Sara Walker on Redefining Life, Matter, and Time: The Physics of Emergence and Universal Principles

The discussion opens by contrasting materialist and vitalist perspectives on life, with Walker suggesting that the "magic" vitalists perceive is simply the unknown, and that science continually redefines what is considered "material." She argues that our current scientific understanding of matter is an invention, and that expanding this definition to include properties like information could reconcile vitalist insights with a materialist framework, allowing for a unified description of life. This expansion is crucial because traditional definitions of life, often rooted in chemistry and individual organisms, are consistently challenged by counter-examples. Walker critically examines common definitions of life, such as "a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution." She argues that each component of this definition is problematic: "self-sustaining" ignores environmental dependencies and societal structures; "chemical system" overlooks the vast combinatorial space of chemistry and the possibility of non-chemical life forms like language or mathematics; and "Darwinian evolution" typically applies to populations, not individuals, thus excluding individuals from being considered "alive." She introduces Assembly Theory as an alternative framework where individuals *can* evolve through constant self-construction. A central tenet of Walker's perspective is that life is fundamentally about how information structures matter across time and space, manifesting as an open-ended cascade of structure generation and increasing complexity. She posits that life is not confined to individual organisms but exists as vast, interwoven lineages. This broader view challenges anthropocentric perceptions, suggesting that entities like the technosphere, language, or mathematics exhibit life-like properties. The "Paradox of finding life" arises because our narrow, individual-focused definitions fail to capture life's universal principles and diverse manifestations. Walker emphasizes that human perception is limited by our evolved architectures, leading us to perceive living objects as fleeting in space rather than immense in time. She proposes that living objects are "gigantic" in their causal structure, encompassing their entire historical lineage. This temporal depth, often missed, makes phenomena appear "emergent" when they are simply aspects of a larger, continuous process. This perspective implies a fundamental interconnectedness of all life and suggests that life can be high-dimensional, with different aspects exhibiting varying degrees of "aliveness" or causal depth. Theoretical physics, by pushing the boundaries of abstraction, helps to reveal these deeper realities.

the Technologies themselves start having this property we call life which is the phase we're undergoing now

the vitalist idea is really that it's it's kind of a dualistic interpretation that there's sort of the material properties but there's something else that animates life that is there when you're alive and it's not there when you're dead

I think the entire universe is just a giant mystery

life could be a material property and still have a lot of the features that the vitalist thought were mysterious

I think the issue with life is we don't know how to think about information in a material way

I think life obeys Universal principles I think there is some deep underlying exploratory framework that will tell us about the nature of life in the universe

all of the definitions of life that we have whether it's life is a self-reproducing system or life eats to survive or life requires compartments whatever it is there's always a counter example that challenges that definition

I think life is the process of how information structures matter over time and space and an an example of life is what emerges on a planet and yields an open-ended Cascade of generation of structure and increasing complexity

I think that living objects are actually huge like they're some of the biggest structures in the universe but they are not big in space they are big in time

the modern technosphere is the largest object in time in the universe that we know about

things only look emergent because we can't see time

we're missing most of what we are

I think you can be alive in some dimensions and and not in others