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#269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness
Lex Fridman Podcast
How Could a Turing Machine Literally Build Itself?
I think von Neumann constructors, he wanted to conceive of a minimal thing, autonomous, that could build itself. And that's what von Neumann kind of constructor looked like. Like it's a minimal hypothetical object that could self-replicate. I'm really fascinated by that because as chemists, if we could go back to the... origin of life and think about what is a minimal machine that can get structured randomly. So like with no prime mover, with no architect, it samples through just existence. You're just part of the universe creating its memory, designing... Exactly. Rewriting history. Imperfectly.
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