Full podcast episode: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/ea2Zd9SZuMqweJ8.html Lex Fridman podcast channel: kzfaq.info Guest bio: Lee Cronin is a chemist at University of Glasgow.

15:35 the reason the shortest path is important is because of efficiency. That’s also why we break the pieces of reality down with our eyes and such tools to understand it in different ways so that we can use it and not need too much energy and die of lack of resources and so on.

I would think that for many cases finding the precise minimum number of steps or index would be an NP problem.

Getting a sense that this brings together J. Bach's notion that "reality is that which is implementable" and Wolfram's idea of computational irreducibly, ie "no cheating allowed".

Good to see Lee back here. His last chat was super.

13:00 not just work but the pattern. You can’t make a something if you haven’t made the things that make it. That’s why anything is possible but it takes understanding which is the evolution of mind when interacting with things and absorbing the details and using it in our predictions. How well we understand also determines how much we can create.

Lee mapped the spiral of life by counting the number of differences to their origin and factoring in complex nested systems. Lex asks the ultimate question "what's the factory that made the factory?" The mystery might be a potent unity, unfolding backward in time as a chain of interacting templates, like a box of Legos with every possible assembly index.

From an evolutionary perspective I think a focus on minimum assembly complexity isn't a particularly important metric. Far more important is assembly rate and robustness, which likely are correlated to assembly complexity but distinct features of the system.

🤔 hmmm.... assembly? Without an assembler? Doubtful.

He never says how we put the atoms together. How do we build the legos? He just says we put them together.

It's a pleasure to listen SMART PERSONS like You✨. Thank You🙏😊.

Wolfram's work on A New Kind of Science (NKS) has been published in various reputable scientific journals, including Complex Systems, Physical Review, and Journal of Statistical Physics.

Dear Sir, what is the predictive power of this theory? Can it make any testable predictions?

Can we have James Tour interviewed ?

15:00 no the laws of physics aren’t even laws but the most likely outcomes in that environment. It’s like a medium and each different area with its medium has different environmental habits/rules, some are more tight and bottlenecked so certain things are like 99.9999999 always happening the same but something interacting with it that’s more different than its pieces and it can’t break it down or absorb it can cause a change. Like breaking something down to the smallest points of connections and seeing its variables and remembering the first connection like a growing stem cell and it’s connected to the rest of the processes. The stem cell can only be that one if that thing is making it and that thing is subject to the influences and we could see them as like laws of evolution but it changes with the environment.

Is it true that his assembly theory is in fact an old compression algorithm used in computer science?

Quick thought, what if the quantum isn’t fundamental but a greater creation. Like the beginning isn’t the smallest point but somewhere in the middle and the quantum is grown smaller to be used in the creation of complex forms. Not just large forms like planets. Like think of it in the Big Bang’s point and it creates a lot of big well how would the small happen? Because the big causes friction or interacts and makes the small and that small group can rub other small groups and make even smaller forms that connect to the big.

Ivan, in Soviet Russia, was working in a tractor combinate, and decided to steal one pack from every component in the warehouse. However he tries to combine the parts, they always make a tank!

Assembly theory doesn't even seem like a theory to me. It depends on measurements we can already make, and it assigns values denoting complexity which is something information theory figured out decades ago. I am still not clear on what is so new and exciting about this

Why is it so difficult for these academic types to grasp the simple idea: more steps, always means more problems, not less. There is an insurmountable compounded improbability problem for any multi step cellular process.

Yeah it's just like legos, someone made those legos just like someone made you, and it's God

I like his knowledge on this but I think losing ground getting off base

I'm confused what he's saying

will this lead to teleportation theory?

13:26 built out of patterns.

He's basically describing computational irreducability, as described by Wolfram. Sounds like a lot of scientists are now coming around to the computational lens of viewing reality, and they're all borrowing (or plagiarizing) ideas from each-other and re-wording them. In the end, the most succinctly or clearly worded description will win. The part about "what's the factory that built the factory" is where it all falls apart though. Just wait until they come to the conclusion that the influence is coming from the universe that envelopes this one, and so on ad infinitum, and that we have no way to interpret it in the same way that a simulated being on our computer can never interpret the shape of the desktop PC running it.

I don’t think it’s practical, when creating a universal IT model of everything, to simulate materially existing structures (like that of the chemicals) separately - rather we need to find the FUNDAMENTAL similarities across all the unique organisational levels we can somewhat discover, and implement only the similarities we find when we analise the way subatomic particles build atoms, atoms self-construct into chemicals, ..., proteins develop into cells, neurons(?) formulate conscious minds, while constantly considering the dual nature as the ultimate sign of intelligence in things that are fundamentally dual in nature but still are one single entity: space/time, matter/wave(energy), data/instruction, multi functional molecular machines to name just a few. Or, if I can borrow your terminology: Assembly index (level of sophistication), Assembly instructions (DNA), Recursion formula (creation method) could form an endless cyclic pattern where the Assembly index and the set of instructions determine the creation method, by rating the instructions potential to drive an evolution towards the more and more intricate structures. Sorry for talking to myself this long.

“Some sort of Conservation Law” - interesting. I’ll now be going down a rabbit hole on this matter. Keep up the excellent work, Lex.

like how stars or planets are born?

In 2021 I was quite fascinated with your talk here, now I see why. I’m looking at the same kind of structure - in what an object is - but it’s applied to phenomena. It might point towards the answer - if married together - for the question “What’s the factory that made the factory?” Relations prior to the relata is perhaps what phenomena flows inside.

