Sara Walker: belief

Transcript context

…One of the possible titles you were thinking about originally for the book is The Hard Problem of Life, reminiscent of the hard problem of consciousness. You are saying that assembly theory is supposed to be answering the question about what is life. Let’s go to the other hard problems. You also say that’s the easiest of the hard problems is the hard problem of life. What do you think is the nature of intelligence and consciousness? Do you think something like assembly theory can help us understand that? I think if assembly theory is an accurate depiction of the physics of life, it should shed a lot of light on those problems. In fact, I sometimes wonder if the problems of consciousness and intelligence are at all different than the problem of life, generally. I’m of two minds of it, but I in general try to… The process of my thinking is trying to regularize everything into one theory, so pretty much every interaction I have is like, “Oh, how do I fold that into…” I’m just building this giant abstraction that’s basically trying to take every piece of data I’ve ever gotten in my brain into a theory of what life is. Consciousness and intelligence are obviously some of the most interesting things that life has manifest. I think they’re very telling about some of the deeper features about the nature of life. It does seem like they’re all flavors of the same thing. But it’s interesting to wonder at which stage does something that we would recognize as life in a canonical silly human way and something that we would recognize as intelligence, at which stage does that emerge? At which assembly index does that emerge? Which assembly index is a consciousness something that you would canonically recognize as consciousness?…

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