Mindscape 79 | Sara Imari Walker on Information and the Origin of Life
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- Опубликовано: 1 окт 2024
- Blog post with audio player, show notes, and transcript: www.prepostero...
Patreon: / seanmcarroll
We are all alive, but “life” is something we struggle to understand. How do we distinguish a “living organism” from an emergent dynamical system like a hurricane, or a resource-consuming chemical reaction like a forest fire, or an information-processing system like a laptop computer? There is probably no one crisp set of criteria that delineates life from non-life, but it’s worth the exercise to think about what we really mean, especially as the quest to find life outside the confines of the Earth picks up steam. Sara Imari Walker planned to become a cosmologist before shifting her focus to astrobiology, and is now a leading researcher on the origin and nature of life. We talk about what life is and how to find it, with a special focus on the role played by information and computation in living beings.
Sara Imari Walker received her Ph.D. in physics from Dartmouth college. She is currently Associate Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, Deputy Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, and Associate Director of the ASU-Santa Fe Institute Center for Biosocial Complex Systems. She is the co-founder of the astrobiology social network SAGANet, and serves on the Board of Directors for Blue Marble Space.
Probably the most intellectually rich talk I've heard in a while. This is someone queuing up a lifetimes-worth of insights and questions whilst at same time carrying a deep awareness of the ways in which one's own biases might a be source if both help and hindrance. What a breadth of thought. Her career is going to be one to follow.
One of my favorite guests so far. She's ridiculously smart and has the rare gift of being able to explain complicated subjects in relatively simple to understand terms... This is a gift not often bestowed upon scientists. A gift that Sean has as well which makes for a great public discussion.
Uhhhh yeah. Wow. And you always know people have this gift, and that they REALLY know their shit, when they make you feel stupid and smart, all at the same time. By this I mean, aside from her impeccable grammar and vocabulary, she knows SOOO much, but can actually explain it to where it's understandable.
The last podcast had a gentlemen speaking really slow, and now this podcast has a speed speaker. Now that is funny
As the original lifeform that started on Earth would have said.... first!
Christopher Mora lmao
Christopher Mora lol
The best first comment.
Damn. Girl is a genius. She hit all the points without getting bogged down. Mind like a laser. Just. Damn.
thanks for giving a platform to these thinkers and ideas. definitely going to put dr. walker on my radar now
This is officially the first Mindscape podcast where I had to pause to catch my breath.
Fabulous tape, Sean. Walker is an excellent speaker. Thank you.
I like her! I think she’s cool!
This woman is ridiculously smart ...jee
An incredible mix of biology, physics, and philosophy.
Sara is super smart.
I am so very glad that people don't include as an added opinion on these topics a religious person and what they think about this like they used to do NOT SO MANY years ago when the great Christopher Hitchens was forced and reduced to have to answer and sit at the same table as these other fantasy gurus. What he had to endure for this now to be available and possible... if he and others hadn't done that, I bet you this intelligent woman had to deal with those idiots' "questions" and FANTASTIC comments on the subject, as she tries to explain her field. It was almost mandatory to include them. Or they used to include some "scientists" believer or some mathematician who strayed a bit far from his field, they used the IMPROBABILITY of life as proof of their beliefs.
The field HAS moved forward; time has moved on.
Another thing is, these two people have students, bright very intelligent students, and at some point they must pass the baton to them, there is just no way around that.
So why not invite some of those vanguardists students, the rebels, the ones that have new irreverent ideas about all of these subjects, and ask THEM about it?? .
On the one hand these two great physicists have to protect their students from making fools of themselves or how this tends to play in the media etc, but on the other hand we NEED to move on to whatever is next and find out, we humans are at the state of development...
I mean, I don't think it will be Elon Musk, as much as he wants to do it, who goes to mars, but his brave and intelligent successors, so THOSE people need to be PUSHED forward and start that bigger picture journey. The sheer number of these new brains must be small, very small. And pick from around the world, not just the USA, please.
Wow! So much food for thought. This is my favorite Mindscape guest so far.
Great! You are better than Fermi and Dirac. Open to not physics, origin of life and evolution and so on.
