything in the universe is unique so even if like there were two lectures i know you like that idea because you're human and you think you're unique yeah exactly but also i can make a logical argument for it that even if we could copy you know all of your molecules and all their positions the other you would be there and you have a different position in space you're distinguishable yeah the other thing always how unique are you just about the position in space really sure but then how much does that light translation of lex well that's i see but but no wait wait a minute is part of the definition of something being interesting is how much it affects the future yes yes but let me come back don't you agree but let me up you disagree one point quickly that you were making sure i think i probably agree yeah if there's two lectures right there's a robot lex that you just basically it's a it's a it is a charade it's a facsimile it's just coded to emulate you are you robot lex but another one no let's get that but let's get there's a point a very important point here because he's he's ducking and diving between this i so so if i faximilied you into a robot then it would you your robot might be would be a representation of you now but fundamentally be boring because you'll go and have other ideas if however you built an architecture that itself was capable of generating novelty you would diverge in your causal chain and you both be equally interesting to interact with yeah we don't know that mechanism all i'm trying to say is we don't yet know that mechanism we do not know the mechanism that generates novelty and at the moment in our ais we are emulating we are not generating you don't think we're sneaking up on that do you think there's something no no there is no ghost in the machine and i want there to be one i want the same thing you want sorry i know you want that as a human because everything you just said makes you feel more special i want to be certain no no no screw my specialness i just want to be surprised if i negoroba can surprise you if i if you can produce an algorithm instantiated in a row what surprised me i will i will i will i will i will have one of those robots it'll be brilliant but they won't surprise me but why why is it a problem to think that humans are special maybe it's not the special you're right it's the better than yes because then you start to not recognize the magic in other life forms that you either have created or you have observed because i just think there's magic and uh legged robots moving about and they are full of surprises yeah so this is nationality yeah so i'm a little uh i know where you like cellular automata right but the specialness in your robot comes from the roboticist that built it yeah it's part of the lineage yeah and so that's fine i'm happy with that that's what i felt like looking at the standing robot was i was looking at four billion years of evolution yeah right if it wasn't so i think i'm happy i mean i'm happy we're going to co-exist i'm just saying you're going to get more excitement there's something missing in our understanding of intelligence intelligence isn't just training uh the way the neural network is conceived right now is great and it's lovely and it'll be brighter and we'll argue forever but you want to know wouldn't it be great if i said look i know how to invent an architecture and i can give it a soul and what i mean by a soul is some i know for real that there is internal reference as soon as like not fake internal reference and if we could generate that mechanism for internal reference that's why our goal direction that's why you have to we can do that get that goal directing this you would love that robot more than the one that's just made to look like it does because you'll have more fun with it because you better generate search other problems get more novelty hell you'll be able to fall in love with that robot for real but not the one that's faking it what about fake it till you make it well i think a lot of people fall in love with with um with with fake yep humans yeah it's it's nice to it's nice to fall in love with something that's full of novelty yes i you know i can imagine all kinds of robots that i would want to have a close relationship with and i don't mean like sexual i mean like intimacy because but i just don't think that um novelty generation is such a special okay there's like mathematical novelty or something like that and then there's just humans being surprised and i think we're easily surprised that's fine but that's that but you don't think that's a good deal no that's good i'm happy to be surprised um but not globally surprised because someone else but i really want i was why i'm a scientist i really want to be the first to be surprised about something and the first thing in the first in the universe to create that novelty and to know for sure that that novelty has never occurred anywhere else that's a real buzz right that's a way to really know that i i you have to have a really big look update right yeah you're never gonna know for sure right that's that's one of the hard things about being and scientists searching for this type of novelty maybe that's why mathematics mathematicians love discovery but actually they are creating and then when they create a new um mathematical structure that they can then they you can you can write code to work out whether there's whether that structure exists before that that's almost why i would love to have been a mathematician from that regard to invent new math that really i know pretty much for sure to not exit does not exist anywhere else in the universe because so contingent right but this gets