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Here’s another YouTube where Blaise talks about his ideas…another bite of the apple so to speak; perhaps the additional exposure to his ideas will help comprehension. See below for active links to other authors and books noted in this YouTube session.

What is Life? draws fascinating parallels between the life-building chemical reactions taking place in natural chimneys deep in our oceans and the work of Alan Turing and John von Neumann in the mid-twentieth century. Blaise joins Robb and Josh to explore how self-reproduction—and thus life—is inherently computational. This conversation delves into the nested nature of life on Earth and how technology is an extension of our evolution.

In this episode, we mention:

  • Richard S. Sutton and Andrew G. Barto’s book, “Reinforcement Learning: second edition: An Introduction (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning series)” (about temporal difference learning): https://www.amazon.com/Reinforcement-…
  • Wolfram Schultz’s work, “Responses of monkey dopamine neurons to reward and conditioned stimuli during successive steps of learning a delayed response task”: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8441015/