3 ms·

No, I don’t think so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22082864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22082864 Coherent memories are the convergent result.

by ken 7y ago

No, I don’t think so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22082864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22082864 Coherent memories are the convergent result. > my memories are chronological and all feature me as the self I’m not sure exactly what you mean by this, but the way I read it, I disagree with this as a description of human memory.

cgriswald 7y ago
> I’m not sure exactly what you mean by this, All my memories point to be me being not just human, but a particular human. In every memory I have, I am male, human, on Earth, live in the United States, live between the period of my birth and now. Speak English. Have the same number of siblings. etc. There's a more or less consistent story there. And the story is chronological. You could argue that the timeline of events is arbitrary and my brain is just remembering them in the order of that makes sense. But I also have memories of remembering things, and in each one of those, I am remembering things that happened before the time I am remembering them. The odds against a Boltzmann Brain having even two random memories that relate at all are incredibly small. The ratio of ordered:non-ordered Boltzmann Brains would be roughly on the order of actual Brain:ordered Boltzmann Brain. That's true even if we include a little wiggle room for the way the brain deals with memory. The likeliest scenario is then that we are not Boltzmann Brains and any explanation of the universe that includes the probability that we are Boltzmann Brains is probably wrong in some way.
- ken 7y ago
  Preface: It took me years (decades?) to realize that what happens in each person's brain when they 'think' or 'remember' is very different. I often have perfectly clear memories that don't fit into any cohesive story. I reject them under the assumption that they're a dream leaking into my waking subconscious, or neurons going crazy, or whatever. (If this were a sci-fi movie, they might be critical foreshadowing!) I wouldn't describe memories as inherently chronological. They're an unordered heap, with various indexes. Time is one such index, but a weak and incomplete one. I often misremember the age (or relative age) of events. Location and mood are much stronger indexes. I haven't had any memories of being a Martian, true, but given that there seems to be some automatic filter already (most dreams don't become memories), it doesn't sound unreasonable that my brain has a GC of sorts. Perhaps my filter threshold is set too low, but still high enough to reject the Martian memories. I agree that Boltzmann Brains are not the most likely explanation, but reflecting on how my memory works doesn't seem to be a good argument against that scenario.

by ken 7y ago

cgriswald 7y ago

> I’m not sure exactly what you mean by this, All my memories point to be me being not just human, but a particular human. In every memory I have, I am male, human, on Earth, live in the United States, live between the period of my birth and now. Speak English. Have the same number of siblings. etc. There's a more or less consistent story there. And the story is chronological. You could argue that the timeline of events is arbitrary and my brain is just remembering them in the order of that makes sense. But I also have memories of remembering things, and in each one of those, I am remembering things that happened before the time I am remembering them. The odds against a Boltzmann Brain having even two random memories that relate at all are incredibly small. The ratio of ordered:non-ordered Boltzmann Brains would be roughly on the order of actual Brain:ordered Boltzmann Brain. That's true even if we include a little wiggle room for the way the brain deals with memory. The likeliest scenario is then that we are not Boltzmann Brains and any explanation of the universe that includes the probability that we are Boltzmann Brains is probably wrong in some way.

ken 7y ago
Preface: It took me years (decades?) to realize that what happens in each person's brain when they 'think' or 'remember' is very different. I often have perfectly clear memories that don't fit into any cohesive story. I reject them under the assumption that they're a dream leaking into my waking subconscious, or neurons going crazy, or whatever. (If this were a sci-fi movie, they might be critical foreshadowing!) I wouldn't describe memories as inherently chronological. They're an unordered heap, with various indexes. Time is one such index, but a weak and incomplete one. I often misremember the age (or relative age) of events. Location and mood are much stronger indexes. I haven't had any memories of being a Martian, true, but given that there seems to be some automatic filter already (most dreams don't become memories), it doesn't sound unreasonable that my brain has a GC of sorts. Perhaps my filter threshold is set too low, but still high enough to reject the Martian memories. I agree that Boltzmann Brains are not the most likely explanation, but reflecting on how my memory works doesn't seem to be a good argument against that scenario.