Lee Cronin
Appearances
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah, but he would agree with that statement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Reassure them that one of the reasons they'll stay sane is by trying to work on concrete problems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
If I knew how Lee's brain worked, I think I would understand a little more about the universe, but I...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
You got to live.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah. It's like, instead of like, well, you could have the blue check, but you should have like, are you a pessimist and optimist? Yeah. There's a lot of neutral.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah, of course. Uh, people are complex. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
I'm trying to imagine all the little flickering lights in the universe in the way that you were describing it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah, I don't know. I've been kind of obsessed with the – I never know how to pronounce it – Schiaparelli.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
It's pretty big.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
You can make this with me when he was here, too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Let's pick apart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Well, in the case of molecule, so if you shine light on a molecule, let's take an infrared, the molecule has each of the bonds absorbs the infrared differently in what we call the fingerprint region. And so it's a bit like, and because it's quantized as well, you have all these discrete kind of absorbences.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I'm not saying we should, I just don't understand why these guys are going around making, literally making stuff up about us all dying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
When basically we need to actually really focus on. Now, let's say there's some actors are earnest, right? Let's say Yudikowsky is being earnest, right? And he really cares, but he loves it. It goes, and then you're all going to die. It's like, you know, why don't we try and do the same thing and say, you could do this and then you're going to be happy forever after. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I understand that. And I kind of, I guess, I mean, I'm involved in the whole hype cycle. I would like us to... I don't want us to... So what's happening right now is there seems to be... So let me just say... Having some people saying AI doom is a worry, fine, let's give them that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But what seems to be happening is there seems to be people who don't think AI is doing that, trying to use that to control regulation and to push people to regulate, which stops humans generating knowledge. And I am an advocate for generating as much knowledge as possible. Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
When it comes to nuclear weapons, I grew up in the 70s and 80s where nuclear doom... A lot of adults really had existential threat. Almost as bad as now with AI doom. They were really worried, right? There were some great... Well, not great. There were some horrific documentaries. I think there was one called Fred's that was generated in the UK, which was terrible. It was so scary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And I think that... The correct thing to do is obviously get rid of nuclear weapons, but let's think about unintended consequences. We've got rid of all the sulfur particles in the atmosphere, right, or the soot. And what's happened in the last couple of years is global warming has accelerated because we've cleaned up the atmosphere too much. Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And my intuition after we realized we could cut molecules up in mass spec, that was the first go at this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I mean, the same thing if you get rid of nuclear weapons. Exactly. That's my point. So what we could do is if we actually started to put the AI in charge, which is I really like an AI, to be in charge of all world politics. And this sounds ridiculous for a second. Hang on. But if we could all agree on the… Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But I really don't like politicians who are basically just looking at local sampling. But if you could say globally, look, here's some game theory here. What is the minimum number of nuclear weapons we need to distribute around the world to everybody? to basically reduce war to zero.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
We did it with using infrared, and the infrared gave us an even better correlation, assembly index, and we used another technique as well in addition to infrared called NMR, nuclear magnetic resonance, which tells you about the number of different magnetic environments in a molecule, and that also worked out. So we have three techniques, which each of them independently gives us
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But I don't think anyone will use them. Because I think, and look, what you've got to try and do is like to qualify for these nuclear weapons. This is a great idea. The game theorists should do this, right? I think the question is this. I really buy your question. We have too many nukes. Just from a feeling point of view that we've got too many of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So let's reduce the number, but not get rid of them because we'll have too much conventional warfare. So then what is the minimum number of nuclear weapons we can just do it around to remove humans hurting each other is something we should stop doing. It's not outwith our conceptual capability.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But right now, what about certain nations that are being exploited for their natural resources in the future for a short-term gain because we don't want to generate knowledge? And so if everybody had an equal doomsday switch, I predict the quality of life of the average human will go up faster.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I am an optimist and I believe that humanity is going to get better and better and better, that we're going to eliminate more problems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I mean, you have to integrate that into the... But we distribute the nukes-like population, right? What we do is we... I can't believe this. But anyway, let's just go there. So if a small nation with a couple of nukes uses one because they're a bit bored or annoyed... the likelihood that they are going to be pummeled out of existence immediately is 100%. And yet they've only nuked one other city.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I know this is crazy and I apologize for it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I can predict a future where we take all nuclear material and we burn it for energy, right? Because we're getting there. And the other thing you could do is say, look, there's a gap. So if we get all the countries to sign up to the virtual nuclear agreement where we all exist, we have a simulation where we can nuke each other in the simulation and the economic consequences are catastrophic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
In the simulation. I love it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It's just going to have economic consequences. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I just made it up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
actual nuclear weapons I think they do in Argentina and they do in Somalia and they do in a lot of these places where no I I think this is a great idea I'm a strong advocate now for so what we come up with burning burning all the nuclear material to have energy and before we do that because mad is good mutually assured destruction is very powerful let's take it into the metaverse and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
The same or tending towards the same assembly index for a molecule that we can calculate mathematically.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
and then get people to kind of subscribe to that. And if they actually nuke each other, even for fun in the metaverse, there are dire consequences.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
No, they're happy. They have a job for another 20 years, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a believer in equal employment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I want to understand the mechanism of intelligence that's gone through evolution, right? Because the way that intelligence was produced by evolution appears to be the following. Origin of life, multicellularity, locomotion, senses. Once you can start to see things coming towards you,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
and you can remember the past and interrogate the present and imagine the future, you can do something amazing, right? And I think only in recent years did humans become Turing-complete, right? Yeah. And so that Turing-completeness kind of gave us another kick up. But our ability to process that information It's produced in a wet brain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I think that we do not have the correct hardware architectures to have the domain flexibility and the ability to integrate information. I think intelligence also comes at a massive compromise of data. Right now, we're obsessing about getting more and more data, more and more processing, more and more tricks to get dopamine hits. So when we look back on this, going, oh, yeah, that was really cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Because when I asked chat GPT, it made me feel really happy. I got a hit from it. But actually, it just exposed how little intelligence I use in every moment. Yeah. Because I'm easily fooled. So what I would like to do is to say, well, hey, hang on. What is it about the brain?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So the brain has this incredible connectivity and it has the ability to, you know, as I said earlier about my nephew, you know, I just I went from Bill to Billy and he went, all right, Leroy. Like, how did he make that leap? That he was able to basically, without any training, I extended his name. He went gay and he doesn't like, he wants to be called Bill.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
He went back and said, you like to be called Lee? I'm going to call you Leroy. So human beings have a brilliant ability or intelligent beings appear to have a brilliant ability to integrate across all domains all at once and to synthesize something which allows us to generate knowledge and becoming true and complete is
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
on our own, although AIs are built in true and complete things, their thinking is not true and complete in that they are not able to build universal explanations. And that lack of universal explanation means that they're just inductivists. Inductivism doesn't get you anywhere. It's just basically a party trick.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I think it's in The Fabric of Reality from David Deutsch, where basically the farmer is feeding the chicken every day, and the chicken's getting fat and happy, and the chicken's like, I'm really happy. Every time the farmer comes in and feeds me, and then one day the farmer comes in and instead of feeding the chicken, just wrings its neck.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Oh, I'm impressed. Right. I'm impressed. Increasingly so. But we're mining the past. Yes. And what the human brain appears to be able to do is mine the future. Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I can show on the back of a piece of paper why that's impossible. And it's like the problem is that, and again, there's domain experts kind of bullshitting each other. The term generative, right? Average person, oh, it's generative. No, no, no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Look, if I take the numbers between 0 and 1,000 and I train a model to pick out the prime numbers by giving them all the prime numbers between 0 and 1,000, it doesn't know what a prime number is. Mm-hmm. Occasionally, if I can cheat a bit, we'll start to guess. It never will produce anything out with the data set because you mine the past.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
The thing that I'm getting to is I think that actually current machine learning technologies might actually help reveal why time is fundamental. It's kind of insane because they tell you about what's happened in the past, but they can never help you understand what's happening in the future without training examples. Sure, if that thing happens again...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It's like, so I think, so let's think about what large language models are doing. We have all the internet as we know it, you know, language, but also they're doing something else. We're having human beings correcting it all the time. Those models are being corrected. Steered. Corrected.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
don't think i think again we can show that on a piece of paper that's sure i think there has you have to have so this is the failure in epistemology like i'm i'm glad i even can say that word let me know what it means you said it multiple times i know it's like three times now without failure quit while you're ahead just don't say it again all right you did really well thanks so i i but i i think the so what is reasoning so coming back to the chemical brain if i could basically if i could show that in a
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Because, I mean, I'm never going to make an intelligence in CanMachina because we don't have brain cells. They don't have glial cells. They don't have neurons. But if I can take a gel and engineer the gel to be a hybrid hardware for reprogramming, which I think I know how to do, I will be able to process a lot more information and train models billions of times cheaper for...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
and use cross-domain knowledge. And there's certain techniques I think we can do, but it's still missing the abilities of human beings that have had to become true and complete. And so I guess the question to give back at you is like, how do you tell the difference between trial and error and the generation of new knowledge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, I'd say so. I'd agree. So I've started an assembly theory of emoticons with my lab, believe it or not. So we take emojis, pixelate them, and work out the assembly index for the emoji. And then work out how many emojis you can make on the path of emojis. So there's the Uber emoji from which all other emojis emerge. So you can then take a photograph, and by looking at the shortest path...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I think the way you can do it is this, is that you come up with a theory, an explanation, inspiration comes from out, yeah, and then you then test that, and then you see that's going towards a truth. And human beings are very good at doing that, and the transition between philosophy, mathematics, physics, and natural sciences. And I think that we can see that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Where I get confused is why people misappropriate the term artificial intelligence to say, hey, there's something else going on here. Because I think you and I both agree, machine learning is really good. It's only going to get better. We're going to get happier with the outcome. But why would you ever think the model was thinking or reasoning? Reasoning requires intention.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And the intention, if the model isn't reasoning, the intentions come from the prompter. And the intention has come from the person who programmed it to do it. So I... But don't you think...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But those initial conditions came from someone starting it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And that causal chain in there. So that intention comes from the outside. I think that there is something in that causal chain of intention that's super important. I don't disagree we're going to get to AGI. It's a matter of when and what hardware. I think we're not going to do it in this hardware. And I think we're unnecessarily fetishizing really cool outputs and dopamine hits.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Because obviously that's what people want to sell us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I agree, but the super intelligence I want, I want to be able to have a discussion with it about... coming up with fundamental new ideas that generate knowledge. And if the superintelligence we generate can mine novelty from the future that I didn't see in its training set in the past, I would agree that something really interesting is coming on. I'll say that again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
If the intelligence system, be it a human being, a chatbot, something else, is able to produce something truly novel that I could not predict, even having full audit trail from the past, They're not going to be sold.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But you're saying truly novel. I think they are in the training set. I think everything it produces comes from a training set. There's a difference between novelty and interpolation. We do not understand where these leaps come from yet. That is what intelligence is, I would argue. Those leaps.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And some people say, no, it's actually just what will happen if you just do cross-domain training and all that stuff. And that may be true. And I may be completely wrong. But right now, the human mind is able to mine novelty. in a way that artificial intelligence systems cannot. And this is why we still have a job and we're still doing stuff. And, you know, I use chat GPT for a few weeks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Oh, this is cool. And then it took me too. I had to. Well, what happened is it took me too much time to correct it. Then it got really good. And now they've they've done something to it. It's not actually that good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
by reproducing the pixels to make the image you want, you can measure that. So then you start to be able to take spatial data. Now there's some problems there. What is then the definition of the object? How many pixels? How do you break it down? And so we're just learning all this right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And the unit future is bigger than the present, which is why human beings are quite good at generating novelty because we have to expand our data set and to cope with unexpected things in our environment. Our environment throws them all at us. Again, we have to survive in that environment. And I mean, I never say never.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I would be very interested in how we can get cross-domain training cheaply in chemical systems, because I'm a chemist, and the only thing I know of is the human brain, but maybe that's just me being boring and predictable and not novel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah. I mean, this is one that goes with my team. I try and do things that are obvious but non-obvious in certain areas. And one of the things I was always asking about in chemistry, people like to represent molecules as graphs. And it's quite difficult. It's really hard. If you're doing AI in chemistry, you really want to basically have good representations. You can generate new molecules.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
They're interesting. And I was thinking, well, molecules aren't really graphs. And they're not continuously differentiable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
could i do something that was continuously differentiable i was like well molecules are actually made up of electron density so they got thinking say well okay could there be a way where we could just basically take a um take a database of readily solved electron densities for millions of molecules so we took the electron density for millions of molecules and just train the model to put to learn what electron density is
