#2184 - Sara Imari Walker
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So your subject matter is so fascinating to me. So first, please explain what this idea of assembly theory. Yeah. Assembly theory is born out of an interest in solving the origin of life and finding aliens. So that's sort of the motivation. I think it's really important to be clear about that to start because it introduces some kind of

radical reconceptions of the way we think about fundamental physics, at least I think so. But the key idea of the theory is that the universe cannot generate complexity outside of living processes. And so we have a way of formalizing what seems kind of intuitively obvious, that the universe doesn't generate complex objects for free.

And we do this with this idea of assembly theory of thinking about the assembly space, which is like the space of all constructible objects. And you can talk about the complexity in that space as a minimal number of steps for making an object. And if you see objects that require a lot of steps to make them and they're in high abundance, life is the only thing that can make them. So this includes plant life. This includes everything, technology, everything on your table. Yeah.

You know, requires billions of years of evolution, evolution of intelligence and technology to generate. So when you say life to generate, what about like crystals? And what about have you ever seen that enormous cave in Mexico where they have these insane crystal structures? Is that the one that's like hot inside? And like, yes, yes, I have seen that. It's gorgeous. I've never been there. Amazing. Yeah, totally. It kind of looks like somebody made it, but it's just natural processes. Yes.

So I'm actually really interested in understanding to what degree we can consider minerals on our planet alive or artifacts of life. But we haven't formalized the theory entirely for minerals yet. So I think that one of the sort of key results we have so far is actually quantifying in molecules a complexity boundary above which if a molecule is so complex that we can say it's definitively of life and we've experimentally verified that.

measuring this property of assembly of molecules to say these are derived from life, these are, you know, and that there's a clear boundary. For minerals, we haven't done that yet, because we're still formalizing the theory and the kind of measurements we need to take. But I expect there to be a boundary that planets can make some kinds of crystal complexity, but not all of it that we see on this planet. So what is, what's the conventional definition of life?

Yeah. So there's a lot of debate about what definitions of life should hold. But the one that is usually cited by astrobiologists is life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution. And I've memorized it because I find it so annoying. I'm like, I got it down. I got to know what I'm annoyed with. What annoys you about it? Everything. It was very funny writing the book because I wanted to get into the new ideas. And my my

My editor was like, you've got to explain how people think about life now. And I was like, okay, well, this definition is the most annoying one. I'll just pick it apart. And it's actually like all the words in it are annoying in some sense. So the first one is that life is chemical. I've never really thought about chemistry being the defining feature of life. I think you have to separate out that life emerges, at least as we understand it, from a chemical soup on a planet. So it emerges in chemistry, but it doesn't mean it's a chemical phenomenon.

And the sort of analogy from the physicist's conception of nature I could draw there is we don't think that gravity is a phenomenon of rocks. Gravity represents some universal physics in our universe. And so when we're thinking about, you know, planets and things, we don't think that they obey the laws of gravity because they're made of rocks. We understand that there's some property called mass that's much more abstract and applies to everything.

I think life's kind of the same. It emerges in chemistry, but there are some informational properties, these things about how life generates complex structures and how it does that so uniquely. That is universal physics that happens to emerge in chemistry. So chemistry has to go out. It's not just a chemical phenomena. And I think you need to recognize that if you're going to talk about like technology and artificial intelligence and like, are they alive or not?

Because they're very different than, you know, like what's happening inside a cell. Right. Non-biological. But still seemingly alive. Yes.

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Yeah. Open a debate. Open a debate. I've said that about technology, that technology does seem to be a life form that requires us to give birth to it. Yes. Didn't Marshall McLuhan. I like that way of thinking about it. Yeah. Yeah. Marshall McLuhan had a great quote, and I believe this was the 1960s. He said that we are the sex organs of the machine world. Oh, incredible. Yeah. I like that a lot. Actually, I don't disagree with that.

Especially if it does become some sort of digital life. That's essentially what we are.

Yeah. By proxy moms. We are. So the way that I think about it is to think about life not in terms of individuals, but lineages. So, you know, there's a lineage of how information has been structuring the material world. But we talk about an assembly theory in terms of all of the configurations of objects created on our planet over four billion years. And that's a process of that's continuous with objects making other objects and

And there's no reason that that should stop with biological forms of life and it just moves into technology. So I like this idea that

or the reproductive organs though because i always think about like societies and like global integrated systems as being living things and we're just like component parts of them well they certainly look like it when you look at traffic uh from overhead and you compare it to blood moving through arteries it's really kind of extraordinary yeah because if you see the ebb and flow of the white lights and the red tail lights back and forth and then you see

blood cells moving through a person's body. It's kind of similar. Yeah. In a very weird way. And if you think that these cars are all carrying people that are assembling this society, both from the inside in terms of like paperwork and research and all the different things that people are doing, then the outside in terms of constructing new buildings and putting glass structures and all these different things, like we really are. Yes. Like some sort of weird thing.

We're like a form of the city itself. It's like a living thing that we're making. Yeah, and I think it's really important for us to recognize that. Actually, it's interesting that you use cars as your analogy because Carl Sagan actually had the same analogy. He would have liked that a lot. Yeah.

You know, thinking about aliens coming to life would have thought cars were the dominant life form, which I think is great. Great. Right. Because, like, yeah, exactly like you're describing, it looks like the lifeblood of our planet. And I always think about cities at night is kind of, you know, the key signature of life on this planet.

If you look at it remotely, you can see all this structure on the planet. But it is hard for us because we're so much wanting to think about ourselves as individuals and the apex of all of the evolutionary processes, not to think about ourselves as part of systems that are much larger than us. And I think it's critically important that we kind of change our reference frame on that because we're also seeing right now with social networks and the influence of having all these societal level dialogues brought to every individual and like

Like we don't know how to process that information. Yes. But we are part of these collective systems that are much larger than us and they are constructing a lot of the world around us without individuals having, you know, as much influence

in that process as we think we do, yet that process is also what gives us our agency. So it's kind of paradoxical. Right. Right. I've often said that if an alien race that was completely outside of our understanding of life and our

our understanding of biology, if they observed us and they'd say, "Well, what is this dominant species doing?" Well, it makes better things. That's all it does. - Yes. - We do a lot of things, but ultimately those things, even war, which is essentially about acquiring money and resources, we use those resources and that money to make better things. And in engaging in war, you're constantly advancing technology to have an advantage over the enemy, so you're making better things. - Yes. - Like everything is making better things.

which when you scale it up, ultimately will lead to another life form. It will lead to some new thing. I hope so. Well, if we don't kill ourselves or if we don't get super volcano, asteroid. I'm not a pessimist. I think we'll be around for a while. You think so? Yeah, but I have a pathology that I'm like really optimistic as a person, so I have a hard time. That's good. That's not a pathology. Why do you think that's a pathology?

I think because I think being overly optimistic can leave blind spots. But part of the reason that I imbue so much optimism in my work is like I think we need more optimistic narratives about the future because so many people are really bleak. I agree. I don't think that helps anybody. And I think ultimately most of the things that you're really terrified about do not come to pass.

Yes. I think us being terrified of them is like an immune response. So usually I'm not afraid of the things that people are really scared of and talking about because it means society is dealing with it. Right. Which I know maybe that's just sort of a scapegoat. I don't have to worry about those things because someone else is. But I think actually there's something rather deep there that like the things that we're trying to work through at this moment in history are being worked through.

My fear about those kind of thoughts is when I worry about things and I say, well, I don't have to worry because society is working through it. I also say, yeah, but someone's probably not and they're

They're enhancing the actual threat so they could profit off of it. Yeah. I mean, that's the military industrial complex. That's a lot of different things. I think that there's a lot of that, unfortunately, that's attached to green energy. I think, you know, the idea of having green energy is wonderful. Everybody should agree to that. But the idea that you're going to give massive corporations this completely philanthropic view of the world all of a sudden, that's not.

Yeah, that's not real. They make money. They're trying to make more money. They're going to lie to you. Everyone's trying to make money and get power. And I think once you realize that, like it's a lot easier to see motives. Yeah, it's freaky. But that also leads to the acquisition of resources, which leads to making better things.

I mean, I am all Google. I was reading articles all day today on the iPhone 16. Why? Why do I care about the iPhone 16? My iPhone 15 is perfect. It works great. What's wrong with me? I don't know. But I think that's also built into materialism. I think materialism sort of facilitates the creation of newer and better things consistently and constantly because everybody's like, what do you got an iPhone 14? What are you poor, Sarah? You know, people get crazy. I'm slumming it.

But you know what I'm saying? You know how people get weird like, what is your car? You have a 2018 car. Don't you want a new one? Look, they got the new one. The new one has this and that. It has a better gas mileage, faster 0 to 60. And it never ends. And it never ends until we create sentient life, I think. Yeah. So part of your argument is sort of our materialistic concept.

culture is about building newer and better things and eventually this is like sort of just more fundamental to the process of life. I think this pathology of materialism, this thing that has possessed so many people where they live their entire lives to acquire things to impress other people, which is a huge number of people that are involved specifically in finance, like

Like all the amphetamine people, all the people that like to do coke and fucking look at my boat. That's what they're doing. They're just constantly getting better and better things. It does sound boring to you because you're a brilliant woman, but it's not necessarily more boring than their normal life.

Right. There's some sort of reward to showing up with a half a million dollar watch on with, you know, diamonds and this is some crazy thing where people go, oh, he's got that thing. Yeah. Oh, look at those shoes she's got. Oh, look at that purse. Oh, look at his car. Look at the house they live in. Oh, yeah. It's weird. It's weird. I know. I sympathize. I am seduced by good fashion aesthetics. Yeah.

I mean, who isn't? Yeah. Well, a lot of men aren't, but a lot of women are. I love it. I think it's great. Yeah, sure. It's beautiful. It's an expression of art. Yeah. That's what it is. Exactly. It makes things look cooler. And, you know, like the way my wife looks at dresses and stuff, it's like she's looking at the way I look at other forms of art, things that I like. That's right. You know, it's just a different aesthetic, a different mindset, but it's art. It is art. Yes, it is. And we are attracted to that too. Yeah. And we're attracted to creation.

We love when people make things. Yeah, and I think you're right to point that this is like maybe hinting at something deeper. So, you know, with this assembly theory stuff, my original motivation was really to get at, you know, what –

that fundamentally explains life in the universe. And, you know, to me, the thing that life does that no other physical system does is creativity. And life is a mechanism for the universe generating things it couldn't generate otherwise. And so, you know, one way I think about that is like, like there's like this huge possibility space of things that could exist, and there's just not enough resource or time for all of them to exist. So by a planet constructing things like us over time, it actually sort of maximizes the number we're

Things that can be made. And I really like this. I like this idea that we're actually really literally the universe's mechanism of expressing creativity and making things possible that would not be possible without things like us.

Do you know who Terrence Howard is, the actor? I am familiar with him. Fascinating person. Yes. A brilliant guy who has some crazy ideas. But one of the craziest ideas he has is that whenever a planet gets far enough away from the sun, it will jettison.

generate life and then that life will give birth to people. People will eventually emerge. And he calls it like peopling, like a planet is peopling. Interesting. And that as these, as these civilizations become more advanced, they're going to have to deal with the fact that the planet is further and further away from the sun. Like over the course of hundreds of millions of years, the climate will change. Things will become cooler. They're going to have to figure out a way to develop a,

Yeah.

of humans, like, you know, the theory of computation and its universality that like we invented in the last century that might be universal to any intelligent species that emerges on any planet. So I think it's really hard to say like what here is universal to other places versus. Yeah, it's certainly a big leap. Right. We have no evidence. Yeah. There's no evidence of people anywhere else. Yeah. Or any other life form.

Yeah. No real evidence. There's a lot of shenanigans. There's a lot of weirdness, but there's no real evidence. Yeah, there's no evidence for life on any other planet. And so the mechanism of how life even got on this planet is not known. I spent my entire career working on it. It's fucking hard.

hard problem. But like, I think it's like the appropriate descriptor of it is really hard. So I think it's easy to speculate on like what we think life on other worlds will be like. And we tend to do it from a very anthropocentric lens where we'll say it will be like us. And, you know, even professional astrobiologists will do the same kind of thought experiments and they'll say, oh, well, the geochemistry on a planet should give rise to things like DNA and proteins. And so we should look for those in the universe. And I think that's really underestimated

estimating how large the space of possibilities actually is. So when you're thinking about the emergence of life,

Is the only way to do it, I mean, it can't be the only way it has to emerge with certain temperatures the way ours has in water. It seems like there could be a wide variety of possibilities that things could adapt to whatever particularly unique environment that this planet provides, given a sustainable temperature and given enough resources that it can survive, that we could have

Like we have jellyfish. Yes. We have lots of weird stuff on this planet. They've been around as long as us. Yeah. Right? Like octopi. Octopi are really weird. Crazy. Crazy. Crazy. Totally batshit crazy. When my friend, my friend Remy Warren, he used to host a show called Apex Predator. And what essentially the show was about was like examining apex predators and their particular adaptation they have for their environment and seeing like what a human can imitate. Like what are these things that they do? And he said...

Octopus by far was the most bizarre thing to dive into. Yeah, she said they're aliens. They are they mean not literally but like yeah, but yeah No, no, I totally agree. I mean they independently evolved a nervous system So and like and you know, like they're crazy I think they're the most alien thing on this planet from us as far as like trying to look at comparable intelligence and really understanding a different evolutionary trajectory and

Also, like, how they can take their body and completely morph it to look like coral. Yeah, that's too...

Instantaneously. Within seconds. I know. The color changes are shocking. Incredible. And the texture. It's everything. How does it even know what it's doing? How does it know what it looks like on the outside? It doesn't have a mirror. How did it adapt to that? I don't know. They're making a lot of progress. There was like the first cephaloneuro conference this year, which I sent one of my students to. I didn't go to. It's a great term. I know, right? It's a great term. I know. The neuroscience of cephalopods.

But yeah, I don't think we know a lot about how they work or how they think. And their lifespan is incredibly short. It's only like a year or two. It's just crazy. Yeah, I have a friend who is building this office building and I talked him out of putting a jellyfish tank in it. He's like, because he wanted to have this big cylindrical jellyfish tank in the center. Like when you walk in, I go, dude, dude.

Trust me. That's going to be such a headache. They die all the time. They don't live. Oh, sure. Oh, it's like a constant. But they're so beautiful. Oh, gorgeous. But there's one of those tanks in the Mandalay Bay shark exhibit. Have you ever been in that? No, I haven't. Incredible. Yeah. Mandalay Bay has this enormous aquarium.

I've always wanted to go. I want to take my kids, but yeah, I haven't been yet. It's so cool. I've been taking my kids since they were really little. It's one of the dopest places because you go in there and there's sharks swimming around and all these incredible fish and people are diving in there with them and it's enormous. Yeah.

So we went on a tour of it, and one of the things that they showed us was their jellyfish habitat. That's it right there. Oh. So that thing is a damn nightmare. And they have all these pipes and filtration systems. Do they just fish the dead jellyfish out? That's a good question. I'm not sure. I'm not sure if they get sucked into the vents. Yeah, I wonder. They have like a thing that they just like filter them every day to make sure there's no dead ones hanging out. I don't know how they do that.

The interior of it, look how beautiful. Yeah, they're amazing. God, they're so incredible. I mean, just imagine if we found that on another planet, how excited we would be. We would be trying to talk to it. We would be blown away. We'd be doing everything. We would be sending it sound and various codes to try to see if we can communicate with it. We try to understand its nervous system. Where's its brain? It doesn't have a brain. Like, where is it? Where's the brain?

it? Where's the brain? Where's the blood? Does it have blood? Like, what is that? We would be freaking out. We would be. But it's in the ocean. We're like, oh, don't get stung. Yeah. But I mean, there's a certain level of excitement seeing it here. I think. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think how diverse life on Earth is is rather shocking. I guess probably we're decent and we're like, you know, used to it, as you're saying. So we don't find it as shocking as we should. Do you think that

This is that human life. I mean, I'm sure you've thought about this. Do you think that this is a very unusual circumstance that it creates this? Or do you think there's versions of this is just rare?

You know, I don't know will be my honest scientific professional answer. I think. Yeah, no, of course. How could you? But I think it's really important to be like honest about the fact that we don't know and just like put it out there because it's very tempting to speculate. But I think, you know, the more I think about how large science

the universe really is. And I don't even mean physically large. Like, you know, like you can look at the Hubble Deep Field and you can see, you know, 10,000 galaxies of like the size of your like pen tip on the night sky. And you're like, oh my God, the universe is a huge place. But if you, you know, like if you go into a chemistry lab and you ask a cheminformatician how many molecules there are, they can't even estimate how many molecules there are. Like chemical space is so big. It's really crazy. Like there's one molecule, I usually use an example, it's called Taxol, which is an anti-cancer drug.

