Transcript for Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #433
萨拉-沃克（Sara Walker）的文字实录：生命物理学、时间、复杂性和外星人 | Lex Fridman 播客 #433

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #433 with Sara Walker. The timestamps in the transcript are clickable links that take you directly to that point in the main video. Please note that the transcript is human generated, and may have errors. Here are some useful links:

Table of Contents 目录

Here are the loose “chapters” in the conversation. Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:

Introduction 导言

Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:00:00) You have an origin of life event. It evolves for 4 billion years, at least on our planet. It evolves a technosphere. The technologies themselves start having 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.
(00:00:00）你有一个生命起源事件。至少在我们的星球上，它演化了 40 亿年。它演化出一个科技圈。技术本身开始具有我们称之为生命的属性，也就是我们现在正在经历的阶段。它解决了自身起源的问题，然后它弄清了这个过程是如何运作的，明白了如何制造更多的生命，然后可以把自己复制到另一个星球上，这样整个结构就可以自我复制了。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:00:26) The following is a conversation with Sara Walker, her third time in this podcast. She is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist interested in the origin of life and in discovering alien life on other worlds. She has written an amazing new upcoming book titled Life As No One Knows It, The Physics of Life’s Emergence. This book is coming out on August 6th, so please go pre-order it now. It will blow your mind. This is The Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Sara Walker.
(00:00:26) 以下是与萨拉-沃克（Sara Walker）的对话，这是她第三次参加本播客。她是一位天体生物学家和理论物理学家，对生命起源和在其他世界发现外星生命很感兴趣。她即将出版一本令人惊奇的新书，书名为《无人知晓的生命--生命出现的物理学》（Life As No One Knows It, The Physics of Life's Emergence）。这本书将于 8 月 6 日出版，请立即预购。它将让你大开眼界。这里是莱克斯-弗里德曼播客。为了支持我们的播客，请在描述中查看我们的赞助商。现在，亲爱的朋友们，有请萨拉-沃克

Definition of life 生命的定义

(00:01:07) You open the book, Life As No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence, with the distinction between the materialists and the vitalists. So what’s the difference? Can you maybe define the two?
(00:01:07）你在《无人知晓的生命：生命出现的物理学》一书的开篇就区分了唯物主义者和生命主义者。这两者有什么区别？你能给两者下个定义吗？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:01:20) I think the question there is about whether life can be described in terms of matter and physical things, or whether there is some other feature that’s not physical that actually animates living things. So for a long time, people maybe have called that a soul. It’s been really hard to pin down what that is. So I think the vitalist idea is really that it’s 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. And materialists don’t think that there’s anything really special about the matter of life and the material substrates that life is made out of, so they disagree on some really fundamental points.
(00:01:20) 我认为这个问题是关于生命是否可以用物质和有形的东西来描述，或者是否有其他一些非物质的特征实际上使生物具有生命力。因此，长久以来，人们也许把它叫做灵魂。但很难确定灵魂到底是什么。所以我认为生命论的观点实际上是一种二元论的解释，即有物质属性，但也有其他赋予生命活力的东西，活着的时候有，死了就没有了。而唯物主义者并不认为生命的物质有什么特别之处 以及生命是由什么物质构成的 所以他们在一些基本点上存在分歧
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:02:10) Is there a gray area between the two? Maybe all there is is matter, but there’s so much we don’t know that it might as well be magic. Whatever that magic that the vitalists see, meaning there’s just so much mystery that it’s really unfair to say that it’s boring and understood and as simple as “physics.”
(两者之间是否存在灰色地带？也许所有的东西都是物质，但我们不知道的东西太多了，就像魔法一样。不管生命论者看到的是什么魔法 意思是有太多神秘的东西 说它枯燥无味、容易理解、像 "物理学 "一样简单实在是不公平
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:02:35) Yeah, I think the entire universe is just a giant mystery. I guess that’s what motivates me as a scientist. And so oftentimes, when I look at open problems like the nature of life or consciousness or what is intelligence or are there souls or whatever question that we have that we feel like we aren’t even on the tip of answering yet, I think we have a lot more work to do to really understand the answers to these questions. So it’s not magic, it’s just the unknown. And I think a lot of the history of humans coming to understand the world around us has been taking ideas that we once thought were magic or supernatural and really understanding them in a much deeper way that we learn what those things are. And they still have an air of mystery even when we understand them. There’s no bottom to our understanding.
(是啊，我觉得整个宇宙就是一个巨大的谜团。我想这也是我作为科学家的动力所在。所以很多时候，当我看到一些开放性的问题，比如生命或意识的本质，或者什么是智慧，或者是否存在灵魂，或者任何我们觉得还没有找到答案的问题时，我觉得我们还有很多工作要做，才能真正理解这些问题的答案。所以，这不是魔法，这只是未知。我认为，在人类认识周围世界的历史上，很多时候都是把我们曾经认为是魔法或超自然的想法，以一种更深入的方式来理解它们，从而了解这些东西到底是什么。即使我们理解了它们，它们仍然带有神秘色彩。我们的理解没有底。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:03:30) So do you think the vitalists have a point that they’re more eager and able to notice the magic of life?
(你认为生命论者的观点有道理吗？ 他们更渴望、更能注意到生命的魔力？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:03:39) I think that no tradition, vitalists included, is ever fully wrong about the nature of the things that they’re describing. So a lot of times when I look at different ways that people have described things across human history, across different cultures, there’s always a seed of truth in them. And I think it’s really important to try to look for those, because if there are narratives that humans have been telling ourselves for thousands of years, for thousands of generations, there must be some truth to them. We’ve been learning about reality for a really long time and we recognize the patterns that reality presents us. We don’t always understand what those patterns are, and so I think it’s really important to pay attention to that. So I don’t think the vitalists were actually wrong.
(我认为，任何传统，包括生命论者在内，对于他们所描述的事物的本质，都不会是完全错误的。因此，很多时候，当我审视人类历史上人们描述事物的不同方式、不同文化时，总会发现其中蕴含着真理的种子。我认为努力寻找这些种子是非常重要的，因为如果人类几千年来、几千代人都在讲述自己的故事，那么这些故事就一定有一定的道理。我们了解现实已经有很长一段时间了，我们认识到现实呈现给我们的模式。我们并不总能理解这些模式是什么，所以我认为关注这一点真的很重要。所以我认为生命论者其实并没有错。
(00:04:21) And a lot of what I talk about in the book, but also I think about a lot just professionally, is the nature of our definitions of what’s material and how science has come to invent the concept of matter. And that some of those things actually really are inventions that happened in a particular time in a particular technology that could learn about certain patterns and help us understand them, and that there are some patterns we still don’t understand. And if we knew how to measure those things or we knew how to describe them in a more rigorous way, we would realize that the material world matter has more properties than we thought that it did. One of those might be associated with the thing that we call life. Life could be a material property and still have a lot of the features that the vitalists thought were mysterious.
(00:04:21）我在书中谈到的很多东西，也是我在职业生涯中思考的很多东西，都是我们对物质定义的本质，以及科学是如何发明物质概念的。其中有些东西实际上是发生在特定时期特定技术的发明，可以了解某些模式并帮助我们理解它们，而有些模式我们仍然不了解。如果我们知道如何测量这些东西，或者我们知道如何以更严格的方式来描述它们，我们就会意识到物质世界的物质比我们想象的具有更多的特性。其中之一可能与我们称之为生命的东西有关。生命可以是一种物质属性，但仍然具有生命论者认为神秘的许多特征。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:05:12) So we may still expand our understanding, what is incorporated in the category of matter, that will eventually incorporate such magical things that the vitalists have noticed, like life?
(00:05:12）那么，我们还可以扩展我们的理解，物质的范畴中包含了什么，最终会包含生命论者所注意到的神奇的东西，比如生命？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:05:27) Yeah. I always like to use examples from physics, so I’ll probably do that. It’s my go-to place. But in the history of gravitational physics, for example, in the history of motion, when Aristotle came up with his theories of motion, he did it by the material properties he thought things had. So there was a concept of things falling to earth because they were solid-like and things raising to the heavens because they were air-like and things moving around the planet because they were celestial-like. But then we came to realize that, thousands of years later and after the invention of many technologies that allowed us to actually measure time in a mechanistic way and track planetary motion and we could roll balls down inclined planes and track that progress, we realized that if we just talked about mass and acceleration, we could unify all motion in the universe in a really simple description.
(00:05:27) 是的，我总是喜欢用物理学的例子，所以我可能会这么做。这是我的首选。但在引力物理学史上，比如在运动史上，当亚里士多德提出他的运动理论时，他是通过他认为事物所具有的物质属性来实现的。因此，有一种概念认为，物体坠落到地面是因为它们是固体状的，物体升到天上是因为它们是空气状的，而物体绕着地球运动是因为它们是天体状的。但是，几千年后，在我们发明了许多技术，使我们能够以机械的方式测量时间，跟踪行星运动，我们可以把球从斜面上滚下来，跟踪运动进程之后，我们意识到，如果我们只谈论质量和加速度，我们就可以用一个非常简单的描述来统一宇宙中的所有运动。
(00:06:22) So we didn’t really have to worry about the fact that my cup is heavy and the air is light. The same laws describe them if we have the right material properties to talk about what those laws are actually interacting with. And so I think the issue with life is we don’t know how to think about information in a material way, and so we haven’t been able to build a unified description of what life is or the kind of things that evolution builds because we haven’t really invented the right material concept yet.
(00:06:22) 所以我们不必担心我的杯子很重而空气很轻。如果我们有正确的物质属性来讨论这些定律实际上是如何相互作用的，那么同样的定律就能描述它们。因此，我认为生命的问题在于我们不知道如何用物质的方式来思考信息，所以我们还无法对生命或进化所构建的事物进行统一的描述，因为我们还没有真正发明出正确的物质概念。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:06:54) So when talking about motion, the laws of physics appear to be the same everywhere out in the universe. You think the same is true for other kinds of matter that we might eventually include life in?
(00:06:54) 因此，当谈到运动时，物理定律似乎在宇宙中的任何地方都是一样的。你认为其他种类的物质也是如此吗？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:07:09) I think life obeys universal principles. I think there is some deep underlying explanatory framework that will tell us about the nature of life in the universe and will allow us to identify life that we can’t yet recognize because it’s too different.
(我认为生命遵循普遍原则。我认为有一些深层次的解释框架会告诉我们宇宙中生命的本质，并能让我们识别那些我们还无法识别的生命，因为它太与众不同了。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:07:28) You’re right about the paradox of defining life. Why does it seem to be so easy and so complicated at the same time?
(00:07:28）你说的对，定义生活是个悖论。为什么它看起来如此简单，同时又如此复杂？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:07:35) All the classic definitions people want to use just don’t work. They don’t work in all cases. So Carl Sagan had this wonderful essay on definitions of life where I think he talks about aliens coming from another planet. If they saw earth, they might think that cars were the dominant life form because there are so many of them on our planet. Humans are inside them, and you might want to exclude machines. But any definition, classic biology textbook definitions, would also include them. He wanted to draw a boundary between these kind of things by trying to exclude them, but they were naturally included by the definitions people want to give. And in fact, what he ended up pointing out is that 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.
(00:07:35）人们想要使用的所有经典定义都不起作用。它们并不适用于所有情况。卡尔-萨根（Carl Sagan）曾写过一篇关于生命定义的精彩文章，我想他在文中谈到了来自外星球的外星人。如果他们看到地球，可能会认为汽车是最主要的生命形式，因为我们的星球上有太多汽车了。汽车里有人类，你可能想把机器排除在外。但任何定义，经典的生物学教科书定义，也会包括它们。他想在这些东西之间划出一条界线，试图将它们排除在外，但人们想要给出的定义却自然而然地包含了它们。事实上，他最后指出的是，我们对生命的所有定义，无论是生命是一个自我繁殖系统，还是生命靠进食生存，或者生命需要隔间，不管是什么，总有一个反例对这个定义提出挑战。这就是为什么病毒如此困难，为什么火如此困难。因此，我们很难从定义的角度来确定生命到底是什么。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:08:42) Yeah, you actually bring up the zombie-ant fungus. I enjoyed looking at this thing as an example of one of the challenges. You mentioned viruses, but this is a parasite. Look at that.
(是的，你提到了僵尸蚂蚁菌。我很喜欢把这东西作为挑战之一的例子。你提到了病毒，但这是一种寄生虫。看看这个。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:08:54) Did you see this in the jungle?
(你在丛林里看到过这个吗？
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:08:55) Infects ants. Actually, one of the interesting things about the jungle, everything is ephemeral. Everything eats everything really quickly. So if an organism dies, that organism disappears. It’s a machine that doesn’t have… I wanted to say it doesn’t have a memory or a history, which is interesting given your work on history in defining a living being. The jungle forgets very quickly. It wants to erase the fact that you existed very quickly.
(感染蚂蚁事实上，丛林里有个有趣的现象 所有东西都是短暂的所有东西都会很快被吃掉所以如果一个生物体死了 这个生物体就消失了这是一台没有......我想说它没有记忆或历史的机器，鉴于你在定义生命体时对历史的研究，这很有趣。丛林很快就会忘记它想很快抹去你存在过的事实
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:09:28) Yeah, but it can’t erase it. It’s just restructuring it. And I think the other thing that is really vivid to me about this example that you’re giving is how much death is necessary for life. So I worry a bit about notions of immortality and whether immortality is a good thing or not. So I have a broad conception that life is the only thing the universe generates that actually has even the potential to be immortal, but that’s as the sort of process that you’re describing where life is about memory and historical contingency and construction of new possibilities. But when you look at any instance of life, especially one as dynamic as what you’re describing, it’s a constant birth and death process. But that birth and death process is the way that the universe can explore what possibilities can exist. And not everything, not every possible human or every possible ant or every possible zombie ant or every possible tree, will ever live. So it’s an incredibly dynamic and creative place because of all that death.
(是的，但它不能删除它。它只是在重组它。我觉得你举的这个例子还有一点很生动，那就是死亡对生命的必要性。所以我有点担心永生的概念以及永生是否是件好事。因此，我有一个宽泛的概念，即生命是宇宙中产生的唯一真正有可能不朽的东西，但那是你所描述的那种过程，生命是关于记忆、历史偶然性和新可能性的建构。但是，当你观察任何生命实例，尤其是像你所描述的那样充满活力的生命实例时，它就是一个不断诞生和死亡的过程。但这个诞生和死亡的过程正是宇宙探索存在可能性的途径。并不是所有的东西，并不是每一个可能的人类、每一只可能的蚂蚁、每一只可能的僵尸蚂蚁或每一棵可能的树都能活下来。因此，因为有了死亡，这里才会充满活力和创造力。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:10:36) This is a parasite that needs the ant. So is this a living thing or is this not a living thing?
(00:10:36) 这是一种需要蚂蚁的寄生虫。那么，这到底是生物还是非生物呢？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:10:41) Yeah. （00: 10: 41）是啊。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:10:43) It just pierces the ant.
(00:10:43) 它只是刺穿了蚂蚁。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:10:43) Right.
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:10:46) And I’ve seen a lot of this, by the way. Organisms working together in the jungle, like ants protecting a delicious piece of fruit. They need the fruit, but if you touch that fruit, the forces emerge. They’re fighting you. They’re defending that fruit to the death. Nature seems to find mutual benefits, right?
(顺便说一句，我见过很多这样的情况。生物在丛林中合作，就像蚂蚁保护美味的果实。它们需要果实，但如果你碰了果实，各种力量就会出现。它们在和你战斗它们誓死保卫果实大自然似乎在寻找互惠互利，对吗？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:11:09) Yeah, it does. I think the thing that’s perplexing for me about these kind of examples is effectively the ant’s dead, but it’s staying alive now because piloted by this fungus. And so that gets back to this thing that we’re talking about a few minutes ago about how the boundary of life is really hard to define. So anytime that you want to draw a boundary around something and you say, “This feature is the thing that makes this alive, or this thing is alive on its own,” there’s not ever really a clear boundary. And these kind of examples are really good at showing that because it’s like the thing that you would’ve thought is the living organism is now dead, except that it has another living organism that’s piloting it. So the two of them together are alive in some sense, but they’re now in this weird symbiotic relationship that’s taking this ant to its death.
(确实如此我觉得这些例子让我感到困惑的是 蚂蚁实际上已经死了 但它现在还活着 因为它是由真菌控制的这又回到了几分钟前我们讨论的话题 生命的边界很难界定因此，无论何时你想给某样东西划一个界限，你会说，"是这个特征让这个东西活了下来，或者这个东西本身就是有生命的"，都不会有一个真正清晰的界限。这些例子就很好地说明了这一点，因为你本以为是活的有机体的东西现在已经死了，但它有另一个活的有机体在引导它。所以从某种意义上说，它们两个在一起还活着 但它们现在处于一种奇怪的共生关系中 而这种关系正将这只蚂蚁带向死亡
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:11:59) So what do you do with that in terms of when you try to define life?
(00:11:59) 那么，当你试图定义生活时，你会怎么做呢？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:12:02) I think we have to get rid of the notion of an individual as being relevant. And this is really difficult because a lot of the ways that we think about life, like the fundamental unit of life is the cell, individuals are alive, but we don’t think about how gray that distinction is. So for example, you might consider self-reproduction to be the most defining feature of life. A lot of people do, actually. That’s one of these standard different definitions that a lot of people in my field like to use in astrobiology is life as a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution, which I was once quoted as agreeing with, and I was really offended because I hate that definition. I think it’s terrible, and I think it’s terrible that people use it. I think every word in that definition is actually wrong as a descriptor of life.
(00:12:02) 我認為我們必須摒棄個體與生命相關的觀念。这真的很难，因为我们思考生命的很多方式，比如生命的基本单位是细胞，个体是有生命的，但我们并没有想过这种区分有多灰暗。举例来说，你可能认为自我繁殖是生命的最大特征。事实上，很多人都这么认为。在我的领域里，很多人喜欢在天体生物学中使用这样一个标准的不同定义，即生命是一个能够进行达尔文进化的自我维持的化学系统，我曾经被引述同意这个定义，我真的被冒犯了，因为我讨厌这个定义。我认为它很糟糕，我认为人们使用它很糟糕。我认为这个定义中的每个词作为生命的描述实际上都是错误的。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:12:52) Life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution. Why is that? That seems like a pretty good definition.
(00:12:52）生命是一个能够自我维持的化学系统，能够进行达尔文式的进化。为什么这么说？这似乎是个不错的定义。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:12:58) I know. If you want to make me angry, you can pretend I said that and believed it.
(00:12:58) 我知道。如果你想让我生气，你可以假装我说过并相信了。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:13:02) So self-sustaining, chemical system, Darwinian evolution. What is self-sustaining? What’s so frustrating? Which aspect is frustrating to you, but it’s also those are very interesting words.
(自我维持，化学系统，达尔文进化论。什么是自我维持？什么让人沮丧？哪个方面让你感到沮丧，但这也是非常有趣的词汇。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:13:15) Yeah, they’re all interesting words and together they sound really smart and they sound like they box in what life is. But you can use any of the words individually and you can come up with counterexamples that don’t fulfill that property. The self-sustaining one is really interesting, thinking about humans. We’re not self-sustaining 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. And that could be the case, but I still think we have some property associated with life. That’s the thing that we’re trying to describe, so that one’s quite hard. And in general, 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, so that part’s already challenging.
(是的，它们都是有趣的词，放在一起听起来非常聪明，听起来就像把生活框住了。但你可以单独使用其中的任何一个词，你也可以提出不符合这一属性的反例。想想人类，自我维持这个词真的很有趣。我们并不依赖于社会而自我维持。所以我发现一个悖论，那就是社会可能比个人更有生命力，因为它们是自我维持的单位。情况可能是这样，但我仍然认为我们有一些与生命相关的属性。这就是我们要描述的东西，所以这个问题很难回答。一般来说，没有任何生物能够真正自给自足。它们总是需要一个环境，所以从某种意义上说，自我维持与你周围的世界息息相关。我们不是生活在真空中，所以这部分已经很有挑战性了。
(00:14:10) And then you can go to chemical system. I don’t think that’s good either. I think there’s a confusion because life emerges in chemistry that life is chemical. I don’t think life is chemical. I think life emerges in chemistry because chemistry is the first thing the universe builds where it cannot exhaust all the possibilities, because the combinatorial space of chemistry is too large.
(00:14:10) 然后你就可以进入化学系统了。我觉得这也不好。我认为这是一种混淆，因为生命是在化学中产生的，所以生命就是化学。我不认为生命是化学的。我认为生命出现在化学中，是因为化学是宇宙建造的第一件东西，它无法穷尽所有的可能性，因为化学的组合空间太大了。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:14:33) Well, but is it possible to have a life that is not a chemical system?
(00:14:33) 那么，有没有可能拥有一个不是化学系统的生命呢？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:14:36) Yes.
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:14:37) Well, there’s a guy I know named Lee Cronin who’s been on a podcast a couple of times who just got really pissed off listening to this.
(00:14:37）我认识一个叫李-克罗宁（Lee Cronin）的人，他上过几次播客，听了之后非常生气。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:14:37) I know. What a coincidence.
（00: 14: 37）我知道。真巧啊
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:14:44) He probably just got really pissed off hearing that. For people who somehow don’t know, he’s a chemist.
(00:14:44) 他可能听了很生气。对于那些不知情的人来说，他是个化学家。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:14:49) Yeah, but he would agree with that statement.
(00:14:49) 是的，但他会同意这种说法。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:14:51) Would he? I don’t think he would. He would broaden the definition of chemistry until it’ll include everything.
(他会吗？我觉得他不会。他会扩大化学的定义，直到包括一切。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:14:58) Oh, sure.
(00:14:58) 哦，当然。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:14:59) Okay.
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:14:59) Or maybe, I don’t know.
(00:14:59) 或者，我也不知道。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:15:01) But wait, but you said that universe, the first thing it creates is chemistry.
(00:15:01) 但等等，但你说过，宇宙首先创造的是化学。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:15:05) Very precisely. It’s not the first thing it creates. Obviously, it has to make atoms first, but it’s the first thing. If you think about the universe originated, atoms were made in Big Bang nuclear synthesis, and then later in stars. And then planets formed and planets become engines of chemistry. They start exploring what kind of chemistry is possible. And the combinatorial space of chemistry is so large that even on every planet in the entire universe, you will never express every possible molecule. I like this example actually that Lee gave me, which is to think about Taxol. It has a molecular weight of about 853. It’s got a lot of atoms, but it’s not astronomically large. And if you try to make one molecule with that molecular formula and every three-dimensional shape you could make with that molecular formula, it would fill 1.5 universes in volume with one unique molecule. That’s just one molecule.
(00:15:05) 非常准确。这不是它首先创造的东西。显然，它必须先制造原子，但这是第一件事。如果你想想宇宙的起源，原子是在大爆炸的核合成过程中产生的，后来又在恒星中产生。然后形成行星，行星成为化学的发动机。它们开始探索什么样的化学是可能的。化学的组合空间是如此之大，以至于即使在整个宇宙的每一颗行星上，你也不可能表达出每一种可能的分子。我很喜欢李给我举的这个例子，想想 Taxol。它的分子量约为 853。它有很多原子，但并不是天文数字。如果你尝试用这个分子式制造一个分子，并用这个分子式制造出所有三维形状，那么一个独特的分子就能填满 1.5 个宇宙的体积。这只是一个分子。
(00:16:09) So chemical space is huge, and I think it’s really important to recognize that because if you want to ask a question of why does life emerge in chemistry, well, life emerges in chemistry because life is the physics of how the universe selects what gets to exist. And those things get created along historically contingent pathways and memory and all the other stuff that we can talk about, but the universe has to actually make historically contingent choices in chemistry because it can’t exhaust all possible molecules.
(所以化学空间是巨大的，我认为认识到这一点真的很重要，因为如果你想问一个问题，为什么生命会在化学中出现，那么，生命会在化学中出现，因为生命是宇宙如何选择存在的物理。这些东西是沿着历史上偶然的路径和记忆以及我们可以谈论的所有其他东西被创造出来的，但宇宙实际上必须在化学中做出历史上偶然的选择，因为它不可能穷尽所有可能的分子。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:16:38) What kind of things can you create that’s outside the combinatorial space of chemistry? That’s what I’m trying to understand.
(在化学的组合空间之外，你能创造出什么样的东西？这正是我想弄明白的。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:16:45) Oh, if it’s not chemical. So I think some of the things that have evolved on our biosphere I would call as much alive as chemistry, as a cell, but they seem much more abstract. So for example, I think language is alive, or at least life. I think memes are. I think-
(哦，如果它不是化学的。所以我认为，在我们的生物圈中进化出来的一些东西，我认为它们和化学、细胞一样都是有生命的，但它们看起来要抽象得多。比如，我认为语言是有生命的，至少是有生命的。我认为记忆体也是。我认为
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:17:06) You’re saying language is life?
(你是说语言就是生命？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:17:07) Yes. 是的
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:17:07) Language is alive. Oh boy, I’m going to have to explore that one.
(语言是有生命的。哦，天哪，我得好好研究一下这个问题。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:17:12) Life maybe. Maybe not alive, but actually I don’t know where I stand exactly on that. I’ve been thinking about that a little bit more lately. But mathematics too, and it’s interesting because people think that math has this Platonic reality that exists outside of our universe, and I think it’s a feature of our biosphere and it’s telling us something about the structure of ourselves. And I find that really interesting because when you would internalize all of these things that we noticed about the world, and you start asking, well, what do these look like? If I was something outside of myself observing these systems that 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.
(00:17:12) 也许是生命。也许不是活着，但实际上我不知道我在这方面的立场到底是什么。我最近一直在思考这个问题。数学也是，这很有趣，因为人们认为数学有一种柏拉图式的现实，存在于我们的宇宙之外，而我认为这是我们生物圈的一个特征，它告诉我们一些关于我们自身结构的东西。我觉得这真的很有趣，因为当你把我们注意到的世界上所有这些东西内化之后，你就会开始问，好吧，这些东西看起来像什么？如果我是我自己以外的东西，观察着这些嵌入其中的系统，这个结构会是什么样子？我认为，我们的样子与我们彼此谈论的样子真的很不一样。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:17:57) What do you think a living organism in math is? Is it one axiomatic system or is it individual theorems or is it individual steps of-
(00:17:57) 你认为数学中的生命体是什么？是一个公理系统，还是各个定理，还是各个步骤？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:18:05) I think it’s the fact that it’s open-ended in some sense. It’s another open-ended combinatorial space, and the recursive properties of it allow creativity to happen, which is what you see with the revolution in the last century with Gödel’s Theorem and Turing. And there’s clear places where mathematics notices holes in the universe.
(00:18:05) 我认为这是因为它在某种意义上是开放的。这是另一个开放式的组合空间，它的递归特性允许创造力发生，这就是你在上个世纪看到的哥德尔定理和图灵的革命。数学在宇宙中发现漏洞的地方很明显
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:18:32) So it seems like you’re sneaking up on a different kind of definition of life. Open-ended, large combinatorial space.
(所以，你似乎悄悄地发现了生命的另一种定义。开放式、大组合空间。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:18:39) Yeah. 是的
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:18:40) Room for creativity.
(00:18:40) 创造空间。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:18:41) Definitely not chemical. Chemistry is one substrate.
(00:18:41) 绝对不是化学。化学是一种基质。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:18:45) Restricted to chemical. What about the third thing, which I think will be the hardest because you probably like it the most, is evolution or selection.
(仅限于化学。第三件事呢，我认为是最难的，因为你可能最喜欢它，那就是进化或选择。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:18:54) Well, specifically it’s Darwinian evolution. And I think Darwinian evolution is a problem. But the reason that that definition is a problem is not because evolution is in the definition, but because 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, most evolutionary processes, they don’t happen at the level of individuals. They happen at the level of population. So again, you would be saying something like what we saw with the self-sustaining definition, which is that populations are alive, but individuals aren’t because populations evolve and individuals don’t. And obviously maybe you are alive because your gut microbiome is evolving. But Lex is an entity right now is not evolving by canonical theories of evolution. In assembly theory, which is attempting to explain life, evolution is a much broader thing.
(具体来说，就是达尔文进化论。我认为达尔文进化论是个问题。但这个定义之所以有问题，并不是因为定义中有进化论，而是因为大多数人想要表达的意思是，个体是有生命的。而进化过程，至少是达尔文的进化过程，以及大多数进化过程，都不是在个体层面上发生的。它们发生在种群层面。所以，你的说法和我们看到的自我维持的定义一样，即种群是有生命的，但个体没有，因为种群在进化，而个体不会进化。很明显，也许你还活着，因为你的肠道微生物组在进化。但根据进化论的经典理论，莱克斯这个实体现在并没有进化。在试图解释生命的组装理论中，进化是一个更广泛的东西。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:19:49) So an individual organism can evolve under assembly theory?
(00:19:49) 那么在装配理论下，单个生物体也能进化？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:19:54) Yes, you’re constructing yourself all the time. Assembly theory is about construction and how the universe selects for things to exist.
(00:19:54) 是的，你一直在构建自己。组装理论是关于构造和宇宙如何选择事物存在的。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:20:01) What if you reformulate everything like a population is a living organism?
(00:20:01）如果你把一切都重新表述为一个种群是一个活的有机体呢？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:20:04) That’s fine too. But this again gets back to it. We can nitpick at definitions. I don’t think it’s incredibly helpful to do it. But the reason for me-
(00:20:04) 这也很好。但这又回到了原点。我们可以对定义吹毛求疵。我不认为这样做会有多大帮助。但对我来说
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:20:04) It’s fun.
(00:20:04) It's fun.
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:20:16) Yeah, it is fun. It is really fun. And actually I do think it’s useful in the sense that when you see the ways that they all break down, you either have to keep forcing in your conception of life you want to have, or you have to say, “All these definitions are breaking down for a reason. Maybe I should adopt a more expansive definition that encompasses all the things that I think and are life.” And so for me, I think life is the process of how information structures matter over time and space, and 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.
(00:20:16) 是的，很有趣。真的很有趣实际上，我认为这很有用，因为当你看到这些定义被打破的时候，你要么继续坚持你的生活理念，要么说 "所有这些定义被打破是有原因的"。也许我应该采用一个更宽泛的定义，涵盖所有我认为是生命的东西"。因此，对我来说，我认为生命就是信息结构如何在时间和空间上发生作用的过程，而生命的一个例子就是一个星球上出现的东西，它产生了一个产生结构和复杂性的开放式级联。这就是生命。而任何个体都只是这些跨时间结构的血统中的一个特殊实例。
(00:21:08) 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.
(我认为这就是这些定义被打破的原因，因为它们不够概括、不够普遍、不够深刻、不够抽象，无法真正捕捉到这种规律性。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:21:28) Because we’re focused on that little ephemeral thing and call it human life?
(00:21:28）因为我们只关注那一点点短暂的东西，并称之为人的生命？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:21:32) Yeah. It’s like Aristotle focusing on heavy things falling because they’re earth-like, and things floating because they’re air-like. It’s the wrong thing to focus on.
(就像亚里士多德关注重物坠落是因为它们像大地，而漂浮物是因为它们像空气。这是不对的。

