Boltzmann Brain

NOTE: This is one is probably better read on Medium.com - it's mirrored here too for archival purposes. TOC: TL;DR (abstract) — for the impatient Problem statement & the “do what you love” fallacy A better way to do it (proposed solution) The “starting with the how” or “engineer’s way” fallacy When stars align — the why-s that can also be what-s 1. TL;DR (abstract) — for the impatient There’s no easy way to summarize this in less than 1000 words. A picture is worth 1000 words. So here you go (better read on and come back to the diagram later though): 2. Problem statement & the “do what you love” fallacy (how I also used to live my life for a while…) We live in an age of abundance. Probably like 90% of people reading this live in an area of the world where this abundance is fully manifested! And this also manifests as an abundance of choices and freedoms. Despite the restrictions we so painfully perceive when they’re laid upon us (by work, school...

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 organi...