"the following is a conversation with lee cronin a chemist from university of glasgow who's one of the most fascinating brilliant out-of-the-box thinking scientists i've ever spoken to this episode was..."

"how do you think life originated on earth and what insights does that give us about life if we go back to the origin of earth and you think about maybe 4.7 4.6 4.5 billion years ago planet was quite h..."

"really important words that we can unpack over the next while can you say all the words again so he says selection so natural selection eight the original a b testing and so and then complexity and th..."

"[Music] okay and then there's autonomy you said complexity we'll talk about but it's a really interesting idea that selection preceded biology yeah i think yes so what first of all what is chemistry l..."

"more information processing building state machines all the way up however you could imagine a situation if you had um i don't know a neutron star or a sun or a ferromagnetic loops interacting with on..."

"i mean um selection has a for i'm convinced that selection is a force in the universe not me not a fundamental force but a but a directing but it is a directing force because existence although um exi..."

"inventions in the history of the universe is the the first molecule they figured out holy i can create a copy of myself how hard is that i think it's really really easy okay i did not expect that i th..."

"broken back into atoms so you have this this kind of destruction of the molecules for our chemical reactions so you only need one or two molecules to become good at copying themselves for them suddenl..."

"there's multiple steps this is when the blind people look at the blind watchmaker argument when you talk about how could a watch something spontaneously emerge well it doesn't it's a lineage of watche..."

"on earth the ribosome the fundamental machine that is responsible for every life for you know every cell on earth of whatever wherever it is in the in the kingdom of life that is an incredibly complex..."

"research a scam aren't you kind of doing origin of life research um okay it was tongue-in-cheek but yeah i think and i meant it as tongue-in-cheek um i am i'm not doing or i'm not doing the origin of ..."

"the universe and most important for us we are going to know or have a good idea what the future of humanity looks like you know we need to understand that although we're precious we're not the only li..."

"even now today synthetic biologists cannot make a cell from scratch because there's some contingent information embodied outside the genome in the cell and that is just incredible so there's lots of l..."

"be it lightning or heat uv light and run this thing in cycles over time and let it solve the search problem so i see the origin of life as a search problem in chemical space and then i would wait lite..."

"coming back to the what i'd expect so let's just say are there are you back it's i think this is once again a rick and morty episode definitely it's definitely all rick and morty all the way down so w..."

"because there's a lot of details there i would say there is potential for catastrophic events to happen in much dumber ways within in ai space there's a lot of ways to create like uh social networks t..."

"discussion i think that in synthetic biology right now we have to be very careful about how we edit genomes and edit synthetic biology to do things so that's kind of that's where things might go wrong..."

"global psychological state meaning going forward that's beautifully that's beautifully put so one it will help us understand ourselves so that's useful for science but two it gives us a kind of hope i..."

"other solutions yeah and wouldn't it be great if we could find a solution i mean it's probably a bit late for i mean i worry about climate change but i'm not that worried about climate change and i th..."

"all martians probably life got going on mars the chemistry on mars seeded earth that might have been a legitimate way to kind of truncate the surface space but in the outer solar system we might have ..."

"similar to earth life and then we'll go to uh titan and all those weird moons with the ices and the volcanoes and all that kind of stuff and then we find there something that looks i don't know way we..."

"like well we all meld into one super intelligent conscious or some weird thing that naturally happens over time yeah i mean i i think that um we join into a virtual metaverse and and start creating wh..."

"you i think so you can have let's let's get this right so um dead world no prospective alive um prebiotic world life emerging living and technological and you probably and the dead one you probably wo..."

"suppose that life is as hard as we first thought it was and so if we just take earth as a marker and if i think that life is a much more general phenomena than just our biology then i think the the un..."

"see them why can't we talk to them because i too have a sense you put it way more poetically but it seems both statistically and uh sort of romantically it feels like the universe should be teeming wi..."

"optimistic that we will well i don't know there are two movies that came out in the same within six months of one another at astra and cosmos at astra they're very expensive blockbuster you know with ..."

"and that might be true but if i can show how i i i'm able to do it with very little cheating or very little information inputs just creating like a a model planet some description and watching it watc..."

"sense humor uh the emergence of humor serves a a role in our game engine and so if selection is fundamental in the universe and so is humor well i don't actually don't know exactly what uh role humor ..."

