Blaise Agüera y Arcas: prediction

Transcript context

…After a few million interactions, magic happens, which is that you go from noise to programs. You start to see complex programs appear on these tapes. This is the most exciting plot that I've made in the last few years and it's the 1 that's on the cover of the book. You can see that in the beginning, it's not very computational and then a sudden transition takes place here. It looks like a phase transition. This is the book that I hear is making the rounds at Sarkana, which I'm very happy to hear. The big 1 on the right, What is Intelligence? Is sort of the Lord of the Rings and What is Life? On the left is kind of The Hobbit. So it's kind of the single and it's also chapter 1 of of what is intelligence. So it goes kind of inside the other 1. Mostly what I'll be talking about today is what's in these 2 books but with, with quite a bit more detail, more mathematical detail since I think this is a really good audience for that. And I'll also be connecting it, a bit with some of the bigger themes of the ALife conference and community and dare I dare I say even movement. You know, in particular, I I actually wanted to begin with this wonderful sort of open problems in artificial life, summary paper which, you know, has a number of of very illustrious co authors of, you know, at least 1 of whom we heard from yesterday and and more than 1 of whom are are are here at the conference. This is, you know, open problems, 14 open problems in artificial life in the year 2000. How does life arise from the non living? How does the transition to life in an artificial chemistry or in a silica environment can occur and why it occurs? I'm sure many of you know this was the the problem that bedeviled Darwin. You know, he made 1 of the most rich and and explanatorily powerful theories in ever in science in in discovering how evolution works, but he was unable to explain how evolution got started. He, at some point in 1 of his letters, said, you you might as well talk about the origin of matter. I think that the origin of matter and the origin of life might actually be 1 and the same thing and evolution might actually be the answer to that question but it's an evolution that includes a term that Darwin did not account for in his original formulation. In section b of these questions, determine what is inevitable in the open ended evolution of life. I'm I'm hoping to speak a little bit about that too. Create a formal framework for synthesizing dynamical hierarchies at all scales and develop a theory of information processing, information flow, and information generation for evolving systems. I won't be going into the information theory in any detail, but, but hopefully we'll we'll set up the problem in in a perhaps somewhat new way that that I I hope will help to do that. And finally, in section c, how is life related to mind, machines and culture? ut, but hopefully we'll we'll set up the problem in in a perhaps somewhat new way that that I I hope will help to do that. And finally, in section c, how is life related to mind, machines and culture? If I have time, I will get into this as well and talk a bit about the emergence of intelligence and mind in an artificial living system and, the influence of machines on the next major evolutionary transition of life. So, you know, it was really cool to to read this paper from 2020 and to see how much of the perspective, that that, that you had already been exploring then, you know, feels, you know, right and consistent with, you know, with with a sort of fresh look at this at these problems in 2025. Let me just begin with, with this question of souls. It used to be in the nineteenth century and and earlier, that we thought that, life had some vital force or spirit, that animated it and made it different from inanimate matter. In the nineteenth century, when we began to figure out organic chemistry and be able to synthesize urea and so on, the the idea that that no, we should really adopt a strictly materialist perspective because there's nothing special or different about the matter in us versus the matter anywhere else in the universe, took hold. And that's progress for sure, but, but it also, you know, when we when we embrace atoms and materialism fully, we're left with some, some questions about, you know, what differentiates life from non life then. You know, like, what can we even say about life? There are at least some biologists who who say, well, maybe it's not even meaningful to talk about about any difference between life and non life. But I I don't think that that's true. And I think that the answer to the to the conundrum is to invoke function. Function is the thing that life has, that non life doesn't have. In other words, if we, you know, just to to give you a little parable, if I were to come back from the future with this object and you ask me what it is, and I tell you it is an artificial kidney with 100 year lifespan. You can implant it in a body and it'll it'll, you know, it'll work the way your kidneys do. It'll it'll filter urea from the blood and so on. That's a really important piece of information, but it's not a material or a materialist piece of information. It's not something that you could read off from the atoms. And, you know, those atoms could be, I don't know, tungsten filaments or carbon nanotubes are made out of some technology we don't understand now, or it could be organic, it could be made out of cloned tissue. And and the point is that it working as a kidney doesn't depend on that matter. There is a kind of separation of concerns between the matter and the function. And so there's some real sense in which the function is like a spirit or like something like something immaterial, it's not material, and yet it also relies of course on the physics of what's going on. You can't have the spirit without the matter as it were. So function is really important and, and function is something that, you know, a rock on a non living planet, somewhere doesn't have.…

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