286 | Blaise Agüera y Arcas on the Emergence of Replication and Computation

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2024

⏱️ 81 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Understanding how life began on Earth involves questions of chemistry, geology, planetary science, physics, and more. But the question of how random processes lead to organized, self-replicating, information-bearing systems is a more general one. That question can be addressed in an idealized world of computer code, initialized with random sequences and left to run. Starting with many such random systems, and allowing them to mutate and interact, will we end up with "lifelike," self-replicating programs? A new paper by Blaise Agüera y Arcas and collaborators suggests that the answer is yes. This raises interesting questions about whether computation is an attractor in the space of relevant dynamical processes, with implications for the origin and ubiquity of life.

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Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/08/19/286-blaise-aguera-y-arcas-on-the-emergence-of-replication-and-computation/

Blaise Agüera y Arcas received a B.A. in physics from Princeton University. He is currently a vice-president of engineering at Google, leader of the Cerebra team, and a member of the Paradigms of Intelligence team. He is the author of the books Ubi Sunt and Who Are We Now?, and the upcoming What Is Intelligence?

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Transcript

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0:41.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. Today's
0:45.1	podcast has a good news, bad news situation. The bad news is there will be bad language in this podcast not because we're getting especially
0:55.8	salty or profane or anything like that but because we're going to be talking
1:01.2	about computer simulations
1:03.4	that were written and run using a language called brain fuck.
1:08.0	Sorry about that if you have sensitive ears,
1:10.2	but this is a very real computer language
1:12.3	that was given that name brain fuck and so we're going
1:14.6	to say the phrase brain fuck over and over again. That's why I'm saying it right now just to loosen
1:20.0	you up and get you to know that this is what is going to be coming. The good news is it's going to be worth it. This is a really fascinating conversation about a super important topic, which is in some sense the topic is the origin of life, but there's not a lot of chemistry or biology or geology or anything like that in the talk, in the conversation.
1:42.0	It's a model for the origin of life, for a simulation of the
1:45.4	origin of life done on a computer. Today's guest is Blaze Agera E. Arcas, who is a
	...

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