"we're kind of joking here but it's uh a counterintuitive idea to me to think that uh life elsewhere in the universe is very different than life on earth and also like all of each instantiation of life..."

"it feels like a selection is a fundamental kind of directed force in the universe won't selection result in a in a few pockets of interesting complexities i mean yeah if we ran earth over again over a..."

"how similar would biology be i would say that there would be there would be broad similarities but um but the emergence of mammals is not a given unless we're going to you know throw an asteroid at ea..."

"why we haven't at scale heard from aliens is um well right now they're different than us we've only been looking for say 70 80 years so i think that we're the reason we have not found aliens yet is th..."

"their club to have a talk well i think they still want to teach us how to talk right but my worry is that or i i think they would want to teach us how to talk like you do when you meet it uh like when..."

"so i'm going to say that the the they might be there but we just i'm not going to say that i believe in inter-dimensional aliens being present yeah but i think you're just being self-critical uh like ..."

"um they don't care okay they got to be self-interested so they'll probably they more care about is it interesting for them maybe they i mean surely there's a way to to pat the to pet the cat in this t..."

"if the the ai will not talk to other ais that don't share the ability to abstract the level of the ai because it's just a cat and would you are you going to travel 20 light years to go and pet a cat s..."

"idea that you're expressing and just to kind of have a sense maybe it's a hope that there's always going to be a desire to interact even with those that don't can't possibly understand the depth of wh..."

"yet see i disagree with that but i'm totally aligned with your hopeful vision which is like we need to understand the origin of life it will help us engineer life will help us engineer intelligent lif..."

"yeah but but i see i almost uh depending on the day i sometimes agree with you but uh with the thing you just said but one of the disappointing things to me about the sightings i still hold the belief..."

"i don't think we have i don't think everybody having a smartphone in their pocket is enough i think that allows for tick-tock videos i don't think it allows for the capture of even interesting relativ..."

"so a few years ago um that that people observed when they did some electrochemistry when they were splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen that you got more energy out than you put in and people got ..."

"aliens and everything else right he's gone from space junk accelerating out of to interdimensional stuff in a very short space of time i see he's obviously bored or or he wants to tap into the psyche ..."

"using the word science and statistics can often uh as as you know kind of become a catalyst for dismissing new ideas out of the box ideas uh wild ideas all that kind of stuff well yes and no i think t..."

"humans with egos and all those kinds of things can uh sometimes uh misused good things like social justice like all ideas were all aspired to misuse these beautiful ideas to um to manipulate people to..."

"needed yeah let's take two minutes we took a quick break and offline you mentioned to me that you have a lab in your home and then i said that you're basically rick from rick and morty which is someth..."

"mean 240 volts yeah ac yeah and then had a couple of electrodes on it so what happens is a pickle um this is a classic thing you do i mean i shouldn't pranks you do you put a pluck pickle into the mai..."

"assembly theory so we'll stick on theory and these big ideas i would say revolutionary ideas this uh intersection between mathematics and philosophy what is assembly theory and generally speaking how ..."

"especially if that object is not one-off you've got a an abundance of them and that's really important the abundant i and i so because if you what i'm literally saying about the abundance if you have ..."

"cut abracadabra up into parts you can put it together again in seven steps so what does that mean that means if you basically don't re you're allowed to reuse things you make in the chain at the begin..."

"exactly it's like a memory in the universe right i'm making lots of leaps here like it's kind of weird i'm saying right there's a process that can form the a and the b and the c let's say and then whe..."

"saying saying by taking a molecule and do it and and doing either infrared or nmr or mass spec i can work out how many parts there are in that molecule and then put it on a scale and what we did in th..."

"that it had to be produced by evolution and this allowed me to come up with a general definition of life based on assembly theory to say that if i find an object that has a that has a large number of ..."

"tells you if you find objects because you can do this reject trajectories as well you think about it that in the unit the fact there are objects in the universe on earth his mind is weird you think ab..."

"you're contractible enough to be able to tell the difference between a molecule that's been formed by the random background and by uh causation and and i think that that's really interesting because u..."

"um i mean in computer science and mathematics and physics people have been really seriously studying complexity for a long time and i think there's some really interesting problems of where we course ..."

"so what assembly theory allows you to do is go to the actual object that you exist you find in space and actually the way you get there is by disassembling it so this assembly theory works by disassem..."

