YouSaid · the spoken record

Sara Walker

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2024-06-13

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2024-06-13

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1. “Yes. And I think my greatest wish in life is to somehow contribute to an idea that transforms the way that we think. Like, you know, I have my problem I want to solve, but like the thing that gives me joy about it is really changing something and ideally getting to a deeper understanding of how the world works and what we are.”

   2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “And being able to deliver that to people, I think, is one of the biggest joys that I have. It's just like maybe it's that sense of mystery, like to share that there's something beyond the frontier of how we understand and we might be able to see it.”

   2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Yeah, so I think I love the way it makes me feel to have ideas that I think are novel. And I think the dual side of that is the painful process of trying to communicate that with other human beings to test if they have any kind of reality to them. And I also love that process. I love trying to figure out how to explain really deep abstract things that I don't think that we understand and trying to understand them with other people. And I also love the shock value of this kind of idea we were talking about before of like being on the boundary of like what we understand. And so people can kind of see what you're seeing, but they haven't ever sought that way before. And I love the shock value that like people have, like that immediate moment of recognizing that there's something beyond the way that they thought about things before.”

   2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “So there's no such thing as experimental platonism. But if you think math is an object that emerged in our biosphere, you can start experimenting with that idea. And that to me is really interesting, like to think about what people, I mean, mathematicians do think about math sometimes as an experimental science, but to think about math itself as object for study by physicists rather than a tool physicists used to describe reality. It becomes the part of reality they're trying to describe to me as a deeply interesting inversion.”

   2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Well, it may not be true. It may be something that allows me to build better theories I can test. Try to understand something objective.”

   2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Right, and you can say that, and that's an interesting philosophy, but again, this is sort of like pushing on the boundaries of like the way that we understand things. I think it's more constructive to say the fact that I can talk about those things is telling me something about the structure of where I actually live and where I exist.”

   2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Sense to talk about things that exist outside of the universe if you're talking about them, you're already talking about something that exists inside the universe and is part of the universe and is part of like what the universe is building.”

   2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Oh, there's nothing outside the universe. So I have a very, I am a very, like, I am like the most physicalist that like anyone could be. So like for me, everything exists in our universe. And like I like to think, everything exists here. So even when we talk about the multiverse, I don't like to me it's not like there's all these other universes outside of our universe that exist. The multiverse is a concept that exists in human minds here and it allows us to have some counterfactual reasoning to reason about our own cosmology and therefore it's causal in our biosphere to understand the reality that we live in and building better theories. But I don't think that the multiverse is something like and also math. I don't think there's a platonic world that mathematical things live in. I think mathematical things are here on this planet. Like I don't think it makes.”

   2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Right. So, well, I think there's sort of two questions embedded here. I think the one that we can answer by answering life is why certain things exist and others don't. But I think the sort of ultimate question, the sort of like prime mover question of why anything exists, we will not be able to answer.”

