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Have you physically done that experiment? Why not? I ask this rhetorically, but I don't mean this as some kind of gotcha to say that you're wrong for not doing

Have you physically done that experiment? Why not? I ask this rhetorically, but I don't mean this as some kind of gotcha to say that you're wrong for not doing the experiment. I believe there's a whole pile of interesting reasons in our heads that explain why we've never done that experiment, and the Boltzmann brain thought experiment is interesting because it helps us notice those reasons. One big reason is that the knowledge of whether you're a Boltzmann brain or not can't possibly help you. I'd also argue that our brain has some kind of intuition that super-low-probability events don't matter compared to super-higher-probability worlds that we can still affect. This seems like some kind of hint for how we can think about the Anthropic principle, but I'm not sure what it's telling us. (Anyway I don't think your experiment is valid: it's perfectly possible for a Boltzmann brain to have the memory of just running that experiment and believing that it's proven it's not a Boltzmann brain.)

Zenst 7y ago
Have I done it myself, no but about 20 years ago a house mate had done some LSD and came home to him in such a state that did exactly that to prove to himself that he was real and that bit of paper acted as a comfort blanket for the rest of the trip he was on. Crazy times, but happened. Myself I have not done that, not at least in that way, but every signature on every aged document thru times arrow does support that. But as a thought experiment, it's good, but resolves around a snapshot instance of time as decay precludes any more. So why do things we remember and `know` work forward and never in reverse. Time always moves forward and how you would resolve the Boltzmann brain with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time makes for an even larger thought experement. Hence a Botzmann Universe expands beyond a brain and into a collective of brains and matter. With us a small substruct of that whole, the decay would be slower and the posibility of time at that lower scale becomes plausable. The Boltzmann brain has decay as a factor of time and as the whole of the brain is needed for conciousnous in this, then any decay would appear instant. Though not all the brain would decay at once, bits would live longer but as not the whole it has ceased to exist. So by expanding that Brain to the scale of a Universe, us human brains would be relative to the scale of the whole. Hence any instant decay of the Universe as a whole would still have pockets which would and could contain whole galaxies. So for the human brain the time until decay reaches them would and could be a measurable amount of time. Now that as a thought is one that ticks more boxes for me and opens up a larger scale of thought that maybe black holes are that decay in action.

Zenst 7y ago

Have I done it myself, no but about 20 years ago a house mate had done some LSD and came home to him in such a state that did exactly that to prove to himself that he was real and that bit of paper acted as a comfort blanket for the rest of the trip he was on. Crazy times, but happened. Myself I have not done that, not at least in that way, but every signature on every aged document thru times arrow does support that. But as a thought experiment, it's good, but resolves around a snapshot instance of time as decay precludes any more. So why do things we remember and `know` work forward and never in reverse. Time always moves forward and how you would resolve the Boltzmann brain with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time makes for an even larger thought experement. Hence a Botzmann Universe expands beyond a brain and into a collective of brains and matter. With us a small substruct of that whole, the decay would be slower and the posibility of time at that lower scale becomes plausable. The Boltzmann brain has decay as a factor of time and as the whole of the brain is needed for conciousnous in this, then any decay would appear instant. Though not all the brain would decay at once, bits would live longer but as not the whole it has ceased to exist. So by expanding that Brain to the scale of a Universe, us human brains would be relative to the scale of the whole. Hence any instant decay of the Universe as a whole would still have pockets which would and could contain whole galaxies. So for the human brain the time until decay reaches them would and could be a measurable amount of time. Now that as a thought is one that ticks more boxes for me and opens up a larger scale of thought that maybe black holes are that decay in action.