Hacker News Reader

Comment by majmun | Hacker News Reader

This is simply not possible (maybe in star trek), because self-aware brain requires certain kind of environment to exist into. so if there is brain there is organized environment. probability that boltzman brain exist is 0%. probability that self-aware brain in an orginized environment exists : 100% probability that Bible exists in a some unimaginable place far far away: unknown.

Anyway what is the point of this (Boltzman brain paradox)? (or point that was supposed to be?)

View on HN

Brains, per se, don't require any sort of environment. If your head was somehow teleported into interstellar space it would take tens of milliseconds for the nerve impulses indicating that everything was not all right to be acquired and processed, and your consciousness would probably last for seconds beyond that.

The horror of the Boltzman Brain idea is that the vast majority of the conscious beings that will ever exist will be created in environments that cannot support them, and will promptly go insane and/or die.

Still this paradox is too detached from reality, maybe for its time it was smart. How can we know what is the chance of universe create brain and how many brains there will be per universe? How can we know that universe fluctuation is less likely than brain fluctuation? without this numbers we know nothing.

Universe filled with many brains fluctuation can be more simple than brain fluctuation. Fluctuations may also happen in environment that doesn't even have atoms that are needed for brain , but will have atoms that are needed for universe. Maybe this atoms needed for brain can only be created by universe fluctuation.

If we assume all this unknowns and create our imaginary universe yes there can be more brains in it than universes.

Yes, and such strange happenstance that all the human brains we've found so far have been in humans. We must be incredibly lucky to have picked this universe at odds of 1 in infinity where no human brains are suffering bodiless in space.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com