Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #269

the following is a conversation with lee cronin a chemist from university of glasgow who's one of the most fascinating brilliant out-of-the-box thinking scientists i've ever spoken to this episode was recorded more than two weeks ago so the war in ukraine is not mentioned i have been spending a lot of time each day talking to people in ukraine and russia i have family friends colleagues and loved ones in both countries i will try to release a solo episode on this war but i've been failing to find the words that make sense of it for myself and others so i may not i ask for your understanding no matter which path i take most of my time is spent trying to help as much as i can privately i'm talking to people who are suffering who are angry afraid when i returned to this conversation with lee i couldn't help but smile he's a beautiful brilliant and hilarious human being he's basically a human manifestation of the mad scientist rig sanchez from rick and morty i thought about quitting this podcast for a time but for now at least i'll keep going i love people too much you the listener i meet folks on the street or when i run you say a few kind words about the podcast and we talk about life the small things and the big things all of it gives me hope people are just amazing you are amazing i ask for your support wisdom and patience as i keep going with this silly little podcast including through some difficult conversations and hopefully many fascinating and fun ones too this is a lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now to your friends here's lee cronin how do you think life originated on earth and what insights does that give us about life if we go back to the origin of earth and you think about maybe 4.7 4.6 4.5 billion years ago planet was quite hot there was a limited number of minerals there was some carbon some water and i think that maybe it's a really simple set of chemistry that we we really don't understand so that means you've got a finite number of elements that are going to react very simply with one another and out of that mess comes a cell so literally sand turns into cells and it seems to happen quick so what i think i can say with some degree of i think not certainty but curiosity genuine curiosity is that life happened fast yeah so when we say fast this is a pretty surprising fact and maybe you can actually correct me and elaborate but it seems like most like 70 or 80 percent of the time that earth has been around there's been life on it like some very significant percentage so when you say fast like the slow part is from single cell or from bacteria to some more complicated organism it seems like most of the time that earth has been around it's been single cell or like very basic organisms like a couple billion years but yeah you're right that that's really i recently kind of revisited our history and saw this and i was just looking at the timeline wait a minute like how did life just spring up so quickly like really quickly that makes me think that it really wanted to like put another way it's very easy for life to spring yeah i agree i think it's much more inevitable and i think um i try to kind of not provoke but try and push chemists to think about because chemists are part are central to this problem right of understanding the origin of life on earth at least because we're made of made of chemistry but i wonder if the origin of life on a planet or so the emergence of life on the planet is as common as the formation of a star and if you start framing it in that way it allows you to then look at the universe slightly differently because um and we can get into this i think in quite some detail but i think i to to come back to your question i have little idea of how life got started but i know it was simple and i know that the process of selection had to occur before the biology was established so that selection built the framework from which life kind of grew in complexity and capability and functionality and autonomy and i think these are all really important words that we can unpack over the next while can you say all the words again so he says selection so natural selection eight the original a b testing and so and then complexity and then or the degree of autonomy and sophistication because i think that people misunderstand what life is um some people say that life is a cell and some people that say that life is a a virus or life is a you know an on off switch i don't think it's that life is the universe developing a memory and the laws of physics and the way well there are no laws of physics physics is just memory free stuff right there's only a finite number of ways you can arrange the fundamental particles to do the things life is the universe developing a memory so it's like sewing a piece of art slowly and then you can look back at it so so there's a stickiness to life it's like universe doing stuff and when you say memory it's like there's a stickiness to a bunch of the stuff that's building together yeah so like you can in a stable way like uh trace back the complexity and that tells a coherent story yeah and i think yeah okay that's by the way very poetic and beautiful life is the universe developing a memory [Music] okay and then there's autonomy you said complexity we'll talk about but it's a really interesting idea that selection preceded biology yeah i think yes so what first of all what is chemistry like does sand still count as chemistry sure i mean as a chemist they can't carry a chemist if i'm allowed a card i don't know i don't know what i am most days what is the card made of what's the chemical composition of the card yeah so um what is chemistry well chemistry is the thing that happens when you bring electrons together and you form bonds so bonds well i say to people when they talk about life elsewhere and i just say well there's bonds there's hope because bonds allow you to get heterogeneity they allow you to record those memories or at least on earth um you could imagine uh you know a stannis left lemtrey world where you might have life emerging or intelligence emerging before life that may be something to on like solaris or something but you know to get to selection if you can form if atoms can combine and form bonds those bonds uh those atoms can bond to different elements and those and those molecules will have different identities and interact with each other differently and then you can start to have some degree of causation or interaction and then selection and then put and then existence and then you you you go you go up the kind of the path of complexity and so at least on earth as we know it there are there is a sufficient pool of available chemicals to start create searching that combinatorial space of bonds so okay this is a really interesting question let's let's lay it out so bonds almost like cards we say there's bonds there is uh life there's intelligence there's consciousness and what you just made me realize is um those can emerge or let's put bonds aside uh those can emerge in any order that's that's really brilliant so intelligence can come before life it's like pan psychists believe that consciousness com i guess comes before life and before intelligence so consciousness like permeates all matter it's some kind of fabric of reality okay so like within this framework you can kind of arrange everything but you need to have the bonds um that's precedes everything else oh and the other thing is selection so like the mechanism of selection that could uh proceed see couldn't that proceed bonds to whatever the house election so i would say that there is an elegant order to it that bonds allow selection allows the emergence of life allows the emergence of multicellularity and then more information processing building state machines all the way up however you could imagine a situation if you had um i don't know a neutron star or a sun or a ferromagnetic loops interacting with one another and these oscillators building state machines and these state machines reading something out in the environment over time these state machines would be able to literally record what happened in the past and sense what's going on in the present and imagine the future however i don't think it's ever going to be with within a human comprehension that type of life um i wouldn't count it out because um you know whenever you i know in science whenever i say something's impossible i then wake up the next day and say no that's actually wrong i mean there are there are some limits of course um i don't see myself traveling fast and light any time soon but eric weinstein says that's possible so he will say europe sure but i'm an experimentalist as well so one of my i have two super powers and my stupidity and i don't mean that is a you know i'm like absolutely completely witless but i mean my ability to kind of just start again and ask the question and then do it with an experiment i always wanted to be a theoretician growing up but i just didn't have the just didn't have the intellectual capability but i i was able to think of experiments in my head i could then do in my lab or in that you know when i was a with a child outside and then those experiments in my head and then outside reinforce one another so i think that's a very good way of kind of grounding the science right well that's the nice way to think about theoreticians is they're just people who run experiments in their head i mean that's exactly what einstein did right and but you were also capable of doing that in the head in your head inside your head and in the real world and the connection between the two is when you first discovered your superpower stupidity i like it okay what's your second superpower oh your accent or it's that well i don't know i'm my i like i am genuinely curious so my curious so i have a you know like everybody ego problems but my curiosity is bigger than my ego so as long as that happens i i can i can that's awesome that is so powerful you're just dropping some powerful lines so curiosity is bigger than ego that's something i have to think about because you always struggle about the role of ego in life and um that's that's so nice to think about don't think about the size of ego the absolute size of ego think about the relative size of ego to the other the other horses pulling at you and if the curiosity one is bigger then uh ego will do just fine and make you uh fun to talk to anyway so those are the two superpowers how do those connect to natural selection or in selection and bonds and i forgot already life and consciousness so that we're going back to selection in the universe and origin of life on earth i mean um selection has a for i'm convinced that selection is a force in the universe not me not a fundamental force but a but a directing but it is a directing force because existence although um existence appears to be the default um the existence of what why does um we can get to this later i think but it's amazing that the discreet things exist and you know you see this cup it's not the you know sexiest cup in the world but it's pretty functional this cup um the complexity of this cup isn't just in the object it is literally the lineage of people making cups and recognizing that seeing that in their head making an abstraction of a cup and then making a different one so i wonder how many billions of cups have you know come before this one and that's the process of selection and existence and the only reason the cup is still used is quite useful i like the handle you know it's convenient so i don't die i keep hydration um and so i think we are missing something fundamental in the universe about selection and i think what biology is is a is a selection amplifier and that the this is where autonomy comes in and actually i think that how humanity is going to humans and and autonomous robots or whatever we're going to call them in the future we'll we'll supercharge that even further so selection is happening in the universe but if you look in the asteroid belt selection if objects are being kicked in and out the asteroid belt um those trajectories are quite complex you don't really look at that as productive selection because it's not doing anything to improve its function but is it the asteroid belt has existed for some time so there is some selection going on but the functionality is is somewhat limited on earth at the formation of earth interaction of chemicals and molecules in the environment gave selection and then things could happen because you could think about in chemistry we could have an infinite number of reactions happen but they don't all all the reactions are allowed to happen don't happen why because they're energy barriers so there must be some things called catalysts out there or there are bits of minerals that when two molecules get together in that mineral it lowers the energy barrier for the reaction and so the reaction is is promoted so suddenly you get one reaction over another series of possibilities occurring that makes a particular molecule and this keeps happening in steps and before you know it these almost these waves as discrete reactions work together and you start to build a machinery that that that is run by existence so as you you go forward in time the fact that the molecules the bonds are getting there are more bonds in a molecule there's more function there's more capability for this molecule to interact with other molecules to redirect them it's like a series of little and i don't want to use this term too much but it's almost thinking about the the simplest von neumann constructor that's the simplest molecule that could build a more complicated molecule to build a more complicated molecule and before you know it when that more complicated molecule can act on the causal chain that's produced itself and change it suddenly you start to get towards some kind of autonomy and that's where life i think emerges in earnest every single word in in the past few paragraphs let's uh break those apart but uh who's von neumann what's the constructor the closing of the loop that you're talking about uh the the molecule that starts becoming the i think you said like the smallest flying neumann constructor yeah the smallest the minimal so uh what do all those things mean and what is uh uh what are we supposed to imagine when we think about the smallest uh violent constructor so john von neumann is a real hero actually if not just me but many people i think computer science and and physics he was an incredible intellect he probably solved a lot of the problems that we're working on today and just forgot to write them down yeah and i'm not sure if it's john von neumann or johnny as i think his friends called him but as um i think he was hungarian mathematician came to the us and um basically got was involved in the manhattan project and developing computation and um came up with all sorts of ideas and i think it was one of the first people to come come up with cellular automata and but he really i didn't know this little fact i think i think so and i think well anyway if he didn't come up with it he probably did come up with and didn't write it down there was a couple of people did at the same time and then conway obviously took it on and then wolfram loves cas there is his fabric of the universe and what i think he imagined was that he wasn't satisfied and this may be incorrect recollection but there's so a lot of what i say is going to be kind of you know just way out of my uh you're just part of the universe um creating its memory designing exactly yeah rewriting history rewriting exactly imperfectly so but what i mean is i think he he would he liked this idea of thinking about um how could a turing machine literally build itself without a turing machine right it's like literally how did state machines emerge and i think that von neumann constructors he was wanted to conceive of a minimal thing autonomous that could build itself and what would those rules look like in the world and that's what a von neumann kind of constructor looked like like it's a minimal hypothetical object that could build itself self-replicate and um and i'm really fascinated by that because i think that um although it's probably not exactly what happened um it's a nice model because as chemists if we could go back to the origin of life and think about what is a minimal machine that can get structured randomly so like with no prime mover we've no we've no no architect and it assembles through just existence so random stuff bumping in together and you make this first molecule so you have molecule a and molecule a um interacts with another random molecule b and they get together and they realize by working together they can make more of themselves but then they realize they can mutate so they can make a b prime so a b prime is different to a b and then a b prime can then act back where a and b were being created and slightly nudge that causal chain and make a b prime more um evolvable or learn more so that's the closing the loop part closing the loop part got it it feels like the mutation part is um not that difficult it feels like the difficult part is just creating a copy of yourself that's step one it seems uh um that seems like one of the greatest inventions in the history of the universe is the the first molecule they figured out holy i can create a copy of myself how hard is that i think it's really really easy okay i did not expect that i think it's really really easy well let's take a step back i think replication replicating molecules are rare but if you say you know i think i was saying on i probably got into trouble on twitter the other day so i was trying to write this there's about more than 18 mils of water in there so one mole of water 6.022 times 10 to the 23 molecules that's about the number of stars in the universe i think of the order so there's three universe worth but between somebody corrected you on twitter yeah i'm as if i've always been corrected it's a great fact but but there's a lot of molecules in the water yeah and so and so there's a lot of so although it's for you and me really hard to conceive of if existence is not the default for a long period of time because what happens is the molecules get degraded so so much of the possibilities in the universe are just broken back into atoms so you have this this kind of destruction of the molecules for our chemical reactions so you only need one or two molecules to become good at copying themselves for them suddenly to then take resources in the pool and start to grow and so then replication actually over time when you have bonds i think is much simpler and much easier and i even found this in my lab years ago i had one of the reasons i started doing inorganic chemistry and making rust making a bit of rust based on a thing called molybdenum military oxide is this molybdenum oxide it's very simple but when you add acid to it and some electrons they make these molecules you just cannot possibly imagine um would be constructed big gigantic wheels of 154 molybdenum atoms in a wheel or i cost a dodecahedron 132 molybdenum atoms all in the same pot and i realized when i and i just finished experiments two years ago i've just published a couple of papers on this that they're actually there is a random small molecule with 12 atoms in it that can form randomly but it happens to template its own production and then by chance it templates the ring just an accident just like just an absolute accident and that ring also helps make the small 12 mer and so you have what's called an auto catalytic set where a makes b and b helps make a and and vice versa and you then make this loop so it's a bit like um these they all work in in synergy to make this chain of events that grow and it doesn't take um a very sophisticated model to show that if you have these objects are competing and then collaborating to help one another build they just grow out of the mess and although they seem improbable they are improbable in fact impossible in one step there's multiple steps this is when the blind people look at the blind watchmaker argument when you talk about how could a watch something spontaneously emerge well it doesn't it's a lineage of watchers and cruder devices that that that couple are bootstrapped onto one another right uh so it's very improbable but once you get that little discovery like with the wheel and um fire it just gets explodes in because it's so successful it explodes it's basically selection so this templating mechanism that allows you to have a little like blueprint for yourself how you go through different procedures is to build copies of yourself so i uh in chemistry somehow it's possible to imagine that that kind of thing is easy to spring up in more complex organisms it feels like a different thing and much more complicated like we're having like uh multiple abstractions of the birds and the bees conversation here but with with human inside with complex organisms it feels like difficult to have reproduction uh to uh that's gonna get clipped out i'm gonna make fun of that um uh it's still it's difficult to develop this idea of making copies of yourself or no uh because that seems like a magical idea for life to uh wow that feels like very necessary for what selection is for what evolution is but then if selection precedes all this then maybe these are just like echoes of the selection the selecting mechanism at different scales yeah that's exactly it so selection is the default in the universe if you want to and what happens is that life the solution that that life has got on earth life on earth biology on earth um is unique to earth we can talk about that um and that was really hard fought for but that was that is the solution that works on earth the ribosome the fundamental machine that is responsible for every life for you know every cell on earth of whatever wherever it is in the in the kingdom of life that is an incredibly complex object but it was evolved over time and it wasn't involved in a vacuum and i think that once we understand that selection can um occur um without the ribosome but what the ribosome does it's a phase transition in replication and i think that that and also technology that that is uh um probably much easier to get to than we think why why do you put the ribosome as the central um part of living organisms on earth it basically is a combination of two different polymer systems so rna and peptides so the rna world if you like gets transmitted and builds proteins and the proteins are responsible for all the catalysis it will the majority of the catalysis that goes on the cell no ribosome no proteins no decoding no evolution so ribosome is looking at the action so you don't put like the rna itself as the critical thing like information you put action as the most important thing i think the actual molecules that we have in biology right now entirely contingent on the history of life on earth they could there are so many possible solutions and this is where chemistry got itself into origin of life chemistry gets itself into a bit of a trap yeah let me uh interrupt you there you've tweeted you're gonna get i'm i'm gonna cite your tweets like it's shakespeare okay it's surprising you haven't gotten cancelled on twitter yet um it's your brilliance once again saves you um i'm just kidding there's there's uh uh you like to have a little bit of fun on twitter you've tweeted that quote origin of life research is a scam so if this is shakespeare can we analyze this word why why is the origin of life research a scam aren't you kind of doing origin of life research um okay it was tongue-in-cheek but yeah i think and i meant it as tongue-in-cheek um i am i'm not doing or i'm not doing the origin of life research i'm trying to make artificial life and i also want to to bound the likelihood of mate of the origin of life on earth but more importantly to find origin of life elsewhere but let me directly address the tweet there are many many good chemists out there doing origin of life research but i want to nudge them and i think they're brilliant like there's no there's there's no question the chemistry they are doing their motivation is great so what i meant by that tweet is saying that maybe they're making assumptions about saying if only i could make this particular type of molecule say this rna molecule or this phosphodiester or this other molecule it's going to somehow unlock the origin of life and i think that origin of life has been looking at this for a very long time and whilst i i think it's brilliant to work out how you can get to those molecules i think that chemistry and chemists doing origin of life could be nudged into doing something even more profound and and so the argument i'm making it's a bit like right now let's say i don't know the first tesla that makes its way to i don't know into a new country in the world let's say i let's say there's country x that has never had a tesla before and they get the tesla russia and they take the test and what they do is they take the tests for a part and say we want to find the origin of of cars in the universe and say okay how did this form and how did this fall and they just randomly keep making until they make the door they make the wheel they make the steering column and all this stuff and and they say oh that's the route that's the way uh that's the way cars emerge on earth but actually we know that there's a causal chain of cars going right back to henry ford and the horse and carriage and before that maybe you know um where people were using wheels and and i think that obsession with the identities that we see in biology right now are giving us a false sense of security about what we're looking for and i think the origin of life chemistry is in danger of of not making the progress that it deserves because the chemists are doing this is this the field is exploding right now there's amazing people out there young and old doing this and there's deservedly so more money going in you know i used to complain there's more money being spent searching for the higgs boson that we know exists and the origin of life you know why is that the origin we understand the origin of life we're going to actually work out what life is and we're going to be outbound the likelihood of finding life elsewhere in the universe and most important for us we are going to know or have a good idea what the future of humanity looks like you know we need to understand that although we're precious we're not the only life forms in the universe well that's my very strong impression i have no data for that it's just right now a belief and i want to turn that belief into a more than a belief by by experimentation but i coming back to the scam the scam is if we just make this rna we've we've got this you know this uh this fluke event we know how that's simple let's make this phosphodiester or let's make atp or adp we've got that part nailed let's now make this other molecule another molecule and how many molecules are going to be enough and then the reason i say this is when you go back to craig venter when he invented his life forms india um this micro this this minimal plasmid it's a it's a myoplasma something i don't know the name of it but he made this wonderful um cell and said i've i've invented life not quite he facsimiled the genome from this entity and made it in the lab all the dna but he didn't make the cell he had to take an existing cell that has a causal chain going all the