271 - Sara Imari Walker & Lee Cronin: Quantum Physics, Time, and the Origin of Life

23:24Robinson:Yeah, I mean, sorry, I could actually give it like a concrete example of like a philosophical concept that I think that we and I have introduced that maybe like helps give a little concrete anchoring to this conversation for people, which is the idea that time or causation is a material property of objects. So we wrote this piece in Aeon a couple years ago called Time is an Object. And it's also in the assembly theory paper that appeared in Nature, this idea that you should actually take this minimum causal history of an object as a physical property of the object. And it's super interesting because this is something that has become, you know, labeled as rhetoric of the theory or people have said, like, we've taken a leap too far.

24:07Robinson:And like, that's just an outrageous statement to make. We're like looking for attention. And it's interesting to me just because I think until we could make that conceptual leap, like this was something like people have never talked about time as a material property. Time in equations and physics is like a backdrop that the universe moves through. It's not an active player in any of our theories, even in relativity. You know, it's crazy, right? So that like we've never thought about time in this way. And it seems so obvious from the work that we're doing that we have to take this conceptual leap.

24:40Robinson:And for me, it's super interesting because in order to do the theory that we're working on, to do assembly theory, I actually have to think about it that way in order to ask the questions I want to ask. So it wasn't like we were trying to take some radical leap for the sake of doing it. It was sort of a necessity to get to the questions that we were getting at. And it's like, and to us, it was like, oh, isn't it weird? Like we are thinking about time as a material property, but like, if we do that, we can get to these other things that we find much more interesting. And I think both of us are kind of mystified by this because every time we have to do something for the advancement of our own thinking, and then we report on the step that was a critical advance to get to where we're going, we get this sort of like major allergic reaction to the staff and it's like oh but that's back there but can't you see where we're going with it and it's like i don't know how you feel about lee but i just thought that like that's a really concrete example whereas it's interesting because some people really resonate with it like oh it's so good you're describing it this way because that's always what i thought or felt and other people are like you cannot say this this is like

25:44Sara Imari Walker:not acceptable but that's quite good that your collaborator is a anti-social doesn't care about has no filters and can just say you know if i'm not wouldn't be insulting people just basically verbally like to say oh yeah time exists and they're like ouch you're like really um but i do think that that's really it is really exciting to shake that because obviously you have to use good philosophy um and good good engineering is really important good philosophy is really important and the scientific method is really important and i love actionable criticism we love actionable criticism and when the one of the things i mean it's not that i'm deeply insecure um um i because i don't mind being told i'm an idiot personally because it's something that's happened since i was like you know seven years old right so i'm kind of okay with it in academia um so i keep asking the question for me that in question is more important than the insult i might receive but what i really like that what we're getting to about kind of coming up these these philosophical questions is to get people to see what we're talking about you know the time thing is natural for me because as a chemist i know that there's no time travel it massively insults me every time a physicist says we can go back in time we go forward and stuff look quantum mechanics this should prove that time doesn't exist again i'm like no quantum mechanics proves there's no sense of causation you can't tell the difference between going forward and back in time don't you think that's the issue given that you can't resurrect your long dead great great great great great grandparent right and people are oh no that's just you know that's just reality like and you're just thinking oh my gosh you have serious people who think that time travel back in time is a serious prospect given what we see in our world and for me that's kind of amusing and And I'm kind of like, how do we get there's so many things mixed up here, quantum mechanics, time travel.

27:45Sara Imari Walker:But but but coming back to philosophical frameworks, I am learning and I've been trying to consume as much information as possible to think about it so I can be consistent and precise. And, you know, and corrected. I mean, you know, your podcast you've done with with Tim and then lately with Jacob. right super important for that because they are very precise very deliberate and and kind of build those step by step and i would love to emulate that clarity i mean sarah is extremely clear in her writing very slow lots of pages and i'm like compress it compress it but it's really good because that means it's accessible to more people and so i that kind of so philosophical thinking from that point of view is really important and i'm glad i discovered it post 50 because i mean it's embarrassing right like i'm over 50 and i didn't know about philosophy sorry problems

28:42Lee Cronin:sarah i wanted to just ask you a bit more about the the concrete example that you brought up just because i find it interesting and i don't think we'd plan to talk about it and maybe we haven't talked about the time or causal history of an object as a physical property in our past conversations so just i wanted to ask first if this is just for an example of that and i mean anybody who's going to admit that there are physical properties of macroscopic objects would probably say that like my mass at present is a physical property of me and what i wanted to ask is so are you suggesting that maybe like the change in my mass over the last few hours is also a physical property of me or what would be the sort of time slash causal history of an object

29:37Robinson:as a physical property so i'm going to defer to lee to give a concrete example but lee if it's okay with you i'd like to like just give a little philosophical framing um because i i think one of the things that's super interesting to me is the fact that like you're citing to like your your mass is a physical property of you. But obviously, like the concept of mass is related to a metrological standard and a history of scientific instrumentation and theory development that came up with the concept of mass and allows you to talk about a precise physical quantity. And temperature is another good example.

30:12Robinson:Like when I say it's 100 degrees Fahrenheit outside, you know, like that's not a property of the world necessarily, like as just, you know, statement of the world is it's a property that allows us to regularize certain features of reality by developing standard instrumentation to measure temperature. And temperature is a pretty interesting abstract example because in order to talk about temperature, we had to invent a concept called absolute zero, which is not even a state a physical system can have. It's a limit of a physical state. And then you can standardize your thermometer scale and then you can talk about things like temperature of physical objects.

30:49Robinson:And we then, when those abstractions, like that concept of mass or temperature, ends up in a theory and it becomes an explanatory paradigm, we then talk about them as physical properties of materials. And so these things don't exist outside of an ontology and a physical framing about how we understand the world and are anchored in our scientific instrumentation. And so it's super interesting to me because that's basically the process that Lee and I are doing. And I think Lee will give a concrete example in a minute, because he's, you know, like, he understands the assembly space so well. I want to hear how he describes this.

31:25But, but when we, when we're, I mean, what was striking to me about what Lee's

31:31Robinson:done, and like, one of the reasons that I got really excited about working on assembly theory is because Lee was metrology first, he, he was trying to think about what is the actual physical sample I'm doing, dealing with, and what are new measurements I can develop that will allow me to get at the properties associated with evolution selection as physical properties of objects of our everyday experience. Like that's where assembly theory started. And so it has, and if you think about it from that perspective, it's all the properties that you would have talked about mass. So, and your change over mass of time, you know, that's kind of derivative of the fact you can measure mass now and you have a separate measuring device that can measure time.

32:10Robinson:So that's a whole other conversation but i just wanted to preface that and then i'm going to pass over to

32:15Lee Cronin:lee to talk about lee jumps in i would just say that certainly whether we describe my mass in terms of like kilograms or pounds is certainly dependent on our language and our instrumentation and our history but i think it would be relatively uncontroversial for um most scientific realists so to say that there is something objective and mind independent of me that my mass it that is my mass that is this property even if we we might um measure it or describe it in different ways and that's mind independent no that's why like i do believe in

32:58Robinson:objective reality. So I don't think like we're subjectively constructing reality by building measuring devices. I don't think mass is an invention of our measuring devices. But I guess the qualification is like the meaning it has and the way that you talk about it is relative to these conceptual infrastructures that we've built. So even the sort of the concept of mass that we usually talk about or familiar with, at least scientifically, like for me, when I go into like my undergrad physics textbooks and there's a parameter called mass, you know, it plays a functional role as a, you know, relational object relative to these other things and something I can actually go and in the physical world and validate.

33:38Robinson:So what you're talking about is the validation step, which is this is actually an objective property. And once I get the right abstract set of relationships, the real world behaves by these relationships if I can go and measure that abstraction in the physical system. And this is why theoretical physics is so hard, because when you come up with a new abstraction, you actually have to do the physical work of embedding that abstraction in a physical measurement. And this is why a lot of modern physics, I think, is, you know, like all these grand unified theories of everything, or somebody building their mathematical theory on someone else's mathematical theory is not really all that interesting, because you're not going to discover things that are new, because the new things are the regularities, like mass, that were once not describable and became describable.

34:23Robinson:And I think what we're dealing with at the frontier of science is there are still regularities of nature, physical properties of objects, physical properties of our everyday experience that we haven't figured out how to do that with yet. And that means that there are new theories to discover in nature that don't exist in our current ontologies.

34:41Sara Imari Walker:So let's go back to this measurement thing. So, I mean, you've spoken for a little while, so it gave me a chance to think about it because I was like, damn it, what will we come up with? but so Robinson what I would say is so let's take a very concrete example the the of a thing that we can measure over time that will that kind of um embeds time in that object and I want to take something I think we can all agree on so I was going to talk about you know kind of uh and I'm going to base it in chemistry but I'm going to base it in your brain chemistry so I'm going to you know i'm going to make a statement for a second like thoughts that we have memories they are molecules they're how big the molecules they are but they are molecules they are they are a compromise between charge transfer between your neurons your proteins and whatever wherever memory is instantiated so if you remember your name there is a structure in your brain that remembers name so i think we're all that so there is stuff in our brain that remembers so if we take that as our our fundamental beginning so that means that there is a kind of combinatorial space almost let's view it like a turing tape if you like we put ones and zeros it's not it's proteins it's it's um neurons into its kind of connections between synapses but those those synapses those synapses are made of lipids and there's ions in them so it's all molecules good so when you remember the past or you remember what you did a few moments ago that combinatorial space of things has expanded so the the tree of possibilities has grown so there's more possibilities now there's more every time you've learned more things that tree has got bigger right and so there's more things being stored and compacted and trimmed and so i could take if i was to imagine your mind i could take that slight the slices and put them in order by how big the trees were because the trees are growing in asymmetry.

