Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2184 - Sara Imari Walker
Uploaded: 2024-08-07T17:00:06.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2184 - Sara Imari Walker' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-08-07. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2184 - Sara Imari Walker' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-08-07. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2184 - Sara Imari Walker

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
So your subject matter is so fascinating to me.
So first, please explain what this idea of assembly theory.
Yeah.
Assembly theory is born out of an interest in solving the origin of life
and finding aliens.
So that's sort of the motivation.
I think it's really important to be clear about that to start
because it introduces some kind of radical reconceptions
of the way we think about fundamental physics, at least I think so.
But the key idea of the theory is that the universe cannot generate complexity
outside of living processes.
And so we have a way of formalizing what seems kind of intuitively obvious
that the universe doesn't generate complex objects for free.
And we do this with this idea of assembly theory of thinking about
the assembly space, which is like the space of all constructible objects.
And you can talk about the complexity in that space as a minimal number of
steps for making an object.
And if you see objects that require a lot of steps to make them
and they're in high abundance, life is the only thing that can make them.
So this includes plant life, this includes everything, technology, everything
on your table, you know, requires billions of years of evolution, evolution of
intelligence and technology to generate.
So when you say life to generate, what about like crystals?
And what about, have you ever seen that enormous cave in Mexico where they have
these insane crystal structures?
Is that the one that's like hot inside?
And like, yes, yes, I have seen that.
It's gorgeous.
I've never been there.
Amazing.
Yeah, totally.
But it kind of looks like somebody made it, but it's just natural processes.
So I'm actually really interested in understanding to what degree we can
consider minerals on our planet alive or artifacts of life.
But we haven't formalized the theory entirely for minerals yet.
So I think that one of the sort of key results we have so far is actually quantifying
in molecules a complexity boundary above which a molecule is so complex that we
can say it's definitively of life.
And we've experimentally verified measuring this property of assembly of
molecules to say these are derived from life.
These are, you know, and that there's a clear boundary.
For minerals, we haven't done that yet because we're still formalizing the
theory and the kind of measurements we need to take.
But I expect there to be a boundary that planets can make some kinds of crystal
complexity, but not all of it that we see on this planet.
So what is, what's the conventional definition of life?
Yeah, so there's a lot of debate about what definitions of life should hold.
But the one that is usually cited by astrobiologists is life is a self-sustaining
chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.
And I've memorized it because I find it so annoying.
So I'm like, I got it down.
I got to know what I'm annoyed with.
What annoys you about it?
Everything.
Actually, it was very funny writing the book because I wanted to get into the
new ideas.
And my editor was like, you've got to explain how people think about life now.
And I was like, okay, well, this definition is the most annoying one.
I'll just pick it apart.
And it's actually like all the words in it are annoying in some sense.
So the first one is that life is chemical.
I've never really thought about chemistry being the defining feature of life.
I think you have to separate out that life emerges, at least as we understand
it, from a chemical soup on a planet.
So it emerges in chemistry, but it doesn't mean it's a chemical phenomena.
And the sort of analogy from the physicist's conception of nature I could draw
there is we don't think that gravity is a phenomena of rocks.
Gravity represents some universal physics in our universe.
And so when we're thinking about, you know, planets and things, we don't think
that they obey the laws of gravity because they're made of rocks.
We understand that there's some property called mass that's much more abstract
and applies to everything.
I think life's kind of the same.
It emerges in chemistry, but there are some informational properties, these
things about how life generates complex structures and how it does that so
uniquely.
That is universal physics that happens to emerge in chemistry.
So chemistry has to go out.
It's not just a chemical phenomena.
And I think you need to recognize that if you're going to talk about like
technology and artificial intelligence and like are they alive or not?
Because they're very different than, you know, like what's happening inside a
cell.
Right.
Non-biological.
But still seemingly alive.
Yes.
Maybe.
Maybe.
Maybe.
Perhaps.
Yeah.
Open to debate.
Open to debate.
I've said that about technology, that technology does seem to be a life form
that requires us to give birth to it.
Yes.
Didn't Marshall McLuhan had...
I like that way of thinking about it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Marshall McLuhan had a great quote, and I believe this was in the 1960s.
He said that we are the sex organs of the machine world.
Oh.
Isn't that incredible?
Yeah, I like that a lot, actually.
I don't disagree with that.
Yeah.
Especially if it does become some sort of digital life.
Yeah.
That's essentially what we are.
Yeah.
We're just by proxy moms.
We are.
So the way that I think about it is to think about life not in terms of
individuals but lineages.
So, you know, there's a lineage of how information has been structuring the
material world, what we talk about in assembly theory, in terms of all of the
configurations of objects created on our planet over 4 billion years.
And that's a process that's continuous with objects making other objects.
And there's no reason that that should stop with biological forms of life, and
it just moves into technology.