way back to luca and he showed when he took out the gene the genes and put in his genes synthesized the cell could boot up but it's remarkable that he could not make a cell from scratch and even now today synthetic biologists cannot make a cell from scratch because there's some contingent information embodied outside the genome in the cell and that is just incredible so there's lots of layers to the scam well let me then ask the question how can we create life in the lab from scratch what have been the most promising attempts at creating life in the lab from scratch has anyone actually been able to do it do you think anyone will be able to do it in the near future if they haven't already um can yeah i think that um nobody has made life in the lab from scratch lots of people would argue that they have made progress the craig vent i think the synthesis of a synthetic genome milestone in human uh achievement brilliant yeah can we just walk back and say what uh would you say from your perspective one of the world experts in exactly this area what does it mean to create life from scratch where if you sit back whether you do it or somebody else does it it's like damn this is we just created life um well what i would i can tell you what i would expect i would like to be able to do is to go from sand to cells in my lab and and can you explain what sand is you just in organic just in organic stuff like like like basically just so sand it's just silica silicon oxide with some other ions in it maybe some inorganic carbon some carbonates just basically clearly dead stuff you you could just grind rocks into sand and it would be what in like in a vacuum so they could remove anything else that could possibly uh be uh like a shadow of life that can assist in the chemical you could do that you could insist and say look i'm going to take and not just inorganic i want some more i want to cheat and have some organic but i want inorganic organic and i'll explain the play on words in a moment so i would like to basically put into a world let's say a completely you know a synthetic world if you like a closed world put some inorganic materials and just literally add some energy in some form be it lightning or heat uv light and run this thing in cycles over time and let it solve the search problem so i see the origin of life as a search problem in chemical space and then i would wait literally wait for a life form to crawl out the test tube that's the joke i tell my group literally wait uh uh for a very and don't worry it's gonna be very feeble it's not gonna take over the world you know there's ways of ethically containing his last words it was indeed indeed indeed but i i i you know this is being recorded right it'll make you it will not make you look good once it crawls out of the lab and destroys all of human civilization but yes but there is very good there's a very good things you can do to prevent that yeah for instance if you put stuff in your world which isn't earth abundant so let's say we make life based on molybdenum and it escapes it would die immediately because there's not enough molybdenum in the environment so we can put in we can we can do it we can do responsible life or as i fantasize with my research group on our away day that would go in it's you know i think it's actually morally we if life if we don't find if you met until humanity finds life in the universe this is going on a tangent it's our moral obligation to make origin of life bombs identify dead planets and bomb them with our origin of life machines and make them alive i think it is our moral obligation to do that i'm sure some people might argue with me about that but i think that we need a lot more life in the universe and then we kind of forget we we did it and then come back and then say where did you come from but coming back to the what i'd expect so let's just say are there are you back it's i think this is once again a rick and morty episode definitely it's definitely all rick and morty all the way down so we i imagine we have this pristine um experiment and everything is you know sanitized and we put in inorganic materials and we we have cycles with them day night cycles up down whatever and we look for evidence of replication and evolution over time and that's what the experiment should be now are there people doing this in the world right now there are a couple of there's some really good groups doing this there's some really interesting scientists doing this around the world they're kind of perhaps too much associated with the scam so and and so they're using molecules that are already we're already invented by biology so there's a bit of replication built in um but i still think the work that is doing they're doing is amazing um but i would like people to be a bit freer and say let's just basically shake a load of sand in a box and wait for life to come out because that's what happened on earth and so that we have to understand that now how would i know i've been successful well because i'm not obsessing with what molecules are in life now i i would wager a vast quantity of money um i'm not very rich so just be a few dollars but for me um the the the solution space will be different so the the genetic material will be not rna the proteins will not be what we think they'll it would the solutions will be just completely different and it might be and it'll be very feeble because that's the other thing we should be able to show um fairly robustly that even if i did make or someone did make a new life form in the lab it would be so poor that it's not going to leap out it is the the fear about making a lethal life form in the lab from scratch is um similar to us imagining that we're going to make the terminator uh boston dynamics tomorrow yeah simply not you and and i and the problem is we don't communicate that properly i know you yourself very um you explain this very well you know there is not the ai catastrophe coming um we're very far away from that that doesn't mean we should ignore it same with the origin of life catastrophe it's not coming anytime soon we shouldn't ignore it but we shouldn't let that fear stop us from doing those experiments but this is a much much longer discussion because there's a lot of details there i would say there is potential for catastrophic events to happen in much dumber ways within in ai space there's a lot of ways to create like uh social networks that are creating a kind of uh accelerated set of events that we might not be able to control the social network virality in the digital space can create mass movements of ideas that can then if times are tough create military conflict and all those kinds of things but that's not intel super intelligent ai that's an interesting at scale application of ai and if you look at viruses viruses are pretty dumb but at scale their application is pretty detrimental and so origin of life much like all the kind of virology you know um the very contentious word of gain of function research and virology sort of like research on viruses uh messing with them genetically that can create a lot of problems if not done well so we have to be very cautious so there's a kind of whenever you're ultra cautious about stuff in ai or in virology and biology it borders on cynicism i would say where it's like everything we do is going to turn out to be destructive and terrible so i'm just going to sit here and do nothing okay that's a possible solution except for the fact that somebody's going to do it it's science and technology progresses so we have to do it in an ethical way in a good way considering in a transparent way in an open way considering all the possible positive trajectories that could be taken and making sure as much as possible that we walk those trajectories so yeah i don't think terminator is coming but a totally unexpected version of terminator maybe around the corner yeah it might be here already yeah so i agree with that and so going back to the origin of life discussion i think that in synthetic biology right now we have to be very careful about how we edit genomes and edit synthetic biology to do things so that's kind of that's where things might go wrong in the same way as you know twitter turning ourselves into kind of strange scale effects i would love origin of life research or artificial life research to get to the point where we have those worries because that's why i think we're just so far away from that we are ju you know right now i think there are two really important um angles there is the origin of life people researchers who are faithfully working on this and trying to make those molecules the scan molecules i talk about and then there are people on the creationist side who's saying look the fact you can't make these molecules and you can't make a cell means that um evolution isn't true and all this other stuff gotcha yeah and so and i find that really frustrating because actually the origin of life researchers are all working in good faith right yes and and so what i'm trying to do is give origin of life research a little bit more of a of a of an open an open context and one of the things i think is important um i really want to make a new life form in my lifetime i really want to prove that life is a general phenomena a bit like gravity in the universe because i think that's going to be really important for humanity's um global psychological state meaning going forward that's beautifully that's beautifully put so one it will help us understand ourselves so that's useful for science but two it gives us a kind of hope if not uh an awe at all the huge amounts of alien civilizations that are out there if you can build life and understand just how easy it is to build life then that's just as good if not much better than discovering life on another planet yeah it's i mean it's cheaper it's much cheaper and much easier and uh probably much more conclusive because once you're able to create life like you said it's a search problem that uh there's probably a lot of different ways to do it so once you create the once you find the first solution you probably have all the right methodology for finding all kinds of other solutions yeah and wouldn't it be great if we could find a solution i mean it's probably a bit late for i mean i worry about climate change but i'm not that worried about climate change and i think what one day you could think about could we engineer a new type of life form that could basically and i i don't want to do this i don't think we should do this necessarily but it's a good thought experiment that would perhaps take co2 out of the atmosphere or or an intermediate life form so it's not quite alive it's almost like a like an add-on that we can with a time a time dependent add-on you could give to say cyanobacteria in the ocean or to maybe to wheat and say right we're just going to we're going to fix a bit more co2 and we're going to work how much we need to fix to basically save the climate and and we're going to use evolutionary principles to basically get there what worries me is that biology has had a few billion years to find a solution for co2 fixation it hasn't really done it's not the solution isn't brilliant for our needs but biology wasn't thinking about our needs biology was thinking about biology's needs but i think if we can do as you say make life in the lab then suddenly we don't need to go to everywhere and conclusively prove it i think we make life in the lab we look at the extent of life in the solar system how far did earth life get probably were all martians probably life got going on mars the chemistry on mars seeded earth that might have been a legitimate way to kind of truncate the surface space but in the outer solar system we might have completely different life forms on enceladus on europa um and and tyson and that would be a cool thing because okay wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute did you just say that you think in terms of likelihood life started on mar like uh statistically speaking life started on mars and seeded earth it could be possible because life was like so mars was habitable uh for the type of life that we have right now type of chemistry before earth so it seems to me that like mars got searching doing chemistry and started way before yeah and so they had a few more replicators and some other stuff and if those replicas got ejected from mars and landed on earth and earth would like i don't need to start again right thanks for that and then it just carries on so i i'm not going i think there is we will find evidence of life on mars either life we put there by mistake contamination or actually life the earliest remnants of life um and that would be really exciting it's a really good reason to go there but i think it's more unlikely because the gravitational situation in the solar system if we find life in the outer solar system titan and all that that would be its own thing exactly wow that would be so cool if we go to mars and we find life that looks a hell of a lot similar to earth life and then we'll go to uh titan and all those weird moons with the ices and the volcanoes and all that kind of stuff and then we find there something that looks i don't know way weirder yeah some other some non-rna type of in my situation almost life like in the prebiotic chemical space and i think there are four types of exoplanets we can go look for right because when jwst goes up and touch wood it goes up and everything's fine when we look at a star we'll know statistically most stars have planets around them what type of planet are they are they going to be dead are they going to be just a prebiotic origin of life coming so are they going to be technological and you know so with intelligence on them and will they will they have died so so you know from you know had life on them but all the four states therefore and so and suddenly it's a bit like i want to classify planets the way we classify stars yeah and i think that in terms of their rather than having this all we've found that we've found methane there's evidence of life we've found oxygen that's the evidence of life we found whatever molecule marker um and start to then start frame things a little bit more but as those four states yeah which by the way you're just saying four but there could be a um before the dead there could be other states that we humans can't even conceive just prebiotic almost alive you know got the possibility to come alive i think um but there could be a post-technological like whatever we think of as technology that could be uh a like pre-conscious like well we all meld into one super intelligent conscious or some weird thing that naturally happens over time yeah i mean i i think that um we join into a virtual metaverse and and start creating which is kind of an interesting idea almost arbitrary uh number of copies of each other much more quickly so we can mess with different ideas like i can create a thousand copies of lex uh like every possible version of flex and then just see like and then i just have them like argue with each other and like until like in the space of ideas and see who wins out how how could that possibly go wrong but anyway but that there's uh especially in this digital space where you could start exploring with ai's mixed in you can start engineering arbitrary intelligences you can start playing in the space of ideas which might move us into a world that looks very different than a biological world like our current world the technology is still very much tied to our biology it's we we might move past that definitely we definitely will definitely that could be another phase then sure because then you but i did say technological so i think i agree with you i think so you can have let's let's get this right so um dead world no prospective alive um prebiotic world life emerging living and technological and you probably and the dead one you probably won't be able to tell between the dead never been alive and the dead one maybe what some artifacts so maybe there's five there's probably not more than five um and i think the technological one could allow could have life on it still but it might just have exceeded because uh you know one way that life might survive on earth is if we can work out how to deal with the coming the real climate change that comes when the sun expands there might be a way to survive that you know um but um yeah i think that we need to start thinking statistically when it comes to looking for life in the universe let me ask you then sort of uh statistically how many alien civilizations are out there in those four phases that you're talking about when you look up the stars and you're sipping on some wine and um talking to other people with british accents about something intelligent intellectual i'm sure uh do you think there's uh a lot of alien civilizations looking back at us i'm wondering the same my romantic view of the universe is really i'm taking loans from my logical self so what i'm saying is i have no doubt i have no idea but having said that there is no reason to suppose that life is as hard as we first thought it was and so if we just take earth as a marker and if i think that life is a much more general phenomena than just our biology then i think the the universe is full of life and the firm the reason for the fermi paradox is not that um they're not out there it's just that we can't interact with the other life forms because they're so different and i'm not saying that they're necessarily like hasn't depicted in a rival or other you know um i'm just saying that perhaps there are very few universal facts in the universe and that and maybe um that is not it's quite the our technologies are quite divergent and so i think that it's very hard to know how we're going to interact with alien life you think there's a lot of kinds of life that's possible i guess that was the intuition yeah you provided that uh the way biology itself but even this particular kind of biology that we have on earth uh is is something that is just one sample of on nearly infinite number of other possible complex autonomous self-replicating type of things that could be possible and so we're almost unable to see the alternative versions of us huh i mean we'll still be able to detect them we'll still be able to interact with them we'll still be able to like which uh what's exactly is lost in translation why can't we why can't we see them why can't we talk to them because i too have a sense you put it way more poetically but it seems both statistically and uh sort of romantically it feels like the universe should be teeming with life like super intelligent life and and uh i just i i sit there and the fermi paradox is very it's felt very distinctly by me when i look up at the stars because it's like it it's uh the same way i feel when i'm driving through new jersey and listening to bruce springsteen and i feel quite sad uh it's like louis c.k talks about pulling off to the side of the road and just weeping a little bit i'm almost like wondering like hey why why aren't you talking to us you know it feels lonely it feels lonely because it feels like they're out there i think that there are a number of answers to that i think the firming paradox is is perhaps based on the the assumption that there's if life did emerge in the universe it would be similar to our life and there's only one solution um and i think that what we've got to start to do is go out and look for selection detection rather than an evolution detection rather than life detection and i and i think that once we start to do that we might start to see really interesting things and we haven't been doing this for very long um and we are living in an expanding universe and that makes the problem a little bit harder everybody's always leaving um but i'm i'm distance wise i'm very optimistic that we will well i don't know there are two movies that came out in the same within six months of one another at astra and cosmos at astra they're very expensive blockbuster you know with brad pitt in it and um saying there is no life and it's all you know we've got a life on earth as more pressures and cosmos which is a uk production which basically aliens came and visited earth one day and they were discovered in the uk right it was quite it's a it's a fun film um and but i really loved those two films and i'm i i and at the same time those films at the time those films are coming out i was working on a paper um a life detection paper and i found it was so hard to publish this paper and it was almost as depressing i got so depressed trying to get this science out there that i felt the depression of the the film and al astra like life is there's no no life elsewhere in the universe and but i but i'm incredibly optimistic that i think we will find life in the universe firm evidence of life and it will have to start on earth making life on earth and surprising as we have to surprise ourselves and make non-biological life on earth and then people say well you you made this life on earth therefore it's you're part of the causal chain of that and that might be true but if i can show how i i i'm able to do it with very little cheating or very little information inputs just creating like a a model planet some description and watching it watching life emerge then i think that we will be even to to persuade even the hardest critic that that is it's possible now with regards to the fermi paradox i think that we might crush that with the jwst it's basically if i recall correctly the mirror is about 10 times the size of the hubble that we're going to be able to do spectroscopy look at colors of exoplanets i think not brilliantly but we'll be able to start to classify them and we'll start to get a real feel for what's going on in the universe on these exoplanets because it's only in the last few decades i think maybe even last decade that we even came to recognize that exoplanets even are common and i think that that gives us a lot of optimism that life is going to be out there but i think we have to start framing um we have to start preparing the fact that biology is only one solution i can tell you with confidence that biology on earth does not exist anywhere else in the universe we are absolutely unique well okay i love the confidence but uh where does that confidence come from you know chemistry uh like how many options does chemistry really have many that's the point and the thing is this is where the origin of life scam comes in uh is that people don't quite count they don't count the numbers so if biology as you find on earth is common everywhere then there's something really weird going on that basically written in the quantum mechanics there's some kind of these bonds must form over these bonds and this catalyst must form over this catalyst when they're all quite equal life is contingent the the origin of life on earth was contingent upon the chemistry available at the origin of life on earth so that means if we want to find other life like other earth-like worlds we look for the same kind of rocky world we might look in the same zone as as as earth and we might expect reasonably to find biological like stuff going on that would be a reasonable hypothesis but it won't be the same it can't be it's like saying i don't believe in magic that's why i i'm sure i just don't believe in magic i believe in statistics and i can do experiments and and so i won't get the same exactly the same sequence of events i'll get something different and so there is tick tock elsewhere in the universe but it's not the same as our tick tock right that's that's what i mean which aspect of it is not the same well i just think you you it the so what is tick tock tick tock is a is a social media where people upload videos right of silly videos so i guess there might be there's humor there's attention there's ability to process this ability for intelligent organisms to collaborate on ideas and find human ideas and play with those ideas make them viral memes you know uh humor seems to be kind of fundamental to the human experience and i think that um that's a really interesting question we can ask is humor a fundamental thing in the universe i think maybe it will be right in terms of if you think about in a game theoretic sense humor uh the emergence of humor serves a a role in our game engine and so if selection is fundamental in the universe and so is humor well i don't actually don't know exactly what uh role humor serves maybe it's like uh from a chemical perspective it's uh like a catalyst for uh i guess it's a several purpose one is the catalyst for spreading ideas on the internet that's modern humor but humor is also a good way to deal with the difficulty of life it's a kind of valve release valve for suffering like throughout human history life has been really hard and for the people that i've known in my life who've lived through some really difficult things uh humorous part of how they deal with that yeah this is usually dark humor but yeah it's interesting i i don't know exactly sort of the what what's the more mathematically general way to formulate what the hell is humor what humor does it serve but i i still we're kind of joking here but it's uh a counterintuitive idea to me to think that uh life elsewhere in the universe is very different than life on earth and also like all of each instantiation of life is likely very different from each other yeah like maybe there's a few clusters of similar like life but uh it's much more likely is what you're saying to me it's a kind of novel thought i'm not sure what to do with it but you're saying that there's uh it's more common to be a weird outcast in the full spectrum of life than it is to be in some usual cluster so every instantiation of a kind of chemistry that results in complexity that's autonomous and self-replicating however the hell you define life that is going to be very different every time i don't know i it feels like a selection is a fundamental kind of directed force in the universe won't selection result in a in a few pockets of interesting complexities i mean yeah if we ran earth over again over and over and over you're saying it's going to come up but there's not going to be elephants every time yeah i don't think so i think uh and i think that there will be similarities and i think we know we don't know enough about how selection is um globally works um but it might be might be that the the elephant um the emergence of elephants was wired into the history of earth in some way like the gravitational force how evolution was going cambrian explosions blah blah the emergence of mammals but i i just don't know enough about the contingency right the variability all i do know is you count the number of bits of information required to make an element sorry an elephant and and think about the causal chain that provide the lineage of elephants going all the way back to luca there's a huge scope for divergence yeah but just like you said with chemistry and selection the the things that result in self-replicating chemistry and self-replicating organisms uh those are extremely unlikely as you're saying uh but once they're successful they multiply so like i i just it might be a tiny subset of all of all things that are possible in the universe chemically speaking it might be a very tiny subset is actually successful creating elephants or uh elephant like or slash human-like creatures well there's two different questions here's the first one if we were to reset earth and to start again