YouSaid · the spoken record

Lee Cronin

lines on the record: 276
first: 2022-03-11
most recent: 2022-03-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But it's fascinating. I mean, the team that did it, I'm really proud of their persistence. We made a chemical computer. It can solve little problems. It can solve traveling salesman problems, actually.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So the BZ reaction, you have an acid in there called melonic acid. And what happens is when it power, it's basically like a battery that powers it and it loses CO2. So decarboxylates, it's just a chemical reaction. What that means we have to do is continuously feed or we just keep the BZ reaction going in a long enough time so it's like it's reversible in time.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All connected to one another in like an analog computer, but being read out discreetly as the BZ reaction. So just to say the BZ reaction is a chemical oscillator. And what happened in each cell is it goes between red and blue. It's two Russians discovered it. Luzov Zeposkinsky, I think Beluzov first proposed it and everyone said, you're crazy. It breaks the second law. And Zaposinski said, no, it doesn't break the second law. It's consuming a fuel. And it's like there's a lot of chemistry hidden in the Russian literature, actually, just because Russians just wrote it in Russian. They didn't publish it in English-speaking journals.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Complexity of the system. And indeed, I mean, whether it's random or just non deterministic, and can we bake in that non-determinism at the beginning? I wonder, I'm trying to think about what is the encoding space. The encoding space is pretty big. We have 49 stir-ups of 49 cells, 49 chem bits.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what's happening is you're getting noise. So, the thing is, You've got this BZ reaction that gives on, off, on, off, on, off, but there's also awake. and those wakes constructively interfere in such a non-trivial way. Non deterministic and the non determinism in the system gives very rich dynamics. And I was wondering if I could physically make a chemical computer with this CA that gives me something different that I can't get in a silicon representation of a CA where all the states are clean because you don't have the noise trailing into the next round. You just have the state.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Game of life with a BZ reactions, each cell would pulse on and off, on and off, on and off. We have a little stirr bars and we have little gates. And we actually played Conway's Game of Life in there, and we got structures in that structures in that game from the chemistry that you wouldn't expect from the actual CA. So that's kind of cool.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we agree. So let's take it back a second. So take the logistic map or something, logistic equation, where you have this equation, which is you don't know what's going to happen to n plus 1, but once you've done n plus 1, you know for all time. You can't predict it. For me, CEA is a logistic equation feel similar. And I think what's incredibly interesting, and I share your kind of wonder at running a CA, but also I'm saying, well, what is it about the boundary conditions and the way I'm running that calculation? So in my group with my team, we actually made a chemical CA. We made game of life. We actually made a physical grid. I haven't been able to publish this paper. It's been trapped in purgatory for a long time. You wrote up as a paper.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I haven't quite got there yet. I was playing on the aeroplane coming over. I just realized I have no idea what real numbers are, really. And I was like, well, I do actually have some notion of what real numbers are. And I think thinking about real numbers as functions rather than numbers is more appropriate. And then if you then apply that to CAs, then you're saying, well, actually, why am I seeing this complexity in this rule? You've got this deterministic system and yet you get this incredible structure coming out. Well, isn't that what you'd get with any real number as you apply it as a function and you're trying to read it out to an arbitrary position? And I wonder if CAs are just helping me my misunderstanding of CAs might be helping me understand them in terms of real numbers. I don't know what you think”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. But I mean, actually, maybe I'm doing myself a bit too down. It was just as a theory was coming through and I didn't really know how to explain it. But we are going to use assembly theory and CAs instead of autometer, but I wanted to, what I was really curious about is why people marvel. I mean, you marvel at CAs and their complexity. And I said, well. Hang on, that complexity is baked in because if you play the game of life in a CA, you have to run it on a computer. You have to do a number of operations, put in the boundary conditions. So is it surprising that you get this structure out? Is it manufactured by the boundary conditions? And it is interesting because I think cellular automata running them is teaching me something about what real numbers are and aren't.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Inside the human mind. Yeah. So I really admire Stephen Wolfram. I think he's a genius. Clearly a genius. And Trappton is actually a problem with being so smart is you get trapped in your own mind, right? And I tried to actually convince Stephen that assembly theory wasn't nonsense. He was like, no, it's just nonsense. I was a little bit sad by that.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was one of the things I wanted to do in my origin of life reaction, right? Basically have a reactor that's basically just randomly enumerating through chemical space and have some kind of cycle. And then read out the molecules reading out using a mass spectrometer. Then convert that to text and publish it on Twitter and then wait until it says I'm alive. I reckon that Twitter account would get a lot of followers. And I'm still trying to convince my group that we should just make an origin of life Twitter account where it's going. And it's like, hello testing. I'm here.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in the end, we had to take them off Twitter and they just communicated via a server because it was just there were people saying you could still find it. Cronin Lab 1 and Cronin Lab 2 on Twitter. And it was like make move, wait, you know, mix A and B, wait 10 seconds. Answer blue, you know.