The Big Picture is rarely as big as a new theory of life
Talk History at 30,000 feet: The Big Picture
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My full review of Life As No One Knows It by Sara Imari Walker
Is glee a word we can use these days? I feel like an anachronism just typing it. Sara Walker is one of the most unusual thinkers I’ve encountered. I became acquainted with her work through her appearances on various podcasts, and just to listen to her express her worldview filled me with, yes, glee. She talked about topics dear to my heart and no doubt to yours like the origin of life and the existence of alien intelligence. Except she was in so deep she had her own long-considered ideas and vocabulary. She rejected all the orthodoxies I’d ever heard, but to listen to her was to hear the beginnings of a scientific and philosophical project that made compelling and intuitive sense. It’s a lot to take in, and this book is her attempt to communicate clearly the ideas she’s working on.
Twitter has long been a place to find some of her concise and intriguing thoughts about life, physics and existence, most in the old 280 character format. For example, “We will only discover alien life when it is no longer alien”, and “Not every bit of matter will ever organize into something alive, we are the lucky bits that get to think, feel and communicate what it is to exist”, and “assembly defines where things exist in time in the same manner that spatial coordinates define where things exist in space”.
Sara Walker is a physicist, yet her career is devoted to matters that usually fall under the purview of biology or chemistry. She’s also readable and funny. In Life As No One Knows It, she walks the reader through her journey to elaborate a theoretical and generalizable basis for life. She notes that while the “idiosyncratic details of biology” are vital to understanding life on Earth, they don’t matter if the goal is to understand life as a universal phenomenon:
“We need a description abstract enough to unify all things we think are life, anticipate the things we don’t think are life but are, and solve the question life’s origin.”
She believes a new physics is necessary to explain life. I do her a disservice to try to summarize her careful and stepwise arguments. But I can’t convey even the gist without at least offering some of her prose. Her understanding is phrased in statements honed over years of effort, and mine are not. This is in fact one of her starting points. Physical objects, including of course life, and the consequences and products of life (like careful phraseologies, or screwdrivers) are contingent on what came before, “and it is precisely the chains of contingency necessary to assemble them that cause these objects to be far too improbable to be explained within current theories of physics.” Said another way, life exists in lineages that have a causal history, and have been the objects of selection and evolution over time. This is a far more general description of life than describing qualities of the specific objects like bacteria and baboons that exist on Earth.
Screwdrivers don’t arise through random fluctuations in the universe, and she and her collaborators argue that without an evolutionary process, the existence of a screwdriver is physically impossible. This leads to a conjecture, one her work has set about to investigate:
“Life is the only thing in the universe that can make objects that are composed of many unique, recursively constructed parts.”
She seeks a testable theory, one that can be studied in the lab. This effort has a name, Assembly Theory. I will not deny you the benefit of hearing her far more cogent account. But her work formalizes the notion that the objects made by life are constructed. There is a minimum number of steps necessary to make any object. The focus is on complex molecules, and the idea is that objects that are part of the lineages we call life are distinguishable from nonlife in their ability, in quantity and reliably, to assemble complex molecules. Life utilizes greater numbers of steps in assembling the components of which it is comprised than does nonlife. This is because the information for construction is retained in the lineage called life, and has been selected and ramified over vast quantities of time, and is available for use in construction. The retained information can be further selected, allowing for the production of novel objects.
If true, the implications of this project can seem radical; if seen another way, illuminating and simplifying. Life is the only physical system that uses information, and that information is causal. Life on Earth is a lineage that stretches back to and is contingent on what happened at the very beginnings of the planet. Time is thus an essential element of life. The products of human technology (the “technosphere”) are part of the lineage of life on Earth, so they are life. A screwdriver is life. AI is life as it emerged from the same historical and causal lineages as the rest of life on Earth. Alien life will be very different from life on Earth, but will still have been constructed based on the principles elaborated in Assembly Theory. It will exist in quantity, ie it will have many copies, and will have been constructed from of a process utilizing many steps.
One day, maybe even soon, we could encounter alien life. How will we even recognize it if we do? Surely its structure and history will be very different from that of life on this planet. If Walker is right, we may be developing just now the theoretical tools to approach this possibility, lest we pass it by without noticing in our incomprehension.