the different phases sorry to keep interrupting yeah no if we restart earth and start again say we could go back back to the beginning and do the experiment or have a number of earths um how similar would biology be i would say that there would be there would be broad similarities but um but the emergence of mammals is not a given unless we're going to you know throw an asteroid at each planet each time and go try and try and faithfully reproduce what happened then there's the other the other thing about when you go to another earth-like planet elsewhere maybe there's a different ratio particular elements maybe there's uh the bom the bombardment at the beginning the planet was quicker or longer than earth and and i just don't have enough information there what i do know is that um the the complexity of the story of life on earth gives us lots of scope for variation and i just don't think it's a reasonable mathematical assumption to think that they will the the life on earth that happened again would be the same as what we have now okay but you've also extended that to say that we might as an explanation from the for the fermi paradox that uh that means we're not able to interact with them or that mean that's an explanation for why we haven't at scale heard from aliens is um well right now they're different than us we've only been looking for say 70 80 years so i think that we're the reason we have not found aliens yet is that we haven't worked out what life is no but the aliens have worked that out surely uh i mean statistically speaking they they must be there's must be a large number of aliens that are way ahead of us on this whole life question unless there's something about this stage of uh intellectual evolution that often quickly results in nuclear war and destroys itself like the there there's something in this process that eventually i don't know crystallizes the complexity and it stops either dies or stops developing but most likely they already figured it out and why aren't they contacting us there's a some some grad student somewhere wants to study a new a new green planet maybe maybe they have i mean maybe i mean i don't i mean i don't have a coherent answer to your question other than to say that if there are other aliens out there like and they're far more advanced they might be in contact with each other and they might also um we might be at a point where what i'm saying quite critically is it takes two to talk right yeah so the aliens might be there but if we if we don't have the ability to recognize them and talk to them then the aliens aren't going to want to talk to us and i think that's the critical point and probably um if if that is a if that's a filter there needs to be an ability for one to communicate with the other and we need to know what life is before we do that so we haven't qualified to even join their club to have a talk well i think they still want to teach us how to talk right but my worry is that or i i think they would want to teach us how to talk like you do when you meet it uh like when you even meet i was gonna say child but that's a human species i mean like and you want to try to communicate with them through whatever devices you can given given what an ant is like i just i worry mostly about that humans are just too close minded or don't have the right tools no i'm going to push back on this quite significantly i would say because we don't understand what life is and because we don't understand how life immersed in the universe we don't understand the physics that gave rise to life yet and that means our description fundamental description i'm way out of my pay grade even further out there better but i'll say it anyways i think it's you can't get paid much anyway as you said earlier so so i would say that we because we don't understand the universe yet we do not understand how the universe spat out life and we don't know what life is and then i think that until we understand that it is going to limit our ability to even um we don't qualify to talk to the aliens so i'm going to say that the the they might be there but we just i'm not going to say that i believe in inter-dimensional aliens being present yeah but i think you're just being self-critical uh like we don't qualify i think i think the fact that we don't qualify qualifies us we're interesting we're interested in our innocence no i'm saying that because we don't understand causal chains and the way that information is propagated in the universe and we don't understand what replication is yet and we don't understand um how life emerged i think that we would not recognize aliens and they and if if someone doesn't recognize you um you wouldn't go and talk to it you don't go and talk to ants you don't go and talk to birds or maybe some birds you do right because you can and there's just enough cognition so i'm saying because we don't have enough cognac our cognitive abilities are not yet where they need to be we probably haven't been communicating with them so you don't agree with the uh dating strategy of playing hard to get because us humans that's going to attract us within us within the species that's fine but i think we don't actually actually have abstraction no i i actually i think you've in in this talk in this conversation you've helped me crystallize something that i think has been troubling me for a long time with the fermi paradox i'm pretty sure that a a reasonable avenue is to say that you would not go and talk to your cat about calculus right but i would still pet it sure but i'm not talking about petting a cat the analogy is that the aliens are not going to talk to us because we and i'm using calculus as an analogy for abstraction because we we lack the um layer the fundamental layer for understanding what life is and what the universe is in our reality that it's it would be so counterproductive interacting with intelligent alien species that it would cause more angst for the univ for human race um they don't care okay they got to be self-interested so they'll probably they more care about is it interesting for them maybe they i mean surely there's a way to to pat the to pet the cat in this this analogy because um even if we lack complete understanding it's it must be a very frustrating experience for for other kinds of intelligence to communicate with us still there must be a way to interact with us well like perturb the system in interesting ways to see what these creatures do we might actually find the answer i mean again at my pay grade in in in a simulation of earth or say let's say a simulation where we allow an intelligent ai to emerge right and that and that ai we then give it um the objective is to be curious interact with other intelligence in its universe and then we might find the um the parameters required for that ai to walk with and i think you'll find if the the ai will not talk to other ais that don't share the ability to abstract the level of the ai because it's just a cat and would you are you going to travel 20 light years to go and pet a cat so not because of the inability to do so but because of like boredom it's it's more interested it will start talking to it will spend most it will spend a majority of its time talking to other ai systems that can at least somewhat understand it's much more fun it's a bit like do we know that plants are conscious well plants aren't conscious in the way we typically think but we don't talk to them they could be right but there's a lot of people on earth who like gardening there's always going to be a weird thing they're just gardening okay well you're not romantic enough to see gardening as a way of communication between humans oh okay you got me but there is there's ways there's always going to be the people who are curious jane goodall who lives with the uh with the chimps right there's always going to be curious intelligence species that visit uh the weird or earth planet and and try to interact i mean it's it's uh yeah i i think it's it's a super cool idea that you're expressing and just to kind of have a sense maybe it's a hope that there's always going to be a desire to interact even with those that don't can't possibly understand the depth of what you understand so i am with you that look so i want to be as positive as you that we the aliens do exist and we will we will interact with them what i'm trying to do is to give you a a reasonable hypothesis why we haven't yet yeah and also something to strive for to be able to do that i mean i you know i there there is the other view that the the universe is just too big and life is just too rare but i want to make come up with an alternative explanation which i think is reasonable and not been philosophically and scientifically thought out which is this this if you can't actually communicate with the object the person the thing competently you don't even know it's there yeah then then there's no point yet see i disagree with that but i'm totally aligned with your hopeful vision which is like we need to understand the origin of life it will help us engineer life will help us engineer intelligent life through perhaps on the computer side of simulation and explore all the ways that life emerges and that will allow us to i think the fundamental reason we don't see overwhelming amounts of life is i actually believe aliens of course these are all just kind of um open-minded beliefs uh it's it's difficult to know for sure about any of this but i think there's a lot of alien civilizations which are actively communicating with us and we're too dumb we don't have the right tools that's what i'm just seeing that's what i'm saying no but you're i maybe i misinterpreted you but you well i interpreted you to say they kind of tried a few times and they're like oh god no no what i'm saying is we so this goes two ways yeah i agree with you there could be information out there but just put in such a way that we just don't understand it yet right so sorry if i didn't make that clear i mean it's not just i don't think we caught i think we qualify as soon as we can decode their signal right so when you say qualified got i got it so you mean we're just not smart enough though the word qualifier was thrown off you know so we're not smart enough to do it's like yeah but we need to get smarter yeah and there's a lot of people who believe let me get your opinion on this about ufo sightings so sightings of weird phenomena that uh you know what does ufo mean it means it's a flying object and it's not identified uh clearly at the time of sighting that's what ufo means so it could be uh physics phenomena it could be bald lightning it could be all kinds of fascinating i was always fascinated with ball lightning as a um like the fact that there could be physical phenomena in this world that are observable by the human eye of course all physical phenomena generally are fascinating that are that that really smart people can't explain i love that because it's like wait a minute especially if you can replicate it it's like wait a minute how does this happen that's like the precursor to giant discoveries in chemistry biology and physics and so on but it sucks when those events are super rare right physical like like ball lightning so so that's out there and then of course that phenomena could have other interpretations that don't have to do with the physics of chemistry the biology of earth it could have to do with more extraterrestrial explanations that in large part thanks to hollywood and movies and all those kinds of things captivates the imaginations of millions of people but just because it's science fiction that captivates the imagination of people doesn't mean that some of those sightings all it takes is one one of those sightings is actually a sign that's it's extraterrestrial intelligence that it's um object that's not of this particular world do you think there's a chance that that's the case what do you make especially the pilot sightings what do you make of those um so i i agree there's a chance there's always a chance any good scientist would have to observation this would have to you know i want to see if aliens exist come come to earth what i know about the universe is i think it's unlikely right now that there are aliens visiting us but but not impossible i think the um releases the dramatization has been happening politically saying we're going to release all this information this you know classified information um i was kind of disappointed because it was just very poor um material and right now the the you know the the ability to capture high-resolution video everybody is carrying around with an incredible video device now and we haven't got more compelling data and so that we've just seeing grainy pictures a lot of hear say instrument kind of malfunctions and whatnot and so i think on balance i think it's extremely unlikely but i think something really interesting is happening um and also during the pandemic right we've all been locked down we all want to have we want to our imaginations are you know running right and i think that the the i don't think that the the information out there has convinced me there are any anything interesting on the ufo side but what it has made me very interested about is how humanity is opening up its mind to ponder aliens and the the mystery of our universe and so i don't want to dissuade people from having those thoughts and say you're stupid and look at that it's clearly incorrect that's not right that's not fair what i would say is that i lack sufficient data replicated observations to to make me go oh i'm going to take this seriously but i'm really interested by the fact that there is this um this great deal of interest and i think that it drives me to maybe want to make or make an artificial life form even more and to help nasa and the air force and whoever go and look for things even more because i think humanity wants to know what's out there there's this yearning isn't there yeah but but i see i almost uh depending on the day i sometimes agree with you but uh with the thing you just said but one of the disappointing things to me about the sightings i still hold the belief that a non-zero number of them uh is an indication of something very interesting so i don't side with the people who say everything can be explained with like uh sensor artifacts kind of thing yeah i'd agree with you i didn't say that either i would say i just don't have enough data right but the thing i want to push back on is is the statement that everybody has a high definition camera one of the disappointing things to me about like the report that the government released but in general is having worked with government having worked with with people all over uh is how incompetent we are like if you look at the pen response to the pandemic how incompetent we are in the face of great challenges without great leadership how incompetent we are in the face of the great mysteries before us without great leadership and i just think it's actually the fact that there's a lot of high definition cameras is not enough to capture the full richness of weird of the mysterious phenomena out there of which intelligence visiting earth could be won i don't think we have i don't think everybody having a smartphone in their pocket is enough i think that allows for tick-tock videos i don't think it allows for the capture of even interesting relatively rare human events that's not that common it's rare to have be in the right moment in the right time to be able to capture the thing i agree i agree let me let me rephrase what i think on this i i haven't seen enough information i haven't really actively sought it out i must admit but i'm i'm reviewing that i love the idea of anomaly detection in chemistry in particular right i want to make anomalies sorry or not necessarily make anomalies i want to understand an anomaly let me give you two from chemistry um which are really quite interesting um phlogiston going way back where people said there's this thing called phlogiston and for ages the alchemist got really um this kind of this the fire is the thing um and that's one and we determined that logistician wasn't what we thought it is let's go to physics the ether the if is a hard one because i think actually the ether might exist and i'll tell you what i think the ether is later um and and and can you explain either so as the vacuum so that light traveling through the ether in the vacuum there is some thing that we call the ether that that basically mediates the the movement of light say and i think that um and then the other one is cold fusion which is more so a few years ago um that that people observed when they did some electrochemistry when they were splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen that you got more energy out than you put in and people got excited and they thought that this was a nuclear reaction and um and in the end it was kind of discredited because you didn't detect neutrons and stuff but i'm pretty sure i'm a chemist i'm going telling you this on your podcast but why not i'm pretty sure there's interesting electrochemical phenomena that's not completely bottomed out yet that there is something there however we lack the technology and the experimental design so all i'm saying in your response about aliens is that we do we lack the experimental design to really capture these anomalies and we are in circulating encircling the planet with many more detection systems we've got satellites everywhere so there is i do hope that we are going to discover more anomalies and remember that the solar system isn't just static in space it's moving through the universe so there's just more and more chance i'm not what with avi loeb that uh he's generating all sorts of kind of um occult i would say uh with this but there but i'm not against him i think there is a finite chance if there are aliens in the universe that we're going to happen upon them because we're moving through the universe what's the nature of of the following that uh lobe has it's doubling down more and more and more and say there are aliens interdimensional aliens and everything else right he's gone from space junk accelerating out of to interdimensional stuff in a very short space of time i see he's obviously bored or or he wants to tap into the psyche and understand and you know he's playfully kind of trying to interact with society and his peers to say stop saying it's not possible and which i agree with we shouldn't do that but we should frame it statistically in the same way we should frame any everything as good scientists statistically yeah good scientists recently the idea of good scientists is um i take quite skeptically i've been listening to a lot of scientists telling me about what is good what is good science that makes me sad because you've been interviewing what i would consider a lot of really good scientists no that's true and but that that's exactly right and most of the people i talk to are incredible human beings but there's a humility that's required science is not um science cannot be dogmatism sure i agree i mean authority like um a phd does not give you authority a lifelong pursuit of a particular task does not give you authority you're just as lost and clueless as everybody else but you're more curious and more stubborn so that's uh that's a nice quality to have but overall just using the word science and statistics can often uh as as you know kind of become a catalyst for dismissing new ideas out of the box ideas uh wild ideas all that kind of stuff well yes and no i think that so i'm i like to some people find me extremely annoying in science because i'm basically um i quite rude and disruptive not in a rude you know so to people say they're ugly or stupid or anything like that i just say you know you're wrong or why do you think this and and something i a gift i got given by society when i was very young because i was in the in the learning difficulties class at school is i was told i was stupid and so i know i know i'm stupid but i always wanted to be smart right i always i remember going to school going maybe today they're going to tell me i i'm not as stupid as i was yesterday and it was always disappointed always and so when i went into academia and everyone says you're wrong i was like join the queue yeah because it allowed me to walk through the you know the wall so i think that people like to always imagine science is a bit like living in a japanese house their paper walls and everyone sits in their paper in their room and i annoy people because i walk straight through the wall not be because why should why should i be a chemist and not a mathematician why should i be a mathematician not computer scientist because if the problem requires us to to walk through those walls um but i'm i like walking through the walls like but i as long then i have to put up you know i have to do good so i have to win the people in those rooms across by good science by taking their criticisms and addressing them head on and i think we must do that and and i think that i i try and do that in my own way and i i i kind of love walking through the walls uh and it it it gives me it's difficult for me personally it's quite painful um but it always leads to a deeper understanding of the people i'm with in particular you know the arguments i have with all sorts of interesting minds because i want to solve the problem or i want to understand more about why i exist um you know that's that's that's it really and i i think we have to not dismiss science on that basis i think we can we can work with science no science is beautiful but uh humans with egos and all those kinds of things can uh sometimes uh misused good things like social justice like all ideas were all aspired to misuse these beautiful ideas to um to manipulate people to all those kinds of things and sure and that's there's in every uh space and walk of life including science yeah yeah and those are those are no good but yes you're right the the scientific method has proven to be quite useful that said for difficult questions for difficult um rare explanations for rare phenomena you have to walk cautiously because the scientific method when you totally don't understand something and it's rare and you can't replicate it doesn't quite apply yeah yeah yeah that's it i agree with you the challenge is to is to not dismiss the anomaly because you can't replicate it i mean we can talk about this this is something i realized when we were developing assembly theory um um that people thinking that the the the the track they're on is so don't matter dogmatic where there is this thing that they see but they don't see and it takes a bit of time and you just have to keep reframing it and my approach is to say well why can't this be right you know why why must we accept that rna is the only way into life i mean who said was there you know does rna have a special special uh class of of uh information that's encoded in the universe no of course it doesn't right that you know rna is not a special molecule with in the space of all the other molecules but it's so elegant and simple and it works so well for the evolution process that we kind of use that as an intuition to explain that that must be the only way to have life sure uh but you mentioned assembly theory well first let me pause bathroom break needed yeah let's take two minutes we took a quick break and offline you mentioned to me that you have a lab in your home and then i said that you're basically rick from rick and morty which is something i've been thinking this whole conversation and then you say that there's a glowing pickle that you used something involving cold plasma i believe i don't know but can you explain the and pickle situation [Laughter] and is there many arbitrarily many versions of you in alternate dimensions so i think you're aware of i tried to make an electrochemical memory in at home um using a and the only way using a pickle the only way i could get any um traction with it was actually by plugging it into a very high voltage alternating current and then putting in a couple electrodes but my kids weren't impressed they're not impressed with anything i do any experiments i do at home i think it's quite funny but you connected to a pickle to some electro i mean 240 volts yeah ac yeah and then had a couple of electrodes on it so what happens is a pickle um this is a classic thing you do i mean i shouldn't pranks you do you put a pluck pickle into the mains and just leave it run away and leave it and what happens is it it starts to decompose it heats up and then explodes because the water turns to steam and it just violently explodes but i wondered if i could cause the iron sodium potassium ions in the pickle to migrate it'd been in a jar right it's been in a in a brine that was yeah that was not my that was not my best experiment so i've done far better experiments in my lab at home at that time was a failed experiment but you never know it could uh every experiment is a successful experiment uh if you stick with it long enough well i mean i get i got kicked out of my own lab by my research team many years ago and for good reason i mean my team is brilliant and i used to go and just break things so what i do do at home is i have a kind of electronics workshop um and i prototype experiments there then i try and then i try and suggest to my team sometimes maybe we can try this thing and they would just say oh well that's not going to work because of this and i'll say aha but actually i've tried and here's some code and here's some hardware can we have a go so that i'm doing that less and less now as i get even more busy but um that's quite fun because then they feel that we're in the you know in the experiment together you do in fact brilliantly just like rick from rick and morty uh connect up chemistry with computation so sort of and when we say chemistry we don't mean the simulation of chemistry a modeling of chemistry we mean chemistry in the physical space as well as in the digital space which is fascinating we'll talk about that but first you mentioned assembly theory so we'll stick on theory and these big ideas i would say revolutionary ideas this uh intersection between mathematics and philosophy what is assembly theory and generally speaking how would we recognize life if we saw it so assembly theory is a theory goes back a few years now my struggle for maybe almost 10 years when i was going to origin of life conferences and artificial life conferences where i thought that everybody was dancing around the problem of what life is and what it does but i'll tell you about what assembly theory is because i think it's easier so assembly theory literally says if you take an object any given object and you are able to break that object into parts very gently so just maybe let's say take a piece of very intricate chinese porcelain and you tap it just on the hammer or the nail at some point and it will fragment into many parts and if that object is able to fragment into many and you count those num those parts the different parts so they're unsymmetrical um assembly theory says the larger the number of parts unsymmetrical parts that object has the more likely it is that object has been created by an evolutionary or information process especially if that object is not one-off you've got a an abundance of them and that's really important the abundant i and i so because if you what i'm literally saying about the abundance if you have a one-off object and you break it into