COMPLEXITY

Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale Intelligence

Jul 2, 2022

01:22:23

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Highlights

AI Chapters

Episode notes

The Historical Dependence of Assembly on Information

01:24

The Hyperobject: A New Perspective on Life

01:22

The latent knowledge in the universe

01:22

The Algorithm of Life

01:23

Introduction

4min

The Science of Life - A Brief Biographical Framing

3min

Algarhythmic Origins of Life

2min

Is There a Difference Between Assemble Theory and the Way That You're Thinking About It?

3min

What's Happening With Assemblage Theory?

4min

Is It Possible to Quantify the Triority?

5min

The Importance of Reproducibility in the Universe

2min

The Intuition of Life

2min

The New Operating Em

3min

10.

Assemble Theory - Is There a Minimum Path?

5min

11.

The Space of All Possible Things Is Much Larger Than Can Be Realized

4min

12.

The Shortest Path Versus Average Path

3min

13.

How to Measure the Shortest Path in a Molecule?

4min

14.

The Shortest Path Is Really Significant

3min

15.

Is There a Difference Between Time and Reality?

4min

16.

Getting Bigger in Assembled Spaces

4min

17.

The Materiality of Ideas

2min

18.

Is It Just That We're Not Capable of Porting an Throughout Human History?

3min

19.

A Black Hole Is Like the Extinction of Information

3min

20.

The Challenge of Identifying When a Planet Has Been Technological

2min

21.

Is There a Transition to Global Intelligence?

3min

22.

The Biosphere Emerging From the Geosphere

5min

23.

Is There a Future in the Universe?

3min

24.

Is There a Difference Between Intelligence and Life?

3min

25.

The Biogenesis of Life on Earth

5min

26.

Aliens Are Not Aliens Anymore

2min

What is life, and where does it come from? These are two of the deepest, most vexing, and persistent questions in science, and their enduring mystery and allure is complicated by the fact that scientists approach them from a myriad of different angles, hard to reconcile. Whatever else one might identify as universal features of all living systems, most scholars would agree life is a physical phenomenon unfolding in time. And yet current physics is notorious for its inadequacy with respect to time. Life appears to hinge on information transfer — but, again, what do we mean by “information,” and what it is relationship to energy and matter? If humankind can’t settle fundamental issues with these theoretical investigations, we might be missing other kinds of life (and mind) — not just in outer space, but here on Earth, right beneath our noses. But new models that suggest a vastly wider definition of life offer hope that we might — soon! — not only learn to recognize the biospheres and technospheres of other living worlds, but notice other “aliens” at home, and even find our place amidst a living cosmos.

Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.

This week on the show, we speak with SFI External Professor Sara Walker (Twitter, Google Scholar), Deputy Director of The Beyond Center at ASU, where she acts as Associate Professor in half a dozen different programs. In this conversation, we discuss her pioneering research in the origins of life and the profound and diverse implications of Assembly Theory — a new kind of physics she’s developing with chemist Leroy Cronin and a team of SFI and NASA scholars. Sara likes to speculate out loud in public conversation, so strap in for an unusually enthusiastic, animated, and free-roaming conversation at the very bleeding edge of science. And be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com.

If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage.

Thank you for listening!

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Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

Mentioned Papers:

Intelligence as a planetary scale process
by Adam Frank, David Grinspoon & Sara Walker

The Algorithmic Origins of Life
by Sara Imari Walker & Paul C. W. Davies

Beyond prebiotic chemistry: What dynamic network properties allow the emergence of life?
by Leroy Cronin & Sara Walker

Identifying molecules as biosignatures with assembly theory and mass spectrometry
by Stuart Marshall, Cole Mathis, Emma Carrick, Graham Keenan, Geoffrey Cooper, Heather Graham, Matthew Craven, Piotr Gromski, Douglas Moore, Sara Walker & Leroy Cronin

Assembly Theory Explains and Quantifies the Emergence of Selection and Evolution
by Abhishek Sharma, Dániel Czégel, Michael Lachmann, Christopher Kempes, Sara Walker, Leroy Cronin

Quantum Non-Barking Dogs
by Sara Imari Walker, Paul C. W. Davies, Prasant Samantray, Yakir Aharonov

The Multiple Paths to Multiple Life
by Christopher P. Kempes & David C. Krakauer

Other Related Videos & Writing:

SFI Seminar - Why Black Holes Eat Information
by Vijay Balasubramanian

Major Transitions in Planetary Evolution
by Hikaru Furukawa and Sara Imari Walker

2022 Community Lecture: “Recognizing The Alien in Us”
by Sara Walker

Sara Walker and Lee Cronin: The Alien Debate
on The Lex Fridman Show

If Cancer Were Easy, Every Cell Would Do It
SFI Press Release on work by Michael Lachmann

The Ministry for The Future
by Kim Stanley Robinson

Re: Wheeler’s delayed choice experiment
Wikipedia

On the SFI “Exploring Life’s Origins” Research Project