And if you wanted to make every permutation of that molecular structure and every like sort of three dimensional shape you could with those atoms, it would fill 1.5 universes in volume. 1.5 universes, one molecular formula. This is how big chemistry is. And then if you want to get to technological artifacts or biological forms, like the space that we live in is so exponentially large, it's unimaginable. And to think that other...

other life out there would traverse the same path through the space of things that could exist that we have is to me like a major sort of a major leap I'm not ready to take because I just I think the universe is far larger in the kind of living things that could exist than we can even imagine. Wow. The

the molecule thing is hard to absorb. Yeah, it's totally crazy. Like, I mean, if you want to think about like, you know, you've got this like crazy stuff on your desk and you took the atoms in those things and you thought about all the ways that you could arrange them, it would fill universes of interesting artifacts. Right. Universes.

And like, why is this one sitting on your desk? Like, why is this the aesthetic humans chose? I mean, it's kind of cool, but you know, like it's crazy to think about how much stuff could exist, but doesn't exist because it wasn't selected and evolution didn't build it over time. Wow. That's such a fascinating way to think about it. The overwhelming possibilities, the overwhelming number of

of different variations. Yes. And so on your question about like humans and like our specialness, I think what is special about us is we're actually capable of imagining some of that space and not just imagining it, but constructing it with our technology. That was your point about societies and things. So there is something special about quote unquote human level intelligence or whatever is going on in the human brain. I don't know if it, whatever that thing is, I think is pretty universal and pretty deep about the structure of reality.

I don't know if it would be in something that's like a human on another planet. But I think our ability to abstract, imagine and create is probably universal. There's another thing about us that I think is bizarre. And it speaks to this concept. There's a theory about the creation of human beings, right?

human beings, the wackiest one of all, is that human beings are the product of accelerated evolution. Yeah. Something has manipulated our genome. Something has manipulated the lower primates. That's why the human brain size doubled over a period of two million years. Yeah. And that this thing, well, but when I think about it, one of the things that intrigues me is I

I'm a lover of nature and I'm completely fascinated by how animals interact with each other. I mean, I can watch nature documentaries all day long. Yeah. Invasive species are weird.

Right. Because when something happens and someone brings a turtle to an island where it doesn't belong or when someone brings a goat to a place that doesn't belong or Australia, which is a fantastic example, there's like so many animals that are non-native invasive species. These Asiatic buffaloes, there's millions of them. They have to fly overhead and shoot them down with helicopters because there's so many of them. Mm hmm.

Humans are kind of like that. Aren't we kind of like that? I mean, if there's an animal that doesn't live in sync with its environment in nature and overwhelms the boundaries and seems to exist in some different sort of space than everything else, everything else, there's sort of a balance between predator and prey resources and birth rates. There's all this sort of synopsis.

symbiotic interaction with nature, with the natural world. But we're wild. We're just dumping shit into the ocean and killing all the fish and polluting the sky and driving in our cars and flying in our planes and still talking about climate change and injecting people with chemicals and trying to make more babies and

Yeah. We're also doing a lot of good for the planet. Again, optimist. Sure, sort of. But there's so many of us. We are on every damn rock that you could find that's habitable. We are essentially like rats. We go everywhere we can go, which is like an invasive species thing. Yeah.

- Yeah, I think you could talk about it that way. And I think people do. I don't really think that's a useful narrative. - I love us, don't get me wrong. I'm not anti-person, but I'm just objectively analyzing our behavior and our impact on our environment.

And it's very similar to like wild pigs getting introduced into an area where they don't have natural predators. Yeah. I think part of the challenge is actually thinking about like the levels of organization that biology has. So what I mean is like, you know, individuals are not actually the problem in what you're describing. It would be like human societies are the problem. And humans have because we have societies and, you know, organization that enable us to do these things like we're able to, you know, take over all these environments and things.

But I like the way I think about life is much more at the planetary scale. So for me, you know, going all the way back to the origin of life, um,

You know, life doesn't happen just in one environment. It happens in all environments. And it's really like a planetary scale transition, like something happened on our planet with enough geochemical environments mixing to mediate this global transition. And when you look at the evolution of life, you get these kind of hierarchies where like cells evolved and then multicellular organisms like cephalopods and plants and fungi and us evolved.

And then we get things that build societies like ant colonies or human societies. And it just seems to me it's like it's a natural progression of the evolutionary process to build more complex systems at larger collective scales that are doing having more impact on the planet and restructuring more of it. And, you know, if life wants to get off this planet, it has to go through something like us.

So I don't think, you know, I think we can look at it from the, you know, couple hundred year timescale and say these things are terribly negative and predator, prey, this, that, and the other thing. But if you look at it over the billions years timescale, there's a really different picture that emerges about what we are and what we're doing.

Isn't it a fascinating thought, though, that you immediately, and we all do, go to if life gets off this planet? Yes. So that seems to be something that we have baked into us. I think so. We have this idea of exploring the universe. So wouldn't something else have that, too? Sure. And if something else had that, and it was 100 million years more advanced than us, and it found us still throwing shit at each other and beating each other to death with sticks, wouldn't it come in and go, maybe we're just going to die?

Would you? Yes. You would? Yeah. Would you fuck with it? Like, what would you do? 100%. Yeah, I would do exactly what they did. I think that's what Curious is.

Oh, like experiment on them? Yes, 100%. Yeah. We do. We do it with animals all the time. Yeah. We make different kinds of... It's how you learn. Yeah. We also, we don't seem to have a problem with sort of manipulating things that we consider lower than us. Yeah. On the evolutionary scale. Yeah. I think that's a problem, but I don't know that that's one that can be solved. So this issue of, you know, trying to treat every living entity, you know, in sort of a...

Like, I don't actually think it's possible to treat... Well, you can't because they won't do that to you. No, but you can't even... Like, you have to eat something, right? Yes. So, like, if you value plants more than animals and you want to eat plants, then you're valuing...

You know, like you're making value statements, but like, you know, plants are, you know, like they're still alive when you eat them. So it's kind of weird. Not only that, there's evidence that they're sentient. Yeah. Plants exchange resources. They communicate through mycelium. There's a lot more to plants. Yeah, there's all kinds of very complicated information processing going on in plants. Yeah. Yeah. We are very...

sort of egocentric to think that our version of consciousness is the only version of consciousness. And I always say that when I talk about dolphins and orcas. Like, to me, it's one of the biggest crimes of modern civilization that we keep those things in

Yes, I totally agree with that. I totally agree. I think they're just like us. I just think they can't manipulate their environment. Yes. So we essentially have these slave pools where people celebrate with their children to stay out of the slaves. I think they're an insanely intelligent species that just doesn't manipulate its environment. And we're so egocentric in our concept of like,

What does intelligent mean? Can you control your environment? Do you have a house? Did you make a house? Do you have a car? How do you get around? Do you communicate with each other through cell phones? Well, then you must be stupid. This episode is brought to you by Kitanica.

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We have this idea. And you have to have the iPhone 16. It can't be the 14 because then you're really stupid. Well, if you're going to make things, you got to make better things all the time and you got to keep up with the Joneses. Yeah. But there's this weirdness that we have attached intelligence to ability to manipulate the environment. And when you've ignored...

The fact that they have a cerebral cortex 40% larger than ours. The fact that they have different dialects that they speak in different areas, different accents, different ways they communicate. And we don't even know what they're saying. We're trying to use AI to recognize the speech patterns. I love this stuff about digital bioacoustics and decoding languages for animals. It might be our only way. Yeah, it's an amazing field. I think it's going to take a while before we really realize the potential of it. But it's super exciting what people are trying to do.

Well, they've been doing interspecies communication research forever. Yeah. Nowhere. Right. Nowhere. Yeah. The leery stuff. Yeah. Or not leery. The guy who made the sensory deprivation tank. God damn it. I don't know who that is. It's locked in my head. I always know this guy's name. And what is it? Oh, John Lilly. Thank you.

God, why does that happen? Like, that's a problem with the mind. Yeah, because you can't remember everything. You forget things, so you have more information. I have too much shit in there. Yeah. I need a clean house. It's hard. It's really hard. But Lily, he invented a sensory deprivation tank, and one of the things that he would do with the sensory deprivation tank, he was trying to create an environment where your body...

in the physical senses of the body don't influence the mind at all, so there's more resources for the mind. And he was setting up these tanks next to dolphin tanks and taking LSD and trying to communicate with dolphins. I have heard about these things. He did a lot of really wild things with dolphins, but none of it really... There was a whole generation that had a lot of wild things with dolphins. But yeah, I think there's a lot of progress in animal communication, but I think we're very far from understanding...

whether animals are communicating at all like us and in what ways. It might be, might be very limited in thinking that this is the only way. Well, it's like your point about anthropocentrizing. Like we, we just, you know, like we have our bubble. We think about the world this way and like the human way is the only way and the right way. And we put our notions of intelligence on other species. And if they don't match, we think they're not intelligent. And,

And that's just not right. Also, we're thinking about this animal, like an orca or a dolphin, with a 40% larger cerebral cortex. And why are we discounting the possibility of some sort of telepathic communication?

Yeah. Like that sounds and frequencies are attached to feelings and that there's something going on that's not like, I love you, like in words. Yeah. But some sort of expression that's different than our concept of language. Yeah. I would say it's certainly possible that they're communicating things that are emotional or much more intelligent than we give them credit for just like with their patterns of speech because they're pretty complex. Yeah. Yeah. So, and then if you...

Think about alien life. You always think about alien life like us. You think about an alien life that, well, we kind of physically needed to do that in order to conquer the surrounding predators. If we wanted to evolve and we wanted to stay alive and gather resources, we had to figure out a way to keep the animals from eating us.

Right. Yeah. And then just like survive in our environment. Right. Right. Animals are one danger, but there's plenty of other ones. Like you don't want to eat the wrong berries. You want to like make sure that you have warm clothes in winter. Right. I mean, it's hell out there. Yeah. It's a lot. Survival's hard. Whereas dolphins are in warm water. Before we came along, there was an abundance of fish. Right. Seems like you don't have to do too much more. You guys got it nailed. Yeah.

Yeah. They're probably living in paradise until we came along and stuck them in swimming pools. And now they live in these noisy oceans or they're in a pool. Yeah. Yeah, both things, right? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I think this is one of the things that really motivated me to really – I mean, obviously, I love theoretical physics and thinking deeply about the nature of reality, but why pick the problem of life? And I think life is so –

complicated like all the examples you're giving we don't really understand what it's like to be another species or even to be another human quite honestly and I think without like like if we had a deep understanding of the nature of life these kind of questions would be much easier I mean when you want to talk about a psychedelic experience imagine if VR could

I mean, if there was some sort of an integrated VR that gets to like a real like matrix sort of state where it allows you to have the thought processes of a being for a short amount of time. Like if they could record octopus thought process. And put it in your brain. Yes. And give you the feeling of what it means. You wouldn't be human for a little while.

For a little while, yeah. But imagine the feeling of what it is to be an octopus. Not just like, wow, I can see the ocean in my language. But instead, think like an octopus for a brief period of time. Yeah. I think that would be amazing. Amazing. I've thought about it. What must it be like to be a plant? I mean, most places have a plant in every room. And it's like the plant's experiencing the room right now. What is it doing? It's just weird if you actually try to think about it.

Right.

Just the whole interaction that they have with each other, the fact that we've only figured that out over the last few decades. Yeah.

And have you ever seen time-lapsed photos of plants? Yeah. When they interact with each other. Yeah, it's been amazing. Wrap around each other and hug each other. It's crazy. But we have a hard time even with plants not anthropocentrizing with the kind of experiments we want to do to learn how they're intelligent because they're using a lot of animal-based experimental programs to try to test plant intelligence. And they probably don't fit plant intelligence because their intelligence is so different. So it's really hard to say what kinds of properties they actually have.

And so if we think about the wide potential for variability in terms of planets out there in the known universe...

You would imagine that there'd probably be a lot of intelligent animals that would find some sort of Goldilocks thing like dolphins had. Yeah. Where they don't really need to manipulate their environment. They're kind of dominant over sharks. You know, they're not really worried about getting eaten by other things. These are the aliens we'll never meet because they had no reason to go out and explore and conquer. So they're like the Na'vi in Avatar. Yeah. They're aliens, but they're kind of like...

you know, synced up. Right. Which is really fascinating too because like that movie caused people to get depressed that they don't live like the Na'vi. Do you know that that was like a real like diagnosed thing? I didn't know that was a real thing. Yeah, it's called Avatar Depression. Really? Yeah, and people would go to see that movie and those people lived in such spiritual harmony with their mother planet and just they rode around on these flying dragons and they were honest and noble and like we were like, God, I want to be them. And so people would like go back to their...

You know, apartment, people beeping their horns and pollution and garbage on the street and crazy homeless people. He'd be like, fuck, I want to live in Navi and land. I want to live in Pandora. I want to live like them. So people got depressed. Weird. Yeah. Avatar depression was like a real thing. That's so crazy. Psychologists were dealing with it. They had to sit people on the couch. But the idea of utopia is like so oversold. I mean, I think there's something like...

I don't know. I don't think such things exist. I don't think utopia exists, but I think harmony exists. Harmony for sure. Yeah. And I think that... But you have to work hard for it. Yes. And I think that's the thing. I think there's some conception that there's some easy path to harmony. And harmony requires work and it requires constant work. Constant work. Yeah. There's no days off. No. And I also think that we...

We have created a world in which harmony is very difficult to acquire. Yeah. Because our world and the structure of doing a thing that you probably do not want to do for most of your day to pay off debt for something that you really didn't need. Yes. Education that you turned out you don't use and all this different stuff that keeps – it's very difficult for people in this environment, especially urban environments that we've fastened. Yeah.

to create harmony. Whereas people that live like in hunter-gatherer tribes and people that live subsistence lifestyles in particular, they report much higher levels of satisfaction and happiness, less depression. I think debt's really hard because you're constantly aspiring to things. And you're right. Like it's just totally baked in. Like, you know, even I still have student loan debt from like, you know, it's just like, it's like you want to do, you want to be, yeah, you just,

You take on debt. You try to do something. But, yeah, it's pretty bad. There was a Vice series a long time ago back when Vice was really first starting out. And it was a Vice guide to travel. And they went to visit this guy who lives in the Arctic Circle. And he's been there since, like, the 1970s. I think he went out there initially as a logger. He's one of the last few people to have a –

He has a permit for a cabin out there. So he lives in this small cabin with no windows. Sounds nice. Sort of. Like while they were filming, he had to shoot a grizzly bear that was trying to kill his dog. Oh, dear God. And steal his food. He's had dogs be killed by bears. It's nice for like six hours. It is very hard. It is.

I can't even imagine. The point is that this guy does live in harmony, though. And he's very healthy and very happy. And, you know, the way he talks about, like, he's a very intelligent person. Yeah. You know, he's not like some weird caveman who's out there in the woods just hunting caribou. No, I think most of the people that do, like, it's a choice, right, to actually decide to live that way. Yeah.

Well, for him it certainly is. But it's also he has an ability to communicate that's unique for a guy who does that because it's not like he's talking to a lot of intelligent people all the time.

I mean, he's essentially out there by himself. Yeah, that's super hard. Does he read a lot? I don't know. It's a good question. But he seems to have, like, he's synced up with nature. I mean, he's catching fish and he's hunting animals and that's all he's eating. He lives off of that. And this guy wakes up every morning and says, what do I need to do to stay alive another day? And he just goes out and does that. Which seems like, for us, we're like, oh my God, that sounds terrible. Yeah.

But does it really sound more terrible than going to a job at some corporation that doesn't give a shit about you, that will cut you if the stock is down, and you've dedicated 25 years of your life to this company, and all of a sudden you're gone, and now you don't know what to do, and you're on unemployment. You're like, what did I do with my life? I'm 46. What the fuck happened? That's a lot of people. Whereas this guy...

He knows what he's going to do tomorrow. He knows what he's going to do the next day. And also he knows his life matters every day. Yeah. Like I think this is a thing we forget is like, you know, our life is a choice and you know, like, and you're fighting for like whatever way you want to live your life. But we're kind of just in the daily grind. We lose our connection to that existential reality that like our lives are finite and we're

I think it really changes your perception of things when you really think about the fact that you have a finite amount of time. Yes. And food's not guaranteed. Yes. That's another thing. Well, survival's not guaranteed, right? Right. So we take for granted survival, and therefore we take for granted that we're alive at all in some sense. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

So when you start studying all these things and thinking about life and thinking about the various possibilities of life, what is the what's the lowest single celled organism? How long ago do we think that that emerged? I think current estimates are that life like the oldest fossils that we can identify and like tracing back genomically about 3.8 billion years ago.