So I like this idea that we're the reproductive organs, though, because I
always think about, like, societies and, like, global integrated systems as
being living things, and we're just, like, component parts of them.
Well, they certainly look like it.
When you look at traffic from overhead and you compare it to blood moving
through arteries, it's really kind of extraordinary.
Yeah.
Because if you see the ebb and flow of the white lights and the red taillights
back and forth, and then you see blood cells moving through a person's body, it's
kind of similar.
Yeah.
In a very weird way.
And if you think that these cars are all carrying people that are assembling
this society, both from the inside in terms of, like, paperwork and research
and all the different things that people are doing,
and then the outside in terms of constructing new buildings and putting glass
structures and all these different things, like, we really are.
Yes.
Like, some sort of weird, you know, we're, like, a form of, like, the city
itself is, like, a living thing that we're making.
Yeah.
And I think it's really important for us to recognize that.
Actually, it's interesting that you use cars as your analogy because Carl Sagan
actually had, like, the same analogy.
He would have liked that a lot.
You know, thinking about aliens coming to life would have thought cars were the
dominant life form.
Which I think is great, right, because, like, exactly like you're describing,
it looks like the lifeblood of our planet.
And I always think about cities at night as kind of, you know, the key
signature of life on this planet.
If you look at it remotely.
Sure.
You can see, you know, all this structure on the planet.
Right.
But it is hard for us because we're so, you know, like, so much wanting to
think about ourselves as individuals
and, like, the apex of all of the evolutionary processes, not to think about
ourselves as part of systems that are much larger than us.
And I think it's critically important that we kind of change our reference
frame on that because we're also seeing right now with, like, social networks
and the influence of, like, having all these societal level dialogues, like,
brought to every individual.
And, like, we don't know how to process that information.
Yes.
But we are part of these collective systems that are much larger than us and
they are constructing a lot of the world around us without individuals having,
you know, as much agency in that process as we think we do.
Yet that process is also what gives us our agency.
So it's kind of paradoxical.
Right.
Right.
I've often said that if an alien race that was completely outside of our
understanding of life and our understanding of biology, if they observed us and
they'd say, well, what is this dominant species doing?
Well, it makes better things.
That's all it does.
Yes.
We do a lot of things, but ultimately those things, even war, which is
essentially about acquiring money and resources, we use those resources and
that money to make better things.
And in engaging in war, you're constantly advancing technology to have an
advantage over the universe.
So you're making better things.
Yes.
Like everything is making better things, which when you scale it up, ultimately
will lead to another life form.
It will lead to some new thing.
I think so.
Well, if we don't kill ourselves or if we don't get super volcano, asteroid.
Yeah.
A lot of different things can happen.
I'm not a pessimist.
I think we'll be around for a while.
You think so?
Yeah.
But I have a pathology that I'm like really optimistic as a person.
So I have a hard time.
That's good.
That's not a pathology.
Why do you think that's a pathology?
I think because I think being overly optimistic can leave blind spots.
But part of the reason that I imbue so much optimism in my work is like I think
we need more optimistic narratives about the future because so many people are
really bleak.
I agree.
I don't think that helps anybody.
And I think ultimately most of the things that you're really terrified about do
not come to pass.
Yes.
I think us being terrified of them is like an immune response.
So usually I'm not afraid of the things that people are really scared of and
talking about because it means society is dealing with it.
Right.
Which I you know maybe that's just sort of a scapegoat.
I don't have to worry about those things because someone else is.
But I think actually there's something rather deep there that like the things
that we're trying to work through at this moment in history are being worked
through.
My fear about those kind of thoughts is when I worry about things and I say
well I don't have to worry because society is working through it.
I also say yeah but someone's probably not and they're enhancing the actual
threat so they can profit off of it.
Yeah.
That's another.
I mean that's the military industrial complex.
That's a lot of different things.
I think that there's a lot of that unfortunately that's attached to green
energy.
I think you know the idea of having green energy is wonderful.
Everybody should agree to that.
But the idea that you're going to give massive corporations this completely
philanthropic view of the world all of a sudden.
That's not.
Yeah.
That's not real.
I know.
They make money.
They're trying to make more money.
They're going to lie to you.
Everyone's trying to make money and get power.
And I think once you realize that like it's a lot easier to see motives.
It's freaky but that also leads to the acquisition of resources which leads to
making better things.
I mean I am all goo goo.
I was reading articles all day today on the iPhone 16.
Why?
Why do I care about the iPhone 16?
My iPhone 15 is perfect.
It works great.
What's wrong with me?
I don't know.
But I think that's also built into materialism.
I think materialism sort of facilitates the creation of newer and better things
consistently and constantly.
Because everybody's like what do you got an iPhone 14?
What are you poor Sarah?
You know like people get crazy.
Oh I'm slumming it.
But you know what I'm saying?
You know how people get weird like where's your car?
You