Chris Kempes: prediction

Transcript context

…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? Oh, it's a it's a very interesting question. So I think I think if you can get enough constraints, and you can get sort of enough complexity in the environment, then there's no reason you couldn't simulate life in a computer. Computer viruses we say are lifelike, right? They, you know, they get passed around and they have functions and they're hard to get rid of and all these other sorts of things, and some of them might even evolve and so forth, right? And so that's an interesting case. There are perpetual debates about whether anything counts as life in any context, right? Whether that's creating synthetic life in the lab or creating artificial life in the computer, there's endless debates about where the threshold would be. I think part of that is that we don't have a strong theory, right? So, you know, if you and I wrote down a 2 dimensional simulation for a gas in a computer and we asked, okay, is this obeying the second law of thermodynamics? You and I would immediately be able to say yes or no. There's just a calculation we could do and we could say, and not, obviously your computer's obeying the second law of thermodynamics, it's heating up the room and the air conditioner's fighting against that and all the rest, but even in the environment of the computer, someone could look at my code and run my simulation and say, you know, that's a really interesting simulation you created, but I don't think it obeyed, I don't think you've built in it obeying the second law of thermodynamics, right? Now if we wanted to try and do the same thing for a living system, that becomes a much harder conversation, right? I mean, if we wanted to say like, okay, really have a simulation of my computer that is life, then it's, then we're into this whole Axiom space where the thresholds are, and we just don't have a good compact theory to tell us when we've crossed that threshold. But I think in principle, there's just, there's no reason why with enough compute, with enough constraints, with enough complexity inside some artificial world, you could create, you know, you could create life. Now, there's a whole other question here about embodiment, and there are people who have, you know, strong commitments to a certain sort of materialism that would rule out certain computer simulations. That's part of a really interesting philosophical debate, right? And for me, I'm mostly interested in principles, and so I don't have strong commitments to those debates yet because I don't think we understand all the principles. Yeah, mean we intuitively know that the the causal graph will be different. The the the energy usage will be different. There are differences. But David said something interesting, which is you know, he thinks about life in terms of representation, inference and adaptivity. And it just brings up all of these interesting questions like, is a virus intelligent? Is culture intelligent? And with the virus 1 in particular, we kind of feel that it doesn't make sense to talk about it as being a life form when it's so obviously parasitic on its instantiation. And we are increasingly kind of going to this abstract level now where we're talking about things that supervene on the physical many levels down as being possibly agents or intelligent organisms in their own rights. And and just the language that we use, you know, it's the same thing in language models. We use mentalistic terms like beliefs and deception and thinking. And it's hard for us to think about this because the language that we use is so grounded in the way we do it.…

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