36:40Sara Imari Walker:Because what sometimes happens, and this is where we know that time is trapped in an object only when we measure the amount of asymmetry. If we were to somehow take the molecules and return them back to their normal state and remove that structure but maintain the mass, you would effectively erase that causal time. Then we'll be remnants elsewhere, but there's to sink in our system. so so that's kind of one example but i've actually done one in my lab with um with with e coli so we take some e coli so we've done this as a trick so we've gone and kind of like take some e coli so so bacteria in a in a plate and what you can do is you can grow them and divide them and keep plating them and over time you could sequence them and you could see they evolve in time right so i think that's good but what we've done what we were able to do is we kind of got one group to say well we're going to grow them really quickly but what so that the see the sequence doesn't change and we're gonna and we're gonna have a like a control like a judge who's like going oh you've plated this one this happened then write it down stopwatch write down label it so you've got the code and say you know you've got these plates say these templates you number them in the order you plate them one two three four all the way up to ten someone writes them down puts a secret code on and puts it away then you go to the microbiologist the synthetic biologist or whatever and say right put them in order that they were grown using their sequence the gene sequence they can't do it but if you look at the assembly space of the molecules present in each thing using a technique called mass spectrometry you can get them in perfect order because the basically the molecules have kind of asymmetrized and grown in a way and we're like holy cow you could actually sequence these so the the this is really mind-bending and i realize i'm not being very precise but what am i saying precisely is the process of the cells growing and dividing produces molecules those molecules don't want to have side reactions because not everything's under perfect control and those side reactions have side reactions of side reactions so it's a memory of the past as this needle as this thread is coming out asymmetrically and and you can and that's how and that's how in this way in the combinatorial space of possibilities time is trapped in the object because you can measure the amount of asymmetry and it's a physical property you can get out with a mass spec does that kind of make sense uh um that it you know because i want to be as concrete as possible because i realize that i'm not always your little

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39:59Lee Cronin:No, what you're saying is making sense to me. I think I was sort of pushing us in a more abstract philosophical direction and wondering whether what you really might be saying, which I don't think is what you're really saying, is that we can infer a lot about the past of an object from its present properties. Or if you're saying something like,

40:33Lee Cronin:so David Lewis, do you know the name, the philosopher David Lewis? Very famous, one of the most respected philosophers of the 20th century, probably, believe that objects exist four dimensionally so it's not like a radical presentist like lee smolan who only thinks that the present exists there's really like this four-dimensional worm that loops back around my kitchen of me and goes outside with the dog and in that sense if you believe in that then all of this causal history of me as an object is just part of me in the same way that um like a property of my fingernail is a property of me a property of this just like past part of me my worm is part of me and that information might be embedded in a four-dimensional object in any different slide any given slice yeah we we are saying that

41:28Sara Imari Walker:in effect and i and i'll let sarah come in a second so what i'm actually saying is that that so but what we're giving is a mechanism to it so now let's just take an object forget what get ecoli forget your brain if i take a molecule um and a molecule that has a high assembly index and i have a high copy number so we'll talk about what they are in a minute just a complicated molecule that's got a lack of symmetry i can infer by chopping up that molecule and looking at the the the length of the graph to make that molecule the minimal steps um how much time has to have passed and what objects must have preceded it to make that possible so in the kind of worm kind of four-dimensional thing i always imagine see the world like that to say oh for me to exist my parents they're together that for that tire to exist there needs to be some rubber tree from that metal to exist someone needed to basically invent metrology in a mine and do this stuff so in every object we have the object is so loaded with with information and causal structures that are vast like in terms of our in revolution if you think if you woke up tomorrow and all all microprocessors were gone on planet earth um i don't know who came up with this idea but someone did it wasn't me but you just imagine you woke up tomorrow all microprocessors are gone how long would it take for us to recreate the causal chain to remake our semiconductor industry you literally almost have to go back not quite to the stone age but you have to go back to maybe the jacquard loom or like the eniac and then you know what we'd know how to do have the books and be like right let's make lithography really quick but then we'd have to go oh damn it there was a micro that microprocessor run run that equipment that got me pure silicon and i haven't got any pure silicon oh no when i get pure silicon from it's like oh and this thing and so you've got this series of events so i do have a great sympathy for this notion of this 4d 4d thing this worm assembly theory allows us to come up with a concrete metrology to measure it

43:32Robinson:i don't know if you agree with that sarah i do i just want to pick up on because you're talking about the scaffolding and the contingency and so i i think to kind of because i i think something is in the conversation getting a little muddled um like you need to make a distinction between clock time and causal time and what lee and i are talking about causal time and so clock time is about the synchronization of physical devices and it allows us to talk about ticking clocks and develop current theories of physics. Causal time goes back to the question we were talking about at the very beginning about Lee and I both thinking that there needs to be some kind of fundamental physics that explains the existence of objects.

44:09Robinson:And in order to talk about the existence of objects, you actually have to organize them in a hierarchy, which is what Lee's referring to by saying, like, if I remove all transistors, then I have to look at the thing that was the immediate predecessor technology to transistors and the thing immediate to that. And so when we build these assembly pathways that Lee's been talking about with these steps, we think about them as causal steps because basically what we're trying to regularize is this thing must exist before this thing exists. And that there's a minimum such number of existing things that have to happen before this thing can exist.

44:44Robinson:And this is not how we think about clock time at all. I think there's probably a very deep relationship between the two concepts, but I wanted to make that distinction. So I don't think the concept of like a four dimensional space and being a presentist are actually at conflict. So Lee and I are both fans of Nick Gazon's work. I hope I pronounced that right.

45:09Robinson:About sort of non-deterministic physics and using constructivist mathematics to describe physics. But one of the concepts he brings into it is this idea that the present is thick. And so we always think about the present being an instantaneous time slice. Now, if you think about this idea of causal time and that some objects like you and I require a very long history of things that had to exist before we can exist, and actually our physical structure encodes, like, is that history, then even in the current time moment, like, it's a very thick, like, it's a causally deep structure in the current instant of clock time existence.

45:49Robinson:And so I think actually it's almost like there's a whole nother physical dimension that we've been missing, which is this possibility space that we're constructed out of. And that depending on how deep objects are in that space of causal possibilities, they have different properties. And the property we associate to life is things that are very deep in that structure. And I was just going to make one more sort of physical example that might help clarify, because we and I have talked about this a lot also, is the relationship between assembly theory and entropy. And so if I'm thinking about it like a physical configuration of me, which is like billions of molecules, you know, if I think about entropically my state, people will say I'm ordered and I might be like a very low probability state out of this, you know, multitude of possible configurations of my atoms.

46:34Robinson:And they think about my spatial size, but they never think about the temporal depth. And the whole thing that actually distinguishes me as an organized state of matter is that I was constructed on a planet over billions of years. and I have a memory in me of most of those processes going all the way back to the invention of ribosomes in the early evolution of our planet, right? Like there's some very deep lineages of causation that compose me. And that whole slice is missing from this, we can statistically sample all possibilities description that we have in current physics. And what Lee and I very much much appreciate is this idea that a finite number of things exist and they have to actually be constructed by like existence has a hierarchical ordering to it.

47:23Robinson:So you like there's no way for the universe to sample all possibilities. It sampled a particular history to get to us. And actually we're the recording of that history. But in this kind of causal possibility space, we're not talking about the past history in a temporal sense of like clock time and any of the inferences that you make about the past are always inferences anyway so when people say there was an actual past and you guys aren't capturing that i don't even know what they mean sometimes like at this but that's a whole nother question go ahead i mean i'm the mate the comment is that the concept of entropy and assembly are very intrinsically connected and i think the problem

48:01Sara Imari Walker:of entropy is that people are doing it are misusing again same way that the the the philosophy underlying philosophy of quantum mechanics is not consistent same with entropy and so people you know if i take the entropy of my my son's bedroom some days it appears um a bit worse than others but actually if you think about it when my son's argument is like no i've cleaned it up it's like and he's like the same number of things are in here and actually if you think about it the when people use this kind of i'm going to put cream in some coffee and look at the dissipation and say the entropy increases, that's actually incorrect.

48:41Sara Imari Walker:And there is a problem with that notion because people don't think in time about, I'm going to take a snapshot and calculate the entropy of this object and calculate this other entropy. And if I'm couching in terms of disorder, I have to subjectively add in a frame of reference to get that. The thing with assembly is that causation is built into the object, so it's not subjective. so what i'm really excited about is bringing more of material objectivity to time and then using the tools of entropy as a readout for certain things it's not that entropy is wrong it's when it's subjective it's very hard for us to use it across domains and across thought experiments in a way that is meaningful because we get deeply confused about you know some people say that life is an entropy generator or entropy reducer i mean it's like no life is a process of which causation emerges from the maelstrom of no causation and wants to persist as long as possible and because it's undergoing evolution it gets more complicated because there's more fighting for that resource and so we have this very interesting kind of ontological gaps that we are kind of i mean And, you know, I'm not I'm not sure how deep they go, but I want to basically bring a new framing to that.