"right i can go to the moon with newtonian physics i think and i can understand um the the orbit of mercury with relativity and so and i can build transistors with quantum mechanics right and i can do ..."

"you've been referring to this kind of an interesting formulation that is memory yeah so uh time time is hard to like put a finger on like what what the hell are we talking about well it's just a direc..."

"so i think i came up with assembly theory the following idea when i was a kid i was obsessed about survival kits what is the minimum stuff i would need to basically replicate my reality and i love com..."

"assemble to assemble and and i realized i could make a causal chain in my survival kit so i guess that's probably why i've been obsessed with assembly theory for so long and i was just pre-configured ..."

"that that makes any sense because um the problem that i have with time being reversible is that um i mean i'm i'm just a you know i'm a dumb experimental chemist right so i love burning stuff you know..."

"and see how that screws with people's minds why you're triggering people by saying fundamental why not we just say like let's say why am i look i'm walking through the wall why why why should i grow u..."

"then use as bricks to build the house okay so i accept that so let's let's let's go back a second because it's a kind of it is i wanted to drop the time bomb at this part because i think we can carry ..."

"because physicists require that causation so this is where i'm going to go causation emerges and it doesn't exist at the micro scale that clearly is wrong because if causation has to emerge at the mac..."

"and we and there's so many there's so many things to unpack here but let's go back to the point you said does can assembly theory work with emergent time sure it can but it doesn't give me a deep sati..."

"just a simpler view if time is fundamental and it and it shakes the physicist's cage a bit right because i'm gonna say but i think that i i just i just enjoy the fact that physicists are in cages i th..."

"which is assembly theory okay let me ask you about continue talking about complexity and uh to clarify with this beautiful theory of yours that you're developing and i'm sure we'll continue developing..."

"it must come from the boundary conditions you put in so all i'm saying is a lot of the complexity that we see is a direct read of the constraints we put in but we just don't understand so as i said ea..."

"theory doesn't do doesn't lower any of the importance of complexity theory but it allows us to go across domains and start to compare things compare the complexity of a molecule of a microprocessor of..."

"so we've applied assembly theory to cellular automata in life and chemistry um what does nietzsche have to do with uh somebody oh that gets me into free will and everything so let me say that again as..."

"the game in 12 minutes if you knew what you were doing for not making mistakes just play the display display disc so it was just about timing and actually was a complete fraud because all the animatio..."

"everything and become a rapper tomorrow right maybe i i could try that but i don't have sufficient um agency to make that necessarily happen i'm on a trajectory so when in dragon's lair i know that i ..."

"we're on yeah so the predictably part is the this is the constraints of the trajectory and the unpredictable part is the part that you still haven't really clarified the origin of uh of the little bit..."

"let me have a go at it i would say that i don't take the stance of sam harris because i think sam harris when he said the way he says it is almost it's really interesting i'd love to talk to him about..."

"his logical inconsistency with that argument because at some point at some point when he loses enough money or the prospect of losing enough money um there's a way of basically mapping out a series of..."

"that's kind of annoying and but then so he's just he's going to through meditation come to acceptance with that fact yeah just which is maybe okay i maybe but i do think that i have the ability to mak..."

"choice which is why you don't do it but if you truly accept that the choice has already been made then you can go i don't know what is the most radical thing um i mean but yeah i don't i wonder what w..."

"responsible for because the question about how life emerged and how intelligence emerges and consciousness and free will they're all ultimately boiling down to some of the same mechanics i think my fe..."

"open you want to do that because you generate novelty you mentioned something about do cellular automata exist outside the human mind in our little offline conversation um why is that an interesting q..."

"all you've just given me a brilliant idea i wonder if there's a tick tock account that's just dedicated to putting out ca rules and if it isn't we should make one 100 and now we'll get so we have mill..."

"game of hex is uh yes so it's a basically a bought a hexagonal board and you try and basically you color each hexagon each element on the board it's hexagon and you try and get from one side to the ot..."

"lab 2 on twitter and it was like make move wait you know mix a and b wait 10 seconds yeah answer blue you know i i really find it super compelling that you would have a chemical entity that's communic..."

"quite a beautiful idea how we were talking about uh ca's existing outside the human mind yeah so i really admire stephen wolfram i think he's a genius clearly a genius and trapped in his actually it's..."

