Max Tegmark
Autor(a) de Life 3.0 : being human in the age of artificial intelligence
About the Author
Max Tegmark is a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of numerous technical papers on such topics as cosmology to artificial intelligence. He is the author of Our Mathematical Universe, and Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. (Bowker Author mostrar mais Biography) mostrar menos
Obras por Max Tegmark
Associated Works
This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking (2012) — Contribuidor — 793 exemplares
Etiquetado
Conhecimento Comum
- Nome legal
- Tegmark, Max Erik
- Outros nomes
- Shapiro, Max (birth name)
- Data de nascimento
- 1967-05-05
- Sexo
- male
- Nacionalidade
- Sweden
USA - Local de nascimento
- Sweden
- Locais de residência
- Stockholm, Sweden
California, USA - Educação
- Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
University of California, Berkeley
Stockholm School of Economics - Ocupações
- cosmologist
- Organizações
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (professor)
University of Pennsylvania - Prémios e menções honrosas
- Fellow of the American Physical Society (2012)
Membros
Críticas
Listas
Prémios
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Estatísticas
- Obras
- 7
- Also by
- 2
- Membros
- 1,799
- Popularidade
- #14,303
- Avaliação
- 3.7
- Críticas
- 49
- ISBN
- 59
- Línguas
- 15
- Marcado como favorito
- 2
THE BOTTOM LINE
• Mathematical structures are eternal and unchanging: they don't exist in space and time-rather, space and time exist in (some of) them. If cosmic history were a movie, then the mathematical structure would be the entire DVD.
• The Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH) implies that the flow of time is an illusion, as is change.
• The MUH implies that creation and destruction are illusions, since
structure, but also all the stuff therein, including the particles that we're made of. Mathematically, this stuff seems to correspond to
"fields": numbers at each point in spacetime that encode what's there.
• The MUH implies that you're a self-aware substructure that is part of the mathematical structure. In Einstein's theory of gravity, you're a remarkably complex braidlike structure in spacetime, whose intricate pattern corresponds to information processing and self-awareness. In quantum mechanics, your braid pattern branches like a tree.
• The movielike subjective reality that you're perceiving right now exists only in your head, as part of your brain's reality model, and it includes not merely edited highlights of here and now, but also a selection of prerecorded distant and past events, giving the illusion that time flows.
• You're self-aware rather than just aware because your brain's reality model includes a model of yourself and your relation to the outside world: your perceptions of a subjective vantage point you call "I" are qualia, just as your subjective perceptions of "red" and "sweet" are.
• The theory that our external physical reality is perfectly described by a mathematical structure while still not being one is 100% unscientific in the sense of making no observable predictions whatsoever.
• You should expect your current observer moment to be a typical one among all observer moments that feel like you. Such reasoning leads to controversial conclusions regarding the end of humanity, the stability of our Universe, the validity of cosmological inflation, and whether you're a disembodied brain or simulation.
• It also leads to the so-called measure problem, a serious scientific crisis that calls into question the ability of physics to predict anything at all.
He writes really well. Rarely, did I need to re-read a paragraph several times to grasp what he was saying. And he has lots of clever metaphors to help the reader grasp certain complex concepts.
And when I keep coming back to my reasons for being skeptical of string theory and multiple universes I am reminded of the anecdote Tegmark relates (p191) of Bryce deWitt saying to Hugh Everett that he liked his math but was really bothered by his gut feeling that he just didn't FEEL like he was constantly splitting into parallel versions of himself. Everett, responded with the question..."Do you feel like you're orbiting the sun at thirty kilometres per second?" "Touché! " Bryce had exclaimed and conceded defeat on the spot.
Actually, though Tegmark seems to be an avid advocate for the multiple world's hypothesis and, in fact four levels of multiverses ....this is probably not the main thrust of his narrative, He came up with the idea that reality is just a mathematical concept. I find it both hard to grasp this and even harder to try and explain what he means. I think he's coming at it from the perspective of a particle physicist: so if you can define a particle in terms of mathematical equations and constants then that's all that is really needed the mathematical concept IS the reality. [I guess we all actually want to think of the particle as being something that you could "hold in your hand"....or in a magnetic field etc. but Tegmark is arguing that that is not reality any more than the mathematical concept of the particle]. I kind of get the impression that Tegmark is secretly hoping that at least one of his really wild ideas (like this) will take off and become the new paradigm and he'll be accorded accolades like Einstein and be awarded the Nobel prize and biographers will line up to describe how he came up with the idea....hence his detailed descriptions of the time and circumstances of how he came up with various ideas.....and who else might have been involved. Though, I wonder, if and when the fame comes, whether all will recollect exactly as Tegmark has set out?).
He does raise some really interesting questions which I've puzzled about. Such as the issue of introducing infinity into equations and explanations. It seems to me that this has created all sorts of amazing scenarios (like an infinite number of worlds inside an infinite number of worlds. Part of the problem is that it seems to me that infinity in these situations is being treated as a number when it is not a number.....it is a concept. What happens if we replace infinity (in all these scenarios) with just a very large number.....like 10 to power of 38. How does this affect the outcome? I recall reading Roger Penrose's book: " Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe" where he seemed to have all sorts of mathematical objections to string theory and multiple universes etc. (apart from his own gut feeling which seemed to take a leading role in his thinking).
Anyway, I followed Tegmark in the early chapters and found myself more or less in agreement but as his flights of fantasy (non scientific, as he admits himself in most cases) grew more and more extreme with his Level IV Multiverse......I found myself with drawing. It was like reading the stories from Sinbad the Sailor. Entertaining...yes...sort of. But graspable and reasonable? NO. I'm still hoping and expecting that somebody will come up with some concepts that are simpler and still connect the quantum world with gravity. Personally, I think the concept of time may be at the root of most of these issues. There's certainly something contradictory with our ideas about time.
Look, this is a significant book and profoundly interesting as well as being well written. Hard to give it anything less than 5 stars. Maybe iIll come back to it and re-read bits of it.… (mais)