50:03Sara Imari Walker:But that's there's so many points there. But I agree with you, Sarah, about clock time and assembly time.

50:08Robinson:I think you're being more generous to entropy than I would be, though, in terms of people's use of it. And I just want to say, like, one of my allergic reactions I have intellectually, like when I get really annoyed, especially lately, because it's just becoming more and more apparent to me how often we do it. So it's not like it's just kind of pervasive intellectually is that we're constantly invoking theoretical concepts that the universe itself could not implement. And, you know, I guess maybe I had this like kind of instilled in me very early because my postdoc mentor, Paul Davies, you know, wrote a lot about like what the laws of physics actually like could they be implemented?

50:45Robinson:And this is also part of Niki Zolom's work and Leeds Mullen's talked a lot about this. I'm going to talk to Paul Davies soon. Oh, great. Paul's great. I think it's all I said. I said hi, but I see him all the time. But anyway, he's great. But he his. Yeah. So he he's thought a lot about that. But in the context of entropy, it's like when you get like like the concepts of statistical physics and entropy in particular are not actually well posed, I think, for biological systems. because if you think about the statistics that you actually have to iterate over to talk about, you know, the actual possibility space of a protein, for example, like the universe cannot explore all of those possibilities ever, period.

51:30Robinson:So how is it meaningful to actually invoke things in your theories that are actually not physically accessible to the universe itself? And we do it all the time in physics, like the laws of physics exist outside of the universe. And like there's all kinds of these weird pathologies that exist in our mathematics that are not actually physically instantiatable. And I think Lee and I think about this a lot. And basically what we're trying to build is a theory that's self-consistent with its physical instantiation. And this is actually a really hard criteria for a theory to have. I don't know. We've never talked about it being described that way.

52:07Robinson:So Lee, you can correct me if you want.

52:08Sara Imari Walker:but like i think the thing that is really important right and all of that is we have to be self-consistent and sarah what sarah's superpower is is really thinking about the self-consistency of what we're doing but also and that again gives me my gives us our framework for them pushing and say the theory does this it makes a courageous if you like or not crazy dave deutsch calls them courageous or karl popper actually says courage it makes a non-trivial statement about an experiment you can do and you can go do it and no other theory does that and then you can then go back and say look i've made the theory suggested this new thing that no other theory has suggested i've just gone and measured it and look it's kind of cool take you know relativity and kind of ed it was eddington who was doing the measurements on the eclipse you know assembly theory and assembly index and all these things that we were doing it's kind of bad it's really for me my grounding as an experimentalist if i can't conceptually come up with a new experiment that tells me something new that i can wave at people and say argue with that there because that's then for me that is really exciting in conjunction with the frameworks you were discussing sarah i think together they're really important but that was all the thing i wanted to add but i love this kind of deep kind of um argumentation and it's really important we have the same framing but you know some people they you know they when you tell them they're not allowed to use infinite mathematics they're like you know well i want to think the universe is infinite is convenient for this and let's just imagine a boltzman brain is possible i mean it's like the denner denner talked about this right what the man but anyway go on with your question

53:54Lee Cronin:robson well i'm glad that you brought up boltzman brains because that's actually i think it's connected to this and i know at least lee we spoke about this a bit but if i'm not uh beating the the time history question too much i just find it interesting but and and sarah i'm guessing maybe i'm wrong lee but i'm guessing that sarah knows more about the theories of quantum mechanics than

54:18Robinson:you or i do but that's probably not true but we can we can roll okay well we we'll we can find out

54:26Lee Cronin:But so some theories of quantum mechanics, so for instance, Tim and Bohmian mechanics, Bohmian mechanics is deterministic, but some are inherently random. And or there's quantum randomness. And if there is quantum randomness, then or let's actually let's take the other case. If quantum mechanics is deterministic, then you really could take the state of an object or its properties at an instant. And I know that there are questions about what an instant is or if the present is thick. But make a perfect inference if you knew the laws of physics about that object's causal history. But, okay, Lee's already shaking his head.

55:18Lee Cronin:But if the if the laws are random, then you could make an inference with a high degree of probability, maybe. But you wouldn't know for certain because there's always the possibility that the universe just fluctuated into being the way that it is at the moment you made your observation. so i'm curious what you two think about that and whether you think i just totally butchered my

55:48Sara Imari Walker:description of how people no you didn't you didn't you didn't and sarah and i've been arguing about this and we flip backwards and forwards all the time so i think um i think the concept of randomness is ill-posed and i really um struggling so quantum mechanics gives us the illusion of randomness right because quantum mechanics is like huh we couldn't bother to keep up with the causation that's all quantum mechanics is right uncertainty in quantum mechanics is born out well actually there's two important things about quantum mechanics the idea that there are quantum intervals and things right and the fact that um that that um when you start to interrogate things with other things that have the same kind of momentum and energy that is very difficult because you're about everything comes a mess very quickly so where is the prime mover so i think um I would used to say that there are things, there are random processes.

56:39Sara Imari Walker:I've got a lump of uranium phosphate in a tin up there and a Geiger counter down here. And I can bring it out and, you know, I won't know when it's going to. For me, radioactivity is the most primal physical kind of, you know, proof that there's randomness. But maybe let's put that aside one second. David Deutsch was saying the multiverse is not random, it's just a sphere. Right. but one of the things I'm beginning to kind of play with is the idea that the universe isn't random it's something else it's just undetermined so and in both quantum mechanics and Newtonian mechanics there's the same uncertainty and I think that people put a special quality on quantum mechanics because it's non-local you'll have entanglement you'll have bells inequalities it is and all these things but you just don't know you you've lost your causal structure and so what that means at the quantum level that because you your bookkeeping is lost you don't know what has happened in what order you've lost your causation so things appear to go back in time be non-local be this be that the other it could be the deflationary interpretation of quantum mechanics is we've just lost the sequence so we just basically sum over this area and it looks it looks like it's random because the way we sample go to macroscopic newtonian mechanics and then it's all about the precision and the point particle and saying i'm gonna okay how if i don't know the precision the resolution of where that object is in three dimensional space four dimensional space apologies um there's going to be a drift at some point and i think these notions are kind of misplaced and so going to actual question romerson if i if the universe was deterministic and i knew you know laplace if i took laplace's demon i could infer what was going on perfectly i'm gonna say i believe and i think the belief has been coming based in a theory that sarah and i are developing that the universe is intrinsically generative and the the the future is unpredictable because the universe is non-deterministic and it's life this is the kicker this is going to blow your mind i think i'm set this up life makes the universe look um regular and determined because of error correction is actually not determined at one extreme or random.

59:12Sara Imari Walker:You can have both of those from the moment. And because life does error correction and copies itself and produces regularities, we look at the universe and go, oh, that looks regular, that looks good. But actually, life has come into existence in spite of this undetermined or random series of events. And it's to do with the way time interacts. And what you've got in assembly space, so you've got these series of processes happening um the way the object interacts with the environment the environment is so continuous but there is a discrete interaction and the way that happens the commentorial space of possibilities is so big you could say in principle but i don't think the word in principle works because your infinity is just too big and there's just too many things i mean we cannot predict what's going to be the next social media craze right who would have predicted tiktok in 1900 right and so i think there's this unpredictability that we see again and again in physics and chemistry but we see predictability in biology there's this there's this very interesting phenomena that is going on and it has something to do with how we treat the past as predictable because we can infer perfectly the past but something happens in the present at the interface for the future i've taken a long time to discuss that but i think let me just crystallize that down the present is um it is is as we say is quite thick we understand the causal structures but when anything we process we proceed in time forward there is a degree of undeterminism when there isn't error correction and that allows us to form new objects which may be kept in play because of evolution and selection and or maybe just dissolved away and this is at the root of unpredictability in our society in biology and consciousness and intelligence and all that jazz but i think i maybe have gone over the top i don't know sarah what you think no no

1:01:12Robinson:it was really good i'm writing down a whole bunch of notes because i feel like there's some things we have to talk about later, but they're not the direction I want to go right now.

1:01:18Sara Imari Walker:Okay.

1:01:19Robinson:But this is always a sign of a productive conversation. The couple of things I wanted to just add to what you were saying, Lee, because I think like helping to build like the conceptual body of what we're working on by hearing it from you and then hearing it from you is probably helpful for people. We don't get a lot of opportunity for that. But I think just as a blanket statement, the future doesn't exist until it's generated. I think this is part of what Lee means about, you know, like the future is a generated process. So in traditional physics, like right now, we have the concept of the block universe and like, you know, the past and future are equally real.

1:01:54Robinson:And, you know, even entropy has like, you know, this kind of artificial introduction of time, but you have to appeal to all possibilities being equally real. And I think Lee and I have both, you know, through the study of life, have adopted this ontology that the future doesn't exist until it's constructed. And the thing that gets interesting about that is if so I actually Lee Smolin convinced me to be a presentist with this caveat that the present is thick and that what we really need like in the present moment for living structures, it's very causally deep. And so what the future is, is exactly what Lee's describing is this sort of combinatorial explosion of these undetermined possibilities.