So essentially somewhere around a billion or so years that we can find from the time Earth was formed? Yeah. So Earth, we think, you know, formed between 4.5 and 4 billion years ago. So like 4 billion years ago, we kind of had Earth as we understand it. Mostly now we don't know if there were oceans, but the moon forming impact had happened. That's Earth 1 and Earth 2, the impact with some other planet? Yeah. Theia, I think it was called. Yeah. Just smacked into Earth and then made our moon. Yeah.

Must have been really traumatic. So I think most people think like life didn't happen before that because if it did, it would have been obliterated. But we really don't know. So, yeah, current estimates are around, you know, like four to three point seven, three point eight billion years ago. So somewhere a billion or less than a billion years later, something emerges. Yes. And how do we think that happened? There is no consensus. None. Yeah.

Yeah, I know. Isn't that fun? It's fun. Yeah, it's kind of crazy. It's totally crazy. That's why I like this problem because nobody knows what happened. Wow. So what are the primary theories? There's a lot of speculation. You know, the sort of canonical ones that you'll hear about are usually like the RNA world that life started with an RNA molecule, which like RNA is still in our bodies today.

So like DNA, most people are probably familiar with, gets translated, like transcribed into RNA, and then the RNA is what's used to make proteins. So...

So RNA, you know, kind of does a dual role. So people think, oh, maybe it happened early on and it was the first life. And then there's like other hypotheses like hydrothermal vents and, you know, sort of energy first approaches to origins of life that like we had some metabolism that was organizing. But all of these are really speculative. And I think I think the issue is that we're trying to take molecules that are

are in modern living systems and trying to understand how they could emerge in a prebiotic environment on early Earth and not really thinking about how the Earth and the geochemistry on the Earth had to evolve into a living system. So it had like selection had to happen, evolution had to happen before life.

And this is sort of the critical gap that we're really missing is like what is that mechanism? And that's where assembly theory is supposed to be coming in is trying to give us a mechanism for how chemical systems can evolve before we even have a living cell, for example. And like in trying to iterate what those missing stages are because we just don't know what they look like right now. Well, also, what would the evolutionary advantage of becoming a cell be?

I think, well, so that's a great question. But one of the problems with this area is, like, we don't know what questions to ask. So I actually don't know that that's the right question. I think when you think about it much more deeply about, like, the physics of life and the way that we've been describing it already, if you think physics, like, what life is doing as a mechanism in the universe is maximizing the amount of stuff that gets to exist, for example.

Like there's this whole world of complex objects that cannot exist unless there's a living architecture that can select and constrain the space to make, you know, something like this instead of like the universes of other things those atoms could be arranged in.

So if you think that there's something that deep and that fundamental about the nature of life, the origin of life transition has something to do with the emergence of systems that basically can persist. They can survive against this sort of random chemical noise, like the chemical soup is just a mess of things being created and destroyed, created and destroyed. And you get something that basically can reinforce its own existence enough to keep existing and then building more complex stuff.

And that's really the origin of life transition. It's pretty simple to say like that. But trying to build an experiment and understand the sort of chemical architecture that mediates that transition is quite hard. And that's where we're at right now.

And so experiments are being done to try to create. How do they conduct these? So that's my collaborator, Lee Cronin, is a chemist. And he's totally brilliant. And actually, him and I are probably, you know, I don't know. Like, what we're trying to do is a little bit crazy to solve the origin of life. But, you know, like, I hadn't, like, he, he,

he's doing the experimental stuff, but like the sort of idea we had in mind is like, I'll write a book, try to get the ideas out there, get people excited about thinking about this space. And he'll start a company that will digitize chemistry and try to raise the funds to actually do the experiments. So he's trying to build the technology and experiments. It's built on this platform he has for building robots that basically do the chemistry for you. And the idea being, if we could build a large enough experiment, we could search that huge space of chemistry, a little bit like a circus,

search algorithm for chemistry and then be able to look in chemical space and try to discover aliens in an original life experiment on Earth. And so that's what we're trying to do. I'm really excited. I hope it happens. Imagine if you guys, if someone does something like this, maybe it's you, maybe it's someone else, someone does something like this and creates an artificial life form and then starts manipulating that life form

and evolving that life form through some extraneous processes. Yeah. So, I mean, there are benefits to that, right? So Lee's company, Chemify, is a digital chemistry company, and their stated aim is to be able to 3D print any molecule on demand, right? So this has huge impact for the pharmaceutical industry, but the real goal is to make an artificial life form in the lab. But that also has huge impact for humanity because you imagine that now you have...

the ability to study in this other system, all of these other kinds of chemistries, like what can you do for like antibiotic discovery or pharmaceutical drug discovery or even psychedelic drug discovery, people like that. But, you know, like there's there's a

crazy amount of new technology and new insights fundamentally to come out of that. But I also don't think that we're really going to understand these other kind of technologies that we're building. Like when we're thinking about artificial intelligence and like, is that alive or not? Unless we solve this chemical problem of what life is, because I think the chemical problem is much harder, but much more direct as far as like understanding the fundamental nature of life when you solve it in an experimental program. Biological life. Biological life. Chemical life.

Because it won't be biology as we know it, right? That's the whole point. It'll be alien biology that we evolve in the lab. Right. And I actually think this is how we're going to make first contact with alien life because I think we won't recognize it unless we understand what it is.

Wow. What ethical concerns would arise when you take a thing, like let's say, let's advance this whole process a few hundred years from now. And you've created artificial life. You've created this thing that doesn't exist anywhere else. And then instead of it being subject to natural selection as a vehicle for its advancement, instead, we just start fucking with it. And then it gets to a point where there's an ethical concern like, hey, this thing is about to get smarter than us.

What do we do? I think there's ethical concerns right along the way. And I don't know that I know immediate answers to those. So, you know, it's kind of like this is the part where it's a little existentially traumatic to work on these kind of problems. So I have a friend that's a philosopher, Ben Bratton, and he says the best kind of like ideas are the ones that are like

equally like really exciting and horrifying. And like you want to work on those ideas because you don't know what it's like future is going to be. And I tend to be on the optimistic side. I think we need to solve this problem because I think we have this sort of existential crisis in some sense that humanity is facing because we don't understand what we are. We don't understand what our technologies are doing. We don't understand what our long term future holds. We don't even understand all the life around us on this planet. So we solve that problem. I think that the lens through which we will look at the kind of at

ethical things that you're talking about will be radically different because the knowledge itself will have transformed us. So I can't even anticipate what those kinds of dialogues are going to be like. Imagine if like, instead of just wondering about cephalopods and plants and stuff on this conversation, we actually had a fundamental understanding of what it is to be other life forms and life as a, you know, as part of the fundamental structure of reality and like participatory in actually like what the universe builds. And you have that kind of understanding and,

I think it radically changes the way that we conceptualize who we are and what we're doing. And I don't know what that looks like. And we would assume that if we continue, especially down the path of AI and quantum computing, they're probably going to solve a lot of these problems.

Yeah, I think we're flying blind in those areas, though, really, especially AI. I mean, I think that that's pretty obvious that, you know, there's a huge amount of debate about the nature of intelligence in these artificial algorithms. I certainly think that their life, but I think their life in the sense that the lineage of information necessary to train a large language model, for example, you know, requires a planet to evolve something like us and evolve language and then enough data about that language to train the model. So it's a direct descendant, like you were saying, like, you know, our technologies are babies, right?

Um, but, um, so there's that part of it, but I think, I don't know. I totally lost my train of thought. This is very funny. Um, it went two ways and I don't know which way I want to go. Um, that's very funny. Um,

Yeah. What was your question again? I'm so sorry. That's a good question. I don't remember what my question was, so we're both in the same boat. The idea was that artificial intelligence would enhance our understanding of what it means to be biological life. Oh, I see. Yeah, and you were asking about quantum information. Yes, and that when computing power is massively increased and you have a sentient artificial intelligence that essentially has all the information that we have of

Every human being, every database, everything all over the world, but yet far more capable of processing this and advancing this. Maybe it'll have a more complex understanding of what life is. Yeah. So I think there's like a sort of subtlety here when you're talking about artificial intelligence and whether it could compete with natural intelligence. Right. So this is sort of the canonical debate about the nature of artificial intelligence. Right.

But I think we really underestimate what chemistry can do. And I think some of the most powerful computers on this planet are still chemical. And if we actually understand chemistry better, you know, with these kind of new digital chemistry technologies, the kind of compute we can get out of chemistry might actually outcompete silicon in the long run. Hmm.

Well, then there's also the concept of hybrids, right? Yes. When it becomes hybrids. I like that concept. But this gets into the blurry area of, like, are you human anymore? Right. Like, if you have a chip in your brain and you're, like, being a cephalopod and then you morph into, like, you know, being, you know...

on your own desktop like are you still human well that's what I always say about like if you go back to Australia Pythagoras and explain to him airplanes and cell phones but you can't be Australia Pythagoras anymore I'd be like whoa I don't want to stop being me yeah you know wouldn't that be the same reaction that they have I

I think, yeah. Probably. Probably terrified. Yeah. I don't want to become a person. I don't want to become an alien. No. I don't want to be some gray dude with a giant head and big black eyes, but maybe that's what we become. Yeah. I think also intergenerationally we're already doing that. So like the sort of, you know, people will always talk about how kids are more comfortable with technology than their parents or grandparents were. Oh, yeah. And why are they more comfortable? Because they grew up in a totally different environment. Right.

Like the world has literally changed in the last few decades. So like the world that kids are growing up today is not the world that it was when kids were growing up like 50 years ago. Right.

And so they are, quote unquote, alien, not really alien, but like they're really fundamentally different in a lot of ways. And I think it's OK to recognize that. Like that's, you know, part of the progression of understanding and the fact that the world is changing. And if we're looking at it from generation to generation, let's scale that up a thousand years or a hundred thousand years or a million years. Those are fun thought experiments.

Yeah, it really is. Because the amount of change that's happened in terms of technology and our ability to access it over the past hundred years is enormous. But yet we're still the same biological creature. Like, how long does that stay? Like, when does that, when do we start integrating? When, even if we didn't integrate, how much of it would change us? Yeah.

I mean, I think we're already seeing signs of that, right? Like people's like fear of leaving their cell phone behind. You know, it's like extensible brains. Like we're all pretty much attached to our cell phone already. So when you just, you know, you can imagine in a generation or two, it's more comfortable just to have that inside your body. So then you don't lose it. Yes. Right. Some people are choosing to have it on their wrist. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It seems like we're in the very bizarre doorway period where we're sort of like about to go through this doorway of transhumanism.

Like the phone thing. Like we don't want to let it go. The car that you have to have. I don't know how to get anywhere without my navigation system. You know, all that stuff. Like we're completely connected in some new strange way that we've just sort of accepted as normal now. And accepted, I mean, for you and I, it's over the course of our lifetime. I mean, when I was a child, there was no internet. I remember very distinctly when it emerged. Yeah.

I was like 27 years old was the first time I got a computer and I got online. I'm like, this is crazy. And that was the You've Got Mail days. Yeah, AOL was like mind-blowing to me. Mind-blowing. I know, instant messaging. Mind-blowing. You could chat with people back and forth with a computer. This was crazy. Totally mind-blowing.

And then you could research things and find out things. And then when bandwidth started increasing and then you started to be able to watch videos and YouTube comes along. How many people have, there's obviously a lot of nonsense on things like YouTube, but how many people have become educated on so many different things because of YouTube? Yeah, I think it's great. It's incredible. There's so much to know. And you can, like on any subject, quantum physics, on carpentry, whatever it is.

There's millions of videos. And all of a sudden, you're instantaneously watching some professor discuss what it means to be alive. Yeah. That's crazy. I love the time we're living in. I think a lot of people want to complain about it, but I think it's fabulous. It's the best. You wouldn't want to live in the 80s. No. All the music sucked. People were on coke. The hair was great. The hair was interesting. Yeah.

But it was like, that was a dumb time. This is a better time. It's a better time to go live. Now it's perfect. For us. Yeah. But if the people in the future are going to be like, imagine living in 2024. Right. Yeah. Imagine that presidential election they had to go through. Imagine this and that and Israel and Gaza and blah, blah,

Yeah. I mean, that's... They're going to look back at us like, how did we do it the way we look back at cave people? Right. But I think the things that they're going to ask about are not the things that we think that they're going to ask about. What do you think they're going to ask about? I don't know. I set myself up for that. No, I don't have an easy answer. That's so bad. Totally did that. Well, I think...

I don't know. Like, you don't know what the historical moments are right now. Like, we cite things that we think are historical, and I don't think that they are. And often times it's really interesting because people imagine the future, you know, being radically different than the present. But Ken Liu is a science fiction author. He's got this great take that, like, if you want to actually predict the future, look at the things that haven't changed in centuries or haven't changed in decades.

And those things are likely still to persist and be the same. And so like when he was talking about this, he had a picture of like, you know, some futuristic thing from like the 1930s. And there was like a maid in like the black outfit with the white thing. And they're like, which of these things is still around? Like she's vacuuming. And it's like just, you know, on the side of the photo. And there's all these like robots and things, you know, like outside. And like nothing looks the same except for like we still have the same maid outfits and vacuums. And we recognize those.

Interesting. And that was like predicted 100 years ago. Right. So it's like it's it's weird, our conception of things and like how much change there is. And of course, we you know, we're we're our brains are tuned to look out for the things that are dangerous and changing in our environment. And so we're always hypersensitive to things that are changing or are changing without like recognizing how much is still the same. Yeah.

Interesting. And I also think we're aware of how much of an impact technology, in particular the internet, has had on us, but probably not as much as someone who's studying history will be aware of it. Yeah. To them, it'll almost be like a bomb went off. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. And I love talking with historians, especially about like the ideas I work on. Right. So like one of the sort of fundamental ideas in assembly theory, which is really radical in some sense from a perspective of physics, but just generally, is that history is actually embedded in objects. So I actually think like any evolved structure has a physical size, like it might be sitting on the desk, but it also has a size in time. Hmm.

Um, and this is actually like a fundamental feature of the physics of life that, that living objects, the things that life creates are large in time. And this kind of idea has been sitting around humanity for millennia, that like contingency history might still be alive in the present, but we don't really think about that in a fundamental way. So, you know, like, um, uh,

And I was talking with Thomas Moynihan, who's a historian, and he was just saying that there's so many threads through history that kind of point to this idea being like, you know, super interesting and very relevant. And so when you think about like the future history, are they going to be like, oh, they finally realized these kind of things were true? Like, and I think about this with the history of physics. It's kind of crazy at what generation we started realizing certain things.

Like when did humanity first start abstracting and building mathematics? Or when did we build mechanical clocks and start recognizing that we could track things at the level of seconds? Like we had to invent seconds. And now we take them for granted. Right. When did China invent the mechanical clock? What year was that? I don't know. Let's see if Jamie can find that out. That's a fascinating thought, right? I know. Because before that they required sundials. Right. Right.

You know, and I don't know how much of an effect. How much of an effect is like the sun? Well, all our clocks before that were based on sun. 725 A.D. I mean, that's just incredible. Look at that. The world's first mechanical clock. Water-driven spherical birds was invented by Yi Jing, a Buddhist monk in 725 A.D. Is there a photo of what that looks like? That's a good question.

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Let's see what it looks like. Whoa. I want to see like a real one. Imagine you would go visit that thing. I know. Like I need to find out what time it is. Well, imagine. But I mean, this is a good thought experiment, right? Like imagine being one of the first people to see a mechanical clock. How big was the first mechanical clock? It looks fucking huge. Yeah. Now we have them like on our wrist. Is that the first one? Just imagine the calculations involved in figuring out how to make all these gears sort of click, click, click and sync. Yes.

Or even having a concept that you could keep time with that kind of regularity. Yeah. Because like you're saying, our clocks before were based on like sand or shadows or water. Like they were very elemental, right? And they were not...

Right. And the tolerances are so tight that they've created things like tourbillon movements so that they're not...

They're not affected by gravity. Yeah. Like these constant force gears. Have you ever seen tourbillon watches? No. I feel like I should build a watch now. This is kind of like, I'm going to get like this weird hobby where I'm going to become like a watchmaker. Oh, watches are amazing. I know, they're cool. Mechanical watches are so damn cool. They're so fascinating. Yeah.

There's a company called Grand Seiko, and Grand Seiko is like the advanced version of Seiko. Seiko makes like a bunch of different kinds of levels of watches in terms of price points, but then Grand Seiko is their luxury line. And Grand Seiko has created watches that are mechanical but also have quartz involved in the movement. So their accuracy is insane to within a half a second a day. Oh, that's cool. And it's all just these gauges.

spinning around in springs. Amazing. And half a second a day. And they have a 72-hour power reserve.

