Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Definitely not chemical. Chemistry is one substrate. Restricted to chemical. What about the third thing, which I think will be the hardest because you probably like it the most, is evolution or selection. Well, specifically it’s Darwinian evolution. And I think Darwinian evolution is a problem. But the reason that that definition is a problem is not because evolution is in the definition, but because the implication that most people would want to make is that an individual is alive. And the evolutionary process, at least the Darwinian evolutionary process, most evolutionary processes, they don’t happen at the level of individuals. They happen at the level of population. So again, you would be saying something like what we saw with the self-sustaining definition, which is that populations are alive, but individuals aren’t because populations evolve and individuals don’t. And obviously maybe you are alive because your gut microbiome is evolving. But Lex is an entity right now is not evolving by canonical theories of evolution. In assembly theory, which is attempting to explain life, evolution is a much broader thing.…

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