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Lex Fridman Podcast

#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe

Sat, 09 Dec 2023

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Lee Cronin is a chemist at University of Glasgow. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/lex to get free product tour - BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off - Shopify: https://shopify.com/lex to get $1 per month trial - Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex to get special savings - AG1: https://drinkag1.com/lex to get 1 month supply of fish oil Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/lee-cronin-3-transcript EPISODE LINKS: Lee's Twitter: https://twitter.com/leecronin Lee's Website: https://www.chem.gla.ac.uk/cronin/ Nature Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9 Chemify's Website: https://chemify.io PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (09:37) - Assembly theory paper (30:06) - Assembly equation (43:19) - Discovering alien life (1:01:38) - Evolution of life on Earth (1:09:34) - Response to criticism (1:27:12) - Kolmogorov complexity (1:39:02) - Nature review process (1:59:56) - Time and free will (2:06:21) - Communication with aliens (2:28:19) - Cellular automata (2:32:48) - AGI (2:49:36) - Nuclear weapons (2:55:22) - Chem Machina (3:08:16) - GPT for electron density (3:17:46) - God

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0.109 - 21.413 Lex Fridman

The following is a conversation with Lee Cronin, his third time on this podcast. He is a chemist from University of Glasgow, who is one of the most fascinating, brilliant, and fun to talk to scientists I've ever had the pleasure of getting to know. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.

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22.013 - 42.49 Lex Fridman

We've got NetSuite for business management software, BetterHelp for mental health, Shopify for e-commerce, Hatesleeve for naps, and AG1 for delicious, delicious health. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team where I was hiring, go to lexfreeman.com slash hiring. You can also get in touch with me if you go to lexfreeman.com slash contact.

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42.81 - 64.532 Lex Fridman

There's so many more things I could say. Let me just keep going. Now on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system.

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65.193 - 94.224 Lex Fridman

I usually do these ad reads and say whatever the heck I want, but sometimes the sponsors ask politely, never required but always politely, to mention a few things. Two things they ask me to mention. One is that NetSuite turned 25 years old this year. Congratulations. Happy birthday, NetSuite. And also, they want me to mention that 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle.

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94.244 - 121.117 Lex Fridman

37,000 companies. I wonder how many companies are out there. Isn't that amazing? Just companies are amazing. A small, a medium, a large collection of humans get together, much as we did in the caveman days around the fire, but here around the office, and tied together with a mission to do something, to build something, but do so under the immense pressures of the capitalist system.

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121.997 - 144.086 Lex Fridman

Like you have to succeed. It's not zero sum, but it is a kind of game where there's competitors and you're always at tension, but also a little bit of a collaboration. It's a dance and it's just a beautiful thing. A dance of humans inside the company, a dance of companies in the big capitalist system that are also interacting with the full human civilization society.

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144.126 - 170.281 Lex Fridman

So it's a dance of humans and companies selling stuff, buying stuff, creating stuff. It's just all beautiful. Anyway, if you're one of those companies, you should use good tools to manage all of this stuff. And NetSuite is one such good tool. You can download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist for free at netsuite.com. That's netsuite.com for your own KPI checklist.

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171.994 - 195.039 Lex Fridman

This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. I think whenever I mention BetterHelp, I have a lot of thoughts in my head. One of them is I believe a BetterHelp ad read that Tim Dillon has done. I think it goes on, if I remember correctly, for a very long period of time. And Tim Dillon is hilarious, so what can you say?

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195.959 - 223.467 Lex Fridman

But also there's a meta-ironic, absurd, hilarious aspect to it. Of all people, Tim Tillons, with the beautiful complexity of his mind and the beautiful complexities of his upbringing and family life, the dynamics of that, that he is doing an ad read for BetterHelp. I love it. I love it. I mean, there's an absurdity and an irony to me doing the same.

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224.868 - 247.926 Lex Fridman

But all of us need a bit of mental health assistance. And BetterHelp is really good for that. Because it's accessible, affordable, all that kind of stuff. It's a good first step to take. And sometimes all you need is the first step. Check them out at BetterHelp.com slash Lex and save on your first month. That's BetterHelp.com slash Lex.

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249.741 - 271.401 Lex Fridman

This show is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store that brings your ideas to life and tools to manage day-to-day operations once the ideas are brought to life. Ideas are brought to life. That's a funny thing, given this conversation with Lee Cronin. Ideas brought to life.

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271.661 - 293.146 Lex Fridman

So we talk about the origin of life in the universe defined more generally, complexity, the emergence of complexity that forms life, the origin of life on Earth and the evolution of life as being part of the same system that integrates physics and chemistry and biology, all that kind of stuff. But ideas, ideas as organisms. brought to life.

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294.007 - 324.494 Lex Fridman

It's interesting to think of ideas as organisms in the same way that all the other emergent, complex organisms come to be. It's interesting. And Shopify is a company which is a complex organism of its own that allows individual creators with an idea to bring their idea to life and manifest it into the physical world. So the imagination is a creative engine

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325.775 - 350.744 Lex Fridman

that starts from some kind of ethereal thing that's just inside our mind and projects out into the physical world and creates a thing, a store, that can then interact with thousands, millions of people. It's fascinating. It's really fascinating to think of ideas as living organisms. Anyway, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex. Back to reality for Lex.

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351.444 - 375.998 Lex Fridman

All lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by a source of a lot of happiness for me, Eight Sleep and the Pod 3 mattress. It cools the two sides of the bed separately. You can also heat them up. I don't know who does that. I do know people like that exist, but I judge them harshly. No.

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377.444 - 399.429 Lex Fridman

I like a really cold bed surface with a warm blanket for a power nap. You're talking about 15, 20 minutes or a full night's sleep. It's just heaven. It's the thing that makes me look forward to coming back home when I'm traveling. I should also mention that they currently ship to America, Canada, the UK, Australia. I need to go to Australia. I need to go to Australia.

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400.189 - 426.449 Lex Fridman

And select countries in the European Union. I don't know why I just mentioned that. Again, I don't have to say anything that the sponsors asked me to say, but there was this list of countries I'm looking at and continents, and it just filled my mind with a kind of inspired energy to travel. You know, Paul Rosalie has been on my case to travel with him in the Amazon. And I want to go.

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426.469 - 454.706 Lex Fridman

I want to go. I want to go. I want to turn off the devices and go with him. He's such an incredible human. Such an incredible human. I'm really glad he exists. Paul is just a beautiful human being. The humor, the stories, the deep, deep gratitude and appreciation of nature, the fearlessness, but also the ability to feel fear and embrace it. And just this childlike sense of wonder.

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454.726 - 474.979 Lex Fridman

I mean, he's just such an incredible human. I'm glad he exists as one of the people when I think about him. Just makes me happy to be alive on this earth together with folks like him. Anyway, check it out and get special savings. Well, we're talking about a sleep check. Get special savings when you go to a sleep dot com slash Lex.

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476.653 - 496.088 Lex Fridman

This episode is also brought to you by the thing I'm drinking right now, AG1. It's a drink with a bunch of vitamins and minerals. It's basically like a delicious multivitamin, but it's green and delicious. And I think it has a lot more than any kind of multivitamin. I don't know.

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497.009 - 528.751 Lex Fridman

I don't know much in this world, friends, but I do know that a kind of peaceful feeling comes over me when I drink AG1, knowing that all the crazy stuff I'm going to do, mentally or physically, I'm gonna be okay. When I have a nice cold bed where they sleep, and a delicious AG1, everything's gonna be okay. So you should definitely try it. See if it's going to give you the same kind of feeling.

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529.612 - 557.836 Lex Fridman

It is, when I don't bring the travel packs, one of the things I miss when I'm traveling. To have a nice cold AG1. in the afternoon, especially after a long run. I love it. Life is beautiful, isn't it? Anyway, they'll give you a one-month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

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558.376 - 594.928 Lex Fridman

And now, dear friends, here's Lee Cronin. So your big assembly theory paper was published in Nature. Congratulations. Thanks. It created, I think it's fair to say, a lot of controversy, but also a lot of interesting discussion. So maybe I can try to summarize assembly theory and you tell me if I'm wrong. Go for it.

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595.709 - 616.261 Lex Fridman

So assembly theory says that if we look at any object in the universe, any object, that we can quantify how complex it is by trying to find the number of steps it took to create it, and also we can determine if it was built by a process akin to evolution by looking at how many copies of the object there are.

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617.001 - 618.162 Lee Cronin

Yeah, that's spot on.

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618.882 - 631.289 Lex Fridman

Spot on. I was not expecting that. Okay, so let's go through definitions. So there's a central equation I'd love to talk about, but definition-wise, what is an object?

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633.892 - 658.758 Lee Cronin

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.

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659.778 - 683.437 Lee Cronin

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

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685.526 - 690.791 Lee Cronin

We've had so many people offering to rewrite the paper after it came out, you wouldn't believe it's so funny.

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691.992 - 717.437 Lex Fridman

Persists over time and is breakable such that the set of constraints to construct it from elementary building blocks is quantifiable. Such that the set of constraints to construct it from elementary building blocks is quantifiable. The history is in the objects. It's kind of cool, right? So, okay. So what defines the object is its history or memory, whichever is the sexier word.

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718.378 - 720.179 Lee Cronin

I'm happy with both depending on the day.

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721.619 - 729.844 Lex Fridman

Okay. So the set of steps it took to create the object. So there's a sense in which every object in the universe has a history.

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730.184 - 730.284 Lee Cronin

Yep.

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731.65 - 740.837 Lex Fridman

and that is part of the thing that is used to describe its complexity, how complicated it is. Okay, what is an assembly index?

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742.008 - 769.244 Lee Cronin

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.

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769.904 - 789.36 Lee Cronin

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.

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789.4 - 802.469 Lee Cronin

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.

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802.789 - 818.756 Lex Fridman

Okay, so that's not so trivial to figure out. So when you look at an object, we can say a molecule, we can say object more generally. To figure out the minimum number of steps it takes to create that object, That doesn't seem like a trivial thing to do.

