Episode Transcript: #2184 - Sara Imari Walker
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The Joe Rogan Experience.
Showing 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 is 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 of 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.