Some of them even more than that. It's bananas. Yeah, I know it is. It really is bananas that they figured out a way to do this with these tiny, and this is one right here. So look how thin it is. It's awesome. It sits right there. Is it heavy? No, not that heavy. But I have some of them. That's a Grand Seiko right there. It's called the Spring Drive. It's not that heavy. But that's all. Oh, no, it's not. That is also a Grand Seiko. Wow. But there's mechanical gears and stuff inside of it. So much cooler knowing what's going on inside. This one is different, too, because this one actually has a battery as well.

And so this one is super duper accurate. Oh, very cool. They just tried to figure out a way to make these things...

Over time, more and more accurate, more and more precise. And what they've gotten it down to now is extraordinary. But show the tourbillon movement because it's bananas when you see what those look like. And some of these tourbillon watches, they go for hundreds of thousands of dollars for a watch just because the complexity of the gears. And then they also have clear windows over the movement so you can stare at it while it's doing its thing. This is a tourbillon watch. Look at all that jazz.

That's amazing. Bananas.

Look at all these gears. I know. I'm trying to figure out how many gears are actually in it, but it's pretty insane. These sync up. I mean, I don't know what the accuracy of this is Grand Seiko. This is another Grand Seiko. This is their constant force tourbillon movement. But look at the watch. That watch is several hundred thousand dollars. Wow. Because it is just so insanely complex. It's gorgeous. To create. Yeah. I love the see-through that you can actually see the gears in. Find out how accurate that thing is.

today because the dive watch or the spring drive is accurate within a half a second a day so how accurate is that damn thing

Yeah. Nutty. You could do physics with it. So the fact that you're doing this with seconds and I mean the precision involved in making sure that every gear and every spring represents a second so perfectly with no deviation that it's a half a second over 24 hours. That's bananas. OK. Plus or minus 12 seconds a day.

Is that a different tourbillon? That's a different tourbillon. That's a seagull tourbillon. I'm just trying to find an answer for one of them. Yeah, that's a different one. This was saying a tourbillon doesn't improve accuracy. It doesn't improve accuracy. Okay. So the idea is that it's not affected by gravity, but it doesn't improve accuracy. The same gravity-fighting effect as tourbillon mechanism effects have been proven that tourbillons offer no more accuracy than a traditional escapement on a wristwatch. In some cases, even less. But it's kind of a nerd thing. Yeah.

Yeah, no, I can see that. People love the tourbillon movements. That's good. It's so fascinating. I could nerd out on those. They're amazing. Oh, for sure. And you can go deep and deep and deep. And they're also, some of them are like wafer thin, wafer thin, and they have this automatic movement inside of them. So the movement of your hand, like every time you move your arm, it's winding the watch. Yeah. So as you move around. Oh, really? Yes, yes. Like a Rolex. Wow. Yes. If you have like an automatic watch, it's like a Rolex.

like a Rolex Submariner, you don't wind it. You move it around. And as you move it around, that's what causes it to have the power to keep going. So as you're wearing it throughout the day, and then there's some that you do wind, some that you wind. I just had a morbid thought that you could tell how long someone was dead for by like how many seconds off.

the launches because it wasn't wound up anymore by now sort of but you'd only tell within you know 12 hours yeah yeah I know that's funny though it is funny yeah because well you'd have to find out yeah yeah like what kind of a movement it is is this a 48 hour movement or a 72 hour movement how long does it last for yeah yeah

That's incredible technology. Was the watch broken already? Yeah. Time Rolex watch helps solve a murder mystery. Whoa. Okay, there you go. See? I wasn't totally off. Look at that. Wow. Is that how it solved it? I don't know. I just made that up. Interesting. Well, it makes sense. So that's the Oyster Perpetual, right? That's one of those watches that also has an automatic movement. I just love the idea of recovering information and like...

figuring out puzzles. All right. The Rolex is known to be 48 hours the power reserve. Police were able to determine the date of death within a reasonable margin of error by subtracting the watch's power reserve from the date that was displayed on the watch when it was found. Yep. According to his Rolex watch, Ronald Platt was murdered on July 20th, 1996. The problem with that is a lot of people don't set their date correctly. So that wouldn't hold up in court. No. It seems like

Like, how do you know the guy was accurate with his date? Oh, sorry. How do you know if he had shitty vision? Like, you can't even see. I can't read that. Unless I have good lighting. Yeah. I can't read that. You're set to the right date or no? Mine probably isn't. Hold on a second. Let me tell you right now.

It'd be funny if it's not. Oh, this one doesn't even have a date. Oh, there you go. That's not going to hold up in court. Duh. This one doesn't have a date. You're safe. Why did I think it does? That's funny. But some of them do. And that's a different...

There's like a different mechanism inside of there. It's called... They call them complications. But these different ones, like they'll have one... I have one that I gave to Lex that's an Omega and it has a moon on it. And so it has a moon-faced...

thing where there's a high resolution photograph of the moon and as the moon rises and moves through the sky becomes a full moon and a half moon a quarter moon it shows it on the watch so and so it's accurate so you have to go to a website you find out what the moon phase is you set the moon phase for where the watch is and then you set the time and the date in the watch and then it stays in sync

Love it. It's crazy. That's so amazing. The Omega is really cool because it's a little image, but it's a high-resolution image of the moon. Can you see if you can find one of those? It's Omega Speedmaster Moon Watch. And so this little moon sort of moves through this little night sky window in the bottom of the watch. I love the phases of the moon. Yeah, that's not it. Find the one with the moon on it, Jamie. Say...

No, no, that's the, no, no, no. Moon watch is the watch they wore during the moon landings. Moon phase is what you're looking for. Yeah. So that one's different.

That's it right there. Click on the one where you just had your cursor. So that, see the image of the moon in the bottom? Got it. Isn't that dope? So it even has like a bunch of little stars back there. And that's all run by Gears too. Yes. So cool. It's so cool. And then the one on the above it, that's the calendar. The window to the upper left of it, that's its calendar. It's amazing that they can sync all those different sort of scales of time within one device with just a bunch of Gears. And incredibly accurate too. Yeah.

Yeah. Amazing. That's my favorite watch. I love that thing. That's great. So cool. It's a great gift. Yeah, but it's just an amazing piece of human ingenuity that someone's figured out how to do that. And again, that's fully mechanical. That's just you move your hand around and it does all the winding. Yeah. And it keeps it accurate. Yeah.

It's nuts. It is nuts. That's our simple little simian brains. Human brains. I know. It's amazing. And when you think about what could possibly become of advanced life if we could exist in, you know, just stay alive and advance another million years, which doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility. I think it'll happen. You think so? I think so. What do you think we look like in the future?

I mean, I think as we've been talking about there, like it's some kind of hybrid existence. Like I can't, I think we are becoming more integrated with our technology. I don't, I don't feel like existentially traumatized by that. And I also don't think like, you know, there's like all these tropes about like machines completely replacing biological life. And I just don't think that's a realistic possibility either. And again, it goes back to like looking at the history of life on earth. Like there's no technology that life invented that,

that was completely replaced if subsequent architecture was built on it. So I always think about the ribosome, which mediates the translation in a cell, is one of the most important and oldest technologies on our planet. We don't think about molecules as technologies, but life had to invent that thing, and it's still here. And there's billions of ribosomes on this planet, and they're kind of the engines of existence in some sense because cells require them to function. Right.

And so I think a lot of the stuff that we're building now, like it's an interesting question, what's going to be around billions of years from now. I don't think that we as humans have invented any technology that will last that long. But I do think the idea that we're not going to be replaced because we are like sort of a key part of the infrastructure of what comes next is interesting.

compelling to me based on looking at the history of life on Earth. Yeah, we may not be replaced, but we probably won't remain the same. No, we won't. Yeah. When we do integrate, if we do have some sort of a technological cyborg existence, what does that look like? Well, the question of like, what does it mean to integrate though? So like...

Already in this discussion, we've been talking about like being in a society or not in a society and the lifestyle of a human and what a human is is fundamentally different. If you're an individual living a hunter gatherer lifestyle on your own versus if you're living in a modern society and you have all this technological aid and this like social constraints imposed on you that you have to hold a nine to five job and you have to have an income and all these other things like you're a fundamentally different kind of entity than you would be as someone living in the wild on their own.

And so we're already part of a technological infrastructure. We just don't really recognize societies as that. But it's being built more and more into us that we're kind of

Right.

I think so, too. And I think the way we make distinctions with animals like feral pigs versus domesticated pigs and things along those lines. It's like we think of them as different things. Yeah. And I think that's... I think they are different. And you could say there's like superficial physical resemblances, but I think those are kind of...

superficial. I think like it's fundamentally different to be a wild species versus a domesticated one or a wild human, so to speak, versus a domesticated human. Right. Right. And I think when you look at that guy who lives in Antarctica and the Arctic Circle, rather, and you compare him to like the saddest overweight gamer who's drinking Mountain Dew all day. Oh, Mountain Dew. That sounds painful. Oh, somebody's just like.

pale, no sunlight at all, just eating garbage and playing Call of Duty all day long. I mean, that is like, they're two completely different animals. They are. One of them is like walking through the mountains with a rifle for looking for caribou and the other one is just like calling Uber Eats. And I suspect that like even the way they feel about

the world is totally different. Right. So it's not just like the, like the, obviously the physiological differences manifest and like mental differences about like the acuity of their mental architecture, how they feel about their environment and like what's happening to them. It's just totally different. How much, if any, do you pay attention to the UFO UAP world? I have a very, um, I don't pay too much attention to it to be quite honest. Um,

I think for me, it's not very exciting, to be honest. I'm much more interested in understanding fundamentally what life is. And I think the UFO discussion really hasn't afforded me a deeper understanding of the problems I'm interested in solving. So I don't pay too much attention to it. I think it's much more interesting as a cultural discussion. And like some of these things...

that we've also been talking about, like augmented humans and all these other things. It's like there's a lot of discussions happening culturally that I think are preparing us for the next phase. And so I kind of see the UFO discussion as being one like, you know, we culturally need to understand how we want to think about alien life, what it is, how we intersect with it. And so there needs to be a lot of discussions about the nature of that problem and people interested in believing in that problem. But I don't really see a lot

intellectually for me personally coming out of that discussion. Yeah, there's no meat. No. It's just a lot of talk and a lot of stories that some of them from very respected people that I believe them and their encounters are fascinating.

But you could waste your whole life thinking about what that means and what's true. There's not enough data. There's very, very, very little data. Yeah, that's the problem. So I find it interesting. Like, it's certainly intriguing and, like,

You know, to think about the possibilities, but it's sort of like like mythology versus. Yes. And and like individual knowledge versus shared knowledge. And I think what science like, you know, you can you can question the sort of academic establishment and the way that we do science. And it's very dogmatic and all those things. And I can I can agree with a lot of those criticisms.

But science fundamentally is about shared knowledge and the ability to like have a joint conversation about something we both understand and to be able to use that to do things like, you know, the laws of gravitation are things that we can easily state. And we can build satellites and new technologies out of that knowledge. And I think, you know, the discussion on alien life is fundamentally about new knowledge that we need to have about how the universe works.

And that's going to come from a lot of different places. But for me, I don't see the UFO discussion fundamentally advancing that question. It's just raising some of the mystery about, you know, certain experiences people have had, but not in a way that allows us to really answer the question of what is an alien. There's also a fundamental problem of accuracy of information and how much of this whistleblower stuff is nonsense. Right.

how much of it is true when you're relying on person...

A, to discuss classified documents. There's a lot of control of narratives, which I don't like. So I don't like people telling people how to think. And I think what I see in the UFO discussion a lot that actually makes me stay out of that community is a lot of people that claim authority on knowledge and then they claim they can't share the knowledge. And I don't like that. I think if you have knowledge, you should share it. You should discuss it. You should try to figure out what it means for everybody and you should not protect it. That's why you're a scientist. Yes.

Yeah, that's what people should be doing. I don't trust people when they claim to have absolute knowledge they can't share with people. The only thing that gives me pause is the possibility that they're dealing with top secret information.

Yeah. That could get them in great trouble and would limit their access to this technology. Yeah. That gives me pause. And it's the only thing that gives me pause. But it's such a good story though, right? It's the best story. I know, right? That's the problem is I'm a sucker. I'm a giant sucker for that kind of story. I love those stories. Yeah. I think we all do. I hear about those stories and I'm like, oh my God. Yeah. I love it. I love it.

it. I want to hear all of them. Yeah. But I think that's like a sort of also standard play that like, you know, if the government needs to keep knowledge a secret, suddenly it becomes more valuable, right? So... I don't even necessarily think it's the government as much as I think it's the government and military contractors. Yes. So if you have some sort of technology that is literally out of this world and you're trying to figure out how it works, it's within your best interest to keep that as secret as possible. Right. And...

Well, we see the cases of that in Arizona. It's like, you know, like they're testing, you know, whatever new technology for fighter jets or whatever. And it's like a million UFO sightings. And then it's like later that it was, you know, the military. Have you ever seen a military jet like a stealth bomber? No. When we were filming Fear Factor way back in the day, we were...

out near Edwards Air Force Base and one of those stealth bombers flew overhead and if I didn't know what it was I would swear that was from another planet. It looks so cool. Yeah. It looks so cool and it does not look like anything else you've ever seen flying in the sky. Yeah. This is like

This is post 9-11, 2001. Right. So this is the very beginning of Fear Factor. And right after 9-11 and we were out there in the desert and you see this thing fly. It's near Palmdale. And you see this thing fly overhead and it's like, it looks like something Batman owns. Yeah. See if you can find one of those. Yeah. So you can find like a video of a stealth bomber flying overhead. But it flew right past us. I was like, whoa. I would love to see that. Yeah.

Part of it was terrifying because like, oh my God, are we going to war? Like, why am I seeing these alien warships? Yeah. I always feel like that when I see military stuff. It's like, it's equal parts like amazing and profound and then like totally existentially traumatizing. Yes, exactly. It's cool. Yeah. But it's designed to kill people really quick. Yeah. It's designed to sneak in and mess people up and then get out of there without anybody knowing you're there. That's literally what it is. A stealth bomber. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, but I do find it exciting that so many people want to talk about UFOs and are really excited about the possibilities for aliens. The thing is, my point is, I mean, was that Einstein's quote? Sufficient technology is indistinguishable from magic. Yeah. Was it Asimov? It might have been Asimov. Yeah. So here's one flying overhead. Look at this. Come on.

Like if you saw this you'd be like, oh my god, they're here. Yeah, like if you saw that fly overhead you'd go Oh my god aliens are real Right. That's how I felt It's kind of epic that the most alien thing on the planet is the human mind and like what it can create Oh my god, the most epic we're responsible for every single thing. Yeah, every single thing. That's an object that didn't grow right? We made it. Yeah, nuts blows my mind

It blows my mind. Yeah. And if I think about the possibility of something even more advanced than us coming here and manipulating us the same way we're willing to take a chance in creating artificial life in a laboratory. Yeah. If we're willing to do that, why would the, if they're so much more advanced than us that they think we're just these silly territorial apes. So why is it always a narrative that there's so much more advanced? Like where does this come from? Because they got here. We can't get there. I see. But I, but I, I don't think that like technological process,

Progress is linear. So they might have the technology to come and visit us, say, but not have other kinds of technology that we've advanced. Perhaps. But the idea that they have gone so far in one area that is so perplexing, which is deep space travel and vast distances of space and time, and that they've conquered that. So the closest planets that we think we have Goldilocks zones are how far away?

How many light years away? I mean, the closest planetary system is probably, you know,

you know, about four light years away. With a recognized Goldilocks zone? There's planets there. It's very debatable about like whether it's a Trappist system, like whether those planets are actually habitable or not. Cause we don't know if they have atmospheres and there's, there's all kinds of debate in the community, but like potentially. Yeah. So let's take the closest planetary system. So four, four light years. Yeah. Okay. Is that, yeah. So imagine something coming here every four years. Cause it takes that long.

Well, that's assuming they can travel at light speed, which is a big if. Or assuming they can do something. Well, we're also assuming that speed is you're taking an object and you're moving that object through some method of propulsion to a new place. Instead of moving the space around it, folding that and having it instantaneously travel from one point to point, which is the way the real super eggheads describe the potential future of space.

Like long distance space travel. Yeah, based on sort of extensions of current theories of gravity. Right. Yeah. And, you know, obviously extrapolating greatly our ability to generate power. Yeah. Right? But if they did figure out a way to get here, they would probably be so unimpressed with us.

Especially if they caught us a few hundred years ago, you know, and we're basically like making stupid houses and burning coal and riding horses. And making mechanical clocks. That's true. Right. That was quite a while ago. Yeah. That's true. Was that A.D. or 725 A.D.? Was that what it was?

