Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
22 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“I think he ended up committing suicide and actually he left his death note on the descent of man, so he was a really deep person.”
02 / belief
“I think if assembly theory is an accurate depiction of the physics of life, it should shed a lot of light on those problems.”
03 / belief
“What I’ve tried really hard to do is not assume that I think life is anything except hold on to the patterns and structures that seem to be the sort of consistent ways that we talk about this thing.”
04 / belief
“I think that’s the space that Stephen is talking about when he talks about his ruliad and these hypergraphs of all these possible computations. But I wouldn’t take that as my base reality because I think again, computation itself, this abstract property computation, is not at the base of reality.”
05 / belief
“I guess that’s what motivates me as a scientist. And so oftentimes, when I look at open problems like the nature of life or consciousness or what is intelligence or are there souls or whatever question that we have that we feel like we aren’t even on the tip of answering yet, I think we have a lot more work to do to really understand the answers to these questions.”
06 / belief
“A lot of my, what happens in my mind when I’m thinking about ideas is I’ve been presented with this information about how people think about things, and I try to go around to different communities and hear the ways that different, whether it’s hanging out with a bunch of artists, or philosophers, or scientists thinking about things.”
07 / belief
“I think there is some deep underlying explanatory framework that will tell us about the nature of life in the universe and will allow us to identify life that we can’t yet recognize because it’s too different.”
08 / belief
“If I knew how Lee’s brain work, I think I would understand a more about the universe.”
09 / belief
“I think if you’re thinking about this thinking about living things as these giant causal structures or these objects that are deep in time or whatever language we end up using to describe it seems to me that consciousness is about the fact that we have a conscious experience is because we are these temporally extended objects.”
10 / belief
“I think the thing that’s perplexing for me about these kind of examples is effectively the ant’s dead, but it’s staying alive now because piloted by this fungus.”
11 / belief
“I think there’s not, I mean it very purposefully because a particular instantiation of a language model trained on a particular data set becomes a crystal of the language at that time it was trained, but obviously we’re iterating with the technology and evolving it.”
12 / belief
“I think life emerges in chemistry because chemistry is the first thing the universe builds where it cannot exhaust all the possibilities, because the combinatorial space of chemistry is too large.”
13 / belief
“We have ways of thinking about it in assembly theory that I think are pretty rigorous.”
14 / belief
“I think too few people think about the aesthetics they build for themselves in the morning and how they carry it in the world and the way that other people interact with that because they put clothes on and they don’t think about clothes as carrying function.”
15 / belief
“I think we have to get rid of the notion of an individual as being relevant. And this is really difficult because a lot of the ways that we think about life, like the fundamental unit of life is the cell, individuals are alive, but we don’t think about how gray that distinction is.”
16 / belief
“Oh, if it’s not chemical. So I think some of the things that have evolved on our biosphere I would call as much alive as chemistry, as a cell, but they seem much more abstract.”
17 / belief
“I think for me, the frontier in modern physics, where the new physics lies is not in high energy particle physics, it’s not in quantum gravity, it’s not in any of these sort of traditionally sold, “This is going to be the newest deepest insight we have into the nature of reality.”
18 / belief
“I think most of the things about understanding anything about what we are embedded in time.”
19 / belief
“I think you can build a theory acknowledging that you’re an observer inside the universe.”
20 / belief
“I think the first thing is the observation that life seems to be the only thing in the universe that builds complexity in the way that we see it here. And complexity is obviously a loaded term, so I’ll just use assembly instead because I think assembly is more precise.”
21 / belief
“Yeah. It is in part an accident because I think some of the structure that gets generated is driven a bit by randomness.”
22 / belief
“I don’t believe in infinity as a physical thing, but I think as a receding horizon, I think because the universe is getting bigger, you can never know all of it.”