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Sara Imari Walker

@saraimari.bsky.social
2.8K followers 242 following 77 posts

Professor @ASU @sfiscience

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Reposted by Sara Imari Walker
Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
what it is to be alive, the fundamental physics of life, AI and why we are far from understanding ourselves youtu.be/QHp3Gzkb_GY?...
youtu.be
How life builds the Universe | Sara Imari Walker
YouTube video by Sana
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
what it is to be alive, the fundamental physics of life, AI and why we are far from understanding ourselves youtu.be/QHp3Gzkb_GY?...
youtu.be
How life builds the Universe | Sara Imari Walker
YouTube video by Sana
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Reposted by Sara Imari Walker
Noema Magazine @noemamag.com · 18/05/2026
“AI cannot replace human scientists.” — @saraimari.bsky.social www.noemamag.com/the-death-of...
noemamag.com
The Death Of The Scientist | NOEMA
Will AI kill science, or will it foster a scientific revolution? The answer depends on something no one knows: What is science?
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 12/04/2026
Of all our universe’s creations, life is the most profoundly significant because it is what allows our universe to create
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 11/04/2026
This is a transformative time to be alive, I do not take it for granted that I exist now: my hope is that those of us alive now do as much as we can to enable ourselves and our descendants to further the creative potential of life, rebelling against a universe that is indifferent without us
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 11/04/2026
This is a transformative time to be alive, I do not take it for granted that I exist now: my hope is that those of us alive now do as much as we can to enable ourselves and our descendants to further the creative potential of life, rebelling against a universe that is indifferent without us
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Reposted by Sara Imari Walker
Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
Among the most amazing things about existence is we are the opportunity to ask why
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
Among the most amazing things about existence is we are the opportunity to ask why
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Reposted by Sara Imari Walker
Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 04/02/2026
Currently hiring 1-2 postdocs to work on origins of life theory/experiment, assembly theory, life detection, with me and @leecronin.bsky.social, positions are mostly based at ASU but also some time could be spent at U. Glasgow, Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/176391 Please help us spread the word!
apply.interfolio.com
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 04/02/2026
Currently hiring 1-2 postdocs to work on origins of life theory/experiment, assembly theory, life detection, with me and @leecronin.bsky.social, positions are mostly based at ASU but also some time could be spent at U. Glasgow, Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/176391 Please help us spread the word!
apply.interfolio.com
Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 19/12/2025
Science is a cultural institution that allows our species to directly confront our epistemological limits. It’s easy to think the criticism & controversy in science is the eclipsing battle but the only battle that really matters is the one at the boundary of what we know
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
Spontaneous, infinite physics leaves life without definition or meaning. Finite, recursive physics makes life definable.
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Hetan Shah @hetanshah.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
Food for thought in this piece by @saraimari.bsky.social on how AI will affect science. Warning: contains philosophy! www.noemamag.com/the-death-of...
noemamag.com
The Death Of The Scientist | NOEMA
Will AI kill science, or will it foster a scientific revolution? The answer depends on something no one knows: What is science?
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Reposted by Sara Imari Walker
Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 15/12/2025
In a universe where everything exists, nothing is possible
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 15/12/2025
In a universe where everything exists, nothing is possible
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 14/12/2025
We have no idea what alien intelligences are like (or if they even exist at all). What little we know about what is “alien” or “intelligent” is put in stark relief if AI is truly the most exotic ‘intelligences’ we can imagine, when these are a mirror of the human niche
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 13/12/2025
"creativity" emerges in wake of deep distress felt when one's experience of reality is not our consensus - what remains is no other choice but to disrupt the consensus
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 11/12/2025
"The death of the scientist is the loss of the inner world that creates an idea, but this is also when the idea can become shared, and the inner world of the societal system of debate and controversy comes alive" www.noemamag.com/the-death-of...
noemamag.com
The Death Of The Scientist | NOEMA
Will AI kill science, or will it foster a scientific revolution? The answer depends on something no one knows: What is science?
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Reposted by Sara Imari Walker
Noema Magazine @noemamag.com · 11/12/2025
“If we misunderstand what science is, mistaking automation of method for the human project of collectively constructing, debating & refining the symbolic representations through which we make sense of reality, AI may foretell the death of science.” — @saraimari.bsky.social #science #ai
noemamag.com
The Death Of The Scientist | NOEMA
Will AI kill science, or will it foster a scientific revolution? The answer depends on something no one knows: What is science?
