[b]Max Tegmark
With a sufficiently broad definition of mathematics, the ERH implies the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis that our physical world is a mathematical structure.
This means that our physical world not only is described by mathematics, but that it is mathematical, making us self-aware parts of a giant mathematical object.[/b]
In other words, we come mathematically?
Alas, I soon grew disillusioned, concluding that economics was largely a form of intellectual prostitution where you got rewarded for saying what the powers that be wanted to hear. Whatever a politician wanted to do, he or she could find an economist as advisor who had argued for doing precisely that. Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to increase government spending, so he listened to John Maynard Keynes, whereas Ronald Reagan wanted to decrease government spending, so he listened to Milton Friedman.
Gee, he thought, I wonder why it works like that?
Gradual declassification of records has revealed that some of these nuclear incidents carried greater risk than was appreciated at the time. For example, it became clear only in 2002 that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the USS Beale had depth-charged an unidentified submarine that was in fact Soviet and armed with nuclear weapons, and whose commanders argued over whether to retaliate with a nuclear torpedo.
Makes you wonder what we don’t know here and now.
Verification asks “Did I build the system right?,”
Validation asks “Did I build the right system?”
Two different things, right?
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.
Not counting mine I’m guessing.
[b]In summary, time is not an illusion, but the flow of time is. So is change. In spacetime, the future exists and the past doesn’t disappear. When we combine Einstein’s classical spacetime with quantum mechanics, we get quantum parallel universes as we saw in Chapter 8. This means that there are many pasts and futures that are all real-but this in no way diminishes the unchanging mathematical nature of the full physical reality.
This is how I see it. However, although this idea of an unchanging reality is venerable and dates back to Einstein, it remains controversial and subject to vibrant scientific debate, with scientists I greatly respect expressing a spectrum of views. For example, in his book The Hidden Reality, Brian Greene expresses unease toward letting go of the notions that change and creation are fundamental, writing, “I’m partial to there being a process, however tentative…that we can imagine generating the multiverse.” Lee Smolin goes further in his book Time Reborn, arguing that not only is change real, but that indeed time may be the only thing that’s real. At the other end of the spectrum, Julian Barbour argues in his book The End of Time not only that change is illusory, but that one can even describe physical reality without introducing the time concept at all.[/b]
Or, sure, none of the above.