into like you are you said a few times but i still really don't understand how you actually plan to do this to build an experiment that detects how the universe is generating novelty or that time is the mechanism so the problem that we all have which i think is what lex is pushing against is if i built the experiment you don't know what you put into it so you don't know what like if you unless you can quantify everything you put in all of your agency all the boundary conditions you don't know if you somehow biased it in some way so is the novelty actually intrinsic to that experiment or to that robot or is it something you gave it but you didn't realize it's gonna be it's gonna asymptote towards that right you're never gonna know for sure but you can start to take out you know you can use good bayesian approaches and just keep updating and updating and updating until you point to one sense of purposes found on how much novelty generation could be yeah got it so the ability generate novelty is correlated with high assembly index with assembly index yeah and yeah because the space possibilities is bigger so um that's the key this could be a good so a running joke of like why lex is single this could be a good part for uh so so what you're looking for in a robot partner is ability to generate novelty and that's i suppose you would say it's a good definition of intelligence too boy is novelty a um a fuzzy concept is creativity better yeah i mean that's all pretty fuzzy it's kind of the same maybe that's why aliens haven't come yet it's because we're not creating enough novelty like there's some kind of a hierarchy of novelty in the universe well i think novelties like things surprise you right so it's a very passive thing but i guess i would remember by saying creativity is i think it's much more active like you think there's like a mechanism of like the things that exist are generating the creativity novelty seems to be there's some spontaneous production it has it's completely decoupled from the things that exist no i i understand i think there's this really really creativity is the mechanism and novelty is the observable yeah novelty could just be surprising your model of the world was broken and and not necessarily in a positive way that's the prize so there's three things now let's go back that's cool right let's go you've got surprise which is basically i'm i don't i mean i'm surprised all the time because i don't read very much i'm pretty dumb i was like oh wow i often used to invent new scientific you know ideas and i was really surprised by that and then when looking literature properly and it's there so surprise that's to the extent that you don't have full information um creativity the act of pushing on that um kind of on the causal structure and novelty which is measuring that degree right so i think that's pretty well defined in that regard so you want your robo you mean in the and in the end that's why actually the way the internet and the printing press share some um i actually think creativity has dropped a bit since it created since the internet because everyone's just just you know just regurgitating stuff but of course now it's beginning to accelerate again because everyone is using this tool to be creative and boom is exploding so i think that's what happens when you create these new technologies that's really that's really helpful there's a difference between novelty and surprise okay i was i think i was thinking about surprise if you give me a toy that surprises me for a bit it'd be great robot surprises me you know experiment that surprises you yeah i mean that's why i love doing experiments because i'm i can't it's still exciting yeah surprise is exciting yeah even negative surprise like some people love drama in relationships like it's like why the hell why'd you do this that could be exciting i could imagine companies selling updates to their their companion robots that just basically generate negative surprise just to just spice things up a bit yeah it's the push and pull that's that's one of the components of love as you said love is a complicated thing oh beauty i wanted to mention this because you also tweeted i think this was sarah no it might have been lee i don't remember but it was a survey published in nature showing that scientists uh find yeah yeah um anyway there's a there's a plot this is published in nature of what scientists find beautiful in their work and it separates biologists and physicists it'd be nice if you showed the full plot and there's simplicity elegance hidden order inner logic of systems symmetry complexity harmony and so on um is there any interesting things that stand out to you i think the fact that biologists like complexity and pleasing colors oh there's pleasing calls on there yeah yeah yeah yeah or shape or shapes pleasing and then physicists obviously love simplicity elegance simplicity elegance yeah they love symmetry and then biologists love complexity and uh well they just love a little bit less they love everything a little bit less the complexity a little bit more a little bit more that's so interesting and pleasing colors are shapes do you think it's a useful i forget what your tweet was that this is missing some of the things oh no i think i it's because i think about how um explanations become causal to our future so i have this whole philosophy that um the theories we build and the way we describe reality should be have the largest breadth of possibilities for the future of what we can accomplish so in some sense it's not like occam's razor is not for simplicity it's for optimism or the kind of future you can build and so i think um i think you have to think this