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819.397 - 839.109 Lee Cronin

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.

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839.689 - 860.746 Lee Cronin

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.

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861.106 - 864.069 Lee Cronin

They're the atoms in the actual composite structure.

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864.449 - 886.572 Lee Cronin

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

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887.934 - 909.772 Lee Cronin

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.

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909.952 - 923.319 Lee Cronin

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.

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923.959 - 950.615 Lex Fridman

So what's the computational complexity of figuring out the shortest path with molecules, with language, with mathematical theorems? It seems like once you have the fully constructed Lego castle, or whatever your favorite LEGO world is, figuring out how to get there from the basic building blocks, is that an NP-hard problem? It's a hard problem.

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950.635 - 970.687 Lee Cronin

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.

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971.027 - 979.291 Lee Cronin

So you can then shorten it as you go down. And that becomes commentorily quite hard. Um, for some natural product molecules, um,

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979.711 - 1001.765 Lee Cronin

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

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1002.469 - 1021.911 Lee Cronin

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.

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1022.712 - 1027.997 Lee Cronin

And my intuition after we realized we could cut molecules up in mass spec, that was the first go at this.

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1028.677 - 1048.575 Lee Cronin

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

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1049.235 - 1054.239 Lee Cronin

The same or tending towards the same assembly index for a molecule that we can calculate mathematically.

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1054.499 - 1066.869 Lex Fridman

Okay, so these are all methods of mass spectrometry, mass spec. You scan a molecule, it gives you data in the form of a mass spectrum, and you're saying that the data correlates to the assembly index.

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1067.29 - 1067.45 Lee Cronin

Yeah.

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1068.05 - 1094.033 Lex Fridman

So how generalizable is that shortcut, first of all, to chemistry, and second of all, beyond that? Because that seems like a nice hack, and you're extremely knowledgeable about various aspects of chemistry, so you can say, okay, it kind of correlates. But the whole idea behind assembly theory paper, and perhaps why it's so controversial, is that it reaches bigger.

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1095.274 - 1099.677 Lex Fridman

It reaches for the bigger general theory of objects in the universe.

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1100.219 - 1124.526 Lee Cronin

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...

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1125.847 - 1143.603 Lee Cronin

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.

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1144.235 - 1156.32 Lex Fridman

So how would you begin to compute the assembly index of a graphical, like a set of pixels on a 2D plane that form a thing?

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1156.82 - 1177.07 Lee Cronin

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.

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1177.09 - 1187.699 Lee Cronin

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.

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1188.259 - 1208.662 Lex Fridman

Wait a minute. But, like, first of all, not every pixel is – I mean, this is at the core sort of machine learning and computer vision. Not every pixel is that important. And there's macro features, there's micro features, and all that kind of stuff. Exactly. The eyes appear in a lot of them. The smile appears in a lot of them.

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1209.318 - 1223.522 Lee Cronin

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.

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1224.402 - 1247.032 Lee Cronin

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.

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1247.653 - 1263.141 Lee Cronin

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.

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1263.582 - 1280.608 Lee Cronin

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.

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1280.828 - 1282.369 Lex Fridman

Yeah. Can you explain each one of them?

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1282.813 - 1291.575 Lee Cronin

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.

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1291.856 - 1302.158 Lex Fridman

Assembly universe, assembly possible, assembly contingent, assembly observed. And on the y-axis is assembly steps in time.

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1302.559 - 1302.759 Lee Cronin

Yeah.

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1303.499 - 1310.701 Lex Fridman

And on the x-axis, as the thing expands through time, more and more unique objects appear.

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1311.4 - 1329.32 Lee Cronin

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.

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1329.601 - 1351.819 Lee Cronin

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.

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1352.38 - 1375.432 Lee Cronin

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.

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1375.912 - 1401.117 Lee Cronin

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.

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1401.414 - 1410.32 Lex Fridman

Wait a minute. So when you say the universe has to construct the system that does the work, is that like the environment that allows for selection?

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1411.081 - 1430.879 Lee Cronin

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.

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1430.899 - 1434.406 Lee Cronin

The Tesla factory, you have to put things in sequence and out comes a Tesla.

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1434.426 - 1435.568 Lex Fridman

So you're talking about the factory.

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1435.816 - 1456.797 Lee Cronin

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

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1457.558 - 1475.782 Lee Cronin

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

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1478.704 - 1490.994 Lex Fridman

So first of all, you assume the laws of physics has just sprung to existence at the beginning. Those are constraints. But what makes the factory the environment that does the selection?

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1491.134 - 1512.01 Lee Cronin

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?

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1512.75 - 1538.037 Lee Cronin

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

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1539.098 - 1557.211 Lee Cronin

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,

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1558.834 - 1590.133 Lee Cronin

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.

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1591.613 - 1611.63 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

1613.151 - 1616.854 Lee Cronin

And it's just like a kind of, it seems to be like some kind of conservation law.

0
💬 0

1616.994 - 1640.459 Lex Fridman

So one of the intuitions you have is the propagation of motifs in time will be done by the things that can construct themselves in the shortest path. So like, you can assume that most of the objects in the universe are built in the shortest, in the most efficient way. So... Big leap I just took there.

0
💬 0

1640.519 - 1666.306 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

1666.326 - 1684.9 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

1685.24 - 1706.571 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

1706.591 - 1711.513 Lee Cronin

I maybe have no leg to stand on, but we think we're getting somewhere with that.

0
💬 0

1711.733 - 1713.333 Lex Fridman

And there's probably some parallelization.

0
💬 0

1713.873 - 1714.074 Lee Cronin

Yeah.

0
💬 0

1714.174 - 1726.658 Lex Fridman

Right? So this is all, this is not sequential. The building is... I guess when you're talking about complex objects, you don't have to work sequentially. You can work in parallel. You can get your friends together.

0
💬 0

1727.158 - 1748.566 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

1749.506 - 1769.394 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

1769.434 - 1771.695 Lee Cronin

It seems like capitalism is very good at finding shortest path.

0
💬 0

1772.715 - 1793.92 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

1794.62 - 1815.53 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

1816.949 - 1841.217 Lex Fridman

We define assembly as the total amount of selection necessary to produce an ensemble of observed objects, quantified using equation one. The equation basically has A on one side, which is the assembly of the ensemble, and then a sum... from one to n, where n is the total number of unique objects.

0
💬 0

1842.338 - 1861.431 Lex Fridman

And then there is a few variables in there that include the assembly index, the copy number, which we'll talk about. That's an interesting, I don't remember you talking about that. That's an interesting addition and I think a powerful one. It has to do with what? That you can create pretty complex objects randomly.

0
💬 0

1862.232 - 1875.437 Lex Fridman

And in order to know that they're not random, that there's a factory involved, you need to see a bunch of them. That's the intuition there. It's an interesting intuition. And then some normalization. What else is it?

0
💬 0

1875.597 - 1884.141 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

1884.707 - 1886.589 Lex Fridman

When there's two of a thing.

0
💬 0

1887.13 - 1894.497 Lee Cronin

Two of a thing is super important, especially if the assembly index is high. So we could say several questions here.

0
💬 0

1894.898 - 1905.929 Lex Fridman

One, let's talk about selection. What is this term selection? What is this term evolution that we're referring to? Which aspect of Darwinian evolution are we referring to that's interesting here?

0
💬 0

1906.593 - 1925.598 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

1925.658 - 1945.652 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

1946.613 - 1954.577 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

1954.597 - 1963.742 Lex Fridman

You say in the physics, they say, because you're basically saying that physics is not enough to tell the story of how biology emerges.

0
💬 0

1964.022 - 1964.682 Lee Cronin

I think so.

0
💬 0

1964.942 - 1969.865 Lex Fridman

And then they said a few physics is the beginning and the end of the story.

0
💬 0

1971.03 - 1982.817 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

1982.897 - 1992.823 Lex Fridman

The first two sentences caused everybody... Scientists have grappled with reconciling biological evolution with the immutable laws of the universe defined by physics.

0
💬 0

1992.963 - 1996.065 Lee Cronin

True, right? There's nothing wrong with that statement. Totally true.

0
💬 0

1997.554 - 2019.638 Lex Fridman

Yeah. These laws underpin life's origin, evolution, and the development of human culture and technology, yet they do not predict the emergence of these phenomena. Wow. First of all, we should say the title of the paper, this paper was accepted and published in Nature. The title is Assembly Theory Explains and Quantifies Selection and Evolution. Very humble title.

0
💬 0

2020.499 - 2027.14 Lex Fridman

And the entirety of the paper, I think, presents interesting ideas but reaches high.

0
💬 0

2028.411 - 2035.376 Lee Cronin

I am not... I would do it all again. This paper was actually on the preprint server for over a year.

0
💬 0

2035.477 - 2036.417 Lex Fridman

You regret nothing.

0
💬 0

2036.797 - 2039.119 Lee Cronin

Yeah, I think, yeah. I don't regret anything.

0
💬 0

2039.139 - 2040.821 Lex Fridman

You and Frank Sinatra did it your way.

0
💬 0

2041.581 - 2061.683 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

2062.303 - 2083.747 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

2084.187 - 2110.629 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

2111.232 - 2131.996 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

2134.778 - 2159.298 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

2159.938 - 2168.284 Lex Fridman

So just to link on the selection, what is the broader sense of what selection means?

0
💬 0

2168.744 - 2183.394 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

2183.855 - 2183.995 Lee Cronin

Mm hmm.

0
💬 0

2184.435 - 2212.64 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

2212.68 - 2237.088 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

2238.068 - 2263.777 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

2264.907 - 2277.5 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

2279.261 - 2304.786 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

2305.566 - 2325.93 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

2326.37 - 2346.295 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

2346.775 - 2369.325 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

2369.685 - 2395.8 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

2395.82 - 2405.302 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

2406.863 - 2412.044 Lex Fridman

How special is that? How do you know those kinds of evolution factors are everywhere in the universe?

0
💬 0

2413.538 - 2436.828 Lee Cronin

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...