This is consistent with Euclid's Elements.

Are ideas objects?

This Sounds like taking a bottom up approach to finally realise that Plato's world of forms makes sense in reality.

He has a paper in Nature! Wow! 👍

The Rainbow picture our Eternal Consciousness, and Nature of Developing-Circuits. Evolution, means In-Volving and Out-Volving in Developing-Zones.

I guess we've come a long way from everything being random chance.

get these guys more taxpayer's research money so they'd finally figure out Shannon's entropy

Enter the Causal Angel stage left...

Great, then make me a Star Trek Replicator.

this feels wrong, not even counterintuitive

Like turtles all the way down it is chemical factories all the way down

Disnt he just debate janes tour?

AT on its own has nothing to do with evolution. Indeed his example at the end, about capitalism, defies AT's application to evolution as it demonstrates that some assemblies require intelligence. Capitalism finds the 'shortest path' via intelligent decision making.

Object Oriented Onthology people be like no way that’s the definition of an “object”. Interview one of them OOO people, Lex!!!! That would be a good one!!

16:15 just pure waffle

Can someone explain it for a dum dum like me?

The sonner the biologists study information technology, the sooner they will understand how wrong they are. Shannon information does not come from unguided processes. It is clear there is an anlogorythm here, the question is how come ...

Expanding electrons/ atoms do it all. That’s physics. “The Final Theory: Rethinking Our Scientific Legacy”, Mark McCutcheon for proper physics. “Metaphysics “ is ‘ something ‘ else: unknowns.

¿Que le pasó a la cabeza de este comentarista?

I think the factory has always existed and always will exist.

I think Lee is a great scientist, but this theory does not well thought out to me. I have watched other videos of him and other people explaining this theory, and every time there is a new information that makes the theory have a slight different meaning. However, the thing with all theories is..... they can be very dangerous. Example, flat earth..... Not saying we have the same issue here, but I am just saying that for a new theory like this to be at least worthy of immediate attention, the authors need to be a bit more cohesive about what this theory actually is. Nevertheless, technically, the theory just considers counting steps in a memory state molecular assembly process. It just rewords what we know about life, hence nothing special in my view.

kzfaq.infoNjvVhiympPs?si=Ln1lnYpatNc8tsP5 Corrections to Dr. Cronin’s speculations.

We've sucked the magic out of all that is incredible. I call it the brain in a jar. And this man gets it. Your entire life, all its memories, all you've seen, all you've heard, where you've been, where you'll go, your thoughts lived and only lived under the hood. We've dumbed it down with overexplanation with how it transfers energy. Neurons, your serebelum, lobes, cortex; its shape. Now put it in a jar. Now think about that magic. We have no idea why the brain "is" doing all that it does, we've just put definitions on the aftermath of those processes. Explained away and dumbed down to an oversimplification, and the magic of how that brain in a jar: can't do a single thing that it can do, when in connection to the rest. It's incredible. I like to think of wifi the same way 😂. Sure, network packets and data layers that come along and handshake; processed in bytes -> layered through binary. I get it. Still, we're missing the magic. We're transferring enormous amounts of data through thin air damnit. That's remarkable. You can just wave your hand and walk in front of it. Let alone online open-world video games like a gta. It's just there surrounding you. I don't need any more explanation. I get it. However, again, the magic is gone. And we tend to do this in so many other ways. And I study many sciences myself, and am far and wide a proponent of advanced science. However, there should be more emphasis on explaining that extra layer of what is so incredible about these processes, and stray away from defining them so hard, we become completely unenthralled. Think about the guy who sequenced the genome and has allowed blood evidence and dna data into our lives. That is magic man, and we push the functional definitions so hard, that the youth no longer sees this, when scientists of the 20th century and before it, our parents and before them for centuries, knew of this magic firsthand. It's incredibly exciting to so many of them. I'm sure you can remember the moments of your old relative handled a touch screen. Or heard again with their cochlear implant. Take a step back and think on things for how incredible they are at the first layer at the top. This man is taking that leap. It's not that we dig too deep, it's that we only dig, the magic completely lost in translation and dumbed down around the 98,000th atomic layer we've reached. Continue that, but for bom sakes, update the messenger because it's all so plain and boring to our future.

So many people in here that study chemistry, physics , Mathematics, biology etc as a hobby and are making big egotistical statements 😂got to love the human condition !

Sounds very Hegelian

God

Not possible... total fantasy.

My wife with her sweetheart said that this isn’t even a theory it actually sounds like you swept the floor up into a dustpan and called it. A theory assembly theory seems like a drowning man’s grasp at the air.

Nice defense of capitalism!

That's quite painful and pathetic watching a chemist rediscover information theory... such a waste of resources and time, and so much confusion spread around. I can't wait for Wolfram to explain to that guy how little he understands anything, but again I don't think it would be worth his time.

It feels like his ideas and the theory are great, but the guy is not very good at explaining things

This is annoying. Slow down a bit. Probably need to watch the full podcast .

Hah! If "nature" took the shortest path a.k.a. "the lazy way" then we'll all be reptiles. Why waste precious calories to warm ourselves when we can just exploit solar energy? 😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣

Assembly paper 1st name Indian.....Even you go to mars you can see an Indian

This guest does alot of talking without making any sense. Sorry.