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And so what we built was a system that you literally could give it a... Let's say you could take a protein that has a particular active site or a cup with a certain hole in it. You pour noise into it. And with a GPT, you turn the noise into electron density. And then, in this case, it hallucinates like all of them do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But the hallucinations are good because it means I don't have to train on such a large, such a huge data set. Because these data sets are very expensive. Because how do you produce it? So... So go back a step. So you've got all these molecules in this data set, but what you've literally done is a quantum mechanical calculation where you produce electron densities for each molecule.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So you say, oh, this representation of this molecule has these electron densities associated with it. So you know what the representation is and you train the neural network to know what electron density is. So then you give it an unknown pocket. You pour in noise and you say, right, produce me electron density. It produces electron density that doesn't look ridiculous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And what we did in this case is we produced electron density that maximizes the electrostatic potential, so the stickiness, but minimizes what we call the steric hindrance, so the overlaps that's repulsive. So, you know, make the perfect fit. And then we then used a kind of like a chat GPT type thing to turn that electron density into what's called a smile.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
A smile string is a way of representing a molecule in letters. and then we can then so it just generates them just generates them and then the other thing is then we bung that into the computer and then it just makes it
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
The robot that we've got that can basically just do chemistry. Yeah. So kind of, we've kind of got this end to end drug discovery machine where you can say, oh, you want to bind to this active site. Here you go. I mean, it's a bit leaky and things kind of break, but it's the, it's a proof of principle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Well, the hallucinations are really great in this case, because in the case of a large language model, the hallucinations just like just make everything up to when it doesn't just make everything up, but it gives you an output that you're plausibly comfortable with and thinks you're doing probabilistically.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
The problem on these electron density models is it's very expensive to solve a Schrodinger equation going up to many heavy atoms and large molecules. And so we wondered if we trained the system on up to nine heavy atoms, whether it would go beyond nine. And it did. It started to generate molecules of 12. No problem. They look pretty good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And I was like, well, this hallucination I will take for free. Thank you very much. Because it just basically, this is a case where interpolation, extrapolation worked relatively well. And we were able to generate the really good molecules. And then what we were able to do here is... And this is a really good point, what I was trying to say earlier, that we were able to generate new molecules...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
from the known data set that would bind to the host. So a new guest would bind. Were these truly novel? Not really because they were constrained by the host. Were they new to us? Yes. So I do understand, I can concede that machine learning systems, artificial intelligence systems can generate new entities, but how novel are they? It remains to be seen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So you would, first of all, determine the resolution. So then what is your X, Y, and what is the number on the X and Y plane? And then look at the surface area. And then you take all your emojis and make sure they're all looked at the same resolution. Yes. And then we would basically then... do exactly the same thing we would do for cutting the bonds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
That's what a lot of people say. So the way to really get to genuine novelty, and assembly theory shows you the way, is to have different causal chains overlap. And this really resonates with the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
the time is fundamental argument and if you're bringing together a couple of objects with different initial conditions coming together when they interact the more different their histories the more novelty they generate in time going forward.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And so it could be that genuine novelty is basically about mix it up a little and the human brain is able to mix it up a little and all that stimulus comes from the environment. But all I think I'm saying is the universe is deterministic going back in time, non-deterministic going forward in time because the universe is too big in the future to contain in the present.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Therefore, these collisions of known things generate unknown things that then become part of your data set and don't appear weird. That's how we give ourselves comfort. The past looks consistent with this initial conditional hypothesis, but actually we're generating more and more novelty. And that's how it works. Simple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But I like this whole idea of mining novelty. I think it is going to reveal why the limitations of current AI is a bit like a printing press, right? Everyone thought that when the printing press came, that writing books is going to be terrible, that you had evil spirits and all this. They were just books.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But that's what the big companies want you to think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
consequences and the way social media has had major consequences both positive and negative and so you have to kind of think about and worry about it but yeah people that fear monger you know my pet theory yeah for this you want to know yeah is i think that um a lot and maybe i'm being and i think i really do respect um you know um a lot of the people out there who are trying to have discourse about the positive future so open ai guys meta guys and all this and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
What I wonder if they're trying to cover up for the fact that social media has had a pretty disastrous effect at some level. And they're just trying to say, oh yeah, we should do this. Because covering up for the fact that we have got some problems with, you know, teenagers and Instagram and Snapchat and, you know, all this stuff. And maybe they're just overreacting now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It's like, oh yeah, sorry, we made the bubonic plate and gave it to you all and you're all dying. And oh yeah, but look at this over here. It's even worse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
You'd cut bits out of the emoji and look at the – you'd have a bag of pixels, and you would then add those pixels together to make the overall emoji.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, I agree. But what I worry about right now is I do care about the ethics of what we're doing. And one of the reasons why I'm so open about the things we're trying to do in the lab, make life, look at intelligence, all this, is so people say, what are the consequences of this? And you say, well, the consequences of not doing it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And I think that what worries me right now in the present is lack of authenticated users and authenticated data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, human users.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But that's like a tool, right? It's a bit like a meditation tool, right? Some people have a meditation tool. It makes them feel better. But I'm not sure you can ascribe sentience and legal rights to a chatbot that makes you feel less lonely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But the dog's sentient.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
The chatbot's not. Right now, using the technology we use, it's not going to be sentient.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Um, I was God. Yeah. I don't know what God is. Uh, I mean, so God exists in our minds created by selection. So the human beings have created the concept of God in the same way that human beings have created the concept of super intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I think the universe, there is a creative force in the universe, but I don't think it's sent in. I mean, I think the... So I do not understand the universe. So who am I to say, you know... that God doesn't exist. I am an atheist, but I'm not an angry atheist, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I have lots of, I have lots of, there's some people I know that are angry atheists and say, you know, say that religious people are stupid. I don't think that's the case. Um, I have faith in some things cause I don't, I mean, when I was a kid, I kept like, you know, it's like, I need to know what the charge of electron is. I'm like, I can't measure the charge of an electron.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I just gave up and had faith. Okay, resistors worked. So when it comes to... I want to know why the universe is growing in the future and what humanity is going to become. And I've seen that the acquisition of knowledge... via the generation of novelty to produce technology has uniformly made humans' lives better. I would love to continue that tradition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And... You said that there's that creative force.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah. I think that... So I think that...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Well, I think selection.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Selection is the force in the universe that creates novelty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah. I think persistence of objects that could decay into nothing through operations that maintain that structure. I mean, think about it. It's amazing that things exist at all, that we're just not a big combinatorial mess.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah. I mean, let's think, maybe the universe is actually... But in the present, everything that can exist in the present does exist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I think the universities might... So the universe started super small. The past was deterministic. There wasn't much going on. It was able to mine, mine, mine, mine, mine. And so the process is somehow generating... The universe is basically... I'm trying to put this into words.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
No, I didn't say that. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I said there is free will. I think I'm saying that free will... It occurs at the boundary between the past and the future. Yeah, I got you. But everything that can exist does exist. Everything that's possible to exist at this moment. There's a lot of loaded words there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So in the same way in chemistry we assume the bond is fundamental, what we do in there here is we assume the resolution at the scale at which we do it is fundamental. And we're just working that out. And you're right, that will change, right? Because as you take your lens out a bit, it will change dramatically.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I think that the universe is able to do what it can in the present.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
right yeah and then i think in the future there are other things that could be possible we can imagine lots of things but they don't all happen sure so what that's where that's where you sneak in free will right there yeah so i guess what i'm saying is what what exists is a com is a convolution of the past with the present and the free will going into the future
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And it's an amazing force because you're imagining. This is the most important thing that we don't understand is our imaginations can actually change the future in a tangible way, which is what the initial conditions in physics cannot predict. Like your imagination has a causal consequence in the future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Isn't that weird too? Yeah. How do you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It breaks the laws of physics as we know them right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
If we then go back to the initial conditions, it's simply not possible that can happen. But if we go into a universe where we accept that there is a finite ability to represent numbers and you have rounding errors, your ability to make decisions, imagine and do stuff is at that interface between the certain and the uncertain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It's not as Yasha was saying to me, randomness goes and you just randomly do random stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
it is that you are set free a little on your trajectory free will is about being able to explore on this narrow trajectory um that allows you to build you have a choice about what you build or that choice is uh you interacting with a future in the present what to you is most beautiful about this whole thing the universe
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But it's just a new way of looking at not just compression, what we do right now in computer science and data, one big kind of... kind of misunderstanding is assembly theory is telling you about how compressed the object is. That's not right. It's a, how much information is required on a chain of events.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
The fact it seems to be very undecided, very open, and the fact that every time I think I'm getting towards an answer to a question, there are so many more questions that make the chase. Do you hate that it's going to be over at some point? Well, for me, I think if you think about it, is it over for Newton now? Newton has had causal consequences in the future. We discuss him all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
The person just had a lot of causal power when he was alive. But oh my God, one of the things I want to do is leave as many Easter eggs in the future when I'm gone to go, oh, that's cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It would be quite boring because, I mean... No novelty generation? I mean, if it's a faithful representation of what I've done in my life, that's great. That's an interesting artifact. But I think the most interesting thing about knowing each other is we don't know what we're going to do next.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Sure. Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I mean, within some constraints I've got, you know, you might, I can predict some things about you. You can predict some things about me, but we can't predict everything. And it's because we can't predict everything is why we're excited to come back and discuss and see it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm kind of, I'm happy that it will be interesting that some things that I've done can be captured, but I'm pretty sure that my, angle on mining novelty from the future will not be captured.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I think life is... A selection produces life, and life affects the universe. Universes with life in them are materially, physically, fundamentally different than universes without life. And that's super interesting. And I have no beginnings of understanding. I think maybe this is like in a thousand years there'll be a new discipline in humans. Yeah, of course, this is how it all works, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I think assembly theory is obvious. That's why a lot of people got angry, right? They were like, oh my God, this is such nonsense. You know, and like, oh, you know, actually it's not quite, but the writing is really bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It's a pleasure as always, Lex. Thanks for having me on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Because the nice thing is if, when you do compression in computer science, we're wandering a bit here, but it's kind of worth wondering, I think in you, you, um, assume you have instantaneous access to all the information in the memory. Yeah. In assembly theory, you say, no, you don't get access to that memory until you've done the work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And then when you don't access that memory, you can have access, but not to the next one. And this is how in assembly theory, we talk about the four universes, the assembly universe, the assembly possible, and the assembly contingent, and then the assembly observed. And they're all scales in this combinatorial universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yep, so the assembly universe is like anything goes. It's just combinatorial kind of explosion in everything. So that's the biggest one? That's the biggest one. It's massive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So, yeah, so assembly universe, everything goes. Yep. Assembly possible, laws of physics come in, in this case in chemistry bonds. In assembly, so that means... Those are actually constraints, I guess. Yes. And they're the only constraints. They're the constraints of the base. So the way to look at it, you've got all your atoms, they're quantized, you can just bung them together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So then you can become a kind of... So in the way in computer science speak, I suppose the assembly universe is just like no laws of physics. Things can fly through mountains beyond the speed of light. In the assembly possible, you have to apply the laws of physics, but... you can get access to all the motifs instantaneously with no effort. So that means you could make anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Then the assembly contingent says, no, you can't have access to the highly assembled object in the future until you've done the work in the past on the causal chain. And that's really the really interesting shift where you go from assembly possible to assembly contingent. That is really the key thing in assembly theory that says you cannot just have instantaneous access to all those memories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
You have to have done the work somehow. The universe has to have somehow built a system that allows you to select that path rather than other paths. And then the final thing is, the assembly observed is basically us saying, oh, these are the things we actually see. We can go backwards now and understand that they have been created by this causal process. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah. That's the thing that does the selection. You could think about it in terms of a von Neumann constructor versus a selection, a ribosome, a Tesla plant assembling Teslas. The difference between the assembly universe in Tesla land and the Tesla factory is Tesla Everyone says, no, Tesla's are just easy. They just spring out. You know how to make them all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
The Tesla factory, you have to put things in sequence and out comes a Tesla.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yes, this is really nice. Super important point is that when I talk about the universe having a memory or there's some magic, it's not that. It's that tells you that there must be a process encoded somewhere in physical reality, be it a cell, a Tesla factory, or something else that is making that object. I'm not saying there's some kind of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
woo woo memory in the universe you know morphic resonance or something i'm saying that there is an actual causal process that is being directed constrained in some way um so it's not kind of just making everything yeah but lee what's the factory that made the factory
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
This is the question. Well, it's the first interesting question that I want to answer out of four. I think the factory emerges in the interplay between the environment and the objects that are being built. And here, let me, I'll have a go at explaining to you the shortest path. So why is the shortest path important?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Imagine you've got, I'm going to have to go chemistry for a moment and then abstract it. So imagine you've got, a given environment that you have a budget of atoms you're just flinging together and the objective of those atoms that have been flung together in say molecule A have to make they decompose so molecules decompose over time so the molecules decompose
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
in this environment, in this magic environment, have to not die, but they do die. They have a half-life. So the only way the molecules can get through that environment out the other side, let's pretend the environment is a box, you can go in and out without dying, and there's just an infinite supply of atoms coming, or, well, a large supply,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
