Max Tegmark Quotes

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.

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.

[I]t's... a big mistake as a species if we don't create institutions and governments which support science. There have been a number of... economic studies that have shown... that investing in basic science is the highest return on investment, basically ever... Inventing the ... just basic... physics research... has benefited us so much, in so many ways... Inventing calculus... didn't cost that much, but it's... so, so valuable... This comes back to the whole media question again. There are much more people who have heard about the Kardashians than... can name three living scientists... let alone twenty. ...[W]e've created a culture where scientists... not only are they not particularly known... or viewed as role models or heroes, but they are even very actively attacked by... folks with power with whom what scientists are saying is inconvenient... One of the best things we can do for science funding is to create a less screwed-up media landscape where we actually appreciate how much we benefit from scientific research. That governments will actually support it again. ...We spend two billion dollars a day or more, in this county alone, on military... If you can get a puny, puny fraction of that into scientific research, we wouldn't even be having to have this conversation about how we get funding.

It's not our universe giving meaning to conscious beings, but conscious beings giving meaning to our universe

This implication of the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis is pretty radical, so please pause (…) take it in and think about it. What you’re aware of right at this moment feels not like a photo but like a movie clip. This movie isn’t reality—it exists only in your head, as part of your brain’s reality model. It contains lots of information about the actual external physical reality—as long as you aren’t dreaming or hallucinating—but still constitutes only a very heavily edited version of reality, akin to the evening news on TV, mainly featuring certain highlights of patterns nearby in space and time that your brain thinks are useful for you to be aware of.

Generations of physicists and chemists have studied what happens when you group together vast numbers of atoms, finding that their collective behavior depends on the pattern in which they're arranged:the key difference between a solid, a liquid and a gas lies not in the types of atoms, but in their arrangement. My guess is that we'll one day understand consciousness as yet another phase of matter. I'd expect there to be many types of consciousness just as there are many types of liquids, but in both cases, they share certain characteristic traits that we can aim to understand.

Alas, I soon grew disillusioned, concluding that economics was largely a form of intellectual prostitution where you got rewarded for saying what the powers that be wanted to hear. Whatever a politician wanted to do, he or she could find an economist as advisor who had argued for doing precisely that. Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to increase government spending, so he listened to John Maynard Keynes, whereas Ronald Reagan wanted to decrease government spending, so he listened to Milton Friedman.