"the following is a conversation with sarah walker a nestor biologist and theoretical physicist at arizona state university and the santa fe institute she's interested in the origin of life how to find..."

"here is my conversation with sarah walker how did life originate on earth what are the various hypotheses for how life originated on earth yeah so i guess you're asking a historical question which is ..."

"there's also other ideas about life starting as metabolism and so that's more connected to the geochemistry of early earth and it would be kind of more focused on this idea that you get some kind of c..."

"for where the original life happened on earth is hydrothermal vents because they had sufficient energy and so we don't really know a lot about early earth we have you know some ideas about when oceans..."

"okay and for the genetic code the idea is that the rna is the first like why would rna be the first moment you can say it's life i guess the idea is it could both have persistent information and then ..."

"and so that this is sort of where this rna world conjecture came from is because of those two properties isn't it amazing that rna came to be in general isn't it yes that is amazing okay so we're not ..."

"so if life was a like a best of album it would be on the maybe one of the songs on there yes one of the early songs okay it's on the greatest hits greatest hits that's the word i was looking for okay ..."

"sure so i think the reason that most original life scientists are interested in the origin of life on earth and say not the original life um you know on mars and then panspermia you know the exchange ..."

"get sticky it'll stick to the earth's and that kind of reduces the barrier of uh like the time it takes the the luck it takes to actually from nothing from the basic chemistry from the basic physics t..."

"a little cheeky when i say that's the wrong question to ask that's exactly like the question that's like the core of my existence but um but i think the way of framing that is what is it about our uni..."

"um and so there has been this sort of progression of getting a deeper understanding of explaining basic phenomena like i'm not gonna drop the cup i'll drop the water bottle there you go okay that fell..."

"there have to be some deep principles at play there um and so so that's sort of my perspective on it now when you ask me what life is i have some ideas of what i think it is but i think that we haven'..."

"like would uh once you come up with an answer to what is life well the words information and computation be in the paragraph no i don't think so oh damn it okay i know it doesn't help does it i know i..."

"maybe it wouldn't be a cup but um but it's a huge it it's um you know you know people talk about the space of things that could exist as being actually infinitely large right i don't know if i believe..."

"you specify the initial condition at specifying a certain sequence of events but it doesn't deal with the fact that other things could have happened which is kind of an informational property like a c..."

"tools to look at it what do you think an open mind is that a tool what's the physics of an open mind i think if we saw that we'll solve everything i'm saying an open mind because i think the biggest s..."

"models yeah there's a guy named stephen wolfram there's a concept called cellular automata so there's a there's some mysteries in these um systems that are computational in nature that have maybe echo..."

"see where the flaws are um so i think like the part that you're talking about that people find intriguing is that if you have like a fairly simple rule and you specify some initial condition and you r..."

"other way of kind of thinking about it in terms of like a more physics-y way of talking about it is that what it looks like in biology is that the rules or the laws depend on the state this is typical..."

"often stated as a underlying assumption is that the law is uh static right okay and even having laws that vary in time and not even as a function of the state is very radical when you the time in gene..."

"in your proposed model of the physics of life the the fundamental thing would be causation if you were to bet your money on on one particular horse or whatever yes and then space is emergent yes so ev..."

"yeah i don't believe in like things like boltzmann brains or uh you know fluctuations out of the vacuum that can produce things like your desk ornaments i actually think they require a particular caus..."

"experiment um because it's part of our biological lineage in the same sense that a couple or i am a part of the biological lineage the experimental ideas are injecting life yes and the constraints tha..."

"what what uh from a lab perspective so lee i guess would you call him a chemist no i think by training he's a chemist but i think most of the people that work in the field we do have lost their discip..."

"have is that this physics only becomes relevant or at least this is this is my personal conjecture and um and it's sort of uh validated by this kind of theory experiment collaboration um that we we ha..."

"not an infinite set but you know the set of undefined set of other things that could exist so can ask a weird yeah question which is so let's look into the future i try that every day it never works s..."

"which is just a slight tangent but you know like when people ask about the origin of mass you know and like looking for the higgs mechanism and things they never like we need to find the historical or..."

"the bounds of your experiment and you can demonstratively prove emerge spontaneously in your experiment wasn't put in by you actually started to govern the future dynamics of that system and specify i..."

"he talked about the emergence of um of causality uh sorry you talked about causality and time being fundamental to the universe does consciousness fit into all of this like uh do you draw any kind of ..."

"i think i am you think there's something special to this particular no no no um no um i don't i'm not a human-centric thinker but are you one entity you said a bunch of stuff came together to make a s..."

"experience um and i really like um the idea of also like the hard problem of matter which is related to the hard problem of consciousness which is you don't know the intrinsic properties of an electro..."

"i can't ask if you're having experience right now but i can ask if you having experience right now changes something about you and the way you interact with the world so does stuff happen it's just it..."

