Tim Scarfe: preference

Transcript context

…I love that. Yeah, and think again, that I think that definition has all of the ingredients that we think will eventually be in a definition or a theory of life. The community at present has different weightings on those different pieces of that, right? So some people are very focused on metabolism and energy. I work a lot on energy, although I'm not, I don't think it's the only thing. Some people are very focused on, you know, autopoiesis, self generation, replication to the next generation. Other people are very focused on information, other people are very focused on computation. So I think all the ingredients are there, and there's something exciting happening in the field because many people's, you know, theories have these overlapping ingredients, and I think it's just about weighting them and quantifying the sort of details of how how we bring each into a sophisticated set of metrics, right? Yeah. What I love about this functionalist perspective is the substrate independence. So there's this beautiful idea of a kind of meme plex, where you have certain patterns of functional processing and they can jump into different phylogenies. Can you give me an example of that? I mean does that explain potentially how the sophisticated life that we have in our phylogeny, could it potentially have transferred from another 1? Yeah, so I think there's sort of different ways to think about that. 1 is, there is a whole lot of lateral transfer that can happen across the tree of life in lots of different ways, right. So even in bacteria, can have these lateral gene transfers where you can move bits of genome from 1 genome to another, so you can discover something in 1 lineage and then bring it over to another lineage, that's great. There's this whole other process of just good old fashioned convergence, which is an old idea, and it just says that in certain cases, there are targets for a function that if you achieve that function, it's likely to look a certain way, and so you see similar solutions across the tree of life, right? So we get many origins of the eye, right? So you can imagine, like, the eye is so complicated, maybe it only gets discovered once, and then everything that has an eye has a common ancestor. Not true. Eyes evolve many times. There are differences in the details of eyes in terms of how exactly they see and how they're constructed and slightly what they're made of and so forth, but in some notion, they're all doing the same sort of physics. So that's the convergent bit, right? And the convergent bit is because the physics is a target, right? We understand that, you know, there's, as is happening to both of us right now, certain ways to focus light and obtain a picture at a distance and so forth, and so that's really the target for convergence. So I think there are 2 things happening in lineages. Sometimes it gets discovered in 1 lineage and transferred, and the other is just something is so predicted by physics that if the function happens, it will look a certain way, even if some of the details are different. I think what's really interesting about human society is that we're really, really good at the transfer bit, right? And so for example, you can have things discovered in entirely different cultures with different languages, and sometimes those get, things like agriculture get discovered multiple times, that's maybe more of a convergent thing, but then there's other cases where you have some really neat thing discovered in 1 part of human society, and then it can just immediately propagate to the rest, right? Because our genomes for in taking and taking on information or rejecting it are really flexible. I mean, genome is very abstracted, in our sort of cultural genomes, right, and because that process is if you tell me an idea, I can filter it, think about it, decide if I wanna integrate it and so forth, right? So it's, you might try to, you know, mutate my mind in some way by giving me a little bit of information, but I get to think about that and process it and decide if I wanna integrate on it, integrate it and decide what actions I might wanna take on it.…

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