0
💬 0

2439.266 - 2460.993 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

2461.693 - 2484.905 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

2485.246 - 2505.699 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

2505.739 - 2523.889 Lee Cronin

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...

0
💬 0

2526.175 - 2547.741 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

2547.761 - 2567.406 Lee Cronin

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,

0
💬 0

2568.546 - 2589.213 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

2590.174 - 2593.895 Lee Cronin

And really, that's the main kind of idea for the entire paper.

0
💬 0

2594.454 - 2611.476 Lex Fridman

Yeah, and see if you can measure the changes in the assembly index throughout the whole system. Yeah. Okay, what about if I show up to a new planet? We'll go to Mars or some other planet from a different solar system. How do we use assembly index there to discover alien life?

0
💬 0

2612.96 - 2634.876 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

2634.956 - 2652.571 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

2652.631 - 2679.348 Lee Cronin

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?

0
💬 0

2679.529 - 2698.843 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

2699.203 - 2710.126 Lex Fridman

Can you just linger on this copy number thing? A million different copies. What do you mean by copies and why is the number of copies important?

0
💬 0

2711.086 - 2734.45 Lee Cronin

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?

0
💬 0

2735.231 - 2747.63 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

2748.23 - 2752.372 Lex Fridman

So copies implies structure.

0
💬 0

2753.172 - 2755.633 Lee Cronin

Yeah. The factory.

0
💬 0

2755.653 - 2784.611 Lex Fridman

I mean, there's a deep, profound thing in there. Because if you just have a random process, you're going to get a lot of complex, beautiful, sophisticated things. What makes them... Complex in the way we think life is complex or, yeah, something like a factory that's operating under a selection process, there should be copies. Is there, like, some looseness about copies?

0
💬 0

2784.651 - 2788.116 Lex Fridman

Like, what does it mean for two objects to be equal?

0
💬 0

2788.722 - 2814.106 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

2814.647 - 2836.24 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

2836.74 - 2854.39 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

2855.09 - 2876.536 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

2876.956 - 2881.357 Lee Cronin

And so it's to do with the detection system that you have and the resolution.

0
💬 0

2881.897 - 2890.063 Lex Fridman

So I wonder if there's an art and science to which detection system is used when you show up to a new planet.

0
💬 0

2890.484 - 2891.324 Lee Cronin

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0
💬 0

2891.344 - 2918.515 Lex Fridman

So you're talking about chemistry a lot today. We have kind of standardized detection systems, right, of how to compare molecules. So when you start to talk about emojis and language and mathematical theorems and things I don't know, more sophisticated things at a different scale, at a smaller scale than molecules, at a larger scale than molecules, like word detection.

0
💬 0

2918.535 - 2926.001 Lex Fridman

If we look at the difference between you and me, Lex and Lee, are we the same? Are we different?

0
💬 0

2926.371 - 2937.154 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

2937.194 - 2939.255 Lex Fridman

Well, also like the species.

0
💬 0

2939.495 - 2940.495 Lee Cronin

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0
💬 0

2940.935 - 2943.756 Lex Fridman

And also there's a sense why we're both from Earth.

0
💬 0

2944.571 - 2973.074 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

2973.976 - 2977.739 Lee Cronin

So that would be, you know, it's kind of a sliding scale. It's kind of nice. Got it.

0
💬 0

2977.759 - 2982.702 Lex Fridman

So those two kind of are at tension with each other. Yeah. The number of copies and the assembly index.

0
💬 0

2982.762 - 2982.983 Lee Cronin

Yeah.

0
💬 0

2984.644 - 2989.887 Lex Fridman

That's really, really interesting. So, okay. So you show up to a new planet, you'll be doing what?

0
💬 0

2990.768 - 2992.009 Lee Cronin

I would do mass spec.

0
💬 0

2992.029 - 3002.797 Lex Fridman

On a sample of what? Like, first of all, like how big of a scoop do you take? Did you just take a scoop? Like what? So we're looking for primitive life.

0
💬 0

3003.817 - 3021.205 Lee Cronin

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,

0
💬 0

3022.706 - 3039.617 Lee Cronin

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…

0
💬 0

3041.573 - 3059.646 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

3061.187 - 3076.419 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3077.159 - 3092.78 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3093.641 - 3115.504 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3116.385 - 3131.954 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3132.074 - 3157.143 Lex Fridman

meter how would you build a life meter let's say we're together starting a new company launching a life mass spectrometer would be the first way of doing it just no no but that's that's uh that's one of the major components of it but i'm talking about like i would what if it's a device we got it and branding logo we're gonna talk all right that's later but what's the input what's the like how do you get to the um a metered output

0
💬 0

3157.463 - 3183.247 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

3185.209 - 3203.71 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3203.77 - 3224.115 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3224.975 - 3227.136 Lex Fridman

It's a good ring to it.

0
💬 0

3227.216 - 3251.54 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3252.46 - 3269.09 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3270.293 - 3286.186 Lee Cronin

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...

0
💬 0

3287.566 - 3312.406 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3313.006 - 3320.469 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3321.03 - 3349.749 Lex Fridman

Complexity and abundance is evidence of selection. Okay, so let's apply our life meter to Earth. So if we were just to apply assembly index measurements to Earth, what kind of stuff are we going to get? What's impressive about some of the complexity on Earth?

0
💬 0

3350.31 - 3368.536 Lee Cronin

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?

0
💬 0

3368.577 - 3387.761 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3388.722 - 3398.789 Lee Cronin

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...

0
💬 0

3400.34 - 3412.329 Lex Fridman

Chemists might say that, of course, out there outside of Earth, there's complex molecules. Yes. Okay. And then you're saying, wait a minute, that's like saying, of course, there's aliens out there.

0
💬 0

3413.01 - 3415.071 Lee Cronin

Yeah, exactly that. Okay. Exactly.

0
💬 0

3415.091 - 3426.92 Lex Fridman

But you're saying, you clarify that that's actually a very interesting question, and we should be looking for complex molecules of which the copy number is two or greater. Right.

0
💬 0

3427.188 - 3454.725 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3455.345 - 3474.219 Lee Cronin

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,

0
💬 0

3475.02 - 3506.95 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3506.97 - 3518.52 Lee Cronin

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?

0
💬 0

3518.66 - 3520.521 Lex Fridman

The better the whiskey, the higher the assembly index.

0
💬 0

3520.541 - 3542.572 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3542.932 - 3567.741 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3567.801 - 3585.913 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3586.513 - 3607.006 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3607.346 - 3629.842 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3630.222 - 3643.773 Lee Cronin

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...

0
💬 0

3645.474 - 3668.369 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3668.389 - 3669.33 Lee Cronin

Resounding success.

0
💬 0

3670.891 - 3675.574 Lex Fridman

Can you just go back to the beer and the E. coli? So what's the assembly index on those?

0
💬 0

3676.354 - 3704.845 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3705.866 - 3706.626 Lex Fridman

Nobody's listening.

0
💬 0

3707.127 - 3719.72 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3719.74 - 3720.741 Lex Fridman

Yeah, what's the tree of life?

0
💬 0

3721.041 - 3741.703 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3743.144 - 3762.517 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3762.557 - 3767.961 Lee Cronin

They were able to draw pictures and say, oh, these look like common classes.

0
💬 0

3768.261 - 3768.421 Lex Fridman

Yeah.

0
💬 0

3768.922 - 3769.122 Lee Cronin

Then...

0
💬 0

3771.664 - 3773.365 Lex Fridman

They're artists, really. They're just, you know.

0
💬 0

3773.485 - 3794.551 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3794.732 - 3819.582 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3819.602 - 3841.929 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3843.383 - 3853.859 Lex Fridman

All right, can you try to say that again with a little more detail? So recreating, what does it take to recreate the tree of life? What does the reverse engineering process look like here?

0
💬 0

3854.198 - 3875.055 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3875.655 - 3892.468 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3893.909 - 3913.722 Lee Cronin

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...

0
💬 0

3916.963 - 3937.652 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3937.992 - 3956.383 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

3956.403 - 3960.326 Lex Fridman

How does knowing if they're the same or different give you the tree?

0
💬 0

3960.765 - 3978.532 Lee Cronin

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,

0
💬 0

3980.017 - 3992.406 Lex Fridman

So this is looking at samples that exist today in the world. What about things that no longer exist? I mean, the tree contains information about the past. Some of it is gone.

0
💬 0

3993.306 - 4013.26 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

4013.721 - 4028.033 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

4028.513 - 4032.537 Lex Fridman

So when a thing dies, you can still get some information about its complexity.

0
💬 0

4032.819 - 4063.62 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

4063.64 - 4088.216 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

4088.436 - 4114.617 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

4115.357 - 4141.342 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

4141.362 - 4157.332 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

4158.24 - 4161.441 Lex Fridman

How old living organs, humans are?

0
💬 0

4161.461 - 4172.164 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

4172.184 - 4184.207 Lex Fridman

Signatures of chemistry are fascinating. So you've been saying a lot of chemistry examples for assembly theory. What if we zoom out and look at a bigger scale of an object?

0
💬 0

4184.487 - 4184.647 Lee Cronin

Mm-hmm.

0
💬 0

4186.416 - 4199.731 Lex Fridman

like really complex objects, like humans, or living organisms that are made up of millions or billions of other organisms. How do you try to apply assembly theory to that?

0
💬 0

4200.296 - 4215.52 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

4215.88 - 4240.781 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

4242.062 - 4258.315 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

4258.335 - 4265.781 Lex Fridman

I don't know what's the deep insight here about the negativity in the space. I think it's probably the immune system of the scientific community that

0
💬 0

4266.401 - 4289.23 Lex Fridman

making sure that there's no bullshit that gets published that's and then it can overfire it can do a lot of damage it can shut down conversations in a way that's not productive we go back i mean i'll answer your question about the hierarchy assembly but let's go back to the perception people saying the paper was badly written i mean of course we could improve it we could always improve the clarity let's go there before we go to the hierarchy yeah um

0
💬 0

4290.063 - 4303.939 Lex Fridman

You know, it has been criticized quite a bit, the paper. What has been some criticism that you found most powerful, like, that you can understand? And can you explain it?

