Chris Kempes: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah, so I think I think that's a very interesting point and you know, we would say, so a lot of the thinking about what is life has been trying to argue about lists of axioms, right? Life needs to have this and that and that, and then what you put in the list rules in and rules out what is life, and so some lists account for viruses and other lists don't. We really tried to argue in that paper that the dynamic of viruses is clearly living, and then we tried to point out that there's a really weird thing about parasitism, right, is how we view it. So if you think about a virus, like language or culture, it's an organism that has a very strange environment. That environment is a host like us, or like bacteria, you know, viruses infect bacteria as well. And so it's a very strange life form with a really complicated environment, and it, but we're a strange life form with a really complicated environment, right? We don't make our own energy directly, you know, it's, you you and I didn't sit outside in the sun for an hour and a half before this interview photosynthesizing and building up enough sugars to, know, have the mental energy to talk about this. We ate a bunch of vegetables and other things that did do all that work, right? And so we're already in some sense, all heterotrophs, all predators in some sense are a certain sort of parasite, right? We require other things that are doing the primary work of energy capture and transformation. We also have this internal microbiome, right? So we're a walking ecology. So we're both parasites and in ecology, and so our argument in that paper is if you take a cyanobacterium, which is just a small organism that makes energy directly from the sun, it's simple, it's self contained, it gets all of its energy away from the sun, maybe that thing is the most living thing. But as you move away from that towards viruses and us, you know, there's certain perspectives where you'd say we're not necessarily more living than a virus. There are other perspectives where we're clearly more living. Right? You and I are having this conversation, we've put things on the moon, you know, there's a certain sort of agency prediction about the future, technology construction that is clearly unique about many of the things that we do. But in the wrong in the wrong projection, again, thinking about this projection space, the wrong projection, us and viruses look like the same sort of parasites living on different types of really complicated environments. And so I think we can start to think about how that applies to AI and learning in general. And sort of to this other point you made about intelligence, I think a lot of us want to put all of the things that matter to life on a spectrum, right? Which is what physics does a good job of as well, which is to say, I want to say that something has 0 intelligence. I don't want to say, or I want to say it has 10 to the minus 20 intelligence in some units, right? physics does a good job of as well, which is to say, I want to say that something has 0 intelligence. I don't want to say, or I want to say it has 10 to the minus 20 intelligence in some units, right? I don't want to have this binary, is it intelligent or not? I want to be able to say, to arrange sort of all systems that might be intelligent on a spectrum, and maybe that spectrum goes 10 to the minus some huge number up to some really big number, 10 to the positive huge number, and we're on 1 end of the spectrum of that, but I think that's what we need for all of these things. For agency, for intelligence, for self replication, all of those need to be put on a spectrum so that we can fairly compare them. Yeah. 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?…

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