Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
17 transcript-backed records
01 / prediction
“If it did emerge that way, then it would say, “Here’s why bacteria have got this charge on their membrane,” because it was there in a hydrothermal vent from the beginning.”
02 / belief
“What I think a feeling is then is effectively the electromagnetic fields generated by membrane potential, which is telling you what your physical metabolic state is in relation to the environment you’re in.”
03 / belief
“Maybe there is, but I think we have to look at the probability of certain things happening.”
04 / uncertainty
“Ursula Mittwoch argued that that was exactly the case. We don’t know for a fact that that’s true.”
05 / uncertainty
“I don’t know enough about coding to give a comparable example, but effectively you would be picking up a module which had some resemblance in terms of, “Okay, it fits into this part of the code.”
06 / prediction
“For most critters, most of the time it’s not going to work, but for one of them it does, and they will take over.”
07 / evaluation
“Only under certain conditions will you do better. So predictably, the endpoint is that it doesn’t work.”
08 / prediction
“I would expect that if you’ve got these same conditions on a wet, rocky planet, you’re going to be producing these same vents because it’s the same chemistry that’s going to happen.”
09 / evaluation
“If you’re starting with CO2 and hydrogen, what I’m saying is the metabolism is thermodynamically favored chemistry. This same chemistry will just go on happening because if you react hydrogen with CO2, and with another CO2 molecule, the parts of the molecules that are going to react are quite predictable.”
10 / prediction
“I think of CO2 as a Lego brick that you pluck out of the air and you bind it onto something.”
11 / commitment
“I will build this into the next time I’m writing a book and try to figure out how I do that better.”
12 / evaluation
“You mass-produce them and the chances are it’s going to work out okay because the ones that can swim best, for example, are the ones that are more likely to… That’s not strictly true, but you can imagine it along those lines.”
13 / prediction
“What I would say is if you’ve got a thousand planets with life on them, maybe life is going to be the same way 999 out of a thousand times because it’s going to be carbon-based, it’s going to be water, it’s going to be cells, it’s going to be charges, it’s going to be hydrogen and CO2, and you’re going to face the same constraints.”
14 / prediction
“I believe we’ll get there, which is why we’re trying to do it, but maybe we won’t, in which case, again, the hypothesis is wrong.”
15 / evaluation
“But there’s a deep problem which goes back. It’s the mind-body problem, but it was framed by David Chalmers as the hard problem of consciousness, which boils down, as my understanding of this is, to more or less that we don’t know what a feeling is in physical terms.”
16 / preference
“How did it arise in the first place? That was, for me, tremendously thrilling because it’s a way in, as a researcher, to the origin of life.”
17 / preference
“I like the fact that religions have searched for meaning and searched for origins.”