This one has been more intriguing than the last few I listened too recently. It may just be my mental state today. Thanks for sharing Mr. Carroll.
This was a 12 round Heavyweight bout! That woman punches like 10 tons of concrete.
1:00:39 The Universe is mathematical because, if it were capricious, it would not stay constant and regular enough for us to evolve. That much is easy. The interesting question is how much choice did the Universe have? How sparse is the space of possibilities really, and how much of it was explored to get to us?
Fascinating and captivating discussion about one of my favorite topics - origin of life. If I may be so bold to recommend a book that can provide a broad base of information about cutting edge thinking on this topic, it is "The Vital Question", by Dr. Nick Lane. Found this book to be well written for a broad audience about this very exciting area of research, and reaches for "first principles" of what may lead to abiogenesis. I found Dr Sarah Walker to be a brilliant and captivating thinker! 👍
Quite good, congratulations. But primordial RNA was ruled out already. The real question is: can we identify as an intelligent process as we do with Egyptian hieroglyphs (we can easily recognize that they were not made through erosion or any other natural process) or not? It´s very hard to take intelligence out of the picture (Darwin doesn't matter here, it matters only when life already happened, so you can't talk of evolution of molecules). See Scientific American's Origin.
Where do you see intelligence when you look into the mirror? ;-)
If I wasn’t already subscribed, I would start subscribing based on this episode alone. Great discussion, my mindscape has expanded.
Wish she would slow down her speech. Couldn't listen to the whole thing.
Life is the development of complexity and information as energy flows towards increasing entropy.
If you think of entropy as the flow from hot, chaotic interaction to cold, ordered uninteraction, life is the emergent warm spot that builds in between.
got 3 episodes in 1, bonus :)
i feel like i just consumed 4 hours of information, in a 1 hour podcast
Dr. Walker just oozes manic enthusiasm. I'll keep my fingers crossed she continues to spend time on public communication about science.
Great talk. Dr. was clearly in work mode, so grab a cup of coffee for this one.
Funny people commenting she talks too fast. To me it's like; finally... You know, so often I set play speed on 1.25, especially with older folks. No joke, I sometimes set play speed on 1.5 just to go through an interview more quickly.
Anyone else think Sean should have pushed back a little more and got a little more clarification on why his guests thinks that current physics is not satisfactory to understand the origins of life
More Clarification??
Simple, The Standard Model is an abstract "mathematical/linguistic" model realized by a very complex anthropogenic culture for describing "inertial patterns" in very complex data compilers/processing devices/experiments ....
Then, You can not deploy an effective reductive model by using an hyper complex symbolic system as its axiomatic core ...
That is Godel's Incompleteness issues + The Observer/Measurement Problem + Gestalt's issues ( the whole is more than The sum of its parts or the actual buzzword "Emergency" ) ....
How can you explain where you come from by talking about what your grand grand sons would be thinking about what they should think about what their grand children will think about where their grand grandchildren should go???
This one is really fucking cool.
Good to know that most of my fellow listeners are also biological lifeforms. Hahaha
She's like. Um like really smart heh.
Simply awesome! Thank you, Sean.
I'm back for my third listen:
She speaks fast, and I get why she does it, but still, If you reduce the speech speed from "normal" [common, average?] which she is clearly not, to 75% it is a lot more fun, and easier to understand and digest, specially for those for whom English is a second or third language.
Glad she didn't become a theologian... did she even have THAT choice with the brain she has??
For many [most?] jobs people can leave them at work and go home, with her, she can never leave her work at work, work is goes with her all the time, at ALL places, there is no other way... I have a hard time imagining her inner monologue that we all have.
Oh so she SMART smart 😳😳
hows this for a definiton of life:
an allostatic system which integrates and applies information.
Definitely my favorite episode.
Mathematics evolved from biological systems? But what about in places where biology doesn't exist? You need a specific CHEMISTRY to have biology, so perhaps everything is emergent from chemistry...?
But maybe that's why computer simulations are the best at predicting outcomes...? It's because they CAN observe systems agnostically... Or maybe that's exactly the reason why they can't simulate life as we know it (pardon the cliche) because they remove the observer! This is all sounding very philosophical... Then can we even answer these questions on the origin of life scientifically???
