A Boltzmann brain is a hypothesized self-aware entity that arises due to random fluctuations out of a state of chaos. The idea is named after the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906), who advanced an idea that the Universe is observed to be in a highly improbable non-equilibrium state because only when such states randomly occur can brains exist to be aware of the Universe. The idea that a disembodied brain seems to require a smaller—hence more probable—fluctuation than intelligent beings similar to humans was proposed by Lawrence S. Schulman in 1997, and the term for this idea was coined in 2004 by Andreas Albrecht and Lorenzo Sorbo.
The Boltzmann brains concept is often stated as a physical paradox. It has also been called the Boltzmann babies paradox. The paradox is that to contemplate the universe, intelligence is necessary; however, much of the machinery that humans use to think (complex organs, muscles, etc.) are not. All that is required is the brain. Since simple organisms ought to be easier to form than complex ones, the vast majority of intelligences in the universe ought to consist of these disembodied but self-aware "Boltzmann brains".
Source: Wikipedia.
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