The molecule gets built, but the molecule that is able to template itself being built and survives in the environment will basically reign supreme. Now, let's say that molecule takes 10 steps and it's using a finite set of atoms. Now, let's say another molecule, smart-ass molecule we'll call it, comes in and can survive in that environment. and can copy itself, but it only needs five steps.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
The molecule that only needs five steps, because both molecules are being destroyed, but they're creating themselves faster they can be destroyed, you can see that the shortest path reigns supreme. So the shortest path tells us something super interesting about the minimal amount of information required to propagate that motif in time and space.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And it's just like a kind of, it seems to be like some kind of conservation law.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah. Yes and no, because there are other things. So in the limit, yes, because you want to tell the difference between things that have required a factory to build them and just random processes. But you can find instances where the shortest path isn't taken for an individual object, an individual function. And people go, ah... that means the shortest path isn't right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And then I say, well, I don't know. I think it's right still because, so of course, because there are other driving forces. It's not just one molecule. Now, when you start to, now you start to consider two objects, you have a joint assembly space and it's not, now it's a compromise between not just making A and B in the shortest path.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
You want to make A and B in the shortest path, which might mean that A is slightly longer. You have a compromise. Right. So when you see slightly more nesting in the construction, when you take a given object, that can look longer, but that's because the overall function is the object is still trying to be efficient. And this is still very hand-wavy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I maybe have no leg to stand on, but we think we're getting somewhere with that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah. And the thing we're working on right now is how to understand these parallel processes. Now there's a new thing we've introduced called assembly depth. And assembly depth can be lower than the assembly index for a molecule. when they're cooperating together because exactly this parallel processing is going on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And my team have been working this out in the last few weeks because we're looking at what compromises does nature need to make when it's making molecules in a cell? And I wonder if, you know, I may be like, well, I'm always leaping out of my competence. But in economics, I'm just wondering if you could apply this in economic processes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It seems like capitalism is very good at finding shortest path.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
you know every time and there are ludicrous things that happen because actually the cost function has been minimized and so i keep seeing parallels everywhere where there are complex nested systems where if you give it enough time and you introduce a bit of heterogeneity the system readjusts and finds a new shortest path but the shortest path isn't fixed on just one molecule now it's in the actual
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
existence of the object over time and that object could be a city it could be a cell it could be a factory but i think we're going way beyond molecules and my competence probably should go back to molecules but hey all right before we get too far let's talk about the assembly equation okay how should we do this now let me just even read that part of the paper
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And minus one, just to make sure that more than one object. One object could be a one-off and random. And then you have more than one identical object. That's interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Two of a thing is super important, especially if the assembly index is high. So we could say several questions here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So, yeah, so this is probably what, you know, the paper, we should talk about the paper for a second. The paper did, what it did is it kind of annoyed, um, we didn't know. I mean, it got attention and obviously angry people, the angry people were annoyed. There's angry people in the world. That's good. So what happened is the evolutionary biologists got angry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
We were not expecting that because we thought evolutionary biologists would be cool. I knew that some, not many, computational complexity people would get angry because I'd kind of been poking them and maybe I deserved it. But I was trying to poke them in a productive way. And then the physicists kind of got grumpy because the initial conditions tell everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
The prebiotic chemist got slightly grumpy because there's not enough chemistry in there. And then finally, when the creationist said it wasn't creationist enough, I was like, I've done my job.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I think so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah. So what happened is the reason why people put the phone down on the core of their paper, if you view reading the paper like a phone call, they got to the abstract. Yep. And in the abstract... The first sentence is pretty strong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
True, right? There's nothing wrong with that statement. Totally true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I am not... I would do it all again. This paper was actually on the preprint server for over a year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, I think, yeah. I don't regret anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
What I love about being a scientist is kind of sometimes... Because I'm a bit dim. I'm like... And I don't understand what people are telling me. I want to get to the point. This paper says, hey, laws of physics are really cool. The universe is great. But... they don't really, it's not intuitive that you just run the standard model and get life out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I think most physicists might go, yeah, there's this, you know, it's not just, we can't just go back and say that's what happened because physics can't explain the origin of life yet. That doesn't mean it won't or can't. Okay. Just to be clear, sorry, intelligent designers, we are going to get there. Second point, we say that evolution works, but we don't know how evolution works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
got going so biological evolution and biological selection so for me this seems like a simple continuum so when i mentioned selection and evolution in the title i think and in the abstract we should have maybe prefaced that and said non-biological selection and non-biological evolutions and then that might have made it even more crystal clear but i didn't think that biology evolutionary biology should be so bold to claim ownership of selection and evolution
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And secondly, a lot of evolutionary biologists seem to dismiss the origin of life questions and say it's obvious. And that causes a real problem scientifically. Because when the physicists are like, we own the universe, the universe is good, we explain all of it, look at us. And the biologists say we can explain biology. And the poor chemists are in the middle going, but hang on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
and this paper kind of says hey there is an interesting um disconnect between physics and biology and that's at the point at which memories get made in chemistry through bonds and hey let's look at this close and see if we can quantify it so yeah i mean i never expected the paper to to to kind of get that much interest and still i mean it's only been published just over a month ago now
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, that's a really good for selection selection. So I think for selection you need. So this is where for me, the concept of an object is something that can persist in time and not die, but basically can be broken up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Mm hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So if I was going to kind of bolster the definition of an object, so if something can form and persist for a long period of time under an existing environment that could destroy other, and I'm going to use anthropomorphic terms, I apologize, weaker objects or less robust objects, then the environment could have selected that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So good chemistry examples, if you took some carbon and you made a chain of carbon atoms, whereas if you took some, I don't know, some carbon, nitrogen and oxygen and made change from those, you start to get different reactions and rearrangements. So a chain of carbon atoms might be more resistant to falling apart under acidic or basic conditions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
versus another set of molecules so survives in that environment so the acid pond the molecule the molecule the resistant molecule can get through and and then then that molecule goes into another environment so that environment now maybe being an acid pond is a basic pond or maybe it's an oxidizing pond and so if you've got carbon and it goes an oxidizing pond maybe the carbon starts to oxidize and break apart so you go through all these kind of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Obstacle courses, if you like, given by reality. So selection is the ability happens when an object survives in the environment for some time. But, and this is the thing that's super interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
subtle the object has to be continually being destroyed and made by process so it's not just about the process the object now it's about the process and time that makes it because a rock could just stand on the mountainside for four billion years and nothing happened to it and that's not necessarily really advanced selection so for selection to get really interesting you need to have a turnover in time you need to be continually creating objects producing them
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
what we call discovery time. So there's a discovery time for an object. When that object is discovered, if it's, say, a molecule that can then act on itself or the chain of events that caused itself to bolster its formation, then you go from discovery time to production time, and suddenly you have more of it in the universe. So it could be a self-replicating molecule.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And the interaction of the molecule in the environment, in the warm little pond or in the sea or wherever, in the bubble, could then start to build a proto factory, the environment. So really to answer your question, what the factory is, the factory is the environment, but it's not very autonomous. It's not very redundant. There's lots of things that could go wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So once you get high enough up the hierarchy of networks of interactions, something needs to happen that needs to be compressed into a smaller volume and made resistant and robust. Because in biology, selection and evolution is robust, that you have error correction built in, that there's good ways of basically making sure propagation goes on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So really, the difference between inorganic abiotic selection and evolution, and evolution and stuff in biology, is robustness. The ability to survive in lots of different environments. Whereas Our poor little inorganic soul, molecule, whatever, just dies in lots of different environments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So there's something super special that happens from the inorganic molecule in the environment that kills it to where you've got evolution and cells can survive everywhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I don't, and I'm excited because I think selection isn't special at all. I think what is special is the history of the environments on Earth that gave rise to the first cell that now has taken all those environments and is now more autonomous. And I would like to think that this paper...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
could be very wrong but i don't think it's very wrong it means certainly wrong but it's less wrong than some other ideas i know right and if this allow inspires us to go and look for selection in the universe because we now have an equation where we can say we can look for selection going on and say oh that's interesting we seem to have a process process that's giving us
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
giving us high copy number objects that also are highly complex. But that doesn't look like life as we know it. And we use that and say, oh, there's a hydrothermal vent. Oh, there's a process going on, there's molecular networks. Because the assembly equation is not only meant to identify at the higher end advanced selection, what you get, I would call it in biology, super advanced selection.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And even, I mean, you could use the assembly equation to look for technology and God forbid, we could talk about consciousness and abstraction, but let's keep it primitive, molecules and biology. So I think the real power of the assembly equation is to say how much selection is going on in this space. And there's a really simple thought experiment I could do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
You have a little Petri dish, and on that Petri dish you put some simple food. So the assembly index of all the sugars and everything is quite low. And you put a single cell of E. coli cell. And then you say, I'm going to measure the assembly, the amount of assembly in the box. So it's quite low, but...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
The rate of change of assembly, DADT, will go vum sigmoidal as it eats all the food, and the number of E. coli cells will replicate because they take all the food, they copy themselves, the assembly index of all the molecules goes up, up, up, and up until the food is exhausted in the box. So now the E. coli's stopped... I mean, dye is probably a strong word.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
They stop respiring because all the food is gone. But suddenly the amount of assembly in the box has gone up gigantically because of that one E. coli factory has just eaten through, milled lots of other E. coli factories, run out of food and stopped. And so that looking at that. So in the initial box, although the amount of assembly was really small,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It was able to replicate and use all the food and go up. And that's what we're trying to do in the lab, actually, is kind of make those kind of experiments and see if we can spot the emergence of molecular networks that are producing complexity as we feed in raw materials and we feed a challenge, an environment. You know, we try and kill the molecules.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And really, that's the main kind of idea for the entire paper.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
In very simply, actually, if we, let's say we'll go to Mars with a mass spectrometer with a sufficiently high resolution. So what you have to be able to do, so good thing about mass spec is that you can select the molecule from the mass. And then if it's high enough resolution, you can be more and more sure that you're just seeing identical copies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
You can count them and then you fragment them and you count the number of fragments and look at the molecular weight. And the higher the molecular weight, And the higher the number of the fragments, the higher the assembly index. So if you go to Mars and you take a mass spec or high enough resolution, and you can find molecules, and I'll give you a guide on Earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
If you could find molecules, say, greater than 350 molecular weight with more than 15 fragments, you have found artifacts that can only be produced, at least on Earth, by life. Now, you would say, oh, well, maybe the geological process. I would argue very vehemently that that is not the case. But we can say, look, if you don't like the cutoff on Earth, go up higher, 30, 100, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Because there's going to be a point where you'll find a molecule with so many different parts, the chances of you getting a molecule that has 100 different parts is... And finding a million identical copies, you know, that's just impossible. That could never happen in an infinite set of universes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, that was so interesting. And I... Always understood the copy number was really important, but I never explained it properly for ages. And I kept having this, it goes back to this, if I give you a, I don't know, a really complicated molecule, and I say it's complicated, you could say, hey, that's really complicated, but is it just really random?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And so I realized that ultimate randomness and ultimate complexity are indistinguishable. Until you can see a structure in the randomness. So you can see copies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah. The factory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
it's it's all to do with the the telescope or the microscope you're using and so at the maximum resolution so in the nice thing about the nice thing about chemists is they have this concept of the molecule and they're all familiar with a molecule and molecules you can hold you know on your hand and lots of them identical copies a molecule is actually a super important thing in chemistry to say look you can have a mole of a molecule so an avogadro's number of molecules
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And they're identical. What does that mean? That means that the molecular composition, the bonding and so on, the configuration is indistinguishable. You can hold them together. You can overlay them. So the way I do it is if I say, here's a bag of 10 identical molecules. Let's prove they're identical. You pick one out of the bag and you basically observe it using some technique.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And then you take it away and then you take another one out. If you observe it using technique, you see no differences. They're identical. It's really interesting to get right because if you take, say, two molecules, molecules can be in different vibrational and rotational states. They're moving all the time. So with this respect, identical molecules have identical bonding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
In this case, we don't even talk about chirality because we don't have a chirality detector. So two identical molecules in one conception assembly theory basically considers both hands as being the same. But of course, they're not. They're different. As soon as you have a chiral distinguisher detect the left and the right hand, they become different.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And so it's to do with the detection system that you have and the resolution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Sure, I mean, of course we're different close up, but if you zoom out a little bit, we'll morphologically look the same. You know, height and characteristics, hair length, stuff like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, I agree. I mean, this is the power of assembly theory in that regard. So the way to look at it, if you have a box of objects, if they're all indistinguishable, then using your technique, what you then do is you then look at the assembly index. Now, if the assembly index of them is really low, and they're all indistinguishable, then it's telling you that you have to go to another resolution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So that would be, you know, it's kind of a sliding scale. It's kind of nice. Got it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I would do mass spec.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I would, I would look, yeah. So if you're just going to Mars or Titan or Enceladus or somewhere, so a number of ways of doing it. So you could take a large scoop or you'd go for the atmosphere and detect stuff. So, and you can make a light, um, a life meter, right? So, um, well,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
One of Sarah's colleagues at ASU, Paul Davis, keeps calling it a life meter, which is quite a nice idea because you think about it. If you've got a living system that's producing these highly complex molecules and they drift away and they're in a highly kind of…