Yeah. I mean, just the idea that we have come so far in such a short period of time, you would just imagine that if that keeps going, it's going to get to the point where everything expands exponentially and the ability to travel through space will be on the list. Yes. And then you're going to go, okay, what are they doing? Oh, they only have rocks. They only have sticks and rocks. They haven't figured out metallurgy yet. They haven't figured out

Right. But the challenge with these kind of like thought experiments is we're always applying today's standard and understanding to long term futures. And if you imagine that we go through this process of, you know, creating the kind of technologies that you're describing, we will be so fundamentally different in the process. We'll be having a different discussion. Right. And we won't be able to reason about what that looks like based on the way that we think about things now. So I think this this kind of, you know, I've never really been a fan of like these sort of.

you know, survival of the fittest, predator, prey, like the aliens are just going to be so much more advanced than us and come and take over everything kind of narratives because it just doesn't seem to be, first off, it's not consistent with what we actually observe because we don't observe aliens yet. And second off, it doesn't seem consistent with the trajectory of what we're doing overall, especially if you think about us not individually, but like much more as just like a biosphere evolving into a technologic universe.

like a technosphere. Yeah. I agree with you there. I think this predator prey thing sort of got sidelined the moment we created agriculture in cities. That kind of stopped and then it became a new thing. And as we advance technologically, it becomes another new thing. My thought is there's going to be a moment in time, the way we've integrated with each other digitally through cell phones and through social media and interaction online, that

There will be another level of that that is exponentially more bizarre. Yes. It's probably going to take place with like Neuralink and similar type technologies. Right. That we're going to integrate with each other and communicate telepathically and communicate with large groups of people telepathically. And I think.

Isn't it amazing that things that were once myths become fact through technology? Yes. I think this is just absolutely amazing, like, how much our ancestors thought about these things that they called magic and, like, we're making...

you know like actual physical reality through technology we had the gentleman who received the first neural implant the neural implant here we talked to him yeah what it's like and he i look at him like this is you're the future like yeah we're probably all going to have something similar to that in our bodies and then eventually when i go why do we have these fragile feet

When you can have these immense deluxe carbon fiber feet that allow you to run over hot coals and not feel a thing. Like, wouldn't you rather have those? They're better. You can control them better. Depends on what you want to do. Right. Depends on what you do. But we are, we're very connected to our biological existence. But my thought is that our biological existence comes with all the baggage of nature.

all the human reward systems that have been put in place in order to ensure our survival. Yes. And this is what's led us to war. This is what's led us to violence. This is what's led us to all the terrible things. Yes. We have a lot of baggage. Yes. And that baggage, I think, is a byproduct of survival of the fittest mentality that came out of our biological life. As we integrate digitally, I think that might be one of the primary benefits of

is that we realize, oh, we can't kill each other. We're all one. Yeah. Like, we really are all one. Yes. And we really are all connected. And instead of doing that, why don't we figure out a way to solve all this and work together? And if we are all one of the same mindset, this whole idea of stealing resources and covert operations, that's all going to go away. Yeah. It just makes sense that that would be one of the things that would happen. We would stop doing all the dumb things that we do. Yeah. And then as we...

joined together, we would say, well, we need to come up with solutions for our environmental issues. We need to come up with solutions for long-term strategies for dealing with all these different problems that we've created. And then we could do it together. Yeah. Instead of like having this whole concept of territorial lines in the sand where you're not allowed to cross unless you have a passport or, you know, you have to have paperwork and...

Some sort of an integration with all human beings. The way we have with cell phones, but way more sophisticated. I mean, something I find really shocking is how difficult it is for humans to think of other humans as human. Right. Like, so we have like our severe friends or like people that we find socially acceptable. And then like pretty much anybody outside of that space is like beyond our cognitive horizon and we just can't treat them as people anymore. And I find this very perplexing and frustrating.

you know, about a bit of an issue in making the kind of transition that you're talking about, that we just like can't even see each other as humans. Sure. I mean, that's the, the whole concept of the other, right? They're different than us. They're different. We're allowed to do this because they're those people. And that permeates so much of modern society right now. It's like hard to look at anybody and see them as a person. And I think that's baked into us, um,

First of all, because we all evolved in tribal groups of very small numbers of people, which is where Dunbar's number comes from, right? We only have a certain amount of people that we can keep intimately connected to in our minds. Yeah, and our social networks are much larger than that now. So most of the people in our network we can't actually humanize. Well, it's even worse if you're famous because you don't remember anybody's name. Yeah. Because I meet so many people. And then you have all kinds of people that have a parasocial relationship with you and they think they know you and they don't know you.

Especially me because I do this. I'm talking all the time. It must be very weird. Fucking strange. But it's also I feel like

That sort of connection with people. This is what I'm what anybody who's doing any sort of a podcast or something like that is kind of doing is like a one way version of what I think is going to exist universally on the planet. Yes, I agree with that. I think actually the thing that I find really interesting about the podcasting space is this kind of.

like very intimate conversation, but it's technologically mediated and shared. Right. And I think that's exactly what you're talking about. And so like this transition phase and like why are podcasting becoming so popular, I think is because it's part of this kind of transition that we're all undergoing. There's also an unusual authenticity in having access to individual minds without influence of producers and directors and a bunch of different people. So like this conversation in particular, like

There was I had zero conversations with any person before I got you on. Yeah. I had a text message that I sent to my friend who's the booking guy. I said, hey, reach out to her. This sounds cool. See if she can do this date. And that's it. Yeah. And then it goes on my phone and that's it. And then so I start watching some of the conversations you had. I watched your thing on Lex. I start looking into this, these concepts and assembly theory and all these different things.

And so my brain, so it's all it is, is something I'm interested in. There's no other reason to have this conversation other than I'm interested in it. And so that I think resonates with other people because I love when someone's interested in something. If they're interested in making baseballs by hand or whatever it is. I think we should all be more excited about things. Like things are exciting, especially creative spaces and like new ideas and people that are thinking about

like changing things but for me it's someone who's passionate about something yeah for sure i totally get what you mean about the baseballs yeah i mean this is why i like the watch discussion because it's very clearly like drawn from enthusiasm and somebody like designed that thing oh yeah and i'm by the way i am a luddite when it comes to watches there are watch nerds yeah like serious watch nerds that can tell you like all the models and what the this movement has on that

movement in there. They know all the pieces. Some of them take them apart and put them back together again on their own. They got these giant goggles and sit in their little tweezers and shit. It's crazy. I mean, but I love when people are really excited about things, whether it's about playing the guitar or making a painting, like something about that to me is infectious and it makes me excited about other things. If I see someone who's really excited about making furniture,

I start getting excited about what I do. Yeah. It's like there's something about that energy. Passion is infectious. Yes. Yeah. And I think like enabling people to find their own passion is really important. Very much so. Yeah. And when you do what like what we're doing on this podcast and have conversations about things that are just interesting.

Yeah. You know, that's all it is. It's just interesting. Right. Interesting is good. It's far better than the opposite. Yes. It's just fascinating. And so that stimulates minds. It stimulates people. It's like there's people at home that are listening. Like, I want to have a question. Like, what? Yeah. What is how did this happen? How did that happen? What what would have happened if it was a little bit colder? What would have happened if it was a little bit warmer? What would have happened if there was no this or that? Imagine a world where no one figures out the wheel.

Yeah. I mean, I think about alternate histories all the time. Well, the bizarre thing is they do not think the Egyptians had the wheel.

Yeah. Like, what are you talking about? How is that even possible? Yeah. And so no theory there. That's like the massive mystery of human civilization itself, just in the structures that were left behind with no explanation. Yeah. That alone makes us go, well, we have this bizarre idea in our head of how things progress based on our current understanding of the world we live in right now. But that has no bearing on Egypt. Right.

Like, what did they do? How'd they do that? We don't know. I know. History is a predictive science, which is like a weird thing, but like people don't like think about this, but like, you know, you have to have theories of the past and then test it against the record, right? So it's not really any different than any other domain of knowledge where we're trying to make predictions and test them against current data. It's just like,

History, for some reason, we think it actually happened. Therefore, like there's one narrative, but it's usually constructed based on what we know and we're learning all the time. Well, also the problem in... And we forget all the time. The collapse of that civilization, the burning of the Library of Alexandria, all the records lost. So they probably had written down how they did everything. Yeah. And some assholes came along and burnt everything. Yeah. And now we're like...

What did you do? They were definitely assholes. That was such an amazing list. Assholes. I know. When I first heard about the Library of Alexandria, that was heartbroken. I was like, can you even imagine what was lost? If we knew what they knew, the amount of advancement. Just Egypt, just that one part of Africa where they figured out how to do some things that to this day, 4,500 plus years later, we are perplexed. Yeah. Perplexed.

Like there's shitty theories. They all suck. Every theory sucks. They've just, you know, they've just recently discovered some sort of hydraulic technology that was in one of the pyramids. Oh, really? Yes. See if you can find that. There's a recent, some recent research that was published where one of, it wasn't the Khufu pyramid. It was another pyramid. And in one of these other pyramids, they believe they have evidence of some sort of hydraulic technology that was used. Oh, that's so cool.

Study published Monday in a journal, PLOS. One researcher proposed that ancient people may have relied on water to build the step pyramid. The suspect hydraulic system may have helped lift stones from the center of the pyramid. Wow. So like we're still trying to figure out what they did.

So long before I got into science, like one of the first places I actually encountered astronomy was like reading about the Orion mystery when I was like in fifth grade. And I like, I was like, got obsessed with it for a little while about like whether the chambers and the pyramids were actually aligned with the stars and stuff. And like, like how did they possibly do that? It was, it was kind of crazy. There's a guy named Christopher Dunn who's an engineer and he has the wildest theory. He thinks that the construction of the pyramid, and this is by the way, both, uh,

maligned by some archaeologists, completely dismissed, but also embraced by younger archaeologists who aren't... So this theory is that the way the Great Pyramid was set up was not set up as a tomb, but was set up as some sort of a way to generate electricity. Oh, whoa. And that there was...

There was a chamber, a subterranean chamber, and that this chamber had something in it that was like pounding on the stone and creating a certain vibration. And then they had these shafts that they had access to that had – they know these shafts existed and they know the structure of these shafts. And these shafts that existed in the marble or whatever the stone – granite rather. And they would fill these shafts up with subterranean.

some sort of chemicals. And then at the end of the shaft was limestone. And so the limestone is porous and the limestone allows the gases to escape from all these chemicals and contain itself inside this chamber. This chamber is constantly being vibrated. And then there are these pathways that lead up to what they're calling the King's Chamber, which is this insane structure. It's one of the most perplexing things about the pyramid because these immense stones that are

I mean, that's a phenomenal piece of architecture. And then in those, they have shafts that go straight out into space that he thinks is gathering gamma rays. And so the gamma rays are interacting with this hydrogen that's being created by these chemicals and the vibrations and that all these things are used to generate electricity. And this is why there's a gold capstone on the top of the period and smooth limestone on the outside. It's a nutty theory.

But this guy, he's a brilliant man. No, I mean, it's incredibly creative. And if it's testable and like there's ways to validate that that could work, that would be. Well, the problem is you'd have to do it at scale. And like, well, you could look for traces of like whatever chemistry is talking about on the pyramid walls. And like it would be possible to experimentally verify whether gamma rays could do that. I don't suspect that they could.

could but but like there's pieces of it like this is how science works you have like a story of a set of hypotheses and you can test individual parts of it and then try to validate it so be kind of cool if you know like you wanted to try to do that right and so then the question is

How'd they figure that out? I don't know. Imagine if it turns out to be correct and this was some sort of a way of generating power from the Earth and space itself. How'd you figure that out? But also why? Because where would they put the power? They didn't have any electric grids or anywhere to like... Not that we know of, right? The problem is it all gets to this weirdness of like how...

How much evidence would be left from 10,000 years ago? How much evidence would be left from 20,000 years ago? How long did it take people to figure that out? Was it 2,000 or 3,000 years? Like, how much tinkering? Yeah. Like, what was it? I mean, there's all kinds of interesting questions you can ask about that kind of stuff, even in, like, deep time. So, you know, one of my colleagues...

Adam Frank had this paper on like the Silurian hypothesis, which is like the idea that there was like intelligent beings around the time of dinosaurs, like a dinosaur race. And like, how would you actually look in the geological record for it? And so like people can work out the mathematics of like, you know, what would be the traces of these,

You know, like if if the Egyptians had this capability or if, you know, there were intelligent species that emerged on the planet long before humans and had enough technology, say, to like have radioactive waste or anything like you can you can actually like bound, you know, like what would we actually see in the record? So it is possible still to constrain this stuff.

Even the most radical hypotheses. So, like, I've been raised in a tradition scientifically of, like, entertaining any idea as long as it's something that we can actually test and measure. Right. And so I guess for me, I think, you know, some of the most creative ideas in science are things that people completely didn't expect. Like what? Yeah.

Well, I mean, I think, I think Einstein's a great example. You know, like he was one of the few people that took seriously that the speed of light, you know, is constant. Like we take that for granted now, but everybody thought that was kind of ridiculous and the experiments must be wrong because there's no way that the speed of light could be constant. And he was like, no, the laws of nature are invariant. And this invariance also implies that the speed of light could be invariant because it's a law of nature. And

And then he was able to derive relativity from that. And that has all kinds of, you know, radical consequences about the way that we think about space and time. And, you know, the fact that time is, you know, like it's actually a relative concept. At least simultaneity is a relative concept. I think there's many concepts of time in physics, right?

But yeah, so I think that's one. But like quantum mechanics is another. Like if you actually look at the observational evidence and you try to build a theory from the observational evidence, you get to like really interesting spaces that are completely different than what you thought. And so it's easy to have theories and creative ideas. It's actually harder to go from the observational constraints and work into a theory that's consistent with all of those. And that's actually where most of our more radical ideas

and foundational shifts come from. And so that's why I'm actually particularly excited about what we're doing with assembly theory as an example, because like what we're trying to do there is say, if life is actually a real property of the physical world, like whatever we call life, it'll have to be redefined. Then we should be able to have

a measurable consequence and the way we talk about that is actually to measure this complexity of molecules assembly of molecules which you can go in the lab and measure with standard instrumentation like a mass spec and an NMR and infrared like you can measure this property of a molecule it's a real physical feature and then you can derive all kinds of weird shit from that and I think this has been the tradition of physics in general but science also more broadly that you know the reason that we get so convinced about things and they work is because we're working backward from what we observe and measure

And then we test it against what we can observe and measure. And the things that happen with reality are far stranger than the things that we can

He could dream up, which is why I love it. It's just crazy, like, the kind of ideas you get out of that process. Well, it's just the process that allows you and I to be staring at each other. First of all, the fact that we could see each other is crazy. Yes, yes. Right? That's pretty nuts. Evolution of eyes is amazing. Nuts. Nuts. Totally nuts. And then also, octopi have them, too. They just evolved on a completely different branch of the evolutionary tree. Totally crazy. But they all evolved eyes. Yeah. Like, it seems like a property that almost every animal has. Yeah. Yeah.

Seeing is pretty deep. I mean, I think, I don't know when the first photon receptors evolved in cells, but, you know, even cells have light sensing capability. So, I mean, that's how photosynthesis evolved also. But, yeah, but it's crazy. So, like, the idea of, you know, like, when life first emerged on the planet, nothing could see, but it evolved later. And...

it is something that is fairly consistent. And even if you think about our technology, so I always think about the progression of biology into technology. It is fascinating also that a lot of our technologies that allow us to understand the world are technologies of sight, like telescopes and microscopes. And, you know, like,

We think we knew life on this planet and then we invented the microscope and it's like, you know Just you don't need that much more resolution and you can suddenly see that this table is completely covered in cells for example That we didn't know were there right which is just mind-blowing and mind-blowing mind-blowing It's like we evolved from cells billions of years ago took us billions of years to build it like to evolve into an intelligence I could build the technology and then look and be like, oh

biology is made out of cells. And then if you think you understand any of it, the people that understand subatomic particles are like, hold my beer. Yeah. Because this whole thing's empty space. Yeah. And it's all operating in some bizarre quantum state where it's like both still and moving at the same time. Those wave functions. Yeah. What? I know. Like what is everything? Everything's weird. Every single thing. This is what got me into it though. Like that, that,

feeling. It's just like, I love that feeling. I love not understanding and thinking like we live in a really trippy reality and the fact that our minds are capable of understanding any of it to me is pretty profound. I feel like we're just emerging from it the same way the ability to

to see things was this emerging technology, this emerging ability that probably changed everything, right? The ability to actually like recognize distances and to see objects and recognize them. And that is this emergent phenomenon that we sort of take for granted because we have this,

But there could be other things like that that have not emerged yet. Yes. So much. Psychic phenomenon is one of the things that I connect with that. I don't believe in psychics like a person could read your tarot cards. But I do think there's some weirdness involved in human beings that you can't put on a scale. I think some people are really good at reading patterns in their environment.