0
💬 0

4305.198 - 4322.473 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

4322.793 - 4344.087 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

4344.487 - 4366.413 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

4366.834 - 4368.378 Lex Fridman

Sure, if you could say that again.

0
💬 0

4369.353 - 4385.505 Lee Cronin

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?

0
💬 0

4385.685 - 4392.291 Lex Fridman

Time. Right. So why? So why? What does time have to do with it?

0
💬 0

4392.931 - 4417.999 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

4418.759 - 4438.047 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

4438.167 - 4452.801 Lex Fridman

It's okay. The evolutionary biologists criticize because... The origin of life is understood and doesn't require an explanation that involves physics.

0
💬 0

4453.221 - 4453.381 Lee Cronin

Yeah.

0
💬 0

4453.621 - 4454.602 Lex Fridman

That's their statement.

0
💬 0

4454.942 - 4481.911 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

4482.871 - 4503.721 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

4504.522 - 4530.815 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

4531.136 - 4553.998 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

4554.517 - 4563.331 Lex Fridman

Well, what about the criticism of you're just putting a bunch of sexy names on something that's already obvious?

0
💬 0

4564.312 - 4594.502 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

4594.982 - 4617.344 Lee Cronin

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?

0
💬 0

4617.664 - 4639.853 Lee Cronin

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?

0
💬 0

4641.054 - 4657.762 Lex Fridman

Sure, but there's a few things to say there. One is... This is in part a philosophical framework because it's not like you can apply this generally to any object in the universe. It's very chemistry focused.

0
💬 0

4657.842 - 4672.364 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

4672.384 - 4673.625 Lex Fridman

Let's stick with cells, yeah.

0
💬 0

4673.665 - 4695.19 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

4695.63 - 4716.58 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

4717 - 4735.59 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

4736.09 - 4736.99 Lex Fridman

Cellular automata, by the way.

0
💬 0

4737.01 - 4759.8 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

4760.28 - 4781.104 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

4781.564 - 4808.927 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

4809.448 - 4815.29 Lee Cronin

But obviously I want a leap to things like emoticons, language, mathematical theorems.

0
💬 0

4815.31 - 4822.994 Lex Fridman

That's a very large number of steps to get from a molecule to the human brain.

0
💬 0

4823.618 - 4839.094 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

4839.114 - 4839.535 Lee Cronin

Mm-hmm.

0
💬 0

4840.015 - 4856.723 Lee Cronin

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?

0
💬 0

4856.743 - 4861.445 Lex Fridman

But then you have to discover for that, the features that you would be looking for.

0
💬 0

4861.685 - 4864.947 Lee Cronin

Yeah. And that means you need to have some idea of the anatomy.

0
💬 0

4865.247 - 4867.228 Lex Fridman

But is there an automated way to discover features?

0
💬 0

4868.79 - 4877.132 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

4877.152 - 4891.46 Lex Fridman

To apply compression to it to see what emerges and then use the thing, the features used as part of the compression as the measurement of... As the thing that is searched for when you're measuring assembly index and copy number.

0
💬 0

4891.6 - 4912.763 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

4912.783 - 4926.773 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

4926.973 - 4954.59 Lex Fridman

What would be amazing is if you can use assembly theory, this framework to show the increase in the assembly index, associated with, I don't know, cultures or pieces of text like language or images and so on, and illustrate without knowing the data ahead of time, just kind of like you do with NASA, that you're able to demonstrate that it applies in those other contexts.

0
💬 0

4955.75 - 4982.96 Lex Fridman

And that probably wouldn't at first, and you have to evolve the theory somehow. You have to change it. You have to expand it. I think so. But like that, I guess this is, as a paper, a first step in saying, okay, can we create a general framework for measuring complexity of objects, for measuring life, the complexity of living organisms? Yeah. That's what this is reaching for.

0
💬 0

4983.34 - 5001.517 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

5001.537 - 5001.717 Lee Cronin

Mm-hmm.

0
💬 0

5002.077 - 5022.627 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

5023.008 - 5039.076 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

5039.516 - 5062.149 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

5062.169 - 5077.161 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

5077.526 - 5080.268 Lex Fridman

I'm a Linux guy, by the way, so your examples go way over my head.

0
💬 0

5080.328 - 5081.148 Lee Cronin

Yeah, well, whatever.

0
💬 0

5081.789 - 5106.344 Lex Fridman

Is that a fruit company of some sort? I don't even know. Yeah, there's a lot of interesting stuff to ask about language. You could look at, how would that work? You could look at GPT-1, GPT-2, GPT-3, 3, 5, 4, and try to analyze the kind of language it produces. I mean, that's almost trying to look at assembly index of intelligent systems.

0
💬 0

5107.113 - 5135.792 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

5136.913 - 5153.003 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

5155.584 - 5184.647 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

5185.41 - 5192.576 Lex Fridman

What do you mean by intelligence there? You seem to associate intelligence with history.

0
💬 0

5192.916 - 5196.199 Lee Cronin

Yeah. Memory. I think selection produces intelligence.

0
💬 0

5197.509 - 5221.308 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

5221.67 - 5228.393 Lex Fridman

So we escaped Darwinian evolution and now we're on to some other kind of evolution, I guess, higher level evolution.

0
💬 0

5228.493 - 5232.255 Lee Cronin

And assembly theory will measure that as well, right? Because it's all a lineage.

0
💬 0

5232.656 - 5251.345 Lex Fridman

Okay, another piece of criticism or by way of question is how is assembly theory or maybe assembly index different from Kolmogorov complexity? So for people who don't know, Kolmogorov complexity of an object is the length of a shortest computer program that produces the object as output.

0
💬 0

5254.512 - 5284.953 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

5285.414 - 5313.572 Lee Cronin

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...

0
💬 0

5315.033 - 5338.569 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

5339.189 - 5360.542 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

5361.322 - 5368.006 Lex Fridman

And I think that's the main… The causal chain is at the core of assembly theory.

0
💬 0

5368.246 - 5390.193 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

5390.273 - 5411.785 Lex Fridman

But assembly theory looks at objects. It doesn't have information about the object history. It's going to try to infer that history. by looking for the shortest history, right? The object doesn't have a Wikipedia page that goes about its history.

0
💬 0

5411.945 - 5416.67 Lee Cronin

I would say it does in a way, and it is fascinating to look at. So you've just got the object.

0
💬 0

5417.311 - 5417.471 Lee Cronin

Mm-hmm.

0
💬 0

5417.991 - 5441.085 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

5441.405 - 5463.72 Lee Cronin

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,

0
💬 0

5464.42 - 5483.603 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

5483.823 - 5491.949 Lex Fridman

But it's still computationally very difficult to compute that history, right, for complex objects.

0
💬 0

5493.29 - 5509.123 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

5509.503 - 5529.025 Lee Cronin

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?

0
💬 0

5529.045 - 5529.385 Lee Cronin

Mm-hmm.

0
💬 0

5529.665 - 5548.077 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

5548.777 - 5562.842 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

5564.002 - 5575.568 Lex Fridman

But just even for the drug discovery point you made, don't you have to simulate all of chemistry to figure out how to come up with constraints? No. And the molecules?

0
💬 0

5576.148 - 5576.328 Lee Cronin

No.

0
💬 0

5576.348 - 5578.389 Lex Fridman

I mean, I don't know enough about protein.

0
💬 0

5578.409 - 5591.036 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

5594.439 - 5599.906 Lex Fridman

Sure, there's assembly index and shortest path examples here on chemistry.

0
💬 0

5600.407 - 5627.548 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

5630.293 - 5650.488 Lex Fridman

by way of question, do you consider the different probabilities of each reaction in the chain? So like that there could be different When you look at a chain of events that led up to the creation of an object, doesn't it matter that some parts in the chain are less likely than others? No. It doesn't matter.

0
💬 0

5650.508 - 5670.551 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

5670.872 - 5674.317 Lee Cronin

What is the quickest way you could zip out that molecule with no reaction constraints?

0
💬 0

5674.718 - 5676.02 Lex Fridman

How do you define quickest there then?

0
💬 0

5676.627 - 5697.36 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

5697.4 - 5721.792 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

5722.112 - 5746.849 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

5747.79 - 5760.62 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

5761.363 - 5785.958 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

5786.698 - 5803.086 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

5803.667 - 5824.415 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

5825.376 - 5834.362 Lee Cronin

But chemical reactions do not exist anywhere. in the constraints that allow chemical transformations to occur do exist.

0
💬 0

5834.662 - 5847.753 Lex Fridman

Okay. Okay. So it's constraint application. So there's no chemical reactions. It's all constraint application. Yep. Which enables the emergence of react,

0
💬 0

5850.019 - 5872.519 Lex Fridman

what's a different word for chemical reaction uh transformation transformation yeah like a function it's a function but no but i love chemical reactions as a shorthand and yeah and so the chemists don't all go mad i mean of course chemical reactions exist on earth shorthand it's a shorthand for these constraints for right so assuming all these constraints that we've been using for so long we just assume that that's always the case yeah in natural language conversation

0
💬 0

5872.739 - 5882.162 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

5882.983 - 5903.004 Lex Fridman

Right, and this is useful to remember, you know, to frame it as constraint application is useful for when you zoom out to the bigger picture of the universe and looking at the chemistry of the universe and then starting to apply assembly theory. That's interesting. That's really interesting. But we've also pissed off the chemists now.

0
💬 0

5904.225 - 5906.186 Lee Cronin

They're pretty happy. Well, most of them.

0
💬 0

5908.487 - 5915.531 Lex Fridman

Everybody deep down is happy, I think. They're just sometimes feisty. That's how they show. That's how they have fun.

0
💬 0

5915.671 - 5934.68 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

5935.06 - 5941.983 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

5943.243 - 5954.948 Lex Fridman

Maybe just a little insider interesting information. What were the editors of Nature, the reviews and so on, how difficult was that process? Because this is a pretty big paper.

0
💬 0

5955.376 - 5983.35 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

5984.53 - 6009.507 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

6010.087 - 6024.99 Lee Cronin

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...

