Consciousness is a mathematical pattern: Max Tegmark

As a physicist, Max Tegmark sees people as "food, rearranged." That makes his answer to complicated questions like "What is consciousness?" simple: It's just math. Why? Because it's the patterns, not the particles, that matter.You know when you’re awake, you know you’re alive, you know whether or not you enjoy the taste of broccoli, but do you know WHY you’re aware of all these things. Physicist, Max Tegmark does: because the particles that make up your existence are arranged in such a mathematical way that allows you to be aware of these things. Plain and simple. Okay, there’s actually nothing simple about it, we are talking about a complex pattern that allows life itself to exist. That’s the subject of Tegmark’s TED Talk: Consciousness is a Mathematical Pattern. The easy problem of consciousness is how our brain processes information. Why is the hard part. Why do we know when we’ere driving a car or playing chess?
From Tegmark’s perspective, a conscious person is simply food rearranged. And food is just electrons rearranged in a different way. Our makeup from a bag of carrots as Tegmark puts it is simply the arrangement of particles. This leads Tegmark and other physicists to ask why certain arrangements of particles have consciousness and others don’t. “Consciousness is how information feels when it is being processed in certain ways.” Tegmark doesn’t view the fact that we’re all a pattern of particles in a negative way, but just the opposite. “You guys are NOT just a bunch of particles. Your brains are the most beautifully complex space time patterns in our universe. It’s not particles, but patterns that really matter.”It’s a pretty interesting talk, and especially relevant to whether machines will one day have consciousness. Perhaps in the future science will uncover even more about this complex mathematical equation that dictates every aspect of life.
His research has focused on cosmology, combining theoretical work with new measurements to place constraints on cosmological models and their free parameters, often in collaboration with experimentalists. He has over 200 publications, of which nine have been cited over 500 times. He has developed data analysis tools based on information theory and applied them to cosmic microwave background experiments such as COBE, QMAP, and WMAP, and to galaxy redshift surveys such as the Las Campanas Redshift Survey, the 2dF Survey and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
With Daniel Eisenstein and Wayne Hu, he introduced the idea of using baryon acoustic oscillations as a standard ruler.With Angelica de Oliveira-Costa and Andrew Hamilton, he discovered the anomalous multipole alignment in the WMAP data sometimes referred to as the "axis of evil". With Anthony Aguirre, he developed the cosmological interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Tegmark has also formulated the "Ultimate Ensemble theory of everything", whose only postulate is that "all structures that exist mathematically exist also physically". This simple theory, with no free parameters at all, suggests that in those structures complex enough to contain self-aware substructures (SASs), these SASs will subjectively perceive themselves as existing in a physically "real" world. This idea is formalized as the mathematical universe hypothesis, described in his book Our Mathematical Universe.
Tegmark was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2012 for, according to the citation, "his contributions to cosmology, including precision measurements from cosmic microwave background and galaxy clustering data, tests of inflation and gravitation theories, and the development of a new technology for low-frequency radio interferometry"