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were doing it through Twitter, and Twitter blanned them a couple of times. I said, come on, you've got a couple of robots doing chemistry. It's really cool. Stop banning them.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I wanted to make it groovier, and I said, look, let's have him competing. So playing a game of hex. And so when the robot doesn't experiment, and the more blue the die, the more it gets, the higher chance it gets to make the move it wants on the hex board. So if it gets a red color, it's like it gets downweighted and the other robot. And so what the robots could do is they play each player move. And because the fitness function or the optimization function was to make the color blue, they started to invent reactions weren't on the list. And they did this by not cleaning because we made cleaning optional. So when one robot realized if it didn't clean its pipes, he could get blue more quickly. And the other robot realized that. So it was like getting dirty as well”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So robot mom would say, I'm going to do experiment one, and the other robot says, I'll do experiment 100. And then they cross it off. But I wanted to make it.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what we did is we built this robot. And doing dye chemistry is really easy. You can just take two molecules, react them together, and change color. And what I wanted to do is have a palette of different molecules. You could react commentorily and get different colors. So you've got two robots. And I went, wouldn't it be cool if the robots basically shared the same list of reactions to do? And they said, Oh, and because then you could do a kind of multi-core chemistry. Like, they weren't, so you could have two chemical reactions going on at once, and they could basically outsource the problem.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What else? The team that did it were brilliant. I really think they still have PTSD from doing it because I said this is a workshop. What I'd often do is I have about 60 people on my team. and occasionally before lockdown I would say I'm a bit bored we're gonna we're gonna have a workshop on something who wants to come and then basically about 20 people turn up to my office and I say we're gonna do this mad thing and then it would just self-organize and some of them would say no I'm not doing this and then you get left with the the happy dozen”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what the Yeah, let's go back. So the two robots Each robot was doing dye chemistry. So making RGB, red, green, blue, red, green, blue, red, green, blue. And they could just choose from experiments to do red, green, blue. Initially, I said to my group, we need to make two chemical robots that play chess. And my group were like, that's too hard. No.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it's basically a hexagonal board, and you try and basically color each hex element on the board, each hexagon, and you try and get from one side to the other, and the other one tries to block you.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We just have to make one. I actually, a few years ago, I made some robots that talk to each other, chemical robots that played the game of hex, invented by John Nash by doing chemistry. And they communicated by Twitter, which were experiments they were doing. And they had a lookup table for experiments. And Robot One said, I'm doing experiment 10. And the other's robot go, okay, I'll do experiment one then.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've just given me a brilliant idea. I wonder if there's a TikTok account that's just dedicated to putting out CA rules, and if there isn't, we should make one”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Infrastructure. So the CA. So when John von Neumann and Conway and Feynman were doing CAs, we're doing on paper. Just drawing them on paper”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The transition from a boring world or a world in which there is no selection. So I wonder if free will has something to do with selection and models and also the models you're generating the brain and also the amount of memory your working memory have available at any one time to generate counterfactuals.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I sometimes do that. I sometimes I try and mess up my reality in unusual ways by just doing things because I'm bored, but not bored. I'm not expressing this very well. I think that this is a really interesting problem that perhaps the hard sciences don't really understand, that they are responsible for because the question about how life emerged and how intelligence emerges and consciousness and free will, they're all ultimately boiling down to some of the same mechanics, I think. My feeling is that they are the same problem again and again and again.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is maybe okay. But I do think that I have the ability to make decisions and I like my decisions. In fact, I mean, this is an argument I have with some people that some days I feel I have no free will and it's just an illusion. And this is one, and it makes me more radical, if you like. I get to explore more of the state space. And I'm like, I'm going to try and affect the world now. I'm really going to ask the question that maybe I dare not ask or dare not or do the thing I dare not do. And that allows me to kind of explore more.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to go this way. And you probably don't know why. I think free will is actually very complex interaction between your conscious and your conscious brain. And I think the reason why we're arguing about it is so interesting, some people outsource their free will to that unconscious brain. And some people try and overthink the free will in the conscious brain. I would say that Sam Harris has realized his conscious brain doesn't have free will, but his unconscious brain does. That's my guess, right?”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a way of basically mapping out a series of. So what will is about, let's not call it free will, what's will is about is to have a series of Decisions equally weighted in front of you, and those decisions aren't necessarily energy minimization, those decisions are a function of the model you've made in your mind, you're in your simulation. And the way you've interacted in reality, and also other interactions that you're having with other individuals and happenstance. And I think that there's a little bit of delay in time. So I think what you're able to do is say, well, I'm going to do the counterfactual. I've done all of them.