Top 40 Max Tegmark Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Our external physical reality is a mathematical structure.”

— Max Tegmark

2. “There’s no better guarantee of failure than convincing yourself that success is impossible, and therefore never even trying.”

— Max Tegmark

3. “In infinite space, even the most unlikely events must take place somewhere.”

— Max Tegmark

4. “I believe that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed.”

— Max Tegmark

5. “In 2056, I think you’ll be able to buy T-shirts on which are printed equations describing the unified laws of our universe.”

— Max Tegmark

6. “The core of a scientific lifestyle is to change your mind when faced with information that disagrees with your views, avoiding intellectual inertia, yet many of us praise leaders who stubbornly stick to their views as “strong.””

— Max Tegmark

7. “All too often, schools resemble museums, reflecting the past rather than shaping the future.”

— Max Tegmark

8. “The hallmark of a deep explanation is that it answers more than you ask.”

— Max Tegmark

9. “If I get a parking ticket, there is always a parallel universe where I didn’t. On the other hand, there is yet another universe where my car was stolen.”

— Max Tegmark

10. “If life were a movie, physical reality would be the entire DVD: Future and past frames exist just as much as the present one.”

— Max Tegmark

11. “So with each advance in understanding come new questions. So we need to be very humble. We shouldn’t have hubris and think that we can understand everything. But history tells us that there is good reason to believe that we will continue making fantastic progress in the years ahead.”

— Max Tegmark

12. “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.”

— Max Tegmark

13. “This ability of Life 2.0 to design its software enables it to be much smarter than Life 1.0.”

— Max Tegmark

14. “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!”

— Max Tegmark

15. “Physics is the ultimate intellectual adventure, the quest to understand the deepest mysteries of our Universe. Physics doesn’t take something fascinating and make it boring. Rather, it helps us see more clearly, adding to the beauty and wonder of the world around us. When I bike to work in the fall, I see beauty in the trees tinged with red, orange and gold. But seeing these trees through the lens of physics reveals even more beauty.”

— Max Tegmark

16. “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!”

— Max Tegmark

17. “Since there can be no meaning without consciousness, it’s not our Universe giving meaning to conscious beings, but conscious beings giving meaning to our Universe.”

— Max Tegmark

18. “But why has our physical world revealed such extreme mathematical regularity that astronomy superhero Galileo Galilei proclaimed nature to be “a book written in the language of mathematics,” and Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner stressed the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences” as a mystery demanding an explanation?”

— Max Tegmark

19. “We invented fire, repeatedly messed up, and then invented the fire extinguisher, fire exit, fire alarm and fire department.”

— Max Tegmark

20. “However, in broad brushstrokes, we might say this: You’re a pattern in spacetime. A mathematical pattern. Specifically, you’re a braid in spacetime-indeed one of the most elaborate braids known.”

— Max Tegmark

21. “Segui il tuo corso et lascia dir le genti!”

— Max Tegmark

22. “Elon Musk argued that what we need right now from governments isn’t oversight but insight: specifically, technically capable people in government positions who can monitor AI’s progress and steer it if warranted down the road.”

— Max Tegmark

23. “So I feel that the experimental verdict is in: the world is weird, and we just have to learn to live with it.”

— Max Tegmark

24. “As the ancient Greeks replaced myth-based explanations with mechanistic models of the Solar System, their emphasis shifted from asking why to asking how.”

— Max Tegmark

25. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 1, scene 5.”

— Max Tegmark

26. “The robot misconception is related to the myth that machines can’t control humans. Intelligence enables control: humans control tigers not because we’re stronger, but because we’re smarter. This means that if we cede our position as smartest on our planet, it’s possible that we might also cede control.”

— Max Tegmark

27. “Some key physical entities such as empty space, elementary particles and the wavefunction appear to be purely mathematical int he sense that their only intrinsic properties are mathematical properties.”

— Max Tegmark

28. “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance. – Confucius The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about. – Wayne Dyer.”

— Max Tegmark

29. “Slow doesn’t necessarily mean boring: if future life lives in a simulated world, its subjectively experienced flow of time need not have anything to do with the glacial pace at which the simulation is being run in the outside world, so the prospects of infinite computation could translate into subjective immortality for simulated.”

— Max Tegmark

30. “Will life in our Universe fulfill its potential or squander it? This depends to a great extent on what we humans alive today do during our lifetime, and I’m optimistic that we can make the future of life truly awesome if we make the right choices.”

— Max Tegmark

31. “It’s not our universe giving meaning to conscious beings, but conscious beings giving meaning to our universe.”

— Max Tegmark

32. “I think that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways.”

— Max Tegmark

33. “I feel that my main responsibility as a teacher isn’t to convey facts, but to rekindle that lost enthusiasm for asking questions.”

— Max Tegmark

34. “The question of how to define life is notoriously controversial. Competing definitions abound, some of which include highly specific requirements such as being composed of cells, which might disqualify both future intelligent machines and extraterrestrial civilizations. Since we don’t want to limit our thinking about the future of life to the species we’ve encountered so far, let’s instead define life very broadly, simply as a process that can retain its complexity and replicate.”

— Max Tegmark

35. “Your synapses store all your knowledge and skills as roughly 100 terabytes’ worth of information, while your DNA stores merely about a gigabyte, barely enough to store a single movie download.”

— Max Tegmark

36. “I think of this as the techno-skeptic position, eloquently articulated by Andrew Ng: “Fearing a rise of killer robots is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars.”

— Max Tegmark

37. “The more automated society gets and the more powerful the attacking AI becomes, the more devastating cyberwarfare can be. If you can hack and crash your enemy’s self-driving cars, auto-piloted planes, nuclear reactors, industrial robots, communication systems, financial systems and power grids, then you can effectively crash his economy and cripple his defenses. If you can hack some of his weapons systems as well, even better.”

— Max Tegmark

38. “Why do we perceive the world as stable and ourselves as local and unique? Here’s my guess: because it’s useful.”

— Max Tegmark

39. “If we don’t know what we want we’re less likely to get it.”

— Max Tegmark

40. “The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about. – Wayne Dyer.”

— Max Tegmark

41. “Life 1.0”: life where both the hardware and software are evolved rather than designed. You and I, on the other hand, are examples of “Life 2.0”: life whose hardware is evolved, but whose software is largely designed. By your software, I mean all the algorithms and knowledge that you use to process the information from your senses and decide what to do – everything from the ability to recognize your friends when you see them to your ability to walk, read, write, calculate, sing and tell jokes.”

— Max Tegmark