You don't even really need a sequence of closely-related brain states encoding a coherent stream of consciousness. Maybe you only exist right now, and nothing e

You don't even really need a sequence of closely-related brain states encoding a coherent stream of consciousness. Maybe you only exist right now, and nothing else ever happens in your life. All you need is a single brain state with all of the right memories loaded up and you'd have a person who thinks they're going about their day. If you consider the likelihood of a one-brain-state person spontaneously arising in thermal noise versus the likelihood of many similar brain states spontaneously arising in thermal noise, the probability that a given person is going to continue living beyond the current moment seems very low, assuming a finite age for the universe. Hopefully there's some better, lower-entropy mechanism out there for generating brain states. Maybe it's even an objective physical reality and human evolution producing physical brains. :) (I loved Permutation City, by the way. I don't think any other novel has made me think so much.)