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, I then would say I'd get him to play a game of cards with me and I'll work out the conditions on which he says no, and then I'll get him to the conditions he says yes and then I'll trap him in his logical inconsistency with that argument. Because at some point when he loses enough money or the prospect of losing enough money.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that he's, I don't know, I'd love to ask him whether he really believes that and then we could play some games. Oh, yeah.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that that's the question that I want to answer. And I know you want to answer it. And I think it's so profound. Let me have a go at it. I would say that I don't take the stance of Sam Harris because I think Sam Harris Do you know what I mean?”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are unpredictably predictable or predictably unpredictable. Predictably unpredictable within a constraint on the trajectory we're on”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you have these constraints in your past, they limit what you were able to do in the future, but you can use them to do amazing things. Let's say a poppy plant and I'm creating some opiates. Opiates are really interesting molecules. I mean, they're obviously great for medicine, great cause, great problems in society. But let's imagine we fast forward a billion years. What will opiate the opioids look like in a billion years? Well, we can guess because we can see how those proteins will evolve and we can see how the secondary metabolites will change. But they can't go radical. They can't suddenly become, I don't know, like a molecule that you find in an OLED and a display. They will have limited the causal chain that produced them. And that's what I'm getting at, saying you're...”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, not tightly. I do think I have some will, and I think I am an agent, and I think I can interact and I can play around with the models I have of the world and the cost functions, right? And I can hack my own cost functions, which means I have a little bit of free will. But as much as I want to do stuff in the universe, I don't think I could suddenly say, I mean, actually, this is ridiculous because now I say I could try and do it, right? It's like I'm suddenly give up everything and become a rapper tomorrow, right? Maybe I could try that, but I don't have sufficient agency to make that necessarily happen on a trajectory. So when in Dragon's Layer, I know that I have some trajectories that I can play with, where Sartre realized he thought that he had no assembly, no memory. He could just leap across and do everything. And Nietzsche said, okay, I realize I don't have full freedom, but I have some freedom. And the Semye theory basically says that. It says,”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like the black mirror, the first interactive, where they had all the several million kind of permutations of the movie that you could select on Netflix. I've forgotten the name of it. So this was exactly that in the Laserdisc. You basically go left, go right, fight the ogre, slay the dragon. And when you flick the joystick at the right time, it just goes to the next animation to play. It's not really generating it. And I play that game and I knew I was being had.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a role playing game, but really good graphics and won the first laser discs. And when you actually flick the stick, it's like it was like a graphical adventure game with animation. And when I played this game, I really, you know, you could get through the game in 12 minutes if you knew what you were doing without making mistakes. Just play the disc, play this, play the disc. So it was just about timing. And actually it was a complete fraud because all the animation has been pre-recorded on the disc.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dragon's Layer, I knew I was being conned, right? Dragon Slayer, when you play the game, you're lucky that you grew up in a basically procedurally generated world.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Satur was like believed in absolute freedom and that he could do whatever he wanted in his imagination. And Nietzsche understood that his freedom was somewhat more limited. And it kind of takes me back to this computer game that I played when I was 10. So I think it's called Dragon's Layer.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that's it. That's all it is. So assembly theory doesn't lower any of the importance of complexity theory, but it allows us to go across domains and start to compare things, compare the complexity of a molecule of a microprocessor, of the text you're writing, of the music you may compose.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not magic. It must come from the boundary conditions you put in. So all I'm saying is a lot of the complexity that we see is a direct read of the constraints we put in, but we just don't understand. So as I said earlier to the poor origin of life chemists, origin of life is a scam, I would say lots of the complexity calculation theories, a bit of a scam, because we put the constraints in, but we don't count them correctly. And I'm wondering if...”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incredible, but then I realized that actually we were cheating. We were putting in the boundary conditions all the time. We're putting in information. And so when people talk to me about the complexity of things, I say, but relative what, how do you measure them? So my attempt, my small attempt, naive attempt, because there's many greater minds than mine on the planet right now thinking about this properly. And you've had some of them on podcasts, right? They're just absolutely fantastic. But I'm wondering if we might be able to reformat the way we would explore algorithmic complexity using assembly. What's the minimum number of constraints we need in our system for this to unfold? So whether it's like, you know, if you take some particles and put them in a box at a certain box size, you get quasi-crystallinity coming out, right? But that emerged.