YouSaid · the spoken record

Sara Walker

lines on the record: 215
first: 2024-06-13
most recent: 2024-06-13
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

“I think if assembly theory is an accurate depiction of the physics of life, it should. Shed a lot of light on those problems. And in fact, I sometimes wonder if the problems of consciousness and intelligence are at all different than the problem of life generally. And I'm not, I am of two minds of it, but I in general try to, you know, like the process of my thinking is trying to regulate everything into one theory. So pretty much every interaction I have is like, oh, how do I fold that into? And like, so I'm just building this giant abstraction that's basically trying to take every piece of data I've ever gotten in my brain into a theory of what life is and consciousness and intelligence are obviously some of the most interesting things that life has manifest. And so I think they're very telling about some of the deeper features about the nature of life.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think the issue is general relativity and quantum mechanics are expressed in mathematical languages And then computation is a mathematical language. So you're basically saying that maybe there's a more universal mathematical language for describing theories of physics that we already know. That's an important question. And I do think that's what Stephen's trying to do and do well. But then the question becomes, does that formulation of a more universal language for describing the laws of physics that we know now tell us anything new about the nature of reality? Or is it a language?”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That will have a fundamental layer to it, right? Because you have to explain something in terms of something else. But so if I want to explain life, for example, then my fundamental description of nature has to be something I think that has to do with time being fundamental. But if I wanted to describe, I don't know, the sort of interactions of matter and light, you know, I have elementary particles be fundamental. If I want to describe electricity and magnetism in the 1800s, I have to have waves be fundamental, right? So you are in quantum mechanics, like it's a wave function that's fundamental because that's the sort of explanatory paradigm of your theory. So, I guess I don't know what problem saying computation is fundamental solves.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I started working on the origin of life, and I think what my challenge was there was no one knew what life was. And so you can't really talk about the origination of something if you don't know what it is. And so the way I would approach it is if you want to understand what life is, then proving that physics is solving the origin of life. So there's the theory of what life is, but there's the actual demonstration that that theory isn't accurate description of the phenomena you aim to describe. So again, they're the same problem. It's not like I can decouple original life from what life is. It's like that is the problem. I guess I'm making about having a question is no matter what slice of reality you take, what regularity of nature you're going to try to describe, there will be an abstraction that unifies that structure of reality, hopefully.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's totally fine to have a turtle. Everyone has a turtle. You can't build a theory without a turtle. It's just so it depends on the problem you want to describe. And actually, the reason I can't get behind Stevens ontology is I don't know what question he's trying to answer. And without a question to answer, I don't understand why you're building a theory of reality.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we had one that was, it was called Infinite Turtles or Ground Truth. And it was really just about this issue. But the thing that was interesting, I think Stephen was trying to make the argument that fundamental particles aren't fundamental. Gravitation is not fundamental. You know, these are just turtles. And computation is fundamental. And I just remember pointing out to him, I was like, well, computation is your turtle. And I think it's a weird turtle to have.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's interesting. So Stephen came to a workshop we had in the Beyond Center in the fall, and the workshop theme was mathematics. Is it evolved or eternal? And he gave a talk about the Ruleiad, and he was talking about how a lot of the things that we talk about in the Beyond Center, like does reality have a bottom? If it has a bottom, what is it?”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's the intuition that people have derived from it. The intuition I get from cellular automata is that the flat space of an initial condition in a fixed dynamical law is not rich enough to describe an open-ended generation process. And so the way I see cellular automata is their embedded slices in a much larger causal structure. And if you want to look at a deterministic slice of that causal structure, you might be able to extract a set of consistent rules that you might call a cellular automata, but you can embed them as much larger space. That's not dynamical and is about the causal structure and relations between all of those computations. And that would be the space cellular automatic. And 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.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now it's probably not. It's a feature of the fact that you as a programmer had a theory that you could embed in the physical architecture of the string lights. Now what happens though is we get confused by this kind of distinction between us as agents in the world that actually can transfer things that life does onto other physical substrates with what the world is. And so for example you'll see people studying the mathematics of chemical reaction networks and saying, well, chemistry is turning universal or studying the laws of physics and saying the laws of physics are Turing universal. But anytime that you want to do that, you always have to prepare an initial state. You have to constrain the rule space and then you have to actually be able to demonstrate the properties of computation. And all of that requires an agent or a designer to be able to do that.