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  "title": "Our Mathematical Universe",
  "slug": "our-mathematical-universe",
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  "author": {
    "name": "Max Tegmark",
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      "slug": "but-ive-suddenly",
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      "text": "But I’ve suddenly changed my mind and turned more optimistic about our cosmic significance. Why? Because I’ve come to believe that advanced evolved life is very rare, yet has huge future potential, making our place in space and time remarkably significant.",
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          "name": "the universe",
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      "slug": "were-all-born",
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      "text": "We're all born with curiosity, but at some point, school usually manages to knock that out of us. ...[M]y main responsibility as a teacher isn't to convey facts, but to rekindle that lost enthusiasm for asking questions.",
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      "slug": "what-is-real",
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      "text": "What is real? Is there more to reality than meets the eye? Yes! was Plato’s answer over two millennia ago. In his famous cave analogy, he likened us to people who’d lived their entire lives shackled in a cave, facing a blank wall, watching the shadows cast by things passing behind them, and eventually coming to mistakenly believe that these shadows were the full reality. Plato argued that what we humans call our everyday reality is similarly just a limited and distorted representation of the true reality, and that we must free ourselves from our mental shackles to begin comprehending it.",
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      "slug": "w-hat-i-had",
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      "text": "[W]hat I had been missing... and what Feynman realized: physics is the ultimate intellectual adventure, the quest to understand the deepest mysteries of our Universe. ...[I]t makes us see more clearly, adding to the beauty and wonder of the world ...[T]he lens of physics adds more beauty to the world ...",
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      "slug": "if-theres-a-singularity",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/max-tegmark/our-mathematical-universe/if-theres-a-singularity",
      "text": "If there’s a singularity, would the resulting AI, or AIs, feel conscious and self-aware? Would they have an internal reality? If not, they’re for all practical purposes zombies. Of all traits that our human form of life has, I feel that consciousness is by far the most remarkable. As far as I’m concerned, it’s how our Universe gets meaning, so if our Universe gets taken over by life that lacks this trait, then it’s meaningless and just a huge waste of space.",
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      "slug": "evolution-endowed-us-with",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/max-tegmark/our-mathematical-universe/evolution-endowed-us-with",
      "text": "Evolution endowed us with intuition only for those aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, such as the parabolic orbits of flying rocks (explaining our penchant for baseball). A cavewoman thinking too hard about what matter is ultimately made of might fail to notice the tiger sneaking up behind and get cleaned right out of the gene pool. Darwin’s theory thus makes the testable prediction that whenever we use technology to glimpse reality beyond the human scale, our evolved intuition should break down. We’ve repeatedly tested this prediction, and the results overwhelmingly support Darwin. At high speeds, Einstein realized that time slows down, and curmudgeons on the Swedish Nobel committee found this so weird that they refused to give him the Nobel Prize for his relativity theory. At low temperatures, can flow upward. At high temperatures, colliding particles change identity; to me, an electron colliding with a and turning into a Z-boson feels about as intuitive as two colliding cars turning into a cruise ship. On microscopic scales, particles schizophrenically appear in two places at once, leading to the quantum conundrums... On astronomically large scales... weirdness strikes again: if you intuitively understand all aspects of black holes... put down this book and publish your findings before someone scoops you on the Nobel Prize for quantum gravity… [also,] the leading theory for what happened [in the early universe] suggests that space isn’t merely really really big, but actually infinite, containing infinitely many exact copies of you, and even more near-copies living out every possible variant of your life in two different types of parallel universes.",
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      "slug": "my-guess-is-that",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/max-tegmark/our-mathematical-universe/my-guess-is-that",
      "text": "My guess is that we’ll one day understand consciousness as yet another phase of matter. I’d expect there to be many types of consciousness just as there are many types of liquids, but in both cases, they share certain characteristic traits that we can aim to understand.",
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      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/max-tegmark/our-mathematical-universe/w-eve-repeatedly-underestimated",
      "text": "[W]e've repeatedly underestimated not only the size of our cosmos, but also the power of our human mind to understand it.",
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      "text": "(…) 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.",
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      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/max-tegmark/our-mathematical-universe/theres-no-better",
      "text": "There's no better guarantee of failure than convincing yourself that success is impossible...",
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      "slug": "we-humans-replace",
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      "text": "We humans replace the bulk of both our \"hardware\" (e.g., our cells) and our \"software\" (e.g., our memories) many times in our life span. Nonetheless, we perceive ourselves as stable and permanent. Likewise, we perceive objects other than ourselves as permanent. Or rather, what we perceive as objects are those aspects of the world that display a certain permanence. For instance, when observing the ocean, we perceive the moving waves as objects because they display a certain permanence, even though the water itself is only bobbing up and down. Similarly (…) we perceive only those aspects of the world that are fairly stable against quantum decoherence.",
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