Best episode yet, that was awesome !
Great stuff! I love you guys!
I like how she speaks fast.
The planet Earth isn't "anti accreting" as long as tons of meteorites so falling to the surface every day.
Correct?
.75 playback
"CMB of biology" love it.
year 2023
0:17 hmm.....I do wonder about that Mr Sean : )
Brilliant podcast plain and simple. At 59:50 I did not get why she said physics is emergent property of biology. I think "discovery" of the physics that exists and is making the universe run is the emergent property of the biology. The physics was there. Did the actual effect of the general theory of relativity come into existence when Einstein and some of his contemporaries proposed it? I don't think so. It is true though that humanities understanding and identification of what goes on emerge from biology that time. She also said some like quantum physics emerged or something like that. I wish Sean had pushed back on that a little more.
To me this is similar to the situation when people insist their experience (A) of some weird subject matter (B) under the influence of drugs like DMT shows that there is more to the reality we live in. No one will argue that their experience (A) did occur and was real, but subject matter (B) was not an actual reality. I see this conflating of A and B in reports of NDEs and spiritual experiences as well.
The point is I found some of her comments about physics emergent from biology the same kind of conflation.
Having said that we have to be always open to (and science is) discovery of new physics that is already doing the work in the universe. I guess it is a case of is Mathematics (and phyisics) discovered or invented. I think it is discovered.
I’m no scientist but she make me think more then my brain knows
Does anyone know how in chemistry they separate chiral molecules into L and R? For example in making medications. Because I know many medications in one form work and In another can be dangerous to the health(eg. Thalidomide) or ineffective like citalopram (50/50 mix) vs escitalpram (100% chiral).
Approximately 57 minutes, my opinion: the Standard Model cannot be used to simulate origin of life, currently, because we don't have the compute capacity. Simulating all states of one amino acid is not possible, let alone a more complex system.
So an AI that lives in a computer and is conscious is not life?
We influence our reality space so will a computer AI..
It lives in a system... It influences the real world through ideas that humans beings might implement.. That is life to me.. Thoughts?
She speaks so fast!!! It was difficult to follow a few times. Though, it was a really interesting talk!!!! thanks, Sean!
I distinctly enjoy these conversations, because they're such a new paradigm of thinking. Thank you for sharing, Sean.
When talking about emergence. I would've loved to hear if she thought you could simulate biology given the ultimate laws of physics, regardless of the standard model. It sounded like she wouldn't believe this to be possible though. I wish he kept pushing her on this a little bit more :)
Shame on you Sean, not to have asked the obvious question: Is Life really like a box of chocolates?
Are there a class of chemicals that can be used for DNA-like material? Is there something that could evolve or be created that could be better than DNA?
Sean and Sara just agrreed to disagree on "strong emergence". I think that's a very consequential point and I'd love to hear a deeper debate on that.?
Dose she have her own RUclips channel
If you could go to any planet where life could be starting, how would you study it without contaminating it? Great show!
Do we not have physical bounds on bits per unit area of information until a black hole forms?
Very interesting... I listen to a lot of podcasts and rarely have I heard such fascinating new ways of conceiving things. Wish I could get more elaboration on math as a product of life and math's ease in being reproduced/copied and how that ease explains its unreasonable effectiveness in describing reality (around 1:00:00 to 1:02:30).
How would the study of biology change if we had multiple data points for life containing planets?
I think she's brilliant.
This issue around "information" is part of why I think the noumenal/phenomenal distinction is a bit of a mistake - and am convinced that some kind of reductive physicalist panpsychism obtains.
Positive and negatively valenced phenomenal bulk properties of matter would be the fundamental 'bits' of 'information'
And in the same way that evolution by natural selection "takes advantage of" or "falls according to" thermodynamics (a bulk / intensive property) and density, and other bulk properties, so it does with the phenomenal property.
That isn't to say that there's a goal or teleology - no I think that would be impossible at the root; I don't think quarks "know" they're quarks, nor even have "awareness" or "self" in the way that Humans do. But I think that all baryonic matter would have a phenomenal bulk property, and evolution happened the way it did in the local entropy gradient in no small part because of this property.
