Chris Kempes: prediction

Transcript context

…I've just read your paper with David Krakauer, Multiple Paths to Life, and towards the end of the paper you said, we want to have a universal theory of life. Tell me about that. Yeah, so it's something that's been of interest for, you know, as almost as perhaps as long as human thought, right? What is life? How do we understand living things and so forth? That question has been more and less obvious to people over the history of science, where sometimes people say, of course, we know what life is, it's a frog, you see 1 there, and so forth. But what we're really after is what are the principles that go into a theory of the living, right? You know, how do we have a set of principles that helps us understand how life first came to be, how you get an origin of life, how that life starts to gain more complexity, how eventually it starts to add more and more intelligence, how you get new types of what are called major transitions in evolution as life gets bigger and more complicated? How eventually do you get new types of life, right? And so in that paper, we argue that from certain theoretical perspectives, human culture should be seen as life. It's just life living on a very strange substrate. That substrate is human minds. Language is the same sort of thing. We argue that in silico life, artificial life should also, should be no question that that counts. Again, it's just life living in a very weird substrate, the substrate of computers that are built by humans and so forth. And so our interest was really what sort of theories, what sort of principles help us understand all of those different cases, right? And in that paper, we're very careful to say we don't think we know what the theory is yet, we're far from it, but there's a style of thinking that hopefully can push us down that path. And we point to some new emerging theories that are sort of exciting. There are new theories of agency, there are new theories of semantic information. David Cracker and a bunch of colleagues have a paper on the information theory of individuality, which helps us understand what an individual is. You know, all this work that I and many collaborators do on scaling laws looks like something that we can start to build into theories of life. And in that paper, we say is that these are all ingredients, and at some point in the future, hopefully we'll have some projection of all these ingredients into some new thing that we'll call life. Maybe that's a set of equations, maybe that's a set of concepts, maybe it's, you know, more agency, less intelligence, we don't know. But we think we're in an exciting time where people are building quantitative theories to get at some of the ingredients, and again, looking at the history of science, there are many cases where all the ingredients were there, and then people figure out, oh, this is the right combination, this is the right projection to give us the theory that really gives us traction on something. So for example, he had this paper which was minds, brains and programs. And what he was basically saying is that the physical instantiation is very important. And if you remove the instantiation, then it doesn't work anymore. And you had this wonderful quote in the paper, you know, where you were saying that the materials on earth might be the universal life machine. Do we need the material? So I think…

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