Intelligence and Life Emerge from Complexity

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Intelligence and life result from the intricate interactions of physical entities, highlighting a naturalistic and physicalist perspective. The concept that life and thought emerge from various configurations of atoms and molecules suggests a statistical mechanics approach to understanding life's origins. Among numerous possible arrangements of matter, only a limited subset yields living organisms, emphasizing the uniqueness and complexity involved in the phenomenon we define as life.

Understanding how life began on Earth involves questions of chemistry, geology, planetary science, physics, and more. But the question of how random processes lead to organized, self-replicating, information-bearing systems is a more general one. That question can be addressed in an idealized world of computer code, initialized with random sequences and left to run. Starting with many such random systems, and allowing them to mutate and interact, will we end up with "lifelike," self-replicating programs? A new paper by Blaise Agüera y Arcas and collaborators suggests that the answer is yes. This raises interesting questions about whether computation is an attractor in the space of relevant dynamical processes, with implications for the origin and ubiquity of life.

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Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/08/19/286-blaise-aguera-y-arcas-on-the-emergence-of-replication-and-computation/

Blaise Agüera y Arcas received a B.A. in physics from Princeton University. He is currently a vice-president of engineering at Google, leader of the Cerebra team, and a member of the Paradigms of Intelligence team. He is the author of the books Ubi Sunt and Who Are We Now?, and the upcoming What Is Intelligence?

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