1:02:31Robinson:But the act of selection is the mechanism of making structures from the past persistent into the future. But because the combinatorial space is always bigger than what exists, you can't predict everything about the future. And most of the time when you're predicting things, you're actually predicting the past because you're predicting the regularities that have already been selected and can persist. And so determinism is emergent by this mechanism. And this is actually what we're really trying to pin down with assembly theory because we have the theoretical tools to make such a physics actually testable.

1:03:01Robinson:But this is the way that we're thinking about it. um if that summarizes it okay for you lee well could i ask just something for

1:03:10Lee Cronin:clarification and i'm sorry if this is going to be muddy but i don't think being determined and being generated are the same things in the sense that like And Tim, or I don't want to say any, put any words in Tim's mouth because they'll probably be wrong. But if you're a determinist, you can think that the future hasn't been generated yet and it will be generated, but it's still determined. But on the other hand, you could be, I suppose, a determinist, but also have a block view where everything is determined, but it is also not generated because it is already.

1:04:00Robinson:Oh, go ahead. It's OK.

1:04:01Sara Imari Walker:I was going to say, I think the deterministic universe and the block universe doesn't even get out of jail. And I think the problem that people have is they don't misunderstand the size. and i think this is the problem that we have with like allowing infinite mathematics to say that the entire universe is to can be determined from previous set and sarah you captured this maybe that's what you're going to say there's a great phrase that sarah put into a book which really got me as like oh my gosh if the universe is going to be determined then all the knowledge of the future state of the universe are present at every single point in the universe that's clearly insane that cannot be possible i think but that you're actually here so i don't need to misquote you so sorry sarah is that that that is that where you were going to go no i was

1:04:49Robinson:i was gonna say i mean i think that's an important point um but that's really about the informational specificity right so like if you're talking about a boltz membrane spontaneously fluctuating into existence at any moment in our universe anywhere in our universe and that's just one object of you know the potentially non-determinable set of possible things our universe could generate you basically are asking for an infinite amount of information at every point in space and time so that was kind of part of the argument in the book. But the point I wanted to make, going back to your points, Robinson, is about the difference between determinism and this idea of generative structure.

1:05:26Robinson:So certainly we're not talking about determinism in the sense of the block universe, because we don't think the future exists yet. But based on the idea that the deterministic structure still determines the future, and it's just executing a program and running out, I think the thing that we have is a much more dynamic and self-constructing notion of the universe that any part of like the physical structure could also stop existing at any moment. And basically, like this comes from the idea that there are no external causes and things have to be selected to persist, which means they have to have some kind of interaction with other physical things that exist.

1:06:00Robinson:And they have to kind of mutually reinforce like the co-construction of that set of entities. And so So there's kind of like a persistence time, you know, to any structure. So like laws of physics or the laws that emerge in biology about persistent regularities on this planet. So I like to use the ribosome as a persistent regularity that emerged on our planet, right? The ribosome is evidence of cellular architecture. And not necessarily direct evidence, right? Because you wouldn't necessarily know about the existence of a cell. But a ribosome as a complex constructed object suggests there has to be something of at least sufficient complexity to make the ribosome.

1:06:37And that structure has to be a persistent regularity for the ribosome to be a persistent regularity.

1:06:43Robinson:So it becomes in some sense like a local law of physics that we have something that persists and is, quote unquote, very deterministic on this planet, very predictable on this planet, but isn't a universal regularity. And I think what physics did that's kind of weird is it assumes all regularities are universal to the point that the laws of physics exist outside the universe. And then you need external causes because you need to ask, where did laws of physics come from and where did the initial condition come from? And in assembly theory, we don't want external causes. What we want is all causes to be co-constructed, like the system has to construct itself, including the entire universe.

1:07:21Robinson:and so every moment is this sort of thick present causally deep structure that is constructing itself into the next moment and the things that we observe over time are these lineages these deep causal lineages that are the persistent structures in that space but as we know in biology things can go extinct um and so i think in physics sorry just to conclude in the physics that you're talking about with tim you know extinction is not like it's not a feature like you're not going to lose the law of physics um and uh you know i'm not i'm not talking about like these like very deep universal regularities in a sense but just like this kind of new physics um anyway sorry go ahead

1:07:56Sara Imari Walker:lee no i was going to say that i think what i wanted to push on is that determinism itself exists because we don't really understand how the future is created and that and that mechanism by how the future is created is the biggest blind spot in physics which that assembly theory is beginning to uncover which is responsible for the concept of causation selection and contingency and that for me is like you know where and this is why we're misunderstanding like ai ironically right gen ai is going to make us more likely to repeat just repeat the plast and falls into the block universe cult that exists right because we're just gonna all this stuff exists so we can search here there's just a search problem where actually life is a generation and discovery problem, not a search problem.

1:08:44Sara Imari Walker:And that's becoming clearer and clearer. But I agree, it's a position that we have to go out and prove. It's an extraordinary position. And I can prove it every day by just doing some modern art, but I'm not a very good artist. Sarah Helpers, or Robinson Helpers, if you can do art. It's like the fact that human beings are, and life is capable of countless new forms, is giving us a little bit of a hint that the universe does not contain all the current causes. So that's kind of cool.

1:09:16Robinson:All the causes, right, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:09:18Sara Imari Walker:Thanks for the correction.

1:09:19Robinson:I wanted to just, it was really nice the way that you asked the question, how is the future created? And I want to go back to, like you were asking at the very beginning, how we exist. And I just wanted to point out that some of these questions become very obvious once you start digging down deep in the foundations. But it's not like like because we're constantly hurtling into the future and we obviously exist like these are not the questions at the tip of people's tongues that are in need of explanation. Right. Because they're just so obvious to our day to day experience of the world that we don't even think to ask why.

1:09:52Robinson:And I think this is what I love about the scientific process in general is that in order, like, like life is a question we want to ask why about like why life, but we don't ask like, you know, like fundamentally like about our own existence or like why the future keeps coming at us. And I think it's interesting when you do science that you start with one question and you end up asking these like really, really basic questions if you dig down deep enough. But as a scientist, you're forced to do it as Lee is constantly holding us to this fire. You must have an excellent time.

1:10:23Sara Imari Walker:There are hints we can see, right, in the combinatorial space. Yeah. And give an example of Taxol, this molecule, which I like quite a lot, it's a natural product, right? If people think that there is a block universe, the block universe has to be so big. I mean, it doesn't actually, it's beyond ludicrous, right? I mean, Cactaxel has a really basic formula, C47H51NO14. It has a molecular weight of 853. So that's good. So you've got this thing. Then it has what's called 11 chiral centers, which are 11 like mirror image-y things in there, Which means just of that taxol, there's 2 ,048 possible unique shapes of that structure even.

1:11:12Sara Imari Walker:So the number of molecules that could fit into that space is so big, we can't even imagine the number of discrete universes required to do it. And so when we start to say, oh, that determinism allows you to have a universe with that, that becomes a meaningless concept. in the end because the numbers are so big and i think the fact that things exist at all is a hint in a universe that is actually quite shy of resources that these things exist let's imagine all the things that don't exist right all the variations on them and why do they exist and i and i so so for me i i have a very hard anti-determinism simply because it makes no sense is inconsistent and we can give up on a being laplace's demon and thinking about newtonian mechanics we have to think about new mechanics yeah and you mentioned earlier that

1:12:10Lee Cronin:you had problems with quantum quantum mechanics that we might get into and i mean i was going to ask whether your your strongly anti-deterministic views or your views on generativity rule out or dispose you toward preferring specific theories like you might want to rule out bohmean mechanics for being deterministic or might dispose you toward a spontaneous collapse theory but maybe i should ask if the the better question is whether your views suggest that there's something wrong with quantum theories as they're currently formulated in general that's something that's

1:12:51Robinson:problematic yes i will let let the qualified physicists go first yeah no i'm not that qualified um uh i well i think i think one of the things like so i i don't really consider that there is a quantum theory i think there's a bunch of interpretations um because i think i have i mean obviously there's a lot of mathematical structures but there's not like a scientific consensus about what the ontology of quantum mechanics is telling us about reality and so i think when people say quantum theory, I'm very confused what they mean because of these very different interpretations of the same physical phenomena.

1:13:29Robinson:But if I just look at the physical phenomena, like the measurements people have done in the lab and why it suggests something like quantum physics is necessary, is it does just seem to describe a universe that's not deterministic. And Lee and I have talked about this a lot. When you look at the history of physics and the tools they had available at the time for developing quantum mechanics, they were very much in sort to the Newtonian mindset that the universe has an initial condition and there's fixed laws of motion. And if you try to impose it on quantum phenomena, you end up with these like patchwork theories that don't really work, which we call interpretations of quantum theory.

1:14:03Robinson:And so I think there's a problem where the lineage of physics wasn't ready for observing these kind of regulars of nature. And Lee and I are both very interested in the work that Jacob is doing in quantum foundations with these kind of indivisible stochastic processes. And I think this is a really nice approach to quantum mechanics because it's basically suggesting that something is missing about causation and time in an explanation of quantum mechanics, which is something that Lee and I had for a long time been thinking is true. And so Lee already made this comment kind of on the side, and I'll let him talk about it a little bit more.