way when you're thinking about life and alien life because ultimately we're trying to build i mean science is just basically our narratives about reality and now you're building a narrative that is what we are as physical systems it seems to me it needs to be as positive as possible because it's basically going to shape the future trajectory where we're going and we don't use that as a heuristic in theory building because we think theories um are about predicting features of the world not causing them but if you look at the history of all of the development of human thought it's caused the things that happen next so it's not just about looking at the world and observing it it's about actually that feedback loop that's missing and it's not in any of those categories what do you think is the most beautiful idea in the physics of life and the chemistry of life in this um through all your exploration with assembly theory what is the um the thing that made you step back and say this is this this um idea is beautiful or potentially beautiful for me it's that the universe is a creative place i guess i i i want to think and whether it's true or not is that we are special in some way and it's not like an arbitrary added on epi phenomena or ad hoc feature of the universe that we exist but it's something deep and intrinsic to the structure of reality um and to me the most beautiful ideas that come out of that is that the the reason we exist is for the universe to generate more things and to think about itself and use that as a mechanism for creating more stuff um that's for me uh so like the the life that this however uh common it is is an intrinsic part as a fundamental part of uh this universe at least that we live in i think so i mean it's always interesting to me because um you know like we have theories of quantum mechanics and gravity and they're supposed to be like our most fundamental theories right now and they describe you know things like the interaction of massive bodies or the way that um charges accelerate or all these kind of features and and they're these really deep theories and they tell us a lot about how reality works but they're they're completely agnostic to our existence and i just i can't help but think that like whatever describes us has to be even deeper than that um and i i think incorporating memory i guess yeah causality whatever the term you want to use into the physics view of the world might be that's the easiest way to do it it's the it's the cleanest so here we go again with the physicists i'm a physicist the clean i was going to say the simplest most elegant way of resolving all of the kind of ways that um we have we have these paradoxes associated with life when you it's not that life is not um current physics is not incompatible with life but it doesn't explain life and then you you want to know where are the explanatory gaps and this idea that we have an assembly that time is fundamental and and objects actually are extended in time and have physical extent in time is the cleanest way of resolving a lot of the explanatory gaps so i i've been struck i struggle with assembly theory for many years because i could see this gap and i think when i first met sarah and we realized we were kind of talking about the same problem but we were we understood none of the language it was quite hilarious actually because it's like look i have no idea what we're talking about but i think it sounds right so for me the most beautiful thing about assembly theory is i realized the assembly theory explains why the universe my life is a universe developing a memory but not only that poetically i could actually go and measure it and i was like holy we were just we physically measured this thing abstra this abstract thing and we could measure it and not only could we measure it but we can then start to quantify the causal consequences and because i mean you know i i think as a kind of inventing this together with sarah and her team i thought there was a quite a high chance that you know we're doing science there's such a high probability we're wrong you know on this and i remember kind of trying to go to hard physicists mathematicians complexity theorists and everyone just kind of giving me such a hard time about it i said you know this is kind of this is you've just done this you've just done that it's it's you know if you've just re capitulated an old theory and i and i was unable i lacked the language to really explain and i had to it was a real struggle so this realization that life what life does that physics cannot understand or chemistry is the universe develops a memory that's causally actionable and then we can measure it but it isn't just a one thing there is this intrinsic property of all the objects in the universe like like i've said before but you know me holding up this water bottle is just any other water bottle but it is a sum total of all the water bottles that have existed right and will likely change the future of water bottles and for other objects so it's that this kind of so for me assembly theory explains the soul in stuff mm-hmm but it is the monology it's not like sheldrick's morphic resonance where we have this kind of wooy thing permeating universe is the interaction of objects of other objects and some objects have more instantaneous causal power that's life living things and some objects are the instantaneous output of that causal power dead objects but they're part of the lineage and that for me is fascinating and really beautiful when i and i think that um even if we're determined to be totally wrong i think it will help us help hopefully understand what life is and go into tech life elsewhere and make