(highlight:: The Three Key Features of Information: Reduction in Uncertainty, Copyability, and Counterfactual Nature
Transcript:
Speaker 1
In this instance, it actually led Sherlock Holmes to make a decision about what did happen so this is sort of one of the most mysterious properties of information, particularly when You come to trying to understand information and its role in living systems from the perspective of physics because in physics, things that don't happen don't happen and they don't Have any causal role in what does happen. But here we see a clear example of where this sort of property that is abstract seems to hop between these different systems, like a sentence, the dog didn't bark, but then somehow it Points to something that didn't happen and it can still cause other things to happen. So those are the three key features. The first one being reduction in uncertainty. The second, that it's copyable and retains meaning and the third being that it could be counterfactual or there's a counterfactual set of possibilities and some of them may or may not Themselves be realized, but somehow still can cause things to happen.)
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(highlight:: Assembly Theory: Measuring how alive something is based on its building blocks
Key takeaways:
• Molecules should not be viewed as hard point objects like elementary particles, but rather as complex objects to be examined from a material perspective.
• The construction of molecules or objects involves the joining of smaller components to create bonds and build towards a specific object.
• Life is unique in that it builds objects above a certain minimal path in a space of possibilities by reducing uncertainty and adding information.
• The presence of specific objects with a high abundance and large depth suggests the existence of a system that evolved the knowledge to build them.
• Objects themselves serve as evidence that information in their environment exists to assemble them.
• The complexity and aliveness of objects increase as one delves deeper into the space of possibilities and associated information.
• This approach provides a means to study non-life, life-boundering chemistry in a laboratory setting by measuring the shortest path in that space.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Assembly theory that I'm working on with Lee Cronin at the University of Glasgow and also with folks at Tana Fe Institute, which is proposing this idea that molecules as complex objects, We shouldn't look at them as hard point objects like we do elementary particles, but instead we should look at the object itself from a different kind of material perspective. So we shouldn't look at like physical stuff in the way we do in standard physics, but we should look at physical stuff in terms of the operations necessary to build the thing. So if you think about a molecule, a molecule is an object that you can decompose into atoms or if you prefer, you can imagine you have a Lego castle. I like to think about Lego Hogwarts because we can all kind of visualize that pretty easily. And you think I just have a whole bunch of bricks on the table and then you want to build up the object again. So if you're building the molecule, you start joining the atoms together to make bonds and you figure out all the ways that you can do that using pieces you've made before to get to that Molecule. Or if you're building Hogwarts, you do the same thing, you put two pieces together, you take pieces you've built already, put them together and then you get all the way up to Hogwarts. And what we think with this theory is that life is the only thing that builds objects above a certain minimal path in that space because each time you perform an operation of putting two Objects together, you have to make a choice. You're reducing the uncertainty and the possible futures of things you can build. You're adding information because you're basically reducing that possibility space like how we talked about before and you're building toward a specific object. And so if you actually observe a specific object with a very large depth, a very large number of operations and you see it in high abundance, it suggests that there had to be a system that Evolved the knowledge to build it, has information specific to producing that object. So objects themselves are evidence that information in their environment exists to assemble them, that's true always. But for some objects, it implies there's a whole cascade of other objects that have to exist. So I think of life in some sense as this chain of objects building other objects, I think of it as stack of objects. And the deeper into that space you get, the more information is associated with that object, the more complex those objects can be and the more alive it comes. And this became a way for us to talk about the non-life, life-boundering chemistry in a way that we can measure in a laboratory because we can measure the shortest path in that space. And just to go back to the Hogwarts analogy, if I was randomly building, I just gave you the pieces and I didn't give you the instructions for making Hogwarts. And maybe you've never seen Hogwarts before, you can just imagine how hard it would be to produce that. I mean, you can hit like what are all possible, pass like objects in Lego or what are all possible objects with the same number of pieces in Lego? That's the possibility space you're excluding when you actually observe Lego Hogwarts. All of these other things were selected out for that thing to exist. And the fact that there are multiple Lego sets across the surface of the planet is evidence of the fact that there are instructions in a booklet somewhere that specify how to build that Specific castle. And of course that booklet itself didn't emerge on its own. That particular castle was built because there was another book of the Hogwarts series that told this great story of this little boy that went on on this big adventure and it became a Very beloved story. And of course that story was inspired and why it used castles is because for centuries humans have been building castles and there's narratives of the hero's journey that emerged across Different cultures. So you can just see how all the information accrued over time to allow Lego Hogwarts to be a specific object that exists in our universe. And basically what we're trying to do with assembly theory is formalize that concept but make it an intrinsic property that we can measure an object so we can detect evidence of this Feature we usually think of as abstract by making information of physical attributes. So we treat a molecule not as like the three dimensional molecule structure but actually as all the ways the universe can build it. And that has all kinds of interesting philosophical implications for reinterpreting concepts of information. But I think this is one of the most interesting things when you get to the world of the complex is that there are new concepts that need to be invented. They're not things that are part of traditional physics and that's one of the reasons that I get really excited about working on physics of life and thinking about it from a complexity Standpoint.)
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(highlight:: The Misconception of Information as an Abstract Property As Opposed to a Physical One
Key takeaways:
• Information is one of the most interesting things to the speaker.
• The way we talk about information can lead to misconceptions.
• Understanding causation is important for shaping our futures.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So I guess that's one of the reasons I get so excited about this problem in particular information to me is one of the most interesting things because for me it is what we are but it's not In a simulated disembodied way. It's in a very physical way that I think is not intuitive for us at a cultural level right now because of the ways we talk about information in this kind of disembodied way, which is one Of the reasons people can imagine we live in simulated universes. And I don't know. I think the sort of standard paradigm leads to a lot of misconceptions that become culturally significant and it would be nice to feel a little bit more about the causation we actually Have and what our futures could be.)
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