1:14:37Robinson:But the sort of underlying impression we have is causation is a real thing in our universe. and causes get selected into existence. Like this is the whole mechanism of assembly theory. And I think what's missing from quantum mechanics is the same thing that we're talking about in assembly theory is missing from descriptions of living systems and physics generally, is that we don't have a way to describe a universe that is self-constructing and doesn't have an external description and is causally deep. And it's really the causal depth that is leading to these weird phenomena in quantum mechanics and selection along causal depth, you know, eventually, you know, from molecules all the way up to us is what leads to living structures.

1:15:20Robinson:So there's this interesting set of ideas emerging that are really exciting, I think, in that space. Go ahead, Lee.

1:15:26Sara Imari Walker:So I think we can be very precise about it. And like, so I don't want to I don't want to misspeak Jacob's work. And I don't want to. But I think he's onto something extremely interesting. and i think what was really interesting is that um he was led there by some kind of interesting mathematical interpretation which led me to see um a causation in quantum mechanics and and this was so interesting and but he's already published some of this he's talked about some of this but let's just go back a step where sarah made a very nice um statement i'm going to reproduce right now is causation is selected into existence now i'm what i'm going to do right now is i'm going to describe in concrete terms what causation is because a lot of people say what you mean by causation and i mean this is a physical thing in the universe not an inferred causation not you know alice and bob you know there was a window and alice threw the stone at the window but bob caught it and then smashed it with his other with a hammer and what caused the window to all this kind of counterfactual causation, I'm going to talk about the following.

1:16:34Sara Imari Walker:And so all I require us is to join me in my universe, in my ontology, and say that the only thing that there is in my universe is basically basic particles or building blocks. Let's just say Lego or Legos, as it seems like Americans say. I would say Lego is cool. Anyway, Lego. We're in the universe of Lego. And there basically is the only thing that the answer to life or the answer to the universe, Why are we here? Douglas Adams 42 is like his existence, persistence beyond the existence time. What am I saying? Well, let's just say my Legos, they can collide randomly in the environment and they can create objects.

1:17:16Sara Imari Walker:Because there's all this energy, they then get broken apart again. So Legos come in, Legos go back. You all got Lego bricks. They keep going. Legos, Legos, Legos. so you've got this maelstrom let's call it random or undetermined i think random is fine for the moment because there's only so many things you can question on one day and then suddenly you just have no platform random legos are colliding because there's some energy occasionally a lego object gets made and that has a half-life before other collisions take it out of existence right so i think everyone's there so far so although there's collisions which cause you know billiard boards sticking together, there's causes, they're random.

1:17:56Sara Imari Walker:So you get an object created, there's a random object, it gets broken as soon as it gets made. Now, when an object forms that is able to intervene on its own process to keep itself maintaining, so basically let's say a Lego block forms, there happens to be a template for another one, and commandeers some mass and make like a U shape makes another U shape like this, and they're like stable, and suddenly all the Legos turn into the yous, because they're connected, suddenly you can see this by the persistence time of the you goes beyond its half-life, exists a bit longer. It exists longer than its natural decay time.

1:18:37Sara Imari Walker:That's how selection, through persistence in time, drags causation into being. So this is super deep and interesting and very concrete. Well, very concrete, just like obvious, in the Lego universe. So suddenly then you have kind of random causes, then an emergence of a thing that can persist in time by some self-templating. We could call it autocatalysis or some other thing. And that causal train gets trapped. And then suddenly it's existing beyond its decay time. That selection. Then what can happen is that object can then interact with other objects to make more complicated networks. and those networks have the causal chain memorized if you like and that is then the emergence of a memory or contingency so you have these three things causation selection and contingency and that is how stuff becomes makes its way to life in a universe where there is no determinism and causation has to be made by future events if you like coming out and i really like the put the phrase you made this area, we should use it, that causation is selected into existence.

1:19:49Sara Imari Walker:That is exactly the right phrase. So that's kind of my view of the mechanism that people have been demanding. Say, what is the mechanism of, you know, assembly theory? And what do you mean by causation? And what do you mean by contingency? And it kind of naturally follows because these complex objects do form in high copy numbers. So I don't know if that makes sense, Robinson.

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1:21:18Lee Cronin:Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I see this as very connected. I mean, causation, selection, contingency. Yeah, yeah.

1:21:26Sara Imari Walker:And then I think, what was the other one? Freedom Evolves. the couple freedom evolves and that was like freedom evolves because i can see that assembly theory leads us to causation in the universe one span causation which then gives us pre-biological evolution and then how as you then start to make objects that undergo get to this thing called intelligence then intelligence is this thing selection intelligence and consciousness and abstraction is all the same process which is why i find the whole agi you know sgi blah blah kind of hilarious because it's like there is this actually this this very big deep principle that's coming into existence but i want to capture that because all assembly theory is trying to do at the base is say what process um underlies the formation of complex objects before a viable ribosome and so the problem that we Sarah and I were posing when we were writing this up is to say well look clearly selection had to exist for for biology but what happened when we published this paper that was controversial is that we basically recaptured the word selection away from evolution biology said no selection is a word that exists before biology natural selection okay evolutionary biology you can own that is great we love it we know what you mean but as a scientist if I'm making terms up that people don't understand, it's harder for me to communicate.

1:22:57Sara Imari Walker:Selection is a good word. I don't need to be afraid of using it and scared. But we were, you know, computer scientists didn't like it. Biologists didn't like it. Chemists didn't understand it. Physicists think we don't need it. And the creationists said it wasn't creationist enough. So we had five disciplines and one theism kind of arguing about this thing all simultaneously, which i found was quite fun but i think this mechanism selection gives causation which then gives contingency that then ultimately leads to evolution is what we're really interested in measuring the fact we can measure it now and quantify aliveness of a causal chain and depth of time an object means i think we're onto something relatively interesting because we can make new conjectures about how sand can turn into cells and hopefully study it in the laboratory and come up with a crazy experiment that is unprecedented from current not allowed by the laws of physics without this new foundation i'm trying to be precise i don't know if i'm being precise i'm really trying hard to be precise um but yeah abstract things are hard to be precise

1:24:10Robinson:about it's good you don't need to be too precise if it's an abstraction you just have to get the

1:24:14Lee Cronin:abstraction someone else's head can you uh spell out how assembly theory treats evolution biological evolution as a more general or maybe it's a more specific it's a special case of this more general

1:24:34Sara Imari Walker:causal principle that's what i think we're getting to is that biological evolution and i think there's kind of this disconnect in a way because i think the dogmatism in biology is like and i think biologists had to be very precise because there is a lot of i found it very hard that there is this kind of nefarious kind of um kind of um people masquerading as scientists who are basically modern day creationists trying to sow discontent, like disinformation. And I can see that. But what I was trying to say is like, if the process of assembly theory leads you to go from a biology to biology, the process of assembly theory is going on.

1:25:16Sara Imari Walker:And we must really observe what does a cell do? Because the assembly equation helps us measure the amount of assembly going on in a volume. And if you constrain it to a smaller volume, I love the thought experiment where you have an a let's say i'm gonna have an agar plate so food in my agar plate i put one e coli and i measure the assembliness of that e coli so what i do is i measure the assembly index of all the molecules in the e coli in the agar so there's sugars and stuff so low assembly index but high copy number a lot of it but the e coli cell has some molecules that have very high assembly index but low copy number so big a is quite small but then the e coli munches on all the food and as it munches on the food it replicates so a start you have this sigmoidal growth you have this exponential growth until all the food is used up and all the molecules in the agar the sugar are turned into high assembly index complexity objects you have this doubt this change and so if and that was one cell making many cells now what am i saying is biology a biological cell is a very interesting device in that it grows divides by respiring and taking food and making more of itself that make more of itself and then you get all the population evolutions in populations and then there's a genetic mechanism you know how that all works and assembly theory doesn't say anything it doesn't make any complaints about that right is not saying genetic the the ribosome and the process of the of evolution using dna rna and protein is one solution that evolution has found by evolving i'll say that again this really blows my mind the process of getting from dna rna to proteins is one solution that abiotic evolution has found by evolution to produce a more specialist version of evolution called biology and so biological evolution is a subset of assembly evolution that's really going to drive people crazy but that's clearly how that works right and i think by considering that as a conjecture it will allow us to understand what life is doing on earth and and also how indeed on top of that our technology and this is the thing that sarah pointed out to me and told me a lot was saying, oh, technology is not, it's part of life, it's part of the lineage, right?

1:27:44Sara Imari Walker:It's part of the process as we go up these levels. So technological evolution is beyond biological evolution, which is beyond assembly evolution, if you like. So that's kind of how it shapes together. We are still trying to understand the mechanism of how randomness becomes, undergoes causation, selection contingency on the way to produce enough complexity to give competent minimal evolution cells but it's something like this you have a huge volume of replicators and as they shrink down and and come to the minimum cooperative unit there's a series of attrition and pairing and parasitism until you all get come up with a minimum technology that allows you to exist on the planet And that's when biology starts proper over a period of time.