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
demanding environment they could be burnt right so they could just be falling apart so you want to sniff a little bit of complexity and say warmer warmer warmer oh we've found life we found the alien we've found we found the alien elon musk smoking a joint in the bottom of the cave on mars or elon himself whatever right you say okay found it so what you can do is the mass spectrometer um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
you could just look for things in the gas phase, or you go on the surface, drill down, because you want to find molecules that are... You've either got to find the source living system, because the problem with just looking for complexity is it gets burnt away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So in a harsh environment on, say, on the surface of Mars, there's a very low probability that you're going to find really complex molecules because of all the radiation and so on. If you drill down a little bit, you could drill down a bit into soil that's billions of years old.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Then I would put in some solvent, water, alcohol or something, or take a scoop, make it volatile, put it into the mass spectrometer and just try and detect high complexity, high abundant molecules. And if you get them, hey presto, you can have evidence of life. Wouldn't that then be great if you could say, okay, we've found evidence of life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Now we want to keep the life meter, keep searching for more and more complexity until you actually find living cells. You can get those new living cells and then you could bring them back to Earth or you could try and sequence them. You could see that they have different DNA and proteins. Go along the gradient of the light.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So I would take a life, so my life meter, our life meter, there you go. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. Would have both infrared and mass spec. So it would have two ports so it could shine a light. And so what it would do is you would have a vacuum chamber and you would have an electrostatic analyzer and you'd have a monochromator to producing infrared and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So you'd take a scoop of the sample, put it in the life meter. It would then add a solvent or heat up the sample, so some volatiles come off. The volatiles would then be put into the mass spectrometer, into electrostatic trap, and you'd weigh the molecules and fragment them. Alternatively, you'd shine infrared light on them. You'd count the number of bands.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But you'd have to, in that case, do some separation because you want to separate. And so in mass spec, it's really nice and convenient because you can separate electrostatically. But you need to have that. Can you do it in real time? Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much, yeah. So let's go all the way back. Okay, we're really going to get this. Let's go. Lex and Lee. No, no, Lex and Lee.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
All right. So you have a vacuum chamber. You have a little nose. The nose would have a packing material. So you would take your sample, add it onto the nose, add a solvent or a gas. It would then be sucked up the nose. And that would be separated using what we call chromatography. And then as each band comes off the nose, we would then do mass spec and infrared.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And in the case of the infrared, count the number of bands. In the case of mass spec, count the number of fragments and weigh it. And then the further up in molecular weight range for the mass spec and the number of bands, you go up and up and up from the dead, interesting, interesting, over the threshold, oh my gosh, Earth life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And then right up to batshit crazy, this is definitely alien intelligence that's made this life, right? You could almost go all the way there. Same in the infrared. And it's pretty simple. The thing that is really problematical is that for many years, decades...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
What people have done, and I can't blame them, is rather they've been obsessing about small biomarkers that we find on Earth, amino acids, like single amino acids or evidence of small molecules and these things, and looking for those, looking for complexity. The beautiful thing about this is you can look for complexity without Earth chemistry bias or Earth biology bias.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So assembly theory is just a way of saying, hey, complexity and abundance is evidence of selection. That's how our universal life meter will work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So we did this a few years ago when I was trying to convince NASA and colleagues that this technique could work. And honestly, it's so funny because everyone's like, no, it ain't going to work. And I was just like, because the chemists were saying, of course there are complicated molecules out there you can detect that just form randomly. I was like, really?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
That's like, that was like, you know, it's a bit like a... I don't know, someone saying, of course, Darwin's textbook was just written randomly by some monkeys and a typewriter. Just for me, it was like, really? And I've pushed a lot on the chemists now, and I think most of them are on board, but not totally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I really had some big arguments, but the copy number caught there, because I think I confused the chemists by saying one-off, and then when I made clear about the copy number, I think that made it a little bit easier. Just to clarify...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, exactly that. Okay. Exactly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, exactly. So on Earth, coming back to Earth, what we did is we took a whole bunch of samples and we were running prebiotic chemistry experiments in the lab. We took various inorganic minerals and extracted them. Look at the volatile because there's a special way of treating minerals and polymers in assembly theory. In our life machine, we're looking at molecules. We don't care about polymers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
because they're not volatile, you can't hold them. If you can't ascertain that they're identical, then it's very difficult for you to work out if there's undergone selection or they're just a random mess. Same with some minerals, but we can come back to that. So basically what you do, we got a whole load of samples, inorganic ones,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
We got a load of, we got Scotch whiskey and also took Ardberg, which is one of my favorite whiskeys, which is very peaty. And another whiskey is like, so the way that in Scotland, in Islay, which is a little island, the Scotch, the whiskey is let to mature in barrels. And it's said that the complex molecules in the peat find their way through into the whiskey.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And that's what gives it this intense brown color and really complex flavor. It's literally molecular complexity that does that. And so, you know, vodka is the complete opposite. It's just pure, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
The higher the assembly index, the better the whiskey. I really love deep, peaty Scottish whiskeys. Near my house, there is one of the lowland distilleries called Glengoyne. It's still beautiful whiskey, but not as complex. So for fun, I took some Glengoyne whiskey in our bag and put them into the mass spec and measured the assembly index. I also got E. coli.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So the way we do it, take the E. coli, break the cell apart, take it all apart, and also got some beer. And people were ridiculing us, saying, oh, beer is evidence of complexity. One of the computational complexity people was just throwing... Yeah, kind of his very vigorous and his disagreement of assembly theory was just saying, you know, you don't know what you're doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Even beer is more complicated than human. What he didn't realize is that it's not beer per se. It is taking the yeast extract, taking the extract, breaking the cells, extracting the molecules, and just looking at the profile of the molecules to see if there's anything over the threshold. And we also put in a really complex molecule, taxol.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So he took all of these, but also NASA gave us, I think, five samples. And they wouldn't tell us what they are. They said, no, we don't believe you're going to get this to work. And they really, you know, they gave us some super complex samples. And they gave us two fossils, one that was a million years old and one was at 10,000 years old. Something from Antarctica, seabed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
They gave us a Murchison meteorite and a few others. Put them through the system. So we took all the samples, treat them all identically, put them into mass spec, fragmented them, counted. And in this case, implicit in the measurement was in mass spec, you only detect peaks when you've got more than, let's say, 10,000 identical molecules.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So the copy number's already baked in, but wasn't quantified, which is super important there. This was in the first paper, because I was like, it's abundant, of course. And when you then took it all out, we found that the biological samples...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
gave you molecules that had an assembly index greater than 15 and all the abiotic samples were less than 15 and then we took the NASA samples and we looked at the ones that were more than 15 and less than 15 and we gave them back to NASA and they're like, oh gosh, yep, dead, living, dead, living. You got it. Mm-hmm. And that's what we found on Earth. That's a success. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Resounding success.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So what you were able to do is like the assembly index of, we found high assembly index molecules originating from the beer sample and the E. coli sample. So I mean, I didn't know which one was higher. We wouldn't really do any detail there because now we are doing that because one of the things we've done, it's a secret, but I can tell you. I think it's a secret.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Well, is that we've just mapped the tree of life using assembly theory, because everyone said that you can't do it in biology. And what we're able to do is, so I think there's three ways, well, two ways of doing tree of life, well, three ways, actually.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So the tree of life is basically tracing back the history of life on Earth, all the different species going back, who evolved from what, and it all goes all the way back to the first kind of life forms, and they branch off. And you have plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, the fungi kingdom, and different branches all the way up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And the way this was classically done, and I'm no evolutionary biologist. Evolution biologists tell me every day, at least 10 times. I want to be one, though. I kind of like biology. It's kind of cool. Yeah, it's very cool. But basically, what Darwin and Mendeleev and all these people do is just they draw pictures, right? And they taxa.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
They were able to draw pictures and say, oh, these look like common classes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Then...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But they were able to find out a lot, right, in looking at verbrates, inverbrates, Cameron explosion, all this stuff. And then came the genomic revolution, and suddenly everyone used gene sequencing. And Craig Venter is a good example. I think he's gone around the world in his yacht just picking up samples, looking for new species, where he's just found new species of life just from sequencing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It's amazing. So you have taxonomy, you have sequencing, and then you can also do a little bit of molecular archaeology, like measure the samples and form some inference. What we did is we were able to fingerprint we took a load of random samples from all of biology and we use mass spectrometry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And what we did now is not just look for individual molecules, but we looked for coexisting molecules where they had to look at their joint assembly space and where we were able to cut them apart and undergo recursion in the mass spec and infer some relationships. And we were able to recapitulate the tree of life using mass spectroscopy, no sequencing and no drawing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So what you do is you take an unknown sample, you pung it into the mass spec. Because this comes from what you're asking, like, what do you see in E. coli? And so in E. coli, you don't just see, it's not that the most sophisticated cells on Earth make the most sophisticated molecules. It is the coexistence of lots of complex molecules above a threshold.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And so what we realize is you could fingerprint different life forms. So fungi make really complicated molecules. Why? Because they can't move. They have to make everything on site. Whereas some animals are lazy. They can just go eat the fungi. They don't need to make very much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And so what you do is you look at the... So you take, I don't know, the fingerprint, maybe the top number of high molecular weight molecules you find in the sample. You fragment them to get their assembly indices. And then what you can do is you can infer common origins of molecules. You can do a kind of molecular...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
when the reverse engineering of the assembly space, you can infer common roots and look at what's called the joint assembly space. But let's translate that into the experiment. Take a sample, bung it in the mass spec, take the top, say, 10 molecules, fragment them, And that gives you one fingerprint. Then you do it for another sample, you get another fingerprint.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Now the question is you say, hey, are these samples the same or different? And that's what we've been able to do. And by basically looking at the assembly space that these molecules create. Without any knowledge of assembly theory, you are unable to do it. With a knowledge of assembly theory, you can reconstruct the tree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
let's go to two leaves on different branches on the tree, right? What you can do by counting the number of differences, you can estimate how far away their origin was. And that's all we do. And it just works. But when we realized you could even use assembly theory to recapitulate the tree of life with no gene sequencing, we were like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, absolutely. I would love to get old fossil samples and apply assembly theory mass spec and see if we can find new forms of life that are no longer amenable to gene sequencing because the DNA is all gone. DNA and RNA is quite unstable. But some of the more complex molecules might be there and might give you a hint of something new.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Or wouldn't it be great if you find a sample that's worth really persevering and doing the proper extraction to PCR and so on and then sequence it and then put it together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, and it appears that you can do some dating. Now, there are really good techniques. There's radiocarbon dating. There is longer dating, going looking at radioactive minerals and so on. And you can also, in bone... you can look at what happens after something dies. You get what's called racemization, where the chirality in the polymers basically changes and you get decomposition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
The deviation from the pure enantiomer to the mixture you can have a time it gives you a time time scale on it half-life so you can date when it died i want to use assembly theory to see if i can date use it date death and things and and trace the tree of life and also decomposition of molecules do you think it's possible
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
oh yeah then without a doubt it may not be better than what because like the i was just at a conference where some brilliant people were looking at isotope enrichment and and looking at how life enriches isotopes and they're really sophisticated stuff that they're doing but i think there's some fun to be had there because it gives you another dimension of dating how old is this molecule um in terms of in or more importantly how long ago was this molecule produced by life
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
The more complex the molecule, the more prospect for decomposition, oxidation, reorganization, loss of chirality, and all that jazz. But what life also does is it enriches. As you get older, the amount of carbon-13 in you goes up. because of the way the bonding is in carbon-13. So it has a slightly different bond strength than you. It's called the kinetic isotope effect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So you can literally date how old you are or when you stop metabolizing. So you could date someone's death, how old they are, I think. I'm making this up. This might be right. But I think it's roughly right. The amount of carbon-13 you have in you, you can kind of estimate how old you are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, yeah, like you could say, oh, this person is 10 years old and this person is 30 years old because they've been metabolizing more carbon and they've accumulated it. That's the basic idea. It's probably completely wrong timescale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
At the moment, we should be able to do this to morphology in cells. So we're looking at cell surfaces and really try and extend further. It's just that, you know, we worked so hard to get this paper published
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
out and people to start discussing the ideas and i was but but it's kind of funny because i think the peb the the penny is falling on this so yeah so what's that even what what's it mean for a penny i mean no the the pennies dropped right because a lot of people like it's rubbish it's rubbish you've insulted me it's wrong and i'm and then you know i mean the paper got published on the 4th of october it had 2.3 million engagements on twitter
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
and it's been downloaded over a few hundred thousand times. And someone actually wrote to me and said, this is an example of really bad writing and what not to do. And I was like, if all of my papers got read this much, because that's the objective, if I have a publishing paper and want people to read it, I want to write that badly again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yes. The most exciting criticism came from the evolutionary biologists telling me that they thought that origin of life was a solved problem. And I was like, whoa, we're really onto something, because it's clearly not. And when you poked them on that, they just said, no, you don't understand evolution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And I said, no, no, I don't think you understand that evolution had to occur before biology, and there's a gap. That was really, for me, the... That misunderstanding, and that did cause an immune response, which was really interesting. The second thing was the fact that physicists, the physicists were actually really polite, right? Really nice about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But they just said, huh, we're not really sure about the initial conditions thing, but this is a really big debate that we should certainly get into because the emergence of life was not encoded in the initial conditions of the universe. And I think assembly theory shows why it can't be. I'll say that again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
