Life as No One Knows It Quotes

“That rockets can be made to happen, once minds emerge that can imagine them, is a nontrivial feature of our universe.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“We have encountered three hard problems now. The hard problem of consciousness: that existing feels like something (at least for us). The hard problem of matter: that nothing can be observed to exist outside of interactions. The hard problem of life: that abstractions (information) matter in determining what can exist.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“objects that are larger than us in time look “abstract” and “informational.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“features of reality appear “material” or “physical” to us if they are smaller in time than we are.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“You might naïvely think that the electron really does have a mass, a charge, and a spin, and that these are intrinsic properties of the electron. But these properties can also be considered to merely describe how electrons interact with certain measuring devices.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“What modern science has taught us is that life is not a property of matter.
Physicists and chemists see very intimately what the rest of us who think life exists cannot: there is no magic transition point where a molecule or collection of molecules is suddenly "living."

Life is the vaporware of chemistry: a property so obvious in our day-to-day experience—that we are living—is nonexistent when you look at our parts.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“Life is how the past connects to the future.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“for a complex object to exist in many copies, there must be many copies of other objects that can make it, and many copies of objects that make those objects, and so on, forming a chain of objects that can cause others to come into existence.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“no current theory of physics contains this kind of physical embodiment of past histories in the present. In assembly theory, the past is rolled up into the present, and is instantiated in the current moment in the assembly space of objects that exist now. Stated slightly differently, assembly theory describes every object you interact with as a recursive stack of its history. You might think of assembly theory as a theory of physics where history is a physical attribute.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“What is considered fundamental in modern physics merely defines the boundary of what we can observe.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“Life is the only thing in the universe that can make objects that are composed of many unique, recursively constructed parts.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“Most of the things that could be made will never be made.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“Existing is special: most things—at least among the set of the ones that we can even imagine—will never even have the chance to exist. Perhaps even more things will never even have the chance to be imagined.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“We need to imagine what is possible before we can cause it to exist.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“What details are important? Which ones can we neglect? These are challenging questions.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“To calculate motion or gravitational attraction, we need only concern ourselves with mass, position, and acceleration. This simplification was a huge conceptual leap made by our species—it allowed us to describe all motion, whether here on Earth or on the other side of the observable universe, in the same way.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“This is the great trick physicists use to get to the heart of reality: we identify what details are important and drop all the rest. This art allows us to unify a seemingly disparate range of things in a mathematically concrete and testable way.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“We are each just one temporary instance of life on this planet—a pattern of information structuring matter across billions of years.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“Our universe is such that this is possible. By observing what is happening now, in the present moment, we can infer what has happened already, even billions of years in the past. We can predict and even cause what happens next. We can write down theories that describe how our reality works, and then test them against observations and experiments. Theoretical physics, among human endeavors, has been stunningly successful at this, in no small part because of minds asking the hard questions about the nature of reality.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“If we are ever to understand what life really is, we need to recognize that among the unimaginably large number of things that could exist, or even the smaller subset of ones that we can imagine, only an infinitesimal fraction ever will. Things come into existence when and where it is possible to—and what we call life is the mechanism for making specific things possible when the possibility space is too large for the universe to ever explore all of it.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“the key feature is the ability to imagine or represent things that do not exist, but could, such that the act of imagination becomes causal to the existence of some objects. In the language of life and information I just introduced, we would say that what we call consciousness must be a feature of the causal chains necessary for the formation of some objects. From this extrinsic perspective, consciousness is a particularly concentrated example of what life is doing more generally.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“can describe as existing—from the perspective of what we can interact with and measure—is the software of reality, the interactions that make objects or allow us to observe their existence. This opens a possible resolution where we must treat matter itself as information, which forces reconsidering our concept of what is material. In some ways we are reenvisioning what the quantum physicist John Wheeler envisaged with his famous dictum, “It from bit,” where his “bit” refers to the measurement of information. However, what I am claiming here is that if we adopt John’s “it from bit,” the most interesting feature is not that what we call reality arises from the posing of yes/no questions and the registration of measurement-evoked information theoretic responses to them, as John claimed (where 1 bit is required to measure the answer to a yes/no question). Instead, what I am suggesting is that what we call the future is constructed by those responses.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“This leads to the possibility of an unfolding of different forms in different locations—what we might call different instances of “life.” Not all chemical possibilities can exist all at once; the ones that do exist must therefore be selected. This is why chemistry also happens to be where life can first emerge.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“Complex objects do not come into existence without the information first existing to make them.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“Function is notoriously tricky to define, but a good working definition is in terms of the relationships between objects that arise due to selection. Some things can exist only if something else already exists that makes their existence possible. That is, possible physical objects need other objects to exist to themselves be selected to exist. Since any object that exists is itself finite, the number of things that can come into existence at any time must also be finite, and therefore, at least in principle, stateable.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“not a property of the screwdriver—it is a local, relational property of all the objects the screwdriver comes into existence alongside in the unfolding of our biosphere. Thus, if you study the objects that exist now, they should already encode all the information you need about the functions that constructed them to also anticipate much of how the near-term future will be constructed (though not all if our universe can produce genuine novelty).”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“You cannot predict all the affordances an object like a screwdriver might have, because you do not know all the objects (whether they currently exist or not) that a screwdriver might interact with.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“Unlike elementary particles and atoms, molecules are special because they are the simplest combinatorically built matter where not all the things that could be built will ever exist. There is not enough material, energy, or time to build them all.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“Chemistry is what happens when elements are combined into molecules. Currently, the largest chemical databases in the world include lists of tens of millions of molecules. That sounds like a lot of cataloged molecules, but it pales in comparison to estimates of the number of possible molecules.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“Universes that have entities like us that are aware will then be a restricted set of the mathematical multiverse, because our existence requires very specific kinds of self-referential relations between mathematical objects.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence