Max Tegmark - What is Ultimate Reality?

What is the deepest nature of things? Our world is complex, filled with so much stuff. But down below, what's most fundamental, what is ultimate reality? Is there anything nonphysical? Anything spiritual? Or only the physical world? Many feel certain of their belief, on each side of controversial question.



Max Tegmark is Professor of Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds a BS in Physics and a BA in Economics from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. He also earned a MA and PhD in physics from University of California, Berkeley.


Closer to Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

[ender]

Robert is so great at understanding the guests and challenging them. Such a great interviewer

[suneasmussen]

I just fucking love watching you formulating your thoughts with such precision Mr. Robert Lawrance Kuhn. And done so in that wonderfull rustily deep voice.

[mr.dankman]

Well, if Max is right, then no wonder I've always felt like I don't understand life. I'm terrible at math.

[tonyscalise]

This Max is amazing. I think he’s on to something. I need to watch this video a few more times.

[shinymike]

Perhaps Reality can be described by math, but that doesn't mean it IS math.

[vettejoevette]

This was truly confusing. Max is very passionate about mathematics. However, mathematics alone cannot explain either existence or reality.

[meesalikeu]

our dr max caught out on the fly, but still droppin 4D spock chess moves.

[cozyslor]

"Difference between a dead Beatle and a live Beatle". It always comes down to Lennon and McCartney.

[vitaexcolatur]

Math is God.... it exists before the big bang.... it is the commandment of the universe.... it is infinite, divine and eternal

[afeather]

When I started watching these, I was seriously trying to understand what is going on. Now I just find almost every talk hilarious, watching us monkeys try to explain in our primitive language the fundamental nature of reality. Not that I look down on anyone, I'm the same way. I philosophize for fun, and I still get excited about it. At this point I think its like Lao Tzu said:

"The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao." (Except applied to any idea of ultimate reality.)

I hope there is an eternal afterlife, just because I think it would be hilarious if one of us puny humans finally figured it out.

I certainly think math, abstraction, could be a fundamental part of reality. Idealists / consciousness-monist people say that all our models don't describe reality, they only describe what we experience, and that we don't have access to the true nature of reality. It's not really possible to get around that argument. It's at least a possibility.

But perhaps you can get around it by saying: ok, but even if we don't have access to ultimate reality, is any experience possible that does not include patterns or structures? Maybe it is and we just can't imagine it. But maybe it isn't! Maybe any experience, even one very different from ours, would include structures which can be described mathematically.

Inevitably every metaphysical philosophy hits this wall where it doesn't seem to intuitively explain some aspect of our experience and just says, "I don't know, but maybe it just works itself out!" Why do mathematical structures "give rise" to consciousness? What is the relationship between these mathematical structures and the phenomena I experience? The answer would have to be, "I don't know, I just know that there is a relationship."

We just can't help but keep touching every side of the elephant and triumphantly proclaiming we've found a snake, and a whip, and a wall, and a tree trunk, etc, etc.

[davidcasagrande]

The ultimate reality is, we are so limited in our ability to perceive the universe around us that we truly don't know ANYTHING . A dog can outsmell us a million to one, so how can we say we know what anything smells like . And so on and on . We can only know as much as our limited bodies can know

[eimkei]

These videos often leave me thinking that if there is a God he is the ultimate scientist. Thus, whatever spiritual elements there may be they will still conform to mathematical principles.

[mickyjohnson]

Music, math and harmony are the tools used in the creation of the Universe. The Universe itself, or the physical, is just the result. There's still a creative force behind it.

[kenmapp]

Lawrence, you did a good job of
Pushing max and finding the holes in his theory: why do the equations get up and move, are all maths theroies real or just the one we live in, And i loved it when you said (words to the effect of) "wait a minute, what thinks? what experiences?"
Still, in honor of max, im going to spend the day thinking of how his theory could be true, even it doesn't seem so to me.
Peace out hippies.

[markconrad]

I agree with Max 100%. Prime numbers, a triangle, the wave function all exist in the same reality as we do...they're just "less complex" than human conciousness. This is the same reason why I believe that eventually AI will be concious in the distant future. This also why I believe that there is higher plane of existance than our own.

[robertrmckerrow]

Seems he is describing design because his description can’t be by chance, his mathematics precludes that chance happening. I would add, multiverses are a hypothetical not proven science.

[MihaiLatYoutube]

We can imagine forever what reality looks like, but true reality must be something of unity, total unity. In such a way that no descriptions are even necessary, you know it without confirmation even to yourself. And no descriptions are even possible because it is purely of perception, where all other organs and instruments collide and merge.

[ArjunLSen]

Its simply absurd to say that physical existence is integral with mathematics or emergent from mathematics. That's like saying that the measurement of the properties of my hand and its materials and components and processes IS mathematics instead of described by mathematics. This is a cardinal error. Penrose got it right when he said that there were three domains : the physical world, mathematics and Consciousness. Suddenly things start getting into focus whereas Tegmark just sounds confused with his identification approach. The next question after Penrose's postulate is what is the linkage between the three domains. In other words, WHY is the universe so well explained by mathematics since incoherence is just as much an outcome for the state of the universe as coherence: and indeed it is said to he heading towards just that. The answer WHY us best answered by an Idealist position which provides the most parsimonious and elegant roadmap for finding the explanation for ultimate reality: Consciousness produces the physical world, it produces coherence explicable by mathematics and directs the breakdown of coherence as well. Is Consciousness 'God'? Who knows. Physicist Paul Davies is not relugious but now believes that the universe is not only purposeful but has been expecting us. This promising approach which increasingly brings together disparate scientific findings from different fields supports an Idealist viewpoint increasingly well. But since Consciousness by definition is NOT reducible to mathematics but produces mathematics, many mathematicians and physicists shy away from the ultimate conclusion (Consciousness is the ground reality producing both mathematics and the physical world the maths describes so well). I am reminded of Sir James Jeans' dictum that the universe looks more and more like a great thought than a great thing. A thought is not reducible to mathematics; on the contrary, mathematics IS a form of thought. Max Planck.asserted that mathematics was fundamental. Von Neumann showed that putting in the Consciousness factor into the equations resolved key conundrums. All the confusions among many top scientists today arise from struggling to fit reality into a physical or mathematically emergent theory including consciousness which has NOT been satisfactorily shown to be emergent from brain activity though brain activity correlates extremely closely with it which - working back.to Consciousness from the physical world produced by Mind which is the Idealist position, is exactly what one would expect. Kastrup has ably demonstrated that putting Consciousness as primary and working from there towards mathematics and the physical world clarifies and enriches our understanding of how the universe really works. Reality is FUNDAMENTALLY subjective ( read 'Idealist') and objectivity is emergent of that. Since this view, however elegant, reverses the assumptions of 500 years of observation and experiment, it is understandably unpalatable to many but really, this is where we are headed and it is really a more exciting view of reality than the standard model so many scientists including Tegmark are reluctant to abandon physically emergent interpretations of reality. Since mathematics clearly describes a much greater assembly of positions than appears in the physical universe, his struggle to identify mathematics with the physical universe is an error of inflation and contradicts why so much mathematics is NOT found in the physical universe.

[ABC-ytnq]

Fascinating conversation. I tend to see math as an ever-increasingly complex language created by humans to more and more precisely describe the currently discernible physical world. Just as human languages proceeded from grunts and gestures to extremely complex ways of describing not just the exterior world but also describing the interior world.

[garybala]

Anything can be a “gift”. Or anything can be a “piece of trash”. Does that mean gifts and trash rule the world and consist of Reality??