I am thrilled, ecstatic and over-the-moon excited. For the very best of reasons, my colleagues and I are having a “Holy Crap” moment. We just found out that the Templeton Foundation has accepted our very big grant to study the most important, most amazing, most freaky-deaky question anyone can ask.
What is Life?
That’s a very big question of course. So, as scientists and philosophers, we must find a useful way into it for real progress to happen. Our approach will focus on a single critical idea: autonomous agency and the intelligence that comes with it. Through this lens we think we might untangle some knots which have plagued science for a long time. Also, it’s worth nothing that the work will have applications to fields as diverse as Astrobiology and AI.
Every living thing is an autonomous agent. From cells to crows to humans, life is always “agentic” acting for itself, for its own self-determined needs. No programmer is ever required. In this way, life is unlike any machine we’ve ever build or even know how to build. Here, at this base level, agency and sentience go hand in hand. All life, even single celled critters have some basic measure of sentience – the feeling of being alive. Then, as living systems evolve to become more complex, higher degrees of sentience become possible. This includes higher degrees of intelligence and our version of self-consciousness.
Agency and intelligence… that’s the problem we want to understand. In that way, the project naturally extends to understanding what’s possible for AI which is also pretty exciting.
To make progress we’re gathering a team that includes philosophers, physicists, biologists and computer scientists. Including philosophers is a key part of the project. Too often scientists try and tackle “big questions” without making sure those questions are well-formulated. Our specific research questions must be posed in a way that ensures a scientific investigation will actually provide relevant answers. In our case, we will start out by investigating what is meant by agency and what meant by information when it comes to life.
After that, the mathematical modeling and simulations will begin. Our project does not directly involve experiments but we hope that they will emerge naturally as we come to understand the project better.
What all this means is that for the next 3 years the team, led by my colleague Gourab Ghoshal, will be digging deep into what I think of as the “fundemental physics of life” (even though the project is really transdisciplinary). The best part of all is the grant allows us to hire 6 post-docs. These are young researchers who just got their PhD’s. They are the ones who will really make this project happen by bringing their energy and creativity to the project. Together we’ll be creating an international Virtual Institute for the Physics of Agentic Intelligence (VIPAI) with weekly meetings, discussions and collaborations.
As the Canadians say, it’s gonna be Big Fun!
Here is a link to the University of Rochester news story on the new grant if you want to know more.
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PS If you have specific questions or issues you want me to address leave a comment on the website or email me at [email protected]
PPS I could not get this proof-read so please excuse typos etc.
— Adam Frank 🚀