life in the lab how does that make you feel by the way does it make you feel less special that you're so deeply integrated interconnected to the lineage i mean i came on one level i just wanted in my life as a scientist i wanted to have an interesting idea just once or an original idea i mean it was like you know uh so i think that was cool that we had this idea and we were playing with it and i think also that um i i kind of i mean it took me ages to realize that sarah had also had the same kind of form coming towards the same formulation just from a completely different point because i um but no it makes me feel special it also makes me feel connected to the universe it also makes me feel not just humble about you know being a living object in the universe but the fact that it makes me really optimistic about what the universe is going to do in the future because we're not just isolated phenomena we are connected i will be able to have you know one of my small objectives in life is to change the future of the universe in some profound way just by existing yeah that's not ambitious at all i think it's also good because it makes me feel less lonely because i just realized i'm not like i mean i'm a unique assembly structure but i have so much overlap with the other entities i interact with that we're not completely individual right and yet your existence does have a huge amount of impact on the how this whole thing unrolls on the future of the as individuals that's yeah all right but i was going to say packets of agency i think we all have a profound impact on the future some more than others right all human beings all life and i mean that's why i think it's a privilege in a way for you know to say like to assert some degree of ego and agency you know i'm going to make a computer or make an origin life machine or you know this thing but actually it's just like you know life's probably living if there is a god or there's a soul in everything it's really laughing at us going i fool these guys by giving them ego so they strive for this stuff and look what it does for you know the assembly space of the universe and there's always a possibility that science can't answer all of it so that part's challenging for me there might be a limit to this thing let me ask you a bunch of ridiculous questions and i demand relatively short answers uh lee what's the scariest thing you've ever done okay yeah or what's a scary thing that pops to mind giving lecture giving giving seminars in front of other scientists yes yeah that is terrifying i i could if i were more time i would ask you about the most embarrassing but will spare you uh what about you sarah scariest thing um up there some of the scary things you've done um actually the scariest for me was deciding i want to get divorced because it was like a totally radical like um life transformation yeah because we had been married for a really long time um and i think it was just so much like i realized like so much of my individual agency i didn't realize i had before and that was just really like scary like empowering scary but like terrifying like you were living in a kind of one way for your whole life and then you realize your life could be a different way and yeah there is a between humans i mean that's the the the the beautiful thing about love is the the connection you have but it's also becomes a dependency and breaking that whether it's a mentor with your parents do you it's almost like waking up like like just there's a different reality yeah that was scary reinventing yourself okay if you could uh leave maybe i'll actually we'll alternate sarah if you could uh be someone else for a day someone alive today you haven't met who haven't met yet or maybe you could do one who you've met who would it be kim kardashian no joke the woman's brilliant i would just like to experience i just i think she's got such an interesting uh and very deep understanding of social reality but you also said you have a appreciation a love for fashion i do but that but that's actually the same like i just think it's really interesting because we live in a social reality which is completely artificially constructed and some people are really genius about moving through that and i think she's particularly good at i wonder if she's good at understanding or if she's i think it's very deeply intrinsic to her so i don't know if she's like surfing away how much cognitive awareness she has of it or how strategic it is but i think it's deeply fascinating so i guess that's the first one that comes fine uh what about you lee if you could be somebody for a day don't say yoshi don't say kim kardashian let's do it off the table off the table no i was going to say i would like to like to be a uh does that have to be here today i was going to say i'd like to be um the latest um uh arm processor obviously i would like to be the latest arm processor i would like to understand what i would like to know what it feels like to basically um you like being objects i like being always obsessed with being objects ever since i was a kid what's the best part of being an armed processor for a day i mean i'd like to understand how i access my memory what i anticipate it's coming next and clock cycles what about how it feels like yeah i want to know how it feels like it could be to be useful to people i mean thanks for that all right um if uh leaf everyone on earth disappeared and it was just you left what would your days look like what would you do nobody else left to impress nobody no probably can't really do any real science at scale what would you do with your remaining yeah every possible tool i could and put it in my workshop and just make