Time and space 时间与空间

Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:21:45) What exactly are we missing by focusing on such a short span of time?
(00:21:45）关注如此短暂的时间跨度，我们究竟错过了什么？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:21:50) I think we’re missing most of what we are. One of the issues… I’ve been thinking about this really viscerally lately. It’s weird when you do theoretical physics, because I think it literally changes the structure of your brain and you see the world differently, especially when you’re trying to build new abstractions.
(00:21:50) 我认为我们遗失了我们的大部分。其中一个问题是......我最近一直在认真思考这个问题。当你从事理论物理研究时，感觉很奇怪，因为我觉得它从字面上改变了你的大脑结构，让你以不同的方式看待世界，尤其是当你试图建立新的抽象概念时。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:22:05) Do you think it’s possible if you’re a theoretical physicist, that it’s easy to fall off the cliff and descend into madness?
(00:22:05) 如果你是理论物理学家，你觉得有可能掉下悬崖，陷入疯狂吗？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:22:13) I think you’re always on the edge of it, but I think what is amazing about being a scientist and trying to do things rigorously is it keeps your sanity. So I think if I wasn’t a theoretical physicist, I would be probably not sane. But what it forces you to do is you have to hold yourself to the fire of these abstractions in my mind have to really correspond to reality. And I have to really test that all the time. And so I love building new abstractions and I love going to those incredibly creative spaces that people don’t see as part of the way that we understand the world now. But ultimately, I have to make sure that whatever I’m pulling from that space is something that’s really usable and really relates to the world outside of me. That’s what science is.
(我觉得你总是在边缘徘徊 但我觉得作为一名科学家 努力严谨做事的奇妙之处 在于它能保持你的理智所以我想，如果我不是一个理论物理学家，我可能就不会理智了。但它迫使你去做的是，你必须坚持自己，让我头脑中的这些抽象概念真正与现实相对应。我必须不断地检验这一点。因此，我喜欢建立新的抽象概念，我喜欢进入那些令人难以置信的创造性空间，而这些空间在人们眼中并不是我们现在理解世界的方式的一部分。但归根结底，我必须确保我从那个空间中提取的东西是真正可用的，真正与我之外的世界相关的。这就是科学。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:23:01) So we were talking about what we’re missing when we look at a small stretch of time in a small stretch of space.
(00:23:01）所以，我们在讨论，当我们在一个狭小的空间里看一小段时间时，我们错过了什么。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:23:09) Yeah, so the issue is we evolve perception to see reality a certain way. So for us, space is really important and time feels fleeting. And I had a really wonderful mentor, Paul Davies, most of my career. And Paul’s amazing because he gives these little seed thought experiments all the time. Something he used to ask me all the time was when I was a postdoc, this is a random tangent, but was how much of the universe could be converted into technology if you were thinking about long-term futures and stuff like that. And it’s a weird thought experiment, but there’s a lot of deep things there. And I do think a lot about the fact that we’re really limited in our interactions with reality by the particular architectures that we evolved, and so we’re not seeing everything. And in fact, our technology tells us this all the time because it allows us to see the world in new ways by basically allowing us to perceive the world in ways that we couldn’t otherwise.
(是的，所以问题在于我们的感知会以某种方式来看待现实。所以对我们来说，空间真的很重要，而时间感觉转瞬即逝。在我职业生涯的大部分时间里，我都有一位非常棒的导师--保罗-戴维斯（Paul Davies）。保罗非常了不起，因为他总是给我们做一些小的种子思想实验。当我还是博士后时，他经常问我一个问题，这是个随机的切入点，就是如果你考虑长期未来之类的东西，宇宙中有多少东西可以转化为技术。这是个奇怪的思想实验，但有很多深层次的东西。我确实想了很多，我们与现实的互动受到了我们进化出的特殊架构的限制，所以我们并不能看到一切。事实上，我们的技术一直在告诉我们这一点，因为它能让我们以全新的方式来看待这个世界，基本上让我们以其他方式无法感知的方式来感知这个世界。
(00:24:05) And so what I’m getting at with this is I think that 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. And we actually can’t resolve that feature. We don’t interact with it on a regular basis, so we see them as these fleeting things that have this really short temporal clock time without seeing how large they are. When I’m saying time here, really, the way that people could picture it is in terms of causal structure. So 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.
(所以我想说的是 我认为有生命的物体实际上是巨大的它们是宇宙中一些最大的结构，但它们在空间上并不大。它们在时间上很大。而我们实际上无法解决这个问题。我们不经常与之互动，所以我们把它们看成是转瞬即逝的东西，它们的时间时钟很短，却看不到它们有多大。当我在这里说时间的时候，实际上，人们可以用因果结构来描述它。所以，如果你思考宇宙的历史，然后想象整个历史就是你，这就是我观察每个生物时脑海中的画面。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:24:52) You have a tweet for everything. You tweeted-
（00:24:52）你有一个鸣叫的一切。你的推特
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:24:53) Doesn’t everyone?
(每个人不都是这样吗？
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:24:54) You have a lot of poetic, profound tweets. Sometimes-
(00:24:54) 你有很多诗意而深刻的推文。有时
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:24:58) Thank you.
(00:24:58) 谢谢。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:24:59) … they’re puzzles that take a long time to figure out.
(00:24:59）......它们是需要很长时间才能解开的谜题。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:25:04) Well, you know what it is? The reason they’re hard to write is because it’s compressing a very deep idea into a short amount of space, and I really like doing that intellectual exercise because I find it productive for me.
(你知道是什么原因吗？它们之所以难写，是因为要把一个非常深刻的想法压缩到很短的篇幅里，而我非常喜欢做这种智力练习，因为我发现这对我来说很有成效。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:25:13) Yeah, it’s a very interesting kind of compression algorithm though.
(00:25:13) 是的，这是一种非常有趣的压缩算法。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:25:18) Yeah, I like language. I think it’s really fun to play with.
(00:25:18) 是的，我喜欢语言。我觉得玩语言真的很有趣。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:25:20) Yeah, I wonder if AI can decompress it. That’d be an interesting challenge.
(00:25:20) 是啊，我想知道人工智能能否解压缩。这将是一个有趣的挑战。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:25:25) I would like to try this, but I think I use language in certain ways that are non-canonical and I do it very purposefully. And it would be interesting to me how AI would interpret it.
(00:25:25) 我也想试试，但我觉得我使用语言的某些方式并不规范，而且我是有目的的。对我来说，人工智能会如何解释这一点会很有趣。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:25:35) Yeah, your tweets would be a good Turing Test for super intelligence. Anyway, you tweeted that things only look emergent because we can’t see time. So if we could see time, what would the world look like? You’re saying you’ll be able to see everything that an object has been, every step of the way that led to this current moment, and all the interactions that require to make that evolution happen. You would see this gigantic tail.
(是啊，你的推文可以作为超级智能的图灵测试。总之，你在推特上说，事情看起来是突发的，因为我们看不到时间。那么，如果我们能看到时间，世界会是什么样子呢？你的意思是说，你可以看到一个物体所经历过的一切，看到它到达此刻的每一步，看到它发生进化所需要的所有相互作用。你会看到这个巨大的尾巴。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:26:11) The universe is far larger in time than it is in space, and this planet is one of the biggest things in the universe.
(00:26:11）宇宙在时间上远远大于空间，而这个星球是宇宙中最大的物体之一。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:26:21) So the more complexity, the bigger the object-
(00:26:21) 因此，复杂性越高，对象就越大。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:26:25) Yeah, I think the modern technosphere is the largest object in time in the universe that we know about.
(00:26:25) 是的，我认为现代科技圈是我们所知的宇宙中最大的时间物体。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:26:33) And when you say technosphere, what do you mean?
(00:26:33) 你说的技术圈是什么意思？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:26:36) I mean the global integration of life and technology on this planet.
(00:26:36）我指的是地球上生命与科技的全球融合。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:26:41) So all the technological things we’ve created?
(00:26:41) 所以我们创造的所有科技东西？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:26:44) But I don’t think of them as separate. They’re very integrated with the structure that generated them. So you can almost imagine it like time is constantly bifurcating and it’s generating new structures, and these new structures are locally constructing the future. And so things like you and I are very close together in time because we didn’t diverge very early in the history of universe. It’s very recent. And I think this is one of the reasons that we can understand each other so well and we can communicate effectively, and I might have some sense of what it feels like to be you. But other organisms bifurcated from us in time earlier. This is just the concept of phylogeny. But if you take that deeper and you really think about that as the structure of the physics that generates life and you take that very seriously, all of that causation is still bundled up in the objects we observe today.
(00:26:44) 但我并不认为它们是独立的。它们与产生它们的结构融为一体。所以你几乎可以把它想象成时间在不断分叉，并产生新的结构，而这些新的结构正在本地构建未来。所以像你和我这样的东西在时间上非常接近，因为我们在宇宙历史的早期并没有分叉。这是最近的事。我想这也是我们能够很好地相互理解 我们能够有效沟通的原因之一 我也许能体会到你的感受但其他生物与我们的分叉时间更早。这只是系统发育的概念。但是，如果你把这个概念理解得更深一些，真正把它看作是产生生命的物理学结构，并认真对待它，那么所有的因果关系仍然捆绑在我们今天观察到的物体中。
(00:27:42) And so you and I are close in this temporal structure, but we’re so close because we’re really big and we only are very different and the most recent moments in the time that’s embedded in us. It’s hard to use words to visualize what’s in minds. I have such a hard time with this sometimes. Actually, I was thinking on the way over here, I was like, you have pictures in your brain and then they’re hard to put into words. But I realized I always say I have a visual, but it’s not actually I have a visual. I have a feeling, because oftentimes I cannot actually draw a picture in my mind for the things that I say, but sometimes they go through a picture before they get to words. But I like experimenting with words because I think they help paint pictures.
(00:27:42) 因此，你和我在这个时间结构中很接近，但我们如此接近是因为我们真的很大，我们只是非常不同，而且是嵌入我们的时间中最近的时刻。很难用语言来形象地描述头脑中的东西。我有时就很难做到这一点。实际上，我在来这里的路上就在想，你脑子里有画面，但很难用语言表达出来。但我意识到，我总是说我有画面感，但实际上并不是我有画面感。我有一种感觉，因为很多时候我无法在脑海中为我说的话画出一幅图画，但有时它们会先经过一幅图画，然后才变成文字。但我喜欢用文字做实验，因为我觉得文字有助于描绘画面。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:28:33) It’s, again, some kind of compressed feeling that you can query to get a sense of the bigger visualization that you have in mind. It’s just a really nice compression. But I think the idea of this object that in it contains all the information about the history of an entity that you see now, just trying to visualize that is pretty cool. Obviously, the mind breaks down quickly as you step seconds and minutes back in time.
(00:28:33) 这同样是一种压缩的感觉，你可以通过查询来了解你心中更大的可视化效果。这真是一种很好的压缩。但我认为，这个对象包含了你现在看到的实体历史的所有信息，试图将其可视化的想法很酷。很明显，当你把时间倒退到几秒几分时，你的思维会很快崩溃。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:29:05) Yeah, for sure.
(是的，当然。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:29:08) I guess it’s just a gigantic object we’re supposed to be thinking about.
(00:29:08) 我想这只是一个我们应该思考的巨大物体。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:29:15) Yeah, I think so. And I think this is one of the reasons that we have such an ability to abstract as humans because we are so gigantic that the space that we can go back into is really large. So the more abstract you’re going, the deeper you’re going in that space.
(是的，我也这么认为。我想这也是我们人类有如此抽象能力的原因之一，因为我们是如此巨大，我们能回到的空间真的很大。所以，你越抽象，你在那个空间里就越深。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:29:29) But in that sense, aren’t we fundamentally all connected?
(00:29:29) 但从这个意义上说，我们从根本上不都是联系在一起的吗？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:29:33) Yes. And this is why the definition of life cannot be the individual. It has to be these lineages because they’re all connected, they’re interwoven, and they’re exchanging parts all the time.
(00:29:33) 是的。这就是为什么生命的定义不能是个人。它必须是这些血脉，因为它们相互连接，相互交织，并且一直在交换部分。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:29:42) Yeah, so maybe there are certain aspects of those lineages that can be lifelike. They can be characteristics. They can be measured with the sunbeam theory that have more or less life, but they’re all just fingertips of a much bigger object.
(是的，也许这些血统的某些方面可以栩栩如生。它们可以是特征它们可以用太阳光理论来测量 它们或多或少都有生命 但它们都只是一个更大物体的指尖
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:29:57) Yeah, I think life is very high dimensional. In fact, I think you can be alive in some dimensions and not in others. If you could project all the causation that’s in you, in some features of you, very little causation is required, very little history. And in some features, a lot is. So it’s quite difficult to take this really high-dimensional, very deep structure and project it into things that we really can understand and say, “This is the one thing that we’re seeing,” because it’s not one thing.
(00:29:57) 是的，我认为生命是非常高维度的。事实上，我认为你可以在某些维度上活着，而在另一些维度上却不是。如果你能投射出你身上所有的因果关系，在你的某些特征中，只需要很少的因果关系，很少的历史。而在某些特征中，则需要很多因果关系。因此，我们很难将这种高维、深层的结构投射到我们真正能够理解的事物中，并说 "这就是我们看到的唯一事物"，因为它并不是唯一的事物。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:30:33) It’s funny we’re talking about this now and I’m slowly starting to realize, one of the things I saw when I took Ayahuasca, afterwards actually, so the actual ceremony is four or five hours, but afterwards you’re still riding whatever the thing that you’re riding. And I got a chance to afterwards hang out with some friends and just shoot the shit in the forest, and I could see their faces. And what was happening with their faces and their hair is I would get this interesting effect. First of all, everything was beautiful and I just had so much love for everybody, but I could see their past selves behind them. I guess it’s a blurring effect of where if I move like this, the faces that were just there are still there and it would just float like this behind them, which will create this incredible effect. But another way to think about that is I’m visualizing a little bit of that object of the thing they were just a few seconds ago. It’s a cool little effect.
(有趣的是，我们现在谈论这个， 我慢慢开始意识到， 我看到的事情之一 当我把死藤水， 事后其实， 所以实际的仪式 是四五个小时，之后我有机会和几个朋友出去玩 在森林里狂欢 我能看到他们的表情他们的脸和头发会产生有趣的效果首先，一切都很美好，我对每个人都充满了爱，但我能看到他们背后的过去的自己。我猜这是一种模糊效果，如果我像这样移动，刚才的面孔依然存在，就会像这样漂浮在他们身后，从而产生不可思议的效果。但换个角度想，我是在把几秒钟前的那个物体视觉化。这是个很酷的小效果。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:31:46) That’s very cool.
(00:31:46) 太酷了。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:31:49) And now it’s giving it a bit more profundity to the effect that was just beautiful aesthetically, but it’s also beautiful from a physics perspective because that is a past self. I get a little glimpse at the past selves that they were. But then you take that to its natural conclusion, not just a few seconds ago, but just to the beginning of the universe. And you could probably get to that-
(00:31:49) 而现在，它赋予了它更多的深刻性，从美学的角度来看，它是美丽的，但从物理学的角度来看，它也是美丽的，因为那是一个过去的自我。我看到了他们过去的自己但如果你把它自然地推向终点 不仅仅是几秒钟前 而是宇宙的开端你也许可以这样
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:31:49) Billions of years, yeah.
(数十亿年，是的。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:32:15) … get down that lineage.
(00:32:15）......顺着这条血脉走下去。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:32:17) It’s crazy that there’s billions of years inside of all of us.
(00:32:17) 我们体内有数十亿年的时间，这太疯狂了。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:32:21) All of us. And then we connect obviously not too long ago.
(我们所有人。很明显，我们不久前还联系过。

Technosphere 科技圈

Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:32:25) Yeah. 是的
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:32:27) You mentioned just the technosphere, and you also wrote that the most, the live thing on this planet is our technosphere. Why is the technology we create a kind of life form? Why are you seeing it as life?
(00:32:27) 你只提到了科技圈，你还写道，这个星球上最有生命的东西就是我们的科技圈。为什么我们创造的技术是一种生命形式？为什么你把它视为生命？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:32:39) Because it’s creative. But with us, obviously. Not independently of us. And also because of this lineage view of life. And 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, and so it’s the furthest thing, it’s the biggest thing. And I think a lot about the nature of life across different scales. And so 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 in our technology on the planet as alive. But I think if you have this deeper view into the nature of life, which I think is necessary also to solve the origin of life, then you have to include those things.
(因为它很有创意。但显然是和我们一起。而不是独立于我们。也因为这种生命的脉络观我经常把生命看成是一种星球尺度的现象，因为所有这些因果关系的自然边界，都捆绑在我们生物圈的每一个物体上。所以对我来说，这只是我们星球上的生命在我们的宇宙中所能产生的事物中的当前边界，所以它是最远的东西，是最大的东西。我经常思考不同尺度的生命本质。我们体内的细胞是有生命的，我们感觉自己是有生命的，但我们通常不会想到我们所处的社会是有生命的，也不会想到我们在地球上的技术所形成的全球规模的组织是有生命的。但我认为，如果你对生命的本质有更深刻的认识，我认为这对解决生命起源问题也是必要的，那么你就必须把这些东西包括进来。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:33:47) All of them, so you have to simultaneously think about-
(00:33:47) 所有这些，所以你必须同时考虑--
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:33:50) Every scale.
(00:33:50) 每个刻度。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:33:50) … life at every single scale.
(00:33:50) ......生命的每一个刻度。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:33:52) Yeah. （00: 33: 52）是啊。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:33:53) The planetary and the bacteria level.
(00:33:53) 地球和细菌层面。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:33:55) Yeah. This is the hard thing about solving the problem of life, I think, is how many things you have to integrate into building a sort of unified picture of this thing that we want to call life. And a lot of our theories of physics are built on building deep regularities that explain a really broad class of phenomena, and I think we haven’t really traditionally thought about life that way. But I think to get at some of these hardest questions like looking for life on other planets or the origin of life, you really have to think about it that way. And so most of my professional work is just trying to understand every single thing on this planet that might be an example of life, which is pretty much everything, and then trying to figure out what’s the deeper structure underlying that.
是的我认为，解决生命问题的难点在于，你必须整合多少东西，才能构建出一幅我们称之为生命的统一图景。我们的很多物理学理论都是建立在深层次的规律性之上的，这些规律性可以解释非常广泛的现象，而我认为我们传统上并没有这样去思考生命。但我认为，要解决一些最难的问题，比如寻找其他星球上的生命或生命起源，你真的必须这样去思考。因此，我的大部分专业工作就是试图了解这个星球上每一个可能是生命的例子的东西，几乎是所有的东西，然后试图找出其背后更深层次的结构。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:34:40) Yeah. Schrodinger wrote that living matter, while not eluding the laws of physics as established up to date, is likely to involve other laws of physics hitherto unknown. So to him-
是的薛定谔在书中写道，生命物质虽然没有逃避迄今为止已确立的物理定律，但很可能涉及到迄今未知的其他物理定律。所以对他来说
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:34:54) I love that quote.
(00:34:54) 我喜欢这句话。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:34:55) … there was a sense that at the bottom of this, there are new laws of physics that could explain this thing that we call-
(......有一种感觉，在这个底部，有新的物理定律，可以解释这个东西，我们称之为 -
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:35:00) … new laws of physics that could explain this thing that we call life.
(00:35:00) ......新的物理定律可以解释我们称之为生命的东西。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:35:04) Yeah. Schrodinger really tried to do what physicists try to do, which is explain things. And his attempt was to try to explain life in terms of non-equilibrium physics, because he thought that was the best description that we could generate at the time. And so he did come up with something really insightful, which was to predict the structure of DNA as an aperiodic crystal. And that was for a very precise reason, that was the only kind of physical structure that could encode enough information to actually specify a cell. We knew some things about genes, but not about DNA and its actual structure when he proposed that. But in the book, he tried to explain life is kind of going against entropy. And so some people have talked about it as like Schrodinger’s paradox, how can life persist when the second law of thermodynamics is there? But in open systems, that’s not so problematic.
是的薛定谔真的想做物理学家想做的事 那就是解释事物他试图用非平衡物理学来解释生命，因为他认为这是我们当时所能做出的最好的描述。因此，他确实提出了一些非常有见地的观点，那就是将DNA的结构预测为非周期性晶体。这是出于一个非常精确的原因，只有这样的物理结构才能编码足够多的信息，从而真正指定一个细胞。当他提出这一观点时，我们对基因有所了解，但对DNA及其实际结构却一无所知。但在书中，他试图解释生命是一种违背熵的行为。所以有些人把它说成是薛定谔悖论 当热力学第二定律存在时 生命怎么可能持续？但在开放系统中，问题不大。
(00:36:02) And really the question is, why can life generate so much order? And we don’t have a physics to describe that. And it’s interesting, generations of physicists have thought about this problem. Oftentimes, it’s like when people are retiring, they’re like, “Oh, now I can work on life.” Or they’re more senior in their career and they’ve worked on other more traditional problems. And there’s still a lot of impetus in the physics community to think that non-equilibrium physics will explain life. But I think that’s not the right approach. I don’t think ultimately the solution to what life is there, and I don’t really think entropy has much to do with it unless it’s entirely reformulated.
(真正的问题是 为什么生命可以产生如此多的秩序？我们没有物理学来描述这一点。有趣的是，几代物理学家都在思考这个问题。很多时候，就像当人们退休的时候 他们会想，"哦，现在我可以研究生命了"或者他们在职业生涯中资历更深 他们研究过其他更传统的问题物理学界仍然有很多人认为非平衡物理学可以解释生命。但我认为这不是正确的方法。我不认为最终能解决生命的问题 我也不认为熵与此有关 除非对其进行重新表述
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:36:42) Well, because you have to explain how interesting order, how complexity emerges from the soup.
(00:36:42) 嗯，因为你必须解释有趣的秩序、复杂性是如何从汤中产生的。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:36:47) Yes. From randomness.
(00:36:47) 是的。来自随机性。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:36:48) From randomness. Physics currently can’t do that.
(来自随机性。物理学目前还做不到这一点。

Theory of everything 万物理论

Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:36:52) No. Physics hardly even acknowledges that the universe is random at its base. We like to think we live in a deterministic universe and everything’s deterministic. But I think that’s probably an artifact of the way that we’ve written down laws of physics since Newton invented modern physics and his conception of motion and gravity, which he formulated laws that had initial conditions and fixed dynamical laws. And that’s been sort of become the standard canon of how people think the universe works and how we need to describe any physical system is with an initial condition in a law of motion. And I think that’s not actually the way the universe really works. I think it’s a good approximation for the kind of systems that physicists have studied so far.
(不，物理学几乎不承认宇宙的基础是随机的。我们喜欢认为自己生活在一个确定的宇宙中，一切都是确定的。但我认为，这可能是牛顿发明现代物理学和他的运动和重力概念以来，我们书写物理定律的方式的产物，他制定的定律有初始条件和固定的动力学定律。他制定的定律有初始条件和固定的动力学定律。这已经成为人们认为宇宙是如何运行的标准规范，以及我们需要如何描述任何物理系统，即运动定律中的初始条件。我认为这并不是宇宙真正运行的方式。我认为对于物理学家迄今为止所研究的系统来说，这只是一个很好的近似值。
(00:37:39) And I think it will radically fail in the longterm at describing reality at its more basal levels. But I’m not saying there’s a base, I don’t think that reality has a ground, and I don’t think there’s a theory of everything, but I think there are better theories, and I think there are more explanatory theories, and I think we can get to something that explains much more than the current laws of physics do.
(我认为从长远来看，它在描述现实的基础层面上会彻底失败。但我不是说有一个基础，我不认为现实有一个基础，我也不认为有一个万物理论，但我认为有更好的理论，我认为有更多的解释性理论，我认为我们可以找到比目前的物理定律解释得更多的东西。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:38:02) When you say theory of everything, you mean everything, everything?
(当你说万物理论时，你是指一切，一切？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:38:06) Yeah. In physics right now, it’s really popular to talk about theories of everything. So string theory is supposed to be a theory of everything because it unifies quantum mechanics and gravity. And people have their different pet theories of everything. And the challenge with the theory of everything, I really love this quote from David Krakauer, which is, “A theory of everything is a theory of everything except those things that theorize.”
(现在物理学界很流行谈论万有理论。弦理论被认为是万物理论，因为它统一了量子力学和万有引力。人们有各自不同的万物理论。万物理论的挑战在于 我很喜欢大卫-克拉考尔的一句话 "万物理论就是万物的理论 除了那些理论化的东西"
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:38:30) Oh, you mean removing the observer from the thing?
(00:38:30) 哦，你是说把观察者从那东西上移开？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:38:31) Yeah. But it’s also weird because if a theory of everything explained everything, it should also explain the theory. So the theory has to be recursive and none of our theories of physics are recursive. So it’s a weird concept.
是啊但这也很奇怪 因为如果万物理论能解释万物 它也应该解释万物理论所以理论必须是递归的，而我们的物理学理论都不是递归的。所以这是个奇怪的概念。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:38:45) But it’s very difficult to integrate the observer into a theory.
(00:38:45) 但要将观察者纳入理论是非常困难的。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:38:47) I don’t think so. I think you can build a theory acknowledging that you’re an observer inside the universe.
(我不这么认为。我认为你可以建立一个理论，承认你是宇宙内部的观察者。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:38:52) But doesn’t it become recursive in that way? And you saying it’s possible to make a theory that’s okay with that?
(但这样不就变成递归了吗？你的意思是说，有可能建立一个可以接受这种情况的理论吗？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:39:01) I think so. I mean, I don’t think… There’s always going to be the paradox of another meta level you could build on the meta level. So if you assume this is your universe and you’re observe outside of it, you have some meta description of that universe, but then you need a meta description of you describing that universe. So this is one of the biggest challenges that we face being observers inside our universe. And also, why the paradoxes and the foundations of mathematics and any place that we try to have observers in the system or a system describing itself show up. But I think it is possible to build a physics that builds in those things intrinsically without having them be paradoxical or have holes in the descriptions. And so one place I think about this quite a lot, which I think can give you sort of a more concrete example, is the nature of what we call fundamental.
(我想是的我的意思是，我不认为......总会有一个悖论，那就是你可以在元层面上建立另一个元层面。所以，如果你假设这是你的宇宙，而你在宇宙之外观察，你对这个宇宙有一些元描述，但你又需要对你描述这个宇宙的元描述。因此，作为宇宙内部的观察者，这是我们面临的最大挑战之一。同时，这也是为什么悖论、数学基础以及我们试图在系统或描述自身的系统中设置观察者的任何地方都会出现的原因。但我认为，我们有可能建立一种物理学，将这些东西内在地融入其中，而不会让它们成为悖论或在描述中出现漏洞。因此，我经常思考这个问题，我认为这可以给你一个更具体的例子，那就是我们所说的基本原理的性质。
(00:39:54) So we typically define fundamental right now in terms of the smallest indivisible units of matter. So again, you have to have a definition of what you think material is and matter is, but right now what’s fundamental are elementary particles. And we think they’re fundamental because we can’t break them apart further. And obviously, we have theories like string theory that if they’re right would replace the current description of what’s the most fundamental thing in our universe by replacing with something smaller. But we can’t get to those theories because we’re technologically limited. And so if you look at this from a historical perspective and you think about explanations changing as physical systems like us learn more about the reality in which they live, we once considered atoms to be the most fundamental thing. And it literally comes from the word indivisible. And then we realized atoms had substructure because we built better technology, which allowed us to “See the world better” and resolve smaller features of it.
(00:39:54) 所以我们现在通常用物质不可分割的最小单位来定义基本粒子。所以，你必须对你认为的材料和物质有一个定义，但现在最基本的是基本粒子。我们认为它们是基本的 因为我们无法进一步分解它们很显然，我们有弦理论这样的理论，如果它们是正确的，就会用更小的东西取代目前对宇宙中最基本的东西的描述。但我们无法实现这些理论 因为我们的技术有限因此，如果你从历史的角度来看待这个问题，你会发现，随着像我们这样的物理系统对其所处的现实有了更多的了解，解释也在发生变化，我们曾经认为原子是最基本的东西。从字面上看，原子来源于 "不可分割 "一词。后来，我们意识到原子具有亚结构，因为我们建立了更好的技术，使我们能够 "更好地观察世界"，并解决它的较小特征。
(00:40:58) And then we built even better technology, which allowed us to see even smaller structure and get down to the standard model particles. And we think that there might be structure below that, but we can’t get there yet with our technology. So what’s fundamental, the way we talk about it in current physics is not actually fundamental, it’s the boundaries of what we can observe in our universe, what we can see with our technology. And so if you want to build a theory that’s about us and about what’s inside the universe that we can observe, not what’s at the boundary of it, you need to talk about objects that are in the universe that you can actually break apart to smaller things. So I think the things that are fundamental are actually the constructed objects.
(然后我们建立了更好的技术，让我们可以看到更小的结构，并深入到标准模型粒子。我们认为，在标准模型粒子以下可能还有结构，但我们的技术还无法到达那里。因此，我们在当前物理学中谈论的基本原理，实际上并不是基本原理，而是我们能在宇宙中观测到的东西的边界，是我们的技术所能看到的东西的边界。因此，如果你想建立一个关于我们的理论，关于我们能观察到的宇宙内部的东西，而不是宇宙边界上的东西，你就需要讨论宇宙中的物体，你实际上可以把它们分解成更小的东西。因此，我认为最基本的东西实际上是被构造出来的物体。
(00:41:45) They’re the ones that really exist, and you really understand their properties because you know how the universe constructed them because you can actually take them apart. You can understand the intrinsic laws that built them. But the things that the boundary are just at the boundary, they’re evolving with us, and we’ll learn more about that structure as we go along. But really, if we want to talk about what’s fundamental inside our universe, we have to talk about all these things that are traditionally considered emergent, but really just structures in time that have causal histories that constructed them and are really actually what our universe is about.
(00:41:45) 它们是真正存在的，你真正了解它们的特性，是因为你知道宇宙是如何构造它们的，因为你实际上可以把它们拆开。你可以理解构建它们的内在规律。但边界上的东西只是在边界上，它们在和我们一起进化，我们会随着时间的推移对这种结构有更多的了解。但实际上，如果我们想讨论宇宙内部的根本问题，我们就必须讨论所有这些传统上被认为是突发性的东西，但实际上只是时间上的结构，这些结构具有构建它们的因果历史，实际上就是我们的宇宙。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:42:17) So we should focus on the construction methodology as the fundamental thing. Do you think there’s a bottom to the smallest possible thing that makes up the universe?
(00:42:17)所以我们应该把重点放在作为根本的构造方法上。你认为构成宇宙的最小可能的东西有底吗？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:42:27) I don’t see one.
(00:42:27) 我没看到。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:42:30) It’ll take way too long. It’ll take longer to find that than it will to understand the mechanism that created life.
(这需要太长的时间。比起了解创造生命的机制，找到它需要更长的时间。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:42:36) I think so, yeah. I think for me, 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.
(我想是的，是的。我认为对我来说 现代物理学的前沿 新物理学不在于高能粒子物理 也不在于量子引力 也不在于任何一种传统意义上的 "这将是我们对现实本质 最新最深刻的洞察"它在于研究生命和智慧的问题 以及我们当前的生存危机 作为一种文明或文化 正经历着生存的创伤
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:43:09) The existential trauma and the terror we feel that that technology might somehow destroy us, us meaning living intelligently with organisms, and yet we don’t understand what that even means.
(00:43:09)我们感到的生存创伤和恐惧是，技术可能会以某种方式摧毁我们，我们意味着与生物智能地生活在一起，但我们甚至不明白这意味着什么。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:43:20) Well, humans have always been afraid of our technologies though. So it’s kind of a fascinating thing that every time we invent something we don’t understand, it takes us a little while to catch up with it.
(人类总是害怕我们的科技因此，每次我们发明了自己不了解的东西，都要花上一段时间才能赶上它的脚步，这真是一件令人着迷的事情。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:43:29) I think also in part, humans kind of love being afraid.
(00:43:29) 我认为在某种程度上，人类也喜欢害怕。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:43:33) Yeah, we love being traumatized.
(是啊，我们喜欢受到创伤。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:43:36) It’s weird, the trauma-
(很奇怪，创伤--
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:43:36) We want to learn more, and then when we learn more, it traumatizes us. I never thought about this before, but I think this is one of the reasons I love what I do, is because it traumatizes me all the time. That sounds really bad. But what I mean is I love the shock of realizing that coming to understand something in a way that you never understood it before. I think it seems to me when I see a lot of the ways other people react to new ideas that they don’t feel that way intrinsically. But for me, that’s why I do what I do. I love that feeling.
(00:43:36) 我们想学到更多，而当我们学到更多的时候，它就会给我们带来创伤。我以前从没想过这个问题，但我觉得这就是我喜欢我的工作的原因之一，因为它总是给我带来创伤。这听起来很糟糕。但我的意思是，我喜欢那种意识到以一种你以前从未理解过的方式去理解一件事的震撼。当我看到其他人对新想法的反应时，我觉得他们本质上并没有这种感觉。但对我来说，这就是我从事这项工作的原因。我喜欢这种感觉。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:44:08) But you’re also working on a topic where it’s fundamentally ego destroying, is you’re talking about life. It’s humbling to think that we’re not… The individual human is not special. And you’re very viscerally exploring that.
(但你也在研究一个从根本上摧毁自我的话题，那就是你在谈论生命。想到我们并不......人类个体并不特别，这让人感到谦卑。你非常直观地探讨了这一点。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:44:27) Yeah. I’m trying to embody that. Because I think you have to live the physics to understand it. But there’s a great quote about Einstein. I don’t know if this is true or not, that he once said that he could feel like beam in his belly. But I think you got to think about it though, right? If you’re really deep thinker and you’re really thinking about reality that deeply and you are part of the reality that you’re trying to describe, you feel it, you really feel it.
(是的，我正在努力体现这一点。因为我觉得你必须活在物理学中才能理解它。爱因斯坦有一句名言我不知道是真是假，他曾经说过，他能感觉到自己的腹部就像有一道光束。但我觉得你得好好想想，对吧？如果你真的是一个深刻的思想家，你真的对现实有那么深刻的思考，而你又是你试图描述的现实的一部分，你就会感觉到它，你真的会感觉到它。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:44:54) That’s what I was saying about, you’re always walking along the cliff. If you fall off, you’re falling into madness.
(00:44:54) 这就是我刚才说的，你总是在悬崖边行走。如果你掉下去，你就会陷入疯狂。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:45:01) Yes. It’s a constant descent into madness.
是的这是一个不断陷入疯狂的过程。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:45:05) The fascinating thing about physicists and madness is that you don’t know if you’ve fallen off the cliff.
(00:45:05)物理学家和疯狂的迷人之处在于，你不知道自己是否已经掉下悬崖。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:45:10) Yeah, you don’t don’t know.
(是啊，你不知道。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:45:10) That’s the cool thing about it.
(00:45:10) 这就是它酷的地方。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:45:13) I rely on other people to tell me. Actually, this is very funny. Because I have these conversations with my students often, they’re worried about going crazy. I have to reassure them that one of the reasons they’ll stay sane is by trying to work on concrete problems.
(00:45:13）我靠别人告诉我。事实上，这很有趣。因为我经常和我的学生进行这样的对话，他们担心自己会疯掉。我不得不向他们保证，他们保持清醒的原因之一就是努力解决具体问题。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:45:28) I’m going crazy or waking up. I don’t know which one it is.
(00:45:28) 我是疯了还是醒了。我不知道是哪一个。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:45:28) Yeah. 是的

