Assembly Theory

Full Title or Meme

Assembly Theory introduces a new framework for understanding the emergence of complex objects like molecules.

Context

The book "life as No One Knows It" defines assembly spaces based on distinguishable building blocks and operations at a given scale and their historical contingency. This aligns with Stephen Wolfram remarks on the limits of bounded observer for perceiving complex processes, and that modeling requires observer dependence. AT shows that the building blocks and pathways in assembly spaces are not observer independent universal truths and subject to redefinitions if measuring tools change in the future. They depend on what we can currently identify and manipulate at our scale. Improved technology and measurement will likely expand the categorized objects and operations over time. AT moves beyond reductionism by starting from observable objects and historical contingency. The dependence on distinguishable components makes assembly spaces inherently observer relative. This contrasts with assumptions of fundamental observer independent laws. This last point is clearly expressed in Nature paper: "In AT, we recognize that the smallest unit of matter is typically defined by the limits of observational measurements and may not itself be fundamental". Furthermore, the paper starts presenting in some way the problem of computer irreducibility of Evolution theories and open-ended generation of novelty in the sense of the "unsustainable expansion in the number of configurations possible in a finite universe in finite time" and in consequence, AT is the resultant of IMO a pocket of computer reducibility: "At every step, the size of the object increases by at least one. The number of total possible steps, although potentially large, is always finite for any finite object and thus the assembly index is computable in finite time. For molecules, the assembly index can be determined experimentally" ... "The assembly index on its own cannot detect selection, but copy number combined with assembly index can. You could also say it just models evolution under our limits as bounded observers and because AT explodes a pocket of computer reducibility. IMHO, by embracing observer dependence, AT creates a more open-ended framework to capture biological and technological complexity.

Problems

It seems to try to reduce the irreducible.

Solutions

The author tries to create yet another metric for Complexity in competition with some heavyweights like Truing or Kolmogorov. Perhaps this makes Complexity easier to explain to lay-people, but it's not clear that it helps to explain any reason for it to exist and ever be expanding.

• See also "The Google Similarity Distance"

  Words and phrases acquire meaning from the way they are used in society, from their relative semantics to other words and phrases. For computers, the equivalent of "society" is "database," and the equivalent of "use" is "a way to search the database". We present a new theory of similarity between words and phrases based on information distance and Kolmogorov complexity.