Max Tegmark Quotes

The various approximations that constitute our current physics theories are successful because simple mathematical structures can provide good approximations of how a self-aware substructure will perceive more complex mathematical structures. In other words, our successful theories are not mathematics approximating physics, but mathematics approximating mathematics!

[W]hat I had been missing... and what Feynman realized: physics is the ultimate intellectual adventure, the quest to understand the deepest mysteries of our Universe. ...[I]t makes us see more clearly, adding to the beauty and wonder of the world ...[T]he lens of physics adds more beauty to the world ...

We humans replace the bulk of both our "hardware" (e.g., our cells) and our "software" (e.g., our memories) many times in our life span. Nonetheless, we perceive ourselves as stable and permanent. Likewise, we perceive objects other than ourselves as permanent. Or rather, what we perceive as objects are those aspects of the world that display a certain permanence. For instance, when observing the ocean, we perceive the moving waves as objects because they display a certain permanence, even though the water itself is only bobbing up and down. Similarly (…) we perceive only those aspects of the world that are fairly stable against quantum decoherence.

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

As the ancient Greeks replaced myth-based explanations with mechanistic models of the Solar System, their emphasis shifted from asking why to asking how.

The question of how to define life is notoriously controversial. Competing definitions abound, some of which include highly specific requirements such as being composed of cells, which might disqualify both future intelligent machines and extraterrestrial civilizations. Since we don’t want to limit our thinking about the future of life to the species we’ve encountered so far, let’s instead define life very broadly, simply as a process that can retain its complexity and replicate.

THE BOTTOM LINE • Parallel universes are not a theory, but a prediction of certain theories. • Eternal inflation predicts that our Universe (the spherical region of space from which light has had time to reach us during the 14 billion years since our Big Bang) is just one of infinitely many universes in a Level I multiverse where everything that can happen does happen somewhere. • For a theory to be scientific, we need not be able to observe and test all its predictions, merely at least one of them. Inflation is the leading theory for our cosmic origins because it’s passed observational tests, and parallel universes seem to be a non-optional part of the package. • Inflation converts potentiality into reality: if the mathematical equations governing

Physicists, we have a sort of arrogance... which has harmed us a lot. ...We forget that we're in a bubble and ...that there's actually a science of how you persuade people ...of how to communicate, and other people have studied that at great length. ...[T]he average person who works making cigarette ads is much more scientific about the way they get their message out than the average physicist. ...[I]t comes not from stupidity ...but from arrogance ...We're not going to stoop so low that we're going to be scientific about how we communicate... about how we advocate. We have to get off our high horses... If you get invaded by Hitler's army, you shouldn't just say... "Tanks are immoral, we're going to fight them with swords." We have to be scientific also about standing up for ourselves and our ideas... A second mistake... spending much more time infighting within our community of physicists, or... having one science pitted against another... for a few more tax dollars... losing sight of the fact that there's a tiny trickle of money that flows to all of the sciences combined... compared to... generic fruits of... corporate lobbying and random waste... So, get out of our bubble again. If we look at the big picture, it's kind of pathetic... that you have physicists, biologists, chemists, who together have built up most of the wealth of the world, and managed to be so incredibly navel-gazing and busy with infighting, and old-fashioned in how they communicate, that they have to come begging for money, and people don't listen to them.

We encountered many beautiful examples of substrate-independent patterns in chapter 2, including waves, memories and computations. We saw how they weren’t merely more than their parts (emergent), but rather independent of their parts, taking on a life of their own. For example, we saw how a future simulated mind or computer-game character would have no way of knowing whether it ran on Windows, Mac OS, an Android phone or some other operating system, because it would be substrate-independent.

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.

Since we don’t want to limit our thinking about the future of life to the species we’ve encountered so far, let’s instead define life very broadly, simply as a process that can retain its complexity and replicate. What’s replicated isn’t matter (made of atoms) but information (made of bits) specifying how the atoms are arranged. When a bacterium makes a copy of its DNA, no new atoms are created, but a new set of atoms are arranged in the same pattern as the original, thereby copying the information. In other words, we can think of life as a self-replicating information-processing system whose information (software) determines both its behavior and the blueprints for its hardware.

In his 2007 book Farewell to Alms, the Scottish-American economist Gregory Clark points out that we can learn a thing or two about our future job prospects by comparing notes with our equine friends. Imagine two horses looking at an early automobile in the year 1900 and pondering their future. “I’m worried about technological unemployment.” “Neigh, neigh, don’t be a Luddite: our ancestors said the same thing when steam engines took our industry jobs and trains took our jobs pulling stage coaches. But we have more jobs than ever today, and they’re better too: I’d much rather pull a light carriage through town than spend all day walking in circles to power a stupid mine-shaft pump.” “But what if this internal combustion engine thing really takes off?” “I’m sure there’ll be new new jobs for horses that we haven’t yet imagined. That’s what’s always happened before, like with the invention of the wheel and the plow.

With a sufficiently broad definition of mathematics, the ERH implies the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH) that our physical world is a mathematical structure.

This means that our physical world not only is described by mathematics, but that it is mathematical (a mathematical structure), making us self-aware parts of a giant mathematical object.

However, in broad brushstrokes, 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.

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these one is wandering in a dark labyrinth. — Galileo Galilei, The Assayer, 1623