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's easy for us to go out into the world and build computers. And then we mistake our ability to do that with assuming that the world is computational. And I'll give you a really simple example. This one came from John Conway. I one time had a conversation with him, which was really delightful. He was really fun. But he was pointing out that if you, you know, string lights in a barn, you can program them to have your favorite one-dimensional CA and you might even be able to make them do a, like be capable of universal computation. Is universal computation a feature of the string lights?”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feel like the universe is computational is because it's so easy for us as things that have the theory of computation in our minds. And actually in some sense, it might be related to the functioning of our minds and how we build languages to describe the world and sets relations to describe the world.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Um I don't think that they're outside our human languages. I think they define the boundary of the space of human languages. They allow us to explore things within that space, which is also fantastic. But I think there is a set of ideas that takes, and Stephen Wolfram has worked on this quite a lot and contributed very significantly to it. And I really like some of the stuff that Stephen's doing with his physics project, but don't agree with a lot of the foundations of it. But I think the space is really fun that he's exploring. You know, there's this assumption that computation is at the base of reality. And I kind of see it at the top of reality, not at the base, because I think computation was built by our biosphere. It's something that happened after many billion years of evolution. And it doesn't happen in every physical object. It only happens in some of them. And I think one of the reasons that we”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a very poor language. A lot of people think it's a really great one, but I think it has some nice properties. But I think the feature of it that is compelling is this kind of idea of universality that like you can, if you have a language, you can describe things in any other language.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for sure. I mean, this is part of the sort of brilliant thing about our collaboration is, you know, complementary skill sets. So I love playing with the abstract space of language. It's a really interesting playground when I'm working with Lee because he thinks at a much deeper level of abstraction than can be expressed by language. And the ideas we work on are hard to talk about for that reason.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it was really fun. But I think it's interesting because. I do, you know, sometimes I'm very upfront about it. I say I'm going to use the same word in probably six different ways in a lecture. And I will.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, the first couple sentences of that paper disturbed people a lot. And I think they were really carefully constructed in exactly this kind of way.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you take the structure of the way that we're talking about it and turn it slightly? So you have all the same pieces that everybody sees are there, but the description that you've come up with seems totally different. So they can understand that there's like they understand the pattern you're describing, but they never heard the structure underlying it describe the way that you describe it.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I, you know, a lot of my sort of like 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 like, you know, hanging out with a bunch of artists or philosophers or scientists thinking about things, like they all think about it different ways. And then I just try to figure out.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for sure. I love this essay by Poincar ⁇ about like mathematical creativity where he talks about this sort of like frothing of all these things and then like somehow you build theorems on top of it and they become kind of concrete. But like, and I also think about this with language. It's like there's a lot of stuff happening in your mind, but you have to compress it in this few sets of words to try to convey it to someone. So it's a compactification of the space. And it's not a very efficient one. And I think just recognizing that there's a lot that's happening behind language is really important. I think this is one of the great things about the existential trauma of large language models, I think, is the recognition that language is not the only thing required. Like there's something underneath it. Not by everybody.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're not what we think they are. And also the internal representations in our mind, like the things I'm seeing about this room are probably they're small projection of the things that are actually in this room. And I think we have such a difficult time moving past the way that we build representations in the mind and the way that we structure our language to realize that those are approximations to what's out there. They're fluid and we can play around with them and we can see deeper structure underneath them. I think like we're missing a lot.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one thing that I feel like I notice much more viscerally than I feel like I hear other people describe is that the representations in our mind and the way that we use language are not the things like Actually, I mean, this is an important point going back to what Girdle did, but also this idea of signs and symbols and all kinds of ways of separating them. There's like the word, right? And then there's like what the word means about the world. And we often confuse those things. And what I But for me, words are objects, and the objects are not the things that they describe. They have like a different ontology to them, like they're physical things, and they carry causation and they can create meaning, but they're not.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and I think too few people think about the way that 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.