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gone. But if you embrace the bottom up with assembly, those states, and you then understand the causal chain that gives rise to the emergence. So what I think assembly will help us do is understand weak emergence at the very least. And maybe allow us to crack open complexity in a new way. And I've been fascinated with complexity theory for many years. I mean, as soon as I could, you know, I learned of the Mandelbrot set and I could just type it up in my computer and run it and just show it and see it kind of unfold. It was just this kind of this mathematical reality that existed in front.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that the problem I have right now is, I mean, you're right, we can, about time as well, the problem is I have this hammer called assembly. And everything I see is a nail. So now let's just apply it to all sorts of things. We take the Bernard instability, the Bernard instability is you have oil, you heat up oil, let's say, on a frying pan. When you get convection, you get honeycomb patterns. Take the formation of snowflakes, right? Take the emergence of a tropical storm or the storm on Jupiter. When people say, let's talk about complexity in general, what they're saying is, let's take this collection of objects that are correlated in some way and try and work out how many moving parts there are, how this got. So what people have been doing for a very long time is taking complexity and counting what they've lost, calculating the entropy. And the reason why I'm pushing very hard on assembly is entropy tells you how much you've lost. It doesn't tell you the microstates.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I would say that Lee Smolin, I don't want to speak for Lee. I'm talking to Lee about this. I think Lee also is an agreement that time has to be fundamental. But I think he goes further. Even in space, I don't think you can go back to the same place in space. I've been to Austin a few times now. It's my, I think third time I've been to Austin. Is Austin in the same place? No. The solar system is moving through space. Not back in the same space. Locally, I am. Every event in the universe is unique.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was at the same time as Newton, he kind of got stuck. I think Leibniz actually invented his assembly theory. He gave soul the soul that you see in objects wasn't the mystical soul, it is assembly. It is a fact there's been a history of objects related. And without the object in the past, this object wouldn't exist. There is a lineage and there is conserved structures, causal structures have given rise to those.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They can't. The only way I can reconcile causation is having a fundamental time because this allows me to have a deterministic universe that is creates novelty. And there's so many things to unpack here. But let's go back to the point. You said, does can assembly theory work with emergent time? Sure, it can, but it doesn't give me a deep satisfaction about how causation and assembly gives rise to these objects that move through time and space. And again, what am I saying to bring it back? I can say without fear, you know, take this water bowl and look at this water bowl and look at the features on it, this writing. You've got a load of them. I know that causal structures gave rise to this. In fact, I'm not looking at just one water bottle here. I'm looking at every water bottle that's ever been conceived of by humanity. This here is a special object. In fact, Leibniz knew this, you know. Leibniz.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It doesn't exist at the microscale. Well, that clearly is wrong because if causation has to emerge at the macro scale, life cannot emerge. So how does life emerge? Life requires molecules to bump into each other, produce replicators, those replicators need to produce polymers. There needs to be cause and effect at the molecular level. There needs to be an erdit, non agurdic to an agirdic transition at some point. Those replicators have consequence, material consequence in the universe. Physicists say, oh, you know what? I'm going to have a bunch of particles in a box. I'm going to think about it in a Newtonian way, in a quantum way, and I'll add on an arrow time so I can label things and causation will happen magically later. Well, how? Explain causation.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so I accept that. So let's go back a second because it's a kind of, I wanted to drop the time bomb at this part because I think we can carry on discussing it for many, many, many, many, many days, many months. But I'm happy to accept that it might be wrong. But what I would like to do is imagine a universe where time is fundamental and time is emergent and ask, let's just then talk about causation because physicists require that causation, so this is where I'm going to go, causation emerges.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's say, I'm walking through the wall. Why should I grow up in a world where time, I don't go back in time. I don't meet myself in the past. There are no one.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The universe is remembering cause in the past. And those structures will have effects in the future. So suddenly a new type of time emerges at that point, which has a direction. And I think Sean Carroll, at this point, might even turn the podcast back on and go, okay, I can deal with that, that's fine. But I'm just basically trying to condense the conversation and say, hey, let's just have time fundamental and see how that screws up people's minds.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, right now appears to work. I appear to be able to measure objects of high assembly in a mass spectrometer and look at their abundance and, you know, all that's fine, right? It's a nice, if nothing else, it's a nice way of looking at how molecules can compress things. Now, am I saying that a time has to be fundamental, not emergent for assembly theory to work? No. I think I'm saying that the universe, it appears that the universe has many different ways of using time. You could have three different types of time. You could just have time that's, the way I would think of it, if you want, if you want to hold on to emergent time, I think that's fine, let's do that for a second. Hold on to immersion time, and the universe is just doing its thing. Then assembly time only exists when the universe starts to write memories through bonds. So let's just say there's rocks running around, you know, when the bond happens and selection starts, suddenly...”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source