"think i said um cetera automata running them uh is teaching me something about what real numbers are and aren't and i haven't quite got there yet i was playing on the airplane coming over and just rea..."

"be helping me understand them in terms of real numbers i don't know what you think yeah well the funk is but uh the devil's in the function it's like which is the function that's generating your real ..."

"actually played conway's game of life in there and we got structures in that we got structures in that game from the chemistry that you wouldn't expect from the actual ca so that's kind of cool in the..."

"that non-determinism at the beginning you know i wonder what what is the i'm trying to think about what is the encoding space the encoding space is pretty big we have um 49 stir ups of 49 cells 49 che..."

"translating it properly well the silver lining slash greater sadness of all of this is there's probably ideas in in english speaking like there's ideas in certain disciplines that if discovered by oth..."

"through every element in the matrix like flip it it just reads out so we can actually do monte carlo by just shaking the box it's literally a box shaker you don't actually have to encode the shaking o..."

"i'm just interested in because stephen wolfram likes cas a lot of people like cas and likes to think of them as minimal computational elements i'm just saying well do they exist in reality or are they..."

"from simplicity i guess what lee you're saying is that this is not you know um this is highly unlike systems we've seen the physical world even though they probably carry some of the same magic like m..."

"bring a grid to life yeah yeah that's what then what is simple that's all i wanted to say i agree with you with a wonder of cas i just think but remember this we take so much for granted what the ca i..."

"knowledge and it's not universal what that is like so it's uh carried from from human to human yeah some of that implicit knowledge and you're saying can we remove the humor from the picture can we li..."

"it's um very formal in nature in terms of like it's precise yes you can mathematically precisely describe a state machine so i mean you know a very simple boolean um gates are a very good way of build..."

"chemicals and so so build chemicals programmatically yeah i mean i get in trouble saying this i i said to my my group oh i shouldn't say it because this but i said look we should make the crackbot is ..."

"i said but is it impossible says yeah and they said they said you know i got the impression they were saying it's magic and so when people tell me things are magic it's like no no they can't be magic ..."

"step is purification so reaction uh work up separate purify so this is basically like my exactly like a um a turing machine where you have your tape you have your tape head you have some rules and the..."

"so i had them come to the lab and we started to 3d print test tubes so you imagine you know 3d printer bottle and then and then and then use the same gantry to basically rather than to squirt out plas..."

"did all they did actually um we got the the abstraction so reaction uh work up separation um purification and then i made the decision to do it in batch now as in batch all chemistry had been digitize..."

"computer is just the early days and so like some of the criticisms just have to do with the early days and yes i would say that something like this is uh quite impossible uh you know so the fact that ..."

"like well it might be both yeah so you tweeted quote why does chemistry need a universal programming language question mark for all the reasons you can think of reliability interoperability collaborat..."

"chem piles [Laughter] all right we can carry on for years i but it is really it's compilation and evolution and what it now does is it says okay the problem we have before is it was possible to do rob..."

"so for people who don't know gpt gpt3 that's the language model that can do natural language generation so you can give it a prompt and it can uh complete the rest of it but it turns out that that kin..."

"uh abstraction and because we have an abstraction that's implementable in the hardware um we've developed basically a chemical analog of codecs what you're doing we say sergeant trial when you say abs..."

"what's what's the hardest part about that pipeline as we look towards a universal touring computer so the hardest computer the heart the hardest thing with the uh the pipeline is that um the software ..."

"and it's it's really important to understand those labeling schemes right and one of the things i was never i was always worried about the beginning that the abstraction was going to fall over and the..."

"are so many safety issues right now that we've got to really be very careful you know protecting the user protecting the environment protecting misuse i mean there's lots to discuss if you want to go ..."

"chemists in the lab as researchers that's better for science so they can build a bunch of um uh like they could do science at a much more accelerated pace so it's not just the development of drugs it'..."

"there's lots of really interesting things there so i think that's going to happen i think that now let's take the the negative before we do that let's imagine what happened to go back to a really trag..."

"some people who've got epilepsy isn't literally forgive the term a no-brainer because these poor people go from seizures like every day to maybe seizures just once every few months so that's that's an..."

"of doing a decentralized peer-to-peer version where and what you have to do i'm not saying you should adopt a blockchain but there is a way of maybe taking kdl's and put them on blockchain here's an i..."

