Mindscape 286 | Blaise Agüera y Arcas on the Emergence of Replication and Computation

Understanding how life began on Earth involves questions of chemistry, geology, planetary science, physics, and more. But the question of how random processes lead to organized, self-replicating, information-bearing systems is a more general one. That question can be addressed in an idealized world of computer code, initialized with random sequences and left to run. Starting with many such random systems, and allowing them to mutate and interact, will we end up with "lifelike," self-replicating programs? A new paper by Blaise Agüera y Arcas and collaborators suggests that the answer is yes. This raises interesting questions about whether computation is an attractor in the space of relevant dynamical processes, with implications for the origin and ubiquity of life.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas received a B.A. in physics from Princeton University. He is currently a vice-president of engineering at Google, leader of the Cerebra team, and a member of the Paradigms of Intelligence team. He is the author of the books Ubi Sunt and Who Are We Now?, and the upcoming What Is Intelligence?

#podcast #ideas #science #philosophy #culture

[jaywettlaufer]

I knew Blaise when he was dropping out of the Princeton PhD physics program because he had invented foveated rendering and a wicked fast general purpose mipmapped UI. I’ve met some very bright people in my life but Blaise is at the very top of that list. I’m proud of him and glad to see his mind is running free at Google.

Excellent podcast. No way to walk away from this conversation without something to think about.

[rumraket]

The most interesting talk I've heard in the last 20 years. So many things Blaise speaks about observing in his simulations have been speculated on in the origin of life community for decades (such as life-like autocatalytic chemistries being attractors in chemical space). We live in interesting times!

[bertpineapple]

Pretty sure I have just witnessed one of the great moments in science.

Life is Computation

I have always loved Sean and now I have a new hero,
Welcome to my Pantheon Blaise

[mitfreundlichengrussen]

What a great conversation - thanks a million for posting! I would love a discussion between Steven Wolfram and Blaise Agüera y Arcas moderated by Mr.

[naderchmait]

Great conversation between two great minds. One note on Kolmogorov complexity being easy to approximate: this is actually a concept most people get partially wrong since we can only really put an upper bound on the Kolmogorov complexity (say of a string, unless it’s a very simple one) so using techniques like Lempel-Ziv or Levin’s KT are really more of upper bounds. That being said I am guilty of that myself as I often use the word approximation when talking about Kolmogorov complexity. We need more on this topic, brilliant episode!

[anuraglamsal]

Blaise is super interesting. I read his article called "Do large language models understand us?", and many of my assumptions were pleasantly challenged. This podcast was also a joy to listen to. Excited for the future.

[oldionus]

I'm a regular listener on a podcast platform... but this episode was truly mindbending. I've forwarded links to it to several friends with "you really gotta listen to THIS one." I honestly think there's some kinda major intellectual revolution going on here, that is going to have repercussions and implications of first rank importance.

[Pluap]

Thanks for the fun discussion on a very interesting topic! Glad someone suggested this podcast to me

[nda]

Very interesting and thought provoking conversation! Thanks for sharing it!

[howardlandman]

For me, the most exciting part of this work wasn't the creation of "life" from a random origin, but the creation of new complexity measures that are easy to compute and very sensitive to the presence of replicators. We've been in want of such measures for decades. This is a substantial step forward.

[___tom___]

Wow. Somehow there were multiple points where I couldn’t tell if a point was trivial or profound. But what was profound was making it seem trivial. I truly understand how life is computation, and is ultimately inevitable in in the presence of energy and randomness. Wow. Truly a very set of wise words.

[grawl]

Fantastic conversation about the most fascinating topic. Thank you.

[dirkbertels]

Very thought-provoking discussion! I especially liked the illuminating description of the Turing machine. Somewhat reminiscent of Max Tegmark's "mathematical universe".

[rumidude]

That was both interesting and understandable, or at least understandable to the degree I can. In other words the explanations were clear and not filled with too much jargon.

[Kyzyl_Tuva]

Sara Imari Walker mentioned this and therefore I am very intrigued. Thank you for this great podcast Sean and Blaise

[nias]

Downloaded this paper a few days ago, but I haven't read it yet. This is a happy coincidence!

[CorwynGC]

Great ending. I have been trying to articulate this concept to people.

[stoneman]

An especially enjoyable episode, thank you!

[gilbertengler]

Just fantastic this brilliant discussion between 2 very very clever scientists. This matter should be taught ( in a simplified version ) in high school to put humanity on the right track instead of sticking to century old dogmas.

[xXrandom]

This episode was very interesting, please make more like these where you investigate how computer simulations are used to showcase Darwinian evolution.