Max Tegmark Quotes

It’s absolutely crucial that we don’t conflate this internal reality with the external reality that it’s tracking, because the two are very different. My brain’s internal reality is like the dashboard of my car: a convenient summary of the most useful information.' Just as my car’s dashboard tells me my speed, fuel level, motor temperature, and other things useful for a driver to be aware of, my brain’s dashboard/reality model tells me my speed and position, my hunger level, the air temperature, highlights of my surroundings and other things useful for the operator of a human body to be aware of.

Advancing computer performance is like water slowly flooding the landscape. A half century ago it began to drown the lowlands, driving out human calculators and record clerks, but leaving most of us dry. Now the flood has reached the foothills, and our outposts there are contemplating retreat. We feel safe on our peaks, but, at the present rate, those too will be submerged within another half century. I propose that we build Arks as that day nears, and adopt a seafaring life!

If we don't know what we want we're less likely to get it.

[W]e've repeatedly underestimated not only the size of our cosmos, but also the power of our human mind to understand it.

Yet the complexity of all this pales in comparison to the patterns of information processing in your brain. Your roughly 100 billion neurons are constantly generating electrical signals (“firing”), which involves shuffling around billions of trillions of atoms, notably sodium, potassium, and calcium ions. The trajectories of these atoms form an extremely elaborate braid through spacetime, whose complex intertwining corresponds to storing and processing information in a way that somehow gives rise to our familiar sensation of self-awareness. There’s broad consensus in the scientific community that we still don’t understand how this works, so it’s fair to say that we humans don’t yet fully understand what we are. However, in broad brush, we might say this: You’re a pattern in spacetime. A mathematical pattern. Specifically, you’re a braid in spacetime—indeed, one of the most elaborate braids known.

This is exactly what Alan concluded: it couldn't just have been a crazy fluke coincidence that infinitely many separate regions of space underwent Big Bang explosions all at once-some physical mechanism must have caused both the exploding and the synchronizing. One unexplained Big Bang is bad enough; an infinite number of unexplained Big Bangs in perfect synchronization strains credulity.

This is know as the horizon problem, because it involves what we see on our cosmic horizon, int he most distant regions we can observe.

Richard Feynman hailed “distrust of experts” as a cornerstone of science,

We discussed the spatial part of this paradox in Chapter 9, and concluded that your consciousness is actually observing not the outside world, but rather an elaborate reality model contained in your brain which is continually updated via input from your sensory organs to track what's actually taking place in the outside world.

economics was largely a form of intellectual prostitution where you got rewarded for saying what the powers that be wanted to hear.

The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and … there is no rational explanation for it. — Eugene Wigner, 1960

Some debaters have argued that designing an effective AWS treaty is hopelessly hard and that we therefore shouldn’t even try. On the other hand, John F. Kennedy emphasized when announcing the Moon missions that hard things are worth attempting when success will greatly benefit the future of humanity. Moreover, many experts argue that the bans on biological and chemical weapons were valuable even though enforcement proved hard, with significant cheating, because the bans caused severe stigmatization that limited their use.

This ability of Life 2.0 to design its software enables it to be much smarter than Life 1.0

Elon Musk argued that what we need right now from governments isn’t oversight but insight: specifically, technically capable people in government positions who can monitor AI’s progress and steer it if warranted down the road.

Evolution endowed us with intuition only for those aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, such as the parabolic orbits of flying rocks

Some ancients speculated that the stars were small holes in a black sphere through which distant light shone through. ...Giordano Bruno suggested that they were... like our Sun, just much farther away, perhaps with their own planets and civilizations... the Catholic Church had him burned at the stake in 1600.