The emergence of life was not and cannot, in principle, be encoded in the initial conditions of the universe. Just to clarify what you mean by life is like what, high assembly index objects? Yeah. And this goes back to your favorite subject. What's that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I mean, probably we can come back to it later, but I think it might be if we have time. But I think I now understand how to explain how, you know, lots of people got angry with the assembly paper, but also the ramifications of this is how time is fundamental in the universe. and this notion of combinatorial spaces.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And there are so many layers on this, but I think you have to become an intuitionist mathematician, and you have to abandon platonic mathematics, and also platonic mathematics has left physics astray, but there's a lot to unpack there. So we can go to the... Platonic mathematics, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Well, I mean, they said lots of confusing statements. Basically, I realized the evolutionary biology community that were vocal, and some of them were really rude, really spiteful, and needlessly so, right? Because, look, you know, I didn't... People misunderstand publication as well. Some of the people have said, how dare this be published in Nature? This is, you know, what a terrible journal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And it really, and I want to say to people, look, this is a brand new idea that's, not only potentially going to change the way we look at biology, it's going to change the way we look at the universe. And everyone's saying, how dare you? How dare you be so grandiose? I'm like, no, no, no, this is not hype.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
We're not saying we've invented some, I don't know, we've discovered an alien in a closet somewhere just for hype. We genuinely mean this to genuinely have the impact or ask the question. And the way people jumped on that was a really bad precedent for young people who want to actually do something new because this makes a bold claim. And the chances are... It's not correct.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But what I wanted to do is a couple of things. I wanted to make a bold claim that was precise and testable and correctable. Not another woolly information in biology argument, information Turing machine, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. A concrete series of statements that can be falsified and explored and either the theory could be destroyed or built upon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, that's really good. So... The assembly index of a molecule is not obvious. No one had measured it before. And no one has thought to quantify selection complexity and copy number before in such a primitive quantifiable way. I think the nice thing about this paper, this paper is is a tribute to all the people that understand that biology does something very interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Some people call it negentropy. Some people think about organizational principles. Lots of people were not shocked by the paper because they'd done it before. A lot of the arguments we got, some people said, oh, it's rubbish. Oh, by the way, I had this idea 20 years before. I was like... Which one? Is it the rubbish part or the really revolutionary part?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So this kind of plucked two strings at once. There is something interesting that biology is, as we can see around this, but we haven't quantified yet. And what this is, the first stab at quantifying that. So the fact that people said, this is obvious, but it's also... So if it's obvious, why have you not done it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, well, I think you will be able to. We just haven't got there robustly. So we can say, how can we... Let's go up a level. So if we go up from level, let's go up from molecules to cells because you jump to people and I jump to emoticons and both are good and they will be assembled.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Good point. If we go from... So if we go from molecules to assemblies, and let's take a cellular assembly, a nice thing about a cell is you can tell the difference between a eukaryote and a prokaryote, right? The organelles are specialized differently. We then look at the cell surface, right? and the cell surface has different glycosylation patterns, and these cells will stick together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Now let's go up a level with multicellular creatures. You have cellular differentiation. Now, if you think about how embryos develop, you go all the way back, those cells undergo differentiation in a causal way that's biomechanically a feedback between the genetics and biomechanics. I think we can use assembly theory to apply to tissue types. We can even apply it to different cell disease types.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So that's what we're doing next. But we're trying to walk... You know, the thing is, I'm trying to leap ahead. I want to leap ahead to go, whoa, we apply it to culture. Clearly, you can apply it to memes and culture. And we've also applied assembly theory to CAs. And not as you think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, yeah, cellular automata. Not just as you think. Different CA rules were invented by different people at different times. And one of my coworkers, very talented chap, basically was like, oh, I can realize that different people had different ideas with different rules. And they copied each other and made slightly different cellular automata rules and looked at them online.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And so he was able to refer an assembly index and copy number of rule whatever doing this thing. But I digress. But it does show you can apply it at a higher scale. So what do we need to do to apply assembly theory to things? We need to agree there's a common set of building blocks. So in a cell, well, in a... In a multicellular creature, you need to look back in time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So there is the initial cell, which the creature is fertilized and then starts to grow. And then there is cell differentiation. And you have to then make that causal chain both on those. So that requires... development of the organism in time. Or if you look at the cell surfaces and the cell types, they've got different features on the cell, walls and inside the cell. So we're building up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But obviously I want a leap to things like emoticons, language, mathematical theorems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah. And I think they are related, but in hierarchies of emergence, right? So you shouldn't compare them. I mean, the assembly index of a human brain, what does that even mean? Well, maybe we can look at the morphology of the human brain, say all human brains have these number of features in common.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
If they have those number of, and then let's look at a brain in a whale or a dolphin or a chimpanzee or a bird and say, okay, let's look at the assembly indices, number of features in these. And now the copy number is just a number of how many birds are there? How many chimpanzees are there? How many humans are there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah. And that means you need to have some idea of the anatomy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I guess so. I mean, and I think this is a good way to apply machine learning and image recognition just to basically characterize things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And the compression has to be... Remember the assembly universe, which is you have to go from assembly possible to assembly contingent. And that jump from... Because assembly possible, all possible brains, all possible features all the time. But we know that... On the tree of life and also on the lineage of life, going back to Luca, the human brain just didn't spring into existence yesterday.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It is a long lineage of brains going all the way back. And so if we could do assembly theory to understand the development, not just in evolutionary history, but in biological development as you grow, we are going to learn something more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
That is the first step. And also to say, look, we have a way of quantifying selection and evolution in a fairly, not mundane, but a fairly mechanical way. Because before now, the ground truth for it was very subjective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Whereas here, we're talking about clean observables. And there's going to be layers on that. I mean, with collaborators right now, we already think we can do assembly theory on language. And not only that, wouldn't it be great if we can figure out how under pressure language is going to evolve and be more efficient? Because you're going to want to transmit things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And again, it's not just about compression. It is about understanding how you can make the most of the architecture you've already built. And I think this is something beautiful that evolution does. We're reusing those architectures. We can't just abandon our evolutionary history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And if you don't want to abandon your evolutionary history, and you know that evolution has been happening, then assembly theory works. And I think that's a key comment I want to make, is that assembly theory is great for understanding where evolution has been used. The next jump is when we go to technology. Because, of course, if you take the M3 processor, I haven't bought one yet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I can't justify it, but I want to at some point. The M3 processor, arguably, there's quite a lot of features, a quite large number. The M2 came before it, then the M1, all the way back. You can apply assembly theory to microprocessor architecture. It doesn't take a huge leap to see that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, well, whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, I mean, I think the thing about large language models, and this is a whole hobby horse I have at the moment, is that obviously they're all about the evidence of evolution in the large language model comes from all the people that produced all the language. And that's really interesting. And all the corrections in the Mechanical Turk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
That's part of the history, part of the memory of the system. Exactly. It would be really interesting to basically use an assembly-based approach to making language in a hierarchy. My guess is that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
you could we might be able to build a new type of large language model that uses assembly theory that it has more understanding of the past and how things were created well basically the thing with llms is they're like everything everywhere all at once splat and make the user happy so there's not much intelligence in the model the model is how the human interacts with the model but wouldn't it be great if we could understand how to embed more intelligence in them in the system
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah. Memory. I think selection produces intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
wait you're almost implying that selection is intelligence no yeah kind of i would go that i would go out on a limb and say that but i think it's a little bit more human beings have the ability to abstract and they can break beyond selection and this is what like darwinian selection because the human being doesn't have to basically do trial and error like they can think about they say oh that's a bad idea won't do that and then technologies and so on
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And assembly theory will measure that as well, right? Because it's all a lineage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, there seems to be a disconnect between the computational approach. So a Kolmogorov measure requires a Turing machine, requires a computer. And that's one thing. And the other thing is assembly theory is supposed to trace the process by which life evolution emerged. There's a main thing there. There are lots of other layers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So Kolmogorov complexity, you can approximate Kolmogorov complexity, but it's not really telling you very much about... the actual... It's really telling you about your data set, compression of your data set. And so that doesn't really help you identify the turtle, in this case, is the computer. And so what assembly theory does is... I'm going to say...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Trigger warning for anyone listening who loves complexity theory. I think that we're going to show that AIT is a very important subset of assembly theory because here's what happens. I think that assembly theory allows us to understand when were selections occurring. Selection produces factories and things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Factories in the end produce computers and then algorithmic information theory comes out of that. The frustration I've had with looking at life through this kind of information theory is it doesn't take into account causation. So the main difference between assembly theory and all these complexity measures is there's no causal chain. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Exactly. And if you've got all your data in a computer memory, all the data is the same. You can access it in the same way. You don't care. You just compress it. And you either look at the program runtime or the shortest program. And that, for me... It is absolutely not capturing what it is, what its selection does.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I would say it does in a way, and it is fascinating to look at. So you've just got the object.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
and you have no other information about the object, what assembly theory allows you to do just with the object is to, and the word infer is correct, I agree with infer, you say, well, that's not the history, but something really interesting comes from this. The shortest path is inferred from the object. That is the worst case scenario if you have no machine to make it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So that tells you about the depth of that object in time. Mm-hmm. And so what assembly theory allows you to do is without considering any other circumstances to say from this object, how deep is this object in time? If we just treat the object as itself without any other, any other constraints. And that's super powerful because the shortest path then says, allows you to say, Oh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
This object wasn't just created randomly. There was a process. And so assembly theory is not meant to one-up AIT or to ignore the factory. It's just to say, hey, there was a factory. How big was that factory and how deep in time is it? Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It is. It becomes harder. But one of the things that's super nice is that it constrains your initial conditions, right? Sure. It constrains where you're going to be. So if you take, say, imagine... So one of the things we're doing right now is applying assembly theory to drug discovery. Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Now, what everyone's doing right now is taking all the proteins and looking at the proteins and looking at molecules docked with proteins. Why not instead look at the molecules that are involved in interacting with the receptors over time, rather than thinking about and use the molecules that evolve over time as a proxy for how the proteins evolved over time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
and then use that to constrain your drug discovery process. You flip the problem 180 and focus on the molecule evolution rather than the protein. And so you can guess in the future what might happen. So rather than having to consider all possible molecules, you know where to focus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And that's the same thing if you're looking in assembly spaces for an object where you don't know the entire history, but you know that in the history of this object, it's not going to have some other motif there that doesn't appear in the past.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Well, this is another thing that I think causes, because this paper goes across so many boundaries. So chemists have looked at this and said, this is not a correct reaction. It's like, no, it's a graph.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
yeah and so and what you do is you look at the minimal constraints on that graph of course it has some mapping to the synthesis but actually you don't have to know all of chemistry you just have to understand you can build up the constraint space rather nicely um but this is just at the beginning right there are so many directions this could go in and i said it it could all be wrong but hopefully it's less wrong what about the little criticism i saw of do you uh
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
No, no. Well, let's go back. So no, not less likely, but react. So no. So let's go back to what we're looking at here. So the assembly index is the minimal path. Mm-hmm. that could have created that object probabilistically. So imagine you have all your atoms in a plasma, you've got enough energy, you've got enough collisions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
What is the quickest way you could zip out that molecule with no reaction constraints?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It's just basically a walk on a random graph. So we make an assumption that basically the timescale for forming the bonds. So no, I don't want to say that because it's going to have people getting obsessing about this point. And your criticism is a really good one. What we're trying to say is like, this puts a lower bound on something. Of course, some reactions are less possible than others.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But actually, I don't think chemical reactions exist. Oh boy. What does that mean? Why don't chemical reactions exist? I'm writing a paper right now that I keep being told I have to finish. And it's called The Origin of Chemical Reactions. And it merely says that reactivity exists as controlled by the laws of quantum mechanics. And reactions, chemists put names on reactions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So you could have like, I don't know, the Wittig reaction, which is by Wittig. You could have the Suzuki reaction, which is by Suzuki. Mm-hmm. Now, what are these reactions? So these reactions are constrained by the following. They're constrained by the fact they're on planet Earth, 1G, 298 Kelvin, one bar. So these are constraints. They're also constrained by the chemical composition of Earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Oxygen, availability, all this stuff. And that then allows us to focus in our chemistry. So when a chemist does a reaction, that's a really nice compressed shorthand for constraint application. Glass flask.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
pure reagent temperature pressure boom boom boom boom boom control control control control control so of course we have bond energies this so the bond energies are kind of intrinsic in a vacuum if you say that so the bond energy you have to have a bond and so for assembly theory to work you have to have a bond which means that bond has to give the molecule certain laugh a half-life
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So you're probably going to find later on that some bonds are weaker and that you are going to miss in mass spectra. When you look at the assembly of some molecules, you're going to miscount the assembly of the molecule because it falls apart too quickly because the bonds just fall. But you can solve that with looking at infrared.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So when people think about the probability, they're kind of misunderstanding. Assembly theory says nothing about the chemistry. Because chemistry is chemistry and their constraints are put in by biology. There was no chemist on the origin of life, unless you believe in the chemist in the sky. And they were, you know, it's like Santa Claus. They had a lot of work to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But chemical reactions do not exist anywhere. in the constraints that allow chemical transformations to occur do exist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Exactly. The grammar of chemistry, of course, emerges in reactions, and we can use them reliably, but I do not think the Wittig reaction is accessible on Venus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
They're pretty happy. Well, most of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Everyone is grumpy on some days when you challenge. The problem with this paper is it's almost like I went to a party. I used to do this occasionally when I was young. Go to a meeting. and just find a way to offend everyone at the meeting simultaneously. Even the factions that don't like each other, they're all unified in their hatred of you just offending them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