I think there's that too. But there's also like phone rings and it was a person you were talking about that you haven't talked to in forever. And all of a sudden they feel you and they call you. There's something trippy to that. That may be not every time, not maybe repeatable, but occasionally you catch it. Occasionally there's this connection that seems to emerge. And I always wonder if that's an emergent form of a new ability that human beings will eventually possess. Yeah, I have...

Lots of thoughts, but I think the first one is I think we forget often that we are all connected by a common history. And so a lot of the features about like why is it that we can be sitting here having this conversation? You know, obviously we both have to speak the same language, but we also have to emerge from the same evolutionary architecture, have the same kinds of sensory apparatus to like to be able to communicate with each other implies shared history.

And so, you know, like I think about life as these kind of, you know, like these structures that are emerging over time and generating novel, you know, things. But like the whole temporal relation, this idea of like objects being in time means that they're connected through time. So, you know, like if you assume a living object actually has a time and size, it means that like every living object in this planet is not really a distinct object. They're all part of that same structure in time.

And I think this is really necessary for interpreting some of the things that you're talking about, because there is so much in our environment that is a part of that shared history that we're picking up on all the time that like we don't even recognize that is like cues for like us to to really like. And we miss it because we don't even recognize the history in our environment. And and so we think things are just happening spontaneously and like there's some magic behind it where really all it is is contingency and causation.

But I think the other thing that is interesting about what you're saying, which we already touched on a little bit, is these kind of stories that – there's ancient myths. I'm a huge Joseph Campbell fan and thinking about the history of mythology. But we've had these myths for centuries.

most of human history and there's been a lot of recurring motifs in them about, you know, telepathy, psychics, miracles, you know, all of these stories. And it's super interesting to see how some of them are becoming, you know, like embodied through our technology, like the things that we imagine, like we're making real. And that's the part that's interesting to me. And that's much more physical. Yeah. The things we're imagining, we're making real.

Yeah. So it's not impossible that people that are psychic at quote unquote could exist. But I think what will happen is the stories that we're telling become embodied in the observations that we're making and the things that we're actually like implementing in the world. But like, I don't know that historically, I would say, like, like, I don't believe in magic. I think magic is...

or I do believe in mystery, but I think when I, yeah. So when I say I don't believe in magic, it's not that I don't believe that people have personal knowledge or things, but I think what's more important is like when those things become shareable, they actually become things that we can use collectively. And I'm much more interested in that kind of knowledge. So I, it's not that I, I don't value mysticism or, or,

Or the kind of personal narratives that people have about experiences. I think those are incredibly valuable. And I think that we need those stories in our culture. It's just for me, I'm much more interested in like, when do we make those kinds of things regular, like regularized in the way that like we understand them as like really fundamental properties and we can use them and like we can share that information.

That's what I like about science because it's like, it's like shareable deep thoughts that are universally usable. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Universally usable is a great way to put it. I've often entertained the idea of, you know, I'm sure you're aware of the concept of the muse, right? Um, maybe, but it probably explain it anyway, just because it's one of the best representations of this gentleman named Steven Pressfield is a great author. He wrote a legend of bagger Vance and a bunch of other great movies and, and,

He wrote this book called The War of Art. And the book is essentially like a guidebook for creative types to avoid procrastination, resistance, and to develop a structure that allows you to sit down in your desk at a very specific time every day and summon the muse. And this idea has persisted throughout time that –

I mean, I'm sure you've had ideas that have come to you like, where does that even come from? Yes. What is that? I think everyone has. I love creativity for that reason because it's so mysterious even to the person having the creative act. Yes, yes. Which is just crazy. Yeah, I almost always think of my best ideas as not even really mine but like a gift to

Yes. I do too. And so this is the concept of the muse, that the muse, you summon the muse, you treat the muse with respect, you literally communicate with the muse, you put this intention out there, and if you do this every day, she will reward you and she will consistently bring you ideas. And if you are a person who can develop that kind of discipline to sit there and do that, you'll become productive through the muse.

Is the muse like a placeholder for your unconscious brain? Could be. Yeah, certainly. But if you treat it like it's a real thing, it behaves like a real thing. No, no, no. I mean, I think the unconscious is a real thing. The reason I'm bringing it up is so many people are really interested in consciousness and then really focused on that. But part of the reason where creativity comes from and part of this idea of using intuition to guide how you think about the world, I think is there's so much happening in your brain that you're just not even consciously aware of. Right.

And I think a lot of the information processing architecture and like where I've kind of resigned myself to like almost all of my thinking is my unconscious brain and I should just like leave it there. And if I get an idea emerging out of it, it seems like it came from nowhere. But it's just it's I'm just not consciously aware of all the processing in my brain. I also wonder if the term consciousness is connected far too much to language.

Yes. Because, right? I think, yes. We think of things that we can describe with language and processes that we examine with language, words that we attribute to specific objects and specific tasks and things that we do. And then there's this other thing that's going on. Maybe you feel bad about

Yeah.

So we have sounds that we make and these represent things and we all understand them. And so we use this as a way to express this thing that's going on with this thought process, the consciousness. We're attaching it to language. Yeah. No, I think most of us do because I think a lot of us construct words or visuals in our brains. But it's super interesting when you have people that don't do that. Like Lee Cronin that I work with a lot and he's the person I originally did Assembly Theory as a chemist.

Like he doesn't have any visuals in his brain or like language in his brain. And it's super interesting talking to him because he's like completely and utterly brilliant. But I think like his mental architecture is really different.

And I love working on deep foundational questions because I think when you talk about these deep ideas and you talk and maybe this is also why people like psychedelics, because if you're not if you're not like trained at the sort of frontier of like intellectual debate, you know, like where do you have these kind of experiences? But the kind of I'm talking about is like you have really thought about how reality works and like you have an architecture in your mind about what you think works.

is fundamental about the nature of reality because you're asking this particular scientific question. And I think some of my best discussions with some of my colleagues have been, you know, those kind of discussions and you really realize how people's brains are so different. Very, very different. So different. What is the estimation? There's some percentage of us that do not have an inner voice. Yeah, I think it's like 4%, but I don't know. I think it's higher than that. Is it? I think it's quite a bit higher. I thought it was like... I think it's in the 20s. Oh. What's that? It's higher than that.

I just made up a number. It's up to 60%, but I've tried to look into this many times. I don't understand anything. Well, I think it's hard to report, though, because people don't even know they don't have an inner voice. Or people don't know they do have an inner voice because you don't know what it's like to be in someone else's mind. So everybody just thinks their mind is normal. Right, right. So if you talk to a schizophrenic, you're like, what's going on in there? What is that?

Like, what's that misfiring? Well, this is one of the things I'm really excited about, like these these neural enhancement technologies, because I think I think we really underestimate the diversity of human minds.

Like it might be the most diverse things on this planet or actually just like what's going on in our heads. Most certainly. I mean, I know so many different unique people. I'm so lucky that I've met so many unique people from talking on this podcast. Yeah. And then just through walks of life. I know so many people who think so differently. Yeah. And I know great athletes and great scientists and great comedians and great musicians. And they're all

Yeah. They think different. They just have a different way. Like some people will look at a problem and go, why is that? What about this thing? Why doesn't that? And then I'm like, how the fuck did you even see that? Like, why did you look at it that way? Everyone has, I mean, it's based on your life experiences, your genetics, but there's also...

I think everyone's interface is different. I don't know even what you see. I assume. I know. This blows my mind. I think about this all the time. I'm like, I have no idea what it looks like to anybody else. Right. Well, it makes sense to me that it has to be different. Yeah. Because if it wasn't different, why would you like things I don't like? Everybody would like the same thing. Yeah. The way that things look. Or food tastes. Yeah. Like I have a...

two children that have totally different ability to absorb hot spicy food. Oh yeah. My kids are like that too. So my youngest is like me. My youngest, I mean, she might have a better version of it than me. Like that kid can eat anything. Yeah. Ghost peppers. Like she likes it hot. Oh,

And she loves like really hot. She's a little kid like Reapers. Like I get this hot sauce called Senor Lechuga. It's really good stuff. It's organic and like really strong, hot. Like if you like it really spicy. And I told him like, this is pretty spicy. Kid dips her finger in it.

sucks on it. She's like, it's not that spicy. I'm like, it's pretty damn spicy. Like you freak. What the hell's wrong with you? Wow. It's kind of incredible. And then the other one, like a little bit of a jalapeno and she's hiccuping and coughing. Like she can't take it at all. It's bizarre. Yeah. Cause they both came from the same parents. Right. But, but,

So obviously things taste different to them. Yeah, totally different. So whatever that is. Yeah. Where like some people love the taste of hot dogs. Some people think they're disgusting and, you know, and they like whatever broccoli, whatever it is. Like, why? What is it? What are you experiencing when you're eating this? I don't know. What are you experiencing when you're seeing it? I'm just guessing that you're seeing what I see.

Yeah. It's a total guess. Yeah. And it's probably a bad guess as you're pointing out, right? Probably. Yeah. I mean, it has to have some, there has to be a bunch of other factors that we're not taking into consideration that are going on internally. Yeah. They're allowing this person to process this in a pleasing or an unpleasing manner. Yeah. Like what is going on? And then the actual structure of the eye.

Right? We know some people's eyes aren't that good. Like, why is that? Yeah. Like, what's going on in there? Like, it stops working so good, and so you see things blurry and like... Or colorblind is also interesting. Crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Totally crazy. The world could all be colorblind. Yeah. We'd be lost. The idea that we're in this spectrum of how light interacts with objects. Right.

incredible variety of different shades of things. Yeah. And like people that have a major shift in that, like I read this Oliver Sacks story once about this person got hit in the head and then they could only see the world in black and white and like how existential that experience was transitioning. Cause like, that's really depressing. Like you see a world of color, then everything's black and white. It's like you're living in a movie or something. But like the story was about how they were an artist and like they came to understand the world quite differently and you can see a lot more shadow and light and

Like you start paying attention to different detail. But I mean, it's just mind blowing that that can happen. It's like the same brain. Yeah, same brain. And then you have to completely readjust your experience to reality because now you see the world differently. I have a friend who got a concussion. He lost a sense of smell. Oh, really? Yeah, for years. That's probably pretty traumatic. Well, a lot of people got it during COVID as well, right? Yeah, that's right. But he got it through a concussion way back.

like at least 15 years ago and lost his sense of smell. Yeah. That's crazy. I, yeah, I like to, you know, when I started thinking about how people think differently, I was like, I think I was listening to a podcast running one day and it's like, you know, like imagine an apple and now taste the apple. And I was like, I can imagine an apple. I can see an apple in my brain and I can bite in the apple, but I cannot taste it. I cannot imagine tasting food.

And this was really perplexing to me because like I never thought about the fact that like inside my head I don't have taste. I only have taste when I'm eating food. I can definitely taste things. But it just – it's like –

you know, like it's a, like a weird thing about my brain, but like, I don't know how common that is, but I think like everybody has things like that. And if they, if like we just do, you know, experiments with our own minds, it's kind of interesting to probe the boundary of like things you take for granted that you think you can do or you can visualize and you just can't, it's just not in your head. Well, the sense of smell we take for granted because everybody has it. And obviously there's an evolutionary advantage in terms of food being rotten, there's a bunch of different factors, gases that are poisonous, but,

But it's invisible. Yeah. Do you know if your friend could still imagine smell or did they lose the ability to even like recall what smells like? I haven't talked to him in years. I'd have to reach out. I don't even know if he got his smell back. Yeah. I'd just be kidding. He's a guy who used to fight in the UFC. Oh, I see. And he got knocked out once and lost his sense of smell. Wow. Crazy. Crazy. Not good. Totally crazy. Yeah, no, that's not good. Not good. But the idea is that sense of smell, we all just take for granted. We have it. Oh, my God, you smell that apple pie. Yeah.

oh, it's coming, it's coming. Ooh, this is so exciting. You know, you smell it when you walk in the house, someone's cooking bacon. We take that for granted. But that is an invisible thing. And who knows how many other things there are like that that we don't have. Like, we don't have the ability to detect neutrinos. You know, imagine if we could feel all the neutrinos passing through us at any given moment. I'm trying to visualize it as you're saying that. I'm like, there's just like thousands.

I mean, they're literally going through the entire earth. They're flying through the earth right now. But we don't have the ability to detect that. But why not? Right? I mean, that's a thing that's real that we don't have the tools for. But we do have the tools for smell. So we have the tools to detect gases. But we don't have the tools to detect other things that we know are real. Right. Well, our sensory perception that evolved biologically only took us so far. But obviously, we're sitting here talking about neutrinos because we have built technologies

technologies that can detect their existence and validate that they're there. And then we have theories that would be consistent with what you're just saying. So the ways that we see the world, I guess my point is, are not just the biological ones, but they're becoming enhanced by technology in all sorts of ways. And theories and explanations are part of that technological infrastructure, which is why we can talk about

that. Or gravitational waves, for example, is another one. Yes. Going through us right now, too. Right. We can't detect them. We can feel the effects of gravity itself. Yeah. You know, but we also know that that's entirely based on mass, right? So we also know that gravity, like the more weight you have on you, the harder it is for you to get around because you're being pulled. Yeah, that's right. Which is bizarre. Yeah. And you can use that to your advantage by rucking. You know, you can get in better shape by putting a heavy backpack on and going up a hill. Yeah.

Yeah. So you change your physical structure by adding weight. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what weightlifting is too, right? You're changing your physical structure and your ability to move through space and time by resisting constantly. So developing these biological tools to get past gravity. Well, I think it's amazing how much of like...

the physical world you can get a sense of by simple things like that. Yeah. Like we really do live in a physical reality. Like I know some people want to think we live in a simulation, but like there's a real physical world. And I think we only kind of misconceive of it as a simulation because like so much of our environment now is architected by human minds that it seems not real, but it is real. So you don't subscribe to the possibility of simulation theater? No, I find it inadequate. Yeah.

It doesn't seem like it's a better explanation than any other current explanation for how the universe works. So I put the simulation argument, intelligent design, and even sort of the current laws of physics on kind of equal footing as far as their ability to explain physics.

why the universe exists the way it does because what all three theories do is they basically push explanation to the boundary. And in physics we do that by saying there was an initial state of the universe that was low entropy and the laws of physics have described what it's done ever since but you can't explain where the universe came from.

And in intelligent design, it's like the universe is designed by some being, but where did that thing come from? And in the simulation argument, it's just the great programmer in the sky made us. And I think the nuance there is if any entities like us could evolve that could build simulations, then it's far more likely that we live in a simulation. But I think you still have to assume a physical reality situation.

that evolves the capability of building simulations. Yes. So it seems all very circular to me. Yes. Yeah, I completely agree. And not explanatory. Yeah, I just don't understand why people are so confident in stating that, like Elon said, the chances of it not being a simulation are in the billions. Yeah. It's like one in billions that we are not in a simulation. But he's also crazy. Yeah.

Well, I think it's easy to throw numbers out there, though, and not have them be founded in anything. There has to have been a thing before the simulation existed in order for that thing to create the simulation, for the simulation to emerge. It's super interesting also to me that a lot of the people that are proponents of the simulation argument tend to be in the tech world. And so I think it's in their favor to think that it's great to think that

are like gods and like, you know, like, and to build this kind of mysticism around these technologies. But like, if you really want an explanation for what simulations are, there has to be a continuity between the physical world and the simulation. Hmm.

And they like you have to be able to explain how it is that computation emerged on a planet and simulations became possible on our planet. And like they they emerged out of something. Right. So I think I'm much more interested in like what is the what is the unification of the virtual and the physical and like how can you think about them as simulations?

Similar kinds of systems than to just say the universe is a simulation therefore I solved how why the universe exists right doesn't get you anywhere It doesn't and also well I always think about the universe itself We always want to look at a birth of a universe in the end of the universe and I always say I wonder if we do that because of our own biological limitations if we Think that a thing had to emerge because we emerged like but why does it have to have emerged and

Yeah. If it exists. Right. Why didn't it always exist? Yeah. But then that's a huge problem. Yeah, you can't have everything exist forever is part of the problem. But what could possibly exist to make everything exist? Yeah. Which is the other one. Yeah, the prime mover. Yeah.

Well, not only that, but the craziest theory of all is the primary theory of the creation of the universe itself, which is the Big Bang Theory, which is the absolute nuttiest theory that's ever existed. Everything that exists came out of something so small, was smaller than the head of a pin, and then in one massive moment, it creates the universe itself. And that's one that universally is agreed upon. Yeah, I know. I agree. And there seems to be a signature of it, so you can study it. Yeah, there's no problem with crazy ideas, by the way. I love crazy ideas. They're the craziest. Yeah.

