Chris Kempes: prediction

Transcript context

…And does the convergence happen at multiple levels? So you know, just with this hierarchy that you proposed in mind, I can understand how the principle of least action or something will give rise to the convergence of certain patterns in different parts of the phylogeny. And then perhaps at the at the optimization level, we we might have a higher level of of, you know, more abstract form of convergence in different parts of the phylogeny. But I suppose what I'm driving to here is, do you think that there could be some some kind of information phylogeny which can eventually transcend the material substrate? Know, what does it resemble a basin of attraction where patterns can't really sort of migrate to very different materials? Or do you think there's something higher level going on which really allows patterns to move around? Wouldn't that be cool? Yeah. I think I think many people have a notion that that might be something like that if we can find the right projection, a general enough theory. I don't think it's something we currently have a ton of traction on, but maybe it is, I mean, people that are thinking very hard about, okay, so software evolution, how does that look like, biological evolution, you know, all these different things. Maybe someday we will find a notion where we realize, oh right, life just, you know, has this process, and then when we started to build software systems, it did exactly the same thing in terms of a bunch of people working on some open source piece of code that then had a very particular evolutionary dynamic. I don't think we know what those projections look like other than at these very coarse grained, what's the macro scale evolutionary dynamic. And so yeah, it's, there's still some fuzziness there, but I think the hope is that someday 1 can find that projection. I mean, I think in general, this is a very meta point, but I think in general theories are often, you know, good theories should either tell you a bunch of things that look different are actually just a projection onto 1 space when you see it at exactly the right angle, right? All the things line up, realize, oh, that was just 1 thing. Or theory should tell you, no, at the most fundamental level, these things are, are, you know, provably different. There's no way to project them into the same space. They're fundamentally different in some interesting way, or these are the similarities they share and these are the similarities they we know provably can't be shared by the 2 things. So that that to me is sort of the whole goal of theories to tell us what's the same but hiding in plain sight, where the sameness is hiding in plain sight, and what's fundamentally different. And similar to how we started the conversation in this paper, you said there are extant theories of of life. So comparing existing life, historical theories. So looking at the trajectories and principles. So abstract principles for all possible life. And we we are a little bit earth centric in in how we think about life. And the million dollar question for me is could we simulate life in a computer?…

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