Origin of life 生命的起源

Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:45:34) So what do you think is the origin of life on earth and how can we talk about it in a productive way?
(00:45:34) 那么，你认为地球生命的起源是什么？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:45:40) The origin of life is like this boundary that the universe can only cross if a structure that emerges can reinforce its own existence, which is self-reproduction, autocatalysis, things people traditionally talk about. But it has to be able to maintain its own existence against this sort of randomness that happens in chemistry, and this randomness that happens in the quantum world. And it’s in some sense the emergence of a deterministic structure that says, “I’m going to exist and I’m going to keep going.” But pinning that down is really hard. We have ways of thinking about it in assembly theory that I think are pretty rigorous. And one of the things I’m really excited about is trying to actually quantify in an assembly theoretic way when the origin of life happens. But the basic process I have in mind is a system that has no causal contingency, no constraints of objects, basically constraining the existence of other objects or forming or allowing the existence of other objects.
(生命的起源就像这个边界，只有当出现的结构能够强化自身的存在时，宇宙才能跨越这个边界，也就是人们传统意义上所说的自我繁殖、自我催化。但它必须能够在化学中的随机性和量子世界中的随机性面前维持自身的存在。在某种意义上，它是一种确定性结构的出现 它说，"我要存在，我要继续存在"但要确定这一点真的很难我们在装配理论中有一些思考方式 我认为是非常严谨的我非常感兴趣的一件事就是尝试用组装理论的方法来量化生命起源的时间。但我心目中的基本过程是一个没有因果偶然性、没有物体约束的系统，基本上是约束其他物体的存在，或形成或允许其他物体的存在。
(00:46:45) And so that sounds very abstract, but you can just think of a chemical reaction can’t happen if there’s not a catalyst, for example. Or a baby can’t be born if there wasn’t a parent. So there’s a lot of causal contingency that’s necessary for certain things to happen. So you think about this sort of unconstrained random system, there’s nothing that reinforces the existence of other things. So those sort of resources just get washed out in all of these different structures and none of them exist again, or they’re not very complicated if they’re in high abundance.
(00:46:45) 这听起来很抽象，但你可以想想，比如说，如果没有催化剂，化学反应就不会发生。或者说，如果没有父母，婴儿就不会出生。所以有很多因果关系是某些事情发生的必要条件。所以你想想这种无约束的随机系统 没有什么能强化其他事物的存在所以这些资源就会在所有这些不同的结构中被冲刷掉 它们都不会再存在了 或者说它们并不复杂 如果它们非常丰富的话
(00:47:21) And some random events allow some things to start reinforcing the existence of a small subset of objects. And if they can do that, just molecules basically recognizing each other and being able to catalyze certain reactions. There’s this kind of transition point that happens where, unless you get a self-reinforcing structure, something that can maintain its own existence, it actually can’t cross this boundary to make any objects in high abundance without having this sort of past history that it’s carrying with us and maintaining the existence of that past history. And that boundary point where objects can’t exist unless they have the selection and history in them, is what we call the origin of life.
(一些随机事件让一些东西开始强化一小部分物体的存在。如果它们能做到这一点，那么分子之间基本上就能相互识别，并能催化某些反应。会出现这样一个过渡点，除非你得到一个自我强化的结构，一个能够维持自身存在的结构，否则它实际上无法跨越这个边界，制造出任何高丰度的物体，除非它有这样一种过去的历史，它和我们一起承载着过去的历史，并维持着过去历史的存在。在这个边界点上，如果没有选择和历史，物体就无法存在，这就是我们所说的生命起源。
(00:48:09) And pretty much everything beyond that boundary is holding on for dear life to all of the causation and causal structure that’s basically put it there, and it’s carving its way through this possibility space into generating more and more structure. And that’s when you get the open-ended cascade of evolution. But that boundary point is really hard to cross. And then what happens when you cross that boundary point and the way objects come into existence is also really fascinating dynamics, because as things become more complex, the assembly index increases. I can explain all these things. Sorry. You can tell me what you want to explain or what people will want to hear. This… Sorry, I have a very vivid visual in my brain and it’s really hard to articulate it.
(在这个边界之外的所有东西，都在拼命地抓住所有的因果关系和因果结构，而正是这些因果关系和因果结构把它放在了那里，它在这个可能性的空间里雕刻着自己的方式，生成越来越多的结构。这就是进化的开放式级联。但这个边界点真的很难跨越。当你越过那个边界点时，会发生什么呢？ 物体产生的方式也是非常迷人的动力学，因为随着事物变得越来越复杂，装配指数也会增加。这些我都能解释抱歉你可以告诉我你想解释什么，或者人们想听什么。这个......抱歉，我脑子里有一个非常生动的画面，真的很难说清楚。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:48:55) Got to convert it to language.
(00:48:55) 必须转换成语言。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:48:58) I know. It’s so hard. It’s like it’s going from a feeling to a visual to language is so stifling sometimes.
（00: 48: 58）我知道。这太难了就像从感觉到视觉再到语言 有时候太令人窒息了
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:49:03) I have to convert it from language to a visual to a feeling. I think it’s working.
(00:49:03) 我必须把它从语言转换成视觉，再转换成感觉。我想这是可行的。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:49:11) I hope so.
(希望如此。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:49:12) I really like the self-reinforcement of the objects. Just so I understand, one way to create a lot of the same kind of object is make the self-reinforcing?
(00:49:12）我非常喜欢物体的自我强化。为了让我理解，创造大量同类对象的一种方法是让它们自我强化吗？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:49:24) Yes. So self-reproduction has this property. If the system can make itself, then it can persist in time because all objects decay, they all have a finite lifetime. So if you’re able to make a copy of your self before you die, before the second law eats you or whatever people think happens, then that structure can persist in time.
(00:49:24) 是的。因此，自我复制具有这种特性。如果系统能够自我复制，那么它就能在时间中持续存在，因为所有物体都会衰变，它们的寿命都是有限的。所以，如果你能在死之前，在第二定律吃掉你之前，或者在人们认为会发生的事情发生之前，复制出一个自己，那么这个结构就能在时间中持续存在。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:49:47) So that’s a way to sort of emerge out of a random soup, out of the randomness of soup.
(00:49:47) 因此，这是一种从随机的汤中脱颖而出的方式，从汤的随机性中脱颖而出。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:49:52) Right. But things that can copy themselves are very rare.
(00:49:52) Right.但能自我复制的东西非常罕见。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:49:55) Yeah, very.
(是的，非常。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:49:56) And so what ends up happening is that you get structures that enable the existence of other things, and then somehow only for some sets of objects, you get closed structures that are self-reinforcing and allow that entire structure to persist.
(00:49:56) 因此，最终的结果是，你会得到能让其他事物存在的结构，然后，不知何故，只对某些对象集而言，你会得到自我强化的封闭结构，并让整个结构持续存在。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:50:16) So the object A reinforces the existence of object B, but object A can die. So you have to close that loop?
(所以物体A强化了物体B的存在，但物体A可能会死。所以你必须关闭这个循环？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:50:27) Right. So this is the classic-
(00:50:27) Right.所以这是经典的
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:50:29) It’s all very unlikely statistically, but that’s sufficiently… So you’re saying there’s a chance?
(00:50:29) 从统计学角度来看，这一切都很不可能，但这足以......所以你是说有可能？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:50:29) There is a chance.
(00:50:29) 是有机会的。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:50:38) It’s low probability, but once you solve that, once you close the loop, you can create a lot of those objects?
(00:50:38) 概率很低，但一旦你解决了这个问题，一旦你关闭了这个循环，你就能创造出很多这样的对象？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:50:44) And that’s what we’re trying to figure out, is what are the causal constraints that close the loop? So there is this idea that’s been in the literature for a really long time that was originally proposed by Stuart Kauffman as really critical to the origin life called, autocatalytic sets. So autocatalytic set is exactly this property we have A makes B, B makes C, C makes A, and you get a closed system. But the problem with the theory of autocatalytic sets is incredibly brittle as a theory and it requires a lot of ad hoc assumptions. You have to assume function, you have to say this thing makes B. It’s not an emergent property, the association between A and B. And so the way I think about it is much more general. If you think about these histories that make objects, it’s kind of like the structure of the histories becomes, collapses in such a way that these things are all in the same sort of causal structure, and that causal structure actually loops back on itself to be able to generate some of the things that make the higher level structures.
(这就是我们想弄明白的 是什么因果关系制约了这个循环？有一个观点在文献中已经存在了很长时间，最初是由斯图尔特-考夫曼（Stuart Kauffman）提出的，对生命起源至关重要，这个观点被称为 "自催化集合"（autocatalytic sets）。自催化集就是这样一个特性 A造出B B造出C C造出A 你就得到了一个封闭的系统但自催化集理论的问题在于，它作为一种理论非常脆弱，需要很多特别的假设。你必须假设功能，你必须说是这个东西造就了B，而A和B之间的关联并不是一个突现的属性。如果你思考这些制造物体的历史，就会发现这些历史的结构会以这样一种方式坍塌，即这些东西都处于同一种因果结构中，而这种因果结构实际上会自我循环，从而产生一些制造更高层次结构的东西。
(00:51:43) Lee has a beautiful example of this actually in molybdenum. It’s like the first non-organic autocatalytic set. It’s a self-reproducing molybdenum ring. But it’s like molybdenum. And basically if you look at the molybdenum, it makes a huge molybdenum ring. I don’t remember exactly how big it is. It might be like 150 molybdenum atoms or something. But if you think about the configuration space of that object, it’s exponentially large how many possible molecules. So why does the entire system collapse on just making that one structure? If you start from molybdenum atoms that are maybe just a couple of them stuck together. And so what they see in this system is there’s a few intermediate stages. So there’s some random events where the chemistry comes together and makes these structures. And then once you get to this very large one, it becomes a template for the smaller ones. And then the whole system just reinforces its own production.
(00:51:43) 李在钼中有一个很好的例子。这就像是第一套非有机自催化装置。它是一个自我繁殖的钼环。但它就像钼。基本上，如果你观察钼，它会形成一个巨大的钼环。我不记得具体有多大了可能有150个钼原子什么的。但如果你想想这个物体的构型空间，它的可能分子数量是指数级的。那么，为什么仅仅制造出这一个结构，整个系统就会崩溃呢？如果你从钼原子开始，也许只有几个钼原子粘在一起。所以他们在这个系统中看到的是几个中间阶段。在这一过程中，会发生一些随机事件，化学反应聚集在一起，形成了这些结构。一旦形成了这个非常大的结构 它就会成为其他小结构的模板然后整个系统就加强了自身的生产
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:52:42) How did Lee find this molybdenum closed loop?
(00:52:42) 李是如何发现这个钼闭环的？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:52:42) If I knew how Lee’s brain work, I think I would understand a more about the universe. But I-
(如果我知道李的大脑是怎么工作的，我想我会更了解宇宙。但我
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:52:42) This is not an algorithm with discovery, it’s a-
(00:52:42) 这不是一种发现算法，而是一种--
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:52:46) No, but I think it goes to the deepest roots of when he started thinking about origins of life. So I mean, I don’t know all his history, but what he’s told me is he started out in crystallography. And there’s some things that he would just… People would just take for granted about chemical structures that he was deeply perplexed about. Just like why are these really intricate, really complex structures forming so easily under these conditions? And he was really interested in life, but he started in that field. So he’s just carried with him these sort of deep insights from these systems that seem like they’re totally not alive and just like these metallic chemistries into actually thinking about the deep principles of life. So I think he already knew a lot about that chemistry. And he also, assembly theory came from him thinking about how these systems work. So he had some intuition about what was going on with this molybdenum ring.
(不，但我认为这是他开始思考生命起源的最深层根源。我不知道他所有的经历 但他告诉我 他是从晶体学起步的有些事情他......人们会认为化学结构是理所当然的，但他对此深感困惑。比如为什么这些错综复杂的结构 在这些条件下如此容易形成？他对生命真的很感兴趣 但他是从那个领域开始的所以他从这些看似完全没有生命的系统中获得了深刻的见解，就像这些金属化学物质一样，进而思考生命的深层原理。因此，我认为他已经了解了很多化学知识。他的装配理论也来自于他对这些系统如何工作的思考。所以他对这个钼环有一些直觉。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:53:53) The molybdenum might be able to be the thing that makes a ring?
(00:53:53) 钼可能是制作戒指的材料？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:53:58) They knew about them for a long time, but they didn’t know that the mechanism of why that particular structure form was all catalytic feedback. And so that’s what they figured out in this paper. And I actually think that paper is revealing some of the mechanism of the origin life transition. Because really what you see the origin of life is basically like you should have a combinatorial explosion of the space of possible structures that are too large to exhaust. And yet you see it collapse on this really small space of possibilities that’s mutually reinforcing itself to keep existing. That is the origin of life.
(00:53:58) 他们很早就知道它们的存在，但不知道这种特殊结构的形成机制完全是催化反馈。于是，他们在这篇论文中发现了这一点。实际上，我认为这篇论文揭示了一些生命过渡的起源机制。因为你所看到的生命起源基本上就像是一个组合爆炸，可能的结构空间大到无法穷尽。然而你却看到它坍缩在一个非常小的可能性空间里 而这个空间又在相互强化以保持存在。这就是生命的起源。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:54:34) There’s some set of structures that result in this autocatalytic feedback.
(00:54:34) 有一些结构导致了这种自催化反馈。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:54:40) Yeah. （00: 54: 40）是啊。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:54:41) And what is it? Tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny percent?
(00:54:41) 那是什么呢？微小、微小、微小、微小的百分比？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:54:44) I think it’s a small space, but chemistry is very large. So there might be a lot of them out there, but we don’t know.
(00:54:44) 我认为这是一个很小的空间，但化学是非常大的。所以可能会有很多，但我们不知道。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:54:53) And one of them is the thing that probably started life on earth?
(00:54:53) 其中一个可能就是地球生命的起源？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:54:56) That’s right.
(00:54:56) That's right.
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:54:57) Many, many starts and it keeps starting maybe.
(00:54:57）很多很多次启动，也许会一直启动。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:55:00) Yes. Yeah. I mean, there’s also all kinds of other weird properties that happen around this kind of phase boundary. So this other project that I have in my lab is focused on the origin of chirality, which is thinking about… So chirality is this property molecules that they can come in mirror image forms. So just like chirality means hand. So your left and right hand are what’s called non-superimposable, because if you try to lay one on the other, you can’t actually lay them directly on top of each other. And that’s the property being a mirror image. So there’s this sort of perplexing property of the chemistry of life that no one’s been able to really adequately explain, that all of the amino acids in proteins are left-handed and all of the bases in RNA and DNA are right-handed. And yet the chemistry of these building block units, amino acids and nucleobases is the same for left.
(是的 - 是的我的意思是，在这种相界附近还会出现其他各种奇怪的特性。我实验室的另一个项目是研究手性的起源，也就是思考......手性是分子的一种特性，它们可以以镜像的形式出现。就像手性意味着手一样所以你的左手和右手是所谓的不可叠加的 因为如果你想把一只手放在另一只手上 你实际上无法把它们直接叠在一起这就是镜像的特性。因此，生命化学有一种令人困惑的特性，没有人能够真正充分地解释它，即蛋白质中的所有氨基酸都是左旋的，而RNA和DNA中的所有碱基都是右旋的。然而这些构建单元的化学性质 氨基酸和核碱基的左旋都是一样的
(00:55:56) And so you have to have some kind of symmetry breaking where you go from these chemistries that seem entirely equivalent, to only having one chemistry takeover is the dominant form. And for a long time, I had been really… I actually did my PhD on the origin of chirality. I was working on it as a symmetry breaking problem in physics. This is how I got started in the origin of life. And then I left it for a long time because I thought it was one of the most boring problems in the origin of life, but I’ve come back to it. I think there’s something really deep going on here related to this combinatorial explosion of the space of possibilities. But just to get to that point, this feature of this handedness has been the main focus. But people take for granted the existence of chiral molecules at all, that this property of having a handedness, and they just assume that it’s just a generic feature of chemistry.
(所以你必须有某种对称性的打破，从这些看似完全等价的化学反应，到只有一种化学反应占据主导地位。很长一段时间以来，我一直在研究......实际上，我的博士学位就是研究手性的起源。我是把它作为物理学中的对称性破缺问题来研究的。我就是这样开始研究生命起源的后来我离开了很长时间，因为我觉得这是生命起源中最无聊的问题之一，但我又回来了。我认为这里有一些非常深奥的东西，与可能性空间的组合爆炸有关。但为了达到这一点，这种手性的特征一直是主要焦点。但人们认为手性分子的存在是理所当然的，这种具有手性的特性，他们只是假设它只是化学的一个通用特征。
(00:56:50) But if you actually look at molecules, if you look at chemical space, which is the space of all possible molecules that people can generate, and you look at small molecules, things that have less than about seven to 11 heavy atoms. So things that are not hydrogen, almost every single molecule in that space is achiral, like doesn’t have a chiral center. So it would be like a spoon. A spoon doesn’t have, it’s the same as its mirror image. It’s not like a hand that’s different than its mirror image. But if you get to this threshold boundary, above that boundary, almost every single molecule is chiral.
(00:56:50) 但如果你实际观察一下分子，如果你观察一下化学空间，也就是人们可以生成的所有可能分子的空间，你再观察一下小分子，也就是重原子数少于 7 到 11 个的分子。所以不是氢的东西，在这个空间里几乎每一个分子都是非手性的，比如没有手性中心。就像一把勺子。勺子没有，它和它的镜像是一样的。它不像一只手，与它的镜像不同。但如果你到达这个临界边界 在这个边界之上 几乎所有的分子都是手性的
(00:57:26) So you go from a universe where almost nothing has a mirror image form, there’s no mirror image universe of possibilities to this one where every single structure has pretty much a mirror image version. And what we’ve been looking at in my lab is that, it seems to be the case that the origin of life transition happens around the time when you start accumulating, you push your molecules to a large enough complexity that chiral molecules become very likely to form. And then there’s a cascade of molecular recognition where chiral molecules can recognize each other. And then you get this sort of autocatalytic feedback and things self-reinforcing.
(所以你从一个几乎没有任何东西有镜像形式的宇宙，一个没有镜像可能性的宇宙，变成了一个每一个结构都有镜像版本的宇宙。我们实验室一直在研究的是，生命起源的转变似乎就发生在你开始积累的时候，你把你的分子推向足够大的复杂度，手性分子变得非常有可能形成。然后出现一连串的分子识别，手性分子可以相互识别。然后你就会得到这种自催化反馈和自我强化。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:58:06) So is chirality in itself an interesting feature or just an accident of complexity?
(00:58:06) 那么，手性本身是一个有趣的特征，还是只是复杂性的一个意外？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:58:11) No, it’s a super interesting feature. I think chirality breaks symmetry in time, not space. So we think of it as a spatial property, like a left and right hand. But if I choose the left hand, I’m basically choosing the future of that system for all time, because I’ve basically made a choice between the ways that that molecule can now react with every other object in its chemical universe.
(00:58:11) 不，这是一个超级有趣的特征。我认为手性打破的是时间对称，而不是空间对称。所以我们认为它是一种空间属性，就像左手和右手。但如果我选择了左手，我基本上就选择了该系统在所有时间里的未来，因为我基本上在该分子现在能与其化学宇宙中的所有其他物体发生反应的方式之间做出了选择。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:58:32) Oh, I see.
(00:58:32) 哦，我明白了。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:58:33) And so you’re actually, when you have the splitting of making a molecule that now has another form it could have had by the same exact atomic composition, but now it’s just a mirror image isometry, you’re basically splitting the universe of possibilities every time.
(00:58:33) 因此，实际上，当你分裂出一个分子时，这个分子现在有了另一种形式，它本可以由相同的原子组成，但现在它只是一个镜像等轴测，你基本上每次都在分裂宇宙的可能性。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (00:58:47) Yeah. In two.
(对，分两次
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (00:58:50) In two, but molecules can have more than one chiral center, and that’s not the only symmetry that they can have. So this is one of the reasons that Taxol fills 1.5 universes of space. It’s all of these spatial permutations that you do on these objects that actually makes the space so huge. So the point of this sort of chiral transition that I am pointing out is, chirality is actually signature of being in a complex chemical space. And the fact that we think it’s a really generic feature of chemistry and it’s really prevalent is because most of the chemistry we study on earth is a product already of life.
(00:58:50) 有两个，但分子可以有一个以上的手性中心，这并不是它们唯一的对称性。因此，这也是 Taxol 能填满 1.5 个宇宙空间的原因之一。正是你在这些物体上进行的所有空间排列，才使得空间如此巨大。因此，我所指出的手性转变的关键在于，手性实际上是复杂化学空间的特征。我们之所以认为手性是化学的一个普遍特征，而且非常普遍，是因为我们在地球上研究的大部分化学都是生命的产物。
(00:59:21) And it also has to do with this transition in assembly, this transition in possibility spaces, because I think there’s something really fundamental going on at this boundary, that you don’t really need to go that far into chemical space to actually see life in terms of this depth in time, this depth in symmetries of objects, in terms of chiral symmetries or this assembly structure. But getting past this boundary that’s not very deep in that space requires life. It’s a really weird property, and it’s really weird that so many abrupt things happen in chemistry at that same scale.
(00:59:21) 而且它还与组装的过渡、可能性空间的过渡有关，因为我认为在这个边界上有一些真正根本性的东西在发生，你并不需要深入到化学空间去真正看到生命在时间上的这种深度，在物体对称性上的这种深度，在手性对称性或这种组装结构上的深度。但要超越这个在空间中并不深的边界，就需要生命。这是一个非常奇怪的特性，而且在同样的尺度上，化学中发生的许多突变也非常奇怪。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:00:02) So would that be the greatest invention ever made on earth in its evolutionary history? I really like that formulation of it. Nick Lane has a book called Life Ascending, where he lists the 10 great inventions of evolution, the origin of life being first and DNA, the hereditary material that encodes the genetic instructions for all living organisms. Then photosynthesis, the process that allows organisms to convert sunlight into chemical energy, producing oxygen as a byproduct, the complex cell, eukaryotic cells, which contain in nucleus and organelles arose from simple bacterial cells. Sex, sexual reproduction. Movement, so just the ability to move under which you have the predation, the predators and ability of living organisms.
(01:00:02) 那这是不是地球进化史上最伟大的发明呢？我很喜欢这种说法。尼克-莱恩（Nick Lane）有一本名为《生命升华》（Life Ascending）的书，他在书中列出了进化史上的十大发明，其中生命起源排在第一位，DNA是遗传物质，它编码了所有生物体的遗传指令。然后是光合作用--生物将阳光转化为化学能的过程，产生氧气作为副产品；复杂的细胞--真核细胞，它包含细胞核和细胞器，是从简单的细菌细胞发展而来的。性，有性生殖。运动，因此只要有运动的能力，就会有捕食，捕食者和生物体的能力。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:00:51) I like that movement’s in there. That’s cool.
(01:00:51) 我喜欢这个动作。真酷
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:00:53) But a movement includes a lot of interesting stuff in there, like predator-prey dynamic, which not to romanticized a nature is metal. That seems like an important one. I don’t know. It’s such a computationally powerful thing to have a predator and prey.
(01:00:53）但运动中包含了很多有趣的东西，比如捕食者与猎物之间的动态关系，这并不是浪漫化的自然界，而是金属。这似乎是一个重要的。我不知道捕食者和猎物的计算能力很强
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:01:10) Well, it’s efficient for things to eat other things that are already alive because they don’t have to go all the way back to the base chemistry.
(01:01:10) 对生物来说，吃掉其他已经活着的生物是很有效率的，因为它们不需要一路回到基础化学。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:01:18) Well that, but maybe I just like deadlines, but it creates an urgency. You’re going to get eaten.
(01:01:18) 好吧，也许我只是喜欢最后期限，但它创造了一种紧迫感。你会被吃掉的
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:01:24) You got to live.
(01:01:24) 你得活下去。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:01:24) Yeah. Survival. It’s not just the static environment you’re battling against.
对生存你要对抗的不仅仅是静态环境。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:01:25) Oh, I see.
(01:01:25) 哦，我明白了。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:01:29) You’re like… The dangers against which you’re trying to survive are also evolving. This is just a much faster way to explore the space of possibilities.
(01:01:29) 你就像......你试图生存的危险也在不断演变。这只是探索可能性空间的一种更快捷的方式。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:01:42) I actually think it’s a gift that we don’t have much time.
(01:01:42) 事实上，我认为这是一种恩赐，因为我们的时间不多了。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:01:45) Yes. Sight, the ability to see. So the increasing complexifying of sensory organisms. Consciousness and death, the concept of programmed cell death. These are all these inventions along the line.
(01:01:45) 是的。视觉，就是看见的能力。因此，感官生物越来越复杂化。意识和死亡，细胞程序性死亡的概念。这些都是沿线的发明。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:02:03) Yeah. I like invention as a word for them. I think that’s good.
(我喜欢用 "发明 "这个词来形容它们。我觉得这很好。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:02:05) Which are the more interesting inventions to you with origin of life? Because you kind of are not glorifying the origin of life itself. There’s a process-
(01:02:05) 对你来说，哪些发明与生命起源更有趣？因为你并没有美化生命起源本身。有一个过程--
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:02:15) No, I think the origin of life is a continual process, that’s why. I’m interested in the first transition and solving that problem, because I think it’s the hardest, but I think it’s happening all the time.
(不，我认为生命的起源是一个持续的过程，这就是原因。我对第一次转变和解决这个问题很感兴趣，因为我认为这是最困难的，但我认为它一直在发生。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:02:24) When you look back at the history of earth, what are you impressed happened?
(01:02:24) 当你回顾地球的历史时，你印象深刻的是发生了什么？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:02:28) I like sight as an invention, because I think having sensory perception and trying to comprehend the world, to use anthropocentric terms, is a really critical feature of life. And I also, it’s interesting the way that site has complexified over time. So if you think at the origin of life, nothing on the planet could see. So for a long time, life had no sight, and then photon receptors were invented. And then when multicellular evolved, those cells eventually grew into eyes and we had the multicellular eye.
(01:02:28）我喜欢把视觉作为一种发明，因为我认为拥有感官知觉并试图理解这个世界，用人类中心主义的术语来说，是生命的一个非常关键的特征。我还发现，随着时间的推移，视觉的复杂化方式也很有趣。因此，如果你认为在生命起源之初，地球上没有任何东西可以看见。所以在很长一段时间里，生命没有视觉 然后光子受体被发明出来然后当多细胞进化时 这些细胞最终长成了眼睛 我们就有了多细胞眼睛
(01:03:14) And then it’s interesting when you get to societies like human societies, that we invent even better technologies of seeing, like telescopes and microscopes, which allow us to see deeper into the universe or at smaller scales. So I think that’s pretty profound, the way that site has transformed the ability of life to literally see the reality in which it’s existing in. I think consciousness is also obviously deeply interesting. I’ve gotten kind of obsessed with octopus. They’re just so weird. And the fact that they evolved complex nervous systems kind of independently seems very alien.
(01:03:14) 有趣的是，当你进入人类社会，我们发明了更好的观察技术，比如望远镜和显微镜，这让我们能够看到更深的宇宙或更小的尺度。因此，我认为这是非常深远的，网站改变了生命的能力，使其能够真正看到它所存在的现实。我认为意识显然也非常有趣。我对章鱼有点着迷。它们太奇怪了它们独立进化出复杂的神经系统 这看起来非常奇怪
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:04:01) Yeah, there’s a lot of alien organisms. That’s another thing I saw in the jungle, just things that are like, “Oh, okay. They make one of those, huh?” It just feels like there’s-
(是的 有很多外星生物这是我在丛林里看到的另一件事 那些东西就像 "哦 好吧"哦，好吧。 他们做了一个这样的，是吧？"感觉就像
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:04:12) Do you have any examples?
(01:04:12) 你有什么例子吗？
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:04:14) There’s a frog that’s as thin as a sheet of paper. And I was like, “What?” And it gets birthed through pores.
(有一只青蛙像纸一样薄。我当时想，"什么？"它是通过毛孔出生的
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:04:22) Oh, I’ve seen videos of that. It’s so gross when the babies come out. Did you see that in person? The baby’s coming out?
(01:04:22) 哦，我看过视频。婴儿出来的时候真恶心。你亲眼见过？婴儿出来了？
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:04:29) Oh, no. I saw the without the-
(01:04:29) 哦，不。我看到了没有
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:04:32) Have you seen videos of that? It’s so gross. It’s one of the grossest things I’ve ever seen.
(01:04:32) 你看过视频吗？太恶心了这是我见过的最恶心的事情之一。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:04:36) Well, gross is just the other side of beautiful, I think it’s like, “Oh, wow. That’s possible.”
(好吧，毛只是美丽的另一面，我认为这就像，"哦，哇。这是可能的。"
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:04:45) I guess, if I was one of those frogs, I would think that was the most beautiful event I’d ever seen. Although, human childbirth is not that beautiful either.
(01:04:45) 我想，如果我是其中一只青蛙，我会觉得这是我见过的最美丽的事件。不过，人类分娩也没那么美。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:04:51) Yeah. It’s all a matter of perspective.
(01:04:51) 是啊，这都是视角的问题。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:04:54) Well, we come into the world so violently, it’s just like, it’s amazing.
(01:04:54) 好吧，我们来到这个世界的时候是如此猛烈，就好像，这太神奇了。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:04:58) I mean, the world is a violent place. So again, it’s just another side of the coin.
(01:04:58) 我的意思是，这个世界是一个充满暴力的地方。所以，这只是硬币的另一面。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:05:05) You know what? This actually makes me think of one that’s not up there, which I do find really incredibly amazing, is the process of the germline cell in organisms. Basically, every living thing on this planet at some point in its life has to go through a single cell. And this whole issue of development, the developmental program is kind of crazy. How do you build you out of a single cell? How does a single cell know how to do that? Pattern formation of a multicellular organism, obviously evolves with DNA, but there’s a lot of stuff happening there about when cells take on certain morphologies and things that people don’t understand, like the actual shape formation mechanism. A lot of people study that, and there’s a lot of advances being made now in that field. I think it’s pretty shocking though that how little we know about that process. And often it’s left off of people’s lists, it’s just kind of interesting. Embryogenesis is fascinating.
(你知道吗？这实际上让我想到了一个不在上面的东西，我确实觉得非常不可思议，那就是生物的生殖细胞过程。基本上，地球上的每一种生物在其生命的某个阶段都要经历单细胞的过程。而这整个发育问题，发育程序有点疯狂。单细胞是如何造人的？单细胞怎么知道怎么做？多细胞生物体的形态形成显然是由DNA演化而来的，但细胞何时形成某种形态，还有很多人们不了解的东西，比如实际的形态形成机制。很多人都在研究这个问题，现在这个领域也取得了很多进展。但我认为，我们对这一过程知之甚少，实在令人震惊。它经常被人们忽略，只是有点有趣。胚胎发生很有趣
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:05:05) Yeah. Because you start from just one cell.
对因为你只从一个细胞开始。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:06:06) Yeah. And the genes and all the cells are the same. So the differentiation has to be something that’s much more about the actual expression of genes over time and how they get switched on and off, and also the physical environment of the cell interacting with other cells. And there’s just a lot of stuff going on.
是的基因和所有细胞都是一样的。因此，分化更多的是随着时间的推移基因的实际表达，以及它们是如何开关的，还有细胞与其他细胞相互作用的物理环境。这里面有很多事情要做。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:06:28) Yeah. The computation, the intelligence of that process-
对这个过程的计算和智慧
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:06:32) Yes.
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:06:32) … might be the most important thing to understand. And we just kind of don’t really think about it.
(01:06:32) ......可能是最重要的一点。而我们却没有真正考虑过这一点。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:06:38) Right.
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:06:38) We think about the final product.
(01:06:38) 我们考虑的是最终产品。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:06:40) Yeah. 是的
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:06:41) Maybe the key to understanding the organism is understanding that process, not the final product.
(01:06:41) 也许理解生物体的关键在于理解这个过程，而不是最终产品。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:06:48) Probably, yes. I think most of the things about understanding anything about what we are embedded in time.
(01:06:48) 也许吧，是的。我认为，关于理解我们所处的时间，大部分事情都是如此。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:06:54) Well, of course you would say that.
(01:06:54) 你当然会这么说。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:06:55) I know. So predictable. It’s turning into a deterministic universe.
(我知道。太容易预测了。它正在变成一个决定论的宇宙。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:07:01) It always has been. Always was like the meme.
(一直都是这样。一直都像备忘录一样。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:07:05) Yeah, always was, but it won’t be in the future.
(01:07:05) 是啊，以前是，但以后不会了。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:07:07) Well, before we talk about the future, let’s talk about the past. The assembly theory.
(01:07:07）好吧，在谈论未来之前，我们先来谈谈过去。装配理论。

