Chris Kempes: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. And I think it's possible to have categories and spectrums at the same time, so you can have spectrums inside the categories. Cause I'm very interested when we look at the phylogeny, we see these phase changes and maybe emergence is a term we might use. So for example, going from abiotic to biotic. Or also I speak to a lot of GoFi people and they adopt a form of cognitive chauvinism where they say humans have cognitive properties that other things don't. So you know, we can have a belief in a strong sense. Our form of intelligence and agency is some something to do with the types of computation we can do. So we, you know, at some point, we become Turing machines. We have this Prometheus moment with language or or something like that. So I suppose the question is, what triggers these Promethean moments where we see huge changes? Yeah. So I think I think that is important, right? That even if you have a metric like I was just describing, that metric can have sudden jumps. And it's important then to talk about what those jumps are. I mean, there's a reason we call water, water and ice ice, right? You can write down an order parameter and you get a jump, and that's cool, right? That's really nice. So I think we've been doing a lot of work to try and understand why you have those jumps over the history of life. And what we typically see is that you have some set of physical constraints that matter for a class of organisms, that predicts how things will change as the organism gets bigger or smaller, and we have nice theory predicting that. Those theories also tell you that at the boundary of those scaling relationships, you often get these strong asymptotic behaviors where things go off to infinity or 0. There's some hard limit to a category of organization, of organisms. And so that creates a wall, an evolutionary wall, and that is where a phase transition is gonna happen. Right? You need to do something to jump over the wall. Now, I'm not sure you always jump over the wall. It's not clear to me you always get these evolutionary transitions, and I'll explain why in a second, but if you're going to get bigger than a certain scale, it says you need to invent a certain sort of architecture that gets you away from that, and that architecture is characteristically different. So going from bacteria to unicellular eukaryotes, you have to put 1 prokaryote inside another prokaryote. Looks like it was a bacteria inside an archaea. That's a new sort of architecture, right? Now suddenly you have 2 genomes. You have more internal membranes. There's something really different happening there. When you go to multicellularity, true multicellularity where you're differentiating cell types creating organs and tissues and all the rest, not just living in a colony, that's another sort of organization that requires a different kind of regulation, communication, developmental programs that get you there, that's another phase transition. Interestingly, when we look at when those jumps happen, they typically happen around huge shifts in Earth history, so when the environment of the planet radically changes. So we have a paper showing that Snowball Earth, which is this period in Earth history, it happened a few times where the planet almost completely covers itself in ice, that we think that induces multicellularity, that a bunch of physical conditions become just right then to get bigger and become complex multicellulars, you discover that, and then when the world thaws out again, that is around and spreads and becomes bigger and you've found that solution. So that's a case where, yes, there are these transitions, We understand what the wall on 1 side is, and then maybe sometimes you need an environmental inducement to jump the wall. You invoked David Deutsch in in your paper. So he had this book, The The Beginning of Infinity, and he spoke about the importance of separating matter and logic. What did he mean by that?…

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