Hrmm, where can I hear more of this mad poetry? (meant earnestly, I mean no disrespect and am curious to read more on this topic if you would be so kind! Any recommended readings?)
@@weestro7
I'm paraphrasing David Pearce I think:
www.physicalism.com/
Is Dissipative Adaptation a good theory for how abiogenesis occurred.
I really enjoyed this episode, thanks!
she laid out some really interesting concepts, i just wish she had more answers for them.
Really enjoyed this one.
Math is deeper than even reality and we can transcend it.
Great guest!
59:50!
Sean is usually cool as a zen monk, but I bet that line had something in his face twitching.
Great podcast!
Speaks fast.... I guess that's how her mind works too; very educated and informed, perhaps also smart.
For a non specialist, the speech speed makes her talk sound un-understandable... I can only imagine what a non-english speaker had to go through if he or she even stuck with it after the first ten minutes, I guess non-english speakers missed a lot of what she said.... Remember this is a worldwide medium.
I had to back it up so damn any times, and only because I have for years, as a non-physicist, what the actual physicists call a "lay"person, been interested about the Origins issues for many many years. I have heard several physicists on the subject, but it was NOT their specialty.
Hope Caroll has her come back again soon and tells her to SLOW DOWN!!
set reproduction speed to 0.75x if you are slow to follow
I found her easy to understand because she was able to build conceptual structures and use metaphors with ease.
@@Alexander_Sannikov
Yes... I wrote the comment after the first five minutes, her speech speed was an issue, but after 20 minutes, once I got the hang of it, it was fine, it was just the initial shock of it for me, wish I hadn't said it LIKE THAT. but I did, and so I take all criticisms, insults etc.
The backing up part was so as to understand her new perspectives well.
I challenge anyone to listen to this woman and NOT get just ridiculously excited in general.
My definition, a reproductive molecular structure that increases in complexity
What about crystals they're not alive but they increase in complexity. Also certain geological formations like volcanoes or the formation of planets and solar systems there seems to be some increase in complexity in natural phenomena that that's clearly not alive
@@origins7298 those examples dont increase on complexity. It's the differential
@@dizzytitan8481 what do you mean crystals are definitely complex structures that emerge
A crystal is definitely a complex self-organizing pattern build from molecules
That's pretty much accepted scientifically
Yeah I've been in a lot of Bio classes and people have discussed it and... The definition you're giving doesn't have enough criteria to really distinguish life from certain inanimate processes
You have to add that life is the ability to self replicate a unique physicochemical identity
The fact that life creates complexity and takes in free energy and goes against entropy or creates negative entropy. those are part of the equation but they don't sum up the distinguishing characteristics of life
Krystal's definitely satisfy your definition but are not generally recognized as being living things
She's really not speaking that quickly not sure why people have comments on her cadence.
What a smart scientist. I absolutely loved this. I decided to buy Pier Luigi Luisi's book on the emergence of life....
I have learned my lesson. Do you remember what I wrote previously...? I don't even dare mention the context. Let us work together to figure out why so many guests speak so rapidly that the fast machine-gun speed of the word sequence degrades communication. It is as if a good proportion of scientists it seems would benefit from taking a course on how to speak while participating in an interview that is meant for the public. Achieving the highest possible speed of word transmittal is not a goal.
I'm saying the goal is clear communication, and the best example is Sean Carroll. Sean is great. Sean speaks so clearly, so effectively.
Guests, please slow down. Extra extra fast speed does not help you.
Cheers!
What do we think life is? Life is what you think it is. "Life" is a category we invented we can define it however we please. "Life" is artificial. The question is: what things that occur in nature do we want to call life?
Tough to follow her. Could have skipped the resume intro.
Smart guest good discussion but struck me as a little newageee, vague, and almost bordering on magical thinking with the assertion that a new physics is needed to understand the origins of life
She's like slightly annoying right?
huh?
cali girl.
@@scottmiller4295 you're doing life wrong
No
not as much as your comment