Assembly theory 装配理论

Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:07:11) Yes.
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:07:12) Can you explain assembly theory to me? I listened to Lee talk about it for many hours, and I understood nothing. No, I’m just kidding. I just wanted to take another… You’ve been already talking about it, but just what from a big picture view is the assembly theory way of thinking about our world, about our universe.
(01:07:12) 你能给我解释一下装配理论吗？我听李老师讲了好几个小时，什么也没听懂。不，我开玩笑的。我只是想再......你已经讲过了，但从全局来看，装配理论是如何思考我们的世界、我们的宇宙的。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:07:38) Yeah. I think the first thing is the observation that life seems to be the only thing in the universe that builds complexity in the way that we see it here. And complexity is obviously a loaded term, so I’ll just use assembly instead because I think assembly is more precise. But the idea that all the things on your desk here from your computer, to the pen, to us sitting here don’t exist anywhere else in the universe as far as we know, they only exist on this planet and it took a long evolutionary history to get to us, is a real feature that we should take seriously as one that’s deeply embedded in the laws of physics and the structure of the universe that we live in.
(我认为第一件事是观察到生命似乎是宇宙中唯一以我们在这里看到的方式建立复杂性的东西。很明显，复杂性是个很复杂的词，所以我用组装来代替，因为我觉得组装更准确。但是，你桌子上的所有东西，从你的电脑到钢笔，再到坐在这里的我们，据我们所知都不存在于宇宙中的任何其他地方，它们只存在于这个星球上，并且经过了漫长的进化史才形成了我们，这是一个我们应该认真对待的真实特征，它深深地嵌入了物理定律和我们所生活的宇宙结构之中。
(01:08:27) Standard physics would say that all of that complexity traces back to the infinitesimal deviations and the initial state of the universe that there was some order there. I find that deeply unsatisfactory. And what assembly theory says that’s very different is that, the universe is basically constructing itself, and when you get to these combinatorial spaces like chemistry, where the space of possibilities is too large to exhaust them all, you can only construct things along historically contingent paths, like you basically have causal chains of events that happen to allow other things to come into existence.
(01:08:27) 标准物理学会说，所有这些复杂性都可以追溯到无穷小的偏差和宇宙的初始状态，即存在某种秩序。我对此深感不满。而装配理论则截然不同，它认为宇宙基本上是在自我建构，当你进入像化学这样的组合空间时，由于可能性空间太大，无法穷尽所有可能性，你只能沿着历史上的偶然路径来建构事物，就像你基本上有因果链事件发生，让其他事物得以出现。
(01:09:15) And that this is the way that complex objects get formed, is basically on scaffolding on the past history of objects, making more complex objects, making more complex objects. That idea in itself is easy to state and simple, but it has some really radical implications as far as what you think is the nature of the physics that would describe life. And so what assembly theory does formally is try to measure the boundary in the space of all things that chemically could exist. For example, like all possible molecules, where’s the boundary above which we should say these things are too complex to happen outside of an evolutionary chain of events, outside of selection. And we formalize that with two observables. One of them is the copy number, the object. So…
(这就是复杂物体形成的方式 基本上就是在物体过去历史的基础上搭建脚手架 制造更复杂的物体 制造更复杂的物体这个观点本身简单明了，但对于你所认为的描述生命的物理学本质而言，它却有着非常深远的影响。因此，装配理论所做的正式工作就是试图测量所有可能存在的化学物质的空间边界。比如说，所有可能存在的分子，我们应该说这些东西太复杂了，不可能在进化过程中发生，不可能在选择过程中发生。我们用两个观测指标将其形式化。其中一个是拷贝数 物体所以...
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:10:00) … is that with two observables. One of them is the copy number of the object. How many of the object did you observe? And the second one is what’s the minimal number of recursive steps to make it? If you start from elementary building blocks, like bonds for molecules, and you put them together, and then you take things you’ve made already and build up to the object, what’s the shortest number of steps you had to take?
(01:10:00) ......有两个观测值。其中一个是物体的拷贝数。你观察到了多少个对象？第二个是，制造它的最小递归步骤数是多少？如果你从基本的构件开始，比如分子的键，然后把它们组合在一起，再把你已经做出来的东西堆砌到物体上，你必须采取的最短步骤数是多少？
(01:10:24) And what Lee’s been able to show in the lab with his team is that for organic chemistry, it’s about 15 steps. And then you only see molecules that the only molecules that we observe that are past that threshold are ones that are in life. And in fact, one of the things I’m trying to do with this idea of trying to actually quantify the origin of life as a transition in… A phase transition and assembly theory is actually be able to explain why that boundary is where because I think that’s actually the boundary that life must cross.
(李和他的团队在实验室里发现，对于有机化学来说，大约需要15个步骤。然后你只能看到分子，而我们观察到的分子中，只有生命中的分子超过了这个阈值。事实上，我试图将生命起源量化为相变和组装理论中的一个过渡过程，我想做的事情之一就是能够解释为什么那个边界会在哪里，因为我认为那是生命必须跨越的边界。
(01:11:01) The idea of going back to this thing we were talking about before about these structures that can reinforce their own existence and move past that boundary, 15 seems to be that boundary in chemical space. It’s not a universal number. It will be different for different assembly spaces, but that’s what we’ve experimentally validated so far. And then-
(01:11:01) 回到我们之前谈到的关于这些结构的想法，这些结构可以强化自身的存在，并超越边界，15 似乎就是化学空间的边界。这不是一个通用的数字。不同的装配空间会有不同的结果，但这是我们目前通过实验验证的结果。然后
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:11:20) Literally 15, the assembly index is 15?
(01:11:20) 从字面上看是 15，装配指数是 15？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:11:22) It’s 15 or so for the experimental data. Yeah.
(01:11:22) 实验数据是 15 左右。是啊 - 是啊
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:11:29) That’s when you start getting the self-reinforcing?
(01:11:29) 这就是你开始自我强化的时候？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:11:30) When have to have that feature in order to observe molecules in high abundance in that space.
(01:11:30）当必须具备这一特征时，才能在该空间观测到高丰度的分子。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:11:36) The copy number is the number of exact copies. That’s what you mean by high abundance and assembly index or the complexity of the object is how many steps it took to create it. Recursive.
(01:11:36) 拷贝数是精确拷贝的数量。这就是你所说的高丰度和装配指数，或者说对象的复杂性是指创建它的步骤有多少。递归。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:11:47) Recursive. Yeah. You can think of objects in assembly theory as basically recursive stacks of the construction steps to build them. They’re like, it’s like you take this step and then you make this object and you make it this object and make this object, and then you get up to the final object. But that object is all of that history rolled up into the current structure.
（01: 11: 47）递归。是的你可以把装配理论中的物体看成是建造步骤的递归堆栈。它们就像，你走这一步，然后做这个对象，再做这个对象，再做这个对象，最后得到最终的对象。但这个物体是所有历史的结晶，是当前结构的一部分。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:12:06) What if you took the long way home with all of this?
(01:12:06) 如果你带着这些东西远走他乡呢？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:12:08) You can’t take the long way.
(01:12:08) 你不能走远路。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:12:10) Why not?
(01:12:10) 为什么不呢？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:12:11) The long way doesn’t exist.
(01:12:11) 长路并不存在。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:12:12) It’s a good song though. What do you mean the long way doesn’t exist? If I do a random walk from A to B, if I start at A, I’ll eventually end up at B. And that random walk would be much longer than the short.
(01:12:12) 不过这首歌不错。你说长路不存在是什么意思？如果我从甲地随机走到乙地，如果我从甲地出发，我最终会到达乙地。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:12:27) It turns out, now if you look at objects… And so we define something we call the assembly universe. And assembly universe is ordered in time. It’s actually ordered in the causation, the number of steps to produce an object. And so, all objects in the universe are in some sense existed, a layer that’s defined by their assembly index.
(01:12:27) 事实证明，如果你观察物体......所以我们定义了一个东西，我们称之为装配宇宙。组装宇宙在时间上是有序的它实际上在因果关系上是有序的，即产生一个物体的步骤数。所以宇宙中的所有物体 在某种意义上都是存在的 这一层是由它们的装配指数定义的
(01:12:48) And the size of each layer is growing exponentially. What you’re talking about, if you want to look at the long way of getting to an object, as I’m increasing the assembly index of an object, I’m moving deeper and deeper into an exponentially growing space. And it’s actually also the case that the typical path to get to that object is also exponentially growing with respect to the assembly index.
(01:12:48) 每一层的大小都在呈指数增长。你所说的，如果你想从长远的角度来看待一个对象，当我增加一个对象的装配索引时，我就会在一个指数级增长的空间中越陷越深。而实际上，通往该对象的典型路径也是与装配索引成指数增长的。
(01:13:11) And so, if you want to try to make a more and more complex object and you want to do it by a typical path, that’s actually an exponentially receding horizon. And so most objects that come into existence have to be causally very similar to the things that exist because close by in that space, and they can actually get to it by an almost shortest path for that object.
(01:13:11) 因此，如果你想尝试制造一个越来越复杂的物体，而你又想通过一条典型的路径来实现它，这实际上是一个指数级后退的地平线。因此，大多数出现的物体都必须在因果关系上与空间中近在咫尺的物体非常相似，而且它们实际上可以通过一条几乎是该物体最短的路径到达那里。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:13:30) Yeah. The almost shortest path is the most likely and by a lot.
(01:13:30) 是的。几乎最短的路径是最有可能的，而且可能性很大。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:13:35) By a lot.
(01:13:35) 很多。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:13:36) Okay. If you see a high copy number.
(01:13:36) 好的，如果你看到一个高拷贝数。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:13:37) Yeah, imagine yourself-
(是啊，想象一下你自己--
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:13:39) A copy number of greater than one.
(01:13:39) 复本数大于 1。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:13:42) Yeah. I mean basically, the more complex we live in a space that is growing exponentially large. And the ways of getting to objects in the space are also growing exponentially large. And so, we’re this recursively stacked structure of all of these objects that are clinging onto each other for existence. And then they grab something else and are able to bring that thing into existence similar to them.
(我的意思是，基本上，我们生活的空间越复杂，就越呈指数级增长。而在这个空间里，找到物体的方法也是指数级增长的。所以，我们就是这样一个递归堆叠的结构，所有这些物体为了存在而相互依附。然后，它们抓住别的东西，并能把那个东西带入与它们相似的存在中。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:14:12) But there is a phase transition.
(01:14:12）但这是一个阶段性的转变。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:14:13) There is a transition.
(01:14:13 有一个过渡。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:14:15) There is a place where you would say, “Oh, that’s life.”
(有一个地方你会说 "哦，这就是生活"。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:14:17) I think it’s actually abrupt. I’ve never been able to say that in my entire career before. I’ve always gone back and forth about whether the original life was gradual or abrupt. I think it’s very abrupt.
(01:14:17) 我觉得这其实很突然。在我之前的整个职业生涯中，我从来没能这么说过。我一直在反复思考原来的生活是渐进的还是突然的。我认为它非常突然。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:14:26) Poetically, chemically, literally?
(01:14:26) 诗意地、化学地、字面地？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:14:28) Life snaps into existence.
(01:14:28) 生命戛然而止。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:14:29) With snaps. Okay. That’s very beautiful.
(01:14:29) With snaps.好的真漂亮
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:14:29) It snaps.
(01:14:29) 它折断了。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:14:31) Okay. But-
(好吧 但是
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:14:31) We’ll be poetic today. But no, I think there’s a lot of random exploration. And then the possibility space just collapses on the structure really fast that can reinforce its own existence because it’s basically fighting against non-existence.
(01:14:31）我们今天就诗意点吧。但不，我认为有很多随机的探索。然后，可能性空间就会迅速坍塌在能够强化自身存在的结构上，因为它基本上是在与不存在作斗争。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:14:47) Yeah. You tweeted, “The most significant struggle for existence in the evolutionary process is not among the objects that do exist, but between the ones that do and those that never have the chance to. This is where selection does most of its causal work. The objects that never get a chance to exist, the struggle between the ones that never get a chance to exist and the ones that…” Okay, what’s that line exactly?
(01:14:47) 是的。你在推特上写道："在进化过程中，最重要的生存斗争不是在确实存在的物体之间，而是在确实存在的物体和从未有机会存在的物体之间。这也是选择发挥最大作用的地方。那些从来没有机会存在的物体，那些从来没有机会存在的物体和那些......"好吧，那句话到底是什么意思？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:15:16) I don’t know. We can make songs out of all of these.
(01:15:16) 我不知道。我们可以把这些都写成歌。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:15:18) What are the objects that never get a chance to exist? What does that mean?
(01:15:18) 什么是永远没有机会存在的物体？这意味着什么？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:15:22) There was this website, I forgot what it was, but it’s like a neural network that just generates a human face. And it’s like this person does not exist. I think that’s what it’s called. You can just click on that all day and you can look at people all day that don’t exist. All of those people exist in that space of things that don’t exist.
(01:15:22) 有一个网站，我忘了是什么了，但它就像一个神经网络，可以生成一张人脸。就像这个人根本不存在一样。我想这就是它的名字。你可以整天点击它，整天看着那些不存在的人。所有这些人都存在于那个不存在的空间里。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:15:22) Yeah. But there’s the real struggle.
是啊但这才是真正的斗争。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:15:44) Yeah. The struggle of the quote, the struggle for existence is that goes all the way back to Darwin’s writing about natural selection. The whole idea of survival of the fittest is everything struggling to exist, this predator-prey dynamic. And the fittest survive. And so, the struggle for existence is really what selection is all about.
(01:15:44) Yeah.引用的斗争，生存的斗争，可以追溯到达尔文关于自然选择的著作。物竞天择，适者生存，就是一切事物都在为生存而斗争，这种捕食者与猎物的动态关系。适者生存。因此，生存斗争才是选择的真谛。
(01:16:05) And that’s true. We do see things that do exist competing to continue to exist. But if you think about this space of possibilities and each time the universe generates a new structure or an object that exists, generates a new structure along this causal chain. It’s generating something that exists that never existed before.
(01:16:05）的确如此。我们确实看到存在的事物在竞争中继续存在。但如果你想想这个可能性的空间，宇宙每产生一个新的结构或一个存在的物体，就会沿着这个因果链产生一个新的结构。它所产生的东西是以前从未存在过的。
(01:16:34) And each time that we make that kind of decision, we’re excluding a huge piece of possibilities. And so actually, as this process of increasing assembly index, it’s not just that the space that these objects exist in is exponentially growing, but there are objects in that space that are exponentially receding away from us. They’re becoming exponentially less and less likely to ever exist. And so, existence excludes a huge number of things.
(01:16:34) 而每当我们做出这样的决定时，我们就排除了一大部分可能性。因此，实际上，随着装配指数的增加，不仅仅是这些物体存在的空间呈指数级增长，而且在这个空间里，有些物体正以指数级的速度离我们越来越远。它们存在的可能性越来越小。因此，存在排除了大量的事物。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:17:03) Just because of the accident of history, how it ended up?
(01:17:03) 只是因为历史的偶然，它是如何结束的？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:17:07) Yeah. It is in part an accident because I think some of the structure that gets generated is driven a bit by randomness. I think a lot of it…. One of the conceptions that we have in assembly theory is the universe is random at its base. You can see this in chemistry, unconstrained chemical reactions are pretty random. And also, quantum mechanics, there’s lots of places that give evidence for that.
(01:17:07)是的，这在某种程度上是个意外，因为我认为有些结构的产生是由随机性驱动的。我认为很多....我们在组装理论中的一个概念是，宇宙的基础是随机的。你可以在化学中看到这一点，无约束的化学反应是非常随机的。量子力学中也有很多地方证明了这一点。
(01:17:36) And deterministic structures emerge by things that can causally reinforce themselves and maintain persistence over time. And so, we are some of the most deterministic things in the universe. And so, we can generate very regular structure and we can generate new structure along a particular lineage. But the possibility space at the tips, the things we can generate next is really huge.
(01:17:36) 而决定论结构是由能够因果强化自身并随着时间推移保持持久性的事物产生的。因此，我们是宇宙中最具有确定性的东西。因此，我们可以产生非常规则的结构，也可以沿着特定的脉络产生新的结构。但在顶端的可能性空间里，我们接下来能产生的东西真的非常巨大。
(01:18:01) There’s some stochasticity in what we actually instantiate as the next structures that get built in the biosphere. It’s not completely deterministic because the space of future possibilities is always larger than the space of things that exist now.
(01:18:01) 我们在生物圈中建造的下一个结构的实例化有一定的随机性。这并不是完全确定的，因为未来可能性的空间总是大于现在存在的空间。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:18:25) How many instantiations of life is out there, do you think? How often does this happen? What we see happen here on earth, how often is this process repeated throughout our galaxy, throughout the universe?
(01:18:25) 你认为有多少生命的实例？这种情况多久发生一次？我们在地球上看到的情况，在整个银河系、整个宇宙中，这个过程重复发生的频率有多高？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:18:33) I said before, right now, I think the origin of life is a continuous process on earth. I think this idea of combinatorial spaces that our biosphere generates not just chemistry, but other spaces often cross this threshold where they then allow themselves to persist with particular regular structure over time.
(01:18:33) 我之前说过，现在，我认为生命的起源是地球上一个持续的过程。我认为，我们的生物圈所产生的组合空间，不仅是化学空间，还有其他空间，经常会跨越这个门槛，然后让自己随着时间的推移，以特定的规则结构持续存在。
(01:18:51) Language is another one where the space of possible configurations of the 26 letters of the English alphabet is astronomically large, but we use with very high regularity, certain structures. And then we associate meaning to them because of the regularity of how much we use them. Meaning is an emergent property of the causation and the objects and how often they recur and what the relationship of the recurrence is to other objects.
(01:18:51) 语言是另一个例子，26个英文字母的可能配置空间大得惊人，但我们却非常有规律地使用某些结构。然后，由于我们使用它们的规律性，我们把意义与它们联系在一起。意义是因果关系和对象的新兴属性，也是它们重复出现的频率以及重复出现与其他对象的关系。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:19:18) Meaning is the emergent property. Okay, got it.
(01:19:18）"意义 "是新兴属性。好的，明白了。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:19:20) Well, this is why you can play with language so much actually. Words don’t really carry meaning, it’s just about how you lace them together.
(01:19:20) 其实，这就是为什么你可以如此玩转语言。词语并没有真正的意义，关键在于你如何把它们串联起来。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:19:29) But from where does the language?
(01:19:29) 但语言从何而来？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:19:31) But obviously as a speaker of a given language, you don’t have a lot of room with a given word to wiggle, but you have a certain amount of room to push the meanings of words.
(01:19:31）但很明显，作为一种特定语言的使用者，你没有太多的余地在一个特定的单词上做文章，但你有一定的余地去推敲单词的含义。
(01:19:43) And I do this all the time, and you have to do it with the kind of work that I do because if you want to discover an abstraction, like some keep concept that we don’t understand yet, it means we don’t have the language. And so, the words that we have are inadequate to describe the things.
(01:19:43）我一直在做这件事，我做的这种工作必须这样做，因为如果你想发现一个抽象概念，比如一些我们还不理解的概念，这意味着我们没有语言。因此，我们现有的语言不足以描述这些事物。
(01:20:02) This is why we’re having a hard time talking about assembly theory because it’s a newly emerging idea. And so, I’m constantly playing with words in different ways to try to convey the meaning that is actually behind the words, but it’s hard to do.
(01:20:02）这就是为什么我们很难谈论装配理论，因为它是一个新出现的概念。因此，我一直在用不同的方式玩弄文字，试图传达文字背后的含义，但这很难做到。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:20:18) You have to wiggle within the constraints.
(01:20:18）你必须在限制范围内摇摆。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:20:20) Yes. Lots of wiggle.
(01:20:20) 是的。扭动幅度很大。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:20:23) The great orators are just good at wiggling.
(01:20:23）伟大的演说家就是善于扭动。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:20:27) Do you wiggle?
(01:20:27) 你会扭动吗？
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:20:28) I’m not a very good wiggler. No. This is the problem. This is part of the problem.
(01:20:28) 我不是一个很好的摇摆人。不，这就是问题所在。这是问题的一部分。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:20:34) No, I like playing with words a lot. It’s very funny because I know you talked about this with Lee, but people were so offended by the writing of the paper that came out last fall. And it was interesting because the ways that we use words were not the way that people were interacting with the words. And I think that was part of the mismatch where we were trying to use words in a new way because we were trying to describe something that hadn’t been described adequately before, but we had to use the words that everyone else uses for things that are related. And so, it was really interesting to watch that clash play out in real time for me, being someone that tries to be so precise with my word usage, knowing that it’s always going to be vague.
(01:20:34) 不，我很喜欢玩文字游戏。这很有趣，因为我知道你和李讨论过这个问题，但去年秋天发表的论文让人们很反感。这很有趣，因为我们使用文字的方式并不是人们与文字互动的方式。我认为这就是不匹配的一部分，我们试图以一种新的方式使用词语，因为我们试图描述一些以前没有被充分描述过的东西，但我们不得不使用其他人用于相关事物的词语。因此，对我来说，看到这种冲突的实时发生真的很有趣，因为我是一个在用词上力求精确的人，我知道这总是会很模糊。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:21:17) Boy, can I relate. What is truth? Is truth the thing you meant when you wrote the words or is truth the thing that people understood when they read the words?
(01:21:17）天啊，我真有同感。什么是真理？真理是你写下这些文字时的意思，还是人们读到这些文字时的理解？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:21:28) Oh, yeah.
(01:21:28) 哦，是的。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:21:30) I think that compression mechanism into language is a really interesting one. And that’s why Twitter is a nice exercise.
(01:21:30）我认为将压缩机制转化为语言是一个非常有趣的机制。这就是为什么 Twitter 是一个很好的练习。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:21:37) I love Twitter.
(01:21:37) 我爱 Twitter。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:21:37) Because you get to write a thing and you think a certain thing when you write it. And then you get to see all these other people interpret it all kinds of different ways.
(01:21:37) 因为你会写一件事，写的时候你会有某种想法。然后你会看到其他人以各种不同的方式来诠释它。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:21:46) Yeah. I use it as an experimental platform for that reason.
(01:21:46) 是的，因此我把它作为一个实验平台。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:21:49) I wish there was a higher diversity of interpretation mechanisms applied to tweets, meaning all kinds of different people would come to it. Like some people that see the good in everything and some people that are ultra-cynical, a bunch of haters and a bunch of lovers and a bunch of-
(01:21:49) 我希望对推文的解读机制能够更加多样化，也就是说，各种不同的人都会来关注它。比如有些人看到了一切美好的事物，有些人则极端愤世嫉俗，有些人是仇敌，有些人是爱人，还有些人是
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:22:07) Maybe they could do better jobs with presenting material to people. How things… It’s usually based on interest. But I think it would be really nice if you got 10% of your Twitter feed was random stuff sampled from other places. That’d be fun.
(01:22:07) 也许他们可以更好地向人们展示材料。事情如何......通常是基于兴趣。但我觉得，如果你的推特上有 10% 的内容是从其他地方随机抽取的，那就真的太好了。那一定很有趣
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:22:22) True. I also would love to filter just bin the response to tweets by the people that hate on everything.
(01:22:22) 没错。我也很想过滤那些讨厌一切的人对推文的回复。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:22:34) Oh, that would be fantastic.
(01:22:34) 哦，那真是太棒了。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:22:34) The people that are super positive about everything. And they’ll just, I guess, normalize the response because then it’d be cool to see if the people that you’re usually positive about everything are hating on you or totally don’t understand or completely misunderstood.
(01:22:34) 对任何事都超级积极的人。我猜，他们会把这种反应正常化，因为这样就能看到那些你通常对一切都很积极的人是否讨厌你，或者完全不理解你，或者完全误解了你。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:22:51) Yeah, usually it takes a lot of clicking to find that out. Yeah, so it’d be better if it was sorted. Yeah.
(01:22:51) 是的，通常需要点击很多次才能找到。是啊，所以如果能分类就更好了。是啊
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:22:56) The more clicking you do, the more damaging it is to the soul.
(01:22:56) 点击次数越多，对灵魂的伤害就越大。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:23:01) Yeah. It’s like instead of like, well, you could have the blue check. But you should have, are you a pessimist, an optimist?
(是的，这就像，而不是像，好吧，你可以有蓝色的支票，但你应该有，你是悲观主义者，乐观主义者？你是悲观主义者还是乐观主义者？
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:23:06) Yeah. There’s a lot of colors.
(01:23:06) Yeah.有很多颜色
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:23:07) Theotic neutral. What’s your personality?
(01:23:07) Theotic neutral.你的个性是什么？
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:23:09) Be a whole rainbow of checks. And then you realize there’s more categories than we can possibly express in colors.
(01:23:09）是一整条彩虹般的检查。然后你就会意识到，我们无法用颜色来表达的类别太多了。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:23:17) Yeah. Of course. People are complex.
当然当然了人是复杂的。