0
💬 0

6025.811 - 6050.187 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

6051.187 - 6073.835 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

6073.875 - 6074.936 Lee Cronin

You must be committing fraud.

0
💬 0

6074.956 - 6075.416 Lee Cronin

Right.

0
💬 0

6076.416 - 6109.982 Lee Cronin

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?

0
💬 0

6110.022 - 6120.013 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

6121.434 - 6139.925 Lex Fridman

Maybe you could just comment on the whole process. You've published some pretty huge papers on all kinds of topics within chemistry and beyond. Some of them have some little spice in them, a little spice of crazy. Like Tom Wade says, I like my time with a little drop of poison. It's not a mundane paper.

0
💬 0

6140.445 - 6156.962 Lex Fridman

So what's it like psychologically to go through all this process, to keep getting rejected, to... to get reviews from people that don't get the paper or all that kind of stuff, just from a question of a scientist. What is that like?

0
💬 0

6157.512 - 6177.702 Lee Cronin

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,

0
💬 0

6178.522 - 6205.85 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

6207.611 - 6235.591 Lex Fridman

and the edit in the end was just like different editors actually what's behind that never giving up when you're sitting there 10 o'clock in the evening there's a melancholy feeling that comes over you and you're like okay this is rejection number 5 or it's not rejection but maybe it feels like a rejection because the comments are that you totally don't get it what gives you strength to keep going there I don't know

0
💬 0

6242.395 - 6291.496 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

6292.557 - 6299.587 Lee Cronin

Never get emotional about papers normally, but I think what we did, you just compressed like five years of angst from this.

0
💬 0

6300.168 - 6301.25 Lex Fridman

So it's been rough.

0
💬 0

6302.1 - 6321.705 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

6324.686 - 6347.735 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

6348.775 - 6370.341 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

6370.521 - 6394.648 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

6394.848 - 6410.74 Lee Cronin

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,

0
💬 0

6411.701 - 6438.675 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

6439.375 - 6460.085 Lee Cronin

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?

0
💬 0

6460.105 - 6476.095 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

6476.135 - 6497.592 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

6499.033 - 6508.82 Lex Fridman

I think it's a beautiful story of perseverance. And the backlash is just a negative word for discourse, which I think is beautiful.

0
💬 0

6508.98 - 6517.586 Lee Cronin

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...

0
💬 0

6518.936 - 6544.512 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

6544.992 - 6565.511 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

6566.272 - 6589.945 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

6590.466 - 6593.848 Lee Cronin

So I think that that's the thing that I wanted to see

0
💬 0

6594.508 - 6622.02 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

6622.993 - 6625.437 Lee Cronin

I wasn't very good at school, right?

0
💬 0

6625.457 - 6627.981 Lex Fridman

This is when you were very young?

0
💬 0

6628.121 - 6649.417 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

6649.937 - 6667.802 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

6668.082 - 6689.935 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

6690.994 - 6716.879 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

6717.839 - 6761.574 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

6761.594 - 6777.286 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

6778.587 - 6802.57 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

6803.69 - 6823.486 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

6823.506 - 6836.281 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

6837.611 - 6838.832 Lex Fridman

What do you mean you weren't allowed to?

0
💬 0

6838.852 - 6859.685 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

6859.725 - 6863.227 Lee Cronin

I had a good chemistry teacher. So in the end, I got to university to do chemistry.

0
💬 0

6863.587 - 6889.626 Lex Fridman

So through that kind of process, I think for kids in that situation, it's easy to start believing that you're not, well, how do I put it? That you're stupid. And basically give up that you're just not good at math, you're not good at school. So this is by way of advice for people, for interesting people, for interesting young kids right now experiencing the same thing.

0
💬 0

6890.387 - 6893.97 Lex Fridman

Where was the place, what was the source of you not giving up there?

0
💬 0

6895.584 - 6927.321 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

6927.381 - 6954.192 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

6954.233 - 6979.135 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

6979.255 - 6999.788 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7000.448 - 7002.149 Lex Fridman

Do you believe in yourself? Essentially?

0
💬 0

7002.289 - 7017.741 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7019.187 - 7028.707 Lex Fridman

Oh, that's quite brilliant. Like as a gradient to optimize. Yeah. Hang out with smart people and confuse them. Yeah. And the more confusing it is, the more there's something there.

0
💬 0

7029.099 - 7046.975 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7047.395 - 7056.122 Lee Cronin

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,

0
💬 0

7057.482 - 7076.786 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7077.886 - 7099.998 Lee Cronin

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...

0
💬 0

7101.611 - 7123.498 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7123.738 - 7139.092 Lee Cronin

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 –

0
💬 0

7140.894 - 7163.91 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

7165.632 - 7175.952 Lex Fridman

Yeah, I've seen you be pretty aggressively critical, but every time I've seen it, it's the idea, not the person.

0
💬 0

7177.815 - 7202.629 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7203.129 - 7219.976 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7220.296 - 7227.118 Lex Fridman

So time is fundamental for assembly theory. I'm just trying to figure out where you and Sarah converged.

0
💬 0

7227.498 - 7250.768 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7253.27 - 7285.21 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7285.23 - 7305.998 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7307.039 - 7338.573 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7338.633 - 7358.499 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7359.059 - 7363.02 Lex Fridman

Let me load that in. The universe is not big enough to contain the future. Yeah.

0
💬 0

7363.843 - 7364.944 Lee Cronin

That's why, that's it.

0
💬 0

7364.964 - 7368.625 Lex Fridman

That's another, that's a beautiful way of saying that time is fundamental.

0
💬 0

7368.765 - 7394.675 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7395.576 - 7400.758 Lee Cronin

The fact that the law of the excluded middle cannot apply to the future explains why time is fundamental.

0
💬 0

7400.778 - 7414.798 Lex Fridman

Wow. I mean, that's a good example, intuitive example, but it's possible that we might be able to predict whether it's going to snow if we had perfect information. You're saying not.

0
💬 0

7415.578 - 7425.126 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7425.286 - 7428.429 Lex Fridman

Can you explain his view on time being fundamental?

0
💬 0

7430.046 - 7456.307 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7456.867 - 7482.343 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7482.803 - 7484.545 Lee Cronin

Yeah, I've seen you say that.

0
💬 0

7485.226 - 7492.889 Lex Fridman

And boy, does that... That's an interesting one to process. What do you mean by that? Earth is the biggest place in the universe.

0
💬 0

7493.069 - 7515.288 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7515.428 - 7539.404 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7539.704 - 7561.568 Lex Fridman

Okay, wait a minute. But, I mean, I know you're being poetic, but how do you know there's not other Earth-like? Like, how do you know? You're basically saying Earth is really special. It's awesome stuff as far as we look out. There's nothing like it going on. But how do you know there's not nearly infinite number of places where cool stuff like this is going on?

0
💬 0

7562.148 - 7589.914 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7590.395 - 7611.026 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7611.646 - 7624.63 Lee Cronin

Because I don't know if we are going to be able to build architectures that will intersect with alien intelligence and architectures.

0
💬 0

7625.27 - 7628.251 Lex Fridman

Intersect, you don't mean in time or space?

0
💬 0

7628.271 - 7629.812 Lee Cronin

Time and the ability to communicate.

0
💬 0

7629.832 - 7631.052 Lex Fridman

The ability to communicate.

0
💬 0

7631.092 - 7639.375 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7640.196 - 7656.003 Lex Fridman

Because it's so big. So you're saying the constraints created by the environment that led to the factory of Darwinian evolution... Are just like this little tiny cone in a nearly infinite combinatorial space.

0
💬 0

7656.143 - 7656.323 Lee Cronin

Exactly.

0
💬 0

7656.343 - 7671.493 Lex Fridman

And so there's other cones like it. And why can't we communicate with other, like, just because we can't create it doesn't mean we can't appreciate the creation, right? Sorry, detect the creation.

0
💬 0

7672.108 - 7696.388 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

7697.449 - 7700.958 Lex Fridman

And this is a planet simulator, you mean like a different kind of planet?

0
💬 0

7700.978 - 7701.118 Lee Cronin

Yeah.

0
💬 0

7701.158 - 7703.384 Lex Fridman

With different sets of environments and pressures.

0
💬 0

7703.692 - 7726.628 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7726.688 - 7748.864 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7749.284 - 7763.393 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7763.413 - 7764.514 Lex Fridman

You're looking for some overlap.

0
💬 0

7764.714 - 7782.405 Lee Cronin

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,

0
💬 0

7783.82 - 7802.868 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7803.048 - 7834.746 Lex Fridman

Yeah. It just feels like the cone, I might be misusing the word cone here, but the width of the cone is growing faster than, is growing really fast to where eventually all the cones overlap. Even in a very, very, very large combinatorial space. But then again, if you're saying the universe is also growing very quickly in terms of possibilities.

0
💬 0

7836.167 - 7856.757 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7857.638 - 7884.08 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7884.517 - 7894.483 Lex Fridman

But it's just hard to intuit a world, a universe, where there's nearly infinite complexity objects and they somehow can't detect each other.

0
💬 0

7894.943 - 7910.573 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7910.853 - 7912.074 Lee Cronin

Look at how big Earth is.

0
💬 0

7912.254 - 7914.714 Lex Fridman

Mm-hmm. That it produced that.

0
💬 0

7914.895 - 7915.615 Lee Cronin

It produced that.

0
💬 0

7915.935 - 7916.235 Lex Fridman

Yeah.

0
💬 0

7916.395 - 7940.095 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7941.937 - 7956.692 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7956.992 - 7957.212 Lex Fridman

Yeah.

0
💬 0

7957.633 - 7963.998 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7964.384 - 7969.489 Lex Fridman

Oh, in real time. There you go. I already got the tattoo, so this is going to be embarrassing if you change my mind.

0
💬 0

7969.789 - 7973.292 Lee Cronin

But you can just add an arrow of time onto it, right?

0
💬 0

7973.312 - 7974.333 Lex Fridman

Yeah, true.

