Blaise Agüera y Arcas explores some mind-bending ideas about what intelligence and life really are—and why they might be more similar than we think (filmed at ALIFE conference, 2025 - https://2025.alife.org/ ). Life and intelligence are both fundamentally computational (he says). From the very beginning, living things have been running programs. Your DNA? It's literally a computer program, and the ribosomes in your cells are tiny universal computers building you according to those instructions. **SPONSOR MESSAGES** — Prolific - Quality data. From real people. For faster breakthroughs. https://www.prolific.com/?utm_source=mlst — cyber•Fund https://cyber.fund/?utm_source=mlst is a founder-led investment firm accelerating the cybernetic economy Oct SF conference - https://dagihouse.com/?utm_source=mlst - Joscha Bach keynoting(!) + OAI, Anthropic, NVDA,++ Hiring a SF VC Principal: https://talent.cyber.fund/companies/cyber-fund-2/jobs/57674170-ai-investment-principal#content?utm_source=mlst Submit investment deck: https://cyber.fund/contact?utm_source=mlst — Blaise argues that there is more to evolution than random mutations (like most people think). The secret to increasing complexity is *merging* i.e. when different organisms or systems come together and combine their histories and capabilities. Blaise describes his "BFF" experiment where random computer code spontaneously evolved into self-replicating programs, showing how purpose and complexity can emerge from pure randomness through computational processes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Ag%C3%BCera_y_Arcas https://x.com/blaiseaguera?lang=en TRANSCRIPT: https://app.rescript.info/public/share/VX7Gktfr3_wIn4Bj7cl9StPBO1MN4R5lcJ11NE99hLg TOC: 00:00:00 Introduction - New book "What is Intelligence?" 00:01:45 Life as computation - Von Neumann's insights 00:12:00 BFF experiment - How purpose emerges 00:26:00 Symbiogenesis and evolutionary complexity 00:40:00 Functionalism and consciousness 00:49:45 AI as part of collective human intelligence 00:57:00 Comparing AI and human cognition REFS: What is intelligence [Blaise Agüera y Arcas] https://whatisintelligence.antikythera.org/ [Read free online, interactive rich media] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049955/what-is-intelligence/ [MIT Press] Large Language Models and Emergence: A Complex Systems Perspective https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11135 Our first Noam Chomsky MLST interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axuGfh4UR9Q Chance and Necessity [Jacques Monod] https://monoskop.org/images/9/99/Monod_Jacques_Chance_and_Necessity.pdf Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the History of Nature [Stephen Jay Gould] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wonderful-Life-Burgess-Nature-History/dp/0099273454 The major evolutionary transitions [E Szathmáry, J M Smith] https://wiki.santafe.edu/images/0/0e/Szathmary.MaynardSmith_1995_Nature.pdf Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle [Dan Everett] https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386120 The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves [W. Brian Arthur] https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Technology-What-How-Evolves-ebook/dp/B002RI9W16/ The MANIAC [Benjamin Labatut] https://www.amazon.com/MANIAC-Benjam%C3%ADn-Labatut/dp/1782279814 When We Cease to Understand the World [Benjamin Labatut] https://www.amazon.com/When-We-Cease-Understand-World/dp/1681375664/ The Boys in the Boat [Dan Brown] https://www.amazon.com/Boys-Boat-Americans-Berlin-Olympics/dp/0143125478 How something can be said about Telling More Than We Can Know [Petter Johansson] (Split brain) https://www.lucs.lu.se/fileadmin/user_upload/lucs/2011/01/Johansson-et-al.-2006-How-Something-Can-Be-Said-About-Telling-More-Than-We-Can-Know.pdf If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies [Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nate Soares] https://www.amazon.com/Anyone-Builds-Everyone-Dies-Superhuman/dp/0316595640 The science of cycology: Failures to understand how everyday objects work [Rebeca Lawson] https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/bf03195929.pdf SEVA: Leveraging sketches to evaluate alignment between human and machine visual abstraction [Kushin Mukherjee, Judith Fan et al] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.03035 Brain-Score [Martin Schrimpf] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/407007v1.full.pdf Feature Visualization [Chris Olah] https://distill.pub/2017/feature-visualization/ THE REVERSAL CURSE [Lukas Berglund] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.12288