parts and it has lots of lots of parts you'd say well that's that could be incredibly intricate and complex but it could be just random and i was troubled with this for years because i saw in reality that assembly theory worked but when i talked to very good computational complexity computationalists algorithmic complexity people they said you haven't really done this properly you haven't thought about it it's like this this is the random problem and so um i kept working this up because i invented an assembly theory in chemistry first of all with molecules and so the thought experiment was how complex does a molecule need to be when i find it that it couldn't possibly have risen by chance probabilistically and if i found this molecule able to detect it enough quantities in the same object like a machine like a mass spectrometer so typically in a mass spectrometer you weigh the molecules in electric field you probably have to have on the order of 10 000 identical molecules to get a signal so 10 000 identical molecules that are complex what's the chance of them occurring by chance well we can do the math let's take a molecule like strychnine or um or yes a stricken is a good molecule actually to take or viagra is a good molecule i have made jokes about viagra because it's complex molecule and one of my friends said yeah if we find viagra on mars in detectable quantities we know something is up yeah but anyway it's a complex molecule so what you do is you take this molecule in the mass spectrometer and you hit it with some electrons or an electric field it breaks apart and if the larger than the larger the number of different parts you know when it starts to get to a threshold my idea was that that molecule could not be created by chance probabilistically so that was where assembly thought theory was born in an experiment in a mass spec experiment and i was thinking about this because nasa's sending the mass spectrometers to mars to titan is going to send them to europa there's going to be a nuclear-powered mass spectrometer going to titan this i mean this is the coolest experiment ever they're not only sending a drone that's going to fly around titan it's going to be powered by a you know a nuclear slug a nuclear battery and it's going to have a mass spectrometer on it is this already launched no it's going to it's dragonfly and it's going to be launched in a few years i think it got pushed a year because of the pandemic so i think you you three or four years fly nuclear dragonfly is going to fly to titan uh and collect uh data about the composition of the various chemicals on titan yeah i'm trying to convince nasa i don't know if i'll be able to convince the dragon fly team um that they should apply this approach but they will get data and depending on how good their mass spectrometer is but i had this thought experiment anyway i did this thought experiment and for me it seemed to work i i turned the thought experiment into an algorithm in assembly theory and i basically assembly theory if i take let's just make it generic and let's just take the word abracadabra say can i um if you find the word so if you have a book with lots of words in it and you find abracadabra one off and it's a wrap book that's been written by in a random way you know set of monkeys in a room and you know head type and you're on typewriters and you find one or fabric adapter no big deal but if you find lots of reoccurrences of abracadabra well that means something weird is going on but let's think about the assembly number of abracadabra so abracadabra has a you know has a number of letters in it you can break it down so you just cut the letters up but when you actually reassemble abracadabra the minimum number of ways of organizing those letters so you'd have an a a b you know uh and keep going up um there's just that you can when you cut abracadabra up into parts you can put it together again in seven steps so what does that mean that means if you basically don't re you're allowed to reuse things you make in the chain at the beginning that's the memory of the universe the process that makes abracadabra and because that causal chain you can then get to abracadabra quicker than the number of letters if we're having to specify only in seven so if you take that to a molecule and you cut the molecule up into parts and you can on the causal chain and you basically start with the atoms and then bonds and then you randomly add on those parts to make the a make the b make the and keep going all the way up um i found that literally assembly theory allows me to say how compressed a molecule is so when there's some information in there um and i realized that assembly theory is it wasn't isn't just confined to molecular space it can apply to anything but let me finish the molecular argument so what i did is i i had this theory i was one of my one of my students we wrote an algorithm we basically took the 20 million molecules from the database and we just calculated their assembly number and that's the index like basically if i take a molecule and i cut it up into bonds what is the minimum number of steps i need to take to reform that molecule from atoms so reusability of previously foreign things is somehow fundamental exactly it's like a memory in the universe right i'm making lots of leaps here like it's kind of weird i'm saying right there's a process that can form the a and the b and the c let's say and then when there's and because we've formed a and b before we can use a and b again with no extra cost except one unit so that's the kind of what the chain of events and that's how you think about memory here when you say the universe when you talk about the universe and or life is the universe creating memory exactly so we we we went through chemical space and we looked at the assembly numbers and we were able to classify it we said okay let's test it let's go so we're able to take a whole bunch of molecules and assign an assembly index to them okay and it's just those as a function of the number of bonds in the molecule how much symmetry so literally assembly theory is a measure of how little symmetry a molecule has so the more asymmetry the more information the more weird it is like a jackson pollock or some description so i then went and did a load of experiments and i basically took those molecules i cut them up in the mass spec and measured the number of peaks without any knowledge of the molecule and we found the assembly num then the there was a almost not quite a one-to-one correlation but almost because not all bonds are equal they have different energies i then did this using two other spectroscopic techniques nmr nuclear magnetic resonance which uses radio frequency to to basically jangle the molecules and get a signature out and i also used infrared and infrared and nmr almost gave us a one-to-one correlation so what am i saying saying by taking a molecule and do it and and doing either infrared or nmr or mass spec i can work out how many parts there are in that molecule and then put it on a scale and what we did in the next part of the work is um we took molecules randomly from the environment from outer space from all around earth from the the the from the sea from antarctica and from fossils and so on and even nasa and they because they didn't believe us blinded some samples and that we found that all these samples that came from biology produced molecules that had a very high assembly number above a threshold of about 15. so basically all the other stuff that came from our ebiotic origin was low there was no complexity there so we suddenly realized that on earth at least there is a cut-off that natural phenomena cannot produce molecules that need more than 15 steps to make them so i realized that this is a way to make a scale of life a scale of technology as well and literally you could just go sniffing for molecules off earth on titan on mars and when you find a molecule in the mass spectrometer that gives you more than 15 parts you'll know pretty much for sure that it had to be produced by evolution and this allowed me to come up with a general definition of life based on assembly theory to say that if i find an object that has a that has a large number of parts say an iphone or boeing 747 or you know any complex object and i can find it in abundance and cut it up i can tell you whether that has been produced by an informational process or not and that's what assembly theory kind of does but it goes a bit further i then realized that this isn't just about life it's about causation so actually it tells you about where there's a causal structure so now i can look at objects in the universe say that again this cup and say right i'm going to look at how many independent parts it has so that's the assembly number i'll then look at the abundance how many cups are two on this table maybe there's a few more you got stashed away so assembly is a is a function of the complexity of the object times the number of copy numbers of that object or a function of the copy number normalized so i realize there's a new quantity in the universe you have energy entropy and assembly so assembly the way we should think about that is uh how much uh reusability there is because reusability is like the like can you play devil's advocate to this so like could this just be a nice uh tertiary signal for living organisms like some kind of distant signal that's yeah this is a nice property but it's not capturing something fundamental or do you think reusability is something fundamental to the life and complex organisms i think reusability is fundamental in the universe not just for life and complex or organisms it's about causation so i think assembly tells you if you find objects because you can do this reject trajectories as well you think about it that in the unit the fact there are objects in the universe on earth his mind is weird you think about it we should just have a commentary explosion of stuff the fact that not everything exists is is really weird now and then as i'm looking at two mugs and two water bottles and uh the things that exist kind of uh are similar and multiply yeah in copies yeah yeah so i would say that assembly allows you to do something that statistical mechanics and people looking at entropy have got stuck with yeah for a while so i'm making it's pretty bold i mean i'm writing a paper with sarah walker on this at the moment and we're realizing we don't want to get ahead of ourselves because i think that there's lots of ways where this is you know it's it's a really interesting idea it works for molecules and it appears to work for any objects produced by causation because you can take a motor car you can look at the assembly of the motor car look at a book look at the assembly of the book assembly theory tells you there's a way of compressing and reusing and so when people i talk to information theorists they say oh this is just logical depth i say it is like logical depth but it's experimentally measurable they say oh it's a bit like common golovk complexity and so but it's computable and now okay it's not infinitely computable gets mp hard very quickly right it's very hard problem when you could get but it's uncomputable enough you're contractible enough to be able to tell the difference between a molecule that's been formed by the random background and by uh causation and and i think that that's really interesting because until now there's no way of measuring complexity objectively complexity has required algorithmic comparisons and programs and human beings to label things assembly is label-free well not entirely we can talk about what that means in a minute okay um my my brain has been uh broken a couple of times sorry i explained it really badly no it was very well explained it was just fascinating and uh it's uh it's a my brain is broken into pieces and i'm trying to assemble it uh so np hard so when you have a molecule you're trying to figure out okay if we were to reuse parts of this molecule which parts can we reuse to uh as an optimization problem and be hard to figure out the minimum amount of reused components that will create this molecule and it becomes difficult when you start to look at a huge huge molecules arbitrarily large because i'm also like mapping this can i can i think about this in complexity generally like looking at a cellular automata system and saying like what's the what can this be used as a measure of complexity for like uh arbitrarily complicated system yeah i think it can it can and i think that the question is then what's the benefit because there's plenty of um i mean in computer science and mathematics and physics people have been really seriously studying complexity for a long time and i think there's some really interesting problems of where we course grain and we lose information and all assembly theory does really assembly theory just explains weak emergence and and so what assembly theory says look going from the atoms into atoms that interact those first replicators that build one another um assembly at the the minimal level just tells you evidence that there's been replication and selection and i think the more selected something is the higher the assembly and so we we're able to start to know how to look for selection in the universe if you go to the moon there's nothing a very high assembly on the moon except the human artifacts we've left there so again let's go back to the sandbox in assembly theory says if all the sand grains could stick together that's the infinite conventory explosion in the universe that should be the default well we don't have that now let's assemble sand grains together and what that's um and do them in every possible way so we have a series of minimal operations that can move the sound together but all that doesn't exist either now because we have specific memory where we say what we're going to put three sand grains in a line or four and make a cross or a triangle or something unsymmetrical and once we've made the triangle the unsymmetrical thing we remember that we can use it again because on that causal chain so what assembly theory allows you to do is go to the actual object that you exist you find in space and actually the way you get there is by disassembling it so this assembly theory works by disassembling objects you have and understanding the the steps to create them and it works with map for bot for molecules beautifully because you just break bonds but like you said it's not be hard it's very difficult it's a difficult problem to figure out how to break them apart for molecules it's easy if you just keep low enough in molecular weight space it's good enough so it's a complete theory when we start to think about objects we can start to assign we can start to think about things at different levels different atoms what do you assign as your atom so in a molecule the atom this is really confusing because the word atom i mean smallest breakable part so in a molecule the atom is the bond because you break bonds not atoms right right so in a car the atom might be i don't know a small amount of iron or the smallest you know reusable part a rivet uh a piece of plastic or something so you've got to be really careful in a microprocessor the atoms might be transistors and so how are some the amount of assembly that something as is a function you have to look at the the atom level what are you where are your parts what are you counting that's one of the things you get to choose what is uh what scale is they add what is the minimum exact thing i mean there's a huge amount of trade-offs in when you approach a system and try to analyze like if you approach earth you're an alien civilization try to study earth what is the atom for trying to measure the complexity of of life is it uh are humans the atoms i would say to start with you just use molecules i can say for sure if there are molecules of sufficient complexity on earth then i know that life has made them and then go further and show technology there are molecules that exist on earth that are not possible even by biology you needed technology and you needed microprocessors to get there so that's really cool and that there's a correlation between that uh between the the coolness of that and uh assembly number whatever the measure what's the what would you call the measure assembly index yeah so yes there are three kind of fundamental kind of labels we haven't so there's the quantity of assembly and the assembly so if you have a box let's just have a box of molecules so i'm gonna have my box we count the number of identical molecules and then we chop each molecule up in a individual molecule class and calculate the assembly number so basically that you then have a function that sums over all the molecules for each assembly and then you divide through so you make it uh divided by the number of of molecules so that's the assembly index for the box so that will tell you some amount of assembly in the box so basically the assembly equation we come up with is like basically the sum of e to the power of the assembly index for molecule i times the number of copies of the molecule i and then you normalize so you sum them all up and then normalize so some boxes are going to be more assembled than others yeah that's what they tell me so if you were to look at me as a box the same a box uh am i some of my parts in terms of like how do you know what what's my assembly index so i'm going to be gentle so let's just we'll talk about the molecules and use so let's just take a pile of sand the same way as you mm-hmm and and i would um take you and just cut up all the molecules i mean and and look at the number of copies an assembly number so in sand let's say there's probably going to be nothing more than a semi number of two or three but there might be trillions and trillions of sand grains and your body there might be the assembly numbers going to be higher but there might not be quite as many copies because the the molecular weight is higher so you do want to average it out you kind of you can do averages i'm not i'm not defined by the most impressive model no no you're an average in your volley what i mean we're just working this out but what's really cool is they're you're going to have a really high assembly the sand will have a very low assembly your causal power is much higher you get to make decisions you're alive you're aspiring assembly says something about causal power in the universe and that's not supposed to exist because physicists don't accept that causation exists at the bottom so i understand at the chemical level why the assemblies cause causation why is it causation because it's capturing the memory exactly capturing memory but there's not an action to it so um i'm trying to see how it leads to life well it's what life does so i think it's we we don't know so yeah that's a good question what is life versus what does life do yeah so that's this is the definition of life the only definition we need right the assembly is that life is able to create objects in abundance that are that are so complex this semi number is so high they can't possibly form by in around in an environment where there's just random interactions yeah so the so suddenly you can put life on a scale um and then life doesn't exist actually in that can it's just how evolved you are and you as an object because you have incredible causal power you could go and you can go and you know um launch rockets or build cars or create drugs or you know it's you can do so many things you can build stuff build more artifacts that show that you have had causal power and that causal power was there's kind of a lineage and i think that over time i've been realizing that the physics as a discipline has a number of problems associated with me as a chemist is kind of interesting that assembly theory and i'm really you know i want to maintain some some credibility in the physicist size but i have to push them because they're physics is a really good discipline it's it's reduced the number physics is about reducing the belief system but they're down to some things in their belief system yeah which is kind of really makes me kind of grumpy number one is requiring order at the beginning universe magically we don't need that the second is the second law well we don't actually need that and i this is blasphemous in a minute i i'll recover my career in a second although i think the good the only good thing about being the regis chair means i think there has to be an act of parliament to fire me [Laughter] so you know you can always go to lee's twitter and protest and i think the third thing is that so we've got you know we've got the um the order at the beginning yeah um second law yeah the second law and the fact that causation is emergent right and that time is immersion carol just turned off this program i think he believes that it's immersion so causation is not that's clearly incorrect because we wouldn't exist otherwise so tight so physicists have kind of got confused about time time is a real thing well i mean so look i'm very happy with the current description of the universe as physics give me because i do a lot of stuff right i can go to the moon with newtonian physics i think and i can understand um the the orbit of mercury with relativity and so and i can build transistors with quantum mechanics right and i can do all this stuff yeah so i'm not saying the physics is wrong i'm just saying if we say that time is fundamental i.e time is non-negotiable there's a global clock i don't neither i don't need to require that there's order been magically made in the past because that asymmetry is built into the way the universe is so if time's fundamental i mean you've been referring to this kind of an interesting formulation that is memory yeah so uh time time is hard to like put a finger on like what what the hell are we talking about well it's just a direction but memory is a construction especially when you have like think about these local pockets of complexity these um non-zero assembly index entities that's being constructed and they remember never forget molecules but remember the thing is i invented assembly theory um i'll tell you i invented it when i was a kid i mean i the thing is i keep making fun of myself from a research group i've only ever had one idea i keep exploring that idea over the 40 years or so since i had that idea well aren't you the idea that the universe had so it's very kind of hierarchical anyway go ahead i'm sorry that's that's very oh that's very poetic yeah so i think i came up with assembly theory the following idea when i was a kid i was obsessed about survival kits what is the minimum stuff i would need to basically replicate my reality and i love computers and i love technology or what technologies can become so i imagined that i would have basically this really big truck full of stuff and i thought well can i delete some of that stuff out can i have a blueprint and then and in the end i kept making this making it smaller i got to maybe half a truck and into a suitcase and then went okay i'll screw it i want to i want to carry my entire technology in my pocket how do i do it and i'm not like a launch interest steve jobian you know i'm iplayer i came up with a matchbox survival kit in that matchbox survival kit i would have the minimum stuff that would allow me to interact the environment to build my shelter to build a fishing rod to build a water purification system and it's kind of like so what did i use in my box to assemble in the environment to assemble to assemble to assemble and and i realized i could make a causal chain in my survival kit so i guess that's probably why i've been obsessed with assembly theory for so long and i was just pre-configured to find it somewhere and when i saw it in molecules i i realized that the causal structure that we say emerges and the physics kind of gets really stuck because they're saying that time you can go backwards in time i mean how do we let physicists get away with the notion that we can go back in time and meet ourselves i mean that that's clearly a very hard thing to let we physicists would not let other scientists get away with that kind of heresy right so why physicists allowed to get away with it let's so first of all to push back to play devil's advocate you are clearly married to the idea of memory you see in this again rick from rick and morty way you see you you have these deep dreams of the universe that is writing the story through its memories those these chemical compounds that are just building on top of each other and and then they they find useful components they can reuse and then they're they're reused components uh create systems that themselves are then reused and all in this way construct things but when you think of that as memory it seems like quite sad that you can walk that back but at the same time it feels like that memory you can walk in both directions on that memory in in terms of time you could walk in both directions but i don't i don't think that that makes any sense because um the problem that i have with time being reversible is that um i mean i'm i'm just a you know i'm a dumb experimental chemist right so i love burning stuff you know burning stuff and building stuff but when i think of reversible phenomena i imagine in my head i have to actually manufacture some time i have to i have to borrow time from the universe to do that i can't when anyone says let's imagine that we can go back in time or reversibility you can't do that you can't step out of time time is non-negotiable it's happening no but see you're assuming that time is fundamental which most of us do when we go day-to-day but it takes a leap of wild imagination to think that time is emergent um no time is not emergent yeah i mean this is an argument we can have but i believe i can come up with an experiment an experiment that proves that time cannot possibly be emerging experiment that shows how assembly theory kind of is the way that the universe produces selection and that selection gives rise to life and also to say well hang on we could allow ourselves to have a theory that requires us to have these these statements to be possible like we need we need to have order in the past or we can have use the past hypothesis um which is order in the past but as well okay and we have to have an arrow of time we have to require that entropy it increases and we have to say and then we can say look the universe is completely closed and there's no novelty or that novelty is predetermined what i'm saying is very very important that time is fundamental which means if you think about it the universe becomes more and more novel each step it generates as more states and next step than it was before that means bigger search so what i'm saying is that the universe wasn't capable of consciousness at day one actually because it didn't have enough states but but today the universe is complex so it's like all right all right hold on a second now we've pissed off the pant cycles too okay no just brilliant sorry i'm a part of me is just you know joking having fun with this thing but uh because you're saying a lot of brilliant stuff and i'm trying to slow it down before my brain explodes so because i want to break break apart some of the fascinating things you're saying so novelty novelty is increasing in the universe because the number of states is increasing what do you mean by states so i think the physicists almost got everything right i can't i can't fault