0
💬 0

7974.393 - 7996.631 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

7997.991 - 8020.865 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

8020.885 - 8041.241 Lee Cronin

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...

0
💬 0

8042.529 - 8067.422 Lee Cronin

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...

0
💬 0

8071.514 - 8073.297 Lex Fridman

We're using infinity very loosely here.

0
💬 0

8073.637 - 8073.998 Lee Cronin

No, no.

0
💬 0

8074.599 - 8079.726 Lex Fridman

Infinite precision. I mean, not loosely, but... Very precisely. So you think infinite precision is required...

0
💬 0

8080.046 - 8101.487 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

8102.188 - 8120.22 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

8121.241 - 8146.277 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

8147.523 - 8158.508 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

8160.329 - 8166.232 Lex Fridman

Okay, so to you, first of all, quantum mechanics, you can just say statistically what's going to happen when two golf balls hit each other.

0
💬 0

8166.312 - 8190.328 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

8191.549 - 8225.333 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

8225.513 - 8226.314 Lee Cronin

They're observables.

0
💬 0

8229.059 - 8249.368 Lex Fridman

I'm trying to see exactly where time being fundamental sneaks in, in this difference between the golf ball can't contain its own position perfectly, precisely, how that leads to time needing to be fundamental.

0
💬 0

8249.408 - 8252.209 Lee Cronin

Do you believe or do you accept you have free will?

0
💬 0

8254.793 - 8259.617 Lex Fridman

Yeah, I think at this moment in time, I believe that I have free will.

0
💬 0

8259.898 - 8278.174 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

8279.195 - 8289.999 Lex Fridman

I think the space of how much we don't know is so vast... that saying the universe is deterministic and from that jumping there's no free will is just too difficult of a leap.

0
💬 0

8290.399 - 8306.506 Lee Cronin

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...

0
💬 0

8307.887 - 8329.289 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

8329.829 - 8351.276 Lee Cronin

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...

0
💬 0

8352.296 - 8373.461 Lee Cronin

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...

0
💬 0

8374.221 - 8401.733 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

8402.423 - 8405.184 Lex Fridman

Just because the space of possibility is so large?

0
💬 0

8405.685 - 8431.697 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

8433.203 - 8441.294 Lex Fridman

Okay, life is a novelty miner from the future that is actualized in the present.

0
💬 0

8442.115 - 8446.332 Lee Cronin

Yep. I think so.

0
💬 0

8446.372 - 8460.688 Lex Fridman

Novelty minor. First of all, novelty. What's the origin of novelty when you go from boring time to creative time? Where is that? Is it as simple as randomness like you're referring to?

0
💬 0

8461.269 - 8479.838 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

8479.879 - 8501.845 Lee Cronin

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?

0
💬 0

8501.885 - 8527.616 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

8527.716 - 8539.524 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

8539.944 - 8559.698 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

8561.139 - 8583.789 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

8585.171 - 8613.937 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

8615.439 - 8619.422 Lex Fridman

Just to clarify, both you and Sarah think the universe is not deterministic.

0
💬 0

8621.196 - 8646.276 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

8647.882 - 8669.858 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

8670.518 - 8696.392 Lee Cronin

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?

0
💬 0

8697.052 - 8702.235 Lee Cronin

There are objects on Earth that are unique to Earth that will not be found anywhere else, because you can do the combinatorial math.

0
💬 0

8703.969 - 8709.296 Lex Fridman

What was that statement you made about life is novelty mining from the future?

0
💬 0

8709.636 - 8709.897 Lee Cronin

Yeah.

0
💬 0

8710.097 - 8713.402 Lex Fridman

What's the little element of time that you're introducing?

0
💬 0

8713.442 - 8731.499 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

8731.84 - 8739.185 Lee Cronin

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...

0
💬 0

8740.286 - 8762.299 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

8764.48 - 8770.007 Lex Fridman

Well, that's one statement. And the statement that the universe is not big enough to contain the future is another statement.

0
💬 0

8770.247 - 8795.497 Lee Cronin

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?

0
💬 0

8795.557 - 8803.188 Lex Fridman

Yeah, but that's because it's kind of difficult to imagine the universe that's that can't contain the future.

0
💬 0

8803.869 - 8805.109 Lee Cronin

But isn't that really exciting?

0
💬 0

8805.55 - 8827.764 Lex Fridman

It's very exciting, but it's hard. I mean, we're humans on Earth, and we have a very kind of four-dimensional conception of the world, of 3D plus time. It's just hard to intuit a world where, what does it even mean? A universe that can't contain the future.

0
💬 0

8829.622 - 8857.875 Lee Cronin

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...

0
💬 0

8858.655 - 8884.042 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

8884.183 - 8898.94 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

8899.301 - 8913.808 Lex Fridman

Well, okay, so... Given that you're disrespecting the power of the initial conditions, let me ask you about, so how do you explain that cellular automata are able to produce such incredible complexity given just basic rules and basic initial conditions?

0
💬 0

8914.328 - 8933.796 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

8934.336 - 8956.803 Lee Cronin

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...

0
💬 0

8957.843 - 8970.689 Lee Cronin

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?

0
💬 0

8970.949 - 8973.51 Lex Fridman

Well, can't you say the same thing about the complexity on Earth then?

0
💬 0

8974.09 - 8980.953 Lee Cronin

No, because the complexity on Earth has a copy number and an assembly index associated with it. That CA is just a number running.

0
💬 0

8982.554 - 8984.255 Lex Fridman

You don't think it has a copy number? Wait a minute.

0
💬 0

8984.966 - 9005.696 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

9006.076 - 9006.236 Lee Cronin

Mm-hmm.

0
💬 0

9006.536 - 9027.072 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

9027.533 - 9035.479 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

9036.881 - 9047.249 Lex Fridman

Right. I guess you were saying that the physicist saying that all you need is the initial conditions and the rules of physics is somehow missing the bigger picture.

0
💬 0

9048.19 - 9048.851 Lee Cronin

Yeah.

0
💬 0

9049.151 - 9055.075 Lex Fridman

And if you look at CAs, all you need is the initial condition and the rules, and then run the thing.

0
💬 0

9055.316 - 9066.646 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

9067.106 - 9069.348 Lex Fridman

Sure, and that's that to use fundamentally.

0
💬 0

9069.368 - 9073.551 Lee Cronin

And you can't predict it from initial conditions. If you could, then it'd be fine.

0
💬 0

9073.571 - 9086.382 Lex Fridman

And that time is the foundation of the history, the memory of each of the things it created. It has to have that memory of all the things that led up to it.

0
💬 0

9086.843 - 9115.023 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

9115.143 - 9117.624 Lee Cronin

Otherwise, you cannot have free will. It logically follows.

0
💬 0

9119.725 - 9137.131 Lex Fridman

Well, the foundation of my belief in free will is just observation-driven. I think if you use logic, it's like logically it seems like the universe is deterministic.

0
💬 0

9137.961 - 9140.182 Lee Cronin

Looking backwards in time, and that's correct. The universe is.

0
💬 0

9140.202 - 9145.543 Lex Fridman

And then everything else is a kind of leap. It requires a leap.

0
💬 0

9146.883 - 9162.247 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

9162.627 - 9162.907 Lex Fridman

Why?

0
💬 0

9163.587 - 9189.195 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

9189.215 - 9196.262 Lee Cronin

I think that we are, neuroscience is making great advances, but I think that we have no idea about AGI. So I am a...

0
💬 0

9197.603 - 9217.742 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

9219.946 - 9220.686 Lex Fridman

What does that look like?

0
💬 0

9221.246 - 9239.49 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

9239.77 - 9248.352 Lex Fridman

Well, Clippy is definitely coming back. But you're saying we don't have a great understanding of what is intelligence, what is the intelligence...

0
💬 0

9249.031 - 9250.432 Lee Cronin

I am very frustrated.

0
💬 0

9250.972 - 9252.053 Lex Fridman

Underpinning the human mind.

0
💬 0

9252.333 - 9276.611 Lee Cronin

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...

0
💬 0

9279.201 - 9297.872 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

9298.332 - 9331.698 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

9332.579 - 9350.712 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

9350.752 - 9371.934 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

9371.954 - 9385.504 Lee Cronin

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...

0
💬 0

9386.545 - 9408.515 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

9408.635 - 9421.505 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

9421.545 - 9437.047 Lex Fridman

Well, let me try to sort of steel man the AI doomer's argument. Actually, I don't know. Are AI doomers in the Yudkowsky camp saying it's definitely going to kill us? Because there's a spectrum. 95%, I think, is the limit. 95% plus?

0
💬 0

9437.387 - 9442.153 Lee Cronin

No, not plus. I don't know. I was seeing on Twitter today various things, but I think Yudkowsky is at 95%.

0
💬 0

9444.195 - 9448.676 Lex Fridman

But to belong to the AI Doomer Club, is there a threshold? I don't know what the membership fee is.

0
💬 0

9448.837 - 9472.024 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

9472.344 - 9478.445 Lee Cronin

So I would say anyone higher than 2%, I mean, I think there's a 0% chance of AGI doom.

0
💬 0

9478.765 - 9505.235 Lex Fridman

Zero. Just to push back on the argument where the N of zero on the AGI, we could see on Earth that there is increasing levels of intelligence of organisms. We could see what humans with extra intelligence were able to do to the other species. So that is... a lot of samples of data what a delta in intelligence gives you.

0
💬 0

9505.595 - 9517.886 Lex Fridman

When you have an increase in intelligence, how you're able to dominate a species on Earth. And so the idea there is that if you have a being that's 10x smarter than humans,

0
💬 0

9519.495 - 9537.598 Lex Fridman

we're not gonna be able to predict what that's going to, what that being is gonna be able to do, especially if it has the power to hurt humans, which you can imagine a lot of trajectories in which the more benefit AI systems give, the more control we give to those AI systems.

0
💬 0

9538.238 - 9551.367 Lex Fridman

over our power grid, over our nuclear weapons, or weapons of any sort, and then it's hard to know what an ultra-intelligent system would be able to do in that case. You don't find that convincing?

