# Atoms to Agents Proto-Lectures

You know the "[NAND to Tetris](https://www.nand2tetris.org/)" book/course, where one builds up the whole stack of a computer from low-level building blocks? Imagine if you had that, but rather than going from logic gates, through CPUs and compilers, to a game, you instead start from physics, go through biology and evolution, to human-like minds.

The Atoms to Agents Proto-Lectures are not that. They don't even quite aspire to that. But they aspire to one day aspire to that.

Basically, I sat down with Eli Tyre and spent a day walking through my current best understanding/guesses about the whole agency "stack", both how it works and how it evolved. The result is unpolished, full of guesswork, poorly executed (on my part), and has lots of big holes. But it's also IMO full of interesting models, cool phenomena, and a huge range of material which one rarely sees together. Lots of it is probably wrong, but wrong in ways that illuminate what answers would even look like.

The whole set of proto-lectures is on youtube [here](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiayR7yJx8-YE63lFmXUvRAa70p4nIS4P); total runtime is about 6 hours, broken across six videos. Below is a rough outline of topics. \[EDIT: [ATheCoder cleaned up the audio](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ajedsWJqkNbdafCqK/atoms-to-agents-proto-lectures?commentId=xL9YNo2HHdntFHLk5) and posted now-better videos [here](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJ9u8EFfTLel8wpw4mZClAgVufYx9aAlF); I've also updated the link at the top of this post to point there. Thankyou!\]

*   Key properties of low-level physics ([proto-lecture 1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DZZ0TaaA8A&list=PLiayR7yJx8-YE63lFmXUvRAa70p4nIS4P&index=1&t=1180s&pp=gAQBiAQB))
    *   Locality
    *   Symmetry
    *   A program-like data structure is natural for representing locality + symmetry
*   Chaos ([proto-lecture 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qy8I23UtQyY&list=PLiayR7yJx8-YE63lFmXUvRAa70p4nIS4P&index=2&t=1809s&pp=gAQBiAQB))
    *   How information is "lost" via chaos
    *   Conserved quantities
    *   Sequences of Markov Blankets as a tool to generalize chaos beyond time-dynamics
*   Objects (beginning of [proto-lecture 3](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7fpLLmVhVw&list=PLiayR7yJx8-YE63lFmXUvRAa70p4nIS4P&index=3&pp=gAQBiAQB))
    *   What does it mean for two chunks of atoms at two different times to "be the same object" or to "be two copies of the same object"?
    *   What would mean for an object to "copy" over time, in a sense which could ground bio-like evolution in physics?
*   Abiogenesis and evolution of simple agents ([proto-lecture 3](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7fpLLmVhVw&list=PLiayR7yJx8-YE63lFmXUvRAa70p4nIS4P&index=3&pp=gAQBiAQB), beginning of [4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swFTpqxYFfA&list=PLiayR7yJx8-YE63lFmXUvRAa70p4nIS4P&index=4&pp=gAQBiAQB))
    *   Autocatalytic reactions
    *   Membranes/physical boundaries
    *   Complex molecules from standardized parts: RNA world, proteins
    *   Durable & heritable “blueprint”: the genome
    *   Transboundary transport
    *   Internal compartments
    *   Making “actions” a function of “observations”
    *   Bistability -> memory
    *   Consistent trade-offs -> implicit "prices"
    *   Mobility
*   Multicellularity & Morphogenesis ([proto-lecture 4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swFTpqxYFfA&list=PLiayR7yJx8-YE63lFmXUvRAa70p4nIS4P&index=4&pp=gAQBiAQB))
    *   Self-assembly at the molecular scale: bulk, tubes, surfaces
    *   Sticky ball
    *   Specialization again
    *   Body axes
    *   Gastrulation: boundaries again
    *   Self-assembly at the multicell scale
    *   Various cool patterning stuff
    *   Specialized signal carriers
    *   Signal processing
*   Minds (proto-lectures [5](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK7jskHXkGY&list=PLiayR7yJx8-YE63lFmXUvRAa70p4nIS4P&index=5&pp=gAQBiAQB) and [6](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YirmpD-wDec&list=PLiayR7yJx8-YE63lFmXUvRAa70p4nIS4P&index=6&pp=gAQBiAQB))
    *   Within-lifetime selection pressure
    *   Selection’s implicit compression bias: grokking and the horribly-named “neuron picture”
    *   Modularity: re-use requires modules
    *   Factorization of problem domains: "environment specific, goal general"
    *   Scarce channels hypothesis
    *   Consistency pressure
    *   General-purpose search
    *   Representation & language
    *   Self-model

### Meta Commentary

**Please feel free to play with these videos**. I put zero effort into editing; if you want to clean the videos up and re-post them, go for it. (Note that I posted photos of the board in a comment below.)

Also, I strongly encourage people to make their own "Atoms to Agents" walkthroughs, based on their own models/understanding. It's a great exercise, and I'd love it if this were a whole genre.

This format started at a Topos-hosted retreat back in January. Eliana was posing questions about how the heck minds evolved from scratch, and it turned into a three-hour long conversation with Eliana, myself, Davidad, Vivek, Ramana, and Alexander G-O working our way through the stack. Highlight of the whole retreat. I tried a mini-version with Alex Turner a few months later, and then recorded these videos recently with Eli. The most fun version looks less like a lecture and more like a stream of questions from someone who's curious and digs in whenever hands are waved. (Eli did a decent job of this, but also I was steering a lot to cover particular topics; the goals of a lecture series are less fun than a freewheeling stream of questions.)