them at all i just think there's a little bit of dog i'm just trying to play devil's advocate i'm very happy to be entirely wrong on this right you know i'm not right on many things at all but but if i can make less assumptions about the universe with this then potentially that's a more powerful way of looking at things if you think if time is fundamental yeah you can make less assumptions overall exactly the time sunder meant i don't need to add on a magical second law because the second law comes out the fact the universe is actually there's more states available i mean we might even be able to do weird things like dark energy in the universe might actually just be time right yeah but then you have to still have to explain why time's fundamental because i can give you one explanation that's simply a time to say god you know like just because it's simple doesn't mean it's but okay you still have to explain god and you still have to explain time like why is it fundamental so let's just say existence is default which means time is the default so how did you go from the existence this is the thing well look we exist right so let's just we'll just just take be very we're yet to talk about what exists means all right let's listen all the way back yeah yeah okay i think it's very poetic and beautiful what you're weaving into this i i don't think this conversation is even about the assembly uh which is fascinating and we'll keep mentioning it assembly index and this idea that i don't think is necessarily connected to time oh i think it is deeply connected like i can't explain it yet so you don't think everything you've said about assembly theory and assembly index can still be correct even if time is emergent so yeah right now assembly theory 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 it's a nice if nothing else it's a nice way of looking at how molecules can compress things um now am i saying that a time has to be fundamental not immersion for assembly theory to work no i'm 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'd 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 emergent 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 there's when when the bond happens and selection starts suddenly there are there the universe is remembering causing 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 with people's minds why you're triggering people by saying fundamental why not we just say like let's say why am i look i'm walking through the wall why why why should i grow up in a world where time ty i don't go back in time i don't mean i don't meet myself in the past there are no one there are no aliens coming from the future right you know it's just like oh no no but that's not no no no no that's like saying we're talking about biology or like uh evolutionary psychology and you're saying okay let's just assume that that clothing is fundamental people wearing clothes is fundamental it's like no no wait a minute you can't like i think you're getting in a lot of trouble as you assume time is fundamental why give me one reason why i'm getting into trouble time being fundamental because you might not understand the origins of this memory that might be deeper like that this memory that could be a thing that's explaining the construction of these uh higher complexities better than just saying it's a it's a search it's it's chemicals doing a search for uh reusable uh reusable structures that they can like then use as bricks to build the house okay so i accept that so let's let's let's go back a second because it's a kind of it is 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 um 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 and it doesn't exist at the micro scale 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 in a girded non-aegonic to a negative transition right at some point and those replicators have consequence material consequence in the universe physicists just say oh you know what i'm gonna have a bunch of particles in the box i'm going to 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 and 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 we and there's so many 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 ca and assembly gives rise to these objects that 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 bottle and look at this water bottle and look at the features on it there's writing you've got a load of them um 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 bowl has ever been conceived of by humanity this here is a special object in fact leibniz knew this you know leibniz um it was at the same time of newton he kind of got stuck i think leibniz actually invented 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 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 fair enough and uh you're saying it's just a simpler view if time is fundamental and it and it shakes the physicist's cage a bit right because i'm gonna say but i think that i i just i just enjoy the fact that physicists are in cages i think that i mean i would say that you know lee smolin i don't want to speak for lee i'm talking to lee about this i think lee also is in agreement that time is has to be fundamental but i think he goes further you know 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 this is my i think third time i've been to austin is austin in the same place no the solar system is moving through space i'm not back in the same space locally i am every event in the universe is unique in space and time and time doesn't mean we can't go back though i i mean uh you know i mean let's just you know rest this conversation which was beautiful uh with a quote from the rolling stones that uh you can't always get what you want which is you want time to be fundamental but if you try you'll get what you need which is assembly theory okay let me ask you about continue talking about complexity and uh to clarify with this beautiful theory of yours that you're developing and i'm sure we'll continue developing both in the lab and in theory um yeah it's can't be said enough just the ideas you're playing with in your head are just and we've been talking about are just beautiful so if we talk about complexity a little bit more generally maybe in an admiring romantic way how does complexity emerge from simple rules the why the how okay the nice algorithm of assembly is there 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 uh if 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 um take the take the emergence of a 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 or how this got how this exists 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 are gone but if you embrace the go the bottom up with assembly those states and you you 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 very least and maybe allow us to crack open complexity in a new way and and i've been fascinated with complexity theory for many years i mean whenever as soon as i could you know i learned of the mandelbrot set and i could write write is just type it up in my computer and run it and just show it and see it kind of unfold it was just this this kind of this mathematical reality that existed in front of me i just found incredible but then i realized that actually we were cheating we're 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 um 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 the podcast right they're just absolutely fantastic but i'm wondering if we might be able to reformat the way we would explore com com algorithmic complexity using assembly let's 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 quite that emergence 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 you know origin of life is a scam i would say lots of 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 oh you're thinking and starting to drop as an assembly theory uh something index is a way to counter the constraints yes that's it it's all it is so assembly theory doesn't do 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 texture of writing of this of the music you may compose you've tweeted quote assembly theory explains why nietzsche understood with limited freedom rather than radical freedom so we've applied assembly theory to cellular automata in life and chemistry um what does nietzsche have to do with uh somebody oh that gets me into free will and everything so let me say that again assembly theory explains why nietzsche understood we had limited freedom rather than radical freedom limited freedom freedom i suppose is referring to the fact that there's constraints or um what is radical freedom what is freedom so sartre was like believed in absolute freedom um 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 lair okay do you know dragon slayer i think i know dragons there yeah dragon slayer i knew i was being conned right dragon's lair when you play the game you're lucky that you grew up in a basically procedurally generated worlds that was rpg a little bit no it's like uh is it turn-based play was it it was a it was a role-playing game but really good graphics and won the first laserdiscs and when you actually flicked the stick you you took it's like it was like a graphical adventure game with animation yeah 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 for not making mistakes just play the display display disc so it was just about timing and actually was a complete fraud because all the animation has been pre-recorded on the disk yeah it's like the black mirror the first interactive where they had all the you know several million uh kind of uh permutations of the movie that you could select on netflix i've forgotten the name of it so this was a exactly that in the laserdisc so 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 yeah it's not really generating it yeah and i played that game and i knew i was being had so to you uh dragon lair is the first time you realize that free will is an illusion yeah and why why not does assembly theory give you hints about free will whether it's an illusion or not yeah so no so not tightly if 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 my 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 i could try that but i don't have sufficient um agency to make that necessarily happen i'm on a trajectory so when in dragon's lair i know that i have some trajectories that i can play with where 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 i and the assembly theory basically says that it says 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 i'm a poppy plant and i'm creating some opiates opiates are really interesting molecules i mean they're obviously great for medicine great product cause great problems in society but let's 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 and but they can't go radical they can't they can't suddenly become i don't know like a molecule that you find in the oled in a display they will have some they will be limited by their the causal chain that produced them and that's what i'm getting at saying you're we're predictive we are unpredictably predictable or predictably unpredictable predictably unpredictable within a constraint on the trajectory we're on yeah so the predictably part is the this is the constraints of the trajectory and the unpredictable part is the part that you still haven't really clarified the origin of uh of the little bit of freedom yeah so you're you're just arguing you're you're basically saying that radical freedom is impossible you're you're really operating in a world of constraints that are constrained by the memory of the trajectory of the chemistry that led to who you are okay but uh you know even just a tiny bit of freedom even if everything if everywhere you are in cages if you can move around in that cage a little bit yeah you're free i agree and so the question is in assembly theory if we're thinking about free will where does the little bit of freedom come from what is the i that can decide to be a rapper what why what is that that's a cute little trick we've convinced each other of so we can do fun tricks at parties or is there something fundamental that allows us to feel free to be free i think that that's the question that i want to answer i know you want to answer it and i think it's so profound i'd 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 when he said the way he says it is almost it's really interesting i'd love to talk to him about it sam harris almost thinks himself out of existence right because because do you know what i mean yeah well i mean he has different views on consciousness versus free will i think he saves himself with consciousness he thinks himself out of existence with free will yeah yeah exactly so that means there's no point right so he's a leaf floating on a river yeah uh um i i think that he he 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 no no i then would say i'll 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 at some point when he loses enough money or the prospect of losing enough money um there's a way of basically mapping out a series of so what what what will is about let's not call it free will that what will us 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 you're having with other individuals and happenstance and i think that you have there's a little bit of delay in time so i think what what you're able to do is say well i'm going to do the counterfactual i've done all of them and i'm going to i'm gonna go this way and you probably don't know why i think free will is actually very complex interaction between your conscious your unconscious and your conscious brain and i think the reason why we're arguing about it so it's so interesting in the and we just some people um 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 and that he can't have access to the unconscious yeah and that's kind of annoying and but then so he's just he's going to through meditation come to acceptance with that fact yeah just which is maybe okay i maybe 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 with uh some people that um 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 you know as a 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 it's funny that um if you truly accept that there's no free will that is a kind of radical freedom it's funny but you're because the little bit of the illusion in under that framework that you have that you can make choices if choice is just an illusion of psychology you can do whatever the hell you want that's the but we don't do we and i think but because you don't truly accept that you you think that there's like you think there's a choice which is why you don't uh just do whatever the hell you want like you feel like there's some responsibility for making the wrong choice which is why you don't do it but if you truly accept that the choice has already been made then you can go i don't know what is the most radical thing um i mean but yeah i don't i wonder what what am i preventing myself from doing that i would really want to do um probably like humor stuff like i would i would love to if i could like save a game do the thing and then reload it later like do undo it'd probably be humor just just to do something like super hilarious [Laughter] that's super embarrassing and then just go i mean it's basically just fun i would add more fun to the world i mean i sometimes do that because i you know um i sometimes um i try and 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 the transition from a you know a 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 and also the models you're generating the brain and also your the amount of memory your working memory have available any one time to generate counter factuals well that's fascinating so the decision making process is a kind of selection yeah that could be just absolutely yet another you get another manifestation of the selection mechanism that's uh pervasive throughout the universe okay that's fascinating to think about yeah there's not some kind of fundamental its own thing or something like that that is just yet another example of selection yeah and in the universe that's intrinsically open you want to do that because you generate novelty you mentioned something about do cellular automata exist outside the human mind in our little offline conversation um why is that an interesting question so uh cellular automata complexity what's the relationship between complexity and the human mind and uh trees falling in the forest infrastructure so the ca so when john von neumann and conway and feynman were doing ca's doing on paper ca is cellular just drawing them on paper how awesome is that that they were doing cellular automata on paper yeah and then they were doing a computer that takes like forever to print out anything and program sure people are now with the tick tock kids these days with the tick tock don't understand how amazing it is to just play with cellular automata arbitrarily changing the rules as you want the initial conditions and see the beautiful patterns emerge sing with fractals all of them all you've just given me a brilliant idea i wonder if there's a tick tock account that's just dedicated to putting out ca rules and if it isn't we should make one 100 and now we'll get so we have millions of views like millions yes no you'll get uh you'll get dozens just have it running i'm saying look i i kind of ca i love cas uh yeah no i just we a few years ago i made some robots that talk to each other chemical robots that played the game of hex um invented by john nash um by doing chemistry and they communicated by twitter which experiments they were doing and they had a they had a they had a they had a look up table of experiments and robot one said i'm doing experiment 10. and the others wrote about okay i'll do experiment one then and then communicate via twister and then publicly or yeah yeah yeah yeah oh can you maybe quickly explain what the game of hex is uh yes so it's a basically a bought a hexagonal board and you try and basically you color each hexagon each element on the board it's hexagon and you try and get from one side to the other and the other one tries to block you wait uh how are they connected uh so what they're wrote uh yeah let's go back so they wrote two robots yeah each robot was doing die 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 um 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 complicated go away um but anyways we had the robot people listening to this uh should probably know that lee cronin is a as a amazing group of brilliant people he's exceptionally well published he's written a huge number of amazing papers whenever he uh calls himself stupid and is is a sign of humility and i deeply respect that and appreciate it so people listening to this should know this is this is a world-class scientist who doesn't take him so seriously which i really appreciate and love anywho you talking about serious science we're back to uh your group rejecting your idea of chemical robots playing chess via dies so you went to a simpler game of hex okay so what else the team that did it were brilliant i really think the i think they still have ptsd from doing it because i said this is a workshop what i'd often do is i'd so 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 were like no i'm not doing this and then you get lu you get left with the the happy dozen yeah and what we did is we built this robot and doing die 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 commentarily 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 have two chemical reactions going on at once and they could basically outsource the problem but they're sharing the same tape exactly okay so robot one would say i'm gonna do i'm gonna do experiment one and the other robot says how to experiment 100. and then they co they cross it off but i wanted to make it that's brilliant by the way that is genius sorry well i wanted to make it groovier and i said look let's have him competing yeah to make to so playing a game of hex and so when the robot does it does an experiment and the more blue the die the more it gets the the chart 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 down weighted in the other robot and so what the robots could do is they play each player move and because the fitness function or the the optimization function was to make the color blue they started to invent um reactions we didn't 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 it could get blue more quickly yeah and the other robot realized that so it's like getting dirty as well and they unintend the consequences of super intelligence okay but that was the game and we communicating through twitter though they were they were doing it through twitter and twitter blamed 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 yeah but and then in the end they have we had to take them off twitter and they just communicated virus 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 yeah answer blue you know i i really find it super compelling that you would have a chemical entity that's communicating with the world that was one of the things i want to do in my origin of life reaction right is basically have a have a reactor that's basically just randomly enumerating through chemical space and have some kind of cycle and then read out what the molecules reading out using a mass spectrometer and then convert that to text and publish it on twitter and then wait until it says i'm alive reckon that would i reckon that that twitter account will get a lot of followers yeah and i'm still trying to convince my group that we should just make an origin of life twitter account where it's going to be like hello testing i'm here well i'll share it i like it i particularly enjoy this idea of a non-human entity communicating with the world via a human designed social network it's quite a quite a beautiful idea how we were talking about uh ca's existing outside the human mind yeah so i really admire stephen wolfram i think he's a genius clearly a genius and trapped in his actually it's like a problem with being so smart is you get trapped in your own you know mind right and i've i tried to actually i tried to convince stephen that assembly theory wasn't nonsense he was like no it's just nonsense i was a little bit sad by that so nonsense applied even if we applied to the simple surprise construct of a one-dimensional cellular automata for example yeah yeah but i mean actually maybe i'm doing myself a bit too down it was it was like it was just as a theory was coming through and i didn't really know how to explain it but but we are going to use assembly theory cas instead of automata but i'm i wanted to what i was really curious about is why people are marvel i mean you marvel at cas and their complexity and i say 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 like you have to have a 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 and it is interesting because i think i said um cetera automata running them uh is teaching me something about what real numbers are and aren't and i haven't quite got there yet i was playing on the airplane coming over and just realized i have no idea what real numbers are really and they'll say well i do actually have some notion what real numbers are um 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 um why am i seeing this complexity in this in this rule is it is it you know is it is it deter 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 as you apply as a function and you're trying to read it out to an arbitrary position and i wonder if cas are just helping me well my my misunderstanding of cas might be helping me understand them in terms of real numbers i don't know what you think yeah well the funk is but uh the devil's in the function it's like which is the function that's generating your real number like that it seems like it's very important the specific algorithm of that function because some lead to something super trivial some lead to something that's all chaotic and some lead to things that are just walk that fine line of complexity and we'll take a look at structure 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 um you don't you don't know what's gonna happen at n plus one but once you've done n plus one you know full time you can't predict it for me cas and logistic equation feel similar and 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 but we wrote up a paper how to do a chemical formulation of the game of life which we made a chemical computer and one of little cells and i was playing game of life with a bz reaction so each cell would pulse on and off on and off on and off we have little stirrer bars and we have little gates yeah and we actually played conway's game of life in there and we got structures in that we got structures in that game from the chemistry that you wouldn't expect from the actual ca so that's kind of cool in the um because they're they're they're interacting outside of the cell smile or so what's happening is you're getting noise so the thing is that you've got this bz reaction that gives on off on off on off but there's also a wake and those wakes constructively interfere or in such a non-trivial way that that's non-deterministic and the non-determinism in in in the system gives very rich dynamics and i was wondering if i could physically make a chemical computer with this ca um 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 so the the paper in particular so it's just a beautiful idea to use a chemical computer to construct the cellular automata and the famous one of game of life but it's also interesting as a really interesting scientific question of whether some kind of random perturbations or some source of randomness can uh have a uh significant constructive effect on the 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 you know i wonder what what is the i'm trying to think about what is the encoding space the encoding space is pretty big we have um 49 stir ups of 49 cells 49 chem bits all connected to one another in like an analog computer but being read out discretely as they come the bz reaction so just to say the bz reaction is a chemical oscillator and what happens in each cell is it goes between red and blue so two russians discovered it blues off zapakinsky i think luzov first proposed it and everyone said you're crazy it breaks the second law and zabasinski said no it doesn't break the second law it's consuming a fuel and so and then and and it's a like there's a lot of uh um uh chemistry hidden in the russian literature actually that just because russians just wrote it in russian they didn't publish in english speaking journalism it's heartbreaking actually yeah it's yeah sad and it's great it's there right it's not lost i'm sure we will find a way of translating it properly well the silver lining slash greater sadness of all of this is there's probably ideas in in english speaking like there's ideas in certain disciplines that if discovered by other disciplines would crack open some of the biggest mysteries in those disciplines like computer science for example it's uh trying to solve problems like nobody else has ever tried to solve problems as as if it's not already been all addressed in cognitive science and psychology mathematics in physics and uh just whatever you want to economics even but if if you look into that literature you might be able to just discover some beautiful ideas obviously russian is uh is an interesting