stuff as so try to make stuff just try and make stuff make companions i'm probably not making companions probably yeah so in the physical space yeah what about you sir what would you when you're just left alone on earth in this scenario no living beings no plants no plants oh interesting i was going to say i would just i would try to walk the entire planet at least all the land mass well this that's true so you probably don't know if there's stuff you could be you could be searching for plants or other humans what would i eat it's uh you just have daily just allotment i would just walk all the time i don't know why i just walk that's just what came to mind i would just walk and i guess i would make a goal of covering all of the entire earth because what else are you going to do with your time what's an item on your bucket list sarah that you haven't done yet but you hope to do um skydiving i travel to space um i don't know you know what's funny with my bucket list i only know it was on my bucket list once i check it off once you check it off so your bucket list is like a fog it's like a mystery yeah almost by doing it yeah so it's very subconsciously driven um so it's in your subconscious in there and i think you're bringing it to the surface i think most of the steering of our agency is in our subconscious anyway so i just kind of go with the flow but i guess um no seriously yeah no i get it i don't know i guess i would like to go in a submarine like to the bottom of the ocean i think that'd be really cool the bottom of the ocean are you captivated by the mystery of the ocean like i am yeah yeah what about you lee what uh item on your bucket list i don't have a bucket list i've just made on i would love to take a computer to the moon or mars and make drugs off the world be the first chemist to make drugs off world of the first drug manufacturer in space yeah why not drop do they have to be somehow like be able to habitate like to be able to survive on that particular space or like what's the connection between being on mars and do makeup i just would like to be that i'd like to take um the ability to make have command and control over chemicals programmatically off earth to somewhere else that just seems like you like difficulty engineering problems before i die if i can do that would you travel to space before yeah yeah that's what i'm saying i'd love to go into space but not just to be a tourist i want to take scientific experiment in space and do a thing in space that never been done before that's a real possibility yeah yeah yeah so that's why there's no point in listing things i can't do yes all right what small act of kindness were you once shown that you will never forget small act of kindness not big somebody was just kind to you somebody did something sweet when i was a phd student um someone helped me out with uh just i was basically i needed a computer i needed some power computation power and someone just took pity on me and helped me and gave me so i was really touched they didn't have to and they were actually quite um they're a disabled scientist they had other things to do rather than help some random phd student gave me access taught me a lot of stuff yeah actually when when you're a grad student or when you're a student when even a student you know the younger it is the better uh the attention the the support the love you get from from an older person a teacher or something like that is super powerful it's fascinating and like from the perspective of the teacher they might not realize the impact they have but that little bit those few words uh a little bit of help can have a have a lot of impact what about you sarah um so i'm gonna give you a free starbucks at some point i love free starbucks i like it when you're like in the line at starbucks and somebody buys your coffee in front of you and then you buy the next one i love those but yeah uh that's not my example oh those are great too yeah it makes me happy and now my kids get all excited when we do it when we go in for the first ones in line doing it but um uh um i guess i i can use a similar example about just being a student um uh so paul davies um is a very well known theoretical physicist and i um uh you know he was generous enough with his time to take me on as a postdoc um but before i became his postdoc he invited me to a workshop at arizona state university in the beyond center and um took a walk with me around campus just to talk about ideas after and i think there were two things that were completely generous about uh that one is um paul's philosophy is always interacting with young people is like you interact with a mind in the room it doesn't matter um you know how well known or whatever it's like you you evaluate the person for the person so um but he also gave me a book uh the eerie silence that he had written and he wrote in it um this is how e e gets to e t um which was an anatomic excess which i worked on as a phd student was the origin of home of chirality um all the way up to what the book was about which was are we alone in the universe and is there intelligent life out there and it was just so much about the questions i wanted to ask because it's like it was just everything about like just it was it was just really really kind like that it's okay to ask these questions yeah and you can actually i mean i think a lot of my career is mostly his encouragement to ask deep questions like he gave me the space to do it in ways that a lot of previous mentors had i mean i have i've had a good experience with mentors but it was like go off the deep end ask the hardest questions and i think that's the best gift you can give somebody what would you because