1:28:31Sara Imari Walker:And that was probably one of the most tremendous results that planet Earth has ever done. Because suddenly we have this fully kind of autonomous machine that takes resource and is able to build complicated artifacts. But one thing that people say is that assembly theory says that evolution is a complexification measure. It's not. It just says you need some minimum complexity to have evolution going at one layer and complexity goes up in layers. So I'm excited about that. And that's where we are so far. But it's so it's really work in progress. And then we're trying to engage with evolutionary biologists, synthetic biologists, prebiotic chemists to try and, you know, say, well, how can we work together to figure out what this new paradigm is?

1:29:17Sara Imari Walker:even if it is a new paradigm, it could be wrong. It's fine if it's wrong. But then we're going to have to explain complexity before biology using another theory, which means I've still got a job because I can come up with another theory with my tea.

1:29:31Robinson:Just an interesting point on the sociology of science, which is something I've learned from Lee, is if someone's operating in good faith and really cares about the scientific process and scientific ideas and they're critical, we like seeks them out for every criticism he can possibly get um and i think it's such a great strategy for developing ideas rapidly it can be a little painful so i think it's been a little bit of steep learning curve for me working with lee to really understand that is a valuable skill but but i just wanted to say that because i think we says this a lot uh in interviews i've listened to where like you know these people are critical but i don't i i don't think people in general appreciate how much he actively seeks this out and how much he still also instills in his group like a culture of like where they're very critical of his like his ideas and each other's like it's just it's such a great way of making progress on science so uh i think it's quite disturbing to my

1:30:27Sara Imari Walker:group because one day i've got this great idea i think it's the best idea ever i'm like we're gonna do this we're gonna do this there's like coming next time i know that was shit what's it like well i've thought about it was wrong well i've had a lot of existential trauma from

1:30:38Robinson:from watching these cycles and also just like you know the feedback that we get and some of the ideas is really quite hard because it's you know like so this social dynamics are interesting um but i think the thing that's really great is like we're super curious we really just want to understand how reality works and i think like when you're operating that spirit and you find other people that are open-minded and also equally curious but critical that's great like that's

1:31:02Sara Imari Walker:exactly what it's a competition right so genuine criticism deep criticism given by another scientist to another scientist is the most precious gift you can get biggest compliment yeah yeah that's what yeah exactly biggest compliment because there are three types of criticism you get you get kind of the crazy saying you know you're crazy and here's my crazy thing you get other scientists who are jealous who don't want to engage with you and like take you down at all costs you'll then get well actually this fall you'll get the other science say yeah it's kind of good but you didn't mentioned my theory yeah right which okay might be good it might be but then there's the people really taking the effort to read it and think about it and give you feedback and if somebody does that and does that from a position of good faith you accept that with open arms right even if it's wrong and you're like and they've misunderstood but it's so good to get that and that's one of the things that's the only way i got validation growing up right when i came out remedial school is this right is this right going to university and talking friends i would say what do you think of this i don't like it because of this yeah and i also just want to say it was

1:32:07Robinson:really encouraging to me as an early career scientist because it's interesting because like there's a lot of noise in the scientific community but i think there's like an ecosystem of deep thinkers and it would always be like people don't understand me or they'd be very critical of what i was saying but like the person i admired most who was like a really high standing person in the field or like a really deep thinker or something like somebody like Paul, for example, would like really take me seriously and sit down and talk to me for hours about like what I was thinking and try to pull it out of me.

1:32:32Robinson:And so I think it's really interesting because there are really thoughtful, really caring scientists on the planet, but they're not ego seekers. And they're not, I don't know, like we just have we have a lot of really amazing intellects. And I think we're both really fortunate that we have a lot of people who have been giving us really thoughtful feedback on the ideas and developing them with us or being critical bystanders that are, you know, like very critical, intensely critical, but not like in a like in an intellectually engaging and very like it's a very great compliment when you get somebody engaging at that level, if they're really thinking and you're forcing them to think differently or they're asking you those kind of questions.

1:33:14Robinson:So, yeah.

1:33:17Lee Cronin:Before we get back to causation selection contingency, I wanted to, since you brought up sociology, Sarah, and personality. Lee, you mentioned at the beginning of the conversation that you always, you had these big questions or you always wanted to come up with good questions and then you wanted to answer them with experiment. and I just when you said that I was reflecting and I thought you know I have lots of questions that I want answered and I come up with questions all the time but never have I thought I want to answer these with experiment I'm often always thinking who can I talk to that will answer these questions for me so that I don't have to like go through this very hard work of devoting my life to answering a couple of questions, if I'm lucky.

1:34:14Lee Cronin:A lot of people devote their whole lives to answering certain questions, and they don't get them. And I'm wondering what it is about the two of you, personality-wise, that you think put you on this path where you're really trying to get these answers for yourselves and to develop the experiments, conduct the experiments, do the theorizing to get them, as opposed to just, like me, just hoping somebody else will come up with the answer.

1:34:45Sara Imari Walker:I will say, I mean, I didn't know this until a few years ago. It's really hard to get to know how you see the world. When I was growing up and I was told I was stupid and I was desperately trying to understand mathematics and language.

1:35:03Lee Cronin:And they were desperately trying to teach you English?

1:35:08Sara Imari Walker:but I could only understand things by literally doing things with my hands and I didn't understand why for me I didn't understand why everyone else didn't look like that but I only found out like a few years ago that I don't actually have any images in my head and no pictures no words I don't know what I'm gonna say next and so I was like I was thinking there is the only reason I can so I can only think by physically trying to do an experiment having a piece of chalk and drawing something or you know and so I don't know maybe that has something to do with it like if i i need to somehow picture it but i can't picture it so the only way i can picture is quickly do it and then remember it without remembering it because i can't see the image and and that's just how i have ideas and so are you literally saying i think it's called like aphantasia like you can't picture things but i mean yeah i think so i mean i don't Do you also not have an internal monologue?

1:36:02Sara Imari Walker:None. None at all.

1:36:04Lee Cronin:Oh, wow. You're a robot.

1:36:07Robinson:He's got nothing in his head.

1:36:08Lee Cronin:You're the philosophical zombie that Chalmers has been telling us about.

1:36:12Sara Imari Walker:Well, but I mean, thanks. I mean, yeah. So I don't know if I'm quite a zombie because you can't predict what I'm going to do next. And I do have a sensitive dependence on my historical conditions. But there is a, and I guess I just trust my subconscious a lot more. there must be something in my head right like that's what i was gonna say i think you have a

1:36:32Robinson:deeper relationship with your subconscious than most people do yeah yeah and then but that's just

1:36:37Sara Imari Walker:a way of kind of access it so it's just it's a very honest answer to the questions i can't imagine not trying to answer the question i mean i remember when i was trying to like measure the charge on an electron when i was like i don't know eight and i was like i can't do that i mean i'd taken apart so many cathode ray tubes and i'd got so many you know microscopes and things i was like i can't do this bit but i'll do something else instead i'll get distracted and i like to tinker around i mean actually i'm in my workshop just now which is in my house right um so i literally play around i invented the computer here because you know my team were like oh it's called work so i was like okay let's just have a go and and i i kind of have no fear of making something that is pretty embarrassing for a professional i have really great people that work for me who are amazing professionals so when i bring in like a prototype that just looks like it's it's horrible and they're like what have you tried to do here and i'm like oh okay we can build that and it gives them a bit of confidence so i like so that i guess the the short answer is because i have this way of interacting with the world and i have a lot of questions and i i there is a certain my way of you i'm jealous of you robinson because you get you can get to think in a way and have this elaborate kind of imagination where that works whereas my imagination is limited by what i can do in the physical environment or at least my my conscious imagination i think i have a slightly bigger subconscious information what i don't see is any disability or anything it's just i only realized a few years ago when i was talking to someone i was like what are you thinking in your head i'm like how do you do that it's like what do you see in your head i'm like are you supposed to see in your head so i was just like yeah that's that's the

1:38:24Lee Cronin:kind of funny thing about me that is funny what now you're making me think of uh the wizard of oz one of them like doesn't have a brain right is it the lion or something no the lion with the heart

1:38:38Sara Imari Walker:the tin man tin man doesn't we should stop this i definitely have a brain and i'm definitely sent but I've but I'm just rather honest about my I don't know you're giving me scallop vibes eczema is unpredictable

1:38:51Lee Cronin:but you can flare less with EPCLIS a once monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema after an initial 4 month or longer dosing phase about 4 in 10 people taking EPCLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks and most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at 1 year with monthly dosing EPCLIS, LibriKizumab LBKZ, a 250 mg per 2 ml injection is a prescription medicine and used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema. Also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies.

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1:39:49Robinson:One sweet, melty bite of a Hershey's bar and suddenly I'm right back sitting on the front porch with my grandmother on a slow summer afternoon. She doesn't say much, just breaks the bar in half and hands me a piece. I open my mouth to say whatever a nine-year-old wants to say. And she replies with a low, shh, listen. so we sat there listening that was the first time i learned that quiet can feel full hershey's it's your happy place

1:40:21Sara Imari Walker:okay there's right sarah over to you

1:40:26Robinson:oh my god um i don't do experimentation i mean this is why i work with lee because i think he's got direct physical insights in a way that most people i've encountered don't um because of the in particular his mental architecture, I think he's actually closer to physical reality than most people I have ever met. Because most of us live in a socially constructed environment and we do exactly what you're saying, Robinson, where if we want knowledge, we go and ask someone. And then we sort of trust the linguistic representation of the knowledge and then we just adopt it. And this is the way that societies function.

