Lee Cronin - Living Process Flourishes if We Make the Present “Thick” (Stewarding the Flame, Ep 2)

[upbeat music] This is Daniel Fugelli. You're tuned in to "The Trajectory," and this is our second episode in the "Stewarding the Flame" series, where we ask about the nature of the living process and how we can encourage its thriving in biological and perhaps, rather likely, post-biological substrates. Our second guest in this series, following Michael Levin as our kickoff for "Stewarding the Flame," is none other than Lee Cronin. Uh, Lee teaches chemistry at the University of Glasgow. He's their Regius Chair for chemistry. He's in the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Society of Chemistry. He's also the CEO of Chemifi. Uh, pretty well anchored in the, uh, the science of chemistry, um, and has a great many insights into the nature and the history of life, and we go into a tremendous number of them in this particular episode. Lee also has, uh, a particular take on artificial general intelligence and its inherent limitations, which I'll be interested in your thoughts on in the, the end of this episode. As usual, I'm gonna save my thoughts and reflections for the very outro of this particular episode. So without further ado, let's fly right in. This is episode two of "Stewarding the Flame" here on "The Trajectory" with none other than Lee Cronin. We're gonna get off on a foot that I think you'll have a bit of a unique take on around, um, the nature of life itself. Purpose of the series here is the concern that it's possible that we build systems that trample us at economic and military activity, uh, maybe e-exhibit all, all sorts of things that are appreciably intelligent in the real world, but don't really carry forward that unraveling process of life that you study closely and have a unique opinion on, which has bubbled up below the single cell to you and I, to the complexity, the power, the experience, the access to nature which, which you and I enjoy that the algae presumably didn't. When you go about defining sort of what life is, what's a starting place for people who don't have a background in, you know, bio in the same way that you do?

That's a great question. Defining life is super hard because people bring in anthropomorphically all their different biases to it, like, "Life should do this. Life should do that. Life should look like this. It's a flame. It's a storm. It's a, a, it's gotta have a soul." And, and what, what I started to think about from my point of view as a chemist when I was, like, trying to understand the transition from chemistry to biology, which is where the physics generally becomes creative, um, is just asking what it-- what do the atoms in a living system or the molecules do that don't happen in non-living systems? And so I f-found, I saw in my colleagues that there was a property that this stuff has, and it's easy to measure, and that is living systems c-create complex artifacts, objects at scale. And what do I mean by that? I mean an object that has lots of parts that can be broken in, and scale, lots of identical copies. And so the more parts an object have-- has, the more complicated it is, and the more copies there are, the more you're sure that a process made it. And then that allows you to separate, if