It's great to see high status people like Max Tegmark and Jaan Tallinn publicly support the Singularitarian cause (i.e., trying to push the future towards a positive Singularity). Tallinn specifically mentioned LW as the main influence for his becoming a Singularitarian (or in his newly invented term, "CL3 Generation"). Does anyone know Tegmark's story?
I suspect that Tegmark is bright enough to have arrived on his own,
given cosmology, physical law and a strict adherence to materialism.
(In terms of how he arrived at a Singularitarian worldview, not how he came to affiliate with the SIAI.)
In his own words (2007):
...I believe that consciousness is, essentially, the way information feels when being processed. Since matter can be arranged to process information in numerous ways of vastly varying complexity, this implies a rich variety of levels and types of consciousness. The particular type of consciousness
Here.