This paper, it feels like the person that went to the party and offended everyone simultaneously, so they stopped fighting with themselves and just focused on this paper.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, I mean, so when we originally sent the paper, we sent the paper and the editor said that, you know, this was like, this is quite a long process. We sent the paper and the editor gave us some feedback and said, you know, I don't think it's that interesting. It's not, you know, or it's hard. It's a hard concept. And we asked, and the editor gave us some feedback
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
um and we and sarah and i took a year to rewrite the paper was the nature of the feedback very specific on like this part this part or was it like like what are you guys smoking what kind of yeah it was kind of the latter what you're smoking okay and you know but polite and there's promise yeah well the thing is there was the edit was really critical but in a but in a really professional way yeah
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And I mean, for me, this was the way science should happen. So when it came back, you know, we had too many equations in the paper. If you look at the preprint, they're just equations everywhere, like 23 equations. And when I said to Abhishek, who was the first author, we've got to remove all the equations. But my assembly equation saying Abhishek was like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
you know no we can't i said well look if we want to explain this to people there's a real challenge and so sarah and i went through the i think it was actually 160 versions of the paper but we basically we got to version 40 or something we said right zero it start again so we wrote the whole paper again we knew the entire amazing and we just went bit by bit by bit and said what is it we want to say and then we sent the paper in um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And we expected it to be rejected and not even go to review. And then we got notification back it had gone to review. And we were like, oh, my God, it's so going to get rejected. How is it going to get rejected? Because the first assembly paper on the mass spec we sent to Nature went through six rounds of review and was rejected. And by a chemist who just said, I don't believe you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
You must be committing fraud.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Long story, probably a boring story. But in this case, it went out to review, the comments came back, and the comments were incredibly... They were very deep comments from all the reviewers. But the nice thing was the reviewers were kind of... very critical, but not dismissive. They were like, oh, really? Explain this, explain this, explain this, explain this. Are you sure it's not Kamigolerov?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Are you sure it's not this? And we went through, I think, three rounds of review pretty quick. And the editor went, yeah, it's in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Um, it's, uh, I think it's, uh, um, I mean, this paper for me kind of, cause this wasn't the first time we tried to publish assembly theory at the highest level, the nature communications paper, we on the mass spec on the, on the idea went through, went to nature and got rejected, went through six rounds of review and got rejected, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, that's spot on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And I just was so confused when the chemist said, this can't be possible. I do not believe you can measure complexity using mass spec. And also, by the way, molecules, complex molecules can randomly form. And we're like, but look at the data. The data says. And they said, no, no, we don't believe you. And we went and I just wouldn't give up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I don't normally get emotional about papers, but, um, it's not about giving it up because we want to get it published because we want the glory or anything. It's just like, why don't you understand? And so, um, So what I would just try to be as rational as possible and say, yeah, you didn't like it. Tell me why. And then, sorry, let me see. Silly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Never get emotional about papers normally, but I think what we did, you just compressed like five years of angst from this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
not just rough it's like it happened you know i came up with the assembly equation you know remote from sarah in arizona and the people sfi i felt like i was a mad person like you know the guy in depicted in in a in a beautiful mind he was just like not not the actual genius part but just the yeah
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
because i kept writing expanded and i have no mathematical ability oh and i was expand i was making these mathematical expansions where i kept seeing the same motif again i was like oh i think this is a copy number the same string is coming again again again i kept i couldn't do the math and then i realized the copy number fell out of the equation and everything collapsed down i was like oh that works kind of so we submitted the paper and then when it was
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, an object. So if I'm going to try to be as meticulous as possible, objects need to be finite and they need to be decomposable into subunits. All human-made artifacts are objects. Is a planet an object? Probably yes, if you scale out. So an object is finite and countable and decomposable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
almost accepted, right? The mass spec one. And it was astrobiologists said, great. You know, a mass spectroscopist said, great. And the chemist went, nonsense, like biggest pile of nonsense ever, fraud, you know? And I was like, but why fraud? And they just said, just because. And I was like, well, and so, and I could not convince the editor in this case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
The editor was just so pissed off because they see it as like a kind of, you know, you're wasting my time. And I would not give up. I wrote, I went and dissected, you know, all the parts. And I think, although, I mean, I got upset about it, you know, it was kind of embarrassing actually, but I guess. Beautiful. Yeah. But it was just trying to understand why they didn't like it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So part of me was like really devastated and a part of me was super excited because I'm like, huh, they can't tell me why I'm wrong. And this kind of goes back to, you know, when I was at school, I was in a kind of learning difficulties class and I kept going to the teacher and say, you know,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
you know how what do i do today to prove i'm smart and they were like nothing you can't i was like give me a job you know give me something to do give me a job to do something to do as we um and i kind of felt like that a bit when i was arguing with the and not arguing there's no ad hominem i wasn't telling the editor they were idiots or anything like this or the the reviewers i kept it strictly like factual and all i did is i just kept knocking it down bit by bit by bit by bit by bit
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It was ultimately rejected and it got published elsewhere. And then the actual experimental data. So this is kind of, in this paper, the experimental justification was already published. So when we did this one and we went through the versions and then we sent it in and in the end it just got accepted, we were like, well, that's kind of cool, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
This is kind of like, you know, some days you have, you know, the student, sorry, the first author was like, I can't believe it got accepted. I was like, nor am I. But it's great. It's good. And then when the paper was published, I was not expecting the backlash.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I was expecting computational... No, actually, I was just expecting one person had been trolling me for a while about it, just to carry on trolling. But I didn't expect the backlash. And then I wrote to the editor and apologized. And the editor was like, what are you apologizing for? It was a great paper. Of course it's going to get backlash. You said some controversial stuff. But it's awesome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
That's the science. As I said to, you know, when it got accepted, and people were saying, were kind of like hacking on it. And I was like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
papers are not gold medals the reason i wanted to publish that paper in nature is because it says hey there's something before biological evolution you have to have that if you're not a creationist by the way this is an approach first time someone has put a concrete mechanism or sorry a concrete quantification and what comes next you're pushing on is a mechanism and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And that's what we need to get to is an autocanalytic set, self-replicating molecules, some other features that come in. And the fact that this paper has been so discussed, for me, is a dream come true. Like, it doesn't get better than that. If you can't accept a few people hating it, and the nice thing is, the thing that really makes me happy
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
is that no one has attacked the actual physical content. Like you can measure the assembly index, you can measure selection now. So either that's right or it's, well, either that's helpful or unhelpful. If it's unhelpful, this paper will sink down and no one will use it again. If it's helpful, it'll help people scaffold on it and we'll start to converge to a new paradigm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
um i suppose mathematically but yeah i still i still wake up some days and go to think to myself what is an object because it's it's it's a non-trivial um question persists over time i'm quoting from the paper here an object that's finite is distinguishable i'm sure that's a weird adjective distinguishable
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So I think that that's the thing that I wanted to see
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
you know my colleagues authors collaborators and people were like you've just published this paper you're a chemist why have you done this like who are you to be doing evolutionary theory like well i don't know i mean sorry did i need to who's anyone to do anything well i'm glad you did let me just before coming back to origin of life and these kinds of questions uh you mentioned learning difficulties i didn't know about this so what was it like
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I wasn't very good at school, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, yeah. But in primary school, my handwriting was really poor and apparently I couldn't read and my mathematics was very poor. So they just said, this is a problem. They identified it. My parents kind of at the time were confused because I was busy taking things apart, buying electronic junk from the shop, trying to build computers and things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And then once I got out of, when I was, I think about the major transition in my stupidity, like, you know, everyone thought I wasn't that stupid when I was, basically everyone thought I was faking, I like stuff and I was faking wanting to be it. So I always wanted to be a scientist. Mm-hmm. So five, six, seven years, I'll be a scientist, take things apart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And everyone's like, yeah, this guy wants to be a scientist, but he's an idiot. And so, and so, so everyone was really confused. I think at first that I wasn't smarter than I, you know, was claiming to be. And then I just basically didn't do well in the test. I went down and down and down and down. And then, and I was kind of like, huh, this is really embarrassing. I really like science.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
and everyone says I can't do it. I really like physics and chemistry and science and people say you can't read and write. And so I found myself in a learning difficulties class at the end of primary school and the beginning of secondary school in the UK. Secondary school is like 11, 12 years old. And I remember being put in the remedial class and the remedial class was basically full of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
um were two types three types of people there were um people that had quite violent right you know and there were people can speak english and there were people that really had learning difficulties so um The one thing I can objectively remember was, I mean, I could read. I like reading. I read a lot. But something in me, I'm a bit of a rebel. I refuse to read what I was told to read.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And I found it difficult to read individual words in the way they were told. But anyway, I got caught one day teaching someone else to read. And they said, okay, we don't understand this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
i i always knew what to be a scientist but didn't really know what that meant and i realized you had to go to university and i thought i can just go to university it's like curious people like no no no you need to have these you have to be able to enter these exams to get this grade point average and the fact is the exams you've been entered into you're not you you're just going to get c d or e you can't even get a b or c right this is the uk gcses i was like oh shit
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And I said, can you just put me into the high exam? They said, no, no, you're going to fail. There's no chance. So my father kind of intervened and said, you know, just let him go in the exams. And they said, he's definitely going to fail. It's a waste of time, waste of money. And he said, well, what if we paid? So they said, well, okay. So you didn't actually have to pay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
You had to pay if I failed. So I took the exams and passed them, fortunately. I didn't get the top grades, but I got into A-levels. But then that also kind of limited what I could do at A-levels. I wasn't allowed to do A-level maths.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Because I had such a bad math grade from my GCSE. I only had a C. But they wouldn't let me go into the ABC for math because of some kind of coursework requirement back then. So the top grade I could have got was a C. So C, D, or E. So I got a C. And they let me do kind of AS level math, which is this half intermediate and go to university. But in the end, I liked chemistry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
We've had so many people offering to rewrite the paper after it came out, you wouldn't believe it's so funny.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I had a good chemistry teacher. So in the end, I got to university to do chemistry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I have no idea other than I was really – I really like not understanding stuff. For me, when I not understand something, I didn't understand – I feel like I don't understand anything now. But back then, I was so – I remember when I was like – I don't know. I tried to build a laser when I was like eight. And I thought, how hard could it be? Like – And I basically, I was going to build a CO2 laser.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And I was like, right, I think I need some partially coated mirrors. I need some carbon dioxide. And I need a high voltage. So I kind of, and I was like, I didn't have, and I was so stupid, right? I was kind of so embarrassed. To make enough CO2, I actually set a fire and try to filter the flame out. Oh, nice. To crap enough CO2. And I was like, it completely failed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And I burnt half the garage down. So my parents were not very happy about that. So that was one thing. I was like, I really like first principle thinking. And so, you know... So I remember being super curious and being determined to find answers. And so when people do give advice about this, well, I ask for advice about this. I don't really have that much advice other than don't give up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And one of the things I try to do as a chemistry professor in my group is I hire people that I think that, you know, I'm kind of home. If they're persistent enough... Um, who am I to deny them the chance because, you know, people gave me a chance and I was able to do stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I'm, I like, so I love being around smart people and I love confusing smart people. And when I'm confusing smart people and, you know, not by stealing their wallets and hiding it somewhere, but if I can confuse smart people, that is the one piece of hope that I might be doing something interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And as long as they're not telling you just a complete idiot and they give you different reasons. And I mean, I'm, you know, if everyone, it's like with assembly theory and people said, oh, it's wrong. And I was like, why? And they're like, and no one could give me a consistent reason. They said, oh, because it's been done before or it's just come a goller off or it's just that and the other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So I think the thing that I like to do is, and in academia, it's hard, right? Because people are critical, but I mean, you know,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
The criticism, I mean, although I got kind of upset about it earlier, which is kind of silly, but not silly, because obviously it's hard work being on your own or with a team spatially separated like during lockdown and trying to keep everyone on board and have some faith that... I've always wanted to have a new idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And so, you know, I like a new idea and I want to nurture it as long as possible. And if someone can give me actionable criticism, that's why I think I was trying to say earlier when I was kind of like stuck for words, give me actionable criticism. You know, it's wrong. Okay, why is it wrong? You say, oh, it doesn't, your equation's incorrect for this, or your method is wrong, or...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And so what I try and do is get enough criticism from people to then triangulate and go back. And I've been very fortunate in my life that I've got great colleagues, great collaborators, funders, mentors, and people that will take the time to say, you're wrong because... And then what I have to do is integrate the wrongness and go, oh, cool, maybe I can fix that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And I think criticism is really good. People have a go at me because I'm really critical. But I'm not criticizing you as a person. I'm just criticizing the idea and trying to make it better and say, well, what about this? And sometimes I'm kind of – my filters are –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
kind of uh you know truncations in some ways i'm just like that's wrong that's wrong that's wrong i want to do this and people are like oh my god you just told me you destroyed my life's work i'm like relax no i'm just like let's make it better and i think that we don't do that enough because we're we're you know we we're we're we're either personally critical which isn't helpful or we don't give any criticism at all because we're too scared
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I'm sure I make mistakes on that. I mean, I argue lots with Sarah and she's kind of shocked. I've argued with Jascha in the past and he's like, you're just making that up. I'm like, no, not quite, but kind of. Yeah. You know, I had a big argument with Sarah about time. She was like, no, time doesn't exist. I'm like, no, no, time does exist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I'm happy with both depending on the day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And as she realized that her conception of assembly theory and my conception of assembly theory were the same thing, necessitated us to abandon the fact that time is eternal, to actually really fundamentally question how the universe produces combinatorial novelty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So I think assembly theory is fine in this time right now, but I think it helps us understand that something interesting is going on. And I'm really inspired by a guy called Nick Gizan. I'm going to butcher his argument, but I love his argument a lot, so I hope he forgives me if he hears about it. But basically... If you want free will, time has to be fundamental.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And if you want time to be fundamental, you have to give up on platonic mathematics and you have to use intuitionist mathematics. By the way, and again, I'm going to butcher this, but basically Hilbert... said that, you know, infinite numbers are allowed. And I think it was Brower said, no, you can't, all numbers are finite. So they're kind of like, so let's go back a step.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Cause it was like, people are going to say, assembly theory seems to explain that large combinatorial space allows you to produce things like life and technology. And that large combinatorial space is so big that is not even accessible to a Sean Carroll, David Deutsch multiverse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
