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Comment by jdkee | Hacker News Reader

What if you are a recurring sequence of Boltzmann brains pooping into existence, lasting mere seconds but correctly temporally sequenced as to form a continuous consciousness?

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There's no reason to expect that your decisions would affect the next Boltzmann brain in the sequence, so there's still no need to put value of the Boltzmann brains' decisions. I don't think it makes sense to put more weight on the specific series of Boltzmann brains where the decisions seem to be followed by a subsequent Boltzmann brain than on the much more likely series of Boltzmann brains that just resemble your mental state but don't have any seemingly-causal relationships between each other.

If you're allowed to put more weight on specific extremely-improbable sequences of Boltzmann brains, then you can propose all sorts of nonsense scenarios like "Imagine the series of Boltzmann brains where if one thinks of a purple elephant, then the next Boltzmann brain experiences the subsequent thought but also a lot of pain. Should you avoid thinking of purple elephants because of the fact this unordered sequence will happen eventually in an infinite universe?".

I think in order to really reason about this sort of thing, you need to start considering theories of the universe like UDASSA (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20119513, http://fennetic.net/irc/finney.org/~hal/udassa/), which provides a framework for how we should expect to anticipate different events, and Boltzmann brains and especially specifically-selected sequences of Boltzmann brains have so little measure compared to other things including our human selves that they're not worth considering, even if their decisions actually did have a causal effect on some part of a world (which would also have minuscule measure compared to ours).

If you like these thought experiments, consider that I’m not actually responding to your comment, but I am actually mashing the keys randomly and it only appears to form a response by coincidence. We are not actually communicating with each other.

You are not mashing the keys, because nothing happens except that God wills it so. It just happens that God keeps making miracles that you have interpreted as the effects of your actions on the world.

This is the first time I've been downvoted for paraphrasing David Hume :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume

Is the phrase "correctly temporally sequenced" even a necessary phrase? I mean, if you imagine there is a set of them where the "frames" are each at some random point in time or space, then what really changes? It's like if you had a simulation of the universe, the passing of time inside wouldn't have any particular relationship to the passing of time outside because the former is part of what's being simulated.

So if you had random sequenced ordering of Boltzmann Brains that add up to the experience of a single life experience, does that collection experience having a life?

If a random stone formation somewhere in the universe happens to look exactly like a statue of Abraham Lincoln, is it a statue of Abraham Lincoln?

What if there is a meteor shower that happens to leave glowing craters on the moon, that spell out "John 3:16" in a dot matrix manner?

Actually, more like "if a million random stone formations somewhere in the universe would be a statue of Abraham Lincoln if put together, are they such a statue?"

> What if you are a recurring sequence of Boltzmann brains pooping into existence, lasting mere seconds but correctly temporally sequenced as to form a continuous consciousness?

This is similar to the premise behind the novel Permutation City, except that it’s not just one brain, but an entire virtual world.

And while fictional evidence is still only fiction, the way that book ends strongly hints that they got something crucial wrong.

They weren't running "on dust", they were running in the simulation of some being that's particularly interested in universes that embed simulations of sapient beings. Such as their own, and then later the "experiment"...

I've thought about this.

And you could reason that because you observe your reality, then the only series of boltzmann brains that could comprise you are those that sequentially form consciousness.

You would never experience any other configuration.

Given some description of the real world that defines how physical states progress through time (like, say, quantum mechanics), aren't we all sequences of such states?

That's not necessary (and is even less likely): the "you" at any given instant would be a Boltzmann brain with the memory of existing at previous instants.

>> recurring sequence of Boltzmann brains pooping into existence

I think this finally explains current pop music to me.

Justin Beibers pooping into existence...

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