Aliens 外星人

Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:23:22) That’s our best feature. I don’t know how we got to the wiggling required given the constraints of language because I think we started about me asking about alien life. Which is how many different times did the phase transition happen elsewhere? Do you think there’s other alien civilizations out there?
(01:23:22）这是我们最大的特色。我不知道我们是如何在语言的限制下达到所需的摇摆的，因为我想我们开始的时候我问的是外星生命。也就是相变在其他地方发生了多少次？你认为还有其他外星文明存在吗？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:23:48) This goes into the are you on the boundary of insane or not? But when you think about the structure of the physics of what we are, that deeply, it really changes your conception of things. And going to this idea of the universe being small in physical space compared to how big it is in time and how large we are. It really makes me question about whether there’s any other structure that’s this giant crystal in time, this giant causal structure, like our biosphere/technosphere is anywhere else in the universe.
(01:23:48) 这就涉及到你是否处于精神错乱的边缘？但是，当你深入思考我们的物理学结构时，你对事物的认识就会发生改变。宇宙在物理空间上是渺小的，而在时间上是巨大的，我们又是如此庞大。这真的让我怀疑，宇宙中是否还有其他结构，就像我们的生物圈/技术圈一样，是时间上的巨型晶体，是巨型因果结构。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:24:28) Why not?
(01:24:28) 为什么不呢？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:24:29) I don’t know.
(01:24:29) 我不知道。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:24:31) Just because this one is gigantic doesn’t mean there’s no other gigantic spheres.
(01:24:31) 这个球体巨大，并不意味着没有其他巨大的球体。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:24:36) But I think when the universe is expanding, it’s expanding in space, but in assembly theory, it’s also expanding in time. And actually that’s driving the expansion in space. And expansion in time is also driving the expansion in the combinatorial space of things on our planet. That’s driving the pace of technology and all the other things. Time is driving all of these things, which is a little bit crazy to think that the universe is just getting bigger because time is getting bigger.
(01:24:36) 但我认为宇宙在膨胀时，空间在膨胀，但在组装理论中，时间也在膨胀。实际上，这也是空间膨胀的驱动力。时间的膨胀也推动着地球上各种事物组合空间的膨胀。这也推动了科技和其他所有事物的发展。时间驱动着所有这些事情，如果认为宇宙变大只是因为时间变大，那就有点疯狂了。
(01:25:06) But the sort of visual that gets built in my brain about that is the structure that we’re building on this planet is packing more and more time in this very small volume of space because our planet hasn’t changed its physical size in 4 billion years, but there’s a ton of causation and recursion and time, whatever word you want to use, information packed into this.
(01:25:06）但在我的大脑中建立起来的视觉效果是，我们在这个星球上建立的结构，在这个非常小的空间里包装了越来越多的时间，因为我们的星球在40亿年里没有改变过它的物理大小，但有大量的因果关系、递归和时间，不管你想用什么词，信息都包装在这里面。
(01:25:31) And I think this is also embedded in the virtualization of our technologies or the abstraction of language and all of these things. These things that seem really abstract are just really deep in time. And so, what that looks like is you have a planet that becomes increasingly virtualized. And so it’s getting bigger and bigger in time, but not really expanding out in space. And the rest of space is moving away from it. Again, it’s a exponentially receding horizon. And I’m just not sure how far into this evolutionary process something gets if it can ever see that there’s another such structure out there.
(01:25:31）我认为这也蕴含在我们技术的虚拟化或语言的抽象化以及所有这些事情中。这些看似抽象的东西其实都是时间的产物。因此，这看起来就像是一个越来越虚拟化的星球。因此它在时间上越来越大，但在空间上却没有真正扩展开来。空间的其他部分正在远离它。同样，这是一个指数级后退的地平线。我只是不确定在这个进化过程中 它能走多远 如果它能看到外面还有另一个这样的结构的话
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:26:10) What do you mean by virtualized in that context?
(01:26:10) 虚拟化是什么意思？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:26:13) Virtual as a play on virtual reality and simulation theories. But virtual also in a sense of, we talk about virtual particles in particle physics, which they are very critical to doing calculations about predicting the properties of real particles, but we don’t observe them directly.
(01:26:13) 虚拟是对虚拟现实和模拟理论的一种发挥。但虚拟也有一定的含义，我们在粒子物理学中谈论虚拟粒子，它们对于预测真实粒子的性质的计算非常关键，但我们并不能直接观察到它们。
(01:26:33) What I mean by virtual here is virtual reality for me, things that appear virtual, appear abstract are just things that are very deep in time in the structure of the things that we are. If you think about you as a 4 billion year old object, the things that are a part of you, like your capacity to use language or think abstractly or have mathematics are just very deep temporal structures. That’s why they look like they’re informational and abstract is because they’re existing in this temporal part of you, but not necessarily spatial part.
(01:26:33) 我这里所说的虚拟是指虚拟现实，对我来说，那些看似虚拟、看似抽象的东西，其实都是我们所处的时间结构中非常深层的东西。如果你把自己想象成一个有 40 亿年历史的物体，那么作为你的一部分的东西，比如你使用语言的能力、抽象思维能力或数学能力，都是非常深的时间结构。这就是为什么它们看起来像是信息和抽象的，因为它们存在于你的时间部分，而不一定是空间部分。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:27:10) Just because I have a 4 billion year old history, why does that mean I can’t hang out with aliens?
(01:27:10) 仅仅因为我有40亿年的历史，为什么就意味着我不能和外星人在一起？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:27:15) There’s a couple ideas that are embedded here. One of them comes again from Paul. He wrote this book years ago about the eerie silence and why we’re alone. And he concluded the book with this idea of quinteligence or something. But this idea that really advanced intelligence would basically just build itself into a quantum computer and it would want to operate in the vacuum of space, because that’s the best place to do quantum computation. And it would just run out all of its computations indefinitely, but it would look completely dark to the rest of the universe.
(01:27:15) 这里蕴含着几个想法。其中一个来自保罗。他多年前写了一本书，讲的是阴森恐怖的寂静以及我们为何孤独。他在书的最后提出了 "五智能 "之类的观点。这个想法认为真正先进的智慧 基本上会把自己构建成一台量子计算机 它想在真空的太空中运行 因为那是进行量子计算的最佳场所它将无限地运行所有的计算 但在宇宙的其他部分看来 它是完全黑暗的
(01:27:47) As typical, I don’t think that’s actually the right physics, but I think something about that idea as I do with all ideas is partially correct. And Freeman Dyson also had this amazing paper about how long life could persist in a universe that was exponentially expanding. And his conception was if you imagine analog life form, it could run slower and slower and slower and slower and slower as a function of time. And so, it would be able to run indefinitely, even against an exponentially expanding universe because it would just run exponentially slower.
(01:27:47) 作为典型，我不认为那是正确的物理学，但我认为这个想法的某些部分是正确的，就像我对所有想法一样。弗里曼-戴森（Freeman Dyson）也曾发表过一篇令人惊叹的论文，论述了在一个呈指数膨胀的宇宙中，生命能持续多久。他的概念是，如果你想象模拟生命形式，它可以运行得越来越慢，越来越慢，越来越慢，作为时间的函数。因此，即使面对指数膨胀的宇宙 它也能无限期地运行下去 因为它只是以指数速度运行而已
(01:28:20) And so, I guess part of what I’m doing in my brain is putting those two things together along with this idea that, if you imagine with our technology, we’re now building virtual realities, things we actually call virtual reality. Which required four billions years of history and a whole bunch of data to basically embed them in a computer architecture. Now you can put an Oculus headset on and think that you’re in this world.
(所以，我想我在大脑中做的部分工作就是把这两件事和这个想法结合起来，如果你想象一下我们的技术，我们现在正在构建虚拟现实，我们实际上称之为虚拟现实。这需要 40 亿年的历史和大量的数据，才能将它们嵌入到计算机架构中。现在，你可以戴上虚拟视界头盔 并认为自己就在这个世界里。
(01:28:47) And what you really are embedded in is in a very deep temporal structure. And so, it’s huge in time, but it’s very small in space. And you can go lots of places in the virtual space, but you’re still stuck in your physical body and sitting in the chair. And so, part of it is 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.
(01:28:47) 而你真正被嵌入的是一个非常深的时间结构。因此，它在时间上是巨大的，但在空间上却非常小。你可以在虚拟空间里去很多地方，但你仍然被困在你的肉体里，坐在椅子上。因此，部分原因可能是进化充分的生物圈会自我虚拟化在它们的时空因果结构中将自己的宇宙内部化 将自己与宇宙的其他部分隔离开来
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:29:19) I just don’t know if a deep temporal structure necessarily means that you’re closed off.
(01:29:19) 我只是不知道深层时空结构是否一定意味着你是封闭的。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:29:24) No, I don’t either. that’s my fear. I’m not sure I’m agreeing with what I say. I’m just saying this is one conclusion. And in my most, it’s interesting, I don’t do psychedelic drugs. But when people describe to me your thing with the faces and stuff, and I’ve had a lot of deep conversations with friends that have done psychedelic drugs for intellectual reasons and otherwise. But I’m always like, “Oh, it sounds like you’re just doing theoretical physics. That’s what brains do on theoretical physics.”
(01:29:24) 不，我也不知道。这就是我的恐惧。我不确定我是否同意我说的话。我只是说这是一个结论。有趣的是，我不服用迷幻药。但当人们向我描述你的面孔之类的东西时，我和朋友们进行过很多深入的交谈，他们因为智力原因或其他原因吸食迷幻药。但我总是说："哦，听起来你只是在做理论物理学。这就是大脑在理论物理学上的作用"
(01:29:54) I live in these really abstract spaces most of the time. But there’s also this issue of extinction. Extinction events are basically pinching off an entire causal structure. The one of these… I’m going to call them time crystals, I don’t know what, but there’s these very large objects in time. Pinching off that whole structure from the rest of it. And so it’s like, if you imagine that same thing in the universe, I once thought that sufficiently advanced technologies would look like black holes.
(01:29:54) 我大部分时间都生活在这些非常抽象的空间里。但也有灭绝的问题。灭绝事件基本上是掐断了整个因果结构。其中一个......我想把它们叫做时间晶体，我不知道是什么，但时间里有这些非常大的物体。把整个结构从其他部分掐断所以这就像 如果你想象宇宙中同样的东西 我曾经认为足够先进的技术 看起来就像黑洞
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:30:22) That would be just completely imperceptible to us.
(01:30:22) 这对我们来说是完全无法察觉的。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:30:23) Yeah. there might be lots of aliens out there.
(是的，外面可能有很多外星人。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:30:24) They all look like black holes.
(01:30:24) 它们看起来都像黑洞。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:30:28) Maybe that’s the explanation for all the singularities. They’re all pinched off causal structures that virtualize their reality and broke off from us
(也许这就是所有奇点的解释。它们都是被捏造出来的因果结构，它们虚拟了自己的现实，并脱离了我们
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:30:34) Black holes in every way, so untouchable to us or unlikely be detectable by us with whatever sensory mechanisms we have.
(01:30:34）黑洞无论从哪方面看，都是我们无法触及的，或者说，无论我们拥有怎样的感官机制，都不太可能探测到黑洞。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:30:45) Yeah. But the other way I think about it is there is probably hopefully life out there. I do work on life detection efforts in the solar system and I’m trying to help with the Habitable Worlds Observatory mission planning right now and working with the biosignatures team for that to think about exoplanet biosignatures. I have some optimism that we might find things, but there are the challenges that we don’t know the likelihood for life, which is what you were talking about.
是的但我的另一种想法是，希望那里有生命存在。我在太阳系中从事生命探测工作，现在正试图帮助宜居世界天文台制定任务计划，并与生物特征团队合作，思考系外行星的生物特征。我乐观地认为我们可能会发现一些东西，但我们不知道生命存在的可能性，这也是你刚才提到的挑战。
(01:31:16) If I get to a more grounded discussion, what I’m really interested in doing is trying to solve the origin of life so we can understand how likely life is out there. I think that the problem of discovering alien life and solving the origin of life are deeply coupled and in fact are one in the same problem, and that the first contact with alien life will actually be in an origin of life experiment. But that part I’m super interested in.
(01:31:16）如果要进行更接地气的讨论，我真正感兴趣的是试图解决生命起源的问题，这样我们就能了解生命存在的可能性有多大。我认为，发现外星生命的问题和解决生命起源的问题是紧密联系在一起的，实际上是同一个问题。但我对这部分超级感兴趣。
(01:31:45) And then there’s this other feature that I think about a lot, which is our own technological phase of development as what is this phase in the evolution of life on a planet? If you think about a biosphere emerging on a planet and evolving over billions of years and evolving into a technosphere. When a technosphere can move off planet and basically reproduce itself on another planet, now you have biospheres reproducing themselves. Basically they have to go through technology to do that.
(01:31:45) 然后还有一个我经常思考的特点，那就是我们自身的技术发展阶段。如果你认为一个生物圈出现在一个星球上，经过数十亿年的进化，进化成一个科技圈。当一个科技圈可以离开星球，基本上可以在另一个星球上自我繁衍时，现在就有生物圈自我繁衍了。基本上，它们必须通过科技才能做到这一点。
(01:32:20) And so, there are ways of thinking about the nature of intelligent life and how it spreads in that capacity that I’m also really excited about and thinking about. And all of those things for me are connected. We have to solve the origin of life in order for us to get off planet because we basically have to start life on another planet. And we also have to solve the origin life in order to recognize other alien intelligence. All of these things are literally the same problem.
(01:32:20）因此，对于智能生命的本质以及它是如何以这种方式传播的，我也有一些非常兴奋的思考方式。对我来说，所有这些事情都是相关联的。我们必须解决生命起源的问题，这样我们才能离开地球，因为我们基本上必须在另一个星球上开始生命。我们还必须解决生命起源问题，以便识别其他外星智慧生物。所有这些都是同一个问题。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:32:46) Right. Understanding the origin of life here on earth is a way to understand ourselves. And to understanding ourselves as a prerequisite from being able to detect other intelligent civilizations. I, for one, take it for what it’s worth on Ayahuasca, one of the things I did is zoom out aggressively, like a spaceship. And it would always go quickly through the galaxy and from the galaxy to this representation of the universe. And at least for me from that perspective, it seemed like it was full of alien life. Not just alien life, but intelligent life.
(01:32:46）对。了解地球上生命的起源是了解我们自己的一种方式。了解我们自己是探测其他智慧文明的先决条件。就我而言 在服用死藤水时 我做的一件事就是像宇宙飞船一样急速放大它总是快速地穿过银河系 从银河系到这个宇宙的表象至少对我来说 从那个角度看 它似乎充满了外星生命不仅仅是外星生命 还有智慧生命
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:33:29) I like that.
(01:33:29) 我喜欢。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:33:29) And conscious life. I don’t know how to convert it into words. It’s more like a feeling. Like you were saying, a feeling converted to a visual to converted to words. I had a visual with it, but really it was a feeling that it was just full of this vibrant energy that I was feeling when I’m looking at the people in my life and full of gratitude. But that same exact thing is everywhere in the universe.
(01:33:29) 还有有意识的生活。我不知道如何用语言表达。它更像是一种感觉。就像你刚才说的，感觉转换成视觉，再转换成文字。我有一个视觉效果，但实际上是一种感觉，它充满了这种充满活力的能量，当我看着我生命中的人时，我就会充满感激之情。但同样的事情在宇宙中无处不在。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:34:01) Right. I totally agree with this, that visual I really love. And I think we live in a universe that generates life and purpose, and it’s part of the structure of just the world. And so maybe this lonely view I have is, I never thought about it this way until you’re describing that. I was like, I want to live in that universe. And I’m a very optimistic person and I love building visions of reality that are positive. But I think for me right now in the intellectual process, I have to tunnel through this particular way of thinking about the loneliness of being separated in time from everything else. Which I think we also all are, because time is what defines us as individuals.
(01:34:01）对。我完全同意这个观点，我非常喜欢这个视觉效果。我认为我们生活在一个产生生命和目的的宇宙中，它是世界结构的一部分。所以也许我的这种孤独的观点是，在你描述之前，我从来没有这样想过。我想，我想生活在那个宇宙中。我是一个非常乐观的人，我喜欢建立积极的现实愿景。但我认为，对我来说，现在在智力发展的过程中，我必须通过这种特殊的思维方式，去思考与其他一切在时间上分离的孤独感。我认为我们都是如此，因为时间是我们作为个体的定义。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:34:51) Part of you is drawn to the trauma of being alone deeply in a physics-based sense.
(01:34:51) 从物理学的意义上讲，你的一部分会被孤独所带来的创伤深深吸引。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:34:51) But also part of what I mean is you have to go through ideas you don’t necessarily agree with to work out what you’re trying to understand. And I’m trying to be inside this structure so I can really understand it. And I don’t think I’ve been able to… I am so deeply embedded in what we are intellectually right now that I don’t have an ability to see these other ones that you’re describing, if they’re there.
(01:34:51) 但我的部分意思是，你必须通过你不一定同意的观点，来找出你试图理解的东西。我试图进入这个结构，这样才能真正理解它。我不认为我能够......我是如此深刻地沉浸在我们现在的知识结构中，以至于我没有能力看到你所描述的那些其他的东西，如果它们真的存在的话。

Great Perceptual Filter 出色的感知过滤器

Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:35:15) Well, one of the things you described that you already spoke to, you call it the great perceptual filter. There’s the famous great filter, which is basically the idea that there’s some really powerful moment in every intelligent civilization where they destroy themselves. That explains why we have not seen aliens. And you’re saying that there’s something like that in the temporal history of the creation of complex objects, that at a certain point they become an island, an island too far to reach based on the perceptions?
(01:35:15) 嗯，你描述的其中一件事，你已经说过了，你称之为 "伟大的感知过滤器"。有一个著名的大过滤器，它基本上是这样的观点：在每个智慧文明中，都会有一些非常强大的时刻，他们会在那里毁灭自己。这就解释了为什么我们没见过外星人你是说在创造复杂物体的时间历史中 存在着类似的东西 在某一时刻它们变成了一座孤岛 一座根据感知无法到达的孤岛？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:35:54) I hope not, but yeah, I worry about it. Yeah.
(01:35:54) 希望不会，但我还是很担心。是啊
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:35:55) But that’s basically meaning there’s something fundamental about the universe where if the more complex you become, the harder it will be to perceive other complex creatures.
(但这基本上意味着，宇宙中存在着某种基本的东西，如果你变得越复杂，就越难感知到其他复杂的生物。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:36:05) I mean, just think about us with microbial life. We used to once be cells. And for most of human history, we didn’t even recognize cellular life was there until we built a new technology, microscopes, that allowed us to see them. It’s weird. Things that we-
(01:36:05) 我的意思是，想想我们的微生物生命。我们曾经是细胞。在人类历史的大部分时间里，我们甚至没有意识到细胞生命的存在，直到我们发明了一种新技术--显微镜，让我们能够看到它们。这很奇怪我们
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:36:21) And they’re close to us.
(01:36:21) 他们离我们很近。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:36:22) They’re close, they’re everywhere.
(01:36:22) 它们就在附近，无处不在。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:36:24) But also in the history of the development of complex objects, they’re pretty close.
(01:36:24) 但在复杂物体的发展史上，它们也非常接近。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:36:28) Yeah, super close. Super close. Yeah. I mean, everything on this planet is… It’s pretty much the same thing. The space of possibilities is so huge. It’s like we’re virtually identical.
(是啊，超级接近。非常接近我是说，这个星球上的一切......都差不多。可能性是如此巨大就像我们几乎一模一样
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:36:42) How many flavors or kinds of life do you think are possible?
(01:36:42) 你认为有多少种生命可能存在？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:36:47) I’m trying to imagine all the little flickering lights in the universe in the way that you were describing. That was kind of cool.
(01:36:47) 我试图以你描述的方式想象宇宙中所有闪烁的小灯。这有点酷。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:36:53) I mean, it was awesome to me. It was exactly that. It was like lights. The way you maybe see a city, but a city from up above. You see a city with the flickering lights, but there’s a coldness to the city. You know that humans are capable of good and evil. And you could see there’s a complex feeling to the city. I had no such complex feeling about seeing the lights of all the galaxies, whatever, the billions of galaxies.
(01:36:53) 我的意思是，这对我来说太棒了。就是这样就像灯光一样就像你看到的城市一样 但城市是从高空俯瞰的你看到的是一个灯光闪烁的城市，但这个城市是冰冷的。你知道人类有善恶之分你可以看到这座城市给人一种复杂的感觉。而我看到所有星系的灯光 却没有这种复杂的感觉 不管是什么 数十亿的星系
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:37:23) Yeah, this is cool. I’ll answer the question in a second, but just maybe this idea of flickering lights and intelligence is interesting to me because we have such a human-centric view of alien intelligences that a lot of the work that I’ve been doing with my lab is just trying to take inspiration from non-human life on earth.
(01:37:23)是的，这很酷。我马上就会回答这个问题，但也许这个闪烁的灯光和智能的想法对我来说很有趣，因为我们对外星智能的看法是如此以人类为中心，以至于我和我的实验室一直在做的很多工作都只是试图从地球上的非人类生命中获取灵感。
(01:37:42) And so, I have this really talented undergrad student that’s basically building a model of alien communication based on fireflies. One of my colleagues, Orit Peleg, is she’s totally brilliant. But she goes out with GoPro cameras and films in high resolution, all these firefly flickering. And she has this theory about how their signaling evolved to maximally differentiate the flickering pattern. She has a theory basically that predicts this species should flash like this. If this one’s flashing like this, other one’s going to do it at a slower rate so that they can distinguish each other living in the same environment.
(所以，我有一个非常有才华的本科生，她基本上是根据萤火虫建立了一个外星通讯模型。我的一位同事叫奥瑞特-佩雷格，她非常出色。她带着GoPro相机出去 拍摄所有萤火虫闪烁的高分辨率画面她有一套理论来解释萤火虫的信号传递 是如何进化到最大程度来区分闪烁模式的她的理论基本上可以预测 这个物种应该这样闪烁如果这只萤火虫这样闪烁 另一只萤火虫就会以较慢的速度闪烁 这样它们就能区分生活在同一环境中的彼此
(01:38:21) And so this undergrad’s building this model where you have a pulsar background of all these giant flashing sources in the universe. And an alien intelligence wants to signal it’s there so it’s flashing a firefly. And I like the idea of thinking about non-human aliens so that was really fun.
(这个本科生建立了一个模型 在这个模型中 你有一个脉冲星背景 宇宙中所有这些巨大的闪烁源一个外星智慧生物想发出它在那里的信号，所以它闪烁着萤火虫。我喜欢思考非人类外星人的想法，所以这真的很有趣。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:38:38) The mechanism of the flashing unfortunately, is the diversity of that is very high, and we might not be able to see it. That’s what-
(01:38:38) 不幸的是，闪烁的机制是多样性非常高，我们可能无法看到它。这就是
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:38:44) Yeah. Well, I think there’s some ways we might be able to differentiate that signal. I’m still thinking about this part of it. One is if you have pulsars and they all have a certain spectrum to their pulsing patterns. And you have this one signal that’s in there that’s basically tried to maximally differentiate itself from all the other sources in the universe, it might stick out in the distribution. There might be ways of actually being able to tell if it’s an anomalous pulsar, basically. But I don’t know if that would really work or not. Still thinking about it.
是的我觉得我们可以通过一些方法来区分信号。我还在思考这部分内容。一是如果你有脉冲星 它们的脉冲模式都有一定的频谱而你有这样一个信号，它基本上试图最大限度地将自己与宇宙中的所有其他信号源区分开来，它可能会在分布中脱颖而出。也许真的有办法分辨出它是否是一颗异常脉冲星，基本上是这样。但我不知道这是否真的可行。还在考虑中

Fashion 时尚

Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:39:12) You tweeted, “If one wants to understand how truly combinatorially and compositionally complex our universe is, they only need step into the world of fashion. It’s bonkers how big the constructable space of human aesthetics is.” Can you explain, can we explore the space of human aesthetics?
(01:39:12) 你在推特上写道："如果有人想了解我们的宇宙在组合和构成上有多么复杂，他们只需要走进时尚世界。人类美学的可构建空间有多大，真是令人难以置信"。你能解释一下，我们能探索人类美学的空间吗？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:39:34) Yeah. I don’t know. I’ve been obsessed with the… I never know how to pronounce it. It’s a Schiaparelli. They have ears and things. It’s such a weird, grotesque aesthetic, but it’s totally bizarre. But what I meant, I have a visceral experience when I walk into my closet. I have a lot of…
(是啊 我也不知道我一直沉迷于......我从来不知道怎么发音。这是一个Schiaparelli。它们有耳朵之类的东西它的审美很怪异，但又很奇特但我的意思是 当我走进我的衣橱 我有一种直观的感受我有很多...
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:39:54) How big is your closet?
(01:39:54) 你的衣橱有多大？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:39:56) It’s pretty big. It’s like I do assembly theory every morning when I walk in my closet because I really like a very large combinatorial diverse palette, but I never know what I’m going to build in the morning.
(01:39:56) 它非常大。就像我每天早上走进衣橱时都会做装配理论，因为我非常喜欢一个非常大的组合多样的调色板，但我从来不知道我早上要做什么。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:40:08) Do you get rid of stuff?
(01:40:08) 你会扔掉东西吗？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:40:09) Sometimes. 有时
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:40:12) Or do you have trouble getting rid of stuff?
(01:40:12) 或者你有扔掉东西的困难？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:40:13) I have trouble getting rid of some stuff. It depends on what it is. If it’s vintage, it’s hard to get rid of because it’s hard to replace. It depends on the piece. Yeah.
(01:40:13) 我很难摆脱一些东西。这要看是什么东西。如果是古董，就很难处理掉，因为很难替换。这要看是什么东西。要看是什么了
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:40:22) You have, your closet is one of those temporal time crystals that they just, you get to visualize the entire history of the-
(你的衣橱就是那些时空水晶之一 你可以将整个历史可视化
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:40:30) It’s a physical manifestation of my personality.
(01:40:30）这是我个性的具体表现。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:40:32) Right. Why is that a good visualization of the combinatorial and compositionally complex universe?
(01:40:32) 没错。为什么说这是组合和构成复杂宇宙的良好可视化呢？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:40:43) I think it’s an interesting feature of our species that we get to express ourselves through what we wear. If you think about all those animals in the jungle you saw, they’re born looking the way they look, and then they’re stuck with it for life.
(01:40:43) 我认为这是我们这个物种的一个有趣特征，我们可以通过穿着来表达自己。如果你想想你在丛林中看到的那些动物，它们生来就是这个样子，然后一辈子都是这个样子。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:40:55) That’s true. I mean, it is one of the loudest, clearest, most consistent ways we signal to each other, is the clothing we wear.
(01:40:55) 没错。我的意思是，这是我们向彼此发出信号的最响亮、最清晰、最一致的方式之一，那就是我们穿的衣服。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:41:03) Yeah. It’s highly dynamic. I mean, you can be dynamic if you want to. Very few people are… There’s a certain bravery, but it’s actually more about confidence, willing to play with style and play with aesthetics. And I think it’s interesting when you start experimenting with it, how it changes the fluidity of the social spaces and the way that you interact with them.
(01:41:03) 是的，非常有活力。我的意思是，只要你愿意，你就能充满活力。很少有人......有一定的勇气，但实际上更多的是自信，愿意玩出风格，玩出美感。当你开始尝试时，我觉得这很有趣，它会改变社交空间的流动性，以及你与他们互动的方式。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:41:27) But there’s also commitment. You have to wear that outfit all today.
(01:41:27) 但这也是一种承诺。你今天必须一直穿着这身衣服。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:41:32) I know. I know. It’s a big commitment. Do you feel like that every morning?
(01:41:32) I know.I know. I know.这是一个很大的承诺。你每天早上都有这种感觉吗？
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:41:35) No. I wear, that’s why-
(01:41:35) 不，我穿，这就是为什么--
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:41:37) You’re like “This is a life commitment.”
(你会说 "这是一生的承诺"
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:41:40) All I have is suits and a black shirt and jeans.
(01:41:40) 我只有西装、黑衬衫和牛仔裤。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:41:44) I know.
(01:41:44) 我知道。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:41:44) Those are the two outfits.
(01:41:44) 这是两套服装。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:41:45) Yeah. Well, see, this is the thing though. It simplifies your thought process in the morning. I have other ways I do that. I park in the same exact parking spot when I go to work on the fourth floor of a parking garage because no one ever parks on the fourth floor, so I don’t have to remember where I park my car. But I really like aesthetics and playing with them. I’m willing to spend part of my cognitive energy every morning trying to figure out what I want to be that day.
是啊是这样的它简化了你早上的思考过程。我还有其他方法。我上班的时候会把车停在停车场四楼的同一个停车位上，因为从来没有人把车停在四楼，这样我就不用记着把车停在哪里了。但我真的很喜欢美学，喜欢玩美学。我愿意每天早上花费一部分认知能量，去想我那天想成为什么样的人。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:42:09) Did you deliberately think about the outfit you were wearing today?
(01:42:09) 你有没有刻意考虑过你今天穿的衣服？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:42:12) Yep.
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:42:13) Was there backup options or were you going back and forth between some?
(01:42:13) 有备份选项吗？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:42:14) Three or four, but I really like yellow.
(01:42:14) 三四个，但我真的很喜欢黄色。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:42:14) Were they drastically different?
(01:42:14) 它们有天壤之别吗？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:42:14) Yes. (01:42:14) 是的。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:42:22) Okay. K/.
(01:42:22) Okay.K/.
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:42:23) And even this one could have been really different because it’s not just the jacket and the shoes and the hairstyle. It’s like the jewelry and the accessories. Any outfit is a lot of small decisions.
(01:42:23) 即使是这个，也可以很不一样，因为它不仅仅是夹克、鞋子和发型。比如珠宝和配饰。任何服装都是由许多小决定组成的。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:42:37) Well, I think your current office has a lot of shades of yellow. There’s a theme. It’s nice. I’m grateful that you did that.
(01:42:37) 我觉得你现在的办公室有很多黄色调。有一个主题。很不错。我很感谢你这么做。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:42:47) Thanks. (01:42:47) 谢谢。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:42:47) Its like its it’s own art form.
(01:42:47) 它就像一门艺术。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:42:49) Yeah. Yellow’s my daughter’s favorite color. And I never really thought about yellow much, but she’s been obsessed with yellow. She’s seven now. And I don’t know, I just really love it.
是啊黄色是我女儿最喜欢的颜色。我从来没怎么想过黄色，但她一直对黄色很着迷。她现在七岁了。我也不知道，我就是很喜欢。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:42:58) I guess you can pick a color and just make that the constraint and then just go with it and understand the beauty.
(01:42:58) 我想你可以选择一种颜色，并将其作为约束条件，然后顺其自然地去理解它的美。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:43:03) I’m playing with yellow a lot lately. This is not even the most yellow because I have black pants on, but I have…
(01:43:03) 我最近经常用黄色。这甚至不是最黄的，因为我穿的是黑色裤子，但我有...
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:43:08) You go all out.
(01:43:08) 你全力以赴。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:43:09) I’ve worn outfits that have probably five shades of yellow in them.
(01:43:09) 我穿的衣服大概有五种黄色。