case of that's because there's a lawson translation but he said there's a source of fuel source of energy yeah yeah so with the bz reaction you have a you have a an acid in there called malonic acid yeah and what happens is it it when it react 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 in a long enough time so it's it's like it's reversible in time but only like yeah but um but it's fascinating i mean the team that did it i'm really proud of their persistence we made a we made a chemical computer um it can solve little problems it can solve travelling salesman problems actually nice um but like i said it's co it's not any faster than a regular computer is there is there something you can do maybe i'm not sure i'm not i think we can come up with a way of solving problems also really complex hard ones um because it's an analog computer and we can we can the it can energy minimize really quickly it doesn't have to basically go through every element in the matrix like flip it it just reads out so we can actually do monte carlo by just shaking the box it's literally a box shaker you don't actually have to encode the shaking of the box in a silicon memory and then just shuffle everything around yeah and you can tell analog it's natural so it's a uh it's an organic computer yeah yeah so we're so i was playing around with this and i was kind of annoying some of my colleagues i'm wondering if we could get to chemical supremacy like quantum supremacy and i kind of calculated how big the grid has to be so we can actually start to solve problems faster than the silicon computer but i'm not willing to um to state how that is yet because i'm probably wrong it's not that i'm it's any top secret thing is i want i think i can make a chemical computer that can solve optimization problems faster than the silicon computer that's fascinating and but then you're unsure how big that has to be yeah i think i mean it might be a big box hard to shake it might be exactly a big box hard to shake and basically a bit sloppy did we answer the the question about uh do uh cellular exist outside the mind we didn't but i would i would posit that they don't and i i and but i think minds can well so the mind is fundamental what's the what i mean well i mean sorry let's go to the back so as a physical phenomena do cas exist in physical reality right i would say they probably don't exist outside the human mind but now i've constructed them they exist in computer memories they exist in my lab they exist on paper so they are they emerge from the human mind i'm just interested in because stephen wolfram likes cas a lot of people like cas and likes to think of them as minimal computational elements i'm just saying well do they exist in reality or are they a representation of a simple machine that's just very elegant to implement so it's a platonic question i guess yeah i mean it's there's initial conditions there's a memory in the system there are simple rules that dictate the evolution of the system so what exists the idea the rules the yeah people are using cas as models for things in reality to say hey look you can you can do this thing in a ca and my my when i see this i'm saying oh that's cool but what does that tell me about reality where's the ca in in space right it's a mathematical object so for people who don't know cellular automata there's a is usually a grid whether it's one-dimensional two-dimensional or three-dimensional and it evolves by simple local rules like you die or born if the neighbors are alive or dead and it turns out if you have with certain kinds of initial conditions and with certain kinds of very simple rules you can uh create like arbitrarily complex and beautiful systems and to me um you know whether uh drugs are involved or not i can sit back for hours and enjoy the the mystery of it how such complexity emerges it gives me almost like you know people talk about religious experiences it gives me a sense that you get to have a glimpse at the uh origin of this whole thing whatever is creating this complexity from such simplicity is the very thing that brought my mind to life this me the human uh our our human civilization and yes those constructs are pretty trivial they're i mean that's part of their magic is even in this trivial framework you could see the emergence or especially in this trivial framework you could see the emergence of complexity from simplicity i guess what lee you're saying is that this is not you know um this is highly unlike systems we've seen the physical world even though they probably carry some of the same magic like mechanistically i mean i'm saying that the the the operating system that ca has to exist on is quite complex right and so i wonder if you're getting the complexity out of the ca from the boundary conditions the operating system the underlying digital computer oh wow so you those are some strong words against ca's then i didn't know again i mean i'm in the i'm in love with cas as well right i'm just saying they aren't as trivial as people think they are incredible you get to that richness you have to iterate billions of times and you need a display and you need a math coprocessor and you need a von neumann machine based on a turing machine with digital error correction and states wow to think that for the simplicity of a grid you're basically saying a grid is not simple yeah it requires incredible complexity to bring a grid to life yeah yeah that's what then what is simple that's all i wanted to say i agree with you with a wonder of cas i just think but remember this we take so much for granted what the ca is resting on because von neumann and and uh firemen weren't showing weren't seeing these elaborate structures they could not get that far yeah but that's the limitation of their mind yeah exactly but i i think that's the question is whether the essential elements of the cellular automata is um is present without all the complexities required to build a computer the reason i find it incredible is that yeah my intuition is yes it might look different uh there might not be a grill structure a grid like structure but local interactions operating under simple rules and resulting in multi-hierarchical complex structures feels like a thing that's doesn't require a computer i agree but coming back to von neumann and feynman and wolfram their their minds the non-trivial minds to create those architectures and do it and to put on those state transitions and i think that something that's really incredibly interesting that um is understanding how the human mind builds those straight those state transition machines you i could see how deeply in love with the idea of memory you are so it's it's like how much of e equals mc squared like is more than an equation it has albert einstein in it like you're saying like you can't just say this is a uh like the equations of physics are a really good simple capture of a physical phenomena it is also has the mem that equation has the memory of the humans absolutely absolutely yeah but i don't i don't know if you're implying this i don't uh that's a beautiful idea but i don't know if i'm comfortable with that sort of diminishing the power of that equation no no it causes built on the shoulders it enhances i think it enhances it it's not that equation is a minimal compressed representation of reality right we can use machine learning or or max tech marks um ai firemen to find lots of solutions for gravity but isn't it wonderful that the laws that we do find are the maximally compressed representations yeah but that representation you can now give it as i guess the universe has the memory of einstein with that representation but then you can now give it as a gift for free yeah yeah it's very memorable civilizations i had to go through a lot of pain together but it's low memory so physic i say that physics and chemistry and biology are the same discipline they're just physics laws in physics there's no such thing as a law in physics it's just low memory stuff because you've got low memory stuff you can things reoccur quickly as you get build in more memory you get to chemistry so things become more contingent when you get to biology more contingent still and then technology so the more memory you need the more that your laws are local that's all i'm saying and that the the less memory the more the laws are universal because they're not laws they are just low memory states we have to talk about a thing you've kind of mentioned already a bunch of times but doing computation through chemistry chemical based computation i've seen you refer to it as in in a sexy title of kemp mutation computation so what is computation what is chemically uh chemical based computation okay so computation is a a name i gave to the process of um building a state machine to make any molecule physically in the lab and so as a chemist chemists make molecules by hand and um and they're quite hard chemists have a lot of tacit knowledge a lot of ambiguity it's not possible to go uniformly to the literature and read a recipe to make a molecule and then go and make it in the lab every time some recipes are better than others but they all assume some knowledge and it's not universal what that is like so it's uh carried from from human to human yeah some of that implicit knowledge and you're saying can we remove the humor from the picture can we like uh program by the way what is a state machine so a state machine is a i suppose a a a object either abstract or mechanical where you can do you can um do a unit operation on it and flick it from one state to another so a turn style would be a good example of a state machine uh there's some kinds of states and some kind of transitions between states and it's um very formal in nature in terms of like it's precise yes you can mathematically precisely describe a state machine so i mean you know a very simple boolean um gates are a very good way of building kind of logic based state machines obviously a turing machine the concept of a turing machine where you have a tape and a read head and a series of rules in a table and you would basically look at what's on the tape and if you're shifting the tape from left to right and if you see a zero or one you look in your lookup table and say right i've seen a zero and a one um i then do i then respond to that so the turn style would be is there a human being pushing the turnstile in direction clockwise if yes i will open let them go if it's anti-clockwise no so yes so state machine has some labels and a transition transition diagram so you're looking to come up with a chemical computer to form state machines to to create molecules or yeah so which what's the chicken in the egg so computation is not a chemical computer because we talked a few moments about actually doing computations with chemicals yeah what i'm now saying is i want to use state machines to transform chemicals and so so build chemicals programmatically yeah i mean i get in trouble saying this i i said to my my group oh i shouldn't say it because this but i said look we should make the crackbot is it in the crack robot the real what the mixture the crackpot oh crackbot the robot that makes crack but maybe we should scrub this from but or uh well so maybe you can educate me on uh breaking bad with like maths right yeah so in breaking bad you want to make you want to make um basically some kind of mix of ex machina and breaking bad no i don't i don't i record i don't but you don't i said that's what i'm going to do once you release the papers but i shaved my head and i'm going to uh live a life of crime anyway i'm sorry no no um so so yeah let's get back to so indeed it is about making drugs but importantly making important drugs um so drugs matter yeah but let's go let's go back so the basic thesis is chemistry is very analog there is no state machine um and i wandered into the through the paper walls in the in the japanese house a few years ago and said okay hey organic chemist why are you why are you doing this analog they said well chemistry is really hard you ha you can't automate it it's impossible i said but is it impossible says yeah and they said they said you know i got the impression they were saying it's magic and so when people tell me things are magic it's like no no they can't be magic right so let's break this down and so what i did is um i went to my my group one day about about eight years ago and said hey guys i've written this new programming language for you um and so everything is clear and you know you have to you're not allowed to just wander around the lab willy-nilly you have to pick up things in order go to the balance at the right time and all this stuff and they looked at me as if i was insane and basically kicked me out of the lab and said no don't do that we're not doing that yeah and i said okay so i went back the next day and said i'm gonna find some money so we can make cool robots do chemical reactions everyone went that's cool yeah and so in that process the first to try to convert the humans to become robots and next you agree you might as well just create the robots yes but so in that in the formalization process yeah so what i did i said look a react chemical to make a molecule you need to do four things abstractly i want to make a chemical turing machine because a turing machine you think about this imagine a turing machine turing machine is the ultimate abstraction of of a computation because it's been shown by turing in others that basically a universal turing machine should be able to do all computations that you can imagine it's like wow why don't i think of a turing machine for chemistry let's think of a magic robot that can make any molecule let's think about that for a second okay great how do we then implement it and i think it's right so what is the abstraction so to do to make any molecule you have to do a reaction so you have to put reagents together do a reaction in a flask typically then you after the reaction you have to stop the reactions you do what's called a workup so whatever cool it down add some liquid to it extract so then after you do the workup you separate so you then remove the molecule separate them all out and then the final step is purification so reaction uh work up separate purify so this is basically like my exactly like a um a turing machine where you have your tape you have your tape head you have some rules and then you run it so i thought cool i went to all the chemists and said look chemistry isn't that hard reaction work up separation purification do that in cycles forever for any molecule all the chemistry done and they said um chemistry is that hard i said but but just in principle and i got a few very enlightened people to say yeah okay in principle but it ain't gonna work and this was in about 2013 2014 and i i found myself going to an architecture conference almost by accident it's like why i'm at this random conference on architecture and that was because i published a paper on inorganic architecture and they said come to the architecture conference but the inorganic architecture nano architecture it's not and i went okay and then i found these guys at the conference 3d printing ping-pong balls and shapes and this is through it 3d printing was cool and it's like this is ridiculous why are you 3d printing ping pong balls and i gave them a whole load of abuse like i normally do when i first meet people how to win friends and influence people and then i was like oh my god you guys are geniuses yeah and so i got from they were a bit confused because i was calling them idiots and then call them geniuses it's like will you come to my lab and we're going to build a robot to do chemistry with a 3d printer and say well that's cool all right so i had them come to the lab and we started to 3d print test tubes so you imagine you know 3d printer bottle and then and then and then use the same gantry to basically rather than to squirt out plastic out of a nozzle have a little syringe and chemicals in so we had the 3d printer that could simultaneously print the test tube and then put chemicals into the test tube and then oh it says really end to end yeah i was like that'll be because they've got g-code to do it all it's like yeah that's cool so i got my group doing this and i developed it a bit and i realized that we could take those unit operations and we built a whole bunch of pumps and valves and i realized that i could basically take the literature and i made the first version of the computer in 2016-17 i made some architectural decisions so i designed the pumps and valves in my group i did all the electronics in my group they were brilliant i i cannot pay tribute to my group enough in doing this they were just brilliant and there were some poor souls there that said lee why are you making us design electronics i'm like well because i don't understand it like so you're making us design stuff because you don't understand it's like yeah it's like but can we not just buy some i said well we can but then i don't understand how to you know what bus they're gonna use and the serial ports and all this stuff i just wanted and i made i came up the decision to design a bunch of pumps and valves and use power of the ethernet so you've got one cable for power and data plug them all in plug them all into a router and um and then i made the state machine and there was a couple of cool things i did all they did actually um we got the the abstraction so reaction uh work up separation um purification and then i made the decision to do it in batch now as in batch all chemistry had been digitized before apparently every once it's been done but everyone's been doing it in flow and flow is continuous and there are infinity is everywhere and you have to just and i realized that i could actually make a state machine where i basically put stuff in the reactor turn it up from one state to another state stop it and just read it out and okay and i was kind of bitching at electrical engineers saying you have it easy you don't have to clean out the electrons you know because electrons don't leave a big mess they leave some em waste but in my state machine i built in cleaning so it's like would do all operation then it cleans the backbone then can do it again so there's no there's any so what we managed to do over a couple of years is is develop the hardware develop state machine and we encoded three molecules we did three the first three we did nitol sleeping drug rafinomide anti-seizure and viagra you know and i i could make jokes on the paper it's a hard problem blah blah blah yeah that's very good and then and then in the next one what we did said okay my poor organic chemist said look lee we've we've worked with you this long we've made a robot that looks like it's going to take our jobs away and and not just take our jobs away that what we love in the lab but now we have to become programmers but we're not even good programmers we just have to spend ages writing lines of code that are boring and it's not as elegant and when you're right so then but i knew because i had this abstraction and i knew that there was language i could suddenly develop a state machine that would interpret the language which was lossy and ambiguous and populate my abstraction so i built a chemical programming language that is is actually going to be recursively enumerable it's going to be a turing complete language actually which is kind of cool which means it's formally verifiable so where we are now is we can now read the literature using a bit of natural language processing it's not the best that many other groups have done better job but we can use that language reading to populate the state machine and basically add subtract there's a we've got about a number of primitives that we the you know basically program loops that we dovetail together and we can make any molecule with it okay so that's that's the kind of program synthesis so you start like literally you talk about like a paper like a scientific paper that's being read from natural language processing extracting some kind of uh details about chemical reactions and the the chemical molecules and composites involved and then that's that uh in gpt terms serves as a prompt for the program synthesis that's kind of trivial right now there you have a bunch of different like for loops and so on that creates a program in this chemical language that can then be interpreted by the chemical computer uh the computer yeah chem kickstarter yeah everything sounds better in your uh british accent but it's i love it so the into the computer and that's able to then basically be a 3d printer for these for molecules yeah i wouldn't call it a 3d printer i would call it a universal chemical reaction system because 3d printing gives the wrong impression but yeah and and it purifies and the nice thing is that that code now that we call it chem the kdl code is is really interesting because now so computation what is computation computation is what computing is to mathematics i think computation is the process of taking chemical code and some input reagents and making the same molecule making the molecule reproducibly every time without fail well it's computation it's the process of taking a using a program to take some input conditions and give you an output same every time right reliably so the the problem is now maybe you can push back and correct me on this so i know biology is messy my question is how messy is chemistry so the if we use the analogy of a computer it's easier to make computation in a computer very precise that it's repeatable it makes errors almost never if it does the exact same way over and over and over and over what about chemistry is there messiness in the whole thing it can that be somehow leveraged can it be controlled can be that removed do we want to remove it from the system oh yes no right is there messiness there there is messiness because chemistry is like you're you're you're doing reactions on on billions of molecules and they don't always work but you've got purification there and so what we've found is at the beginning everyone said it can't work it's gonna be too messy it'll just fail and i said but you managed to get chemistry to work in the lab are you magic are you doing something so i would say now go back to the first ever computer or the eniac five million soldered joints 400 000 uh valves that are exploding all the time was that would you have gone okay that's messy so we've got the and have we got the equivalent of the aniak in my lab we've got 15 computers in the lab now and they are they unreliable yeah they fall apart here and there but are they getting better really quickly yeah are they now able to reliably make are we at the point in the lab where there are some molecules we would rather make on the computer than have a human being make yeah we've just done we've just made a um anti-influenza molecule and some antivirals um six steps on the computer that would take a human being about one week to make arbor doll um of continuous labor and all they do now is load up the reagents press go button and just go away and drink coffee wow so this i mean and this is uh you're saying this computer is just the early days and so like some of the criticisms just have to do with the early days and yes i would say that something like this is uh quite impossible uh you know so the fact that you're doing is is incredible not not impossible of course but extremely difficult it it did seem really difficult and i do keep pinching myself when i go in the lab i was like is it working like yep and it it's not you know it does clog it does stop you've got to clean this is great you know but it's um it's getting more reliable because i made some we just made design decisions and said we are not going to abandon the abstraction think about it if the if you the von neumann implementation was abandoned i mean think about what we do to semiconductors to really constrain them to um what we do to silicon in a fab lab we take computation for granted silicon is not in its natural state we are doping the hell out of it it's incredible what they're able to accomplish and achieve that reliability at the scale they do like you said that's after moore's law we'll have now and so where we you know uh how it started you know now we started at the bottom now we're here we have only have 20 million molecules say 20 million molecules in one database maybe a few hundred million in all the pharmaceutical companies um and those few hundred million molecules are responsible for all the drugs that we've had in humanity except you know biologics for the last 50 years now imagine what happens when a drug goes out of print it goes out of prints because there's only a finite number of manufacturing facilities in the world that make these drugs is that a print yeah isn't that computer the printing press the for chemistry yeah and and not only that we can protect the kdl so we can stop bad actors doing it we can encrypt them and we can give people that's the name of sorry to interrupt is the name of the programming language the kydl is the name of the programming language and the pro code we give the chemicals so chi as in you know just for it's like a it's actually like an xml format but i've now taken it from script to a to a fully expressible programming language so we can do dynamics and there's four loops in there and conditional statements right but the structure it started out as a um like a like an xml thing yeah yeah yeah yeah and now we also the chemist doesn't need to program in kdl they can just go to the software and type in add a to b reflux do what they would normally do and you just convert it to kindly l and they have a linter to check it and everything how do you um you know not with ascii but because it's a greek letter how do you go with um how do you spell it just using the english alphabet we're just like xdl but all we use we put in kai and it was named by one of my students and i and one of my postdocs many years ago and i quite liked it it's like it's important i think when the team are contributing to such big ideas because their ideas as well isn't i try not to just rename i didn't call it cronin or anything that because they keep saying you know is a is it the the chemistry when they're putting stuff in the computer one of my students said we're asking now is it cronin complete and i was like what does that mean i said well can we make it on the damn machine and i was like oh is that is that a compliment or a majority but they're like well it might be both yeah so you tweeted quote why does chemistry need a universal programming language question mark for all the reasons you can think of reliability interoperability collaboration remove ambiguity lower cost increase safety open up discovery molecular customization and publication of executable chemical code which is fascinating by the way just publish code and um can you maybe elaborate a little bit more about this kai dl what does the universal language of chemistry look like a crone and complete language it's a true incomplete language really it's um but um so what it has it has a series of operators in it like add heat stir um so there's a bunch of just unit operations and all it is really is just uh it's with chemical engineers why i talked about this that you've just re you've just you've just rediscovered chemical engineering and i said well yeah i know i said well that's you know that's trivial i said well well not real well yes it is trivial and that's