1:40:58Robinson:And so I guess as a theorist for me, because I'm so socially attuned and I'm not, you know, I'm not on some spectrum where like I don't understand the social cues and things. And so I can interrogate physical reality better because I think this is sort of like if you think about societies as adaptive systems, like the most adaptive thing you can do is pick up on the social cues. But some of us are not great at social cues, but we're much better at actually understanding the world as it actually is, not as it's taught to us. So I'm actually not one of those people that understands the world as it is, not as it's taught to us.

1:41:33Robinson:So the strategy that I think I've developed without really being consciously aware of it is I look for patterns in human thought is the best way I can describe it. So there's all these sort of ways that we talk to each other and like meaning we associate to the words, but the meaning in the words is kind of like there is no meaning in words. They're like they're pattern structures that we're communicating. And there's an underlying architecture of the actual meaning. And most of what I do actually professionally, like across all of the scientific disciplines, philosophical history and art and like everything I've ever interacted is look for the underlying patterns of understanding that I think humans have, but we don't have languages for expressing.

1:42:12Robinson:um and so i'm really i guess i'm a kind of a translator um and i think this is why lee and i work uh so effectively well together because i think he's got a really uh deep insight into physical reality which i think i share but the way i picked it up was actually looking at the gaps and the way that i see the patterns of human communication and what like there's a discontinuity between what we can talk about right now and what actually exists.

1:42:39Sara Imari Walker:But I think, yeah, I think you've got, I think not only that you got assembly index faster than anyone else because of this relationship, not just, you know, your ability to look at relationships and what humans say in language, but when you remove the language because the assembly index or the causal structure in the assembly index is a very, very.

1:42:56Robinson:That's part of my point is there's a structure under language that is not language.

1:43:01Sara Imari Walker:Yeah.

1:43:01Robinson:And that's actually what we're communicating. And I think this is why it's really interesting to people that, you know, there's a disconnect where like some people, they interact with an LLM and they're haunted by the fact that it feels very human. And some people are just like, you really feel like it's an inert machine. And it just depends on your sensitivity to the patterns that language actually communicates. For some of us, we don't put a lot of stock in words to begin with. And we're looking at other sort of underlying structure in what's being communicated to us that's not tied to the specific discretization of human words.

1:43:33Robinson:And so, yeah, which I think you said more eloquently than I said, but I think I like to play with that disconnect, basically.

1:43:45Sara Imari Walker:What is really important in that disconnect, and I think it gave me confidence, us confidence, is one of the problems we had, Robinson, when I first was coming out with Assembly Index and everything, everyone said, well, this is just Lempel-Ziff, right? Many years ago, I was like, Lempel-Ziff, and because Lempel-Ziff is kind of an approximation of Komagolorov. And I'm like, the Komagolorov in the limit is not computable. Okay, but let's assume it is kind of computable. It's not really right. And then we like Komogolov complexity, which is a way of like, you know, kind of expressing the shortest program to do a thing.

1:44:20Sara Imari Walker:But then there's a Chirology in that language. So if in the language I have a function that allows me to do the thing and it's compressed into that thing, you can't make the comparisons. And so if I was able to, if I could do it across all languages that exist in infinity, I could look at how compressed something is. What assembly theory does is says, ah, I remove the language from it because I just look at the minimum causal relationship between the objects to construct the thing because we take the shortest path. And this kind of idea puts on a collision course with a couple of people in computer science.

1:44:56Sara Imari Walker:But then when we were able to convince these people that it was different to Lempel-Ziff and a different complexity class, they were like, oh, that's okay. That's kind of cool. Sorry, Sarah.

1:45:05Robinson:Yeah, I think this raises some really deep existential points about what representation of reality is. But maybe we don't want to go in that direction. But yeah, I guess my only point is, I guess, as a theorist, my only tools of access are other people's minds. And I'm just looking for bits of truth that people have that don't realize they have in common because they've like, you know, put them across different theories and different conceptions of reality.

1:45:35Sara Imari Walker:But you are experimental as well. So I'm in my group right now. I'm doing some chiral amplification work that basically is an experiment that Sarah has designed. And also I'm getting to do some theory with Sarah, right, and so on. So in a way, we're kind of blurring those boundaries, what it means to be an experimentalist and a theorist. And that you need both coming together. And also you need the social dynamics, whereas Sarah is really, I think it's, I don't think Sarah can, well, maybe she can, I don't know. It's possible, impossible for Sarah to offend anyone. And I've once been at a conference with Sarah on assembly theory, and I'm just going, all you guys are completely wrong because of this, this, this.

1:46:11Sara Imari Walker:And Sarah's like, hey, what about if we consider it in this way? And, you know, and there's more kind of, and people are still dogmatists, right? But they're less offended. and so it's kind of interesting that we're going to compare notes on how how the how the offensive shock comes with the kind of gentle hey there's this thing called fire and you're and it's over there burning your house down you may want to put it out with this thing called water whereas i'll be going you idiot your house is on fire i'll put it out for you they're gone out don't do that again and it's a kind of cognitive shock right as we go between the sociology and try to get people to because you can't do science outside of a social system it's i i want to just make it pull make a

1:46:58Robinson:couple other comments on that um which i found super interesting and you know like one of my greatest lenses into human social architecture has come from like the way the ideas that lee and i I've been working on in Iraq with different people. And it's super interesting because, you know, we've worked together for a long time. We have a pretty deep understanding of what we're working on. And in a lot of ways, we think it's the same idea. But sometimes people understand it if I say it, or they'll understand it if Lee says it, but not if one or the other of us says it. And then obviously, like, we're like, you know, physically very different people, very different disposition, you know, like, separated by culture and things like that.

1:47:34Robinson:And so all of the interfaces that people have with the ideas are through these social lenses. And it's been super interesting to watch that, you know, in the specific example that Lee was given, but just in all kinds of dimensions. You know, like even if you think on social media, you know, we did experiments for a little while. We were trying to put the same tweet out at the same time and just see how people react. Right. And it's like if you like and they're almost they're not interacting with the idea. They're interacting with the social construct that presented the idea. And so I think this is something that we're both keenly aware of because we're really trying to dig down into the real ideas and the real new knowledge to be gained.

1:48:15Robinson:And then seeing it put through these prisms of all these social filters and how people reinterpret and do all these things, it's just a really fascinating thing. And it really says a lot about how ideas develop and become cultural knowledge in ways that I never thought I would have such an intimate existential awareness of.

1:48:40Lee Cronin:well a few minutes ago Sarah I think you said you you didn't you were going to like hold back on going in some direction because you didn't want to take us too far afield but my my sense after all these episodes of doing this podcast is that when you get toward the end that's when the time to go on any tangent is totally justified but before we do just a thought that occurred to me as we're talking right now is I looked at I mean I'm for those of us who aren't for those of our listeners who aren't watching I mean we're doing this conversation virtually unfortunately but hopefully soon we'll do one in person but my background of this monitor that I'm looking at is one of those really famous Hubble images I think it was called like the pillars of creation something like that and the idea is you see all this interstellar gas and these stars being formed and i think it is very neat that you're working on i mean bridging at the one end of complexity life and at the other end i mean i guess you can get even more basic you can get the just the formation of um the the really small elements at the beginning of the universe but you have these inert substances being formed here.

1:50:00But you mentioned a couple of minutes ago

1:50:03Lee Cronin:that some people talk to ChatGPT, and this is me going on a tangent, and experience it as just this mundane inert interface. And others feel like they're talking to something with a soul and they're really taken by it. I was wondering, I take it both of you feel like you're just talking to a machine like something that's very there's no there's no ghost

1:50:31Robinson:in there for me i it's just so apparent what the lineage structure is that i i just don't i don't mistake it for something like me um because i i see all the historical contingency that led up to that thing existing um and so i don't think it's like deeply important or a signature of intelligence but i i wouldn't misinterpret i wouldn't misinterpret it for an interaction with another human being i i like i just don't feel i don't feel that when i interact

1:51:01Lee Cronin:with it i i know i'm i'm not i'm not suggesting that either of you might actually think that it's conscious but while i also think it's totally inert when i speak with chat or type to chat chapt i cannot help but treat it very politely like i always say please thank you or like great suggestion i don't i know that chachi bt doesn't have feelings that it's not conscious but i guess part of me is also like you've got to be really nice to chachi bt and it's not because when it kills everyone i want it to have a soft spot for me it's just i can't not do that it's

1:51:41Sara Imari Walker:a master class of of marketing the way they set it up right had they set it up in such a way that it was very mechanical and so on you get stuff out they've kind of tried to layer in i think it's a very interesting tool in that um that yeah i mean i i am i polite to it as well as like i try to be i don't know really the the interesting thing about your point about interacting with chat gbt when i read a book i do have an i do feel i have a connection with the author alive or dead like i've never met dan dennett and i sadly never will because he's now passed but i i've heard seen him on interviews and he's actually quite interesting right because he's like you know he has very definite view or he had very definite views and when i read his books i'm like oh i'm interacting with this guy i really feel what they're saying the thing that i found with chat gpt because it's his probably because it's taken all the people and all the minds and mushed them up i know that there's stuff in there that can be coming out as kind of entertaining but because it hasn't come from one individual that has a lineage of experience it's a it it for me i can see the for me the um the uncanny valley linguistically exists in that in the way that abstractions are formed and put out and i can see that chad gpt has no understanding and and a Lots of people argue with me, like really smart people who think, really good critical thinkers think the chat GPT does have some kind of underlying intelligence.

