Max Tegmark

But from my perspective as a physicist, I am a blob of quarks and electrons moving around in a certain pattern and processing information in certain ways.

And this is also a blob of quarks and electrons moving

I'm not smarter than the water bottle because I'm made of different kind of quirks.

I'm made of up quirks and down quirks, exact same kind as this.

There's no secret sauce, I think, in me.

It's all about the pattern of the information processing.

And this means that there's no law of physics saying that we can't create technology, which can help us.

us by being incredibly intelligent and help us crack mysteries that we couldn't.

In other words, I think we've really only seen the tip of the intelligence iceberg so far.

Very good question.

Again, I think many people have underestimated our ability to make progress on this by convincing themselves it's hopeless because somehow we're missing some ingredient that we need or some new consciousness particle or whatever.

I happen to think that we're not missing anything and that it's not... The interesting thing about consciousness that gives us this amazing subjective experience of colors and sounds and emotions and so on is rather something at the higher level about the patterns of information processing and

That's why I like to think about this idea of perceptronium.

What does it mean for an arbitrary physical system to be conscious in terms of...

what its particles are doing or its information is doing.

I hate carbon chauvinism, this attitude you have to be made of carbon atoms to be smart or conscious.

Yeah, and you can see I have my favorite equations here describing various fundamental aspects of the world.

I feel that I think one day, maybe someone who's watching this will come up with

The equations that information processing has to satisfy to be conscious.

I'm quite convinced there is big discovery to be made there.