The Meaning Code Discovering Origin of Life is the Deepest Scientific Rabbithole
Perry Marshall, author of Evolution 2.0 and founder of the $10 million price for the origin of a spontaneously arising communication system joins Glen and Karen to discuss the fundamental nature of information, choice and the observer. Links to videos mentioned will follow timestamps.
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:45 Origin of Life v. Origin of Species
05:14 Is something missing in the Intelligent Design argument?
07:35 Where does the idea come from in the first place? Information must become physical.
11:00 How many divine interventions are there supposed to be?
16:00 The limitations of the God of the Gaps argument. Information shows up. There has to be a mechanism, a chunk of hardware. This problem is not addressed by Intelligent Design
18:30 Does Code = Information? Many definitions of information. Shannon, for example.
22:00 Definition of code is symbolic information exchanged between a sender and a receiver, Between an encoder and a decoder, and it’s a digital communication system 27:25 Science v. Religion is a proxy battle for something deeper, perhaps what it means to be human.
33:30 Does Maxwell’s demon actually exist?
41:00 John Torday, A systems approach to physiologic evolution https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jcp.25820
45:00 Information capacity is a capacity for choice. Freedom to select a one or a zero. 53:00 Maxwell’s demon lives on symbolic info, not bits and bytes. It’s what the 1’s and 0's represent symbolically. What is the sender looking at and the receiver sending onto? A bigger more holistic landscape than science can look at.
1:00:22 Free choice in quantum mechanics. The observer has free choice in what experiment to do.
1:05:45 Time acts on the rocks. The rocks do not act on time. We act on time
1:11:14 If you want to push choice down to the level of Quantum physics, you have to acknowledge that there are multiple pathways into the future which are all consistent with the past history of the universe, so you can’t have perfect determinism. Choice breaks that.
1:15:25 Following the question of the observer is a fruitful path. Glen’s suggestion: perhaps replace consciousness with agency. Consciousness is how WE experience agency, so it takes US out of the theoretical pathway. Reluctance to recast definitions into formal, mathematical statements hinders progress in the search for Origin of Life.
1:17:00 Stuart Kaufman and Set Theory
1:24:00 Heuristics leads to an outcome that is good enough. Inductive reasoning is a powerful skill set.
The Meaning Code videos related to The Physics of Life: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoARw9zo4EUZhxqfaqYU5yjy0-Tr8RlB4
The Observer: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoARw9zo4EUZTm9ZRgC9OQINsbC1BxsPy
Perry Marshall and Stephen Meyer on Unbelievable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RHUEXn2upI&t=1s
Perry Marshall, Denis Noble and Lee Cronin on Unbelievable https://youtu.be/Njuso5A2jts
The Prize website: https://evo2.org
The book: Evolution 2.0: Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design by Perry Marshall