Sara Imari Walker

Currently hiring 1-2 postdocs to work on origins of life theory/experiment, assembly theory, life detection, with me and @leecronin.bsky.social, positions are mostly based at ASU but also some time could be spent at U. Glasgow, Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/176391 Please help us spread the word!

Currently hiring 1-2 postdocs to work on origins of life theory/experiment, assembly theory, life detection, with me and @leecronin.bsky.social, positions are mostly based at ASU but also some time could be spent at U. Glasgow, Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/176391 Please help us spread the word!

Science is a cultural institution that allows our species to directly confront our epistemological limits. It’s easy to think the criticism & controversy in science is the eclipsing battle but the only battle that really matters is the one at the boundary of what we know

Spontaneous, infinite physics leaves life without definition or meaning. Finite, recursive physics makes life definable.

The Death Of The Scientist | NOEMA Will AI kill science, or will it foster a scientific revolution? The answer depends on something no one knows: What is science?

Food for thought in this piece by @saraimari.bsky.social on how AI will affect science. Warning: contains philosophy!
www.noemamag.com/the-death-of...

In a universe where everything exists, nothing is possible

In a universe where everything exists, nothing is possible

We have no idea what alien intelligences are like (or if they even exist at all). What little we know about what is “alien” or “intelligent” is put in stark relief if AI is truly the most exotic ‘intelligences’ we can imagine, when these are a mirror of the human niche

"creativity" emerges in wake of deep distress felt when one's experience of reality is not our consensus - what remains is no other choice but to disrupt the consensus

Yes of course it’s evolving, perhaps try reading the essay before commenting? I am personally an optimist

The Death Of The Scientist | NOEMA Will AI kill science, or will it foster a scientific revolution? The answer depends on something no one knows: What is science?

"The death of the scientist is the loss of the inner world that creates an idea, but this is also when the idea can become shared, and the inner world of the societal system of debate and controversy comes alive" www.noemamag.com/the-death-of...

The Death Of The Scientist | NOEMA Will AI kill science, or will it foster a scientific revolution? The answer depends on something no one knows: What is science?

“If we misunderstand what science is, mistaking automation of method for the human project of collectively constructing, debating & refining the symbolic representations through which we make sense of reality, AI may foretell the death of science.”

— @saraimari.bsky.social

#science #ai

Language remains the most profound technology we humans ever developed because its implication is that our mind is shared

Last week's dialogue with @saraimari.bsky.social is online.

Life Against Smallism: Iterability, Assembly Theory, and the Origin of Ideality - published on September 24, 2025 That the order of explanation tracks the relative scale of objects involved and that the smaller objects must explain the larger is a common, often unchallenged assumption in the metaphysics of scienc...

On ontological anarchy in assembly theory … really enjoyed the deconstruction of both reductionism and emergence in this piece by Michael Ardoline. I will happily take ontological anarchy over reductionism or emergence any day www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf...

YouTube video by Robinson Erhardt Sara Imari Walker: Astrobiology, Aliens, and the Origin of Life

Thoughts on thought experiments … youtu.be/h52qWMncEUE?...

YouTube video by Robinson Erhardt Sara Imari Walker: Astrobiology, Aliens, and the Origin of Life

Thoughts on thought experiments … youtu.be/h52qWMncEUE?...

Life Against Smallism: Iterability, Assembly Theory, and the Origin of Ideality - published on September 24, 2025 That the order of explanation tracks the relative scale of objects involved and that the smaller objects must explain the larger is a common, often unchallenged assumption in the metaphysics of scienc...

On ontological anarchy in assembly theory … really enjoyed the deconstruction of both reductionism and emergence in this piece by Michael Ardoline. I will happily take ontological anarchy over reductionism or emergence any day www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf...

This year's issue includes:
- Essays from @blaiseaguera.bsky.social, @kalladomcdowell.bsky.social, Benjamin Bratton, and @saraimari.bsky.social consider how to define and differentiate intelligence, computation, and identity in the face of synthetic minds.

Meet Real-time meetings by Google. Using your browser, share your video, desktop, and presentations with teammates and customers.

"Information and the Emergence of Complexity"
I'm looking forward to an IAIS dialogue with @saraimari.bsky.social, moderated by Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic.
Wednesday, November 19th, 2025 17:30 (CET) | 11:30 AM (EST)
meet.google.com/gqm-frcd-apg...
More info: sites.google.com/view/iais-in...

As a species we see reality through mental models, the deepest rooted is the socially constructed one we feel like we live inside which we call our own “mind”. Seeing ourselves outside of the models we currently live inside will be one of the greatest challenges for science in the coming centuries

If you are too confident in your representational maps of reality you will miss seeing reality

What we communicate are models of the world, not the world.

The platonic world does not exist “out there”, it’s a projection inside your mind when you must construct internal representations that are devoid of the history and causal contingency in the objects of your experience

Mathematics without ontological commitment is not a theory of reality, it’s an interpretation, which is how we landed on the current landscape of descriptions in quantum mechanics, none of which are satisfactory

Contrary to science fiction an infinite number of copies of you do not exist, you only exist here and now, and the closest things to copies of you are the other humans inhabiting this same rock at this same time.

Asking about alien lineages of life requires deconstructing four billion years of evolution and attempting to look into a space of possibilities we’ve never seen in our entire history

“You only exist here. And you exist here because four billion years was necessary to construct you on this planet.”
- @saraimari.bsky.social

It is an odd feature of the human mind that we use all these things that don’t exist to reason about the ones that do.

Recursive Worlds | Antikythera

Recursive Worlds (@saraimari.bsky.social): Life reshapes how we think about reality: best understood in time, not space. Earth is a self-constructing system: ‘a very deep stack of recursive objects’ built over 4 billion years. recursiveworlds.antikythera.org