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 06/12/2025
Language remains the most profound technology we humans ever developed because its implication is that our mind is shared
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Carlos Gershenson @cgershen.bsky.social · 24/11/2025
Last week's dialogue with @saraimari.bsky.social is online.
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 22/11/2025
On ontological anarchy in assembly theory … really enjoyed the deconstruction of both reductionism and emergence in this piece by Michael Ardoline. I will happily take ontological anarchy over reductionism or emergence any day www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf...
pdcnet.org
Life Against Smallism: Iterability, Assembly Theory, and the Origin of Ideality - published on September 24, 2025
That the order of explanation tracks the relative scale of objects involved and that the smaller objects must explain the larger is a common, often unchallenged assumption in the metaphysics of scienc...
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Reposted by Sara Imari Walker
Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 23/11/2025
Thoughts on thought experiments … youtu.be/h52qWMncEUE?...
youtu.be
Sara Imari Walker: Astrobiology, Aliens, and the Origin of Life
YouTube video by Robinson Erhardt
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 23/11/2025
Thoughts on thought experiments … youtu.be/h52qWMncEUE?...
youtu.be
Sara Imari Walker: Astrobiology, Aliens, and the Origin of Life
YouTube video by Robinson Erhardt
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 22/11/2025
On ontological anarchy in assembly theory … really enjoyed the deconstruction of both reductionism and emergence in this piece by Michael Ardoline. I will happily take ontological anarchy over reductionism or emergence any day www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf...
pdcnet.org
Life Against Smallism: Iterability, Assembly Theory, and the Origin of Ideality - published on September 24, 2025
That the order of explanation tracks the relative scale of objects involved and that the smaller objects must explain the larger is a common, often unchallenged assumption in the metaphysics of scienc...
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Reposted by Sara Imari Walker
The Long Now Foundation @longnow.org · 19/11/2025
This year's issue includes: - Essays from @blaiseaguera.bsky.social, @kalladomcdowell.bsky.social, Benjamin Bratton, and @saraimari.bsky.social consider how to define and differentiate intelligence, computation, and identity in the face of synthetic minds.
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Carlos Gershenson @cgershen.bsky.social · 14/11/2025
"Information and the Emergence of Complexity" I'm looking forward to an IAIS dialogue with @saraimari.bsky.social, moderated by Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic. Wednesday, November 19th, 2025 17:30 (CET) | 11:30 AM (EST) meet.google.com/gqm-frcd-apg... More info: sites.google.com/view/iais-in...
meet.google.com
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 07/11/2025
As a species we see reality through mental models, the deepest rooted is the socially constructed one we feel like we live inside which we call our own “mind”. Seeing ourselves outside of the models we currently live inside will be one of the greatest challenges for science in the coming centuries
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
If you are too confident in your representational maps of reality you will miss seeing reality
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 31/10/2025
What we communicate are models of the world, not the world.
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 30/10/2025
The platonic world does not exist “out there”, it’s a projection inside your mind when you must construct internal representations that are devoid of the history and causal contingency in the objects of your experience
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 30/10/2025
Mathematics without ontological commitment is not a theory of reality, it’s an interpretation, which is how we landed on the current landscape of descriptions in quantum mechanics, none of which are satisfactory
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 16/10/2025
Contrary to science fiction an infinite number of copies of you do not exist, you only exist here and now, and the closest things to copies of you are the other humans inhabiting this same rock at this same time.
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 16/10/2025
Asking about alien lineages of life requires deconstructing four billion years of evolution and attempting to look into a space of possibilities we’ve never seen in our entire history
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The Long Now Foundation @longnow.org · 08/10/2025
“You only exist here. And you exist here because four billion years was necessary to construct you on this planet.” - @saraimari.bsky.social
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 11/09/2025
It is an odd feature of the human mind that we use all these things that don’t exist to reason about the ones that do.
