Nisan comments on Open Thread: July 2010 - Less Wrong
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Is there really a cosmology that says that most beings with my subjective experiences are Boltzmann brains? It seems to me that in a finite universe, most beings will not be Boltzmann brains. And in an infinite universe, it's not clear what "most" means.
I gathered this from a talk by Sean Carroll that I attended, and it was supposed to be a consequence of the standard picture. All the Boltzmann brains come up in the way distant future, after thermal equilibrium, as random fluctuations. Carroll regarded this as a defect of the normal approach, and used this as a launching point to speculate about a different model.
I wish I had a more precise reference, but this isn't my area and I only heard this one talk. But I think this issue is discussed in his book From Eternity to Here. Here's a blogpost that, I believe, faithfully summarizes the relevant part of the talk. The normal solution to Boltzmann brains is to add a past hypothesis. Here is the key part where the post discusses the benefits and shortcomings of this approach:
The years there are missing some carats. Should be 10^100 and 10^10^120.
Oh I see. I... I'd forgotten about the future.
Link to talk.
This is always hard with infinities. But I think it can be a mistake to worry about this too much.
A rough way of making the point would be this. Pick a freaking huge number of years, like 3^^^3. Look at our universe after it has been around for that many years. You can be pretty damn sure that most of the beings with evidence like yours are Botlzmann brains on the model in question.