Von Neumann's universal constructor is literally a universal Turing machine, which shows that life is inherently embodied computation.

7:40set foot in a bolab. The the profound insight is that he said by the way a universal constructor is a universal touring machine. Those are literally one and the same thing. And by by making that observation what he discovered was that life is literally embodied computation. It is computational. You cannot have life without having computation. So obviously not everything that is alive reproduces but everything that is alive has to be able to make

8:04itself. It has to be able to do some combination of healing, growing, maintaining itself, reproducing. All of that is autopoesis. All of that involves self- construction and all of that necessarily involves a universal constructor. Now what do I mean by embodied computation? This is a really important distinction between vonoyman and touring. in touring the symbols that the that the head writes are different from the head itself and the tape and uh

8:31and the table of rules that the that the head follows whereas in vonoyman it's it's more like a 3D printer uh the the memory is atoms not abstract symbols in other words uh you know you could think about a touring machine as like this laptop uh you know which can't extrude another laptop out the side but a vonoyman replicator is like a combination of a laptop and a 3D printer

8:53that can print another laptop. So its memory is actually atoms. Uh that's what I mean by embodied. So I don't mean embodied in the ways that a lot of roboticists talk about embodied. I mean that that there is a closure between the uh the medium in which the computation happens and the thing that is actually doing the computation. That's the key. So uh computation that is embodied in

9:12that sense and that is autopetic is alive. You can't reproduce non-trivally evolvably without without uh computation. No computation, no life. Uh I do want to say a word briefly about what I mean by computation. Uh and in this I'm following the the work of uh Susan Stephanie, Dominick Horesman, uh Rob Wagner, Viv Kendon. Uh this is from a nice paper they wrote in 2023 relating uh the evolution of a physical system

9:37and the computation that it does. So you know on top you have logical gates, on the bottom you have uh you know transistors in in your computer. Uh this is important because you know there's there are no bits in a computer. There are just voltages that go up and down. In fact, you know, even the voltages are an abstraction of something further, you know, if we go further down. But you