Life is embodied autopoietic computation that becomes more computationally complex over time through symbiogenesis, and this same mechanism inherently connects life to the emergence of intelligence.

43:45life, including including big complex animals like ours, like us. Um there's more and more evidence in the in the last decade of of things like this going on. You know, for instance, the arc virus uh was endogenized uh in in the mammal lineage and you can find it in our brains and it turns out that if you knock out the ark virus in mice, they stop being able to form new memories. So

44:05clearly the arc virus is doing something important for us and and that's a source of novelty that that was an endogenized virus. uh similar the mamalian placenta uh was uh is formed by an indogenized virus that fuses cell membranes together and so on. Okay. So there's a definition of life that comes out of this life uh and I I said this uh you know in the panel yesterday is an embodied

44:26autopoetic computation arising and complexifying through symbioenesis. It's not just neuroscience that's computational. Life was computational from the beginning and it gets more computationally complex over time through symbioenesis at many scales because remember if life is a computer from the start then every time things fuse together you're making a more and more parallel computer. Those computers have to be not only running the code that model themselves and reproduce

44:54themselves but that also do something about modeling the other and figuring out how they interact or work with the other. And this means that an ecology of functions is building up through massively parallel computation that becomes if you like more and more intelligent with every one of these of these fusions. And since symbioenesis makes the computation massively parallel uh that implies that intelligence and life are very very closely connected. uh

45:17which is why uh you know I ended up with the book what is life as part of the book what is intelligence when you're not only using that intelligence to model yourself but also to model your environment which by the way includes others most importantly then that's intelligence and that means that life was intelligent from the start and the moment that that modeling of others begins what we call in in larger more

45:40complex animals theory of mind becomes fundamental to the way intelligence develops So uh you know these are really simple simulations that show how uh you know just persistence allows you know the modeling of of of an environment to turn into learning chemotaxis in these fake bacteria. Uh but of course you know in real life uh you're not only learning about an environment that that exists in isolation like the like the sugar

46:05crystal but actually all of your friends right the moment you're reproducing the greater part of your environment is is actually all of your all of the other things that that uh you know even your own reproduction is creating. Uh life is never single player. Things like intelligence explosions in in our lineage in the hominins and in citations uh and in bats and a variety of other species are exactly this kind of runaway