But that's the craziest, right? Yeah, yeah. But even going back to the simulation, I'd like... But yeah, the Big Bang is... I mean, but I think, you know, when you're trying to understand how reality works, it should surprise you. And it should have counterintuitive properties. I mean, I think that's how we really know we're learning things. So... And I don't... And I'm also of the perspective that I think any theory can be replaced by a better one. Any explanation is not an ultimate explanation. So we're constantly learning more and we're constantly refining our ideas. So...

Is that a problem in science in that when people have espoused a very particular idea of how the world works, they have a hard time backing off of that? I think collectively, yes. I think scientists have a hard time doing that. And so, you know, I confront this a lot in my work because the kind of ideas we're proposing are new and new.

They say very different things than sort of the standard canon would say or like we make – like we're seeing structure that isn't part of the way that people talk scientifically about the nature of life or like its fundamental properties. And what I see is a lot of resistance to new ideas because people think things are already explained.

And so this is really funny for me, the original life. It's like, we already have an evolutionary theory. The original life is solved. And it's like, have you been to a meeting on the original life? It's like, that problem is not solved. I'm sorry. But so...

people think it is they just think like it's easy it's been done you'll get like really prominent um you know physicists too being like oh you get the first replicator on on the planet and then you get life and the real hard problems are like you know the long-term future of the universe and things and i think i think we're just we're reasoning based on assuming absolute knowledge sometimes when we don't have absolute knowledge do you think that some of that what

Some of that sort of trying to define things in a definite way that we do know it, we understand it, is in response to some religious ideas about the creation of life and that they propose that these scientific riddles have been solved. Because if you leave them open, that kind of opens the door to the possibility of a creator or of intelligent design. And they want to kind of rush to say, no, we figured it out. Yeah.

That's what I've been told by like, I mean, because we have a lot of, you know, there have been a lot of reactions to the work that we've been doing, both positive and like, you know, interacting with people's dogmas in certain ways. So they're like very reactionary. And then some people that are much more thoughtful and critical and then some people that are very not thoughtful, but very critical.

And so you get like the whole spectrum. And I guess if you do any kind of high profile science, you're going to get everything thrown at you. And part of the reason that I want the ideas out there is because I want that critical feedback. So that's fine. If it's, you know, intelligent feedback, that's amazing. But I think the thing that I've noticed is, yeah,

is that the way that different communities interact with the ideas are totally different. So it's like, you know, the evolutionary biologists, you know, where some of them, not all of them, you can't make blatant statements about any group, you know, really don't understand what we're trying to do. And then, but the creationists don't either, and they don't want it either. So it's like, you're in this weird space and they're dueling with each other because they think they have totally different explanations for things. So, um,

But yeah, I have been told that that field is particularly protective of its ideas because it's had to

with intelligent design for so many decades and really stand its ground. And original life is like a really separate community from biology writ large. I mean, I was even told early in my career when I was a postdoc by a very prominent biologist that I shouldn't work on origins of life. I want to understand what life is. I should just pick a standard biology problem. And I thought to myself, like, the one problem you want to pick is the one everyone can't answer because that's where you have the most progress right now.

Yeah. So it's just very funny to me that it's often it's swept under the rug as solved or too hard to solve both simultaneously at the same time. It sounds insane to me that someone would tell you not to look into the origin of life. Yeah. Because the idea that we have figured everything out about even if we understand the processes involved, right? How often does this take place in the universe? Like what is this? Are there other ways to do it? Yeah. It's fast.

I mean, we don't have an idea what an alien is, right? Like, I mean, just that should slap you in the face. Like the multitude of ways we talk about alien, we don't even like, we don't know what we mean when we say that. It brings me back to this concept of the muse. So my thought,

I had this bizarre thought once that ideas are life forms. Oh, sure. I totally agree with that. Really? Yeah. So my thought is every physical object that human beings have ever created came out of an idea. Yes. So idea gets into primate brain. Primate brain goes, oh, I think I can make a canoe.

And then primate brain figures out a way to hollow out a tree and turn it into a canoe. And then primate brain says, you know what? When I let go of this stick, if I pull it back, it goes forward. Right. If I let go of it and it springs. What if I could tie a string? And what if I could pull it further? And what if I get a stick? I think I can get that stick to fly further.

And then it becomes a bow and arrow. Yeah. And so the human mind interacts with these ideas. The ideas manifest themselves in physical objects. Yes. And every physical object, including airplanes, spaceships, space stations, satellites, all of them come from ideas. I know. And then these ideas, much like human beings, interact with other human beings. These ideas interact with other ideas.

And they create more and more complex versions. Then you get quantum computing. It's not like one person's idea. No, these are things that happen over centuries. No, I totally agree with this. I actually make similar arguments in my book about rockets as a good example of this. They were imagined long before they became actual physical objects. Another Chinese invention, by the way. Yeah, the Chinese were onto lots of stuff. Everything. Paper, alcohol, everything. Mechanical clock, everything. Yeah.

Yeah. So I think, yeah, I think this gets to the idea of like living objects being deep in time because you like and this and I also think a lot about the nature of like abstract things versus physical things. So I think everything is physical. And when we think of ideas as being abstract, it's just because, you know, like they're not physical objects yet in the same way that we see objects.

these kind of physical objects. But they come to our mind in some weird way that doesn't seem like you... Look, if I dig a hole, I know I dug that hole. I know I stuck that shovel, I exerted effort, I put force, I lifted the dirt out, I made the hole. So if someone says, where'd that hole come from? I go, oh, I dug the hole. Simple. But if someone says, where'd you get the idea for a joke?

I'll go, oh, I don't know. It came to me one day. I was just laughing with my friends and a thought popped in. It wasn't a calculated thing where I worked on it forever and ever. It's just it got entered into my mind out of nowhere. And then it came out my mouth and everybody laughed and I'm not sure where it came from.

That's weird. It is totally weird. It's weird. Now imagine that someone figuring out an airplane, like some Wilbur and Orville writer. Well, people did, but you're right. It's also distributed over many human minds. So it's not like a single mind architecture. It's like the interaction of many minds and the physical world that generates these things. But I think- But that force of whatever the idea is. I think it's time. It's time. Time. Literally. Yeah. So in assembly theory, we think

Time is fundamental, but you might think of time as in terms of causation. And things like you that are, you know, take billions of years to for the universe to generate have a lot of time embedded in you. And time is actually the creative mechanism that's expanding the space of possibilities and maybe the universe itself. But but that that's how I think about it. So you actually have an incredible amount of time and a small volume of space.

That's what you are as an evolved object. At least that's sort of the current, my current thinking with this theory that we're developing and how we're trying to test the transition to life. And so where are those things coming from? They're coming from the fact that you are an architecture that's deep in time and you have all of this internal space in you that's,

temporal in size, not spatial in size that you can draw from to create things. And if you are reading people's work and interacting with people's research and you're learning things that people have discovered, you're essentially interacting with their time. Yes. You're looking at all their traces of time and you're doing it over time and that's becoming part of your architecture.

Yeah. And time and all of that structure is still in you. And the more time you spend on it, the more you'll absorb that. Yeah. You'll absorb more and more and more of it. Yeah. And the more people's thoughts and more people's work you take in, you're taking all of their time. Yes. And you're putting it all into your head. We're just like bundles. I think about time and information kind of being the same thing, but we're just all of that.

that causation bundled up in like these small, we, we look small, but we're not small. Yeah. So sometimes I, you know, I have this visualization of earth as like the largest thing in the universe that we know of, which is in terms of possibility space or how much time is embedded in the current structure of the earth. So if you could like, if you could do a zoom out of like the entire universe, uh, you know, and you could look at like space, you know, assuming there's no aliens out there and you look at earth, you know, like earth is giant as far as like

the amount of stuff that can be made here and how much history is embodied in every object. It's like, it's just this huge causal structure in this, like, and I think, I think we're representations of that physics. And that's one of the reasons that we have this kind of perplexing feature of like, these things seem abstract. Well, they're not, they're not abstract. Like they don't, they don't look like they're in physical space, like knock on wood on the table, but the table is like an object that has like 4 billion years of history in it. So it's like the physicality of the table is mostly in time, not space.

And that's true, I think, for us as living things. It makes sense. And it also, if you could go to the original collision of Earth 1...

Yeah. When Earth 1 creates the moon. And just imagine being able to. It's so fabulous we have a giant moon. So crazy. Like, so crazy. It's the only thing that keeps our atmosphere stable. That's the only reason why we're here. Yeah. In this form. Yeah, exactly. With the stable temperatures. Such a chance event. And it's so big. Yeah. It's one quarter the size of us. I know. It's nuts. And it looks nice on watches. It's beautiful. Yeah. And it's floating in the sky and it makes a, you know, a summer night look incredible. Look at the moon.

I know. And we get eclipses. Yeah. So much of human history is dictated by the moon. It's amazing. Anyway, sorry. It is. No, it's incredible. But that this whole thing, if you could watch it take place, I wonder if... I've often thought, like, there's so many mysteries of history, but I've almost wondered that if...

get to a point, if computers get to a point where they could examine all of the objects in all the places that they are currently in the world and all the force that would cause them to exist and all the history that caused them to exist, you could accurately go back and see exactly what happened every step of the way. Yeah.

I think it might be possible. It's an interesting kind of thought experiment about whether the universe is deterministic and fully predictable. And I think in the past, one of the reasons that we think the laws of physics are deterministic is because in the past you can determine things, but I think the future is undetermined until it happens. Probably. Probably.

Yeah. So it might be possible, but I don't know how much you can reconstruct because things die out like extinction of entire lines of life or like things disappear, like they don't exist anymore. And so I think that you can reconstruct the past, but I don't believe personally in an exact history for the universe.

Well, if we can reconstruct the past based on our current understanding, which is fairly limited and much greater than it used to be three or four hundred years ago, if we could expand that knowledge for the next thousand, five hundred thousand years ago, whatever it is from now into the future, to develop some sort of a computation system, some sort of an ability to have an accurate assessment of everything that took place and then be able to lay it out how it took place. Because

of all the objects and all the places and all the species that died off and all the records when they do core samples and they understand the iridium content, which meant asteroids impacted here and carbon, which is some sort of a fire here. And it just calculated out where you can get some accurate...

Like in principle, it makes sense. But I think in practice, I'm not even sure that's physically possible because as you're like trying to compute everything that the universe has done, you also have to like make sure that that physical thing actually can calculate itself and continue to exist in the future. So if you're like – it's not – it's an interesting thought experiment about like how much of the universe can be computed. But you have to deal with resource bounds, right?

And so, like, you have to deal with an actual physical implementation of that computer, and that computer has to be able to persist long enough to do the calculations and have enough energy to do it, which means there has to be things external to the computer. So you can't use all the resources available just for the computer. Like the compute, you actually have to keep the whole thing running. Right. So I don't think that you actually can know the past with computers.

I was going to say infinite resolution, but I don't believe in infinities anyway, but like really precise resolution that you could reconstruct everything that has happened in the history of the universe. I think our universe forgets things, and I think it does so on purpose because that's part of the... Not purpose, but like not in an anthropocentric way, but it does so because...

The act of forgetting things is actually in part how the universe generates novelty. If it remembered everything in the past and only those things persisted, like we live in an incredibly boring universe. We live in a universe that's constantly creating things. And sometimes it, you know, like some of those things can't be generated anymore, but it makes more space for other things to be created. You don't believe in infinity? I don't. Interesting. I mean, as a mathematical construct, sure. But as a real physical thing, no.

But I have a really different view of mathematics than most people. Like I think mathematics is a physical system that exists on our planet. And I don't believe in like a Euclidean world that's like a perfect mathematical forms. I think they're a thing that our biosphere has invented. And one of the reasons that we think mathematics is universal is because it's a language that we understand that actually, you know, like is information that's embedded in pretty much every object in our environment. But it doesn't mean that it's like it has universal reach.

Yeah. There's some problems with mathematics too, right? Eric Weinstein is a mathematician. Yeah. I know Eric. He's kind of explaining the number two. Yeah. There's a bunch of different things that are...

bizarre with math. So it almost hints to an incomplete understanding of mathematics, even as we currently know it. Right. Well, there's always that. I mean, you know, it always perplexes me that, you know, people accepted Euclidean geometry as the only form of geometry for like 2000 years. I mean, it's like, like literally like that was it. And then we were like, oh, well, there could be non-Euclidean geometries. And we just never imagined them because like they don't reflect our physical environment. I mean, that's crazy. So that's like,

That's saying that there's mathematics we don't understand. But then there's a question about whether there's a deeper structure that's not even mathematical that math might be derived from. Like, is there a language deeper than math? What could that be? Don't know.

Have you thought about it? I have. I think about it a lot. What are your theories? I'm sure you do. Well, I mean- Kind of a rhetorical question. Yeah, no, it's okay. Well, I worry about this a lot with the nature of the relationship between the theory of computation and assembly theory, for example. So computation is a way that we kind of understand the formalization of mathematical things that we actually can algorithmically do, right? So anything that you can calculate, you can compute. Yeah.

And so there are obviously like uncomputable numbers and things like that, but they live in some abstract, you know, like. But anyway, so assembly theory has some features that look like theories of complexity and computation in that, you know, like people talk about a minimal complexity for a computer program as being the way that you talk about complexity. And we talk about a minimal causal history to construct an object, right?

But I think what assembly theory is that is a bit different and super interesting is it's NP, like it's actually hard to compute the assembly index. It's harder than classes of computational algorithms that are kind of similar to it. But the universe generates these molecules that are computationally incredibly complex, but causally the universe can generate them.

And so like you couldn't compute necessarily like on a supercomputer like, you know, the complexity of a cell. Like you're saying, like, could I reconstruct the whole history? Yet the universe can generate that structure. So it suggests to me that there's something else going on in the space is actually a lot larger than what you can computationally compress. So what else could be going on? I think that.

I the best language I have for it right now, and I really don't know, like I'm really struggling with this in my work right now. And Lee and I are going back and forth about these things all the time. But is causation. And also that the the other part about like why the universe is maybe not computable is this mechanism of novelty generation. Like there are there are some things.

If the universe genuinely creates novelty that can't be predicted on prior history and like the future really is not determined, that's just suggesting something fundamentally different than the way that we understand the way the world works right now.

And I don't know what it is, but I think it has to do with something with causation and something about the physicality of objects. Like objects really do exist. They really do encode their histories. And those histories are interacting all the time, which is making everything much more complicated. Like that idea of these time threads interacting that you were talking about. And then there's the fundamental question of why. Yes.

I think, I mean, when I think about like what life is, like why does life exist? I think the universe is trying to maximize the number of things that exist. Because if you think like things exist or they don't, and you know, like the universe is the constructor for things to get to exist. Like it's building all of existence is, you know, like what physically exists in our universe. You know, wouldn't it be great if like there was a principle of nature or it's just trying to pack as much existence in as possible. Well, it makes sense also if,

physical things these human beings create and life creates physical things that would be the best way to maximize it because this being which is also why I think we have free will because if we act independently we're actually more creative than if we didn't do you ever butt heads with determinism people? I butt heads with everyone nothing wrong with that that's what it's all about right? I fundamentally love disagreeing with smart people

And so I think and I try to surround myself with colleagues that share that mentality. So I think the best mentality. Yeah. And I think being around people that challenge you is so critical. And like you disagree with them on fundamental things like that's OK. Like I you know, I like some of my closest friends boil my blood on some things. But like but like you have to respect that they're thinking smart people and like.

I always put myself in their head. I think we have a huge problem as human beings. We attach ideas to ourself. And so we defend these ideas as if we're defending our very existence. Yes, yes, I know. I think we do have a tendency to do that. I've developed that through having so many conversations with people that I don't see eye to eye with on the podcast. Instead of arguing with them, I try to ask them how they think.

Why they think the way they think. Yes. What is it? Challenge a little bit just to try to get a response out of them. Yeah. Try to figure out like what is your process and why is it so different than mine? Well, that's good for you too because you grow more and you understand more by doing that. Of doing this thing over the last 15 years has been like the most radical unexpected education that I could have ever had. That's amazing. I'm a different human. Yeah. Like completely different human than I was. Right. 15 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. I think.

