Blaise Agüera y Arcas: evaluation

Transcript context

…Symbiosis is not symbiogenesis. Like, you know, what is the thing that you would claim is kind of like, you know, a good insight for how, you know, A and B solve being A and B in symbiosis and they become something else. The fact that that phase transitions don't come from R alone, you know, but but you have to look at k. Now you you do you do get these these runaway modes, right, which which tell you that something is about to is about to happen. But in order to understand that phase transition, right, in other words, in order to see that a major evolutionary transition has occurred, right, to put it in biological terms, you you actually have to understand the physics of k. It's only by understanding the physics of k that you can do the theory that lets you, you know, predict and understand what is going on right here. So, you know, if you model a body as just a bunch of bacteria, then it's not wrong, but but then, you know, it's invisible to you that, you know, that something amazing happened when we became multicellular, or when eukaryotes formed out of out of out of bacteria. So this allows higher order modeling. And and in particular, by the way, that higher order modeling, you know, if we just take the subjective perspective for a moment, if you are 1 of those bodies, if you are 1 of those people, then, you know, you're not gonna survive very well if you're only modeling other people as collections of bacteria. Right? You have to build higher order models of them because that becomes an essential part of your umwelt, and you have to simplify or coarse grain the world in order to build a model that is that is ecologically relevant to you. So, you know, I'm I'm kind of mixing here a a subjective and an and an objective perspective, but the subjective perspective ultimately is super important. You know, it's a little bit similar to like why do we need temperature and pressure in physics? You know, those don't exist if we just look at the microscopics, but it's only by by coarse graining and looking at the larger scale that you can understand thermodynamics. And in the same way, it's only by zooming out and looking at the symbiogenesis that you can understand the dynamics of transitions, of phase transitions, METs, and smaller and coarser grained models that, you know, where where higher orders of things emerge. Well, actually, that's exactly what I was doing like 30 years ago.…

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