372 | Erik Winfree on DNA Computers and Robots

Hello, everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. I think we all know in you know the history of intellectual development of the human race, et cetera, It took us a long time to invent the concept of the number zero. Right? Like we could count. There were people who did accounting back in Mesopotamia or whatever, and you know, you had to figure out how much stuff you had. Once you've been in agriculture, the need for accounting became very important. There's a level of abstraction.

that you get to when you say there's a number that is not a counting number, the number zero, right? It it doesn't represent A quantity of anything, it represents an absence of a quantity. Um negative numbers, imaginary numbers, uh all these things are levels of abstraction that we reach. And and maybe like the biggest Not the biggest level of abstraction ever, but sort of the most fundamental in this game is the idea of computation. Right.

The idea of Manipulating information. In a certain way as instantiated in matter, right? So not just in the realm of ideas or whatever, but a machine that moves things around that you can interpret at the end of the day as having done a computation, having solved a problem, having answered a question, or whatever, having performed a task. And for various reasons it's not A hundred percent obvious that it's the only way to do it, but

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