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 structur… - Max Tegmark
" "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!
About Max Tegmark
Max Tegmark (born May 5, 1967) is a Swedish-American physicist, cosmologist and machine learning researcher. He is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the scientific director of the Foundational Questions Institute. He is also a co-founder of the Future of Life Institute and a supporter of the effective altruism movement, and has received research grants from Elon Musk to investigate existential risk from advanced artificial intelligence.
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Additional quotes by Max Tegmark
This is exactly what Alan concluded: it couldn't just have been a crazy fluke coincidence that infinitely many separate regions of space underwent Big Bang explosions all at once-some physical mechanism must have caused both the exploding and the synchronizing. One unexplained Big Bang is bad enough; an infinite number of unexplained Big Bangs in perfect synchronization strains credulity.
This is know as the horizon problem, because it involves what we see on our cosmic horizon, int he most distant regions we can observe.
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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.