why it's good because we've not only have we just got rediscovered chemical engineering we've made it implementable on universal hardware that doesn't cost very much money and so the kdl has a series of statements like define the reactor so it defines the reagents so they're all labels so you assign them and what we i also implemented at the beginning is because i give all the hardware i p address you put it on a graph and so what it does is like the graph is equivalent to the the process of firmware the processor code so when you take your kdl and you go to run it on your computer you can run it on any compatible hardware in any configuration says what's your what's your graph look like as long as i can solve the problem on the graph with these unit operations you have the resources available compile chem piles [Laughter] all right we can carry on for years i but it is really it's compilation and evolution and what it now does is it says okay the problem we have before is it was possible to do robotics for chemistry but the robots were really expensive they were unique they had and what i want to do is to make sure that every chemist in the world can get access to machinery like this at virtually no cost because it makes it safer it makes it more reliable and then if you go to the literature and you find a molecule that could potentially cure cancer and let's say the molecule that could potentially cure cancer takes you three years to repeat and maybe a student finishes their phd in the time and they never get it back um so it's really hard to to kind of get all the way to that molecule and it limits the ability of humanity to build on it if they just download the code and can execute it it turns i would say the electronic laboratory notebook in chemistry is a data symmetry because no one will ever reproduce it for now the data cemetery is a jupiter notebook and you can just execute it and people can play with it yeah the access to it reverses the magnet huge is increased uh we'll talk about the so as with all technologies i think there's way more exciting possibilities but they're also terrifying possibilities and we'll talk about all of them but let me just kind of linger on the machine learning side of this so you're describing programming but it's a language i don't know if you've heard about open air codex which is uh yeah i'm playing with it are you playing of course you are you really are rick from rick and morty this is great okay uh except philosophically d i mean he is i guess kind of philosophically deep too so for people who don't know gpt gpt3 that's the language model that can do natural language generation so you can give it a prompt and it can uh complete the rest of it but it turns out that that kind of prompt it's not just completes the rest of it's generating uh like novel sounding text and then you can apply that to generation of other kinds of stuff uh so these kinds of uh transformer based language models are really good at forming at uh uh forming deep representations of a particular space of like a medium like language so you can then apply it to a specific subset of language like programming so you can have it learn the representation of the python programming language and use it to then generate uh syntactically and semantically correct uh programs so you can start to make progress on one of the hardest problems in computer science which is program synthesis how do you write programs that accomplish different tasks so what uh openai codex does is it generate those programs based on a a prompt of some kind usually you can do a natural language prompt so basically as you do when you program you write some a comment which serves the basic documentation of the inputs and the outputs and the function of the particular set of code and it's able to generate that point being is you can generate programs using machine learning using neural networks those programs operate on the boring old computer can you generate programs that operate there's got to be a clever version of programs for this but uh can you write programs that uh operate on a computer yep there's actually software out there right now we can go and do it right so yeah it's a heuristic it's rule based but we have what we've done inspired by codex actually is um over the summer i ran a little workshop some of my groups thought this inspired idea that we should get a load of um students and ask them to manually collect data to label chemical procedures into kdl and um we have a called synth reader so that so there's a lot bunch of people doing this right now but they're doing it without uh abstraction and because we have an abstraction that's implementable in the hardware um we've developed basically a chemical analog of codecs what you're doing we say sergeant trial when you say abstraction in the hardware what do you mean so right now a lot of people doing machine learning and reading chemistry and just and saying oh you've all these operations add shake whatever he but they but because they don't have a uniform um i mean there's a couple of groups doing it competitors actually and they're good very good but um they can't run that code automatically it they are losing meaning and and with and the really important thing that you have to do is generate context and so what we've learned to do with our abstraction is make sure we can pull the context out of the text and so can we take a chemical procedure and read it and generate our executable code yes what's the hardest part about the whole pipeline from the initial text interpreting the initial text of a paper extracting the meaningful context and the meaningful chemical information to then generating the the program to then uh running that program in the hardware what's what's the hardest part about that pipeline as we look towards a universal touring computer so the hardest computer the heart the hardest thing with the uh the pipeline is that um the software the model gets confused between some meanings right so if you know chemists are very good at inventing words that aren't broken down so i would that the classic word that you would use for boiling something is called reflux so reflux is um you would have a salt you'd have a solvent in a round bottom flask at reflux it would be boiling going up the reflux condenser and coming down but that term reflux to reflux could be changed you know to people often make up words new words and the and then the software can fall over but what we've been able to do is a bit like in python or any programming language is identify when things aren't matched so you present the code you say this isn't matched you may want to think about this and then the user goes and says oh i mean reflux and just ticks the box and collects it so what the codex or the chemex uh does in this case is it just it suggests the first go and then the chemist goes and corrects it and i really want the chemist to correct it because it's not safe i believe for for to allow ai to just read literature and generate code at this stage because now you're having actual by the way chemex nice uh nice name uh so you you are unlike which is fascinating if we live in a fascinating moment in human history but yes you're literally connecting ai to some physical and like it's building something in the physical realm yeah especially in the space of chemistry that operates sort of invisibly yeah yeah i would say that's right and it's it's really important to understand those labeling schemes right and one of the things i was never i was always worried about the beginning that the abstraction was going to fall over and the way we did it was just by brute force to start with we just kept reading the literature and saying is there anything new can we add a new rule in and actually our kydl language expand exploded there was so many extra things we had to keep adding and then i realized the primitives still were maintained and i could break them down again so we get it's pretty good i mean there are problems there problems of you know interpreting any big sentence and turning it into an actionable code and then codex is not without its problems you can you can crash it quite easily right you can generate nonsense but boy it's interesting i would love to learn to program now using codex right just hacking around right and i wonder if chemist in the future will learn to do chemistry by just hacking around with the system writing in different things because the key thing that we're doing with the chemistry is that where a lot of mathematical chemistry went wrong is people and i think wolfram does this in mathematica he assumes that chemistry is a reaction where atom a or molecule a reacts with molecule b to give molecule c that's not what chemistry is chemistry is take take some molecule take a liquid and a solid mix it up and heat it and then extract it so the programming language is actually with respect to the process operations and if you flick in process space not in chemical graph space you unlock everything because there's only a finite number of processes you need to do in chemistry and that yeah and that's reassuring and so so we're in the middle of it it's really exciting um it's not you know the be all on the end or and there is like i say errors that can creep in one day we might be able to do it without human interaction you simulate it and you'll know enough about the simulation that will it the you know i'm the lab won't catch fire but there are so many safety issues right now that we've got to really be very careful you know protecting the user protecting the environment protecting misuse i mean there's lots to discuss if you want to go down that route because it's very very interesting you don't want another chocks being made or or explosives being made or or recreational drugs being made but how do you stop a molecular biologist making a drug that's going to be important for them looking at their you know particular assay on a bad actor trying to make methamphetamine i saw how you looked at me and you said bad actor but that's exactly what i'm going to do i'm trying to get the details of this so i can be first oh don't worry we can protect you from yourself okay um i'm not sure that's true but that statement gives me hope does this ultimately excite you about the future or does it terrify you so let's we mentioned that time is fundamental it seems like you're at the cutting edge of progress that will have to happen that will happen that there's no stopping it and i as we've been talking about i see obviously a huge number of exciting possibilities so whenever you automate uh these kinds of things just the world opens up it's like programming itself and the computer a regular computer has uh created innumerable applications it made the world better in so many dimensions and it created of course a lot of negative things that we for some reason like to focus on using that very technology to tweet about it but i think it made a much better world but it created a lot of new dangers so maybe you can speak to when you have when you kind of stand at the end of the road for uh building a really solid reliable universal computer um what are the possibilities that are positive what are the possibilities that are negative how can we minimize the chance of the negative yeah that's a really good question so there's so many positive things from drug discovery from supply chain um uh stress for basically enabling chemists to basically build more productive in the lab right well this isn't the computer is not going to replace the chemist there's going to be a moore's law of molecules right there's going to be so many more molecules we can design so many more diseases we can cure so chemists in the lab as researchers that's better for science so they can build a bunch of um uh like they could do science at a much more accelerated pace so it's not just the development of drugs it's actually like doing the basic understanding of the science of drugs and the personalization the cost of drugs right now we're all living longer we're all having more and more we know more about our genomic development we know about our you know pre-determination and we might be able to one dream i've got is like imagine you know you you you can work your genome assistant tells you you're going to get cancer in seven years time and uh you have your personal computer that cooks up the right molecule just for you to cure it right that's a really positive idea yeah the other thing is um is when drugs so right now i think it is absolutely outrageous that not all of humanity has access to medicine and i think the computer might be able to change that fundamentally because it will disrupt the way things are manufactured so let's stop thinking about manufacturing in different factories let's say that computers clinical grade computers or drug grade computers will be in facilities all around the world and they can make things on demand as a function of the cost you know maybe people won't be able to afford the latest and greatest patent but maybe they'll be up we get the next best thing and we'll basically democratize um make available drugs to everybody that they need you know and you know there's lots of really interesting things there so i think that's going to happen i think that now let's take the the negative before we do that let's imagine what happened to go back to a really tragic accident a few years ago or not accident an act of murder by that pilot on the i think it's euro wings or swiss swings off but what he did is the plane took off um he went to his pilot went to the toilet he was a co-pilot he locked the door and then set the the autopilot the the the um above the alps so you set the altimeter or the the the descend height to zero so the computer just took the plane into the alps now i mean that was such a tragedy that obviously the guy was mentally ill but it wasn't just a tragedy for him it was for all the people on board but what if and i was inspired by this am i thinking what can i do to do to to anticipate problems like this in the computer had the had the software and i'm sure boeing and airbus will be thinking ah maybe i can give the computer a bit more situational awareness and whenever one some tries to drop the height of the plane and it knows it's above the alps or just say oh no computer says no we're not letting you do that um of course he would have been out of fine another way maybe fly it until it runs out of fuel or something but you know keep anticipating all the large number of trajectories that can go negative all those kinds of running into the alps and try to at least make it easy for the engineers to build systems that protecting us that yeah and and let's just think so what are in the computer world right now with kydl's let's just not think about what i'm doing right now what i'm doing right now is it's completely open right everyone's going to know kai dl's maybe playing with them making them more easier and easier and easier but what we're going to start to do it makes sense to encrypt the kydl's in such a way you you let's say you work for a pharmaceutical company and you have a license to make a given molecule or you get issued with a license by the fda or your local authority and they'll say right you're licensed to do it here it is it's encrypted and the kdl gets run so you have a license for that instance of use easy to do computer science has already solved the problem so the fact that we all trust online banking right then right now then we can secure it i'm 100 sure we can secure the computer and because of the way we have a many you know it's like the same um mapping problem that you to actually reverse engineer a kdl will be as hard as reverse engineering the encryption key you know brute force it will be cheaper um to um to just actually buy the regulated medicine and actually people aren't going to want to then make their own fake pharmaceuticals because it'll be so cheap to do it will drop the cost of access to drugs now what will happen recreational drugs people start saying well i want access to recreational drugs well it's going to be up to it's going to accelerate that social discussion that's happening in the u.s and canada and the uk everywhere right because cost goes down yes access goes up giving cannabis thc to some people who've got epilepsy isn't literally forgive the term a no-brainer because these poor people go from seizures like every day to maybe seizures just once every few months so that's that's an interesting idea to try to minimize the chance that it can get into like the hands of individuals like terrorists or people that want to do harm now with that kind of thing you're putting a lot of power in the hands of governments in the hands of institutions and so then emerge the kind of natural criticism you might have with governments that can sometimes use these for ill use them as uh weapons of war not weapon not uh tools of uh betterment so um and sometimes not just war against other nations but war against its own people as it has been done throughout history well i'm thinking so there's another way of doing a decentralized peer-to-peer version where and what you have to do i'm not saying you should adopt a blockchain but there is a way of maybe taking kdl's and put them on blockchain here's an idea let's just say the way we do in my lab right now is we we go to the literature we take a uh a recipe to make a molecule convert that to cardio and diligently make it in the robot and validate it we that so we that i would call mining proof of work fruit of synthesis right for the synthesis yeah yeah but this is cool because suddenly when you do when you actually synthesize it you can get the analytical data but there's also a fingerprint in there of the impurities that get carried across because you can never make one something 100 pure that fingerprint will allow you to secure your kdl so what you do is encrypt those two things so suddenly you can have people out there mining and what you could do perhaps is do the type of thing we need to basically look at the way that contact tracing should have been done in covid where people are given the information so you've just been in contact with someone covered you choose i'm not telling you to stay at home you choose right so now if we could imagine a similar thing like you know you have got access to these chemicals they will have these effects you choose and publicize it or maybe it's out somewhere i don't know i'm not a policy maker on this and what my job here is to not just make the technology possible but to have it as open as a discussion as possible with people to say hey can we stop childhood mortality of this technology and to those benefits outweigh the one-off where people might use it for terrorism or people might use it for recreational drugs chemify which is the name of the entity will make this happen i think we have we have some social responsibilities as an entity to make sure that we're not enabling people to manufacture personal drugs weapons at will and what we have to do is have a discussion with society with the people invest in this with people that are going to pay for this to say well do you want to live longer and you want to be healthier and are you willing to accept some of the risks and i think that's a discussion to have so by the way when you say personal drugs do you mean the illegal ones or do you have a concern of just putting the manufacturer of any kind of legal drugs in the hands of of uh regular people because they might like dose matters they might take way too much i mean i would say to be honest the either the chances of computers being well shouldn't always never so the fact i can now say this means it's totally going to come true right you know i am going to do it i i cannot imagine that computers will be in people's houses anytime soon but they might be at the local pharmacy okay right and they and if you've got a drug manufacturing facility in every town then you just go and they give you a prescription they do it in such a way they format it so that you you don't have to take 10 pills every day you get one manufactured for you that has all the materials you need and the right distribution got it but you mentioned recreational drugs and and the reason i mentioned because i know people are going to speak up on this if the drug is legal there's to me no reason why you can't manufacture i mean for recreation i mean you can do it what do you have against fondly i i haven't so i mean i'm a chemistry professor in a university who who's an entrepreneur as well i just think i need to be as responsible as i can in the discussion sure um not sure but i know i'm so let me be the one that says like there's nothing because you have said recreational drugs and like terrorism in the same sentence yeah yeah i think okay i think let's make sure we draw a line uh that there's real dangers to the world of terrorists of bio warfare and then there's a little bit of weed so i have i mean i i think it's up to the society to yes to tell is governments what it wants what's acceptable right and if it becomes let's say that thcs become you know heavily acceptable and that you can modify them so let's say there's let's say it's like blood type there's a particular type of thc that you that you tolerate better than i do then why not why not have a machine that makes the one you like yeah and then and why not the perfect brownie okay and i i think that that's fine um but i'm you know i we're so far away from that i can barely get the thing to work in the lab right i mean it's reliability and all this other stuff but what i think is going to happen in the short term it's going to turbo charge molecular discovery reliability and that will change the world that's super exciting you have a draft of a paper titled autonomous intelligent exploration discovery and optimization of nanomaterials so we are talking about automating engineering of nanomaterials how hard is this problem and as we continue down this thread of the positives and the worrisome what are the things we should be excited about and what are the things we should be terrified about and how do we minimize the chance of the of the uh terrifying consequences so in this robot the robot does all the heavy lifting so the robot basically is an embodied ai i really i really like ai in in in a domain specific way one that actually should say at this point there was an attempt in the 60s uh joshua ludenberg and some really important people did this that made an ai to try and guess if organic molecules in a mass spectrometer were alien or not yes and they did they failed because they didn't have assembly theory i think and when i and i and wait what does assembly theory give you about alien versus human life well no it just they it tells you about unknown the degree of unknowns you can fingerprint stuff they weren't looking at um they were trying to basically just look at the corpus of or complex organic molecules so i when i was a bit down about assembly theory because i couldn't couldn't convince referees and couldn't convince computational um people interested in computational complexity i was really quite depressed about it and i mean i've been working with with sarah walker's team and i think she you know i think she also invented an assembly theory in some way we talk about it later when i found the ai not working for the dendral project i suddenly realized i wasn't it totally insane coming back to this nano robot so what it does it's a basically a like a computer but now what it does is it squirts a liquid with gold in it in the test tube and it adds um some uh reducing agents there's some electrons to make the gold turn into a nanoparticle now when gold becomes a nanoparticle it gets a characteristic color a plasmon so it's a bit like if you look at the sheen on a gold wedding ring or a gold bar or something those those are the ways that conducting electrons basically reflect light what we did is we randomly squirt the gold the gold particle and the reducing agent in and we measure the uv we measure the color and so what we do is we've got the robot has a mind so it has a mind where in a simulation it randomly generates nanoparticles and the plasmon the color that comes out randomly generally imagines in its head it then or the other so that's the imaginary side of the robot in the physical side of the robot it squirts in the chemicals and looks at the color and it uses a genetic algorithm and a map elite actually on it and it goes around in cycles and refines um the color to the objective now we use two different points we have an exploration and an optimization they're two different so the exploration just says just do random stuff and see how many different things you can get and when you get different things try and optimize and make the peak sharper sharper sharper and what it does after a number of cycles is it physically takes a sample of the optimized nano material resets all the round bottom flasks cleans them and puts the seed physical seed back in and what this robot is able to do is is search a space of 10 to the 23 possible reactions in just a thousand experiments in three days and it makes five generations of nanoparticles which get nicer and nicer in terms of shape and color and definition and then at the end it outputs like ideal code that could then be wow just doing the search for programs in the physical space yeah so it's doing a kind of reinforcement learning yeah yeah in the physical space with the exploration and the optimization and that cardio will work on any computer or any qualified hub now that's it that's now that's a general piece of code that can replicate uh somewhat maybe perfectly what it created that's amazing that's incredible but the nanoparticles themselves are dumb the robot has all the thinking so we don't try and apply any self-replication or try and get the the particles to make themselves although it would be cool to try so well there you go that's that those are famous last words for the end of human civilization would be cool to try so is it possible to create molecules that start approaching this question that we started this conversation which which is the origin of life so to start to create molecules that have life-like qualities so have the replication have like complex start to create complex organisms so we have done this with the oxides i talked about earlier the molybdenum oxides and the rings and the bulls and the problem is that well they are they do they auto catalytically enhance one another so they would i guess you would call it self-replication but because there's limited um function and mutation they're pretty dumb so don't do very much so i think the prospect of us being able to engineer a nano material a nanomaterial life form in the short term like i said earlier my aim is to do this of course i mean i'm you know on one hand i'm saying it's impossible on the other hand saying i'm doing it so which is it lee you know it's like uh well like i think we can do it but only in the robot so the causal chain that's gonna allow it's in the robot these particles if they do start to self-replicate the systems can be so fragile that i don't think anything dangerous will come out it doesn't mean we shouldn't treat them as potentially you know um i mean i don't want to scare people like gain a function we're going to produce stuff that comes out our number one kill switch is that we always try to search a space of objects that don't exist