Blaise Agüera y Arcas: prediction

Transcript context

…t the flaw is that they're only talking about 8 events or 12 events. And if if what I'm saying is true, then this is just the tip of a gigantic iceberg. Basically, it's symbiogenesis all the way down. Most of these symbogenic events are much more uneven. There may be just a little bit of something getting incorporated into something much bigger, but that is the source of novelty in all of evolution. These are just the most dramatic cases that involve, you know, really really big, visible stuff happening. So is there evidence for these smaller symbogenetic events in biology? Lots. There's lots of evidence for it. So, you know, I I don't have time to go into it in any detail but if you look at at just the human genome, you find that, you know, only 1 and a half percent of it codes for our proteins and lots of the rest of it is transposons and, other endogenous, retroviral elements of various kinds that involve viruses whose, whose ecology is our own genomes and that reproduce inside our genomes and sometimes jump species resulting in weird shit like, a quarter of the cow genome being a retrotransposon that also lives in lizards and salamanders and stuff. And so, you know, when you start to look at that, you you realize that that genomes are fractal and it's replicators made of replicators made of replicators just as I've as I've described, not these kind of, you know, fixed design space and evolution only happening in its usual way. It's not just horizontal gene transfer in bacteria. This single genetic picture, think, is is the engine, that produces novelty, throughout all of life, including including big complex animals like ours, like us. There's more and more evidence in the in the last decade of of things like this going on. You know, for instance, the ARC virus, was endogenized, in in the mammal lineage and you can find it in our brains and it turns out that if you knock out the ARC virus in mice, they stop being able to form new memories. So clearly, the ARC virus is doing something important for and that's a source of novelty that that was an endogenized virus. Similar, the mammalian placenta, was, is formed by an endogenized virus that fuses cell membranes together, and so on. Okay. So there's a definition of life that comes out of this. Life, and I I said this, you know, in the panel yesterday, is an embodied autopoietic computation arising and complexifying through symbiogenesis. It's not just neuroscience that's computational. Life was computational from the beginning. And it gets more computationally complex over time through symbiogenesis at many scales. Because remember, if life is a computer from the start, then every time things fuse together, you're making a more and more parallel computer. Those computers have to be not only running the code that model themselves and reproduce themselves, but that also do something about modeling the other and figuring out how they interact or work with the other. And this means that an ecology of functions is building up through massively parallel computation that becomes, if you like, more and more intelligent with every 1 of these of these fusions. he other. And this means that an ecology of functions is building up through massively parallel computation that becomes, if you like, more and more intelligent with every 1 of these of these fusions. And since symbiogenesis makes the computation massively parallel, that implies that intelligence and life are very, closely connected, which is why, you know, I ended up with the book What is Life? As part of the book What is Intelligence? When you're not only using that intelligence to model yourself, but also to model your environment, which by the way includes others most importantly, then that's intelligence and that means that life was intelligent from the start. And the moment that that modeling of others begins, what we call in in larger, more complex animals, theory of mind becomes fundamental to the way intelligence develops. So, you know, these are really simple simulations that show how, you know, just persistence allows, you know, the modeling of of of of an environment to turn into learning chemotaxis in these fake bacteria. But of course, you know, in real life, you're not only learning about an environment that that exists in isolation like the like the sugar crystal, but actually all of your friends. Right? The moment you're reproducing, the greater part of your environment is is actually all of your all of the other things that that, you know, even your own reproduction is creating. Life is never a single player. Things like intelligence explosions in our lineage in the hominins and in cetaceans, and in bats and in a variety of other species are exactly this kind of runaway modeling of others resulting in, growth of brains and growth of of groups and and therefore that, you know, when we think about the growth of advanced intelligence, you know, in in in, you know, human societies or human brains, it's it's really that same sort of of symbiotic process happening at a much at a much higher level. Let's end there and and switch to, questions. I think there are, multiple different ways to represent the symbiotic. I think in the real biology, we maintain those hierarchical structures and that there are fundamental mathematical differences, how how you treat those embryos. And do you have any insight how we can implement that?…

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