Max Tegmark Quotes

In short, redness and self-awareness are both qualia.

Even if building robots were physically impossible, a super-intelligent and super-wealthy AI could easily pay or manipulate myriad humans to unwittingly do its bidding,

... I would rather have questions that I can't answer than answers that I can't question. (variation of a remark by Richard Feynman)

"Я помню, как на лекции по квантовой механике Юджин Комминс с серьезным лицом произнес: "Это называется уравнением Клейна-Гордона, поскольку его открыл Шредингер"."

The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about. — Wayne Dyer

Does it require interacting with people and using social intelligence? Does it involve creativity and coming up with clever solutions? Does it require working in an unpredictable environment?

[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 ...

It depends... on what you measure outrageousness in... If what you mean is that something is more extravagant if it... involves somehow having more particles, or reality being bigger... then sure. But... maybe the kind of simplicity that we should value with Occam's razor is rather that the math is simple. The equations are simple.

We invented fire, repeatedly messed up, and then invented the fire extinguisher, fire exit, fire alarm and fire department.

Gradual declassification of records has revealed that some of these nuclear incidents carried greater risk than was appreciated at the time. For example, it became clear only in 2002 that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the USS Beale had depth-charged an unidentified submarine that was in fact Soviet and armed with nuclear weapons, and whose commanders argued over whether to retaliate with a nuclear torpedo.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. Isaac Asimov

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.

a hallmark of a living system is that it maintains or reduces its entropy by increasing the entropy around it. In other words, the second law of thermodynamics has a life loophole: although the total entropy must increase, it’s allowed to decrease in some places as long as it increases even more elsewhere. So life maintains or increases its complexity by making its environment messier.

I feel that my main responsibility as a teacher isn’t to convey facts, but to rekindle that lost enthusiasm for asking questions.

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