Doğumundan 13.8 milyar yıl sonra evrenimiz uyandı ve kendinin farkına vardı. - Max Tegmark

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.

Advancing computer performance is like water slowly flooding the landscape. A half century ago it began to drown the lowlands, driving out human calculators and record clerks, but leaving most of us dry. Now the flood has reached the foothills, and our outposts there are contemplating retreat. We feel safe on our peaks, but, at the present rate, those too will be submerged within another half century. I propose that we build Arks as that day nears, and adopt a seafaring life!

We encountered many beautiful examples of substrate-independent patterns in chapter 2, including waves, memories and computations. We saw how they weren’t merely more than their parts (emergent), but rather independent of their parts, taking on a life of their own. For example, we saw how a future simulated mind or computer-game character would have no way of knowing whether it ran on Windows, Mac OS, an Android phone or some other operating system, because it would be substrate-independent.