Denis Noble - Life is “Fluid” in Ways Machines Still Aren’t (Stewarding the Flame, Episode 4)

This is Daniel Fagella. You're tuned in to The Trajectory, and this is our fourth episode in the Stewarding the Flame series, where we ask about what it might look like to have humans encourage the flourishing of the greater living process of which we are part, in biological or in post-biological means. Our guest this week is none other than Dennis Noble. Few people in the world today have done more work to counter the reductionist account of biology and life than Dennis Noble. He's the author of some 700 scientific papers, a dozen books, has taught at Oxford and other universities, and In terms of systems and theoretical biology, again, there's few more important thinkers now living. In this particular episode, he distinguishes what he suspects to be some of the key advantages to life over what today are artificial intelligence or machines, the distinguishing factors between the two, and lays out from his best account What we might want to do to ensure that our machine systems have more of the values and qualities of life including what he refers to as the stochasticity which allows them to open up new options, new forms, new possibilities. What we might think about as potentia as we've often referred to in our various episodes. Noble is no stranger to Spinoza and a variety of philosophical thinkers, as you'll see in this episode as well. As usual, I'll save my commentary for the very end of this episode. Let's spend most of our time listening to and diving in deep with Mr. Dennis Noble here on The Trajectory. So Dennis, welcome to the show. Well, hi, and good to be on the show. Absolutely. Man, when thinking about, Dennis, the notion of sort of the greater process of life and what we can do to encourage its flourishing, I think there's few people with a more robust background on what that looks like and how to explain it than yourself. And so I'm grateful that you're with us on this series. I want to open with kind of the widest question we're going to start with before we get into the implications for the building of AGI and these future technologies. In terms of your thoughts about what people should understand of what makes life, life. It's not just the molecules bumping around. There's more there. What's the tertiary way that you like to kind of explain it to folks?

It's a very deep question with both scientific empirical aspects to it and very deep philosophical aspects to it. I think... When all is analyzed on those two aspects, the scientific and the philosophical, the central point I would go for is that life has what we call agency in the following senses. It is capable of almost unlimited forms of choice within the constraints of its environment. And in that, I think it is essentially unpredictable by any algorithm. That's the key, I think. And the reason for that is that life is always living on the edge of the order-disorder boundary. It is a living system that enables its immune system to create new DNA to enable a new immunoglobulin, that's a protein that can grab a virus or a bacterium, in order to find one that fits the new invader. And that is not allowed by the standard 20th century biology because you're not supposed to