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

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!

La inteligencia hace posible el control: los humanos controlamos a los tigres no porque seamos más fuertes, sino porque somos más inteligentes. Esto significa que, si dejamos de ser los más inteligentes del planeta, es posible que perdamos también el control.

Other big questions tackled by ancient cultures are at least as radical. What is real? Is there more to reality than meets the eye? Yes! was Plato's answer over two millennia ago. In his famous cave analogy, he likened us to people who'd lived their entire lives shacked ina a cave, facing a blank wall, watching the shadows cast by things passing behind them, and eventually coming to mistakenly believe that these shadows were the full reality. Plato argued that what we humans call our everyday reality is similarly just a limited and distorted representation of the true reality, and that we must free ourselves from our mental shackles to comprehending it.