   2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “It is the same. Well, that's sort of like I try to fold all of the questions into that question because I think that one's really hard. And I think the nature of existence is really hard.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Your free will can't be instantaneous. So for example, like I'm sitting here talking to you right now, I can't be in the UK and I can't be in Arizona, but I could plan, I could execute my free will over time because free will is a temporal feature of life to be there tomorrow or the next day if I wanted to.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “It's also not just the randomness. There's two features one is the randomness helps generate some novelty and some flexibility, but it's also that like because you're the structure that's deep in time, you have this combinatorial history that's you. And I think about time and assembly theory not as linear time, but as combinatorial time. So if you have all of the structure that you're built out of, you in principle, you know, your future can be combinations of that structure. You obviously need to persist yourself as a coherent you. So you want to optimize for a combination like a future in that combinatorial space that still includes you most of the time for most of us. And when you make those kinds, and then that gives you a space to operate in. And that's your sort of horizon where your free will can operate.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “It's the fact that you're a deterministic structure living in a random background. And also all of that selection bundled in you allows you to select on possible futures. So that's where your will comes from. And there's just always a little bit of randomness because the universe is getting bigger. And this idea that the past is and the present is not large enough yet to contain the future. The extra structure has to come from somewhere. And some of that is because outside of those giant causal structures that are things like us, it's fucking random out there. And it's scary. And we're all hanging on to each other because the only way to hang on to each other, like the only way to exist is to like cling on to all of these causal structures that we happen to co-inhabitate existence with and try to keep reinforcing each other's existence.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “So you can't live in all those universes. You'd have to go all the way back to the very beginning of the universe and retrace everything again to be a different you.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “No, it's random at the bottom, right? But like this randomness that we see at the bottom of reality that is quantum mechanics, I think people have assumed that that is reality. And what I'm saying is all those things you see in many worlds, all those versions of you, just collect them up and bundle them up. And like they're all you. And what has happened is, you know, like elementary particles don't have, they don't live in a deterministic universe, the things that we study in quantum experiments. They live in this fuzzy random space. But as that structure collapsed and started to build structures that were deterministic and evolved into you, you are a very deterministic microscopic object. And you can look down on that universe that doesn't have time in it that random structure. And you can see that all of these possibilities look possible, but they don't look, they're not possible for you because you're constrained by this giant causal structural history.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “It's very gigantic. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, that's consistent with many worlds, right? Because there's this constant branching. But it doesn't really have a directionality to it. I don't know many worlds is weird. So my interpretation of reality is like, if you fold it up, like all that bifurcation of many worlds and you just fold it into the structure that is you and you just said you are all of those many worlds. And like that sort of, you know, like like your history, like converged on you, but like you're actually an object exists that's like that, you know, was selected to exist and you're self-consistent with the other structures. So like the quantum mechanical reality is not the one that you live in. It's this very deterministic classical world and you're carving a path through that space. But I don't think that you're constantly branching into new spaces. I think you are that space.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Right, or like the theory of gravitation, for example. Like when we invented that theory, we only knew about the planets in our solar system. And now, you know, many centuries later, we know about all these planets around other stars and black holes and other things that we could never have anticipated. So, and then we can ask questions about them. Like we wouldn't have been asking about singularities and like can they really be physical things in the universe several hundred years ago? That question couldn't exist.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “But you couldn't have been asking this at the origin of life, right? Because obviously, like, you wouldn't have existed at the origin of life. But like the question of intelligence and artificial general, like those questions did not exist then. And so they in part existed because the universe invented a space for those questions to exist. Through evolution”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “I don't know how big the frontier is. I don't actually think it has a limit. 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.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “You know why I use that though? I'll tell you why my brain went there is because, you know, anybody that gets an education in physics has this sort of trope about how all the great physicists did their best work in their 20s. And then you don't do any good work after that. And I always thought it was kind of funny because for me, physics, Is Is not complete. It's not nearly complete, but most physicists think that we understand most of the structure of reality. And so I think I actually think I put this in the book somewhere, but this idea to me that societies would discover everything while they're young is very consistent with the way we talk about physics right now. But I don't think that's actually the way that things are going to go. And you're finding that people that are making major discoveries”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “No, we can't, but this is why I'm okay with having a finite lifetime. And, you know, one of the reasons I'm okay with that, actually. Goes back to this issue of the fact that we're resource bound. We live in a, you know, like we have a finite amount of material, whatever way you want to define material. I think like for me, you know, material is time, material is information. But we have a finite amount of material. If time is a generating mechanism, it's always going to be finite because the universe is, you know, like it's a resource that's getting generated, but it has a size. Which means that all the things that could exist don't exist. And in fact, most of them never will. So death is a way to make room in the universe for other things to exist that wouldn't be able to exist otherwise. So if the universe over its entire temporal history wants to maximize the number of things, wants as a hard word, maximize a hard word, all these things are approximate, but wants to maximize the number of things that can exist, the best way to do it is to make recursively embedded stacked objects like us that have a lot of structure and a”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “I mean, I think it does require life to use new energy sources in order to expand the way it is. So that part's accurate. But I think this sort of process of life being the mechanism that the universe creatively expresses itself generates novelty, explores the space of the possible is really the thing that's most deeply intrinsic to life. And so, you know, these sort of energy consuming scales of technology, I think, is missing the sort of actual feature that's most prominent about any alien life that we might find, which is that it's literally our universe, our reality trying to creatively express itself and trying to find out what can exist and trying to make it exist.