YouSaid · the spoken record

Sara Walker

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215
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2024-06-13
most recent
2024-06-13
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1
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podcast

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  1. “They're all interesting words. And, you know, together, they sound really smart and they sound like they box in what life is, but you can use any of the words individually and you can come up with examples.”

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

  2. “I think we have to get rid of the notion of an individual as being relevant. And this is really difficult because, you know, a lot of the ways that we think about life, like the fundamental unit of life is the cell, individuals are alive. But we don't think about how gray that distinction is. So for example, you might consider self-reproduction to be the most defining feature of life. A lot of people do. Actually, like, you know, one of these standard different definitions that a lot of people may feel like to use in astrobiology is life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution, which I was once quoted as agreeing with. And I was really offended because I hate that definition. I think it's terrible. And I think it's terrible that people use it. I think like every word in that definition is actually wrong as a descriptor of life.”

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

  3. “Thinking we were talking about a few minutes ago about how the boundary of life is really hard to define. So anytime that you want to draw a boundary around something and you say this feature is the thing that makes this alive or this thing is alive on its own, there's not ever really a clear boundary. And these kind of examples are really good at showing that because it's like the thing that you would have thought is the living organism is now dead, except that it has another living organism that's piloting it. So the two of them together are alive in some sense, but they're, you know, now in this kind of weird symbiotic relationship that's taking the aunt to its death.”

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

  4. “Yeah, it does. I think the thing that's perplexing for me about these kind of examples is effectively the ants dead, but it's staying alive now because it's piloted by this fungus. And so that gets back to this.”

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

  5. “Aunt or every possible zombie ant or every possible tree will ever live. So it's, you know, it's an incredibly dynamic and creative place because of all that death.”

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

  6. “Yeah, but it can't erase it. It's just restructuring it. And I think the other thing that is really vivid to me about this example that you're giving is how much death is necessary for life. So I worry a bit about notions of immortality and whether immortality is a good thing or not. So I have sort of a broad conception that life is the only thing the universe generates that actually has even the potential to be immortal. But that's as like this sort of process that you're describing where life is about memory and historical contingency and construction of new possibilities. But when you look at any instance of life, especially one as dynamic as what you're describing, it's a constant birth and death process. But that birth and death process is like the way that the universe can explore what possibilities can exist and not everything, not every possible human or every possible.”

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

  7. “Definition. This is why viruses are so hard or why fire is so hard. And so we've had a really hard time trying to pin down from a definitional perspective exactly what life is.”

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

  8. “Know all the sort of classic definitions people want to use just don't work. They don't work in all cases. So Carl Sagan had this wonderful essay on definitions of life where I think he talks about aliens coming from another planet if they saw Earth. They might think that cars were the dominant life form because there's so many of them on our planet and like humans are inside them. And you might want to exclude machines, but any definition, you know, like classic biology textbook definitions would also include them. And so, you know, he wanted to draw a boundary between these kind of things by trying to exclude them, but they were naturally included by the definitions people want to give. And in fact, what he ended up pointing out is that all of the definitions of life that we have, whether it's life as a self-reproducing system or life eats to survive or life requires compartments, whatever it is, there's always a counter example that challenges.”

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

  9. “I think life obeys universal principles. I think there is some deep underlying explanatory framework that will tell us about the nature of life in the universe and will allow us to identify life that we can't yet recognize because it's too different.”

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

  10. “Simple description. So we didn't really have to worry about the fact that my cup is heavy and the air is light. Like the same laws describe them. If we have the right material properties to talk about what those laws are actually interacting with. And so I think the issue with life is we don't know how to think about information in a material way. And so we haven't been able to build a unified description of what life is or the kind of things that evolution builds because we haven't really invented the right material concept yet.”

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

  11. “Yeah, so I think about, I always like to use examples from physics, so I'll probably do that to like, like it's just my go-to place. But in the history of gravitational physics, for example, in the history of motion, like when Aristotle came up with his theories of motion, he did it by the material properties he thought things had. So there was a concept of things falling to Earth because they were solid-like and things raising to the heavens because they were air-like and things moving around the planet because they were celestial like. But then we came to realize that thousands of years later and after the invention of many technologies that allowed us to actually measure time in a mechanistic way and track planetary motion and we could roll balls down inclined planes and track that progress, we realized that if we just talked about mass and acceleration, we could unify all motion in the universe in a really”

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

  12. “And that some of those things actually are inventions that happened in a particular time, in a particular technology that could learn about certain patterns and help us understand them and that there are some patterns we still don't understand. And if we knew how to measure those things or we knew how to describe them in a more rigorous way, we would realize that the material world matter has more properties than we thought that I did. And one of those might be associated with the thing that we call life. Life could be a material property and still have a lot of the features that the vitalists thought were mysterious.”

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

  13. “I think that no tradition vitalists included is ever fully wrong about the nature of the things that they're describing. So a lot of times when I look at different ways that people have described things across human history, across different cultures, there's always a seed of truth in them. And I think it's really important to try to look for those because if there are narratives that humans have been telling ourselves for thousands of years, for thousands of generations, there must be some truth to them. You know, we've been learning about reality for a really long time. And we recognize the patterns that reality presents us. We don't always understand what those patterns are. And so I think it's really important to pay attention to that. So I don't think the vitalists were actually wrong. And a lot of what I talk about in the book, but also I think about a lot just professionally, is the nature of our definitions of what's material and how science has come to invent the concept of matter.”

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

  14. “Yeah, I think the entire universe is just a giant mystery. I guess that's what motivates me as a scientist. And so oftentimes when I look at open problems like the nature of life or consciousness or what is intelligence or are there souls or whatever question that we have that we feel like we aren't even on the tip of answering yet, I think, you know, we have a lot more work to do to really understand the answers to these questions. So it's not magic. It's just the unknown. And I think a lot of the history of humans coming to understand the world around us has been taking ideas that we once thought were magic or supernatural and really understanding them in a much deeper way that we learn what those things are. And they still have an era of mystery even when we understand them. There's no sort of bottom to our understanding.”

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

  15. “I think the question there is about whether life can be described in terms of matter and physical things or whether there is some Feature that's not physical that actually animates living things. So for a long time, people maybe have called that a soul. It's been really hard to pin down what that is. So I think the vitalist idea is really that it's kind of a dualistic interpretation that there's sort of the material properties, but there's something else that animates life that is there when you're alive and it's not there when you're dead. And materialists kind of don't think that there's anything really special about the matter of life. and the material substrates that life is made out of so they disagree on some really fundamental points”

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