0
💬 0

9551.567 - 9566.776 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

9568.618 - 9589.612 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

9590.412 - 9616.277 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

9616.617 - 9629.16 Lex Fridman

Yeah, yeah, which is basically a... For people who don't understand the point, the Chem Machina is a great film about, I guess, AGI embodied, and Chem is the chemistry version of that.

0
💬 0

9629.542 - 9651.309 Lee Cronin

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...

0
💬 0

9652.97 - 9677.108 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

9677.528 - 9694.972 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

9695.492 - 9721.961 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

9722.702 - 9746.053 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

9746.753 - 9767.947 Lee Cronin

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?

0
💬 0

9768.568 - 9776.253 Lee Cronin

Well, I think it's kind of they're making leaps that they're trapped in a virtual reality that isn't reality.

0
💬 0

9776.853 - 9810.097 Lex Fridman

Well, I can continue a set of arguments here, but also it is true that ideologies that fearmonger are dangerous. Because you can then use it to control, to regulate in a way that halts progress, to control people, to cancel people, all that kind of stuff. So you have to be careful. Reason ultimately wins, right? But there is a lot of concerns with superintelligence systems, very capable systems.

0
💬 0

9810.497 - 9830.726 Lex Fridman

I think when you hear the word superintelligence, you're hearing like it's smarter than humans in every way that humans are smart. But the... Paperclip manufacturing system doesn't need to be smart in every way. It just needs to be smart in a set of specific ways.

0
💬 0

9830.926 - 9847.937 Lex Fridman

And the more capable the AI systems become, the more you could see us giving them control over, like I said, our power grid, a lot of aspects of human life. And that means they will be able to do more and more damage when there's unintended consequences that come to life.

0
💬 0

9849.029 - 9864.519 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

9864.719 - 9869.022 Lex Fridman

Yeah, we're both qualified in sentience, I think, as much as anyone else.

0
💬 0

9869.062 - 9892.359 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

9892.659 - 9916.971 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

9917.592 - 9925.757 Lex Fridman

And so... In evolution. You don't think it's possible to engineer, for example, sorry to interrupt, but like a perfect virus? No. That's deadly enough? No.

0
💬 0

9926.798 - 9951.773 Lex Fridman

nonsensical okay i think that just wouldn't again it wouldn't work it was too deadly it would just kill the radius and not replicate yeah i mean you don't think it's possible to get a i mean if you were super i mean i if you were it not kill all of life on earth but kill all humans there's not many of us there's only like eight billion there's there's so much more ants i mean i don't i so many more ants

0
💬 0

9953.12 - 9954.202 Lex Fridman

And they're pretty smart.

0
💬 0

9954.983 - 9978.339 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

9978.739 - 9996.271 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

9998.913 - 10021.071 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

10021.091 - 10028.275 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

10028.495 - 10028.656 Lee Cronin

Yeah.

0
💬 0

10028.916 - 10048.548 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

10049.629 - 10075.809 Lex Fridman

Well, I think there's several things to say there. One, I think there is a role in society for people that say we're all going to die. Because I think it filters through as a message, as a viral message, that gives us the proper amount of concern. Okay, all right. Meaning it's not 95%, but when you say 95% and it filters through society, it'll give an average of like 0.03%, an average.

0
💬 0

10078.451 - 10098.362 Lex Fridman

So it's nice to have people that are like, we're all going to die, then we'll have a proper concern. For example, I do believe we're not properly concerned about the threat of nuclear weapons currently. It just seems like people have forgotten that that's a thing, and there's a war in Ukraine with nuclear power involved.

0
💬 0

10098.382 - 10117.314 Lex Fridman

There's nuclear power throughout the world, and it just feels like we're on the brink of a potential world war, to a percentage that I don't think people are properly calibrating in their head. We're all thinking it's a Twitter battle as opposed to actual threat. So it's nice to have that kind of level of concern.

0
💬 0

10117.694 - 10141.22 Lex Fridman

But to me, when I hear AI doomers, what I'm imagining is with unintended consequences, a potential situation where let's say 5% of the world suffers deeply because of a mistake made of unintended consequences. I don't want to imagine the entirety of human civilization dying, but there could be a lot of suffering if this is done poorly.

0
💬 0

10141.4 - 10160.571 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

10160.971 - 10177.138 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

10177.478 - 10198.493 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

10198.513 - 10224.823 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

10224.843 - 10244.33 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

10244.37 - 10261.542 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

10261.842 - 10286.643 Lex Fridman

I mean, just this thought experiment of the United States and China and Russia and major nuclear powers get together and say, all right, we're going to distribute nuclear weapons to every single nation on Earth. Yep. Oh, boy. I mean, that has a probably greater than 50% chance of eliminating major military conflict.

0
💬 0

10287.063 - 10287.243 Lee Cronin

Yeah.

0
💬 0

10287.703 - 10288.544 Lex Fridman

Yeah, but it's not 100%.

0
💬 0

10288.624 - 10309.759 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

10310.059 - 10327.903 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

10327.943 - 10346.429 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

10347.149 - 10354.352 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

10354.612 - 10362.576 Lex Fridman

But I think, yeah. But the probability of a bad actor of one of the nations setting off a nuclear weapon

0
💬 0

10364.693 - 10390.632 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

10391.272 - 10393.673 Lee Cronin

I know this is crazy and I apologize for it.

0
💬 0

10393.793 - 10420.103 Lex Fridman

I think it's just to be clear, we're just having a thought experiment that's interesting, but there's terrorist organizations that would take that trade. We have to ask ourselves the question of how many, which percentage of humans would be suicide bombers, essentially, where they would sacrifice their own life because they hate another group of people.

0
💬 0

10421.103 - 10426.626 Lex Fridman

I believe it's a very small fraction, but is it large enough to, if you give out nuclear weapons,

0
💬 0

10427.026 - 10444.775 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

10445.655 - 10445.875 Lex Fridman

Sure.

0
💬 0

10446.316 - 10447.396 Lee Cronin

In the simulation. I love it.

0
💬 0

10447.636 - 10448.797 Lex Fridman

It's not going to kill all humans.

0
💬 0

10448.877 - 10452.736 Lee Cronin

It's just going to have economic consequences. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I just made it up.

0
💬 0

10452.816 - 10466.312 Lex Fridman

No, it's interesting. But it's interesting whether that would have as much power on human psychology as actual physical nuclear explosion. I think so. It's possible, but people don't take economic consequences as seriously, I think, as...

0
💬 0

10467.313 - 10489.634 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

10490.134 - 10497.937 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

10498.447 - 10513.93 Lex Fridman

Yeah, yeah. So it's like a video game. We all have to join this metaverse video game. Yeah. And then there's dire economic consequences. I don't know how. And it's all run by AI, as you mentioned. So the AI doomers are really terrified at this point.

0
💬 0

10514.39 - 10516.81 Lee Cronin

No, they're happy. They have a job for another 20 years, right?

0
💬 0

10517.39 - 10518.651 Lex Fridman

Oh, fear mongering.

0
💬 0

10518.691 - 10521.951 Lee Cronin

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a believer in equal employment.

0
💬 0

10522.631 - 10528.523 Lex Fridman

You've mentioned that, what do you call it? Chem Machina?

0
💬 0

10528.783 - 10528.944 Lee Cronin

Yeah.

0
💬 0

10529.204 - 10543.324 Lex Fridman

Yeah. So you've mentioned that a chemical brain is something you're interested in creating. And that's a way to get conscious AI soon. Can you explain what a chemical brain is?

0
💬 0

10544.246 - 10564.798 Lee Cronin

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,

0
💬 0

10565.718 - 10592.041 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

10594.461 - 10622.632 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

10622.652 - 10645.017 Lee Cronin

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?

0
💬 0

10645.357 - 10666.106 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

10666.606 - 10687.653 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

10688.948 - 10712.835 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

10714.515 - 10731.62 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

10733.422 - 10759.118 Lex Fridman

you know and that's kind of and had the chicken had an alternative understanding of why the farmer was feeding it it's interesting though because we don't know what's special about the human mind that's able to come up with these kind of generalities this universal theories of things and come up with novelty I can imagine because you gave an example you know about William and Leroy I feel like

0
💬 0

10761.491 - 10783.994 Lex Fridman

example like that we'll be able to see in future versions of large language models. We'll be really, really, really impressed by the humor, the insights, all of it, because it's fundamentally trained on all the incredible humor and insights that's available out there on the internet, right? So we'll be impressed. I think we'll be impressed.

0
💬 0

10784.534 - 10793.977 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

10794.517 - 10803.039 Lex Fridman

So novelty. It is interesting whether these large language models will ever be able to come up with something truly novel.

0
💬 0

10803.099 - 10818.539 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

10819.079 - 10838.305 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

10838.885 - 10857.851 Lee Cronin

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...

0
💬 0

10859.251 - 10878.856 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

10881.184 - 10903.773 Lex Fridman

modified tweaked is well yeah but i mean cheating well you could say that training on human data in the first place is cheating well let me the human is in the loop sorry to interrupt yes so human is definitely in the loop uh but it's not just human is in the loop a very large collection of humans is in the loop look i totally that could be

0
💬 0

10905.765 - 10928.343 Lex Fridman

I mean, to me, it's not intuitive that you said prime numbers, that the system can't generate an algorithm, right? That the algorithm that can generate prime numbers or the algorithm that can tell you if a number is prime and so on and generate algorithms that generate algorithms that generate algorithms that start to look a lot like human reasoning, you know?

0
💬 0

10928.363 - 10928.383 Lee Cronin

I...

0
💬 0

10930.325 - 10959.064 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

10960.365 - 10984.822 Lee Cronin

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...

0
💬 0

10985.482 - 11008.082 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11008.502 - 11029.306 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11030.166 - 11054.044 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11056.218 - 11070.905 Lee Cronin

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...

0
💬 0

11071.585 - 11092.567 Lex Fridman

you can prompt it to have intention. Basically start with the initial conditions and get it going. Where the, you know, currently large language models, Chad GPT, only talks to you when you talk to it. There's no reason why you can't just start it talking.