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the point is, you're saying it's an adaptive trait for sexual selection or something. And I'm saying that the adaptation, that beauty confers is far richer than that. And some of the adaptation is about social hierarchy and social mobility and just plain social dynamics. Like, why do some people dress golf? It's because they identify with a community and a culture associated with that. And they get, you know, and that's a beautiful aesthetic. It's a different aesthetic. Some people don't like it.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to be and about owning that person. And then the way that people interact with that person is very different than if I didn't have using that attribute as part of, and obviously that's influenced by the society I live and like what's aesthetically pleasing things, but it's interesting to be able to turn that around and not have it necessarily be about the aesthetics, but about the power dynamics that the aesthetics create.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, evolutionarily, maybe, but then beauty becomes a signal of other things, right? So it's really not like, and then beauty becomes an adaptive trait. So it can change with different, like, you know, maybe some species would think, well, you thought the frog having babies come out of its back was beautiful and I thought it was grotesque. Like there's not a universal definition of what's beautiful. It is something that is dependent on your history and how you interact with the world. And I guess what I like about beauty like any other concept is when you turn it on its head. So, you know, maybe the traditional conception of, you know, why women wear makeup and they dress certain ways is because they want to look beautiful and pleasing to people. And I just like to do it because it's a confidence thing. It's about embodying the person that I want.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it sure does. So I think it's the intellectual pursuit, right? Like it's not, so this is like very highly intellectual. And I think it's a lot like how I play with language is the same way that I play with fashion or the same way that I play with ideas in theoretical physics. Like there's always this space that you can just push things just enough. So they're like, they look like something someone thinks is familiar, but they're not familiar. And yeah, and I think that's really cool.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right. But this gets at the question is that horrific or is it beautiful? And I think he had a traumatic, he ended up committing suicide. And actually he left his death note on the descent of man. So he was a really deep person.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, I mean, his stuff is amazing. I think was called Nihilism. I don't know. I don't know if you could find it. You know, I mean, he was really dramatic. He carried a lot of trauma with him. There you go. That's, yeah. Yeah. But he changed the fashion industry. His stuff became very popular.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he was really phenomenal, but like his early, and actually I kind of, I kind of used like what happened to him in the fashion industry as a coping mechanism with our paper when like the nature paper in the fall when everyone was saying it was controversial and how terrible that like, you know, like, but controversial is good, right? But like when Alexander McQueen, you know, first came out with his fashion lines, he was mixing horror and beauty. And people were horrified. It was so controversial. It was macabre. He had like, you know, like it looked like there were blood on the models and like.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know this is amazing though, isn't it? Amazing. Like, you have the choice to do it. But one of my favorite, just on the question of beauty, one of my favorite fashion designers of all time is Alexander McQueen”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, it's interesting. It's not, I'm not, I mean, I am attracted to style and aesthetics because I think they're beautiful, but it's much more because I think it's fun to play with. And so I will get to the beauty thing, but I guess I want to just explain a little bit about my motivation in this space because it's really an intellectual thing for me. And Stewart Brand has this great infographic about the layers of like human society. And I think it starts with like the natural sciences and like physics at the bottom and it goes through all these layers and it's like economics and then like fashion is at the top is like the fastest moving part of human culture. And I think I really like that because it's so dynamic and so short in its temporal longevity contrasted with like studying the laws of physics, which are like, you know, like the deep structure reality that I feel like I.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the constraint and it just goes yellow a lot lately. Like, this is not even the most yellow because I have black pants on, but I have worn outfits that have probably five shades of yellow in them.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Yellow's my daughter's favorite color, and I never really thought about yellow much, but she's been obsessed with yellow. She's seven now. And I don't know, I just really love it.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And even this one could have been really different because, like, you know, it's not just the sort of jacket and the shoes and the hairstyle. It's like the jewelry and the accessories. So like any outfit is a lot of small decisions.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The two outfits. Yeah. Well, see, this is the thing, though, right? It simplifies your thought process in the morning. So, like, I have other ways I do that. I park in the same exact parking spot when I go to work on the fourth floor of a parking garage because no one ever parks on the fourth floor. So I don't have to remember where I park my car. But I really like aesthetics and playing with them. So I'm willing to spend part of my cognitive energy every morning trying to figure out what I want to be that day.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah And it's highly dynamic. I mean, you can be dynamic if you want to. Very few people are, there's a certain bravery, but it's actually more about confidence willing to play with style and play with aesthetics. And I think it's interesting when you start experimenting with it, how it changes the fluidity of the social spaces and the way that you interact with them.