"can you elaborate against this kind of yeah the parallels it has to do a little bit with the consciousness and the and the matter thing you're talking about yeah it does and i i can't remember what st..."

"neuroscientists which you know i'm no neuroscientist and i'm not an expert in this field so um but you know they have very sophisticated ways of measuring you know activity in our brain and trying to ..."

"so your tweets and titles are are stellar and also your ideas but the tweets and titles are much more important of course so these will live longer yeah they're much more diffused though um well it's ..."

"there do you think consciousness can be engineered yes in the same way that life can be well that was a fast answer i didn't even think about that that's interesting you don't have a free will that wa..."

"this is fascinating physics but it exists so there you go i mean in some sense if you look at like general relativity and gravity morphing space time in that same way maybe whatever the physics of con..."

"i used to not but i actually uh i have become increasingly convinced that it probably will um and part of the reason is um i think i've talked a little bit already about these holes in physics like th..."

"how it's relating um to maybe deeper principles about what life is so short answer yes long-winded answer rewind can we talk about aliens anytime so one i think one interesting way to sneak up on the ..."

"and if that number's higher it assumes that a longer causal history is necessary to produce that object or more information is necessary to specify the creation of that object in the universe now that..."

"essentially the process looks like reverse engineering trying to figure out what is the shortest path to create that thing yeah so most yeah and i would say most like most examples of biology or techn..."

"we're searching for life in terms of actually searching for things like us in this kind of deeper way but how do you do that initial kind of say i'm walking down the street and i'm looking for that do..."

"in this carpet see there's all these kinds of patterns right yeah uh i don't know if if i don't know if this carpet is an alien well so i see what you're saying um so assembly theory is pretty general..."

"rigorous computer vision question can we visually is there a strong correlation between certain kind of high assembly objects when they get to the scale where they're visually observable and some like..."

"okay let me ask you uh i apologize ahead of time but let me ask you the internet question so you're a physicist you ask rigorous questions about the physics of existence and these models of high assem..."

"eat us and the same thing with not sex in general reproduction but genetically mixing stuff like would we would be able to mix genetic information maybe not genetic but maybe information right and i t..."

"something yes yes and we have a last universal common ancestor for all life on earth which i think is sort of the nexus of that causality map for life on earth but the question is where would other al..."

"how many alien civilizations do you think are out there i don't have intuition for that um which i i have always thought was deeply intriguing so and and part of this uh i mean i say it specifically i..."

"home than we have to deal with with any other problems in physics which we're talking about the physics of ourselves and when you're asked about the original life event that event happening in the uni..."

"think um i don't do that deliberately but i do think that way and this is sort of the inversion from the logic of physics because physics as it's always been constructed has treated us as external obs..."

"i assume we have a future well we definitely have a future and the question is well yeah where that future decreases the assembly like it could be where at the peak or we could be just um that would b..."

"oh so um so i made this point about thinking life is the physics of existence and it's not just the physics of existence it's the physics of more things existing so i think one of these drives the yea..."

"um not just it's not an individual is not necessarily the fundamental unit of life right the fundamental you know life is these uh informational lineages and they're kind of you know they intersect ov..."

"is life is not a scale-dependent phenomena it's not just cellular life so if you have a shadow biosphere it has to be integrated with all of these other scales in it and that and that would lose the m..."

"origin to surface life right that they wouldn't be interacting with each other yeah and that's one of the proposals for the shadow biosphere is like sometimes people talk about it as being geologicall..."

"a more general phenomenon i do think it's uh just as you said a good way to psychologically and sociologically prepare ourselves to sort of like what would that look like right and very importantly wh..."

"for that process yeah the restriction that aliens might be way weirder than we can imagine yes yes i'm i'm pretty sure they're probably weirder than we can imagine okay we've uh in 2020 and still livi..."

"overtake the the other competing forms of life right and that's scary both for ai and for viruses and it seems like understanding these processes that are underlying viruses and i don't mean like on t..."

"i like people yeah yeah like i said i like optimistic theories well i don't know if that's up to me that that could be terrifying to people because yeah because uh you know a system that maximizes cre..."

"technology is going to replace us in that way it's just going to keep scaffolding and building and and i also don't have an idea that we're going to build ai in a box i think ai is going to emerge agi..."

"uh maybe not about the last one um you know a lot of people ask me this question about like like working on such hard problems like how can you make a successful career out of that but i think for me ..."

"come with any career or life yeah i've had a bunch of moments in my life where i've just been captivated by some beautiful phenomena and i guess being rigorous about it and asking what is the question..."

"offline about dogs and other pets and so on there's a magic i mean i've been calling it love is this beauty of the human experience that's created and it just feels like fascinating that you could do ..."

"they could be deeply related in that way well i don't think there's a better way to end it i think this conversation was beautiful thank you so much for uh wasting all your valuable time with me today..."