The physicists saying that all of the universe already exists in time is probably, provably, that's a strong word, not correct. that we are going to know that the universe as it stands, the present, the way the present builds the future so big, the universe can't ever contain the future. And this is a really interesting thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I think Max Techmark has this mathematical universe where he says, you know, the universe is kind of like a block universe. I apologize to Max if I'm getting it wrong, but people think you can just move. You have the initial conditions, and you can run the universe right to the end and go backwards and forwards in that universe. That is not correct.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
That's why, that's it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yes, and that you can have, and that's what, this is why the law of the excluded middle, something is true or false, only works in the past. Is it going to snow in New York next week or in Austin? You might in Austin say, probably not. In New York, you might say, yeah. If you go forward to next week and say, did it snow in New York last week? True or false? You can answer that question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
The fact that the law of the excluded middle cannot apply to the future explains why time is fundamental.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Impossible. Impossible. So here's why. I'll make a really quick argument, and this argument isn't mine. It's Nick's and a few other people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So the assembly index, if you're to take the object apart and be super lazy about it or minimal, it's like you've got a really short term memory. So what you do is you lay all the parts on the path and you find the minimum number of steps you take on the path to add the parts together to reproduce the object. And that minimum number is the assembly index. It's a minimum bound.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, so I'll give my view, which kind of resonates with his. But basically, it's very simple, actually. He would say that your ability to design and do an experiment is exercising free will. So he used that thought process. I never really thought about it that way, and that you actively make decisions. I used to think that free will was a kind of consequence of just selection.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But I'm kind of understanding that human free will is something really interesting. And he very much inspired me. But I think that what Sarah Walker said that inspired me as well, that these will converge, is that I think that the universe... The universe is very big. Huge. But actually... The place that is largest in the universe right now, the largest place in the universe is Earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, I've seen you say that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Because we have this combinatorial scaffolding going all the way back from Luca. So you've got cells that can self-replicate. And then you go all the way to terraforming the Earth. You've got all these architectures, the amount of selection that's going on, biological selection, just to be clear, biological evolution. And then you have multicellularity. then animals and abstraction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
With abstraction, there was another kick because you can then build architectures and computers and cultures and language. These things are the biggest things that exist in the universe because we can just build architectures that couldn't naturally arise anywhere. The further that distance goes in time, it's gigantic. And from a complexity perspective. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I agree. And I would say, I'll say again, that Earth is the most gigantic thing we know in the universe, commentatorily. We know. We know. Now, I guess, this is just purely a guess, I have no data other than hope. Well, maybe not hope. Maybe, no, I have some data. That every star in the sky probably has planets and life is probably emerging on these planets.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But the amount of contingency that is associated with life is I think the commentorial space associated to these planets is so different. Our causal cones are never going to overlap or not easily. And this is the thing that makes me sad about alien life. That's why we have to create alien life in the lab as quickly as possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Because I don't know if we are going to be able to build architectures that will intersect with alien intelligence and architectures.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Time and the ability to communicate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah. My biggest fear in a way is that life is everywhere, but we become infinitely more lonely because of our scaffolding in that combinatorial space.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Exactly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
i i truly don't know but i it's an excuse for me to ask for people to give me money to make a planet simulator yeah right if i can make with a different i'm just like another shameless say it's like give me money i need this was all a long plug for a planet simulator it's like you know hey i'll be the first in line to my my my uh my rick my rick garage has run out of room you know yeah no um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And it was always my intuition, the minimum bound in assembly theory was really important. And I only worked out why a few weeks ago, which is kind of funny. Because I was just like, no, this is sacrosanct. I don't know why. It will come to me one day. And then when I was pushed by a bunch of mathematicians, we came up with the correct physical explanation, which I can get to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Exactly. If we could basically recreate the selection before biology, as we know it, that gives rise to a different biology, we should be able to put the constraints on where I look in the universe. So here's the thing. Here's my dream. My dream is that by creating life in the lab, based upon constraints we understand, so let's go for Venus-type life or Earth-type life or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Again, do Earth 2.0. Screw it. Let's do Earth 2.0. And Earth 2.0 has a different genetic... Alphabet, fine, that's fine. Different protein alphabet, fine. Have cells and evolution, all that stuff. We will then be able to say, okay, life is a more general phenomena. Selection is more general than what we think is the chemical constraints on life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And we can point the James Webb and other telescopes at other planets. that we are in that zone, we are most likely to combinatorially overlap with, right? So, because, you know, we basically, so there are chemistry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And then we can then basically shine light on them literally and look at light coming back and apply advanced assembly theory to general theory of language that we will get and say, huh, we, in that signal, it looks random, but there's a copy number. Oh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
This random set of things that shouldn't be, that looks like a true random number generator has structure as a, not Kolmogorov, AIT type structure, but evolutionary structure given by assembly theory. And we start to, but I would say that because I'm a shameless assembly theorist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I hope that as we build abstractions... I mean, one idea is that as we go to intelligence, intelligence allows us to look at the regularities around us in the universe. And that gives us some common grounding to discuss with aliens.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And you might be right that we will overlap there, even though we have completely different chemistry, literally completely different chemistry, that we will be able to pass information from one another. But it's not a given. And, you know, I have to kind of try and divorce hope and emotion, you know, away from what I can logically justify.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But it's the minimum. And it's really important. It's the minimum. And the reason I knew the minimum was right is because we could measure it. So almost before this paper came out, We've published papers explaining how you can measure the assembly index of molecules.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But the universe is expanding. But the nice thing is, I would say, I would look... You see, I think Carl Sagan did the wrong thing. Well, not the wrong thing. He flicked the Voyager probe around in a pale blue dot and said, look how big the universe is. I would have done it the other way around and said, look at the Voyager probe that came from the planet Earth that came from Luca.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Look at how big Earth is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It produced that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And that I think is like completely amazing. And then that should allow people on Earth to think about, well, probably we should try and get causal chains off Earth onto Mars, onto the moon, wherever. Yeah. Whether it's human life or Martian life that we create, it doesn't matter. But I think this commentorial space tells us something very important about the universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I realized in assembly theory that the universe is too big to contain itself. And I think this is, and I'm coming back and I want to, I want to kind of change your mind about time. Cause I'm, I'm guessing that your time is just a coordinate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So I'm going to, I'm going to change them. I'm guessing you're one of those. I'm going to change your mind in real time, or at least attempt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But you can just add an arrow of time onto it, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Or erase it a bit. And the argument that I think is really most interesting is people say the initial conditions specify the future of the universe. Okay, fine. Let's say that's the case for a moment. Now let's go back to Newtonian mechanics. Now, the uncertainty principle in Newtonian mechanics is this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
If I give you the coordinates of an object moving in space and the coordinates of another object and they collide in space, and you know those initial conditions, you should know exactly what's going to happen. However... you cannot specify these coordinates to infinite precision. Now everyone said, you know, oh, this is kind of like, you know, the chaos theory argument.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
No, no, it's deeper than that. Here's a problem with numbers. This is where Hilbert and Brouwer fell out. To have the coordinates of this object, a given object, as they're colliding, you have to have them to infinite precision. That's what Hilbert says. He says, no problem, infinite precision is fine. Let's just take that for granted. But when the object...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It's finite and it can't store its own coordinates. What do you do? So in principle, if a finite object cannot be specified to infinite precision, in principle, the initial conditions don't apply. Well, how do you know it can't store its... Well, how do you store an infinitely long number in a finite size? Well...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
No, no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Well, let's take the object. Let's say the object is a golf ball. Golf ball is a few centimeters in diameter. We can work out how many atoms are on the golf ball. And let's say we can store numbers down to atomic dislocations. So we can work out how many atoms there are in the golf ball, and we can store the coordinates in that golf ball down to that number. But beyond that, we can't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Let's make the golf ball smaller. And this is where I think that we think that we get randomness in quantum mechanics. And some people say, you can't get randomness in quantum mechanics to be deterministic. But aha, this is where we realize that classical mechanics and quantum mechanics suffer from the same uncertainty principle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And that is the inability to specify the initial conditions to a precise enough degree to give you determinism. The universe is intrinsically too big, and that's why time exists. It's non-deterministic. Looking back into the past, you can use logical arguments because you can say, was it true or false? You already know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But the fact we are unable to predict the future with the precision is not evidence of lack of knowledge. It's evidence the universe is generating new things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Statistically, but sure, I can say statistically what's going to happen, but then when they do happen, and you keep nesting it together, I mean, it goes almost back to, let's think about entropy in the universe. So how do we understand entropy change? Well, we could do the process. We can use the Agurdic hypothesis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So with molecules, it's not trivial, but it is possible because what you can do, and because I'm a chemist, so I'm kind of like, I see the lens of the world for just chemistry. I break the molecule part, break bonds. And if you take a molecule and you break it all apart, you have a bunch of atoms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
We can also have the counterfactuals, where we have all the different states, and we can even put that in the multiverse, right? But both those are kind of... They're non-physical. The multiverse kind of collapses back to the same problem about the precision. So all the... What you... If you accept you don't have to have true and false going forward into the future, the real numbers are real.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
They're observables.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Do you believe or do you accept you have free will?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So then you have to believe that time is fundamental. I understand that's a statement you've made. Well, no, that we can logically follow, because if you don't have free will... So, like, if you're in a universe that has no time, the universe is deterministic. If it's deterministic, then you have no free will.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
No, it logically follows. No, no, I don't disagree. I'm not saying any... I mean, it's deep and it's important. All I'm saying, and it's actually different to what I've said before, is that if you don't require Platonistic mathematics...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
and accepts that non-determinism is how the universe looks and that gives us our creativity and the way the universe is getting novelty, it's kind of really deeply important in assembly theory because assembly theory starts to actually give you a mechanism why you go from boring time which is basically initial conditions specify everything, to a mismatch in creative time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And I hope we'll do experiments. I think it's really important to... I would love to do an experiment that proves that time is fundamental and the universe is generating novelty. I don't know all the features of that experiment yet, but by having these conversations openly and getting people to think about the problems in a new way...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Better people, more intelligent people with good mathematical backgrounds can say, oh, hey, I've got an idea. I would love to do an experiment that shows that the universe... I mean, universe is too big for itself going forward in time. And I really... This is why I really hate the idea of the Boltzmann brain. The Boltzmann brain makes me super...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
kind of like you know everyone's having a free lunch it's like saying it's like let's break all the laws of physics so a Boltzmann brain is this idea that in a long enough universe a brain will just emerge in the universe as conscious without and that neglects the causal chain of evolution required to produce that brain and this is where the computational argument really falls down because the computationist could say I can calculate the probability of a Boltzmann brain and I can and they'll give you a probability but I can calculate the probability of a Boltzmann brain zero
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And then you say, okay, I'm going to then take the atoms and form bonds and go up the chain of events to make the molecule. And that's what made me realize, take a toy example, literally a toy example, take a Lego object, which is broken up of Lego blocks. So you could do exactly the same thing. In this case, the Lego blocks are naturally the smallest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, it's like when we start fooling ourselves with numbers that we can't actually measure and we can't ever conceive of, I think it doesn't give us a good explanation. And I want to explain why life is in the universe. I think life is actually a novelty miner. I mean, life basically mines novelty almost from the future and actualizes it in the present.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yep. I think so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I'm really struggling with randomness because I had a really good argument with Yasha Bark about randomness. And he said, randomness doesn't give you free will. That's insane because you'd just be random. But I think, and I think he's right at that level. But I don't think we, I don't think he is right on another level. And it's not about randomness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It's about, it's about constrained, I'm going to sound like, constrained opportunity. I'm making this up as I go along. So making this up. Constrained opportunity. So what I mean is like, so you have to have, so the novelty, what is novelty? You know, this is what I think is a funny thing. You ever want to discuss AI?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Why I think everyone's kind of gone AI mad is that they're misunderstanding novelty. But let's think about novelty. Yes, what is novelty? So I think novelty is a genuinely new configuration that, that is not predicted by the past, right? And that you discover in the present, right? And that is truly different, right? Now, everyone says that some people say that novelty doesn't exist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It's always with precedent. I want to do experiments that show that that is not the case. And it goes back to a question you asked me a few moments ago, which is, where is the factory? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
right because i think the same mechanism that gives us a factory gives us novelty and i think that that is that is why i'm so deeply hung up on time i mean of course i'm wrong but how wrong and i and i think that that life opens up that commentarial space in a way that the the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Our current laws of physics, although as contrived in a deterministic initial condition universe, even with the get out of the multiverse, David Deutsch style, which I love, by the way, but I don't think is correct. But it's really beautiful. David Deutsch's conception of the multiverse is kind of like given.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But I think that the problem with wave particle duality and quantum mechanics is not about the multiverse. It's about understanding how determined the past is. Well, I don't just think that actually this is a discussion I was having with Sarah about that, right? She was like, oh, I think we've been debating this for a long time now about how do we reconcile novelty, determinism, indeterminism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