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Greg @jamyang.net · 04/09/2025
Recursive Worlds (@saraimari.bsky.social): Life reshapes how we think about reality: best understood in time, not space. Earth is a self-constructing system: ‘a very deep stack of recursive objects’ built over 4 billion years. recursiveworlds.antikythera.org
recursiveworlds.antikythera.org
Recursive Worlds | Antikythera
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Santa Fe Institute @sfiscience.bsky.social · 20/08/2025
Unfold the history of proteins and you find rich, unexplained complexity. This August, an SFI working group with @ELSI_origins and @ASU_SCAS used machine learning and assembly theory to explore hidden rules underlying all folded matter, from proteins to potential new drugs. santafe.edu/news
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 18/08/2025
We should always take seriously where computational descriptions fail, as it tells us something about where the current boundaries of what we can describe in language lie
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
Of all the materials that compose you, the most significant is time. It takes billions of years for our universe to generate structures like us.
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Santa Fe Institute @sfiscience.bsky.social · 11/08/2025
Collaborate with researchers globally. Chart your transdisciplinary path. Apply to SFI's 2026 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships. Competitive pay, research funds, and generous benefits to become a leader in transdisciplinary research. Deadline: Oct 1, 2025 Apply: santafe.edu/sfifellowship
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 13/08/2025
Known examples of life persist across scales from the molecular to the planetary. Death also is a matter of scale, raising the question of which of our deaths matters most? The individual? The lineage? The biosphere/planetary? Or the universe?
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 13/08/2025
Myths are very much alive in modern societies, and apart from in few cultural practices, like science, we have just as hard of a time recognizing when we are steeped in them as our ancestors did.
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Nils Gilman @nilsgilman.bsky.social · 11/08/2025
Toward Planetary Maturity: The RAND Corporation's new proposal for astrographic standardization will help to provide a standard grammar for #PlanetarySapience, thus helping to "mature the technosphere," as per @saraimari.bsky.social. My latest substack: nilsgilman.substack.com/p/toward-pla...
nilsgilman.substack.com
Toward Planetary Maturity
The RAND Corporation's new proposal for astrographic standardization will help to provide a standard grammar for planetary sapience, thus helping mature the technosphere
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Ruthanna Emrys @r-emrys.bsky.social · 05/08/2025
Finally, in the second Seeds of Story post, @saraimari.bsky.social's Life as No One Knows It offers cool new physics and a metric for whether that thing out there is aliens: reactormag.com/the-wild-ali...
reactormag.com
Finite Monkeys, Finite Keyboards: The Wild Alien Possibilities of Sara Imari Walker’s Life as No One Knows It - Reactor
Radically rethinking the origins of life on Earth and throughout the universe...
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 12/08/2025
Life as No One Knows It, my conversation with Sophia Al Maria during the inaugural AIR festival (also named Life As No One Knows It!!) now on Aspen Public radio, an incredible week celebrating art, artists, creativity and ideas with so many amazing humans ❤️ www.aspenpublicradio.org/ideas-speake...
aspenpublicradio.org
Aspen Art Museum: Life As No One Knows It - Sara Imari Walker and Sophia Al-Maria
Physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker and artist Sophia Al-Maria explore life on other worlds. Departing from Walker’s radical rethinking of the origins and definitions of life in her 2024 bo...
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 01/08/2025
“Human” is the most amazing configuration of matter any of us has ever observed, yet we deeply under appreciate what we are
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 31/07/2025
What is the human aesthetic choice behind Google's algorithm ‘People also ask' - it seems like it prioritizes content scaling over relevance and/or depth. The answers are depressing and boring. Would love it to add value to my original search.Why is understanding NOT the aesthetic we are going for?
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Sara Imari Walker @saraimari.bsky.social · 30/07/2025
Physics for a new century should solve what we, and all life, share fundamentally youtube.com/watch?v=43Re...
youtube.com
2025 Interdisciplinary Science Summit Showcase Talk: Sara Walker
YouTube video by Schmidt Science Fellows
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Reactor Magazine @reactorsff.bsky.social · 29/07/2025
@r-emrys.bsky.social explores the work of physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker, and how her insights into Assembly Theory and the origins of life might influence the future of science and science fiction 🌱 reactormag.com/the-wild-ali...
reactormag.com
Finite Monkeys, Finite Keyboards: The Wild Alien Possibilities of Sara Imari Walker’s Life as No One Knows It - Reactor
Radically rethinking the origins of life on Earth and throughout the universe...
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