Beauty 美容

Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:43:12) Wow. What do you think beauty is? We seem to… Underlying this idea of playing with aesthetics is we find certain things beautiful. What is it that humans find beautiful? And why do we need to find things beautiful?
(01:43:12) Wow.你认为美是什么？我们似乎......这种玩美学的想法背后是我们觉得某些东西很美。人类到底觉得什么东西美？为什么我们需要发现美的事物？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:43:30) Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, I am attracted to style and aesthetics because I think they’re beautiful, but it’s much more because I think it’s fun to play with. And so, I will get to the beauty thing, but I guess I want to just explain a little bit about my motivation in this space, because it’s really an intellectual thing for me.
(01:43:30) 是的，这很有趣。我的意思是，我被风格和美学所吸引，因为我觉得它们很美，但更多的是因为我觉得玩起来很有趣。所以，我会说到美这件事，但我想我只想解释一下我在这个领域的动机，因为这对我来说真的是一件智力上的事。
(01:43:54) And Stewart Brand has this great infographic about the layers of human society. And I think it starts with the natural sciences and physics at the bottom, and it goes through all these layers and it’s economics. And then fashion is at the top, is the fastest moving part of human culture. And I think I really like that because it’s so dynamic and so short and it’s temporal longevity. Contrasted with studying the laws of physics, which are the deep structure reality that I feel like bridging those scales tells me much more about the structure of the world that I live in.
(01:43:54) 斯图尔特-布兰德（Stewart Brand）有一张很棒的信息图表，介绍了人类社会的各个层次。我认为它从最底层的自然科学和物理学开始，然后是经济学。然后，时尚位于顶端，是人类文化中发展最快的部分。我觉得我很喜欢这一点，因为它是如此充满活力，如此短暂，而且具有时间上的持久性。与研究物理定律相比，我更喜欢研究深层结构的现实，我觉得在这些尺度之间架起一座桥梁，能让我更了解我所生活的世界的结构。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:44:31) That said, there’s certain kinds of fashions. A dude in a black suit with a black tie seems to be less dynamic. It seems to persist through time.
(01:44:31) 话虽如此，但也有某些类型的时尚。一个穿着黑色西装、打着黑色领带的人似乎不那么有活力。它似乎历久弥新。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:44:49) Are you embodying this?
(01:44:49) 你体现了这一点吗？
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:44:49) Yeah, I think so. I think it just-
(是的，我想是这样。我认为这只是
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:44:49) I’d like to see you wear yellow, Lex.
(01:44:49) 我想看到你穿黄色衣服，莱克斯。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:44:56) I wouldn’t even know what to do with myself. I would freak out. I wouldn’t know how to act to know-
(01:44:56) 我甚至不知道该拿自己怎么办。我会抓狂。我不知道该怎么做才能知道--
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:44:56) You wouldn’t know how to be you. Yeah. I know. This is amazing though, isn’t it? Amazing, you have the choice to do it, but one of my favorite-
(你不知道怎么做你自己我知道但这很神奇，不是吗？很神奇，你可以选择这样做，但我最喜欢的一个--
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:45:00) Amazing. You have the choice to do it. But one of my favorite, just on the question of beauty, one of my favorite fashion designers of all time is Alexander McQueen. He was really phenomenal. But his early, and actually I used what happened to him in the fashion industries, a coping mechanism with our paper. When the nature paper in the fall when everyone was saying it was controversial and how terrible that… But controversial is good. But when Alexander McQueen first came out with his fashion lines, he was mixing horror and beauty and people were horrified. It was so controversial. It was macabre. He had, it looked like there were blood on the models.
(01:45:00) 太棒了。你可以选择这样做。我最喜欢的时装设计师之一是亚历山大-麦昆（Alexander McQueen）。他真的很了不起。但他早年的经历，实际上是我用他在时尚界的遭遇，作为我们报纸的应对机制。秋天的自然》杂志出版时，每个人都在说它很有争议，多么可怕......但有争议是好事。但当亚历山大-麦昆首次推出他的时装系列时 他将恐怖和美感融为一体 人们都被吓坏了这太有争议了太恐怖了他让模特身上看起来像有血一样
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:45:40) That was beautiful. We’re just looking at some pictures here.
(01:45:40) 太美了。我们正在看一些照片。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:45:45) Yeah, no, his stuff is amazing. His first runway line, I think was called Nihilism. I don’t know if you could find it. He was really dramatic. He carried a lot of trauma with him. There you go, that’s… Yeah. Yeah.
(01:45:45) 是的，不，他的作品非常棒。他的第一条跑道线，我想是叫虚无主义。我不知道你能不能找到。他真的很戏剧化他身上有很多创伤给你，那是...是啊 是啊
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:46:03) Wow.
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:46:03) But he changed the fashion industry. His stuff became very popular.
(01:46:03) 但他改变了时尚界。他的作品大受欢迎。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:46:07) That’s a good outfit to show up to a party in.
(01:46:07) 穿着这身衣服去参加派对很不错。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:46:09) Right, right. But this gets at the question, is that horrific or is it beautiful? I think he ended up committing suicide and actually he left his death note on the descent of man, so he was a really deep person.
(没错，没错。但这就涉及到一个问题：这是恐怖还是美丽？我认为他最后是自杀的，实际上他在人的下降过程中留下了死亡遗言，所以他是一个非常有深度的人。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:46:29) Great fashion certainly has that kind of depth to it.
(01:46:29) 伟大的时尚当然具有这种深度。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:46:32) Yeah, it sure does. I think it’s the intellectual pursuit. This is very highly intellectual and I think it’s a lot how I play with language. It’s the same way that I play with fashion or the same way that I play with ideas in theoretical physics, there’s always this space that you can just push things just enough so they look like something someone thinks is familiar, but they’re not familiar. I think that’s really cool.
(01:46:32) 是的，确实如此。我认为这是一种智力追求。这是非常高智商的，我觉得这也是我玩弄语言的一种方式。就像我玩转时尚，玩转理论物理学中的观点一样，总是有这样一个空间，你可以把东西推得足够远，让它们看起来像别人熟悉的东西，但它们并不熟悉。我觉得这真的很酷。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:46:58) It seems like beauty doesn’t have much function, but it seems to also have a lot of influence on the way we collaborate with each other.
(01:46:58) 美貌似乎没有什么作用，但它似乎也对我们相互合作的方式有很大影响。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:47:10) It has tons of function.
(01:47:10) 它有很多功能。
(01:47:10) What do you mean it doesn’t have function?
(01:47:10) 什么叫没有功能？
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:47:11) I guess sexual selection incorporates beauty somehow. But why? Because beauty is a sign of health or something. I don’t even-
(01:47:11)我想，性选择在某种程度上包含了美。但为什么呢？因为美是健康的象征还是什么？我甚至不
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:47:19) Oh, evolutionarily? Maybe. But then beauty becomes a signal of other things. It’s really not… Then beauty becomes an adaptive trait, so it can change with different, maybe some species would think, well, you thought the frog having babies come out of its back was beautiful and I thought it was grotesque. There’s not a universal definition of what’s beautiful. It is something that is dependent on your history and how you interact with the world. I guess what I like about beauty, like any other concept is when you turn it on its head. Maybe the traditional conception of why women wear makeup and they dress certain ways is because they want to look beautiful and pleasing to people.
(01:47:19) 哦，进化论？也许吧但美会成为其他事物的信号这真的不是......那么美就变成了一种适应性特征，所以它会随着不同的变化而变化，也许有些物种会认为，你认为青蛙从背上生小孩很美，而我认为它很怪诞。什么是美，并没有一个统一的定义。它取决于你的历史和你与世界的互动方式。我想，我喜欢美，就像喜欢其他概念一样，是在你颠覆它的时候。也许在传统观念中，女性化妆和穿衣打扮的原因是她们想让自己看起来更美、更讨人喜欢。
(01:48:07) I just like to do it because a confidence thing, it’s about embodying the person that I want to be and about owning that person. Then the way that people interact with that person is very different than if I wasn’t using that attribute as part of… Obviously, that’s influenced by the society I live and what’s aesthetically pleasing things. But it’s interesting to be able to turn that around and not have it necessarily be about the aesthetics, but about the power dynamics that the aesthetics create.
(01:48:07) 我喜歡這樣做，是因為自信，是為了體現我想成為的那個人，是為了擁有那個人。显然，这是受我所生活的社会和审美观的影响。但有趣的是，我可以把它转过来，不一定是关于美学，而是关于美学所产生的权力动态。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:48:45) But you’re saying there’s some function to beauty in that way, in the way you’re describing and the dynamic it creates in the social interaction.
(01:48:45) 但你的意思是说，美有某种功能，就像你描述的那样，它在社会交往中创造了一种动态。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:48:45) Well, the point is you’re saying it’s an adaptive trait for sexual selection or something. I’m saying that the adaptation that beauty confers is far richer than that. Some of the adaptation is about social hierarchy and social mobility and just playing social dynamics. Why do some people dress goth? It’s because they identify with a community and a culture associated with that and get, and that’s a beautiful aesthetic. It’s a different aesthetic. Some people don’t like it.
(重点是，你说这是性选择的适应特征什么的。我想说的是，美貌所带来的适应性远不止于此。有些适应是关于社会等级、社会流动性和社会动态的。为什么有些人会穿哥特装？这是因为他们认同与之相关的社区和文化，并获得了一种美丽的审美。这是一种与众不同的审美。有些人不喜欢
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:49:12) It has the same richness as does language.
(01:49:12) 它和语言一样具有丰富的内涵。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:49:16) Yes. (01:49:16) 是的。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:49:16) It’s the same kind of-
(01:49:16) 是同一种--
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:49:18) Yes. I think too few people think about the aesthetics they build for themselves in the morning and how they carry it in the world and the way that other people interact with that because they put clothes on and they don’t think about clothes as carrying function.
(01:49:18) 是的。我认为，很少有人会考虑到他们早上为自己打造的美感，以及他们如何将这种美感带到这个世界上，以及其他人与这种美感的互动方式，因为他们穿上衣服后，并没有考虑到衣服所承载的功能。

Language 语言

Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:49:35) Let’s jump from beauty to language. There’s so many ways to explore the topic of language. You called it, you said that language, parts of language or language in itself or the mechanism of language is a kind of living life form. You’ve tweeted a lot about this in all kinds of poetic ways. Let’s talk about the computation aspect of it. You tweeted, ” The world is not a computation, but computation is our best current language for understanding the world. It is important we recognize this so we can start to see the structure of our future languages that will allow us to see deeper than the computation allows us.” What’s the use of language in helping us understand and make sense of the world?
(01:49:35) 让我们从美跳到语言。探讨语言这个话题有很多方法。你说过，语言、语言的部分或语言本身或语言的机制是一种活生生的生命形式。你在推特上以各种诗意的方式对此进行了大量讨论。让我们来谈谈其中的计算方面。你在推特上写道："世界不是一种计算，但计算是我们当前理解世界的最佳语言。我们必须认识到这一点，这样我们才能开始看到未来语言的结构，让我们看到比计算更深层次的东西"。语言在帮助我们理解和认识世界方面有什么用处？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:50:21) I think one thing that I feel like I notice much more viscerally than I feel like I hear other people describe is that the representations in our mind and the way that we use language are not the things… Actually, this is an important point going back to what Godel did, but also this idea of signs and symbols and all kinds of ways of separating them. There’s the word and then there’s what the word means about the world. We often confuse those things. What I feel very viscerally, I almost sometimes think I have some synesthesia for language or something, and I just don’t interact with it the way that other people do. But for me, words are objects and the objects are not the things that they describe.
(01:50:21）我觉得有一件事，我比听到其他人的描述更直观地注意到，那就是我们头脑中的表象和我们使用语言的方式并不是事物......实际上，这一点很重要，可以追溯到戈德尔的研究，也可以追溯到符号和象征的概念，以及将它们分开的各种方法。有文字，也有文字对世界的意义。我们经常混淆这些东西。我的直观感受是，有时我几乎认为自己对语言有某种联觉，只是我与语言的互动方式不同于其他人。但对我来说，语言是对象，而对象并不是语言所描述的事物。
(01:51:09) They have a different ontology to them. They’re physical things and they carry causation and they can create meaning, but they’re not what we think they are. Also, the internal representations in our mind, the things I’m seeing about this room are probably… They’re small projection of the things that are actually in this room. I think we have such a difficult time moving past the way that we build representations in the mind and the way that we structure our language to realize that those are approximations to what’s out there and they’re fluid, and we can play around with them and we can see deeper structure underneath them that I think we’re missing a lot.
(01:51:09) 它们有不同的本体论。它们是有形的东西，它们有因果关系，它们可以创造意义，但它们并不是我们想象的那样。另外，我们头脑中的内部表象，我所看到的关于这个房间的事物可能......它们只是这个房间里实际存在的事物的微小投影。我认为我们很难超越我们在头脑中建立表象的方式 以及我们构建语言的方式 去意识到这些都是外面事物的近似值 它们是流动的 我们可以玩弄它们 我们可以看到它们下面更深层次的结构
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:51:51) But also the life of the mind is, in some ways, richer than the physical reality. Sure. What’s going on in your mind might be a projection.
(01:51:51) 但心灵的生活在某些方面也比物理现实更丰富。当然，你头脑中的东西可能是一种投射。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:52:00) Right.
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:52:00) Actually here, but there’s also all kinds of other stuff going on there.
(01:52:00）实际上是在这里，但那里还发生了各种各样的其他事情。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:52:04) Yeah, for sure. I love this essay by Poincare about mathematical creativity where he talks about this sort of frothing of all these things and then somehow you build theorems on top of it and they become concrete. I also think about this with language. It’s like there’s a lot of stuff happening in your mind, but you have to compress it in this few sets of words to try to convey it to someone. It’s a compactification of the space and it’s not a very efficient one. I think just recognizing that there’s a lot that’s happening behind language is really important. I think this is one of the great things about the existential trauma of large language models, I think is the recognition that language is not the only thing required. There’s something underneath it, not by everybody.
(是的，当然。我喜欢 Poincare 关于数学创造力的这篇文章，他在文中说到，所有这些东西都在发酵，然后不知何故，你在其上建立了定理，它们就变得具体了。我也在思考语言的问题。就好像在你的头脑中发生了很多事情，但你必须把它压缩成几组词语，试图传达给别人。这是对空间的压缩，效率并不高。我认为，认识到语言背后发生的很多事情真的很重要。我认为这是大型语言模型存在创伤的一个重要原因，因为我们认识到语言并不是唯一需要的东西。语言背后还有其他东西，不是每个人都需要的。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:52:54) Can you just speak to the feeling you have when you think about words? What’s the magic of words, to you? Do you feel, it almost sometimes feels like you’re playing with it?
(01:52:54) 你能谈谈当你想到文字时的感受吗？对你来说，文字的魔力是什么？你会不会觉得，有时几乎就像是在玩文字游戏？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:53:09) Yeah, I was just going to say it’s like a playground.
(01:53:09) 是啊，我正想说这就像个游乐场。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:53:11) But you’re almost like, I think one of the things you enjoy, maybe I’m projecting, is deviating using words in ways that not everyone uses them, slightly deviating from the norm a little bit.
(01:53:11) 但你几乎就像，我认为你喜欢的事情之一，也许是我的投射，是偏离使用单词的方式，不是每个人都使用它们，稍微偏离规范一点点。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:53:25) I love doing that in everything I do, but especially with language.
(01:53:25) 我做任何事都喜欢这样做，尤其是语言。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:53:28) But not so far that it doesn’t make sense.
(01:53:28) 但也不至于说不通。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:53:31) Exactly. (01:53:31) 没错。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:53:32) You’re always tethered to reality to the norm, but are playing with it basically fucking with people’s minds a little bit, and in so creating a different perspective on another thing that’s been previous explored in a different way.
(01:53:32) 你总是被现实的常态所束缚，但你又在玩弄它，基本上是在一点点地扰乱人们的思维，从而创造出一种不同的视角来看待另一件以前以不同方式探索过的事情。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:53:51) Yeah. It’s literally my favorite thing to do.
(是的，这是我最喜欢做的事。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:53:53) Yeah. Use as words as one way to make people think.
(01:53:53) 是的。用文字作为让人们思考的一种方式。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:53:57) Yeah. A lot of my, what happens in my mind when I’m thinking about ideas is I’ve been presented with this information about how people think about things, and I try to go around to different communities and hear the ways that different, whether it’s hanging out with a bunch of artists, or philosophers, or scientists thinking about things. They all think about it different ways. Then I just try to figure out how do you take the structure of the way that we’re talking about it and turn it slightly so you have all the same pieces that everybody sees are there, but the description that you’ve come up with seems totally different. They can understand that they understand the pattern you’re describing, but they never heard the structure underlying it described the way that you describe it.
(01:53:57) Yeah.当我思考想法时，我脑海中出现的很多信息都是关于人们如何思考问题的，我试着去不同的社区，聆听不同的思考方式，无论是和一群艺术家、哲学家，还是科学家一起思考问题。他们都有不同的思考方式。然后，我就试着找出如何把我们正在讨论的方式的结构稍作改变，这样你就能拥有所有人都看到的相同的部分，但你想出的描述似乎完全不同。他们能够理解你所描述的模式，但他们从未听说过你所描述的结构。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:54:47) Is there words or terms you remember that disturbed people the most? Maybe the positive sense of disturbed, is assembly theory, I suppose, is one.
(01:54:47) 在你的记忆中，有没有最让人们感到不安的词语或术语？我想，"不安 "的褒义词 "集会理论 "就是一个。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:55:00) Yeah. The first couple sentences of that paper disturbed people a lot, and I think they were really carefully constructed in exactly this kind of way.
是的那篇论文的前几句话让人非常不安，我认为它们正是以这种方式精心构思的。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:55:09) What was that? Let me look it up.
(01:55:09) 那是什么？让我查查。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:55:10) Oh, it was really fun. But I think it’s interesting because I do sometimes I’m very upfront about it. I say I’m going to use the same word in probably six different ways in a lecture, and I will.
(01:55:10) 哦，真的很有趣。但我觉得这很有趣，因为我有时会很直白地表达出来。我说我要在一次讲座中用六种不同的方式使用同一个词，我就会这样做。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:55:25) You write, “Scientists have grappled with reconciling biological evolution with immutable laws of the universe defined by physics. These laws underpin life’s origin, evolution, and the-“
(01:55:25) 你写道："科学家们一直在努力协调生物进化与物理学所定义的宇宙永恒定律之间的关系。这些定律是生命起源、进化和......"
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:55:37) [inaudible 01:55:37] with me when he was here, too.
(01:55:37) [听不清 01:55:37] 他在这里的时候也和我在一起。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:55:38) “The development of human culture.” Well, he was, I think your love for words runs deeper than these.
("人类文化的发展"我觉得你对文字的热爱远不止这些
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:55:46) Yeah, for sure. This is part of the brilliant thing about our collaboration is complimentary skill sets. I love playing with the abstract space of language, and it’s a really interesting playground when I’m working with Lee because he thinks at a much deeper level of abstraction than can be expressed by language. The ideas we work on are hard to talk about for that reason.
(01:55:46) 是的，当然。这也是我们合作的精彩之处，那就是我们的技能互补。我喜欢玩语言的抽象空间，而当我和李合作时，这是一个非常有趣的乐园，因为他的思维比语言表达的抽象程度要深得多。正因如此，我们合作的想法很难说出口。

Computation 计算

Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:56:16) What do you think about computation as a language?
(01:56:16) 你如何看待计算这种语言？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:56:19) I think it’s a very poor language. A lot of people think is a really great one, but I think it has some nice properties. But I think the feature of it that is compelling is this kind of idea of universality, that if you have a language, you can describe things in any other language.
(01:56:19) 我认为这是一种非常糟糕的语言。很多人认为它是一种很棒的语言，但我认为它有一些很好的特性。但我认为，它最吸引人的地方在于这种普遍性的理念，即如果你有了一种语言，你就可以用任何其他语言来描述事物。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:56:37) Well, for me, one of the people who revealed the expressive power of computation, aside from Alan Turing, is Stephen Wolfram through all the explorations of cellular automata type of objects that he did in a New Kind of Science and afterwards. What do you get from that? The computational worlds that are revealed through even something as simple as cellular automata. It seems like that’s a really nice way to explore languages that are far outside our human languages and do so rigorously and understand how those kinds of complex systems can interact with each other, can emerge, all that kind of stuff.
(01:56:37) 对我来说，除了艾伦-图灵之外，斯蒂芬-沃尔夫拉姆（Stephen Wolfram）通过他在《新科学》（New Kind of Science）一书及其后对细胞自动机类型对象的探索，揭示了计算的表现力。你从中得到了什么？即使是像蜂窝自动机这样简单的东西，也能揭示出计算的世界。这似乎是探索人类语言之外的语言的一种非常好的方式，而且可以严谨地进行探索，并理解这些复杂系统是如何相互作用、如何出现的，诸如此类。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:57:26) I don’t think that they’re outside our human languages. I think they define the boundary of the space of human languages. They allow us to explore things within that space, which is also fantastic. But I think there is a set of ideas that takes, and Stephen Wolfram has worked on this quite a lot and contributed very significantly to it. I really like some of the stuff that Stephen’s doing with his physics project, but don’t agree with a lot of the foundations of it. But I think the space is really fun that he’s exploring. There’s this assumption that computation is at the base of reality, and I see it at the top of reality, not at the base, because I think computation was built by our biosphere. It’s something that happened after many billion years of evolution. It doesn’t happen in every physical object.
(01:57:26) 我不认为它们在我们人类语言之外。我认为它们界定了人类语言空间的边界。它们允许我们在这个空间内探索事物，这也很奇妙。但我认为，斯蒂芬-沃尔夫拉姆（Stephen Wolfram）在这方面做了大量工作，并做出了重大贡献。我非常喜欢斯蒂芬在他的物理学项目中所做的一些事情，但并不同意其中的很多基础。但我认为他所探索的空间非常有趣。有一种假设认为计算是现实的基础，而我认为它是现实的顶端，而不是基础，因为我认为计算是由我们的生物圈构建的。它是经过数十亿年的进化才形成的。它并不是发生在每一个物理物体上。
(01:58:16) It only happens in some of them. I think one of the reasons that we feel like the universe is computational is because it’s so easy for us as things that have the theory of computation in our minds. Actually, in some sense it might be related to the functioning of our minds and how we build languages to describe the world and sets of relations to describe the world. But it’s easy for us to go out into the world and build computers and then we mistake our ability to do that with assuming that the world is computational. I’ll give you a really simple example. This one came from John Conway. I one time had a conversation with him, which was really delightful. He was really fun. But he was pointing out that if you string lights in a barn, you can program them to have your favorite one dimensional CA and you might even be able to make them do a be capable of universal computation. Is universal computation a feature of the string lights?
(01:58:16) 它只发生在其中的一部分。我认为，我们之所以觉得宇宙是可计算的，其中一个原因是，作为在我们头脑中拥有计算理论的事物，这对我们来说太容易了。其实，从某种意义上说，这可能与我们的思维功能有关，也与我们如何构建语言来描述世界，以及如何构建关系集来描述世界有关。但是，我们很容易就能走到外面的世界并制造出计算机，然后我们就会错误地把我们的能力与假定世界是可计算的联系在一起。我给大家举个非常简单的例子。这个例子来自约翰-康威。有一次，我和他进行了一次谈话，非常愉快。他真的很有趣。但他指出，如果你在谷仓里挂上灯，你就可以给它们编程，让它们具有你最喜欢的一维CA，你甚至可以让它们进行通用计算。通用计算是灯串的一个特性吗？
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (01:59:25) Well, no.
(01:59:25) 嗯，没有。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (01:59:27) No, it’s probably not. It’s a feature of the fact that you as a programmer had a theory that you could embed in the physical architecture of the string lights. Now, what happens though is we get confused by this distinction between us as agents in the world that actually can transfer things that life does onto other physical substrates with what the world is. For example, you’ll see people studying the mathematics of chemical reaction networks and saying, “Well, chemistry is turning universal,” or studying the laws of physics and saying, “The laws of physics are turning universal.” But anytime that you want to do that, you always have to prepare an initial state. You have to constrain the rule space, and then you have to actually be able to demonstrate the properties of computation. All of that requires an agent or a designer to be able to do that.
(01:59:27) 不，可能不是。作为程序员，你有一套理论可以嵌入到灯串的物理结构中，这是事实的一个特征。现在，发生的事情是，我们作为世界中的代理者，实际上可以把生命所做的事情转移到其他物理基质上，而世界是什么，这两者之间的区别让我们感到困惑。例如，你会看到人们在研究化学反应网络的数学时说："好吧，化学正在变得普遍"，或者在研究物理定律时说："物理定律正在变得普遍"。但无论何时你想这么做 你都必须准备一个初始状态你必须限制规则空间，然后你必须能够实际展示计算的特性。所有这些都需要一个代理或设计者来完成。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:00:17) But it gives you an intuition if you look at a 1D or two cellular automata, it allows you to build an intuition of how you can have complexity emerge from very simple beginnings, very simple initial conditions-
(02:00:17) 但它给了你一种直觉，如果你看一下一维或两维蜂窝自动机，它允许你建立一种直觉，即如何从非常简单的开端、非常简单的初始条件中产生复杂性。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:00:31) I think that’s the intuition that people have derived from it. The intuition I get from cellular automata is that the flat space of an initial condition in a fixed dynamical law is not rich enough to describe an open-ended generation process. The way I see cellular automata is they’re embedded slices in a much larger causal structure. If you want to look at a deterministic slice of that causal structure, you might be able to extract a set of consistent rules that you might call a cellular automata, but you could embed them as much larger space that’s not dynamical and is about the causal structure and relations between all of those computations. That would be the space cellular automata live in. I think that’s the space that Stephen is talking about when he talks about his ruliad and these hypergraphs of all these possible computations. But I wouldn’t take that as my base reality because I think again, computation itself, this abstract property computation, is not at the base of reality.
(02:00:31）我想这就是人们从中得出的直觉。我从细胞自动机中得到的直觉是，在一个固定的动力学定律中，初始条件的平面空间不足以描述一个开放式的生成过程。我认为细胞自动机是一个更大的因果结构中的嵌入片段。如果你想观察该因果结构的确定性切片，你或许可以提取出一组一致的规则，并称之为细胞自动机，但你也可以把它们嵌入更大的空间，这个空间不是动态的，而是关于所有这些计算之间的因果结构和关系。这就是细胞自动机所处的空间。我认为这就是斯蒂芬在谈论他的鲁里亚德和所有这些可能计算的超图时所说的空间。但我不会把它作为我的现实基础，因为我认为，计算本身，这种抽象的属性计算，并不是现实的基础。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:01:25) Can we just linger on that ruliad?
(02:01:25) 我们能继续讨论这个问题吗？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:01:27) Yeah. One ruliad to rule them all.
对一统天下。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:01:31) Yeah. This is part of Wolfram’s physics project. It’s what he calls the entangled limit of everything that is computationally possible. What’s your problem with the ruliad?
(02:01:31) Yeah.这是沃尔夫拉姆物理学项目的一部分。这就是他所说的一切计算可能的纠缠极限。你对鲁里亚德有什么意见？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:01:46) Well, it’s interesting. Stephen came to a workshop we had in the Beyond Center in the fall, and the workshop theme was Mathematics, Is It Evolved or Eternal? He gave a talk about the ruliad, and he was talking about how a lot of the things that we talk about in the Beyond Center, like “Does reality have a bottom.If it has a bottom, what is it?”
(02:01:46）嗯，这很有趣。斯蒂芬参加了我们秋天在超越中心举办的一个研讨会，研讨会的主题是数学，它是进化的还是永恒的？他做了一个关于ruliad的演讲，他谈到了我们在超越中心谈论的很多事情，比如 "现实有底吗，如果有底，它是什么？"
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:02:08) I need to go to-
(02:02:08) 我得走了--
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:02:09) We’ll have you to one sometime.
(02:02:09) 有机会我们会请你去的。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:02:15) This is great. Does reality have a bottom?
(02:02:15) 太棒了。现实有底线吗？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:02:15) Yeah. We had one that was, it was called Infinite turtles or Ground Truth. It was really just about this issue. But the thing that was interesting, I think Stephen was trying to make the argument that fundamental particles aren’t fundamental, gravitation is not fundamental. These are just turtles. Computation is fundamental. I remember pointing out to him, I was like, “Well, computation is your turtle. I think it’s a weird turtle to have.”
对我们有一本，叫《无限海龟》或《地面真相》。其实就是关于这个问题的。但有趣的是 我认为斯蒂芬试图论证 基本粒子不是基本的 引力也不是基本的这些只是乌龟。计算才是根本我记得我当时对他说 "计算就是你的乌龟我认为这是一个奇怪的乌龟。"
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:02:45) First of all, isn’t it okay to have a turtle?
(02:02:45) 首先，养乌龟不好吗？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:02:47) It’s totally fine to have a turtle. Everyone has a turtle. You can’t build a theory without a turtle. It depends on the problem you want to describe. Actually, the reason I can’t get behind Stephen’s ontology is I don’t know what question he’s trying to answer. Without a question to answer, I don’t understand why you’re building a theory of reality.
(02:02:47) 养乌龟完全没问题。每个人都有乌龟。没有乌龟就无法建立理论。这取决于你想描述的问题。其实，我之所以不能支持斯蒂芬的本体论，是因为我不知道他想回答什么问题。如果没有要回答的问题，我就不明白你为什么要建立现实理论。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:03:07) The question you’re trying to answer is-
(你想回答的问题是--
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:03:10) What life is.
(02:03:10）生命是什么？
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:03:11) What life is, which another simpler way of phrasing that is how did life originate?
(02:03:11）生命是什么，另一种更简单的说法是生命是如何起源的？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:03:17) Well, I started working in the origin of life, and I think what my challenge was there was no one knew what life was. You can’t really talk about the origination of something if you don’t know what it is. The way I would approach it is if you want to understand what life is, then proving that physics is solving the origin of life. There’s the theory of what life is, but there’s the actual demonstration that that theory is an accurate description of the phenomena you aim to describe. Again, they’re the same problem. It’s not like I can decouple origin life from what life is. It’s like that is the problem.
(我开始研究生命的起源，我认为我面临的挑战是没有人知道生命是什么。如果你不知道它是什么，你就无法真正谈论它的起源。我的方法是，如果你想了解生命是什么，那么证明物理学是解决生命起源的方法。这里有关于生命是什么的理论，但也有关于该理论是否准确描述了你想要描述的现象的实际论证。同样，它们是同一个问题。我无法将生命起源与生命是什么分离开来。问题就在于此。
(02:03:54) The point, I guess, I’m making about having a question is no matter what slice of reality you take, what regularity of nature you’re going to try to describe, there will be an abstraction that unifies that structure of reality, hopefully. That will have a fundamental layer to it. You have to explain something in terms of something else. If I want to explain life, for example, then my fundamental description of nature has to be something I think that has to do with time being fundamental. But if I wanted to describe, I don’t know the interactions of matter and light, I have elementary particles be fundamental. If I want to describe electricity and magnetism in the 18 hundreds, I have to have waves be fundamental. Right? You are in quantum mechanics. It’s a wave function that’s fundamental because the explanatory paradigm of your theory. I guess I don’t know what problem saying computation is fundamental solves.
(02:03:54）我想，我想说的是，无论你从现实中抽取什么片段，试图描述什么规律性的自然，都会有一个抽象概念来统一现实的结构，希望如此。这将有一个基本的层次。你必须用其他东西来解释某些东西。比如说，如果我想解释生命，那么我对自然的基本描述就必须是我认为与时间有关的东西。但如果我想描述，我不知道物质和光的相互作用，我就必须以基本粒子为基础。如果我想描述1800的电和磁，我就必须以波为基础。对不对？这就是量子力学波函数才是根本 因为它是你理论的解释范式我不知道说计算是基础能解决什么问题
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:05:07) Doesn’t he want to understand how does the basic quantum mechanics and general relativity emerge?
(02:05:07) 难道他不想了解基本量子力学和广义相对论是如何产生的吗？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:05:14) Yeah. 是的
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:05:15) And cause time.
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:05:16) Right.
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:05:17) Then that doesn’t really answer an important question for us?
(02:05:17) 那么这并没有真正回答我们的一个重要问题？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:05:19) Well, I think that the issue is general relativity and quantum mechanics are expressed in mathematical languages, and then computation is a mathematical language. You’re basically saying that maybe there’s a more universal mathematical language for describing theories of physics that we already know. That’s an important question. I do think that’s what Stephen’s trying to do and do well. But then the question becomes, does that formulation of a more universal language for describing the laws of physics that we know now tell us anything new about the nature of reality? Or is it a language?
(我认为问题在于广义相对论和量子力学是用数学语言表达的，而计算也是一种数学语言。你基本上是在说，也许有一种更通用的数学语言可以用来描述我们已经知道的物理学理论。这是一个重要的问题。我认为这正是斯蒂芬想做的，而且做得很好。但接下来的问题就变成了，用一种更通用的语言来描述我们现在已知的物理定律，是否能告诉我们关于现实本质的任何新东西？或者说，这只是一种语言？
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:05:54) To you, languages can’t be fundamental?
(02:05:54) 对你来说，语言不可能是根本？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:05:58) The language itself is never the fundamental thing. It’s whatever it’s describing.
(02:05:58) 语言本身从来不是根本。而是它所描述的任何事物。

