Top 15 Max Tegmark Quotes

Your synapses store all your knowledge and skills as roughly 100 terabytes’ worth of information, while your DNA stores merely about a gigabyte, barely enough to store a single movie download.

There’s no better guarantee of failure than convincing yourself that success is impossible, and therefore never even trying.

… when people ask about the meaning of life as if it were the job of our cosmos to give meaning to our existence, they’re getting it backward: It’s not our Universe giving meaning to conscious beings, but conscious beings giving meaning to our Universe.

I think that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways.

If consciousness is the way that information feels when it’s processed in certain ways, then it must be substrate-independent; it’s only the structure of the information processing that matters, not the structure of the matter doing the information processing. In other words, consciousness is substrate-independent twice over!

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance. — Confucius The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about. — Wayne Dyer

computer scientists call validation: whereas verification asks “Did I build the system right?,” validation asks “Did I build the right system?

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

Why do we perceive the world as stable and ourselves as local and unique? Here’s my guess: because it’s useful.

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

Life 1.0”: life where both the hardware and software are evolved rather than designed. You and I, on the other hand, are examples of “Life 2.0”: life whose hardware is evolved, but whose software is largely designed. By your software, I mean all the algorithms and knowledge that you use to process the information from your senses and decide what to do — everything from the ability to recognize your friends when you see them to your ability to walk, read, write, calculate, sing and tell jokes.

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

So I feel that the experimental verdict is in: the world is weird, and we just have to learn to live with it.

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