Max Tegmark Quotes

measurements, so please let me take a few minutes to summarize 13.8 billion years of cosmic history.

Suppose that humanity flourishes thanks to the enslaved-god AI. Would this be ethical? If the AI has subjective conscious experiences, then would it feel that “life is suffering,” as Buddha put it, and it was doomed to a frustrating eternity of obeying the whims of inferior intellects? After all, the AI “boxing” we explored in the previous chapter could also be called “imprisonment in solitary confinement.” Nick Bostrom terms it mind crime to make a conscious AI suffer.4 The “White Christmas” episode of the Black Mirror TV series gives a great example. Indeed, the TV series Westworld features humans torturing and murdering AIs without moral qualms even when they inhabit human-like bodies.

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.

My favorite movie of all time is... Life of Brian. We really should try and reenact this epic skit, "What have the Romans ever done for us?" by saying "What has physics ever done for us? ...But ...besides ...the internet and transistors, what has physics ever done for us?"

[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.

I'll be the first to admit that we ultimately don't know what's going on exactly with quantum mechanics, and my personal guess... is that even quantum mechanics is probably an emergent theory, maybe an approximation of... something deeper. Maybe we can get it out of GU somehow, but... I also would guess... the opposite of Roger Penrose... that gravity doesn't really have much to do with this. I think you can... be in a spaceship far away... from any... important gravitating objects and do your little quantum experiments with a Schrödinger-like apparatus and you would get all the same fascinating things happening. So... ignoring gravity... ignoring relativistic effects altogether, you still have this thing people love fighting about. Does the wave function collapse or not, and that's why I'm so interested in this kind of discussion...

We don't know for sure that the Schrödinger equation is actually that accurate a description of nature either. That's why it's so exciting to see what's going to happen with the quantum computer efforts... Will they ultimately fail because physics isn't fully described by the Schrödinger equation, or will they actually succeed... This is where ultimately our experimental friends will... give us crucial insights...

Here... is the Schrödinger equation [<math qid=Q165498>i \hbar \frac{d}{d t}\vert\Psi(t)\rangle = \hat H\vert\Psi(t)\rangle</math>]... and what it's actually saying is that the state of the world, that's this Greek letter Ψ there with the bracket around it... It's saying that the rate of change of it... depends on the current state of the world, when you do this operation on it and for the math nerds, this is a linear operation... and what that just means is, as Everett has pointed out and many others have known for a very long time is that, in some circumstances, two different solutions to this can do their parallel thing. We can talk at... length about the discoveries... about decoherence and why it is that sometimes these different parallel branches are unaware or each other, but my point is... if you give a science nerd colloquium... at a physics department... ideally, you should also start in the same way you start discussing this with your grandma. Just at a very high level... here are the cool ideas, and then you can go as deep as the audience or the listener wants, from there.

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.

For Neils Bohr and the Copenhagen interpretation, I respond with Hamlet, "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark." ...The does not collapse. ...There is absolutely no experimental evidence for it. It appears to collapse, yes, but what Hugh Everett showed so beautifully... in the... 50s and 60s is that even if it does not collapse... If you just drop that entirely and just... go with the Schrödinger equation all the way, it's going to appear like it collapses... according to all the usual Copenhagen interpretation rules... [I]t doesn't even have anything particularly fundamental to do with quantum mechanics. ...If you have any sort of physics which lets you make copies of an observer, classically or quantum mechanically, you will experience apparent randomness. ...Suppose you ...clone yourself ...so you can get twice as much done? ...One copy ...wakes up in Room 1 and the other... in Room 2... Are you going to see... a sign that says Room 1 or will you see a 2? You cannot predict this... because... there will be two experiences. ...It seems random. I'm going to see either... with equal probability. This is what fundamentally is happening in quantum physics too. The quantum reality is just bigger than the one we thought we lived in before quantum mechanics, and it has this ability that it can start with something which is one way and make [it] effectively being in two ways. [W]hen we make a measurement, sometimes we find out which copy we were. So I wouldn't worry too much about the way a function collapse[s].

Why is at the beginning of time so low, and the entropy in a black hole so high? ...We ...don't know that the entropy was low ...We don't even know if there was a beginning of time. ...[E]ntropy ...is this measure of how messy things are, so my room ...tends to get higher and higher entropy, messier and messier. Why... eggs fall on the floor and break, and not fly up and unbreak? People argued about that for a very long time until the shocking insight... that it was very low 13.4 billion years ago at the time when those baby pictures of the universe were given off... the cosmic microwave background. So our flow of time... has something to do with the origin of our universe? That... we have learned. ...[I]f you take seriously the idea of inflation and also the theory that the does not collapse, according to Hugh Everett, you can do some math and get an explanation... but... it's a wonderful mystery, and I'm open to all ideas... and black holes... there are great truths yet to be discovered.

How is technology changing the hierarchical nature of our world? History reveals an overall trend toward ever more coordination over ever-larger distances, which is easy to understand: new transportation technology makes coordination more valuable (by enabling mutual benefit from moving materials and life forms over larger distances) and new communication technology makes coordination easier. When cells learned to signal to neighbors, small multicellular organisms became possible, adding a new hierarchical level. When evolution invented circulatory systems and nervous systems for transportation and communication, large animals became possible. Further improving communication by inventing language allowed humans to coordinate well enough to form further hierarchical levels such as villages, and additional breakthroughs in communication, transportation and other technology enabled the empires of antiquity. Globalization is merely the latest example of this multi-billion-year trend of hierarchical growth.

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.

But I’ve suddenly changed my mind and turned more optimistic about our cosmic significance. Why? Because I’ve come to believe that advanced evolved life is very rare, yet has huge future potential, making our place in space and time remarkably significant.

If there’s a singularity, would the resulting AI, or AIs, feel conscious and self-aware? Would they have an internal reality? If not, they’re for all practical purposes zombies. Of all traits that our human form of life has, I feel that consciousness is by far the most remarkable. As far as I’m concerned, it’s how our Universe gets meaning, so if our Universe gets taken over by life that lacks this trait, then it’s meaningless and just a huge waste of space.