Consciousness 意识

Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:06:04) One of the possible titles you were thinking about originally for the book is The Hard Problem of Life, reminiscent of the hard problem of consciousness. You are saying that assembly theory is supposed to be answering the question about what is life. Let’s go to the other hard problems. You also say that’s the easiest of the hard problems is the hard problem of life. What do you think is the nature of intelligence and consciousness? Do you think something like assembly theory can help us understand that?
(02:06:04）你最初考虑的书名之一是《生命的难题》（The Hard Problem of Life），让人联想到意识的难题。你的意思是说，装配理论应该是在回答 "什么是生命 "这个问题。我们再来看看其他的难题。你还说，最简单的难题就是生命难题。你认为智慧和意识的本质是什么？你认为装配理论能帮助我们理解吗？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:06:46) I think if assembly theory is an accurate depiction of the physics of life, it should shed a lot of light on those problems. In fact, I sometimes wonder if the problems of consciousness and intelligence are at all different than the problem of life, generally. I’m of two minds of it, but I in general try to… The process of my thinking is trying to regularize everything into one theory, so pretty much every interaction I have is like, “Oh, how do I fold that into…” I’m just building this giant abstraction that’s basically trying to take every piece of data I’ve ever gotten in my brain into a theory of what life is. Consciousness and intelligence are obviously some of the most interesting things that life has manifest. I think they’re very telling about some of the deeper features about the nature of life.
(02:06:46) 我认为，如果装配理论是对生命物理学的准确描述，那么它应该会给这些问题带来很多启示。事实上，我有时会想，意识和智能问题与一般的生命问题是否有什么不同。我对这个问题有两种看法，但总的来说，我试图......我的思考过程就是试图把所有东西都规范化为一个理论，所以我的每一次互动都像是在说："哦，我该怎么把它折叠进......"我只是在建立一个巨大的抽象概念 它基本上是在试图把我大脑中的每一个数据 转化成一个关于生命是什么的理论意识和智慧显然是生命表现出的一些最有趣的东西。我认为它们很能说明生命本质的一些深层特征。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:07:45) It does seem like they’re all flavors of the same thing. But it’s interesting to wonder at which stage does something that we would recognize as life in a canonical silly human way and something that we would recognize as intelligence, at which stage does that emerge? At which assembly index does that emerge? Which assembly index is a consciousness something that you would canonically recognize as consciousness?
(看起来它们都是同一种东西的味道。但有趣的是，在哪个阶段，我们会以一种典型的愚蠢的人类方式认识到生命的存在，而在哪个阶段，我们会认识到智慧的存在？是在哪个阶段出现的？哪一个装配指数是你会认可为意识的意识？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:08:12) Right. Is this the use of flavors the same as you meant when you were talking about flavors of alien life?
(02:08:12）对。这个 "味道 "的用法和你说的 "外星生命的味道 "是一个意思吗？
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:08:18) Yeah, sure. Yeah. It’s the same as the flavors of ice cream and the flavors of fashion.
(是的，当然。就像冰淇淋和时装的口味一样
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:08:24) But we were talking about in terms of colors and very nondescript, but the way that you just talked about flavors now was more in the space of consciousness and intelligence. It was much more specific.
(02:08:24）但我们之前谈论的是颜色，非常不明确，而你刚才谈论味道的方式更多是在意识和智慧的空间里。这要具体得多。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:08:34) It’d be nice if there’s a formal way of expressing-
(02:08:34) 如果有一种正式的表达方式就好了--
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:08:38) Quantifying flavors.
(02:08:38) 量化味道。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:08:39) Quantifying flavors.
(02:08:39) 量化味道。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:08:41) Yeah. 是的
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:08:41) It seems like I would order it life, consciousness, intelligence probably as the order in which things emerge. They’re all just, it’s the same.
(02:08:41) 看来，我会把生命、意识、智慧排序为事物出现的顺序。它们都是一样的。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:08:54) They’re the same.
(02:08:54) 它们是一样的。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:08:55) We’re using the word life differently here. Life when I’m talking about what is a living versus non-living thing at a bar with a person, I’m already four or five drinks in, that kind of thing.
(02:08:55）我们对 "生命 "这个词的用法不同。当我和一个人在酒吧里谈论什么是生命与非生命时，我已经喝了四五杯酒了，诸如此类。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:09:09) Just that.
(02:09:09) 就是这样。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:09:10) We’re not being too philosophical, like “Here’s the thing that moves, and here’s the thing that doesn’t move,” but maybe consciousness precedes that. It’s a weird dance there, is life precede consciousness or consciousness precede life. I think that understanding of what life is in the way you’re doing will help us disentangle that.
(02:09:10) 我们不要太哲学化，比如 "这是动的东西，这是不动的东西"，但也许意识先于意识。是生命先于意识，还是意识先于生命？我认为以你现在的方式理解生命是什么 将有助于我们厘清这个问题。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:09:37) Depending on what you want to explain, as I was saying before, you have to assume something’s fundamental. Because people can’t explain consciousness, there’s a temptation for some people to want to take consciousness as fundamental and assume everything else is derived out of that. Then you get some people that want to assume consciousness preceded life. I don’t find either of those views particularly illuminating because I don’t want to assume a feminology before I explain a thing. What I’ve tried really hard to do is not assume that I think life is anything except hold on to the patterns and structures that seem to be the sort of consistent ways that we talk about this thing. Then try to build a physics that describes that.
(02:09:37) 取决于你想解释什么，正如我之前所说，你必须假设某些东西是根本。因为人们无法解释意识，所以有些人就想把意识作为根本，并假定其他一切都是由此衍生出来的。还有人认为意识先于生命。我觉得这两种观点都不是特别有启发性，因为我不想在解释一件事之前先假设女性学。我一直在努力做的是，除了坚持我们谈论这件事时似乎始终如一的模式和结构之外，不假设我认为生命是什么。然后尝试构建一种物理学来描述它。
(02:10:23) I think that’s a really different approach than saying, “Consciousness is this thing we all feel and experience about things.” I would want to understand irregularities associated with that and build a deeper structure underneath that and build into it. I wouldn’t want to assume that thing and that I understand that thing, which is usually how I see people talk about it,
(我认为这与 "意识是我们对事物的感受和体验 "的说法大相径庭。我想了解与之相关的不规则性，并在此基础上建立更深层次的结构，并将其融入其中。我不想假定我理解了这件事，而这通常是我看到的人们谈论这件事的方式、
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:10:43) The difference between life and consciousness, which comes first.
(02:10:43）生命与意识的区别，孰先孰后。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:10:48) Yeah. I think if you’re thinking about this thinking about living things as these giant causal structures or these objects that are deep in time or whatever language we end up using to describe it seems to me that consciousness is about the fact that we have a conscious experience is because we are these temporally extended objects. Consciousness and the abstraction that we have in our minds is actually a manifestation of all the time that’s rolled up in us. It’s just because we’re so huge that we have this very large inner space that we’re experiencing that’s not, and it’s also separated off from the rest of the world because we’re the separate thread in time. Our consciousness is not exactly shared with anything else because nothing else occupies the same part of time that we occupy. But I can understand something about you maybe being conscious because you and I didn’t separate that far in the past in terms of our causal histories. In some sense, we can even share experiences with each other through language because of that overlap in our structure.
(我觉得如果你把生命体看成是巨大的因果结构 或者是时间深处的物体 或者是我们最终用来描述的任何语言 在我看来 意识就是我们之所以有有意识的体验意识和我们头脑中的抽象概念实际上是我们体内所有时间的体现。正因为我们是如此巨大，所以我们才会有这个非常大的内在空间，我们所体验到的并不是这个空间，它也与世界上的其他事物隔绝开来，因为我们是时间上的独立线索。我们的意识并不完全与其他事物共享，因为其他事物占据的时间与我们占据的时间是相同的。但我可以理解你可能有意识，因为就因果历史而言，你和我在过去并没有分离得那么远。从某种意义上说，我们甚至可以通过语言分享彼此的经验，因为我们的结构存在重叠。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:12:00) Well, then if consciousness is merely temporal separateness, then that comes before life.
(02:12:00）那么，如果意识仅仅是时间上的分离，那么它就在生命之前。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:12:07) It’s not merely temporal separateness. It’s about the depth in that time.
(02:12:07) 这不仅仅是时间上的分离。而是时间的深度。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:12:12) Yes. (02:12:12) 是的。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:12:12) The reason that my conscious experience is not the same as yours is because we’re separated in time. The fact that I have a conscious experience is because I’m an object that’s super deep in time, so I’m huge in time. That means that there’s a lot that I am basically, in some sense, a universe onto myself because my structure is so large relative to the amount of space that I occupy.
(02:12:12) 我的意识体验之所以和你的不一样，是因为我们在时间上是分离的。事实上，我之所以有有意识的体验，是因为我是一个在时间上超级深邃的物体，所以我在时间上是巨大的。这意味着，从某种意义上说，我基本上就是一个宇宙，因为我的结构相对于我所占据的空间来说是如此之大。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:12:34) But it feels like that’s possible to do before you get anything like bacteria.
(02:12:34) 但感觉在感染细菌之前是可以做到的。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:12:40) I think there’s a horizon, and I don’t know how to articulate this yet, it’s a little bit like the horizon at the origin of life where the space inside a particular structure becomes so large that it has some access to a space that doesn’t feel as physical. It’s almost like this idea of counterfactuals. I think the past history of your horizon is just much larger than can be encompassed in a small configuration of matter. You can pull this stuff into existence. This property is maybe a continuous property, but there’s something really different about human-level physical systems and human-level ability to understand reality.
(02:12:40) 我认为有一个地平线，我还不知道该如何表述，它有点像生命起源时的地平线，在那里，特定结构内部的空间变得如此之大，以至于它可以进入一个感觉不那么物理的空间。这几乎就是反事实的概念。我认为你的地平线过去的历史远比一个小的物质结构所能包含的要大得多。你可以把这些东西拉进来这种特性也许是一种连续的特性，但人类层次的物理系统和人类层次的理解现实的能力确实有一些不同。
(02:13:27) I really love David Deutsch’s conception of universal explainers, and that’s related to theory of universal computation. I think there’s some transition that happens there. But maybe to describe that a little bit better, what I can also say is what intelligence is in this framework. You have these objects that are large in time. They were selected to exist by constraining the possible space of objects to this particular, all of the matter is funneled into this particular configuration of object over time.
(02:13:27）我非常喜欢戴维-多伊奇（David Deutsch）关于通用解释者的概念，这与通用计算理论有关。我认为那里发生了一些过渡。但也许为了更好地描述这一点，我还可以说，在这个框架里，智能是什么。你有这些在时间上很大的物体。它们被选择存在的方式是将物体的可能空间限制在这个特定的范围内，随着时间的推移，所有的物质都被输送到这个特定的物体配置中。
(02:14:05) These objects arise through selection, but the more selection that you have embedded in you, the more possible selection you have on your future. Selection and evolution, we usually think about in the past sense where selection happened in the past, but objects that are high density configurations of matter that have a lot of selection in them are also selecting agents in the universe. They actually embody the physics of selection and they can select on possible futures. I guess what I’m saying with respect to consciousness and the experience we have is that something very deep about that structure and the nature of how we exist in that structure that has to do with how we’re navigating that space and how we generate that space and how we continue to persist in that space.
(02:14:05）这些物体是通过选择而产生的，但你体内蕴含的选择越多，你的未来就有越多可能的选择。选择和进化，我们通常是从过去的意义上考虑的，即选择发生在过去，但那些高密度物质构型的物体也是宇宙中的选择媒介，它们有很多选择。它们实际上体现了选择的物理学原理，可以对可能的未来进行选择。我想，关于意识和我们所拥有的经验，我想我要说的是，这种结构和我们如何存在于这种结构中的本质有一些非常深刻的东西，这些东西与我们如何驾驭这个空间、我们如何产生这个空间以及我们如何在这个空间中持续存在有关。

Artificial life 人造生命

Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:14:55) Is there shortcuts we can take to artificially engineering, living organisms, artificial life, artificial consciousness, artificial intelligence? Maybe just looking pragmatically at the LLMs we have now, do you think those can exhibit qualities of life, qualities of consciousness, qualities of intelligence in the way we think of intelligence?
(02:14:55) 在人工工程、生物体、人工生命、人工意识、人工智能方面，我们是否有捷径可走？也许只是务实地看看我们现在拥有的LLMs ，你认为它们能以我们认为的智能的方式展现出生命的特质、意识的特质、智能的特质吗？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:15:24) I think they already do, but not in the way I hear popularly discussed. They’re obviously signatures of intelligence and a part of a ecosystem of intelligence system of intelligent systems. But I don’t know that individually I would assign all the properties to them that people have. It’s a little like, so we talked about the history of eyes before and how eyes scaled up into technological forms. Language has also had a really interesting history and got much more interesting I think once we started writing it down and then inventing books and things. But every time that we started storing language in a new way where we were existentially traumatized by it. The idea of written language was traumatic because it seemed like the dead were speaking to us even though they were deceased. Books were traumatic because suddenly there were lots of copies of this information available to everyone and it was going to somehow dilute it.
(02:15:24）我认为它们已经这样做了，但不是以我听到的流行讨论的方式。它们显然是智能的标志，是智能系统的智能生态系统的一部分。但我不知道，我是否会把人们所拥有的所有特性都赋予它们。这就有点像，我们之前讨论过眼睛的历史，以及眼睛是如何升级为技术形态的。语言也有一段非常有趣的历史，我认为，一旦我们开始把它写下来，然后发明了书本之类的东西，语言就变得更加有趣了。但每当我们开始以一种新的方式储存语言时，我们都会因此受到生存创伤。书面语言的概念是一种创伤，因为它似乎是死者在对我们说话，尽管他们已经去世。书籍是一种创伤，因为突然之间，每个人都可以获得大量的信息，而这将以某种方式稀释信息。
(02:16:28) Large language models are interesting because they don’t feel as static. They’re very dynamic. But if you think about language in the way I was describing before, as language is this very large in time structure. Before it had been something that was distributed over human brains as a dynamic structure. Occasionally, we store components of that very large dynamic structure in books or in written language. Now, we can actually store the dynamics of that structure in a physical artifact, which is a large language model. I think about it almost like the evolution of genomes in some sense, where there might’ve been really primitive genes in the first living things and they didn’t store a lot of information or they were really messy.
(02:16:28) 大型语言模型很有趣，因为它们给人的感觉并不是静态的。它们非常动态。但如果你以我之前描述的方式来思考语言，那么语言在时间上就是一个非常庞大的结构。在此之前，语言是一种分布在人类大脑中的动态结构。我们偶尔会把这个庞大的动态结构的组成部分存储在书本或书面语言中。现在，我们可以把这种动态结构存储在一个物理工具中，也就是一个大型语言模型中。在某种意义上，我认为这就像基因组的进化一样，在最初的生物体内可能存在着非常原始的基因，但它们并没有存储大量的信息，或者说它们非常凌乱。
(02:17:12) Then by the time you get to the eukaryotic cell, you have this really dynamic genetic architecture that’s read writable and has all of these different properties. I think large language models are kind of like the genetic system for language in some sense, where it’s allowing an archiving that’s highly dynamic. I think it’s very paradoxical to us because obviously in human history, we haven’t been used to conversing anything that’s not human. But now we can converse basically with a crystallization of human language in a computer that’s a highly dynamic crystal because it’s a crystallization in time of this massive abstract structure that’s evolved over human history and is now put into a small device.
(02:17:12) 然后到了真核细胞，你就有了这个非常动态的遗传结构，它可读可写，具有所有这些不同的特性。我认为大型语言模型在某种意义上有点像语言的遗传系统，它允许高度动态的存档。我认为这对我们来说非常矛盾，因为在人类历史上，我们显然不习惯与任何非人类的东西对话。但现在，我们基本上可以在计算机中与人类语言的结晶对话，它是一种高度动态的结晶，因为它是人类历史上进化出的巨大抽象结构的时间结晶，现在被放到了一个小型设备中。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:18:07) I think crystallization implies that a limit on its capabilities.
(02:18:07) 我认为结晶意味着对其能力的限制。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:18:08) I think there’s not, I mean it very purposefully because a particular instantiation of a language model trained on a particular data set becomes a crystal of the language at that time it was trained, but obviously we’re iterating with the technology and evolving it.
(02:18:08) 我认为没有，我的意思是这是很有目的性的，因为在特定数据集上训练的语言模型的特定实例化在训练时就成为了语言的结晶，但很明显，我们正在迭代技术并不断发展它。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:18:20) I guess the question is, when you crystallize it, when you compress it, when you archive it, you’re archiving some slice of the collective intelligence of the human species.
(02:18:20) 我想问题在于，当你将其结晶、压缩、存档时，你是在存档人类集体智慧的某些片段。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:18:31) Yes. That’s right.
(02:18:31) Yes.没错
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:18:32) The question is how powerful is that?
(02:18:32) 问题是这有多强大？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:18:36) Right. It’s a societal level technology. We’ve actually put collective intelligence in a box.
(02:18:36) 没错。这是一项社会层面的技术。我们实际上是把集体智慧装进了一个盒子里。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:18:40) Yeah. How much smarter is the collective intelligence of humans versus a single human? That’s the question of AGI versus human level intelligence, superhuman level intelligence versus human level intelligence. How much smarter can this thing, when done well, when we solve a lot of the computation complexities, maybe there’s some data complexities and how to really archive this thing, crystallize this thing really well, how powerful is this thing going to be? What’s your thought?
(人类的集体智慧与单个人类相比要聪明多少？这就是 AGI 与人类智能、超人智能与人类智能的问题。当我们解决了大量复杂的计算问题，也许还有一些复杂的数据问题，以及如何将这件事真正归档、结晶，这件事到底会有多强大？你有什么想法？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:19:15) Actually, I don’t like the language we use around that, and I think the language really matters. I don’t know how to talk about how much smarter one human is than another. Usually, we talk about abilities or particular talents someone has, and going back to David Deutsch’s idea of universal explainers, adopting the view that where the first kinds of structures are biosphere has built that can understand the rest of reality. We have this universal comprehension capability. He makes an argument that basically we’re the first things that actually are capable of understanding anything. It doesn’t mean…
(02:19:15) 事实上，我不喜欢我们在这方面使用的语言，我认为语言真的很重要。我不知道该如何谈论一个人比另一个人聪明多少。通常，我们谈论的是一个人的能力或特殊才能，而回到戴维-多伊奇（David Deutsch）关于通用解释器的想法，采用的观点是，生物圈建立的第一类结构能够理解现实的其余部分。我们具有这种普遍的理解能力。他提出的论点是 我们是第一批能够理解任何事物的人这并不意味着...
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:20:00) … Things that actually are capable of understanding anything. It doesn’t mean an individual understands everything, but we have that capability. And so there’s not a difference between that and what people talk about with AGI. In some sense, AGI is a universal explainer, but it might be that a computer is much more efficient at doing, I don’t know, prime factorization or something, than a human is. But it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily smarter or has a broader reach of the kind of things that can understand than a human does.
(02:20:00) ......实际上能够理解任何事物的东西。这并不意味着个体能够理解一切，但我们有这种能力。因此，这与人们所说的 AGI 并无区别。从某种意义上说，AGI是一种通用解释器，但计算机在做质因数分解之类的事情时，可能比人类更有效率。但这并不意味着计算机就一定比人类更聪明，或者在理解事物的范围上比人类更广。
(02:20:35) And so I think we really have to think about is it a level shift or is it we’re enhancing certain kinds of capabilities humans have in the same way that we enhanced eyesight by making telescopes and microscopes? Are we enhancing capabilities we have into technologies and the entire global ecosystem is getting more intelligent? Or is it really that we’re building some super machine in a box that’s going to be smart and kill everybody? It’s not even a science fiction narrative. It’s a bad science fiction narrative. I just don’t think it’s actually accurate to any of the technologies we’re building or the way that we should be describing them. It’s not even how we should be describing ourselves.
(02:20:35）因此，我认为我们真的要思考一下，这是一种水平的转变，还是我们正在以制造望远镜和显微镜来增强视力的方式，增强人类所拥有的某些能力？我们是在把我们所拥有的能力提升为技术，从而使整个全球生态系统变得更加智能化？还是说，我们真的在制造某种装在盒子里的超级机器，它会变得聪明并杀死所有人？这甚至不是科幻小说的叙事。这是个糟糕的科幻叙事。我只是不认为这对我们正在建造的任何技术或我们应该描述它们的方式是准确的。我们甚至不应该这样描述我们自己。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:21:12) So the benevolence stories, there’s a benevolent system that’s able to transform our economy, our way of life by just 10Xing the GDP of countries-
(因此，仁慈的故事，有一个仁慈的系统，能够改变我们的经济，我们的生活方式，只需10倍的国家的GDP -
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:21:25) Well, these are human questions. Right? I don’t think they’re necessarily questions that we’re going to outsource to an artificial intelligence. I think what is happening and will continue to happen is 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. And for the balance to shift to the technology would require some very bad human actors, which is a real risk, or some sort of… I don’t know, some sort of dynamic that favors… I just don’t know how that plays out without human agency actually trying to put it in that direction.
(02:21:25) 嗯，这些都是人类的问题。对不对？我不认为这些问题一定会外包给人工智能。我认为正在发生并将继续发生的事情是，人类与科技之间正在发生共同进化，我们现在正在这个生态系统中共存，并保持着很多平衡。如果要让平衡转向技术，就需要一些非常糟糕的人类行为者，这确实是一个风险，或者是某种......我不知道，某种有利于......我只是不知道，如果没有人类机构的实际尝试，这种情况会如何发展。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:22:12) It could also be how rapid the rate-
(02:22:12) 这也可能与速度的快慢有关。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:22:12) The rapid rate is scary. So I think the things that are terrifying are the ideas of deepfakes or all the kinds of issues that become legal issues about artificial intelligence technologies, and using them to control weapons or using them for child pornography or faking out that someone’s loved one was kidnapped or killed. There’s all kinds of things that are super scary in this landscape and all kinds of new legislation needs to be built and all kinds of guardrails on the technology to make sure that people don’t abuse it need to be built and that needs to happen. And I think one function of the artificial intelligence doomsday part of our culture right now is it’s our immune response to knowing that’s coming and we’re over scaring ourselves. So we try to act more quickly, which is good, but it’s about the words that we use versus the actual things happening behind the words.
(02:22:12）速度之快令人恐惧。因此，我认为最可怕的是 "深度伪造"（deepfakes）的想法，或者所有各种成为人工智能技术法律问题的问题，以及用它们来控制武器，或用它们来制作儿童色情制品，或伪造某人的亲人被绑架或杀害。在这种情况下，有各种各样的事情都是超级可怕的，我们需要制定各种新的法律，在技术方面建立各种防护措施，以确保人们不会滥用这些技术。我认为，现在我们的文化中人工智能末日部分的一个功能是，这是我们对即将到来的人工智能的免疫反应，我们过度恐慌了。因此，我们试图更快地采取行动，这是好的，但问题在于我们使用的词语与词语背后实际发生的事情。
(02:23:26) I think one thing that’s good is when people are talking about things in different ways, it makes us think about them. And also, when things are existentially threatening, we want to pay attention to those. But the ways that they’re existentially threatening and the ways that we’re experiencing existential trauma, I don’t think that we’re really going to understand for another century or two, if ever. And I certainly think they’re not the way that we’re describing them now.
(02:23:26）我认为有一件事是好的，那就是当人们以不同的方式谈论事物时，会让我们思考它们。而且，当事物的存在具有威胁性时，我们也会想要关注它们。但是，它们威胁生存的方式，以及我们经历生存创伤的方式，我认为我们在一两个世纪内都无法真正理解，如果有的话。当然，我也认为它们不是我们现在所描述的那样。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:23:49) Well, creating existential trauma is one of the things that makes life fun, I guess.
(02:23:49) 我想，制造生存创伤是生活的乐趣之一。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:23:55) Yeah. It’s just what we do to ourselves.
(是啊，我们就是这样对待自己的。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:23:57) It gives us really exciting, big problems to solve.
(02:23:57）它为我们提供了真正令人兴奋的、需要解决的大问题。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:24:00) Yeah, for sure.
(是的，当然。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:24:01) Do you think we will see these AI systems become conscious or convince us that they’re conscious and then maybe we’ll have relationships with them, romantic relationships?
(02:24:01) 你认为我们会看到这些人工智能系统变得有意识，或者让我们相信它们是有意识的，然后也许我们会和它们建立关系，浪漫的关系？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:24:14) Well, I think people are going to have romantic relationships with them, and I also think that some people would be convinced already that they’re conscious, but I think in order… What does it take to convince people that something is conscious? I think that we actually have to have an idea of what we’re talking about. We have to have a theory that explains when things are conscious or not, that’s testable. Right? And we don’t have one right now. So I think until we have that, it’s always going to be this gray area where some people think it hasn’t, some people think it doesn’t because we don’t actually know what we’re talking about that we think it has.
(02:24:14) 嗯，我认为人们会与它们建立浪漫的关系，我也认为有些人已经相信它们是有意识的，但我认为为了......要怎样才能让人们相信某些东西是有意识的呢？我认为我们必须对我们正在谈论的东西有一个概念。我们必须有一套理论来解释事物有意识与否 这套理论是可以检验的对不对？我们现在还没有这样的理论所以我认为在我们有这个理论之前 它将一直是一个灰色地带 有人认为它没有 有人认为它没有 因为我们并不知道我们在说什么
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:24:52) So do you think it’s possible to get out of the gray area and really have a formal test for consciousness?
(02:24:52) 那么，你认为有可能走出灰色地带，真正对意识进行正式测试吗？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:24:57) For sure.
(02:24:57) 当然。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:24:58) And for life, as you were-
(而对于生活，就像你刚才说的--
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:25:00) For sure.
(当然。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:25:00) As we’ve been talking about for assembly theory?
(02:25:00) 正如我们一直在谈论的装配理论？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:25:02) Yeah. 是的
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:25:03) Consciousness is a tricky one.
(02:25:03）意识是个棘手的问题。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:25:04) It is a tricky one. That’s why it’s called the hard problem of consciousness because it’s hard. And it might even be outside of the purview of science, which means that we can’t understand it in a scientific way. There might be other ways of coming to understand it, but those may not be the ones that we necessarily want for technological utility or for developing laws with respect to, because the laws are the things that are going to govern the technology.
(02:25:04) 这是一个棘手的问题。这就是为什么它被称为意识的难题，因为它很难。它甚至可能超出了科学的范畴，这意味着我们无法用科学的方法来理解它。也许我们可以用其他方法来理解它，但这些方法不一定是我们所希望的技术手段，也不一定是我们所希望的制定相关法律的方法，因为法律才是支配技术的东西。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:25:30) Well, I think that’s actually where the hard problem of consciousness, a different hard problem of consciousness, is that I fear that humans will resist. That’s the last thing they will resist is calling something else conscious.
(我认为这就是意识的难题所在，意识的另一个难题，我担心人类会抵制这个难题。他们最不愿意看到的就是把别的东西说成是有意识的。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:25:48) Oh, that’s interesting. I think it depends on the culture though, because some cultures already think everything’s imbued with a life essence or kind of conscious.
(02:25:48) 哦，真有意思。我认为这取决于不同的文化，因为有些文化已经认为万物都有生命本质或意识。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:25:58) I don’t think those cultures have nuclear weapons.
(02:25:58) 我不认为这些文化拥有核武器。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:26:00) No, they don’t. They’re probably not building the most advanced technologies.
(02:26:00）不，他们没有。他们可能没有建造最先进的技术。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:26:04) The cultures that are primed for destroying the other, constructing very effective propaganda machines of what the other is the group to hate are the cultures that I worry would-
(02:26:04) 那些准备好摧毁他人的文化，构建了非常有效的宣传机器，将他人视为需要憎恨的群体。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:26:04) Yeah, I know.
(是的，我知道。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:26:19) Would be very resistant to label something to acknowledge the consciousness latent in a thing that was created by us humans.
(02:26:19）如果给某样东西贴上标签，承认它是由我们人类创造的，就会非常抵触，因为它潜藏着意识。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:26:32) And so what do you think the risks are there, that the conscious things will get angry with us and fight back?
(02:26:32) 那么你认为存在什么风险，有意识的东西会对我们生气并反击吗？
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:26:40) No, that we would torture and kill conscious beings.
(02:26:40) 不，我们会折磨和杀害有意识的生命。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:26:42) Oh, yeah. I think we do that quite a lot anyway without… It goes back to your… And I don’t know how to feel about this, but we talked already about the predator-prey thing that in some sense, being alive requires eating other things that are alive. And even if you’re a vegetarian or try to have… You’re still eating living things.
(哦，是的。我觉得我们经常这样做，而不是......这又回到了你的......我不知道该如何看待这个问题，但我们已经讨论过捕食者与猎物的关系，从某种意义上说，活着就必须吃其他活着的东西。即使你是个素食主义者，或者试图......你还是在吃活物。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:27:09) So maybe part of the story of earth will involve a predator-prey dynamic between humans-
(也许地球故事的一部分会涉及人类之间捕食与被捕食的关系
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:27:17) That’s struggle for existence.
(02:27:17) 这就是生存斗争。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:27:20) And human creations, and all of that is part of the chemosphere.
(02:27:20) 还有人类的创造物，所有这些都是化学气圈的一部分。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:27:20) But I don’t like thinking 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 of… 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. And so this is the part that I think we are really good, and this is driving in part a lot of the attitude of, “I’ll kill you first with my nuclear weapons.” 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.
(02:27:20) 但我不喜欢把我们的科技视为一个独立的物种，因为这又回到了选择层次的问题上。如果你认为人类个体是有生命的，那么你就忽略了社会也是有生命的这一事实。因此，我更多地是从生态系统的角度来思考这个问题，这个词用得不太恰当，但我们没有合适的词来形容这些东西......这就是我为什么要谈技术圈的原因。这是一个既有人类又有科技的系统它既不是人类的，也不是科技的。所以这部分我认为我们真的很擅长 而这也是 "我先用核武器杀了你 "这种态度的部分原因我们非常善于识别其他事物。我们并不善于理解什么时候我们是相同的，什么时候我们是一个综合系统的一部分，而这个系统实际上是以某种有凝聚力的方式共同运作的。
(02:28:21) So even if you look at the division in American politics or something, for example. 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 like 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.
(02:28:21) 所以，即使你看看美国政坛的分裂或其他什么，举个例子。重要的是，要有多方互相争论，因为这实际上是解决社会问题的方法。这并不是一个不好的特点。我认为一些极端的立场和人们谈论的方式可能并不理想，但这就是社会解决问题的方式。对个人而言，这与社会层面的结果确实不同，而事实上......我不想称之为认知或计算。我不知道你怎么称呼它，但在社会动态中存在着一个过程，我们都是其中的个体行动者，我们不是其中的一部分。这需要我们每个人都单独行动，但这个更高层次的结构正在发生一些事情，一些事情正在得到解决，以便它能够维持自身。这就是我们的技术所处的层次。它们不是生活在我们这个层面。它们生活在社会层面，与社会有机体深度融合，如果你想这么称呼的话。
(02:29:19) And so I really get upset when people talk about the species of artificial intelligence. I’m like, you mean we live in an ecosystem of all these intelligent things and these animating technologies that were 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.
(所以当人们谈论人工智能物种时，我真的很不高兴。我想，你的意思是，我们生活在一个生态系统中，所有这些智能的东西和这些动画技术，在某种意义上都在帮助我们活过来。我们是在创造它们，但这并不像生物圈在发明新物种时会消除其过去的所有历史。所有这些东西都是有支架的，我们在创造技术的同时也在增强自己。我认为我们无法预知这个系统会是什么样子。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:29:51) So in some fundamental way, you always want to be thinking about the planet as one organism?
(02:29:51) 所以从根本上说，你总是想把地球当作一个有机体？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:29:56) The planet is one living thing.
(02:29:56) 地球是一个生命体。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:29:58) What happens when it becomes multi-planetary? Is it still just-
(02:29:58) 当它变成多行星时会发生什么？它还只是--
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:29:58) Still the same causal chain.
(02:29:58) 还是那个因果链。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:30:02) Same causal chain?
(02:30:02) 同样的因果链？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:30:04) It’s like when the first cell split into two. That’s what I was talking about. When a planet reproduces itself, the technosphere emerges enough understanding. It’s like this recursive, the entire history of life is just recursion. Right? So you have an original life event. It evolves for 4,000,000,000 years, at least on our planet. It evolves the technosphere. The technologies themselves start to become having 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.
(就像第一个细胞分裂成两个一样。我说的就是这个意思。当一个星球自我繁衍时，科技圈的出现就足够让人理解了。就像这种递归，整个生命史就是递归。对不对？所以你有一个原始的生命事件它进化了4,000,000,000年，至少在我们的星球上是这样。它进化出了科技圈技术本身开始具有我们称之为生命的特性，也就是我们现在正在经历的阶段。它解决了自身的起源问题，然后它弄清了这一过程是如何运作的，明白了如何制造更多的生命，然后可以把自己复制到另一个星球上，这样整个结构就可以自我繁殖了。
(02:30:44) And so 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 multiscale 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 multiscale 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.
(因此，生命的起源正在这个星球上的科技圈再次发生，我们的星球正在经历另一次转变。就像生命起源时，地球化学过渡到生物学一样，这是全球性的......对我来说，这是一个地球范围的过渡。这是一个多尺度的过程，从化学尺度一直到行星周期。现在也是如此，从人类个体到互联网，这是一个全球性的技术，还有所有其他的东西。这个多尺度的过程正在发生，并使我们在全球范围内发生转变，这是一个戏剧性的转变。它发生得非常快，而我们正生活在其中。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:31:20) You think this technosphere that created this increasingly complex technosphere will spread to other planets?
(02:31:20) 你认为这个创造了日益复杂的科技圈的科技圈会扩散到其他星球吗？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:31:26) I hope so. I think so.
(希望如此。我想是的。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:31:28) Do you think we’ll become a type two Kardashev civilization?
(02:31:28) 你认为我们会成为第二类卡尔达舍夫文明吗？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:31:31) I don’t really like the Kardashev scale, and it goes back to I don’t like a lot of the narratives about life because they’re very like survival of the fittest, energy consuming, this, that and the other thing. It’s very, I don’t know, old world conqueror mentality.
(02:31:31) 我不太喜欢卡达舍夫量表，这又回到了我不喜欢很多关于生命的叙述，因为它们很像适者生存、能源消耗、这样那样的东西。我不知道 这是旧世界征服者的心态
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:31:49) What’s the alternative to that exactly?
(02:31:49) 究竟有什么替代方案？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:31:53) I think it does require life to use new energy sources in order to expand the way it is, so that part’s accurate. But 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. And so these energy-consuming scales of technology, I think is missing the actual feature that’s most prominent about any alien life that we might find, which is that 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.
(02:31:53) 我认为这确实需要生命使用新的能源来扩展它的方式，所以这部分是准确的。但我认为，生命是宇宙创造性地表达自身、产生新奇事物、探索可能空间的机制，这个过程才是生命最深刻的内在本质。因此，我认为这些耗费能源的科技规模，缺少了我们可能发现的外星生命最突出的实际特征，那就是它实际上是我们的宇宙，我们的现实，试图创造性地表达自己，试图找出什么可以存在，并试图让它存在。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:32:36) See, but past a certain level of complexity, unfortunately, maybe you can correct me, but all complex life on earth is built on a foundation of that predator-prey dynamic.
(但不幸的是，过了一定的复杂程度，也许你能纠正我，但地球上所有复杂的生命都是建立在捕食者-猎物的动态基础上的。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:32:46) Yes. (02:32:46) 是的。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:32:46) And so I don’t know if we can escape that.
(02:32:46) 所以我不知道我们是否能摆脱这种情况。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:32:48) No, we can’t. But this is why I’m okay with having a finite lifetime. And one of the reasons I’m okay with that actually, goes back to this issue of the fact that we’re resource bound. We have a finite amount of material, whatever way you want to define material. For me, material is time, material is information, but we have a finite amount of material. If time is a generating mechanism, it’s always going to be finite because the universe is… It’s a resource that’s getting generated, but it has a size, which means that all the things that could exist don’t exist. And in fact, most of them never will.
(02:32:48) 不，我们不能。但这就是为什么我可以接受有限的生命周期。我之所以能接受，其中一个原因就是我们的资源有限。我们的物质是有限的，无论你如何定义物质。对我来说，物质就是时间，物质就是信息，但我们的物质是有限的。如果时间是一种生成机制，那么它总是有限的，因为宇宙是......它是一种正在生成的资源，但它有一个大小，这意味着所有可能存在的事物都不存在。事实上，大部分都不会存在
(02:33:29) So death is a way to make room in the universe for other things to exist that wouldn’t be able to exist otherwise. So 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 and a small volume of space. And to have those things turn over rapidly so you can create as many of them as possible.
(02:33:29) 所以死亡是宇宙中为其他事物腾出空间的一种方式，否则这些事物就无法存在。因此，如果宇宙在其整个时间历史中想要最大限度地增加事物的数量...... "想要 "是一个很难的词，"最大限度 "是一个很难的词，所有这些东西都是近似的，但想要最大限度地增加能够存在的事物的数量，最好的办法就是制造像我们这样的递归嵌入式堆叠物体，它们具有大量的结构和较小的空间体积。让这些东西快速翻转，这样你就能创造出尽可能多的东西。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:33:58) So that for sure is a bunch of those kinds of things throughout the universe.
(02:33:58) 所以，在整个宇宙中，肯定有很多这样的东西。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:34:02) Hopefully. Hopefully our universe is teaming with life.
(希望如此希望我们的宇宙充满了生命。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:34:05) This is like early on in the conversation. You mentioned that we really don’t understand much. There’s mystery all around us.
(02:34:05）这就像是谈话的开头。你提到我们真的不了解很多东西。我们周围充满了神秘。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:34:14) Yes.
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:34:15) If you had to bet money on it, what percent? So say 1,000,000 from now, the story of science and human understanding that started on earth is written, what chapter are we on? Is this 1%, 10%, 20%, 50%, 90%? How much do we understand, like the big stuff, not the details of… Big important questions and ideas?
(02:34:15）如果让你赌一把，百分之几？那么，假设100万年后，地球上开始的科学和人类认识的故事被写成了，我们在哪一章？是 1%、10%、20%、50% 还是 90%？我们理解了多少，比如重要的东西，而不是细节......重要的问题和想法？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:34:51) I think we’re in our 20s and-
我想我们都是 20 多岁的人了-- (02:34:51) I think we're in our 20s and-
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:34:55) 20% of the 20?
(20人中的20%？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:34:55) No, age wise, let’s say we’re in our 20s, but the lifespan is going to keep getting longer.
(02:34:55）不，从年龄上来说，比方说我们 20 多岁，但寿命会越来越长。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:34:55) You can’t do that.
(02:34:55) 你不能这么做。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:35:03) I can. You know why I use that though? I’ll tell you why, why my brain went there, is because anybody that gets an education in physics has this trope about how all the great physicists did their best work in their 20s, and then you don’t do any good work after that. And I always thought it was funny because for me, physics is not complete, it’s not nearly complete, but most physicists think that we understand most of the structure of reality. And so I think I put this in the book somewhere, but this idea to me that societies would discover everything while they’re young is very consistent with the way we talk about physics right now. But I don’t think that’s actually the way that things are going to go, and you’re finding that people that are making major discoveries are getting older in some sense than they were, and our lifespan is also increasing.
(02:35:03) 我可以。你知道我为什么这么说吗？我会告诉你为什么，为什么我的大脑去那里， 是因为任何人，得到一个教育 在物理有这个特例 关于如何所有伟大的物理学家 做他们最好的工作在他们20多岁，我一直觉得这很有趣，因为对我来说，物理学并不完整，也不接近完整，但大多数物理学家都认为我们了解了现实的大部分结构。所以我想我把这个写进了书里的某个地方 但对我来说 社会会在年轻时发现一切的观点但我不认为事情会是这样发展的，你会发现那些有重大发现的人在某种意义上比以前更老了，而我们的寿命也在延长。
(02:36:01) So I think there is something about age and your ability to learn and how much of the world you can see that’s really important over a human lifespan, but also over the lifespan of societies. And so I don’t know how big the frontier is. I don’t actually think it has a limit. I don’t believe in infinity as a physical thing, but I think as a receding horizon, I think because the universe is getting bigger, you can never know all of it.
(02:36:01) 因此，我认为年龄和学习能力，以及你能看到多少世界，对人的寿命和社会的寿命都很重要。因此，我不知道前沿到底有多大。我不认为它有极限。我不相信物理上的无穷大，但我认为它是一个后退的地平线，因为宇宙越来越大，你永远不可能了解它的全部。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:36:29) Well, I think it’s about 1.7%.
(02:36:29) 嗯，我想大概是 1.7%。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:36:35) 1.7? Where does that come from?
(02:36:35) 1.7?从何而来？
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:36:36) And It’s a finite… I don’t know. I just made it up, but it’s like-
(02:36:36) 这是一个有限的......我不知道。我刚编出来的，但它就像--
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:36:38) That number had to come from somewhere.
(02:36:38) 这个数字肯定是有出处的。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:36:41) Certainly. I think seven is the thing that people usually pick
(02:36:41) 当然。我认为，人们通常会选择 7
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:36:44) 7%?
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:36:45) So I wanted to say 1%, but I thought it would be funnier to add a point. So inject a little humor in there. So the seven is for the humor. One is for how much mystery I think there is out there.
(02:36:45) 所以我想说 1%，但我觉得加一个点会更有趣。所以在这里注入一点幽默。所以，7 是为了幽默。1代表我认为有多少神秘。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:36:59) 99% mystery, 1% known?
(02:36:59) 99%神秘，1%已知？
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:37:01) In terms of really big important questions.
(02:37:01) 就真正的重大问题而言。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:37:04) Yeah. 是的
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:37:06) Say there’s going to be 200 chapters, the stuff that’s going to remain true.
(02:37:06) 假设将有 200 个章节，这些内容将保持不变。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:37:12) But you think the book has a finite size?
(02:37:12) 但你认为书的大小是有限的吗？
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:37:14) Yeah. 是的
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:37:15) And I don’t. Not that I believe in infinities, but I think this size of the book is growing.
(02:37:15) 我不这么认为。不是我相信无穷大，而是我觉得这本书的篇幅在不断增长。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:37:23) Well, the fact that the size of the book is growing is one of the chapters in the book.
(02:37:23) 嗯，事实上，这本书的篇幅在不断增长，这也是书中的一个章节。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:37:28) Oh, there you go. Oh, we’re being recursive.
(02:37:28) Oh, there you go.哦，我们在递归。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:37:33) I think you can’t have an ever-growing book.
(02:37:33) 我觉得你不可能有一本越读越多的书。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:37:36) Yes, you can.
(02:37:36) 是的，你可以。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:37:38) I don’t even… Because then-
(02:37:38) 我甚至不......因为那时--
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:37:41) Well, you couldn’t have been asking this at the origin of life because obviously you wouldn’t have existed at the origin of life. But the question of intelligence and artificial general… Those questions did not exist then. And they in part existed because the universe invented a space for those questions to exist through evolution.
(你不可能在生命起源的时候就问这个问题 因为很明显你在生命起源的时候就不存在了但智能和人工智能的问题......这些问题当时并不存在。它们之所以存在 是因为宇宙通过进化 为这些问题的存在创造了空间
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:38:01) But I think that question will still stand 1,000 years from now.
(02:38:01) 但我认为，这个问题在一千年后依然存在。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:38:06) It will, but there will be other questions we can’t anticipate now that we’ll be asking.
(02:38:06) 会的，但还会有其他我们现在无法预料的问题。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:38:10) Yeah, and maybe we’ll develop the kinds of languages that we’ll be able to ask much better questions.
(02:38:10) 是的，也许我们会开发出能提出更好问题的语言。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:38:15) Right. Or the theory of gravitation, for example. When we invented that theory, we only knew about the planets in our solar system. And now, many centuries later, we know about all these planets around other stars and black holes and other things that we could never have anticipated. And then we can ask questions about them. We wouldn’t have been asking about singularities and can they really be physical things in the universe several 100 years ago? That question couldn’t exist.
(02:38:15) Right.比如万有引力理论。当我们发明这一理论时，我们只知道太阳系中的行星。而许多世纪后的今天，我们知道了其他恒星周围的行星、黑洞和其他我们无法预料的东西。然后我们就可以对它们提出问题了如果是在几百年前，我们就不会问奇点的问题了，它们真的是宇宙中的物理现象吗？那个问题不可能存在。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:38:42) Yeah, but it’s not… I still think those are chapters in the book. I don’t get a sense from that-
(02:38:42) 是的，但这不是......我仍然认为这些是书中的章节。我不觉得