I think that is something that's really hard is like, if you close yourself to ideas that you don't agree with, you're closing off your, like yourself to potential to grow. Yes. Um, and understand the world better. And I think unquestionably, yeah, unquestionably. And these ideas that the problem when we start defending them is like,

then we stop looking at them. We start, we start like, like we put them as like a protected thing that we're trying to argue against. And we're trying to, instead of invite criticism and some sort of an analysis of our thought process, we try to defend it. No. So I'm, I'm happy like professionally also to change my mind all the time. So I like, I was a determinist. I'm not a determinist anymore right now. I'm a presentist. When did that change? Um, I think that probably changed in the last few years. Um,

And it's mostly because of the structure of what I understand of like what we're doing with assembly theory. So like assembly theory is like still very much in development and we're still really trying to work on the ideas. But I always had these ideas about the original life having something to do with information playing a

causal role in the structure of reality and information is like an abstract thing. Like how can you think mathematical structures can influence physical world? But like you just gave great examples of things that were once ideas that became physical. And I think about like Newton's law of gravitation is a law of nature. It describes something about the objective world, but the law itself is also an object that exists in our biosphere that's generating structure, like allowing us to launch satellites into space that wouldn't be possible without that

mathematical form existing on our planet as a description of reality, right? So that's an object. And so these kind of things were always really perplexing to me. And so, you know, I started working with Lee on assembly theory and like Lee's very radical and very thought provoking and always pushing. And, you know, he was really on this idea of the universe not being deterministic and getting larger in time. And like part of that was not like it was like

He's like, I'm a chemist. I burn shit. I see this in the lab. The second law is not the right description of what's going on here. But there is some underlying undeterminism and novelty mechanism in chemistry that life seems to be really manifesting. So what is free will then? For me, so what happened was when I started working on assembly theory, I started to see that there was a really different structure, especially associated with

the way information gets embodied in physical objects and the history being physical in the objects. And free will becomes this idea that like, you know, you can't, you actually can't, you know, in standard physics, you would say like an emergent thing like us can be reduced to our atoms and all of the fundamental description is down there. But what you've done is stripped that physical system of all the time inside of it. Right?

Right. So elementary particles, they don't require memory for the universe to generate them. They just they're spontaneous. The universe has them for free. But things like us require memory and things that know how to build things like us in order for us to exist. And then once we exist, we're encoding all of that history and information in us as objects. All of that causation is in us, which means that all of the selection over all the histories to generate us is still part of us and allows us.

to actually work in this combinatorial space that we can actually generate new structures. And that is actually where free will comes from. It's not that... It's basically if you assume you can't reduce things to elementary particles all the time and you actually have time and objects, things become causal agents, actually have some navigability over the combinatorial space of the possibilities they live in that they have some control over.

And that's what I think free will is. You don't have control over everything. So it's not like free will is not all free or all determinism. And I think Dan Dennett was really brilliant on this point. Like he talked about free will inflation, which I thought was a historic, a hysterical concept. It's like really funny. But it's like either people think the universe is random and you absolutely have free will and control over everything. I think it's fully deterministic and you have no freedom. But actually what it is is determinism is built over lineages because things get selected to exist and they become part of the right.

regular structure of our universe. So determinism itself is an emergent property and things that are very deterministic like us actually have more causal control over the kind of things that can happen to them, but they can't control everything. So we have limited free will. Like I couldn't be home in Arizona this exact second, but I can be there later today because I planned ahead for it. Like that's where your free will executes over time. So this concept of determinism is just too, it's too simplistic. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, to think that the universe is all like one human concept anyway is too simplistic. It's like it's deterministic or it's not deterministic. Actually, you know, there are cases where you can model it as being deterministic because you're looking at the past and there are places you cannot model it as being deterministic because you're looking at the future. Right.

And I think that's a pretty simple concept and very evident when you're looking at living things. Like no one can predict the future technologies like are the future of the biosphere. Right. Some of the information's there. Like we were talking about before, like maids will probably still be present 50 years from now. So like I might be able to predict some things about the future, but the novelty is really hard. The problem I've always had with determinism is that people seem too sure of it.

Yes. The people that espouse it, they seem very sure of it. And I think how can you be sure when you know for a fact in your own mind you make decisions?

Yeah. And you think that these decisions are made entirely based on your life experiences, your education, your biology, yada, yada, yada. But maybe not. Maybe not. Because there's things going on that are weird. There's moments. There's inspiration. There's a lot of stuff happening. Intuition is a big one for me. I always find that very mysterious. Yes. Like I live my whole life on instincts. Yeah. Like I do things that a lot of people go, why are you doing that? I'm like...

I feel like that's what I should do. I feel like that's what I should do. Like it feels like a thing to do. And that is, that seems to be for lack of a better term, free will, you know, discipline itself for lack of a term, better term is free will. Yeah. Like what, what is it about the idea of being rewarded by doing something difficult that you don't want to do, but you force yourself to do it. If that is not free will, what is?

Yeah. It seems like nothing can make you get up and go for a run if you don't want to go for a run. But you decide to do it, which is the embodiment of free will. Right. That is free will manifested in a physical action. I 100% agree. Yeah. I think the issue about why people, you know, like really want to say free will doesn't exist is because it's not compatible with standard like values.

theories in physics and therefore, you know, we know how our universe works. You can't have free will. But our standard theories in physics can't explain life. They can't explain mind. And free will lives in the space of whatever physics describes life and mind. It doesn't live in the physics of gravitation or the physics of quantum particles.

Right.

the history of physics. It's like every century they think the last century did it. Like we understand reality now. It's like every century has a new description. I like I will never forget like I like bouncing between my classes as an undergrad physics student and how many times I was told like I you know it's like it's really comical at the end of the 1800s that they thought physics was complete and like then there was general relativity and quantum mechanics. This is so funny but it's like I go in a physics department and we're talking about this and I'm like we don't need new physics for life like

physics is already done. Like we have the standard model. And I'm just like, are you not like understanding the dichotomy here between what we teach like students and like how we talk about where we are now in history? It's like crazy. Yeah. Totally crazy. It is crazy that we repeat these problems, repeat these issues over and over and over again. And we go, oh, back then they were stupid. Like, don't you think in the future, if you could just look at the history of human beings, what they believed.

And don't you think there's got to be some stuff like that right now? Yeah. There has to be. There has to be. There's no way we figured it out. No. No, I definitely think fundamental physics has a very bright future of, like, having some really fundamentally, like, earth-shattering, like, ways of thinking about things that I don't even think, like, our current theories are, like, that. Like, they're...

they're going to be replaced by things even more awesome. And I'm really excited about that. I mean, that's like why you want to do like physics, right? Like you don't want to work on the theories of like, you know, the guys that were around a hundred years ago. Like, why don't you work on the new ideas that describe the reality is like, you're coming to understand it now in history. Yeah. So it's, it's funny that people want to just accept what previous generations taught them is like absolute fact and then not be confronted with like the changing times, the changing understanding of the world around us, the changing sets of observations, right?

Because I can imagine, you know, many thousands of years ago when humans were, you know, still like, you know, being hunter gatherers, not really thinking we have a lot of causal agency in the world. Like you see the seasons, you have no control over them. And like, you know, and so obviously like we're born out of this idea that the universe is objective and existing outside of us because of a deep history of not having control. But like now...

Now in a modern technological society, we see how much of reality we've shaped and changed. Like, I don't know how you could hold that view anymore.

Like it's very deep in our history that like we think these things. But like the evidence around us right now is completely to the contrary. And this also seems like an emergent property of human beings. Yes. Humans in particular. I think animals do it to an extent. But I think our ability to abstract and our ability to build technologies based on our abstractions and like what we're doing now is fundamentally different than anything that our biosphere has done over the last four billion years. I think we're pretty special and I have no problem saying that. Like I think we're the most interesting thing in the universe. Right.

Yeah, I think so. Well, the known universe. Known universe, yeah. I think it's quite possible there's something else out there that's a little bit more interesting than us. Yeah, I'm sure there is, but I don't think that we're ever going to recognize what that thing is until we actually really appreciate what we are. Interesting. You glossed over this, but I want to get back to it. Sure. Why don't you believe in infinity? Oh, so I just, I think it's not possible for, like,

Like, I guess people want to say the universe is infinite in size, and I don't know what that means. I think it just is a placeholder of, like, we don't understand. So infinity helps in, like, certain theories of physics, like, to actually make your mathematics tractable. But to say it's actually, like, a physical thing to me is...

It doesn't make any sense. And it doesn't make any sense because I think if you assume, you know, like there's an infinity of things that could exist and that infinity of things exists somewhere. Right. Like so you have like, you know, max tag marks, mathematical universe hypothesis, all mathematical objects exist somewhere. And obviously there's like an infinite number of them. It doesn't actually explain anything about here. Right.

Or like, why do we have the things that we have in this universe? And I think it's – I think what infinity is, is it's a feature of humans' imagination to define the space of what's possible. And it physically exists as the boundary of that space. But it doesn't physically exist out there as a real physical thing. Like there is no infinite space. There is no infinite possibilities of a multiverse. Those are –

abstractions that exist in human minds that allow us to think about how the world works and reason in what we can actually construct here as far as theories we understand or things we can build.

But the concept of infinity, if there is no, if the universe is not infinite, then the universe has a defined boundary. So what's beyond that boundary? I don't know. That's weird, right? Yes. Yes. It seems like maybe that's what infinity is. Yeah. Yeah. So I think we could be saying the same. Like, I think, I think about it sort of like.

there's a boundary that is like the physical size of the universe and the physical stuff in the universe. And then there's another boundary, which is part of that physical boundary, but it's like the things that we can imagine and the things we can imagine at least can possibly be physically real. And then there's another boundary we can't even imagine. I don't even know if there's stuff out there that's like beyond that. And like you,

You can't even talk about it because you can't even imagine what it is. Right. One of the most perplexing theories that I've ever heard was the concept of the... In the center of every galaxy, there's a supermassive black hole. And that going through that supermassive black hole, you will go into another universe. Yeah. Yeah, these are kind of interesting and fun. Fun. Yeah. But like...

Very fun. What are you saying? Yeah, no, I mean, well, there's a lot of theories about like the multiverse and I think they're intellectually interesting and they bring interesting philosophy into physics, but I don't know that I can assign physical realism to anything that we can't observe directly.

And I would rather take the mathematics and like and the theories of physics themselves. Like I do these thought experiments about like the theoretical physics of theoretical physicists. It's like if I were outside of myself and I was watching what I was as a theoretical physicist writing down equations and like trying to describe the world, what would those mathematical objects look like as physical things? And so this to me is the perspective that I find much more productive because I don't think people have looked at that way.

through that lens at what mathematics is. Like we tend to take the Euclidean, you know, and like the, you know, Plato's cave type paradigm from the ancient Greeks that like there's a perfect world of forms and like, you know, we're just seeing the shadows of like this perfect reality. And I think the universe is constructing itself and mathematics is a particular thing our universe has constructed that enables things to be possible that wouldn't be possible without mathematics existing.

The people that are proponents of this concept of infinity and that do believe in it, when you steel man that, what's the best argument for it? Well, I think the idea, it's kind of like what you're saying. Like if you take the limit, like there, you know, it actually is consistent with our equations to assume that, you know, like the universe could be infinite or the time in the future could be infinite. And to them, I think it seems like it has some physicality to it.

But I don't – but I always – it always seems to me to be a placeholder of like the boundary. And so – but also like it depends on what you think is satisfactory. So if you want to believe a multiverse hypothesis and there's sort of an infinite number of realities because you find that more like explanatory to assume that everything exists and therefore like we're just one thing in that space. Yeah.

You know, some people find that satisfactory. I don't find that satisfactory because it doesn't explain why we exist. And I and I I just I want to explain us. I want to know what we are. Yeah, but it's it's hard set of questions around infinity and mathematics just generally.

And I find it really fun to think about. The multiverse to me is the most bizarre mind experiment because there's no evidence that it exists, but it's a concept that's universally shared a lot and it's debated a lot and it's,

you know, some people, you know, they'll pontificate on it, but you might be thinking about nonsense. Right. So I think, you know, another reason I don't, I don't really think infinity is like a real construct is I really, I'm a big fan of Nick Jisen. He's a physicist that's kind of arguing that real numbers aren't real. And what he means by that is like, if you want to compute a real number and like, you know, we use real numbers, like, you know, like they, they require infinite precision to, to compute all the digits. Right.

And, you know, you're assuming a lot of resource for a universe built on real numbers because basically it means anything that you look at, you can look at with infinite resolution.

And it's probably the case, especially if you think the universe is constructed or even if you believe in a simulation argument, that there has to be a granularity there because the universe has to do these things in finite time with finite resource. There isn't evidence that there's infinite time or infinite resource in our universe. And therefore, like if you want something to actually be physically real, the universe has to be able to implement it. The universe cannot implement infinity in finite time. It just can't do it. Right. Right.

Finite time. Yeah. And I think time is finite. I think time is a resource. And I think time is, you know, part of the mechanism that the universe is actually constructing itself. The universe is constructing itself from moment to moment.

And, you know, and we persist over a certain set of moments. But yeah, this is why I said I'm a presentist. And I don't even know if I agree with myself on this. Like, I disagree with myself on a lot of things and I might change my mind tomorrow. But it's like the idea only the present exists. So the past is rolled up in the present. Like, I think that they're like the past structure exists in the present and the present is now constructed

the next moment, right? And so, but the space, like the future is expanding. It's getting larger and larger and larger because there's so much combinatorial structure, like all these past histories now entwined in the modern structure that they can now intertwine to make the future bigger and bigger and bigger. And this is from our current

observable position. Yes. And then you go... Which is the only one we can talk about. Right. And then you expand out to the whole universe and it's like, what is going on out there? Yeah. So it's interesting you say that because, you know, most theories of physics are actually constructed with the observer living outside the universe. Right. So like Newton had this conception of...

You know, like you could take a God's eye view, literal God's eye view of the universe and describe it objectively from the outside. And all of our theories of physics have this problem. This is why quantum mechanics is so existentially hard because it confronts us with the fact that like if you have a physics where the observer is not part of the physics, it leads to really like really big problems with how we structure theories of physics. And this is why there's no one quantum theory. There's a whole bunch of interpretations of quantum mechanics.

quantum experiments and people call those different theories of quantum mechanics. But there's no like accepted standard interpretation that people would point to and say, this is the theory of quantum mechanics. There's interpretations. And I think that's they're great. You know, there's there's great theories. It's great, like amazing, insightful stuff. But it's not quite on the same footing as like general relativity, which is like a widely accepted theory that describes a set of observations. Right.

But it's because quantum mechanics has observers and people don't know how to interpret the observer. And we don't have a physics that was built from starting from observers like us, things like us that are constructing theories of physics. How do we think about the world and put us inside the world? And I think a theory of life has to have that property. It has to account for the fact that we live inside the universe. We cannot escape the universe. We're always going to be physically stuck here. Right.

This is all we got. Yeah. Um, and like describe why, like what is the observational horizon we interact with and how did we get structured out of that space? Like why, why do we exist the way we do within that space? Why do we, um,

I don't know. But I mean, I like the why questions. I was also told by like a really prominent senior physicist not to ask why. And I was like, why should we not ask why? Like you should really you should ask the why questions are good questions. Isn't it interesting that some people that are at the top of their field still have these bizarre ideas that you just completely disagree with?

Yeah. Do I find that bizarre? No, I've had that since I, you know, it's very funny because I think sometimes people are like, oh, Sarah, you're really successful in your career. Now you can say these things. And I'm like, I think I've been saying these things since I was like, I don't know, at forever. Like I haven't changed. My personality hasn't changed. I just like I'm deeply curious and I want to understand things. And I think that's

You know, you have to be able to follow what you rationally think and what the evidence is telling you and the questions you think are interesting to answer. And I think the thing that I guess I've done is like the questions I want to answer are not ones that people have really taken as seriously as I've taken them because of the reasons that they think they're not answerable or they're already answered. And I just see this gaping hole in our understanding of reality that needs to be filled.

Well, listen, Sarah, I'm glad you're out there. I really am. This is a really fun conversation. I really appreciate it. Tell everybody how they can see some of your work or read about it. Yeah, I have a book out. It actually is out today called Life as No One Knows It, The Physics of Life's Emergence, where I talk about assembly theory and what's needed to solve the physics of life. And also really trying to motivate this experimental process.

that Lee is spearheading because I am such a fan of it to try to find aliens in the lab. So basically like the idea here is we just want to get people excited about these problems and thinking about them more deeply agreeing or better yet like having lots of debate and discussion about like the nature of life and how we think about it and whether we can start an experimental program to

really validate the idea. So that's that. And I narrated the audio book. Fantastic. I love that. That makes me happy. Yeah, it was kind of funny. I was really like shy about doing it because some people like criticize my voice on like all the YouTube channels and stuff. And I was like, you know what? I'm going to do it. Listen, stop reading the comments. Thank you. But anyway, it's really fun. And it was deeply personal. So that was cool. And I'm on

Twitter X thing and Instagram. Who are you on? How does someone find you on Twitter? Sarah Amari. There, you can find me that way. Instagram as well? Alien Matter. Alien Matter. Okay. I don't use that one as much, but it's fun. Okay. Yeah. Anyway. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. It was a lot of fun. It was fun. Thank you. Thank you. Bye, everybody. This episode is brought to you by Kitanica.

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