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “I don't really like the Kardashv scale. And it goes back to like, I don't like a lot of the narratives about life because they're very like, you know, survival of the fittest, energy consuming, this, that, and the other thing. It's very like, I don't know, sort of old world, you know, like conqueror mentality.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “The technosphere with the way that our planet is undergoing another transition, just like at the origin of life when geochemistry transitioned to biology, which is the global, for me, it was a planetary scale transition. It was a multi-scale thing that happened from the scale of chemistry all the way to planetary cycles. It's happening now, all the way from individual humans to the internet, which is a global technology and all the other things. Like there's this multi-scale process that's happening and transitioning us globally. And it is really like, it's a dramatic transition. It's happening really fast. And we're living in it”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “It's like when the first cell split into two. That's what I was talking about when a planet reproduces itself, the technosphere emerges enough understanding. It's like this recursive, like the entire history of life is just recursion, right? So you have an original life event. It evolves for 4 billion years, at least on our planet. It evolves a technosphere. The technologies themselves start to become... Having this property we call life, which is the phase we're undergoing now, it solves the origin of itself, and then it figures out how that process all works, understands how to make more life, and then can copy itself onto another planet. So the whole structure can reproduce itself. And so the origin of life is happening again right now on this planet.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “Or when we're part of an integrated system that's actually functioning together in some kind of cohesive way. So even if you look at like, you know, the division in American politics or something, for example, it's important. In some sense, helping to come alive. We are generating them, but it's not like the biosphere eliminated all of its past history when it invented a new species. All of these things get scaffolded. And we're also augmenting ourselves at the same time that we're building technologies. I don't think we can anticipate what that system is going to look like.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “But I don't like thinking about them as our technologies as a separate species because this again goes back to this sort of levels of selection issue. And if you think about humans individually alive, you miss the fact that societies are also alive. And so I think about it much more in the sense of an ecosystem's not the right word, but we don't have the right words for these things of like, and this is why I talk about the technosphere. It's a system that is both human and technological. It's not human or technological. And so this is the part that I think we're really good for, and this is driving in part a lot of the sort of attitude of like, I'll kill you first with my nuclear weapons. We're really good at identifying things as other. We're not really good at understanding when we're the same.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Yeah, I think we do that quite a lot anyway. I mean, it goes back to your And I don't know how to feel about this, but we talked already about the Predator Prey thing, that in some sense, you know, being alive requires eating other things that are alive. And even if you're a vegetarian or, you know, like try to have like you're still eating living things.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Oh, that's interesting. I think it depends on the culture, though, because, I mean, some cultures already think everything's imbued with, you know, a life essence or kind of conscious”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “It is a tricky one. I mean, that's why it's called the hard problem of consciousness because it's hard. And it might even be outside of the purview of science, which means that we can't understand it in a scientific way. There might be other ways of coming to understand it. But those may not be the ones that we necessarily want for technological utility or for developing laws with respect to because the laws are the things that are going to govern the technology.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “Well, I think people are going to have romantic relationships with them. And I also think that some people would be convinced already that they're conscious. But I think in order, you know, what does it take to convince Convince people that something is conscious. I think that we actually have to have an idea of what we're talking about, that it's like it's like we have to have a theory that explains when things are conscious or not. That's testable, right? And we don't have one right now. So I think until we have that, it's always going to be this sort of gray area where some people think it hasn't and some people think it doesn't because we don't actually know what we're talking about that we think it has.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “But I just, you know, it's about the words that we use versus the actual things happening behind the words. I think one thing that's good is when people are talking about things different ways, it makes us think about them. And also when things are existentially threatening, we want to pay attention to those. But the ways that they're existentially threatening and the ways that we're experiencing existential trauma, I don't think that we're really going to understand for another century or two, if ever. And I certainly think they're not the way that we're describing them now.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “The rapid rate is scary. So, I think the things that are terrifying are the ideas of deep fakes or like. Know all the kinds of issues that become legal issues about artificial intelligence technologies and using them to control weapons or using them for child pornography or faking out that someone's loved one was kidnapped or killed and ransacked like there's all kinds of things that are super scary in this landscape and all kinds of new legislation needs to be built and all kinds of guardrails on the technology to make sure that people don't abuse it need to be built and that needs to happen and I think one function of sort of the artificial intelligence doomsday sort of part of our culture right now is it's sort of our immune response to knowing that's coming. And we're overscaring ourselves so we try to act more quickly, which is good.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “These are human questions, right? I don't think they're necessarily questions that we're going to like outsource to an artificial intelligence. I think what is happening and will continue to happen is there's a co-evolution between humans and technology that's happening. we're coexisting in this ecosystem right now and we're maintaining a lot of the balance. And for the balance to shift to the technology would require some very bad human actors, which is a real risk or some sort of I don't know, some sort of dynamic that favors, like I just don't know how that plays out without human agency actually trying to put it in that direction.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “But it doesn't mean that it's necessarily smarter or has a broader reach of the kind of things that can understand than a human does. And so I think we really have to think about, is it a level shift or is it we're enhancing certain kinds of capabilities humans have in the same way that we can enhance eyesight by making telescopes and microscopes? Are we enhancing capabilities we have into technologies and the entire global ecosystem is getting more intelligent? Or is it really that”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “Abilities or particular talents someone has. And, you know, going back to, you know, David Dreish's idea of universal explainers, like, you know, adopting the view that we're the first kinds of structures our biosphere has built that can understand the rest of reality. We have this universal comprehension capability. He makes an argument that basically we're the first things that actually are capable of understanding anything. It doesn't matter. It doesn't mean an individual understands everything, but like we have that capability. And so there's not a difference between that and what people talk about with AGI. In some sense, AGI is a universal explainer. But, you know, like it might be that a computer is much more efficient at doing, I don't know, prime factorization or something than a human is.