(… or the SFI and others in their line of inquiry)

Some of my sources you likely share in common:

• Stuart Kauffman’s At Home In The Universe, which got me interested in what Santa Fe Institute has been up to. This was the first plausible assertion I’d found that life can be expected to evolve naturally from a universe like ours, and got me thinking about just what that bootstrapping process might require.
• William Poundstone’s The Recursive Universe, which is one of the key concepts in Assembly Theory in that the recursive assembly of new objects is an essential aspect of life’s physical means. This also gave me a good introduction to Conway’s Game of Life, which has been a prolific idea fountain along these lines.
• David Deutsch’s The Beginning Of Infinity, in which I first came to deeply appreciate the difference between what I call designed vs deeply derived objects. Proceeding down this path I became convinced of the impossibility of the “Boltzmann brain” and developed my ideas about what exactly design is vs the sacred nature of deep derivation, what you might call “large in time” assembly spaces. Deutsch’s more basic work on explanation as I was introduced to him in TED talks is also important to the paradigm.
• Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, which is very clear about the nature of selection and its essential role in the evolution of complexity.
• Dan Dennett’s Freedom Evolves, which as a part of a series of elaborations in other books, clarifies what he calls the “strange inversion of reasoning” which this whole paradigm of selection, variation, and the evolving affordances of the shared ecosystem demands. As a philosopher, Dennett seems to hold in full view this paradigm which it seems very few people — even those deeply educated in physics, biology, and information science — seem to possess with integrated clarity.
• James Gleick’s The Information, which deepened my understanding of Claude Shannon’s work and better founded my ideas about entropy and complexity especially as instantiated as information. Thinking along these lines got me exploring that knife’s edge life walks between chaos and order (as introduced by Kauffman) and the subtle yet decisive power of information which exists in a separate ontology from matter-energy and yet is deeply entangled with it to form the concept of configuration.
• Albert Einstein’s Relativity, which by assembling a couple of his papers, is obviously important to a modern physics perspective. However I also have to say that there’s a lot worn out or shown to be less constructive about relativity in my eyes, more on that below.

Where I’m coming from

I studied Physics in the brief time I spent at RPI in the 90s, so I have a decent foundation in math and physics to be able to interpret the more advanced publicly accessible works. I have a decent understanding of quantum mechanics, relativity, and most sciences in general. I’ve also kept a kind of naturalist spiritual philosophy in the center of my thinking, providing a naturally-derived paradigm integrating clear notions of truth, ontology, epistemology, purpose, free will, life, sentience, morality, and meaning. Another book list could be made like that above to highlight some of my favorite sources on that side of the house. Folks like Jeremy Lent, Ian McGilchrist, Alan Watts, James Carse, and Jonathan Haidt readily come to mind.

Before discovering your work, I’d already developed a few anchoring concepts by integrating sources including those above and many others. They seem to match up nicely with what I see in your work and include:

• The universe itself is emergent. - I believe that space itself is emerging continuously and that this is a much better explanation of what we call gravity. It also probably helps explain both dark energy and dark matter. My thinking here has been developing since my college days, but has really been crystallized of late in a currently running YouTube channel called Dialect.
• In material reality, emergence wends its way along streams and in “ontological layers”. - I spent some time many years ago trying to define what I meant by these streams, and your book does a good job capturing much of it as you describe the material time dimension of deeply derived objects. You don’t as expressly get into my concept of ontological layers, but it’s implied in how you describe the necessity of abundant and “remembering” substrates from which any more advanced object can be assembled. i.e. You don’t find brains except downstream from earlier animals, and so “brains” ontologically don’t belong in upstream layers like that of subatomic particles. Examples of very distinct layers I like to point to include (in up- to down-stream order) molecular chemistry, eukaryotic biology, sentient life with its minds and feelings, social life with its institutions and political dynamics, and the software space with its info-universal computing capabilities. Each such layer sufficiently stabilized forms a substrate in which unique ontologies hold. For example, MUSIC is of an ontology which is incompatible with or inaccessible to all aspects of quantum physics. It’s not alien (in your meaning), but rather many established layers downstream from it; the point here is that there’s more than a reductionist materialist viewpoint (physics) required to understand all the things even just in our own lineage. Then there are all those which are truly alien, in your very useful way of using the term. I’m especially keen to explore what is and is not analogous across the layers in a lineage, and its converse: exploring what exactly is truly new in any layer.
• Design, as a noun, one of the deepest derived and downstream things we know of, demonstrates a special relationship between information and the reality of its artifacts and stands in very interesting contrast with the deeply derived objects life provides. Design manipulates free information (in that it’s not bound in any one representational form) to imagine objects which suit purposes and then can become expressed in their material instantiation. This makes design new and unique in the universe downstream of sentience. And yet in its purpose-orientation, it carries on an intrinsic aspect of deeply derived things like people: they have purpose derived into them, the kind of purpose which can provide a basis for naturally-derived ethics and more.

One of the things I love about your work is that it’s clarifying what life is able to derive in its intimate entanglement of information and specific forms of matter. The pathways it selects reveal a sort of “validated vector” through “assembly space” which seems to me necessarily sacred to us as our existence and purpose are dependent on, demonstrative of, and guided by a respect of, that lineage all the way down to its roots.

And yet going beyond that materially-encoded information lineage, we’ve reached the layer of “creative minds”, which are capable of imagining and implementing designs of startling power. Those designs can respect and further the lineage, but they could also thwart and destroy the very lineage that birthed it. In this I see an epic moral drama which might only be adequately informed by a clear understanding of this whole paradigm in its integrated completeness.

Worthy discussion topics

I’d love to talk even briefly about:

• You’ve dropped hints in your books, interviews, and talks that you care about some of these philosophical interpretations of the very real science you’re working on. It’s always fun to connect on that level, to find just how far our common paradigm can be established.