They're the atoms in the actual composite structure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
uh i'm i won't speak for sarah but i roughly can't i i think that the universe i think the universe is deterministic looking back in the back in the past right but undetermined going future going forward in the future so i'm kind of having my cake and eat it eating it here this is because i fundamentally don't understand randomness right as yasha told me or other people told me but if i adopt a new view now which um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
lego architecture but then if you maybe take you know um a couple of blocks and put them together in a certain way maybe there have a their offset in some way that offset is on the memory you can use that offset again with only a penalty of one and you can then make a square triangle and keep going and you remember those motifs on the chain so you can then leap from the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
The new view is the universe is just non-deterministic, but I'd like to refine that and say the universe appears deterministic going back in the past, but it's undetermined going forward in the future. So how can we have a universe that has deterministically looking rules that's non-determined going into the future? It's this breakdown in precision in the initial conditions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And we have to just stop using initial conditions and start looking at... trajectories and how the combinatorial space behaves in expanding universe in time and space. And assembly theory helps us quantify the transition to biology, and biology appears to be novelty mining, because it's making crazy stuff. That we are unique to Earth, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
There are objects on Earth that are unique to Earth that will not be found anywhere else, because you can do the combinatorial math.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So what I'm kind of meaning is because the future is bigger than the present, in a deterministic universe, how do you go from the... How do the states go from one to another? I mean, there's a mismatch, right? So that must mean that you have a little bit of indeterminism, whether that's randomness or something else. I don't understand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I want to do experiments to formulate a theory to refine that as we go forward that might help us explain that. And I think that's why I'm so...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
um determined to try and crack the the non-life to life transition looking at networks and molecules and that might help us think about it the mechanism but certainly the future is bigger than the past in in my conception of the universe and some conception of the universe and by the way that's not obvious right that's what was just kind of the future being bigger than the past
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That one is a big one. That one's a really big one. I think so. But I think it's entirely... Because look, we have the second law. And right now, I mean, we don't need the second law if the future's bigger than the past. It follows naturally. So why are we retrofitting all these sticking plasters onto our reality to hold onto a timeless universe?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But isn't that really exciting?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, it's kind of crazy, but obvious. I mean, I suppose it sounds obvious, yeah, if it's true. But the nice thing is you can... So the reason why assembly theory turned me on to that was that let's just start in the present and look at all the complex molecules and go backwards in time and understand how evolutionary processes gave rise to them. It's not at all obvious that taxol...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
which is one of the most complex natural products produced by biology, was going to be invented by biology. It's an accident. You know, taxol is unique to Earth. There's no taxol elsewhere in the universe. And taxol was not decided by the initial conditions. It was decided by this kind of interplay between the... So the past simply... is embedded in the present.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
start with all the Lego blocks or atoms just laid out in front of you and say, right, I'll take you, you, you, connect and do the least amount of work. So it's really like the smallest steps you can take on the graph to make the object. And so for molecules, it came relatively intuitively. And then we started to apply it to language. We've even started to apply it to mathematical theorems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It gives some features, but why the past doesn't map to the future one-to-one is because the universe is too big to contain itself. That gives space for creativity, novelty, and some things which are unpredictable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I think that this falls into the Brouwer-Hilbert trap. So how do you get a cellular automata to produce a complexity? You have a computer, you generate a display, and you map the change of that in time. Mm-hmm. There are some CAs repeat, like functions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It's fascinating to me that for pi, there is a formula where you can go to the millionth decimal place of pi and read out the number without having to go there. But there are some numbers where you can't do that. You have to just crank through. Whether it's Wolframian computational irreducibility or some other thing, it doesn't matter. But these CAs...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
That complexity, is that just complexity or a number that is basically you're mining that number in time? Is that just a display screen for that number, that function?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
No, because the complexity on Earth has a copy number and an assembly index associated with it. That CA is just a number running.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Well, it does in the human, where we're looking at humans producing different rules, but then it's nested on selection. So those CAs are produced by selection. Yeah. I mean, the CA is such a fascinating pseudo complexity generator. What I would love to do is understand, quantify the degree of surprise in a CA and write it long enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But what I guess that means is we have to instantiate, we have to have a number of experiments where we're generating different rules and running them time steps. But, ah, got it. CAs are mining novelty in the future by iteration, right? And you're like, oh, that's great, that's great. You didn't predict it. Some rules you can predict what's going to happen. Other rules you can't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So for me, if anything, CAs are evidence that the universe is too big to contain itself. Because otherwise you'd know what the rules are going to do forever more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
You need... Three things. You need the initial conditions, you need the rules, and you need time, iteration to mine it out. Without the coordinate, you can't get it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And you can't predict it from initial conditions. If you could, then it'd be fine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I think it's, yeah, you have to have the resource. Yeah. Because time is a fundamental resource. And yeah, I'm becoming, I think I had a major epiphany about randomness, but I keep doing that every two days and then it goes away again. It's random. You're a time fundamentalist. You should be as well. If you believe in free will, the only conclusion is time is fundamental.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I'm so well out of my depth, but it looks like you can take minimum set of axioms and then start to build up kind of mathematical architectures in the same way. And then the shortest path to get there is something interesting that I don't yet understand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Otherwise, you cannot have free will. It logically follows.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Looking backwards in time, and that's correct. The universe is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I mean, I think that it's kind of... I think machine learning is going to provide a big chunk of that, right? Because it helps us explain this. So the way I'd say, if you take... That's interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Well, let's just... My favorite one is because the AI doomers are driving me mad. The fact that we don't have any intelligence yet. I call AI autonomous informatics just to make people grumpy. You're saying we're quite far away from AGI. I think that we have no conception of intelligence. And I think that we don't understand how the human brain does what it does.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I think that we are, neuroscience is making great advances, but I think that we have no idea about AGI. So I am a...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
technological i guess optimist i believe we should do everything the whole regulation of ai is nonsensical i mean why would you regulate excel other than the fact that clippy should come back and i love excel 97 because we can play um you know we can do the flight flight simulator uh i'm sorry in excel yeah have you not played the flight simulator in excel 97 yeah yeah
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It's like wireframe, very, very basic. But basically, I think it's X0, Y0, shift, and it opens up and you can play the fight simulator. Oh, wow. Wait, wait. Is it using Excel? Excel. Excel 97. Okay. I resurrected it the other day and saw Clippy again for the first time in a long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I am very frustrated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I'm very frustrated by the way that we're AI dooming right now. And people are bestowing some kind of magic. Now, let's go back a bit. So you said AGI. Are we far away from AGI? Yes. I do not think we're going to get to AGI anytime soon. I've seen no evidence of it. And the AI doom scenario is nonsensical in the extreme. And the reason why I think it's nonsensical, but it's not...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And I don't think there isn't things we should do and be very worried about, right? I mean, there are things we need to worry about right now, what AI are doing, whether it's fake data, fake users, right? I want authentic people, authentic data. I don't want everything to be faked. And I think it's a really big problem. And I absolutely want to go on the record to say I really worry about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
What I'm not worried about is that some fictitious entity is going to turn us all to paperclips or detonate nuclear bombs. I don't know. Maybe, I don't know, anything you can't think of. Why is this? I'll take a very simple series of logical arguments. The AI doomers do not have the correct epistemology. They do not understand what knowledge is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And until we understand what knowledge is, they're not going to get anywhere because they're applying things falsely. So let me give you a very simple argument. People talk about the probability, P-Doom AI. We can work out the probability of an asteroid hitting the planet. Why? Because it's happened before. We know the mechanism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
We know that there's a gravity whirl or that space-time is bent and stuff falls in. We don't know the probability of AGI because we have no mechanism. So let me give you another one, which is like, I'm really worried about AG. What's AG? AG is anti-gravity. One day we could wake up and anti-gravity is discovered. We're all going to die. The atmosphere is going to float away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
We're going to float away. We're all doomed. What is the probability of AG? We don't know because there's no mechanism for AG. Do we worry about it? No. And I don't understand the current...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
um reason for these for the for certain people in certain areas to be generating this nonsense i think they're not doing it maliciously i think we're observing the emergence of new religions how religions come because religions are about kind of some control so you've got the optimist saying ai is going to cure us all and ai is going to kill us all what's the reality Well, we don't have AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
We have really powerful machine learning tools, and they will allow us to do interesting things. And we need to be careful about how we use those tools in terms of manipulating human beings and faking stuff, right? Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
No, not plus. I don't know. I was seeing on Twitter today various things, but I think Yudkowsky is at 95%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Maybe. And what are the fees? I think Scott Aronson, I was quite surprised. I saw this online, so it could be wrong. So sorry if it's wrong. It says 2%. But the thing is, if someone said there's a 2% chance you're going to die going into the lift, would you go into the lift? In the elevator for the American English speaking audience. Well, no, not for the elevator.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So I would say anyone higher than 2%, I mean, I think there's a 0% chance of AGI doom.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It's a hard problem, but actually, if you look at it, so the best way to look at it, let's take a molecule. So if the molecule has... um, 13 bonds. First of all, take 13 copies of the molecule and just cut all the bonds. So take cut 12 bonds and then you just put them in order. Yeah. And then that's how it works. So, and you keep looking for symmetry and re or, or copies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I think this is, I would fail that argument 100%. Here's a number of reasons to fail it on. First of all, we don't know where the intention comes from. The problem is that people think, they keep, you know, watching all the hucksters online with the prompt engineering and all this stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
When I talk to a typical AI computer scientist, they keep talking about the AI as having some kind of decision-making ability. That is a category error. The decision-making ability comes from human beings. We have no understanding of how humans make decisions. We've just been discussing free will for the last half an hour, right? We don't even know what that is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So the intention, I totally agree with you. People who intend to do bad things can do bad things, and we should not let that risk go. That's totally here and now. I do not want that to happen, and I'm happy to be regulated to make sure that systems I generate, whether they're like computer systems or You know, I'm working on a new project called Chem Machina. Nice. Well done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And I only know one way to embody intelligence, and that's in chemistry and human brains. So category error number one is they have agency. Category error number two is saying that, assuming that anything we make is going to be more intelligent. Now, you didn't say super intelligent. I'll put the words into our mouths here, super intelligent. I think that there is no...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
No reason to expect that we are going to make systems that are more intelligent, more capable. When people play chess computers, they don't expect to win now. The chess computer is very good at chess. That doesn't mean it's super intelligent. So I think that superintelligence, I mean, I think even Nick Bostrom is pulling back on this now because he invented this. So I see this a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
When did this first happen? Eric Drexler, nanotechnology, atomically precise machines. He came up with a world where we had these atom cogs everywhere. They were going to make self-replicating nanobots. Not possible. Why? Because there's no resources to build these self-replicating nanobots. You can't get the precision. It doesn't work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It was a major category error in taking engineering principles down to the molecular level. The only functioning nanomolecular technology we know produced by evolution. There. So now let's go forward to AGI. What is AGI? We don't know. It's super. It can do this. Humans can't think. That... I would argue the only AGIs that exist in the universe are produced by evolution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So you can then shorten it as you go down. And that becomes commentorily quite hard. Um, for some natural product molecules, um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And sure, we may be able to make our working memory better. We might be able to do more things. The human brain is the most compact computing unit in the universe. It uses 20 watts. It uses a really limited volume. It's not like a chat GPT cluster, which has to have thousands of watts model that's generated and has to be corrected by human beings. You are autonomous and embodied intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So I think that there are so many levels that we're missing out. We've just kind of went, oh, we've discovered fire. Oh, gosh, the planet's just going to burn one day randomly. I mean, I just don't understand that leap. There are bigger problems we need to worry about. So what is the motivation? Why are these people, let's assume they have their earnest, have this conviction?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Well, I think it's kind of they're making leaps that they're trapped in a virtual reality that isn't reality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
um it becomes very hard it's not impossible but we're looking at the bounds on that at the moment but as the object gets bigger it becomes really hard and but that's the bad news but the good news is there are shortcuts and we might even be able to physically measure the complexity without computationally calculating it which is kind of insane well how would you do that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I think that that's right, the unintended consequences we have to think about, and that I fully agree with. But let's go back a bit. Sentience, I mean, again, I'm far away from my comfort zone and all this stuff, but hey, let's talk about it because I give myself a qualification.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I think the paperclip scenario is just such a poor one because let's think about how that would happen. And also, let's think about we are being so... unrealistic about how much of the Earth's surface we have commandeered. You know, for paperclip manufacturing to really happen, I mean, do the math. It's like, it's not going to happen. There's not enough energy, there's not enough resource.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Where is it all going to come from? I think that what happens in evolution is really... why is a killer virus not killed all life on Earth? Well, what happens is, sure, super killer viruses that kill the ribosome have emerged. But you know what happens? They nuke a small space because they can't propagate. They all die. So there's this interplay between evolution and propagation, right? And death.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I think the nice thing about where we are, I would love for the AI crowd to take a leaf out of the book of the bio warfare, chemical warfare crowd. I mean, not love, because actually people have been killed with chemical weapons in the First and Second World War, and bioweapons have been made, and we can argue about COVID-19 and all this stuff. Let's not go there just now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But I think there is a consensus that some certain things are bad and we shouldn't do them, right? And sure, it would be possible for a bad actor to engineer something bad, but the damage would be, we would see it coming, and we would be able to do something about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Now, I guess what I'm trying to say is when people talk about Doom and they just, when you ask them for the mechanism, they just say, you know, they just make something up. I mean, in this case, I'm with Jan LeCun. I think he put out a very good point about trying to regulate jet engines before we've even invented them. Yeah. And I think that's what I'm saying.