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “I actually don't like this sort of language we use around that. And I think the language really matters. So I don't know how to talk about how much smarter one human is than another, right? Like usually we talk about”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “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.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “System for language in some sense, where it's allowing, and I sort of archiving that's highly dynamic. And I think it's very paradoxical to us because obviously in human history, we haven't been used to conversing with anything that's not human. But now we can converse basically with a crystallization of human language in a computer that's a highly dynamic crystal because it's a crystallization in time of this massive abstract structure that's evolved over human history and is now put into a small device.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “Large language models are kind of interesting because they don't feel as static. They're very dynamic. But if you think about language in the way I was describing before as language is this very large and time structure and before it had been something that was distributed over human brains as a dynamic structure and occasionally we store components of that very large dynamic structure in books or in written language now we can actually store the dynamics of that structure in a physical artifact, which is a large language model. And so I think about it almost like the evolution of genomes in some sense where there might have been like really primitive genes on the first living things and they didn't store a lot of information or they were like really messy. And then we, you know, like you by the time you get to the eukaryotic cell, you have this really dynamic genetic architecture that's read writable, right? And like, and has all of these different properties. And I think large language models are kind of like the genetics.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “I mean, I think they already do, but not in the way I hear popularly discussed. So there are obviously signatures of intelligence and And a part of an ecosystem of intelligent systems. But I don't know that individually, you know, I would assign all the properties to them that people have. It's a little like, so we talked about the history of eyes before and like how eyes scaled up into technological forms. And language has also had a really interesting history and got much more interesting, I think, once we started writing it down. And then, you know, in inventing books and things. But like, you know, every time that we started storing language in a new way, you know, where we kind of existentially traumatized by it. So like, you know, the idea of written language was traumatic because it seemed like the dead were speaking to us, even though they were deceased and books were traumatic because, you know, like suddenly there were lots of copies of this information available to everyone and it was going to somehow dilute it.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “So they actually embody the physics of selection and they can select on possible futures. And I guess what I'm saying with respect to consciousness and the experience we have is that there's something very deep about that structure and the nature of how we exist in that structure that has to do with how we're navigating that space and how we generate that space and how we continue to persist in that space.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “And I think there's some transition that happens there. But maybe to describe that a little bit better, what I can also say is like what intelligence is in this framework. So you have these objects that are large in time. They were selected to exist by constraining the possible space of objects to this particular, like all of the matters funneled into this particular configuration of object over time. And so these objects arise through selection. But the more selection that you have embedded in you, the more possible selection you have on your future. And so selection and evolution, we usually think about in the past sense, where selection happened in the past. But objects that are high density configurations of matter that have a lot of selection in them are also selecting agents in the universe.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “I think there's a horizon, and I don't know how to articulate this yet. It's a little bit like the horizon at the origin of life where the space inside a particular structure becomes so large that it has some access to a space that's not, that doesn't feel as physical. It's almost like this idea of counterfactuals. So I think like the past history of your horizon is just much larger than can be encompassed in like a small configuration of matter. So you can like pull this stuff into existence. This property is maybe a continuous property, but there's something really different about human level physical systems and human level ability to understand.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “It's not merely temporal separateness, it's about the depth in that time. The reason that my conscious experience is not the same as yours is because we're separated in time. The fact that I have a conscious experience is because I'm an object that's super deep in time. So I'm huge Time. And that means that there's a lot that I am basically, in some sense, a universe onto myself because my structure is so large relative to the amount of space that I occupy.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “It seems to me that consciousness is about the fact that we have a conscious experience is because we are these temporally extended objects. So consciousness and the abstraction that we have in our minds is actually a manifestation of all the time that's rolled up in us. And it's just because we're so huge that we have this very large inner space that we're experiencing that's not, and it's also separated off from the rest of the world because we're the separate thread in time. And so our consciousness is not exactly shared with anything else because nothing else occupies the same part of time that we occupy. But I can understand something about you maybe being conscious because you and I didn't separate that far in the past in terms of our causal histories. So in some sense, we can even share experiences with each other through language because of that sort of overlap in our structure.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “Yeah, so I think if you're thinking about this sort of 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.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “Understand the regularities associated with that and build a deeper structure underneath that and build into it. I wouldn't want to assume that thing that I understand that thing, which is usually how I see people talk about it.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “Depending on what you want to explain, as I was saying before, you have to assume something's fundamental. And so because people can't explain consciousness, there's a temptation for some people to want to take consciousness as fundamental and assume everything else is derived out of that. And then you get some people that want to assume consciousness preceded life. And I don't find either of those views particularly illuminating. I think because I don't want to assume a feminology before I explain a thing. And so what I've tried really hard to do is not assume that I think life is anything, except hold on to sort of the patterns and structures that seem to be the sort of consistent ways that we talk about this thing and then try to build a physics that describes that. And I think that's a really different approach than saying, you know, consciousness is this thing we all feel and experience about things. I would want to”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “Yeah, like, but we were talking about in terms of colors and like very nondescript, but the way that you just talked about flavors now was more in like the space of consciousness and intelligence. It was kind of like much more specific.”

    2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source