Origins Institute Public Lecture - Hard Problems: Life, Matter, Mind
Join the Origins Institute as they welcome Dr. Sara Imari Walker who will give an online talk on matter and mind.
What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind. What is Life? Never mind that matter.
Understanding what life is, and by extension how it originates may be the most difficult open question in science, rivaling only the problem of consciousness in its potential difficulty. Both seem to bend our current understanding of physics and chemistry as ill-equipped to solve them. The ‘hard problem’ of consciousness is meant to precisely articulate the key feature of consciousness our current understanding of physical reality cannot explain - that being feels like something, and that we cannot easily reconcile this observation with physicalism. This in turn inspired articulation of another hard problem. This is the hard problem of matter – that we cannot observe anything outside of interaction (we cannot know the properties of anything, even of elementary particle, that are not interacting with a measuring device).
As with these hard problems, here Dr. Walker will argue that explaining life can similarly be reduced to a single focal hard problem. This is the hard problem of life - that information matters to matter. I discuss the relationship between the hard problems of consciousness, matter, and life and how their relationship to each other might help inform progress on some of the deep open questions about life and mind. In particular, she will discuss new developments in a theory called assembly theory aiming to address specifically the physics underlying life, and speculate on what that physics might have to say about the problems of matter and mind.
About the speaker:
Dr. Sara Imari Walker is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist at Arizona State University. She is Deputy Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, Associate Director of the SU-Santa Fe Institute Center for Biosocial Complex Systems and Assistant Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration.
The views expressed by presenters are their own and their appearance in a program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation by McMaster University.