"tracing should have been done in covid where people are given the information so you've just been in contact with someone covered you choose i'm not telling you to stay at home you choose right so now..."

"discussion to have so by the way when you say personal drugs do you mean the illegal ones or do you have a concern of just putting the manufacturer of any kind of legal drugs in the hands of of uh reg..."

"distribution got it but you mentioned recreational drugs and and the reason i mentioned because i know people are going to speak up on this if the drug is legal there's to me no reason why you can't m..."

"can modify them so let's say there's let's say it's like blood type there's a particular type of thc that you that you tolerate better than i do then why not why not have a machine that makes the one ..."

"and as we continue down this thread of the positives and the worrisome what are the things we should be excited about and what are the things we should be terrified about and how do we minimize the ch..."

"the corpus of or complex organic molecules so i when i was a bit down about assembly theory because i couldn't couldn't convince referees and couldn't convince computational um people interested in co..."

"electrons basically reflect light what we did is we randomly squirt the gold the gold particle and the reducing agent in and we measure the uv we measure the color and so what we do is we've got the r..."

"seed back in and what this robot is able to do is is search a space of 10 to the 23 possible reactions in just a thousand experiments in three days and it makes five generations of nanoparticles which..."

"the thinking so we don't try and apply any self-replication or try and get the the particles to make themselves although it would be cool to try so well there you go that's that those are famous last ..."

"so i think the prospect of us being able to engineer a nano material a nanomaterial life form in the short term like i said earlier my aim is to do this of course i mean i'm you know on one hand i'm s..."

"something or you know which is the opposite of uh oftentimes gain and function research just focused on like how do you get a dangerous thing to be closer to something that works with humans yeah so h..."

"and they don't share the same chemistry yeah and then they only wait time they recognize each other when they become intelligent they go well what's that moving yeah i i wanted to co-evolve and that's..."

"technology so if we do technology so so elon either needs to take a computer to mars he needs to manufacture drugs right on demand right because zero cost payload and all that stuff is just code or wh..."

"yeah that's one of the questions is can we um instill consciousness into other beings because that's a sad thought that whatever this thing inside our minds that hopes and dreams and fears and loves c..."

"then you become a philosopher i still aspire to actually building a bunch of stuff but my sense is super intelligence leads to um deep integration into human society so like intelligence is strongly c..."

"it's again the dumb algorithms the dumb algorithms that scale in the hands of people that are too don't study history that don't study human psychology and human nature just applying too broadly for s..."

"will evolve because you know i wonder how much how much productivity has twitter and social media has taken out humanity because how many now um i mean so the good thing about twitter is it gives powe..."

"interesting problem for humanity that we will solve i like how you said it's a pretty cool problem for civilization it's a big one what's the budget i want to there's a bunch of really yeah really big..."

"at getting there i'm not sure whether i have my i have my doubts but i'm not qualified you know i'm sure people have their doubts that computation works yeah but but but i've got it working and i you ..."

"but many of them negative many of them most of them at least i hope are weird and wonderful and and fun in ways that are totally unexpected and we sitting on a porch with a bottle of jack daniels and ..."

"which exists by default so automa exists by default apparently and then there's wakes of non-existence what the hell is the non-existence in the universe that's the top that's and also in another conv..."

"between you and and joshua bach that uh that can elucidate some of the other topics we've been talking about yeah so yash has an incredible mind and he has he's so well read um and uses language reall..."

"got kind of trapped in our words and terms because of course it's possible for a turing machine or computers to exist in the universe we have them but what i'm trying to understand is where did the tr..."

"to our cellular automata conversation yeah you were taking away some of the magic from the cellular automata because very intelligent biological systems came up with that cellular automata well this i..."

"novelty generation and the ability to create objects within objects within objects you know there's a perhaps it's grounded in physics there's this intuition of conservation yeah that stuff is conserv..."

"configurations of things and maybe that just can continue indefinitely and uh this human species that was created along the way is probably just one method like that's able to ask the universe about i..."

"perhaps join across not just for the computational lists and what i try to do with yahshua is meet him halfway so what happens if i become a computationalist what do i gain a lot it turns out because ..."

"well you mentioned sarah i think uh you and sarah walker are just these uh fascinating human beings i'm really fortunate to um have the opportunity to be in your presence to study your work to follow ..."