<div dir="ltr">This seems to be an unfalsifiable hypothesis. The theory is that everything you remember, all data and history and evidence, is a lie forged by the random coincidence that caused your brain to exist in this moment. This is a form of the old, "am I really experiencing what I seem to be experiencing, or is it an illusion of some sort" chain of thought.<div><br></div><div>While it is true that the only thing you can prove is that you exist - because you are thinking about the problem, which means there has to be some thing that is doing that thinking, and the thing that is thinking your thoughts and having your experiences is you by definition - Occam's Razor suggests that it is far more likely that the universe as we experience it is in fact what's going on. This further suggests that mathematical convolutions that suggest something else have an error in their logic or their data.</div><div><br></div><div>In this case, "brains just randomly forming and miserably and almost immediately expiring somewhere in the universe should outnumber galaxies randomly forming in that universe" seems to be the error. Specifically, ignoring the different time scales needed for construction (and its effects on the likelihood of random assembly) between extremely short-lived entities that would need near-instant formation - brains forming and almost immediately expiring - versus extremely long lived entities that can take much longer to assemble - galaxies.</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 4:34 AM Re Rose via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><span style="border-collapse:separate"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><span style="border-collapse:separate"><div style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;font-size:13px;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small">To clarify my comment below, I didn't mean the proto-biolgical building blocks that have been observed, such as R,S-glycine, R,S-alanine, adenine, ribose, and their friends; or the simple protenoids and polypeptides - those building blocks of biology can and do spontaneouly form. I meant higher-order biologial molecles like, I dunno, hydrolases, or NADPH synthases, biologcally active structures like that. </div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small"><br></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small">-R</div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small"><br></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small">-----<snip>-------</div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small">I have never seen evidence of the spontaneous formation in the galaxy of even biological-like molecules (like an ATPase or something), much less functional ones.</div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small"><br></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small">------<snap>------</div><div dir="ltr" style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small"><span style="border-collapse:separate"><br></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small"><span style="border-collapse:separate">--------------------------------------------</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small"><span style="border-collapse:separate">Message: 12<br>Date: Fri, 1 May 2020 22:31:29 -0400<br>From: Rafal Smigrodzki <<a href="mailto:rafal.smigrodzki@gmail.com" target="_blank">rafal.smigrodzki@gmail.com</a>><br>To: ExI chat list <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>><br>Subject: [ExI] Boltzmann brains<br>Message-ID:<br> <CAAc1gFhmoEPHoMjhenYskn1TeTy+q4ooYseZOM6iPO=<a href="mailto:HgjjLyA@mail.gmail.com" target="_blank">HgjjLyA@mail.gmail.com</a>><br>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"<br><br>It occurred to me today that Wolfram's hypergraph theory offers a solution to the paradox of Boltzmann brains.<div style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;font-size:13px;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small"><br></span></div><div style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;font-size:13px;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small">Boltzmann brains show up when you contemplate sufficiently large numbers of </span><span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small">fluctuating physical entities (atoms, molecules), where any physically </span><span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small">possible arrangement of molecules eventually happens by some random </span><span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small">aggregation of molecules. </span></div><div style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;font-size:13px;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small"><br></span></div><div style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;font-size:13px;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small">The theorists assume that the likelihood of a </span><span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small">particular arrangement of smaller entities coming "randomly" into existence i</span><span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small">s a more or less simple function of the number of entities needed to form </span><span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small">that arrangement. </span></div><div style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;font-size:13px;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small"><br></span></div><div style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;font-size:13px;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small">Since it takes a lot fewer atoms to make a brain than </span><span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small">needed to make a galaxy, brains just randomly forming and miserably and </span><span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small">almost immediately expiring somewhere in the universe should outnumber </span><span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small">galaxies randomly forming in that universe by some hundreds of orders of </span><span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small">magnitude. </span></div></span></div></div></span></div></div></span></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
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