enoch_exe_incAlso on the subject of things cause me great existential distress is the concept of #BoltzmannBrains. Given how many eternities it will take for the universe to reach maximum entropy (i.e. ‘heat death’), it’s far more likely for consciousness to arise out of random fluctuations and local decreases of entropy than it is through biological phenomenon.
How do we know we’re humans observing the universe on Earth and not disembodied consciousnesses formed in the far-off distant future *imagining* ourselves to be such? It’s extremely improbable…but the thing about absurdly long timeframes is that given enough time, even the most improbable things will happen, and the thing about exponentially long timeframes is that they’ll happen all the time.
Now, we’re talking about incredibly vast expanses of time where even the evaporation of the most supermassive black holes occurs in all but an instant. But, as far as we know, if it takes that long for a Boltzmann brain to materialise, then one order of magnitude up, we could reasonably expect ten Boltzmann brains to materialise. Then a hundred, a thousand, and so on until the number of Boltzmann brains vastly exceeds that of “ordinary” observers.