One of the more tantalising quotes encountered by Nudel on Twitter in recent months was by Sara Amari Walker, theoretical physicist and astrobiologist:
Life occurs as a continual recursive combinatorial collapse of the space of possibilities … the structures it generates are increasingly deep recursive stacks, retaining the past in the present and using this to construct the future
https://x.com/sara_imari/status/1789423907050528990?s=61
The quote encapsulates the ideas that Walker, Cronin, and others have developed via what they refer to as Assembly Theory - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9.pdf
Nudel asked ChatGPT to create a diagram that explains the quote