#388 — What Is Life?
Making Sense with Sam Harris
Waking Up with Sam Harris
4.6 • 29.1K Ratings
🗓️ 21 October 2024
⏱️ 47 minutes
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Summary
Sam Harris speaks with Sara Imari Walker about a scientific understanding of life. They discuss the contributions of physics to this topic, Erwin Schrödinger, the inadequacy of standard definitions of life, the prospect of "artificial" life, the role of information, constructor theory, assembly theory, the space of all possible structures, a "block universe," the existence of abstract objects like numbers, the Fermi paradox, the likelihood of life elsewhere in the universe, experiments that decide how likely life is to emerge, the possibility of a Great Filter, the number of Earth-like worlds, and other topics.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast, this is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this you're not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. podcast, you'll need to subscribe at Sam Harris.org. There you'll also find our |
| 0:24.9 | scholarship program where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We |
| 0:29.0 | don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. |
| 0:34.0 | So if you enjoy what we're doing here weeks out from the presidential election in the U.S. |
| 0:50.0 | and there's going to be a lot of politics on the podcast. I think I have three |
| 0:57.4 | episodes that I will drop before the election, all more or less focused on politics, but not today, because today I'm speaking |
| 1:07.5 | with Sarah Walker. |
| 1:10.0 | Sarah is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist who focuses on the origin of life |
| 1:15.5 | and also the possibility of discovering alien life in other worlds. She is |
| 1:21.1 | deputy director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, and a professor |
| 1:26.5 | in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. |
| 1:31.7 | She is also a fellow of the Berghruin Institute and a member of the external |
| 1:35.6 | faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. She is a recipient of the Stanley L. Miller Early |
| 1:41.0 | Career Award for her research on the origin of life, and her research team at |
| 1:45.3 | ASU is internationally regarded as being among the leading labs aiming to build a fundamental |
| 1:49.8 | theory for understanding what life is. And she has also written a very interesting book titled, |
| 1:55.0 | Life as No One Knows It, The Physics of Life's Emergence, |
| 1:59.0 | which is the focus of our conversation. |
| 2:02.0 | We discuss the contributions of physics to this topic. |
| 2:06.3 | Erwin Schroninger in his famous book, What Is Life, the inadequacy of standard |
| 2:11.6 | definitions of life, the possibility of artificial life, |
| 2:16.6 | the role of information, constructor theory, assembly theory, the space of all possible structures, the concept of a block universe, |
... |
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