Eric Smith

This is episode nine of Stewarding the Flame.

The thinker we're interviewing today is probably without question the person that's made me most robustly reconsider some of my fundamental assumptions about the origins of life and the nature of life, and that is Eric Smith.

He is the specially appointed professor of Earth Life Science Institute at Tokyo.

He's also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute where he spent many years.

As usual, I'll save my thoughts for the end of this episode and I'll have a handful of them.

Without further ado, we've got to bring it on.

Arguably my favorite thinker on the living process, none other than Eric Smith here on The Trajectory.

So Eric, welcome to the show.

The living process seems to be X strikes me as pretty square.

And you talk to a Stuart Kaufman or an Eric Smith or, uh, you know, uh, Dennis Noble or, uh, really, really hardcore people getting close to what the living process...

Mike Levin.

These people have all been on the, the, uh, Trajectory show.

They're not as individuated.

So this, this issue Pearce I think suspects, and again, I, I won't put words in his mouth.

It's a bit of my crissing and crossing of talking to Eric Smith and Stuart Kaufman and also talking to, to Pearce, um, that that embryonic sort of unfurling and that maintained process, which we, we don't see that with GPUs.

We, we don't see this process-level maintenance.

Lovelock unfortunately passed away before I could interview him, but, uh, I would, would have loved to.

But, um, uh, uh, uh, I'm, I'm sort of with you here that, you know, Eric Smith, for example, Santa Fe, might say that the initial chemical gradients that permitted the autocatalytic sets, uh, to sort of kick off, you know, in Stuart Kauffman language, um, like, where is the line where that wasn't alive and isn't? Like, it actually does get fuzzy at the bottom, and I presume even for you it does, but you've still got, like, at least some criteria to say alive versus not alive.

I tend to be with you in the sense of AI today, at least as of today, because if I throw a laptop or all the best robots in the world into the woods, I can't come back in a, in a million years and expect to see a thriving robotic civilization with all kinds of new power, experience, and access to nature bubbled forth from that process as we've seen in the biological world.

Um, and, and so I, I don't...