in our reaction don't exist in the environment so even if something got out it just would die immediately it's like making a silicon life form or something or you know which is the opposite of uh oftentimes gain and function research just focused on like how do you get a dangerous thing to be closer to something that works with humans yeah so have it jump to humans so that's the one that's one good mode to operate on is always try to operate on chemical entities that are very different than the the kind of chemical environment that humans operate in yeah and also i mean i'll say something dramatic which may not be may not be true so i should be careful if let's say we did discover a new living system but it was made out of a shadow biosphere and we just released it in the environment who cares it's going to use different stuff it'll just live just live yeah i i found one of my biggest fantasies is actually is like a planet that's basically half in the sun it doesn't rotate right and and you have two different origins of life on that planet and they don't share the same chemistry yeah and then they only wait time they recognize each other when they become intelligent they go well what's that moving yeah i i wanted to co-evolve and that's fascinating i mean so one fascinating thing to do is exactly what you were saying which is a life bomb which is like try to focus on atmospheres or chemical conditions of other planets and try within this kind of uh exploration optimization system try to discover life forms that can work in those conditions and then you send those life forms over there see what kind of stuff they build up like you can do like a large scale it's kind of a safe physical environment to do large-scale experiments it's another planet yeah so look i'm gonna say something quite contentious i mean elon wants to go to mars i think it's brilliant wants to go mars but i would counter that and say is elon just obsessed with getting humanity off earth or what about just technology so if we do technology so so elon either needs to take a computer to mars he needs to manufacture drugs right on demand right because zero cost payload and all that stuff is just code or what we do is we actually say hang on it's quite hard for humans to survive on mars why don't we write a series of origin life algorithms where we put our embed our culture in it right this is a very ridley spot prometheus right yeah which is a terrible film by the way but anyway um and dump it on mars and just terraform mars and what we do is we evolve life on mars that is suited to life on mars yeah rather than brute forcing human life on mars so one of the questions is you know what what is human culture what is the things you encode some of it is knowledge some of it is information but the thing that elon talks about and i think the thing i think about i think you think about as well is some of the more unique aspects of human nature of what makes us human which is our particular kind of consciousness so he talks about the flame of human consciousness yeah that's one of the questions is can we um instill consciousness into other beings because that's a sad thought that whatever this thing inside our minds that hopes and dreams and fears and loves can all die yeah but i think you already know the answer to that question um i have a robot lawnmower at home my kids call it cc call cutter it's a robomow and it the way it works it has an electric field around the perimeter and it just tell it the area and it it goes out and goes from its base station just mows a bit gets to the perimeter detects and then chooses a random angle rotates around and goes on yeah but my kids call it call cutter it's a she i don't know why it's a she they just they when they were like quite young they called it um i don't want to be sexist there it could be but they liked um they they gendered the lawnmower they gendered the lawnmower okay yeah why not but i was thinking this lawnmower if you apply integrated information theory to lawmaker the lawnmower is conscious now information integrated information theory um is that people say as a flawed way of measuring consciousness but i don't think it is i think assembly theory actually measures consciousness in the same way consciousness is something that has generated over a population of objects of humans consciousness didn't suddenly spring in our consciousness has evolved together right the fact we're here and the robots we leave behind they all have some of that so we won't lose it all sure consciousness requires that we have many models being generated there's not just one domain specific ai right i think that the way it created consciousness i'm going to say unashamedly the best way chemical to make a consciousness is in a chemical system because you just have access to many more states and the problem right now we're making silicon consciousness is you just don't have enough states so there are more possible states or sorry there are more possible configurations possible in your brain than there are atoms in the universe and you can you can switch between them you can't do that on a core i10 it's got it's got 10 billion 12 billion 40 billion transistors but you can't you can't reconfigure them as dynamically well you've shared this intuition a few times already that the larger number of states somehow correlates to greater possibility of life but it's also possible that constraints are essential here yeah yeah i mean but but coming back to the you worry that something's lost i agree um but i think that um you know we will get to an agi but i wonder if it's if it's not it can't be separate from human it can't be separate from human consciousness because the causal chain that produced it came from humans so the people what i kind of try and suggest heavily to people worry about um the existential threat of ai saying i mean you put it much more elegantly earlier like we should worry about algorithms on dumb algorithms written by human beings on twitter driving us insane right and doing acting in odd ways yeah i think intelligence this is what i have been ineloquent in trying to describe it partially because i try not to think too deeply through this stuff because then you become a philosopher i still aspire to actually building a bunch of stuff but my sense is super intelligence leads to um deep integration into human society so like intelligence is strongly correlated like uh intelligence the way we conceive of intelligence materializes as a thing that becomes a fun entity to have at a party and with humans so like uh it's a mix of wit intelligence humor like intelligence like knowledge ability to do uh reasoning and so on but also humor emotional intelligence ability to love to uh to dream to share those dreams to um to play the game of um human civilization the push and pull the whole dance of it the whole dance of life and i think that kind of super intelligent being is not the thing that that worries me i think that ultimately will enrich life it's again the dumb algorithms the dumb algorithms that scale in the hands of people that are too don't study history that don't study human psychology and human nature just applying too broadly for selfish near-term interests that's the biggest danger yeah i think it's not a new danger right um right i now know how i should use twitter and how i shouldn't use twitter right um i like to provoke people into thinking i don't want to provoke people into outrage it's not fun it's not a good thing for humans to do right and i think that when you get people to outrage they take sides and taking sides is really bad but i think that we're all beginning to see this and i think that actually i'm very optimistic about how things will evolve because you know i wonder how much how much productivity has twitter and social media has taken out humanity because how many now um i mean so the good thing about twitter is it gives power so it gives voice to minorities right and and that's good to some degree but i wonder how much voice does it give to all sorts of other problems that don't need this emergency by the way when you say minorities i think uh or at least if i were to agree with you what i would say minorities broadly defined in these small groups of people that uh it magnifies the concerns of the small versus the big that is good to some degree um but i think i mean i have to be careful because i think i have a a very i mean i think that the world isn't that broken right i think the world is pretty cool place i think academia is really great i think climate change presents a really interesting problem for humanity that we will solve i like how you said it's a pretty cool problem for civilization it's a big one what's the budget i want to there's a bunch of really yeah really big problems that if solved can significantly improve the quality of life or large that ultimately is what we're trying to do improve like how awesome life is for the maximum number of people yeah and i think the the coming back to consciousness i don't think the human universe is doomed to heat death right it's one of the optimists that's why i want to kind of nudge you into thinking that time is fundamental because the time is fundamental then suddenly you don't have to give it back the univ the universe just constructs stuff you know and what we see around us in our construction i know everyone's worried about how fragile civilization is and i mean look at the fundamentals we're the good we're good until the earth the the sun expands right we've got quite a lot of resource on earth we're trying to be quite cooperative humans are nice to each other when they when they're not under enormous stress we're coming back to the consciousness thing are we going to send human beings to mars or conscious robots to mars or are we going to send some hybrid um and our and i don't know the answer to that question right now i guess you know elon's gonna have a pretty good go at getting there i'm not sure whether i have my i have my doubts but i'm not qualified you know i'm sure people have their doubts that computation works yeah but but but i've got it working and i you know and most most of the cool technologies we have today and take for granted like the airplane aforementioned airplane were things that people doubted every like majority of people doubted before they uh came to life yeah and they come to life and speaking of hybrid ai and humans it's fascinating to think about all the different ways that hybridization that merger can happen i mean we have currently have the smartphone so there's already a hybrid but there's all kinds of ways that hybrid happens how we and other technology play together like a computer how that changes the fabric of human civilization is like wide open who knows who knows if you remove if you remove cancer if you remove major diseases from humanity there's going to be a bunch of consequences we're not anticipating many of them positive but many of them negative many of them most of them at least i hope are weird and wonderful and and fun in ways that are totally unexpected and we sitting on a porch with a bottle of jack daniels and a rocker we'll see kids these days don't appreciate how hard we had it back in the day i gotta ask you um speaking of nudging you and uh yoshi bach nudge each other on twitter quite a bit in uh wonderful intellectual debates and of course for people who don't know joshua bach is this brilliant guy he's been on the podcast a couple times you tweeted or he to he tweeted joshua bach everyone should follow him as well should definitely follow mr lee cronin dr lee cronin um he tweeted dinner with lee cronin we discussed that while we can translate every working model of existence into a turing machine the structure of the universe might be given by wakes of non-existence in a pattern generated by all possible automata which exists by default and then he followed on saying face to face is the best so the the dinner was face to face what is joshua talking about uh in wakes quote wakes of non-existence in a pattern generated by all possible automata which exists by default so automa exists by default apparently and then there's wakes of non-existence what the hell is the non-existence in the universe that's the top that's and also in another conversation you tweeted it's state machines all the way down which presumably is the origin story of this discussion yeah and then joshua said again nudging nudging nudging slash trolling joshua said you've seen the light welcome friend many foundational physicists effectively believe in some form of hyper computation lee is coming around to this idea and then you said i think there are notable differences first i think the universe does not have to be a computer second i want to understand how the universe emerges constructors that build computers and third is that there is uh something below church touring okay what the heck is this dinner conversation about uh maybe and put another way maybe zooming out a little bit are there interesting agreements or disagreements between you and and joshua bach that uh that can elucidate some of the other topics we've been talking about yeah so yash has an incredible mind and he has he's so well read um and uses language really elegantly it bamboozles me at times so i'm uh so often i'm using i'm describing concepts in a way that i built from the ground up and so we misunderstand each other a lot and he's floating in in the clouds something like not quite but i think so this concept of a turing machine so a turing machine turing machines i would argue um and i think um this is not the turing machine the universe is not a turing machine biology is not even a turing machine right and because turing machines don't evolve right there's a there is this problem that people see chewing machines everywhere but isn't it interesting the universe gave rise to biology that gave rise to intelligence that gave rise to alan turing who invented the abstraction of the turing machine and allowed us to digitize and and so i've been looking for the mystery at the origin of life the origin of intelligence and the origin of this and i when i discuss with yasha i think yoshi he was saying well the universe of course the universe is a turing machine of course there's a there's a hyper computer there and i've and i think we got kind of trapped in our words and terms because of course it's possible for a turing machine or computers to exist in the universe we have them but what i'm trying to understand is where did the transition continuous to discrete occur and i've been this is because of my my general foolishness of understanding um the continuous but i guess what i'm trying to say is there were constructors before they were abstractors because how did the universe abstract itself into existence and it goes back to earlier saying could the universe intelligence have come first what's the constructor what's an abstractor so the abstractor is the ability of say of alan turing and goodall and very and and church to in to think about the mathematical universe and to label things and then from those labels to come up with a set of axioms with those labels and to basically understand the universe mathematically and say okay i can label things but where did the labeler come from where is the prime labeler even if the universe is not a touring computer does that negate the possibility that a touring computer can simulate the universe like just because the abstraction was formed at a later time does that mean that abstraction this is to our cellular automata conversation yeah you were taking away some of the magic from the cellular automata because very intelligent biological systems came up with that cellular automata well this is where the existence is the default right is it does the fact that we exist and we can come up with a turing machine does that mean the universe has to be a turing machine as well but can it be a touring machine though that's a that has to be in the canopy can it be sure um i don't know i don't understand if it has to be or not can it be but can the universe have turing machines in it sure they do exist now i'm wondering though maybe and this is this is written if things get really hairy is i think the universe maybe in the past did not have the computational power that it has now this this is almost like a law of physics kind of so the computational power is not you can get some free lunch yeah i mean with the fact that we now we sit here in this period in time and we can imagine all these robots and all these machines and we built them and so we can easily imagine going back in time that the universe was capable of having them but i don't think it can so the universe may have been a lot dumber computationally and i think that's why i don't want to go back to the time discussion but i think it has some relationship with it the universe is basically smarter now than it used to be and it's going to continue getting smart smarter over time because of novelty generation and the ability to create objects within objects within objects you know there's a perhaps it's grounded in physics there's this intuition of conservation yeah that stuff is conserved like like you're not you've always had all everything you're just rearranging books on the bookshelf through time so you're saying like new books are being written which laws you want to break the origin of the origin of the big bang you had to break the second law because we got order for free yeah well what i'm telling now is that the energy isn't conserved in the universe oh it's the second law okay i got you so because but not in a mad way okay so computation potentially is not conserved which is a fascinating idea intelligence is not conserved complexity is not conserved i suppose that's deeply connected to uh time being fundamental the natural consequence of that is if time is fundamental and the universe is inflating in time if you like then there are one or two conservation laws that we need to have a look at and i wonder if that means the total energy of the universe is actually increasing over time and i might this may be completely ludicrous but um we do have all this dark energy that's we we have some anomalies let's say dark matter and dark energy if we don't add them in galaxies so dark matter i think doesn't doesn't hold you know you need to hold the galaxies together and there's some other observational issues could dark energy just be time so figuring out what dark energy is might give us some uh deep clues about this not just time but the consequences of time so it could be that i mean i'm not saying there's perpetual motions allowed in this free lunch but i'm saying if the universe is intrinsically asymmetric and it appears to be um and it's generating novelty and it appears to um couldn't that just be a mechanistically how reality works and therefore um i don't really like this idea that the and so i want to live in a deterministic universe that is undetermined yeah right the only way i can do that so time is fundamental because otherwise it's all the rest of us just it's just slight of hand because the physicist will say yes everything's deterministic newton is newtonian mechanics it's deterministic quantum mechanics is deterministic let's take the everedian view and then basically we can just draw out this massive universe branching but it closes again we get it all back and don't worry your feeling of free will is effective what the physicists are actually saying is the entire future is mapped out and that is clearly problematical and clearly um that's not so clear yeah it's just it's just problematic it well yeah yeah so it's it's okay because that maybe is just the way it is it's problematic to you well creature along this timeline i want to reduce the number of beliefs i need to understand the universe so if time is fundamental i don't need to have magic order at the beginning and i don't need a second law but you do need the magical belief that time is fundamental well i need the i need the observation that i'm seeing to be just like how it is all the way down but the earth also looks flat if you cut if you agree with your observation so we can't necessarily trust our observation i know the earth isn't flat because i can send a satellite into space but i'm saying i'm going to do experiments that start to show i mean i i think that it's worth so if you can't so if i cannot do an experiment or a thought experiment that will test this assumption then the assumption is without merit really in the end you know that's it's fine yeah so that's a beautiful idea you hold yourself to that's that's uh that's given that you think deeply in a philosophical way you think about some of these really important issues and you have theoretical frameworks like uh assembly theory it's really nice that you're always grounded with experiment that's what i have that's so refreshing that's so beautifully refreshing now that we're holding you to the ground in an experiment to the harsh truth of reality let me ask the the big ridiculous question what is the meaning of this whole thing what's the meaning of life why this uh time is fundamental it's marching forward and along this long timeline come along a bunch of descendants of apes that uh have come up with cellular automata and computers and now computers why i have so many different answers to this question it depends on on what day i would say that given the way of the conversation we had today i'd say the meaning well we make our own meaning i think that's fine but i think the universe wants to explore every possible configuration that this allows us to explore and this goes back to the kind of question that we were asking about yasha and the existence and non-existence of things right so if the universe is a turing machine it's churning through a load of states and you think about combinatorial theory before assembly theory so everything is possible what yahshua and i were saying is well not everything is potent we don't see the commentary explosion we see something else and what we see is um evidence of memory so there's there clearly seems to be some interference between the commentary explosion of things and what the universe allows and it's like this kind of constructive destructive interference so maybe the universe is not just about um it is assembling objects in space and time and those objects are able to search more um space and time and the universe is just infinitely creative and i guess i'm searching for why the universe is infinitely creative or is it infinitely creative and maybe the meaning is just simply to make as many objects create as many things as possible and i and i see a future of the universe that doesn't result in the heat death of the universe the universe is going to extract every ounce of creativity it can out of it because that's what we see on nerf right and if you think that almost like intelligence is not conserved that maybe creativity isn't either maybe like it's an infinite well so like creativity is ultimately tied to novelty you're coming up with cool new configurations of things and maybe that just can continue indefinitely and uh this human species that was created along the way is probably just one method like that's able to ask the universe about itself it's just one way to explore creativity maybe there's other meta levels on top of that like obviously as a collective intelligence will create organisms maybe there'll be organisms that uh ask themselves questions about themselves in uh in a in a deeper bigger picture way that we humans do first to ask questions about the humans and then construct some kind of hybrid systems that ask themselves about the collective aspect just like some weird stacking that we can't even imagine yet and that's stacking i mean i've discussed this stacking a lot with um with sarah walker who's a professor of physics and astrobiology at asu and we argue about you know how creative the universe is going to be and is it as deterministic as all that because i think she thinks she's more of a free will thinker and i'm of a less free will thinker but i think we're beginning to converge and understanding that um because there's simply a missing understanding right now we don't we don't understand how the universe we don't know what rules the universe has to allow the universe to contemplate itself so asking the meaning of it before we know even know what those rules are is premature but my guess is that it's not meaningless and it isn't just about that and there's there are three levels of meanings obviously the universe wants us to do stuff we're interacting with each other so we create meaning in our own society and our own interactions for human humanity but i do think there is something else going on but because reality is so weird we're just scratching at that and i think that we have to make the experiments better and we have to perhaps join across not just for the computational lists and what i try to do with yahshua is meet him halfway so what happens if i become a computationalist what do i gain a lot it turns out because i can make turing machines in the universe because on the one hand i'm making computers which are state machines inspired by turing on the other hand i'm saying they can't exist well clearly that's that i can't have my cake and eat it so there's something that weird going on there so then did the universe have to make a continuous to a discrete transition or is the universe just discrete it's probably just discrete so if it's just discrete then there are i will then give yasha his turing-like property in the universe but maybe there's something else below it which is the constructor that constructs a turing machine that then constructs you know it's a bit like the you you generate an a computing system that then is able to build an abstraction that then recognizes it can make a generalizable abstraction because human beings with mathematics have been not going to be able to go on and build physical computers if that makes any sense and i think that's the meaning i think that's you know as far as we can the meaning will be further elucidated with further experiments well you mentioned sarah i think uh you and sarah walker are just these uh fascinating human beings i'm really fortunate to um have the opportunity to be in your presence to study your work to follow along with your work i'm big i'm a big fan like i told you offline i hope we get a chance to talk again with perhaps just the two of us but also sarah that's a fascinating dynamic uh uh for people who haven't heard i suppose on clubhouses where i heard you guys talk but you have an incredible dynamic and i also can't uh wait to hear you and joshua talk so i think if there's some point in this uh predetermined or yet to be determined future uh where the the three of us you and sarah or the four of us with yosha could meet and talk would be a beautiful future and i look i look i look forward to most features but i look forward to that one in particular lee thank you so much for spending your valuable time with me today thanks lex it's been a pleasure thanks for listening to this conversation with lee cronin to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from the mad scientists rick sanchez of rick and morty fame to live is to risk it all otherwise you're just a an inner chunk of randomly assembled molecules drifting wherever the universe blows you thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you