1:53:09Sara Imari Walker:And for me, I feel it's a fail from my side. I can obviously see that's not true and I'm not able to explain that. And I think to myself, well, maybe I'm wrong, right? Maybe the chat GPT does have some access to some actual understanding intelligence abstraction that I'm just, you know, I'm the dogmatist. right here but but i i think it's just because i haven't come up with the right um ontology to explain that um and so my you know my my reaction i was just like i don't i don't ask for chat gpt for help i ask it to help me write emails to put to other people to people who try and distract me with long emails they get a chat gpt email they never notice because i say in the style of Lee Cronin.

1:53:56Robinson:I maybe have an analogy to kind of like to help a little like which is to like flying in an airplane. So like flying in an airplane I don't know about you both but like every once in a while I have this very existential moment where I realize I'm in a machine built by the human mind and it's catapulting you know at super high speeds thousands of miles above the surface of my planet and you know that's a really deep existential realization and what I feel in those moments is gratitude for my species and the planet I live on and just like this marvel of technology that exists because of all of these lineages that came to construct it and then there's also like these moments of terror where like every once in a while you realize that you're in a plane and you're like thousands of you know feet above the surface of the planet and most of the time you're interacting with it and you're not thinking about any of these things.

1:54:50Robinson:Right. So, um, so I think like when I, when I interact with LLMs, um, you know, for me, it's really interesting in this sort of existential moments to think about the lineage and the thousands of human conversations and the thousands of years of, of, uh, evolution of human language and a technology that had to be developed in order for this thing to exist and me to converse with human language as a physical object and an artifact in my environment. And then sometimes, you know, I like with Lee, like what Lee was just saying, where it's like, well, these other people could be right. And like, it could be the end times for everyone and everything.

1:55:26Robinson:And I'm just like, well, that's kind of a, you know, like, I don't, I don't know how to get behind that view because it's, it's, it's more to me. It's just the appreciation of what we are when I look at these things, not that I have some deep appreciation for this thing autonomous to us. So I guess that's, it's just amazing what humans can do. Like skyscrapers, like there's just so many things that we've created on this planet.

1:55:54Sara Imari Walker:3D printed morphine.

1:55:56Robinson:There you go. 3D printed morphine.

1:55:58Sara Imari Walker:I printed it.

1:55:59Robinson:Or like photographs of the district, but this is not a photograph. It's a pastel by my sibling. Did you print that today, Lee?

1:56:09Sara Imari Walker:No, no, I printed it the other week. I have a bamboo bust in here. That's one of the things I like. I have to have a 3D printer. So this is my favorite molecule at the moment, not because I take it or anything, but just because it's small enough to be makeable, but complicated enough to be really interesting, unique. And the chemical space that had to be searched to get this molecule is pretty huge. It's much smaller than taxol. You can make this in 26 chemical steps anyway. I'm debating myself why I have no images in my head i think i need i need i need like some kind of retinal projection or something like maybe

1:56:41Robinson:i can get to neural link and they can yeah you could build like we could invent technology that would make people have pictures when they don't i mean i guess that's what your phone is hallucinations

1:56:50Sara Imari Walker:so basically i just need to take the right drugs to hallucinate and then i'm good because maybe that's all you are just hallucinating anyway this is a side sorry well this is true like yeah that's

1:57:01Lee Cronin:that could be interesting where does morphine come from does it come from the poppy plant Okay.

1:57:06Sara Imari Walker:Yeah. And I was talking to a couple people, because the poppy plant is a plant, right, grows. And this molecule is so unique. The poppy plant produces it, and it's a secondary, what's called secondary metabolite. And it's produced. And the reason it's produced, obviously, is because the animals that eat it, they get it because they want pain meds. And also, so what the animal gets, the animal gets a pain med, and what the poppy will want to get is its seeds spread wide. But you think there must be a deep evolutionary connection. and that poppy that this morphine did not randomly get made it is co-evolved on the lineage of life and as life is diverted you know the poppy plant is helping out the animals in pain and i was explaining this from drug discovery people they're like whoa i was like you know no it must be just random i'm like do you know how big chemical space is the likelihood the poppy plant is going to randomly make a molecule that's going to hit that receptor in your brain is zero right it's boltz membranes all over it and you know this is for me as a chemist i can see this commentorial space and as i'm trying to figure out how new ways to do drug discovery i'm i'm kind of using assembly theory to help build those things at the moment but yeah it's a small enough to look tractable but the amount of the billions of years of evolution in this in this morphology is just immense.

1:58:24Sara Imari Walker:It's amazing.

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1:59:23Lee Cronin:Yeah, it is very interesting. I mean, we haven't really talked a lot. I mean, you didn't today in this conversation, we didn't you didn't explain assembly theory from the ground up and demonstrate some of the things it can predict in its powers. But it is interesting to think that, I mean, something so simple in a certain sense just could not exist without life. No matter how large, I mean, the universe is, like in these pillars of creation, it's not going to come into existence without life.

1:59:56Sara Imari Walker:And it's fascinating to me that when I talk to chemists, many chemists still think that that is a fundamentally false premise, that complex molecules can just pop into existence. but then when I say in large numbers you can detect they then kind of you know start to the wheels start to spin but even then I think the discipline of chemistry is is not quite there yet I mean the thing about the morphine is that you know when you this has a or any molecule any complex molecule that has a can be chopped into parts and you can put on a graph you can get the assembly index and what we've shown and I was I have wobbles every now and then I'm like the assembly index isn't real i just made it up is a heuristic and and sarah has kind of helped me understand the metrology or the the falsity behind the metrology to say well hang on let's just unpack this properly and actually you can infer the assembly index and measure it precisely from the molecular structure and is embedded in there and by reading about temperature because temperature there's two things there's heat and there's actual temperature so in assembly theory you have assembly index like how complicated it is the analogy in temperature is how many degrees fahrenheit and then um and then the uh um the amount of heat is literally the number of copies the analogy in assembly theories you have those two dimensions like the amount of power you have because even if you had a if you had a you know an object at 100 degrees boiling point so for water and you got had an ice cube and you put the ice cube on it but it was only a small surface area the ice cube wouldn't melt you wouldn't have enough heat and so understanding that molecules have this property both in in in in this kind of this kind of vector like space and they're kind of connected together for me it still blows my mind and the fact that people are like yeah it doesn't exist you made it up i'm like i may have made it up but i can measure it isn't that cool so what am i measuring and that's getting people thinking so i i think that and quantifying the degree of surprise in the assembly index of these objects is kind of nice because as we really get to cope with understanding how big chemical space is because if i may divert for one millisecond a lot of people think that ai can use drug discovery by searching but then when you say hey if you imagine if you take a drug space the number of possible molecules in that drug space is probably no less than 10 to the power of 100 and probably a bit more than that and so if you try and imagine making 10 to the 100 molecules there's not enough atoms in the universe about five universes right it's like well even no makes more than five universes it's just not possible so the notion of searching using an ai is fundamentally wrong fundamentally you have to generate novelty in in a in a hybrid kind of kind of interaction and uh and whether it's drug discovery or origin of life or evolution that novelty is generated by doing work against the present or with the present to go into the future and i'm still you know i'm really excited because i think we might make progress on the mechanism how things go from the this sounds ridiculous i'm gonna hopefully with sarah and a few other people work out how the how the present goes into the future it's like what well in a way that we can understand how regularities complex regularities are maintained and new things are discovered because think about it ai cannot discover new things and that's the thing that i find very exciting about the current you know the fact that ai is fooling us all it's going to give wind to assembly theory and generative processes in physics to say well how does the universe actually generate new things because AI can predict the past brilliantly because the past is trained on the past, but it can't predict the future at all.

2:03:57Sara Imari Walker:And that, for me, is a sign of something extremely exciting. Sadly, there was no Einstein for intelligence because Einstein predicted frame dragging before we put clocks into space and went, what's that? We've literally done the same equivalent in AI where we've generated these things that look intelligent and they're like, well, they look intelligent, but we don't understand how the universe generates novelty. which is why we're in this big delusion right now.

2:04:23Lee Cronin:Well, I'm glad that you two are ambitious enough to tackle the problem of how the present turns into the future, because I'm not. But later today, I will be working on improving my shrimp sear, which is about as ambitious as I get with things. But we came into this conversation with a surprisingly small list of topics to cover, and yet we maybe got to like one and a half of them. So hopefully soon you'll both be in town or all three of us will be somewhere and we can sit down and do another one in person. But this has been really fun. So thanks for bearing with me on all the tangents and it's been really great.

2:05:08Sara Imari Walker:Thanks very much, Robinson.

2:05:10Robinson:Yeah, it was fun. Thanks.

2:05:11Sara Imari Walker:And good to see you again, Sarah.

2:05:13Robinson:Yeah.

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