you're both fascinating minds and not i would say uh non-standard in the best possible way is there advice you can give to young folks how to be non-standard how to stand out novelty how to generate novelty that's what i want on my tombstone i have one um he he generated novelty no no how to it's like how to how still um i just love doing science and so when i was younger i was just just wanted to i mean i'm still not sure i'm a real scientist right so i want to try so my advice for the young people is just if you just if you love asking questions then don't be afraid to ask the question even if it pisses people off because if you piss people off you're probably asking the right question what i would say though is don't do what i do which is just piss everyone off try and work out how to you know i think if you're if other people are challenged by your questions you will get not only your respect but people will give you create space for you because you're doing something really new i really try to create space in my academic career my my team really try and praise them and push them to do new things so my advice is try to do new things get feedback and the universe will help you because the universe likes novelty i think so i think so right if this one will keep them around what about you sarah um you two like to ask the really out there yeah uh because i have a strong passion for them so i think um uh it goes back to the love like if you if you're doing the thing you're supposed to be doing you should really love it um so i always tell people that they should do the thing they're most passionate about but i think a flip side of that is that's when you become uh in some mind like not to sound cheesy but like your best version of yourself so i guess like for me as i become more successful in my career i feel like i can be more myself as an individual and so there's this i've always been following the questions i'm most interested in which very early on i was discouraged from knowing by many people because they thought they were unanswerable questions and i always just thought well if no one's even trying to answer them of course they're going to be unanswerable and then that was kind of an odd viewpoint but the more i i found my way in that space the more i also made a space for myself as a person because you're basically generating the niche that you want to exist in um and so i think um i think that's that's part of it is not just to follow your passion but also think about like who do you want to be and create that yeah who am i who you want to be i mean yeah play temporally with it yeah who am i now who do i want to be now but who do i want to be in the future they're not decoupled yeah i always wonder if that's like if i become something am i finding myself or am i creating myself yeah and i think those are somehow the same kind of thing i do feel often like that i was always meant to be this kind of thing yeah but um is that created or discovered i don't know but basically go towards that direction if you were abducted by aliens sarah excellent i'm waiting [Laughter] there on a spaceship there and then they somehow figured out the language you speak um and ask you what are what are you what is what explain yourself not you sarah but the species oh what's life on earth uh like we we don't have time we're busy grad students from another uh planet i see what what what's interesting about human civilization what's interesting about you uh you specifically too they could be very kind of personal and kind of pushy um and yeah okay um i have one um because you know like obviously i self-identify as a scientist and a physicist but intrinsically i feel more like an artist but it's almost like you're an artist that you don't know what you're painting yet um and i guess i feel like that's humanity like in in some sense we're we're creating something i think is profound and potentially very beautiful like existence of the universe but we're just so night like not night oh we're just early we're we're early we're young we don't know what we're doing yet yeah what's with the nuclear weapons is the question too like what are you guys what are we doing with them this creativity that you talked it sounds very nice but it's you're seeing we're making things that are like very destructive and like the rockets what this seems very aggressive yeah i know this is my my blinders on um i don't know i i mean it goes back to the whole conversation about suffering i have a hard time uh regularizing certain aspects of reality into what i want to envision and that's obviously problematic but you know nuclear power has also given us a lot of good things so um so both that's human nature both both human beings and the technology we create has the capacity for evil and the capacity yeah we can't all be good all the time i mean there's like this huge misnomer that you need to be liked by everyone universally and obviously that's like an ideal but it's physically impossible you like you can't get a group of people in the room and have everyone like each other all the time so i think that kind of tension is actually really important um that we have different aesthetics different goals uh and and sometimes conflict comes out of that yeah speaking of which do you lee and yoshibach ever say anything nice to each other or is it always conflict we never have conflict we argue but i don't i don't think they argue arguments are bad i mean i think the problem i have yeah not a problem i think here we go and he's not here as defendants no i just i don't necessarily understand the the what i mean he's just talking at such a high level yeah you know i'm i'm a dimwit so