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's an interesting feature of our species that we allow, we get to express ourselves through what we wear. Like if you think about all those animals in the jungle you saw, like they're born looking the way they look and then they're stuck with it for life.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have trouble getting rid of some stuff. It depends on what it is. If it's vintage, it's hard to get rid of because it's kind of hard to replace. It depends on the piece. Yeah.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's pretty big. It's like I do assembly theory every morning when I walk in my closet because I have, I like, I really like a very large combinatorial, diverse palette, but I never know what I'm going to build in the morning.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't know. I've been kind of obsessed with, I never know how to pronounce it, chaparelli. Like, you know, like, like they have ears and things. Like, it's such a weird grotesque aesthetic, but it's totally bizarre. But what I meant, like, I have a visceral experience when I walk into my closet. I have a lot of music.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I think there's some ways we might be able to differentiate that signal. I'm still thinking about this part of it. So one is like, like if you have pulsars and they all have a certain spectrum to their pulsing patterns and you have this one signal that's in there that's basically tried to maximally differentiate itself from all the other sources in the universe, it might stick out in the distribution. Like there might be ways of actually being able to tell if it's an anomalous pulsar basically. But I don't know if that would really work or not. Still thinking about it.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like they can distinguish each other living in the same environment. And so this undergrad's building this model where you have a pulsar background of all these like giant flashing sources in the universe and an alien intelligence wants to signal it's there. So it's flashing like a firefly. And I just like the idea of thinking about non-human aliens. So that was really fun.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is kind of cool. I'll answer the question a second, but it's just maybe like this idea of flickering lights and intelligence is interesting to me because I, you know, like we have such a human-centric view of alien intelligence is that a lot of the work that I've been doing with my lab is just trying to take inspiration from non-human life on earth. And so I have this really talented undergrad student that's basically building a model of alien communication based on fireflies. So one of my colleagues or at Pelleg is she's totally brilliant, but she goes out with like GoPro cameras and like, you know, films and high resolution, all these firefly flickering. And she has like this theory about how their signaling evolved to like maximally differentiate the flickering patterns. So like she has a theory basically that predicts, you know, like the species should flash like this. If this one's flashing like this, this other one's going to do it at a slower rate so that the, you know.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm like trying to imagine all the little flickering lights in the universe in the way that you were describing. That was kind of cool.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, super close, super close. Like, yeah, I mean, everything on this planet is like, it's like pretty much the same thing. Like, like the space of possibilities is so huge. It's like we're virtually identical.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, just think about us with microbial life, right? Like we used to once be cells. And for most of human history, we didn't even recognize cellular life was there until we built a new technology, microscopes that allowed us to see them. So that's kind of weird, right? Like things that we”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part of what I mean is like you have to go through ideas you don't necessarily agree with to work out what you're trying to understand. And I'm trying to be inside this structure so I can really understand it. And I don't think I've been able to like I'm so deeply embedded in what we are intellectually right now that I don't have an ability to see these other ones that you're describing if they're there.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I totally agree with this visual I really love. And I think we live in a universe that generates life and purpose. And it's part of the structure of just the world. And so maybe like this sort of lonely view I have is, I never thought about it this way until you're describing that. I was like, I want to live in that universe. And I'm like a very optimistic person. And I love building visions of reality that are positive. But I think for me right now in the intellectual process, I have to tunnel through this particular way of thinking about the loneliness of being like separated in time from everything else, which I think like we also all are because time is what defines us as individuals.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In order for us to get off planet because we basically have to start life on another planet. And we also have to solve the origin of life in order to recognize other alien intelligence. Like all of these things are literally the same problem. Right.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Life will actually be in an original life experiment. But that part I'm super interested in. And then there's this other feature that I think about a lot, which is our own technological phase of development as sort of like, what is this phase in the evolution of life on a planet? If you think about a biosphere emerging on a planet and evolving over billions of years and evolving into a technosphere. When a technosphere can move off planet and basically reproduce itself on another planet, now you have biospheres reproducing themselves. Basically, they have to go through technology to do that. And so there are ways of thinking about sort of the nature of intelligent life and how it spreads in that capacity that I'm also really excited about and thinking about. And all of those things for me are connected. Like we have to solve the original life.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source