Is glee a word we can use these days? I feel like an anachronism just typing it. Sara Walker is one of the most unusual thinkers I’ve encountered. I became acquainted with her work through her appearances on various podcasts, and just to listen to her express her worldview filled me with, yes, glee. She talked about topics dear to my heart and no doubt to yours like the origin of life and the existence of alien intelligence. Except she was in so deep she had her own long-considered ideas and vocabulary. She rejected all the orthodoxies I’d ever heard, but to listen to her was to hear the beginnings of a scientific and philosophical project that made compelling and intuitive sense. It’s a lot to take in, and this book is her attempt to communicate clearly the ideas she’s working on.
Twitter has long been a place to find some of her concise and intriguing thoughts about life, physics and existence, most in the old 280 character format. For example, “We will only discover alien life when it is no longer alien”, and “Not every bit of matter will ever organize into something alive, we are the lucky bits that get to think, feel and communicate what it is to exist”, and “assembly defines where things exist in time in the same manner that spatial coordinates define where things exist in space”.
Sara Walker is a physicist, yet her career is devoted to matters that usually fall under the purview of biology or chemistry. She’s also readable and funny. In Life As No One Knows It, she walks the reader through her journey to elaborate a theoretical and generalizable basis for life. She notes that while the “idiosyncratic details of biology” are vital to understanding life on Earth, they don’t matter if the goal is to understand life as a universal phenomenon:
“We need a description abstract enough to unify all things we think are life, anticipate the things we don’t think are life but are, and solve the question life’s origin.”
She believes a new physics is necessary to explain life. I do her a disservice to try to summarize her careful and stepwise arguments. But I can’t convey even the gist without at least offering some of her prose. Her understanding is phrased in statements honed over years of effort, and mine are not. This is in fact one of her starting points. Physical objects, including of course life, and the consequences and products of life (like careful phraseologies, or screwdrivers) are contingent on what came before, “and it is precisely the chains of contingency necessary to assemble them that cause these objects to be far too improbable to be explained within current theories of physics.” Said another way, life exists in lineages that have a causal history, and have been the objects of selection and evolution over time. This is a far more general description of life than describing qualities of the specific objects like bacteria and baboons that exist on Earth.
Screwdrivers don’t arise through random fluctuations in the universe, and she and her collaborators argue that without an evolutionary process, the existence of a screwdriver is physically impossible. This leads to a conjecture, one her work has set about to investigate:
“Life is the only thing in the universe that can make objects that are composed of many unique, recursively constructed parts.”
She seeks a testable theory, one that can be studied in the lab. This effort has a name, Assembly Theory. I will not deny you the benefit of hearing her far more cogent account. But her work formalizes the notion that the objects made by life are constructed. There is a minimum number of steps necessary to make any object. The focus is on complex molecules, and the idea is that objects that are part of the lineages we call life are distinguishable from nonlife in their ability, in quantity and reliably, to assemble complex molecules. Life utilizes greater numbers of steps in assembling the components of which it is comprised than does nonlife. This is because the information for construction is retained in the lineage called life, and has been selected and ramified over vast quantities of time, and is available for use in construction. The retained information can be further selected, allowing for the production of novel objects.
If true, the implications of this project can seem radical; if seen another way, illuminating and simplifying. Life is the only physical system that uses information, and that information is causal. Life on Earth is a lineage that stretches back to and is contingent on what happened at the very beginnings of the planet. Time is thus an essential element of life. The products of human technology (the “technosphere”) are part of the lineage of life on Earth, so they are life. A screwdriver is life. AI is life as it emerged from the same historical and causal lineages as the rest of life on Earth. Alien life will be very different from life on Earth, but will still have been constructed based on the principles elaborated in Assembly Theory. It will exist in quantity, ie it will have many copies, and will have been constructed from of a process utilizing many steps.
One day, maybe even soon, we could encounter alien life. How will we even recognize it if we do? Surely its structure and history will be very different from that of life on this planet. If Walker is right, we may be developing just now the theoretical tools to approach this possibility, lest we pass it by without noticing in our incomprehension.
