[b]Max Tegmark
On January 25, 1995, Russian president Boris Yeltsin came within minutes of initiating a full nuclear strike on the United States because of an unidentified Norwegian scientific rocket. [/b]
Among other things, it’s a miracle we’re all still around.
If the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis is correct, then our Universe is a mathematical structure, and from its description, an infinitely intelligent mathematician should be able to derive all these physics theories.
Where’s James S. Saint when we need him?
…in the external reality of general relativity, you’re an extended braidlike pattern in a static four-dimensional spacetime…
Wow, who woulda thunk it?
Imagine a thought experiment where a perfect clone of me is built asleep, complete with all my memories, and is only woken up long enough to perceive a single observer moment. He’d still feel that time flowed from a complex and interesting past, even though he got to experience only that one moment. This means that the subjective perceptions of duration and change are qualia, basic instantaneous perceptions just as redness, blueness or sweetness.
Thought experiment indeed!
…there’s no such thing as brown light! The color brown doesn’t exist in the external reality, but only in your internal reality: it’s simply what you perceive when seeing dim orange light against a darker background.
Is shit still brown then?
Above we worried about how to think about our initial conditions, and we now have a radical answer: this information isn’t fundamentally about our physical reality, but about our place in it. The vast complexity we observe is an illusion in the sense that the underlying reality is quite simple to describe, and what requires close to a googol bits to specify is just our particular address in the multiverse.
Just one more thing we’ll take to the grave.