Sara Imari Walker

“Human” is the most amazing configuration of matter any of us has ever observed, yet we deeply under appreciate what we are

What is the human aesthetic choice behind Google's algorithm ‘People also ask' - it seems like it prioritizes content scaling over relevance and/or depth. The answers are depressing and boring. Would love it to add value to my original search.Why is understanding NOT the aesthetic we are going for?

YouTube video by Schmidt Science Fellows 2025 Interdisciplinary Science Summit Showcase Talk: Sara Walker

Physics for a new century should solve what we, and all life, share fundamentally youtube.com/watch?v=43Re...

Finite Monkeys, Finite Keyboards: The Wild Alien Possibilities of Sara Imari Walker’s Life as No One Knows It - Reactor Radically rethinking the origins of life on Earth and throughout the universe...

@r-emrys.bsky.social explores the work of physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker, and how her insights into Assembly Theory and the origins of life might influence the future of science and science fiction 🌱

reactormag.com/the-wild-ali...

Many cannot see past the current representational maps that architect our minds & want them to remain static, but it’s important to recognize these can always be revised - the models we inhabit in our own minds should always be changing if we are to really come to understand anything about our world

The most transformative theories never come from trying to build better mathematical representations of current theories. Instead we get them by making direct contact with observations not accounted for in our existing map of the world.

YouTube video by The Long Now Foundation Sara Imari Walker | An Informational Theory of Life | Long Now Talks

What is Life?

In her Long Now Talk, astrobiologist and theoretical physicist Sara Imari Walker (@saraimari.bsky.social) explores the fundamental nature of life and how can physics help shape our understanding of how it arises in the universe.

Full talk here: youtu.be/zhzxQraB2m0?...

"We are lineages, not individuals." @saraimari.bsky.social is such a badass! Making great & under-appreciated points in this @noemamag.com piece: www.noemamag.com/ai-is-life/

the term “prebiotic” in origin of life research is ironic given that it almost always refers to chemistry post-selected to be of interest to biology on Earth

The origin of life is not computable, yet it happens anyways

Glad you enjoyed it!

Math is evolved

Math is physical

Science is not about an automaton-like process of observation, measurement, experiment. It is about building explanations improving on those of our ancestors, ones we might want to gift our descendants if they choose to accept them.

Automating an experiment is possible, automating science is not - there is no scientific “super-intelligence” to train on the methods of science given no one can agree exactly what science is. It’s modern myth making to assume otherwise.

Science is not about an automaton-like process of observation, measurement, experiment. It is about building explanations improving on those of our ancestors, ones we might want to gift our descendants if they choose to accept them.

It is a=1, not a sign of life. I expect dimethyl sulfide (if observation is confirmed) to have plenty of abiotic explanations, but exciting times none the less.

great team! ❤️

Revealing non-trivial information structures in aneural biological tissues via functional connectivity Author summary A central challenge in understanding several diverse processes in biology, including morphogenesis, wound healing, and development, is learning from empirical data how information is in...

We published a new xenobot-related paper today:

journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

In a nutshell: building xenobots from frog "explants" is good because explants, apparently, come with adaptive potential "built in".

This paper took 6 years and 10 co-authors (see post #2) to reach the light.

A major misconception about the physics underlying life is intelligence is about prediction. Intelligence assembles patterns in the past, it is impossible to predict the future. The best we can do is identify persistent patterns in our past that we anticipate will be in the future.

Of all the things our universe could have constructed but that never will exist, our planet rearranged matter over billions of years to assemble you. Existence is special even as its forms are transitory.

The physics underlying life is a physical invariant and observer-independent, computation is very much observer-dependent. We live in a causally rich enough environment our computational models sometimes work, but our computational languages obscure the truly alien

LLMs are recursively deep software, but shallow causal structures; human minds are recursively deep causal structures, our “software interface” is shallow. We can trick ourselves, anthropomorphizing a reality that is not there, thinking the world is experienced by everything as we see it in our mind

the ability to abstract comes from being a deeper causal structure in assembly space than almost everything around you

It’s a but sad the tech sector has made it no longer socially acceptable to talk about ‘agency’ as something life does in intellectual circles b/c they’ve appropriated the meaning of the word to only a small projection of it’s original conceptual space, the interesting stuff is no longer in the word

Scientists, no matter our generation, can be silly and very human. Thanks to @christophermichel.com for revealing the more playful side of who we are and what we do www.christophermichel.com/New-Heroes/N...

Why the Physics Underlying Life is Fundamental and Computation is Not Our ability to explain gravity fundamentally changed how we interact with our world. So too might an explanatory framework for life transform our future.

Reality is not computation any more than it was the calculus of a mechanical clock centuries ago. Let’s not confuse our technology with what our universe is, it’s a surefire way to close the future by stifling our ability to see beyond the dogmas of our time. longnow.org/ideas/physic...

I’m so impressed with @christophermichel.com’s ability to portray scientists as ‘new heroes’ of our time. It was such a joy to work with him and I’m honored to be part of his art. For more portraits of other humans on this epic journey we call science visit: www.christophermichel.com/New-Heroes/N...

This fundamentally misses my point. KC and statistical inference are observer-centered explanations, all you are saying here is how you as an intelligent agent can build effective models of the world, but these are not the world.

Why the Physics Underlying Life is Fundamental and Computation is Not Our ability to explain gravity fundamentally changed how we interact with our world. So too might an explanatory framework for life transform our future.

Reality is not computation any more than it was the calculus of a mechanical clock centuries ago. Let’s not confuse our technology with what our universe is, it’s a surefire way to close the future by stifling our ability to see beyond the dogmas of our time. longnow.org/ideas/physic...