Free will 自由意志

Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:38:48) So do you think the universe has an end, if you think it’s a book with an end?
(02:38:48) 如果你认为这是一本有结局的书，那么你认为宇宙有结局吗？
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:38:54) I think the number of words required to describe how the universe works as an end, yes. Meaning I don’t care if it’s infinite or not.
(02:38:54) 我认为描述宇宙如何运作所需的字数是一个终点，是的。也就是说，我不在乎它是否是无限的。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:39:06) Right.
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:39:06) As long as the explanation is simple and it exists.
(02:39:06) 只要解释简单，存在就好。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:39:09) Oh, I see.
(02:39:09) 哦，我明白了。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:39:11) And I think there is a finite explanation for each aspect of it, the consciousness, the life. Very probably, there’s some… The black hole thing, it’s like, what’s going on there? Where’s that going? What are they what?
(02:39:11) 我认为它的每个方面都有一个有限的解释，意识，生命。很有可能，有一些......黑洞的事情，就像是，那里发生了什么？它们要去哪里？它们是什么？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:39:29) [inaudible 02:39:29].
（02:39:29） [听不清 02:39:29]。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:39:29) And then why the Big Bang?
(02:39:29) 那为什么会有宇宙大爆炸呢？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:39:33) Right.
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:39:34) It’s probably, there’s just a huge number of universes, and it’s like universes inside-
(可能是有大量的宇宙 就像宇宙内部一样
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:39:39) You think so? I think universes inside universes is maybe possible.
(02:39:39) 你这么认为？我认为宇宙中的宇宙也许是可能的。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:39:43) I just think every time we assume this is all there is, it turns out there’s much more.
(02:39:43) 我只是觉得，每次我们假设这就是全部，结果却发现还有更多。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:39:53) The universe is a huge place.
(02:39:53) 宇宙是一个巨大的地方。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:39:54) And we mostly talked about the past and the richness of the past, but the future, with many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
(02:39:54）我们主要讨论了过去和过去的丰富性，但未来，还有量子力学的多世界解释。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:40:02) Oh, I’m not a many worlds person.
(02:40:02）哦，我不是一个多世界的人。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:40:04) You’re not?
(你不是吗？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:40:07) No. Are you? How many Lexes are there?
(02:40:07) 没有，你呢？有多少 Lexes？
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:40:08) Depending on the day. Well-
(视天气而定。嗯--
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:40:10) Do some of them wear yellow jackets?
(02:40:10) 他们中有人穿黄夹克吗？
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:40:12) The moment you asked the question, there was one. At the moment I’m answering it, there’s now near infinity, apparently. The future is bigger than the past. Yes?
(02:40:12) 在你提问的那一刻，有一个。在我回答问题的那一刻，显然已经接近无限。未来比过去更大。是吗
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:40:24) Yes. (02:40:24) 是的。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:40:25) Okay. Well, there you go. But in the past, according to you, it’s already gigantic.
(02:40:25) Okay.好吧，给你。但在过去，根据你的说法，它已经是巨大的了。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:40:30) Yeah. But yeah, that’s consistent with many worlds, right? Because there’s this constant branching, but it doesn’t really have a directionality to it. I don’t know. Many worlds is weird. So my interpretation of reality is if you fold it up, all that bifurcation of many worlds, and you just fold it into the structure that is you, and you just said you are all of those many worlds and your history converged on you, but you’re actually an object exists that was selected to exist, and you’re self-consistent with the other structures. So the quantum mechanical reality is not the one that you live in. It’s this very deterministic, classical world, and you’re carving a path through that space. But I don’t think that you’re constantly branching into new spaces. I think you are that space.
是的但这与许多世界是一致的，对吗？因为有这种不断的分支，但它并没有真正的方向性。我也不知道多重世界很奇怪所以我对现实的解释是，如果你把它折叠起来，所有那些分叉的多重世界，你把它折叠成你这个结构，你说你是所有那些多重世界，你的历史汇聚在你身上，但你实际上是一个被选择存在的物体，你与其他结构是自洽的。所以量子力学的现实并不是你所处的现实。它是一个非常确定性的经典世界 你在这个空间里开辟了一条道路但我不认为你会不断地进入新的空间我认为你就是那个空间。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:41:19) Wait, so to you, at the bottom, it’s deterministic? I thought you said the universe is just a bunch of random-
(02:41:19) 等等，所以对你来说，在底部，它是确定性的？我以为你说宇宙只是一堆随机的---
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:41:24) No, it’s random at the bottom. Right? But this randomness that we see at the bottom of reality that is quantum mechanics, I think people have assumed that that is reality. And what I’m saying is all those things you see in many worlds, all those versions of you, just collect them up and bundle them up and they’re all you. And what has happened is elementary particles, they don’t live in a deterministic universe, the things that we study in quantum experiments. They live in this fuzzy random space, but as that structure collapsed and started to build structures that were deterministic and evolved into you, you are a very deterministic macroscopic object. And you can look down on that universe that doesn’t have time in it, that random structure. And you can see that all of these possibilities look possible, but they’re not possible for you because you’re constrained by this giant causal structural history. So you can’t live in all those universes. You’d have to go all the way back to the very beginning of the universe and retrace everything again to be a different you.
(02:41:24) 不，底部是随机的。对不对？但我们在量子力学中看到的现实底层的随机性，我想人们已经假定那就是现实。而我想说的是，你在许多世界里看到的所有东西，所有那些版本的你，只要把它们收集起来，捆绑起来，它们就是你。现在的情况是，基本粒子并不像我们在量子实验中研究的那样，生活在一个确定性的宇宙中。它们生活在一个模糊的随机空间里，但随着这个结构的坍塌，并开始建立起确定性的结构，进化成了你，你就是一个非常确定性的宏观物体。你可以俯视那个没有时间的宇宙，那个随机结构。你可以看到，所有这些可能性看起来都是可能的，但对你来说却是不可能的，因为你受制于这个巨大的因果结构历史。所以你不可能生活在所有这些宇宙中。你必须回到宇宙诞生之初，重新追溯一切，才能成为另一个你。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:42:29) So where’s the source of the free will for the macro object?
(02:42:29) 那么，宏对象的自由意志来源在哪里？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:42:33) It’s the fact that you’re a deterministic structure living in a random background. And also, all of that selection bundled in you allows you to select on possible futures. So that’s where your will comes from. And there’s just always a little bit of randomness because the universe is getting bigger. And this idea that the past and the present is not large enough yet to contain the future, the extra structure has to come from somewhere. And some of that is because outside of those giant causal structures that are things like us, it’s fucking random out there, and it’s scary, and we’re all hanging onto each other because the only way to hang on to each other, the only way to exist is to clinging on to all of these causal structures that we happen to coinhabitate existence with and try to keep reinforcing each other’s existence.
(事实上，你是一个生活在随机背景中的确定性结构。同时，你身上所有的选择捆绑在一起，让你可以选择可能的未来。这就是你的意志来源。因为宇宙越来越大，所以总会有一点随机性。过去和现在还没有大到足以容纳未来的程度，这种想法认为额外的结构必须来自某个地方。有些是因为在那些巨大的因果结构之外 像我们这样的东西，外面都是随机的，很可怕 我们都在相互依赖 因为唯一能相互依赖的方法，唯一能存在的方法 就是紧紧抓住所有这些因果结构
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:43:25) All the selection bundled in.
(02:43:25) 所有选择捆绑在一起。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:43:28) In us, but free will’s totally consistent with that.
(但自由意志与此完全一致。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:43:34) I don’t know what I think about that. That’s complicated to imagine. Just that little bit of randomness is enough. Okay.
(02:43:34) 我不知道该怎么想。想象起来很复杂。只要有那么一点随机性就够了。好吧
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:43:37) Well, it’s not just the randomness. There’s two features. One is the randomness helps generate some novelty and some flexibility, but it’s also that because you’re the structure that’s deep in time, you have this commonatorial history that’s you. And I think about time and assembly theory, not as linear time, but as commonatorial time. So if you have all of the structure that you’re built out of, in principle, your future can be combinations of that structure. You obviously need to persist yourself as a coherent you. So you want to optimize for a future in that combinatorial space that still includes you, most of the time for most of us.
(02:43:37) 不仅仅是随机性。有两个特点。其一是随机性有助于产生一些新颖性和灵活性，但也因为你是深藏于时间中的结构，你有一段属于你自己的共同历史。我认为时间和装配理论不是线性时间，而是共时时间。因此，如果你有了自己的所有结构，原则上，你的未来就可以是这个结构的组合。显然，你需要把自己作为一个连贯的你来坚持下去。因此，你想要在组合空间中优化未来，而这个组合空间在我们大多数人的大多数时间里仍然包含着你。
(02:44:25) And then that gives you a space to operate in, and that’s your horizon where your free will can operate, and your free will can’t be instantaneous. So for example, I’m sitting here talking to you right now. I can’t be in the UK and I can’t be in Arizona, but I could plan, I could execute my free will over time because free will is a temporal feature of life, to be there tomorrow or the next day if I wanted to.
(02:44:25) 然后这就给了你一个运作的空间，这就是你的地平线，在那里你的自由意志可以运作，而你的自由意志不可能是瞬时的。举个例子，我现在坐在这里跟你说话。我不可能在英国，也不可能在亚利桑那州，但我可以计划，我可以在一段时间内执行我的自由意志，因为自由意志是生命的时间特征，如果我想的话，明天或后天我就可以在那里。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:44:51) But what about the instantaneous decisions you’re making like, I don’t know, to put your hand on the table?
(02:44:51) 但你瞬间做出的决定呢，比如，我不知道，把手放在桌子上？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:44:58) I think those were already decided a while ago. I don’t think free will is ever instantaneous.
(02:44:58）我认为这些问题在不久前就已经决定了。我不认为自由意志是瞬间产生的。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:45:05) But on a longer time horizon, there’s some kind of steering going on? Who’s doing the steering?
(02:45:05) 但从更长的时间跨度来看，是否存在某种转向？谁在操盘？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:45:14) You are.
(02:45:14) 你是。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:45:16) And you being this macro object that encompasses-
(02:45:16) 而你作为这个宏对象，包含了--
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:45:20) Or you being Lex, whatever you want to call it.
(02:45:20) 或者你是莱克斯，随便你怎么称呼。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:45:27) There you are assigning words to things once again.
(02:45:27) 你又在给事物赋词了。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:45:31) I know.
(02:45:31) 我知道。

Why anything exists 为什么任何事物都存在

Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:45:32) Why does anything exist at all?
(02:45:32) 为什么会有东西存在？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:45:34) Ag, I don’t know.
(02:45:34) Ag，我不知道。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:45:35) You’ve taken that as a starting point [inaudible 02:45:40] exists.
(02:45:35) 你已经把它作为一个起点 [听不清 02:45:40] 存在。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:45:40) Yeah, I think that’s the hardest question.
(02:45:40) 是的，我认为这是最困难的问题。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:45:42) Isn’t it just hard questions stacked on top of each other?
(02:45:42) 这不就是难题叠着难题吗？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:45:45) It is.
(02:45:45) 没错。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:45:45) Wouldn’t it be the same kind of question of what is life?
(02:45:45) 这不就是 "生命是什么 "的问题吗？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:45:49) It is the same. Well, that’s like I try to fold all of the questions into that question because I think that one’s really hard, and I think the nature of existence is really hard.
(02:45:49) 是一样的。嗯，这就像我试图把所有问题都归结到这个问题里，因为我觉得这个问题真的很难，我觉得存在的本质真的很难。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:45:57) You think actually answering what is life will help us understand existence? Maybe it’s turtles all the way down. Understanding the nature of turtles will help us march down even if we don’t have the experimental methodology of reaching before the Big Bang.
(02:45:57) 你觉得回答 "生命是什么 "能帮助我们理解存在吗？也许一路走来都是乌龟。即使我们没有达到大爆炸之前的实验方法，理解乌龟的本质也会帮助我们往下走。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:46:15) Right. Well, I think there’s two questions embedded here. I think the one that we can’t answer by answering life is why certain things exist and others don’t? But I think the ultimate question, the prime mover question of why anything exists, we will not be able to answer.
(02:46:15) Right.我觉得这里有两个问题。我认为我们无法通过回答生命来回答的问题是 为什么某些事物存在而另一些不存在？但我认为终极问题，也就是为什么任何事物都存在的原动力问题，我们将无法回答。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:46:36) What’s outside the universe?
(02:46:36) 宇宙之外是什么？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:46:38) Oh, there’s nothing outside the universe. So I am the most physicalist that anyone could be. So for me, everything exists in our universe. And I like to think everything exists here. So even when we talk about the multiverse, to me, it’s not like there’s all these other universes outside of our universe that exist. The multiverse is a concept that exists in human minds here, and it allows us to have some counterfactual reasoning to reason about our own cosmology, and therefore, it’s causal in our biosphere to understanding the reality that we live in and building better theories, but I don’t think that the multiverse is something… And also, math. I don’t think there’s a Platonic world that mathematical things live in. I think mathematical things are here on this planet. I don’t think it makes sense to talk about things that exist outside of the universe. If you’re talking about them, you’re already talking about something that exists inside the universe and is part of the universe and is part of what the universe is building.
(宇宙之外什么都没有。所以，我是最物理主义者的人。所以对我来说，一切都存在于我们的宇宙中。我认为万物都存在于这里。所以，即使我们谈论多元宇宙，对我来说，也并不存在我们宇宙之外的其他宇宙。多元宇宙是存在于人类头脑中的一个概念，它让我们能够通过一些反事实推理来推理我们自己的宇宙学，因此，它在我们的生物圈中对于理解我们所处的现实和建立更好的理论是有因果关系的，但我不认为多元宇宙是什么......还有，数学。我不认为数学存在于柏拉图式的世界里我认为数学就在这个星球上我不认为谈论宇宙之外的东西有意义如果你在谈论它们，你就已经在谈论存在于宇宙中的东西，是宇宙的一部分，是宇宙正在构建的一部分。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:47:44) It all originates here. It all exists here in some [inaudible 02:47:48]?
(02:47:44) 这一切都源于这里。都存在于这里的某处 [听不清 02:47:48]?
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:47:47) What else would there be?
(02:47:47) 还能有什么？
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:47:49) There could be things you can’t possibly understand outside of all of this that we call the universe.
(02:47:49) 在我们称之为宇宙的这一切之外，可能还有你无法理解的东西。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:47:56) Right. And you can say that, and that’s an interesting philosophy. But again, this is pushing on the boundaries of the way that we understand things. I think it’s more constructive to say the fact that I can talk about those things is telling me something about the structure of where I actually live and where I exist.
(02:47:56) Right.你可以这么说，这是一种有趣的哲学。但同样，这也是在挑战我们理解事物的边界。我认为，更有建设性的说法是，我能谈论这些事情，说明了我实际生活和存在的结构。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:48:09) Just because it’s more constructive doesn’t mean it’s true.
(02:48:09) 更有建设性并不意味着它是真的。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:48:13) Well, it may not be true. It may be something that allows me to build better theories I can test to try to understand something objective.
(02:48:13) 嗯，这可能不是真的。它也许能让我建立更好的理论，我可以通过测试来尝试理解客观事物。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:48:24) And in the end, that’s a good way to get to the truth.
(02:48:24) 最后，这也是一个了解真相的好方法。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:48:25) Exactly. (02:48:25) 没错。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:48:26) Even if you realize-
(02:48:26) 即使你意识到--
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:48:27) So I can’t do experiments-
(02:48:27) 所以我不能做实验--
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:48:28) You were wrong in the past?
(02:48:28) 你过去错了吗？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:48:29) Yeah. So there’s no such thing as experimental Platonism, but if you think math is an object that emerged in our biosphere, you can start experimenting with that idea. And that to me, is really interesting. Well, mathematicians do think about math sometimes as an experimental science, but to think about math itself as an object for study by physicists rather than a tool physicists use to describe reality, it becomes the part of reality they’re trying to describe, to me, is a deeply interesting inversion.
是的因此，并不存在实验柏拉图主义，但如果你认为数学是我们生物圈中出现的一个物体，你就可以开始用这个想法做实验。对我来说，这真的很有趣。数学家有时确实把数学当成一门实验科学，但把数学本身当成物理学家研究的对象，而不是物理学家用来描述现实的工具，数学就成了他们试图描述的现实的一部分，对我来说，这是一个非常有趣的反转。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:49:02) What to you is most beautiful about this kind of exploration of the physics of life that you’ve been doing?
(02:49:02) 对你来说，你对生命物理学的这种探索最美的是什么？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:49:11) I love the way it makes me feel.
(02:49:11) 我喜欢它带给我的感觉。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:49:15) And then you have to try to convert the feelings into visuals and the visuals into words?
(02:49:15) 然后你必须尝试将感受转化为视觉效果，再将视觉效果转化为文字？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:49:23) Yeah. I love the way it makes me feel to have ideas that I think are novel, and I think that the dual side of that is the painful process of trying to communicate that with other human beings to test if they have any kind of reality to them. And I also love that process. I love trying to figure out how to explain really deep abstract things that I don’t think that we understand and trying to understand them with other people. And I also love the shock value of this idea we were talking about before, of being on the boundary of what we understand. And so people can see what you’re seeing, but they haven’t ever saw it that way before.
(02:49:23) 是的，我喜欢有新奇想法时的感觉，我认为这种感觉的两面性是，尝试与其他人交流这些想法，以检验它们是否具有现实意义的痛苦过程。我也喜欢这个过程。我喜欢想办法解释那些我认为我们无法理解的深奥抽象的东西，并尝试与其他人一起理解它们。我也喜欢我们之前谈到的这个想法的震撼价值，即处于我们所理解的边界上。这样人们就能看到你看到的东西，但他们以前从未这样看过。
(02:50:06) And I love the shock value that people have, that immediate moment of recognizing that there’s something beyond the way that they thought about things before. And being able to deliver that to people, I think is one of the biggest joys that I have, is just… Maybe it’s that sense of mystery to share that there’s something beyond the frontier of how we understand and we might be able to see it.
(02:50:06) 我喜欢人们的震撼力，他们会立刻意识到，有些东西超越了他们之前对事物的理解。能把这些传递给人们，我觉得是我最大的乐趣之一，就是......也许是那种分享的神秘感，有一些东西超越了我们理解的边界，我们也许能看到它。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:50:27) And you get to see the humans transformed, like no idea?
(02:50:27) 你会看到人类的转变，就像不知道一样？
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:50:31) Yes. And I think my greatest wish in life is to somehow contribute to an idea that transforms the way that we think. I have my problem I want to solve, but the thing that gives me joy about it is really changing something and ideally getting to a deeper understanding of how the world works and what we are.
(是的。我认为，我一生最大的愿望就是能为改变我们思维方式的想法做出某种贡献。我有我想解决的问题，但让我感到快乐的是，我真的改变了一些东西，而且理想的情况是，我对这个世界是如何运作的以及我们是什么有了更深刻的理解。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:50:58) Yeah, I would say understanding life at a deep level is probably one of the most exciting problems, one of the most exciting questions. So I’m glad you’re trying to answer just that and doing it in style.
(02:50:58）是的，我想说，从深层次理解生命可能是最令人兴奋的问题之一，也是最令人兴奋的问题之一。所以，我很高兴你正试图回答这个问题，而且做得很有风格。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:51:15) It’s the only way to do anything.
(02:51:15) 这是唯一的办法。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:51:17) Thank you so much for this amazing conversation. Thank you for being you, Sara. This was awesome.
(02:51:17) 非常感谢这次精彩的对话。谢谢你做你自己，萨拉。这真是太棒了。
Sara Walker 萨拉-沃克 (02:51:23) Thanks, Lex.
(谢谢，莱克斯。
Lex Fridman 莱克斯-弗里德曼 (02:51:24) Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sara Walker. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Charles Darwin. “In the long history of humankind, and animal kind too, those who learn to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
(02:51:24) 感谢您收听本期与萨拉-沃克的对话。为了支持本播客，请查看说明中的赞助商。现在，让我用查尔斯-达尔文的一段话来结束这次谈话。"在人类以及动物的漫长历史中，那些学会协作和最有效地随机应变的人取得了胜利"。感谢您的收听，希望下次再见。