Sara Walker: belief

Transcript context

…So self-sustaining, chemical system, Darwinian evolution. What is self-sustaining? What’s so frustrating? Which aspect is frustrating to you, but it’s also those are very interesting words. Yeah, they’re all interesting words and together they sound really smart and they sound like they box in what life is. But you can use any of the words individually and you can come up with counterexamples that don’t fulfill that property. The self-sustaining one is really interesting, thinking about humans. We’re not self-sustaining dependent on societies. And so I find it paradoxical that it might be that societies, because they’re self-sustaining units, are now more alive than individuals are. And that could be the case, but I still think we have some property associated with life. That’s the thing that we’re trying to describe, so that one’s quite hard. And in general, no organism is really self-sustaining. They always require an environment, so being self-sustaining is coupled in some sense to the world around you. We don’t live in a vacuum, so that part’s already challenging. And then you can go to chemical system. I don’t think that’s good either. I think there’s a confusion because life emerges in chemistry that life is chemical. I don’t think life is chemical. I think life emerges in chemistry because chemistry is the first thing the universe builds where it cannot exhaust all the possibilities, because the combinatorial space of chemistry is too large. Well, but is it possible to have a life that is not a chemical system?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.