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 counterexample that challenges that definition. This is why viruses are so hard or why fire is so hard. And so we’ve had a really hard time trying to pin down from a definitional perspective exactly what life is.
We’re not self-sustaining. We’re dependent on societies. And so I find it paradoxical that it might be that societies, because they’re self-sustaining units, are now more alive than individuals are.
No organism is really self-sustaining. They always require an environment. So being self-sustaining is coupled in some sense to the world around you. We don’t live in a vacuum.
Life emerges in chemistry because life is the physics of how the universe selects what gets to exist.
If I was something outside of myself observing these systems that we’re all embedded in, what would that structure look like? And I think we look really different than the way that we talk about what we look like to each other.
The implication that most people would want to make is that an individual is alive. And the evolutionary process—at least the Darwinian evolutionary process, and most evolutionary processes—they don’t happen at the level of individuals, they happen at the level of populations.
Life is the process of how information structures matter over time and space.
An example of life is what emerges on a planet and yields an open-ended cascade of generation of structure and increasing complexity, and this is the thing that life is. And any individual is just a particular instance of these lineages that are structured across time. And so we focus so much on these individuals that are these short temporal moments in this larger causal structure that actually is the life on our planet. And I think that’s why these definitions break down—because they’re not general enough, they’re not universal enough, they’re not deep enough, they’re not abstract enough to actually capture that regularity.
Living objects are actually huge. They’re some of the biggest structures in the universe—but they are not big in space, they’re big in time.
If you think about the history of the universe to get to you, and you imagine that that entire history is you, that is the picture I have in my mind when I look at every living thing.
The modern technosphere is the largest object in time in the universe that we know about.
I think about life often as a planetary-scale phenomena, because the natural boundary for all of this causation that’s bundled in every object in our biosphere. And so, for me, it’s just the current boundary of how far life on our planet has pushed into the things that our universe can generate.
We have cells inside of us that are alive, and we feel like we’re alive. But we don’t often think about the societies that we’re embedded in as alive, or a global-scale organization of us and our technology on the planet as alive.
I think you can build a theory acknowledging that you’re an observer inside the universe.
The frontier in modern physics, where the new physics lies, is not in high-energy particle physics, it’s not in quantum gravity, it’s not in any of these sort of traditionally sold, “this is going to be the newest, deepest insight we have into the nature of reality.” It is going to be in studying the problems of life and intelligence, and the things that are sort of also our current existential crises as a civilization, or a culture, that’s going through an existential trauma of inventing technologies that we don’t understand right now.
It might be the case that sufficiently evolved biospheres virtualize themselves, and they internalize their universe in their temporal causal structure, and they close themselves off from the rest of the universe.
It’s a societal-level technology. We’ve actually put collective intelligence in a box.
We’re the first kinds of structures our biosphere has built that can understand the rest of reality. We have this universal comprehension capability.
Are we enhancing capabilities we have into technologies, and the entire global ecosystem is getting more intelligent?
There’s a co-evolution between humans and technology that’s happening, and we’re coexisting in this ecosystem right now, and we’re maintaining a lot of the balance.
I don’t like thinking about our technologies as a separate species, because this again goes back to this sort of levels of selection issue. And if you think about humans individually alive, you miss the fact that societies are also alive. And so I think about it much more in the sense of—an ecosystem’s not the right word, but we don’t have the right words for these things. And this is why I talk about the technosphere. It’s a system that is both human and technological, it’s not human or technological.
We’re really good at identifying things as other. We’re not really good at understanding when we’re the same or when we’re part of an integrated system that’s actually functioning together in some kind of cohesive way.
It’s important that there’s multiple sides that are arguing with each other, because that’s actually how you resolve society’s issues. It’s not a bad feature. I think some of the extreme positions and the way people talk about are maybe not ideal, but that’s how societies solve problems.
What it looks like for an individual is really different than the societal-level outcomes, and the fact that there is—I don’t want to call it cognition or computation; I don’t know what you call it—but there is a process playing out in the dynamics of societies that we are all individual actors in, and we’re not part of that. It requires all of us acting individually, but this higher-level structure is playing out some things, and things are getting solved for it to be able to maintain itself. And that’s the level that our technologies live at. They don’t live at our level. They live at the societal level, and they’re deeply integrated with the social organism, if you want to call it that.
We live in an ecosystem of all these intelligent things, and these animating technologies that we are (in some sense) helping to come alive. We are generating them. But it’s not like the biosphere eliminated all of its past history when it invented a new species. All of these things get scaffolded. And we’re also augmenting ourselves at the same time that we’re building technologies. I don’t think we can anticipate what that system’s going to look like.
You always want to be thinking about the planet as one organism.
The planet is one living thing.
The entire history of life is just recursion, right? So you have an origin of life event. It evolves for four billion years—at least on our planet. It evolves a technosphere. The technologies themselves start to have this property we call life, which is the phase we’re undergoing now. It solves the origin of itself, and then it figures out how that process all works, understands how to make more life, and then can copy itself onto another planet, so the whole structure can reproduce itself.
The origin of life is happening again right now, on this planet, in the technosphere with the way that our planet is undergoing another transition. Just like at the origin of life, when geochemistry transitioned to biology, which is the global—for me, it was a planetary-scale transition. It was a multi-scale thing that happened from the scale of chemistry all the way to planetary cycles. It’s happening now, all the way from individual humans to the Internet, which is a global technology, and all the other things. There’s this multi-scale process that’s happening and transitioning us globally. And it’s a dramatic transition. It’s happening really fast, and we’re living in it.
I think this process of life being the mechanism that the universe creatively expresses itself—generates novelty, explores the space of the possible—is really the thing that’s most deeply intrinsic to life.
It’s literally our universe, our reality, trying to creatively express itself and trying to find out what can exist and trying to make it exist.
If the universe, over its entire temporal history, wants to maximize the number of things—“wants” is a hard word, “maximize” is a hard word; all these things are approximate—but wants to maximize the number of things that can exist, the best way to do it is to make recursively embedded stacked objects, like us, that have a lot of structure in a small volume of space, and to have those things turn over rapidly so you can create as many of them as possible.
