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abramdemski comments on Forcing Anthropics: Boltzmann Brains - Less Wrong
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In the criticisim of Boltzman, entropy sounds like a radio dial that someone is tweaking rather than a property of some space. I may be misunderstanding something.
Basically, if some tiny part of some enormous universe happened to condense into a very low-entropy state, that does not mean that it could spontaneously jump to a high-entropy state. It would, with extremely high probability, slowly return to a high-entropy state. It thus seems like we could see what we actually see and not be at risk of spontaneously turning into static. Our current observable universe has a certain amount of entropy and had a certain amount before the current time. If we were in some different bubble, the universe would presumably look quite different, and probably only certain bubbles could generate conscious observers, and those bubbles would not be at risk of spontaneously maximizing entropy.
The argument as applied to consciousness makes perfect sense, but at the very least I seem to be missing something about the universe argument.
I agree. The idea that low-entropy pockets that form are totally immune to a simplicity prior seems unjustified to me. The universe may be in a high-entropy state, but it's still got physical laws to follow! It's not just doing things totally at random; that's merely a convenient approximation. Maybe I am ignorant here, but it seems like the probability of a particular low-entropy bubble will be based on more than just its size.