i'm like i spend some so i think a lot of our conflict is not conflict we actually we actually have i think i mean i can't speak for i have a deep appreciation for him he's brilliant but i i think i'm kind of frustrated and i'm trying to he thinks the universe is a computer and i want to turn the universe into a computer yeah that's that's a small disagreement so what would you how would you defend your life to an alien when you're being abducted would you focus on the specifics of your life no no i would be i would try to be as random as possible and try and confuse them oh good good excellent that might be the wiser choice the easter eggs in reality no i mean if the aliens would die i would try and be as random as but i would try and do something that would surprise the hell out of them which i thought i mean are probably like brisket they might kill me but i think that might be funny that might yeah they might want to study you for prolonged periods my reasoning is if i wanted to stay alive okay so if the thing is if i wasn't going back to earth and the job was to stay alive if i could be as surprising as possible they'd keep me around like a pet right pet lee on the aliens you'd be okay being being a pet well no but i mean the last the last human that survives would just be a pet to the alien i i don't know but i mean i think um that might be fun because then that might might i might get some feedback from their curiosity but yeah let me ask you this question given our conversation has a very different meaning not more profoundly perhaps but would you rather lose all of your old memories or never be able to make new ones i would have to um lose all my old memories again it's the novelty um what about you sarah i'm not saying because i don't think like it's about the future experience right and in some sense like you were saying earlier most of our lived experience is actually in our memories so if you can't generate new memories it's like you're not alive anymore that's it what comforts you on bad days when you look at human civilization when you look at your own life what gives you hope what makes you feel good about what we're doing about life at the small scale of you as a human and the big scale of us is a human civilization may be the big scale of the universe children my kids but i i also mean that in like a grand sense of like not a grant but like like future minds in some sense so for me like the most bleak movie ever you know people worry about apocalyptic things like ai existential risk and climate change which children of men you know the whole premise of the movie was there can be no children born on the entire planet and the youngest person on the planet is like 18 years old or something like can you imagine a world without children it's just it's harrowing that's the scariest thing so i think um what gives me hope is always youth and um the the hope of children and the you know the possibilities of the future they see and they grow up in a completely different reality than adults do um and i i think we have a hard time seeing what their reality actually looks like but i i think i think most of the time it's super interesting yeah they have dreams of imagination they have this kind of excitement yeah so it's so cool so fun to watch and yeah you feel like you're almost getting in the way yeah of all that uh imagination what about you lee what gives you hope so when i go back to my eight-year-old self the thing that i dreamed of my old self was this world in which technology became programmable when there was internet how do i get information and i would expand my consciousness by just just you know um getting access to everything that was going on and it's happened in my lifetime and we really do have that i mean okay there's some bad things you know there's tick tock everyone just or whatever all the bad things about social media but i think um i mean i'm i can't quite believe my luck being born now so amazing being able to program reality in some way yeah and the thing that i really find fascinating about human beings is that just how ingenious they are i'm you know whether it's from my my kids my research group my peers other companies just how ingenious everyone is and um and i'm pretty sure humanity has a v or our causal chain in which humanity is a vital part in the future is going to have a lot of fun and i'm just yeah it's just it's just mind-blowing just to watch and you know so humans are ingenious and i i hope to help them be more ingenious if i can well what gives me hope what makes me feel good on bad days is the existence of wild minds like yours novelty generators assembly structures that generate novelty and do so beautifully and then tweet about it uh sarah this i really really enjoy talking to you i enjoy following you i'm a huge fan sarah lee i hope i hope to talk to you many times in the future maybe with your shabbat you're just incredible people thank you for everything you do you're awesome thank you for talking today i really really appreciate it thank you yeah it's been brilliant to be here thanks for listening to this conversation with sarah walker and lee cronin to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description now let me leave you with some words from arthur c clarke two possibilities exist either we are alone in the universe or we are not both are equally terrifying and let me if i may add to that by saying that both possibilities at least to me are both terrifying and exciting and keeping these two feelings in my heart is a fun way to explore to wander to think and to live always a little bit on the edge of madness thank you for listening i hope to see you next time you