The Integrated Evolutionary Synthesis: A Unifying Theory of Reality

Yep. All right. Thanks, Daniel, for having me, everyone at the Active Inference Lab. Sorry for canceling twice. Life's been kind of crazy with finishing this book that this talk will be about and having a kid. I'm six months old and I got sick like a week ago, like right leading up to like, you know, didn't want to cancel a third time and look crazy. So this is a very rushed presentation. It'll be better if it's more of like a conversation since I haven't even gone through the slides myself once. And it's going to get into a lot of things like immediately, like open up bags of worms, like there's just philosophical issues, things that people won't agree about, like immediately. But yeah, so this is just going to be like a small introduction to the thesis in the book. And yeah, I'll explain more, I guess, after I begin. So yeah, it's called this the integrated evolutionary synthesis, compared to like the modern synthesis, or even the extended evolutionary synthesis. This is integrated because it kind of reconceptualizes evolution, biology and evolution in terms of thermodynamics and information theory or energy flows, energy and information flows takes from cybernetics. So yeah, it's a non reductive theory of everything that includes emergent phenomena like life, mind and civilization. I say that because most theories of everything we're used to are fundamental physics theories that don't have anything to say about life and consciousness. They ignore them. And I don't think those should be called theories of everything because theories of everything should be an explanation for everything. And if you leave the things that we care about most out, then it's not much of a theory of everything. So this is the book I've spent the last two to three years writing obsessively. And it's available for pre-order now. So if you want to check that out, you can find it with a Google search. Here's the table of contents. So the book is broken into three sections. Part one talks about the origins of life and part two, about evolution, while part three focuses on consciousness and free will and the fate of life in the universe. So these like really big questions, but we're going to focus on part two and give a pretty like a superficial overview of part two. But you can feel free to ask me any questions about any of the other topics that are related. And I'll try to see what I can answer without going into like all of the information that I would, I would need to explain those things. So Thomas Huxley, known as Darwin's bulldog, because he was such a strong advocate for Darwin's theory, said that the question of questions for mankind, the problem which underlies all others is more deeply interesting than any other, is the ascertainment and of the place which man occupies in nature and of his relations to the universe of things. So where do we fit into the grand cosmic scheme? Most scientists in the 20th century, and I would even say now, believe that we are an accident. So Jacques Manot, a French biochemist who won the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine, wrote a book called Chance and Necessity, which was really influential. And he was just as reductionist as you can get. Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance. Neither, so some of the words are covered by Daniel. So neither is his destiny spelled out nor his duty have been written down. I think there's something wrong with that quote. But so if there are times where I'm trying to read something where the picture's over, I might have to skip. You can move that because it looks different on my side. It looks fine. Thank you. Great. Yeah. Neither his destiny nor his duty have been written down. So that was kind of based on this old idea that the emergence of life was a product of chance assembly. So like this just statistical fluctuation that brought together all the molecules needed to create the first cell. We…