0
💬 0

11093.747 - 11096.568 Lee Cronin

But those initial conditions came from someone starting it.

0
💬 0

11096.949 - 11097.129 Lex Fridman

Yes.

0
💬 0

11097.249 - 11116.376 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11116.716 - 11118.417 Lee Cronin

Because obviously that's what people want to sell us.

0
💬 0

11119.778 - 11142.715 Lex Fridman

Well, but there could be, I mean, AGI is a loaded term, but there could be incredibly super impressive intelligent systems on the way to AGI. So these large language models, I mean, if it appears conscious, if it appears super intelligent, who are we to say it's not?

0
💬 0

11143.365 - 11165.459 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11165.579 - 11180.127 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11180.267 - 11191.176 Lex Fridman

Well, so we should be clear that it can currently produce things that are, in a shallow sense, novel, that are not in the training set.

0
💬 0

11191.656 - 11208.23 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11209.311 - 11228.49 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11228.55 - 11237.38 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11237.981 - 11260.964 Lex Fridman

yeah right i don't know what's going on censorship yeah and so i mean that's interesting but it will push us humans to uh characterize novelty better like characterize the the novel like what is novel what is truly novel what's the difference between novelty and interpolation i think that this this is the thing that makes me most excited about these technologies is they're going to help me demonstrate to you that time is fundamental and

0
💬 0

11261.084 - 11280.986 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11282.668 - 11295.304 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11296.209 - 11312.018 Lex Fridman

Yeah, you mentioned GPT for electron density. So a GPT-like system for generating molecules that can bind to host automatically. I mean, that's interesting. That's really interesting. Applying this same kind of transform mechanism.

0
💬 0

11312.867 - 11336.283 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11336.303 - 11342.547 Lee Cronin

They're interesting. And I was thinking, well, molecules aren't really graphs. And they're not continuously differentiable.

0
💬 0

11343.367 - 11367.063 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

11368.584 - 11385.695 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11386.075 - 11407.11 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11407.49 - 11424.901 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11425.662 - 11446.785 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11446.805 - 11459.533 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

11460.089 - 11463.531 Lex Fridman

Yeah. The, the computer being the thing that, right.

0
💬 0

11463.551 - 11478.3 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11478.34 - 11482.963 Lex Fridman

Well, were the hallucinations, what are those still, uh, accurate?

0
💬 0

11483.24 - 11496.189 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11496.71 - 11520.923 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11520.943 - 11542.769 Lee Cronin

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...

0
💬 0

11543.973 - 11572.066 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11573.519 - 11580.443 Lex Fridman

Yeah, and how novel the things that humans generate is also difficult to quantify. They seem novel.

0
💬 0

11582.104 - 11595.151 Lee Cronin

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...

0
💬 0

11599.073 - 11617.36 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11617.901 - 11639.931 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11640.772 - 11659.145 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11660.527 - 11667.075 Lex Fridman

So it's hard to quantify novelty looking backwards. I mean, the present and the future are the novelty generators.

0
💬 0

11667.435 - 11686.384 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11688.105 - 11697.127 Lex Fridman

And same would be with AI. Yeah. But I think just the scale you can achieve in terms of impact with AI systems is... Pretty nerve-wracking.

0
💬 0

11697.507 - 11699.93 Lee Cronin

But that's what the big companies want you to think.

0
💬 0

11701.232 - 11704.695 Lex Fridman

But not like in terms of destroy all humans, but you could have major...

0
💬 0

11707.014 - 11734.223 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

11735.003 - 11754.231 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11754.591 - 11754.811 Lex Fridman

Yeah.

0
💬 0

11755.011 - 11761.774 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11762.25 - 11779.527 Lex Fridman

Yeah, there's a little bit of that, but there's also not enough celebration of the positive impact that all these technologies have had. We tend to focus on the negative and tend to forget that, in part because it's hard to measure. It's very hard to measure the positive impact social media had on the world.

0
💬 0

11780.236 - 11797.709 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11798.409 - 11806.635 Lee Cronin

And I think that what worries me right now in the present is lack of authenticated users and authenticated data.

0
💬 0

11807.556 - 11808.196 Lex Fridman

Human users.

0
💬 0

11808.376 - 11809.137 Lee Cronin

Yeah, human users.

0
💬 0

11810.345 - 11829.311 Lex Fridman

I still think that there will be AI agents that appear to be conscious, but they would have to be also authenticated and labeled as such. There's too much value in that, like friendships with AI systems. There's too much meaningful human experiences to have with AI systems that I just...

0
💬 0

11830.131 - 11841.239 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11842.8 - 11849.804 Lex Fridman

Sentience, yes. I think legal rights, no. I think it's the same. You can have a really deep, meaningful relationship with a dog.

0
💬 0

11850.885 - 11851.746 Lee Cronin

But the dog's sentient.

0
💬 0

11852.666 - 11852.886 Lex Fridman

Yes.

0
💬 0

11854.207 - 11857.89 Lee Cronin

The chatbot's not. Right now, using the technology we use, it's not going to be sentient.

0
💬 0

11859.428 - 11881.378 Lex Fridman

Ah, this is going to be a fun continued conversation on Twitter that I look forward to. Since you've had also from another place some debates that were inspired by the assembly theory paper, let me ask you about God. Is there any room for notions of God in assembly theory?

0
💬 0

11882.53 - 11898.822 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11899.924 - 11923.147 Lex Fridman

Sure, but does it mean, does it not, it still could mean that that's a projection from the real world where we're just assigning words and concepts to a thing that is fundamental to the real world, that there is something out there that is a creative force underlying the universe.

0
💬 0

11924.375 - 11945.648 Lee Cronin

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?

0
💬 0

11946.028 - 11964.959 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11964.999 - 11990.649 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

11991.95 - 11995.372 Lee Cronin

And... You said that there's that creative force.

0
💬 0

11995.752 - 12006.939 Lex Fridman

Do you think, just to think on that point, do you think there's a creative force? Is there like a thing, like a driver that's creating stuff?

0
💬 0

12007.679 - 12009.981 Lee Cronin

Yeah. I think that... So I think that...

0
💬 0

12010.768 - 12013.636 Lex Fridman

And where? Can you describe it mathematically?

0
💬 0

12013.656 - 12014.538 Lee Cronin

Well, I think selection.

0
💬 0

12014.658 - 12016.563 Lex Fridman

I think selection... Selection is the force.

0
💬 0

12016.764 - 12019.591 Lee Cronin

Selection is the force in the universe that creates novelty.

0
💬 0

12020.782 - 12023.043 Lex Fridman

So is selection somehow fundamental?

0
💬 0

12024.924 - 12040.61 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

12040.89 - 12044.832 Lex Fridman

A thing that exists persists in time.

0
💬 0

12045.332 - 12055.686 Lee Cronin

Yeah. I mean, let's think, maybe the universe is actually... But in the present, everything that can exist in the present does exist.

0
💬 0

12061.71 - 12063.751 Lex Fridman

Well, that would mean it's deterministic, right?

0
💬 0

12065.034 - 12083.929 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

12083.949 - 12085.27 Lex Fridman

Did you just say there's no free will, though?

0
💬 0

12086.171 - 12114.006 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

12115.107 - 12117.767 Lex Fridman

There's a time element loaded into that statement.

0
💬 0

12118.007 - 12120.708 Lee Cronin

I think that the universe is able to do what it can in the present.

0
💬 0

12121.621 - 12142.309 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

12142.776 - 12145.897 Lex Fridman

But we can still imagine stuff, right? We can imagine stuff that will never happen.

0
💬 0

12145.957 - 12166.323 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

12167.463 - 12172.545 Lee Cronin

Isn't that weird too? Yeah. How do you?

0
💬 0

12174.969 - 12177.812 Lee Cronin

It breaks the laws of physics as we know them right now.

0
💬 0

12179.074 - 12182.939 Lex Fridman

Yeah. So you think the imagination has a causal effect on the future.

0
💬 0

12183.559 - 12183.84 Lee Cronin

Yeah.

0
💬 0

12184.04 - 12191.609 Lex Fridman

But it does exist in there, in the head. It does. There must be a lot of power in whatever's going on. There could be a lot of power in whatever's going on in there.

0
💬 0

12192.848 - 12217.164 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

12217.545 - 12222.508 Lee Cronin

It's not as Yasha was saying to me, randomness goes and you just randomly do random stuff.

0
💬 0

12223.108 - 12246.858 Lee Cronin

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

0
💬 0

12248.223 - 12280.612 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

12280.632 - 12282.113 Lex Fridman

His ideas, but not the person.

0
💬 0

12283.254 - 12290.862 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

12291.903 - 12298.549 Lex Fridman

Would you be very upset if somebody made a good large language model that's fine-tuned to Lee Cronin?

0
💬 0

12299.386 - 12315.045 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

12316.081 - 12318.862 Lee Cronin

Sure. Sure.

0
💬 0

12319.082 - 12332.865 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

12333.286 - 12349.204 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

12350.124 - 12364.888 Lex Fridman

Yeah. Yeah. That's what life is. It's just some novelty generation and then you're done. Each one of us just generate a little bit. Or have the capacity to, at least.

0
💬 0

12365.288 - 12391.733 Lee Cronin

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?

0
💬 0

12392.133 - 12394.234 Lex Fridman

In retrospect, it will all be obvious, I think.

0
💬 0

12395.552 - 12405.809 Lee Cronin

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.

0
💬 0

12407.605 - 12426.338 Lex Fridman

Well, I can't wait to see where it evolves, Lee. And I'm glad I get to exist in this universe with you. You're a fascinating human. This is always a pleasure. I hope to talk to you many more times. And I'm a huge fan of just watching you create stuff in this world. And thank you for talking today.

0
💬 0

12426.719 - 12428.56 Lee Cronin

It's a pleasure as always, Lex. Thanks for having me on.

0
💬 0

12429.821 - 12450.159 Lex Fridman

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Lee Cronin. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan. We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.

0
💬 0

12451.06 - 12453.802 Lex Fridman

Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

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