[extropy-chat] Boltzmann Brains

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 2/21/07, Amara Graps <amara at amara.com> wrote:

Curious about Boltzmann Brains?
>
> http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/02/21/oos-and-bbs/
> http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/08/01/boltzmanns-anthropic-brain/
>
> {begin quote from the blog}
>
> Then, though, there are the BB's in the universe: Boltzmann Brains.
> Random fluctuations of the fabric of spacetime itself which, most of the
> time, are rather insignificant puffs which evaporate immediately. But
> sometimes they stick around. More rarely, they are complex. Sometimes
> (very very rarely) they are really quite as complex as us human types.
> (Actually, "very very rarely" does not quite convey just how rare we are
> talking now.) And sometimes these vacuum quantum fluctuations attain the
> status of actual observers in the world. But, the rarest of them all,
> the BB's, are able to (however briefly) make actual observations in the
> universe which are, in fact, "not erroneous" as Don Page put it.
>
> The man was a compelling speaker, and soon I realized there was an
> actual intellectual debate underway in the high end of the
> cosmology/high energy community as to what the role of these BB's might
> be in the universe, in the very far (or maybe not so far) future. We
> have a certain prejudice that, well, there just aren't so many of them
> out there at this stage of the game, 14 billion years after the Big
> Bang. We'd like to think that we have the stage at the moment, we OO's,
> um, assuming there are in fact more of us out there. (Any other
> non-human OO's out there, could you let us know, please that you are
> listening? We have a few questions for youŠ)
>
> The thing is, when you start talking about very veryŠvery rare things
> like Boltzmann Brains, you are talking about REALLY long times. Much
> longer than we've had on earth (and I mean 4.5 billion years) by many
> orders of magnitude. Numbers like 10 to the 60th years were being batted
> around like it was next week in this talk. By those times, all the stars
> and all the galaxies have gone out, and gone cold, and space has
> continued to expand exponentially and things are long past looking
> pretty bleak for the OO's still around, who (we presume) need heat and
> light and at least a little energy of some sort to survive, even if we
> are talking about very slow machine intelligence (even slower than
> humans for example).
>
> So eventually, the mere fact that there is, at these long times, just
> oodles of space in the universe means that the BB's become more and more
> common (even if they are rare) and eventually dominate the, uh,
> intellectual landscape of the universe. Of course this immediately
> raises all sorts of questions, such as mind/matter duality, the nature
> of reality and consciousness and multiple consciousnesses, perceived
> versus objective independent reality. Not to mention whether our
> "universe" is the only one. Okay, I'll stop nowŠ
>
> Well, at this point in the talk, being new to this and my mind already
> quite blown,
>
> {end quote from the blog}
>
> --
>
> Amara Graps, PhD      www.amara.com
> INAF Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario (IFSI), Roma, ITALIA
> Associate Research Scientist, Planetary Science Institute (PSI), Tucson


It occurred to me a long time ago that BB's (although I didn't call them
that) were a means to immortality. All I had to do after I died was wait
until the right configuration of atoms came about somewhere in the universe
and I would continue to have experiences where I left off at the moment of
death. I would have to wait a long time or the universe would have to be
very large, but it's not as if you notice time passing when you're dead.

But wait, it's even better than this because we have functionalist theories
of mind! This means my mind could be multiply realisable: on a brain, on a
laptop running Windows, on a Klingon computer based on the radioactive decay
pattern of a sacred stone. In general, there is a countable infinity of
abstract machines that could realise my brain when physically implemented
(meaning, loosely, that there is an isomorphism between the states of the
abstract machine and the states of the abstract system).

The implication of this is that I don't have to wait zillions of years for
the one "correct" configuration that will implement my brain, because at
least one of the infinite possible configurations will come up somewhere
every moment. You're guaranteed of instant continuation after death, and in
fact your next conscious moment will most likely be generated by this
mechanism. If this conclusion seems wrong, then there is a problem with
functionalism.

Stathis Papaioannou
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