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DuncanS comments on A boltzmann brain question. - Less Wrong
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My fault for not describing this more specifically. I know that in truly vast spaces of space and time, it eventually becomes quite likely that a Boltzmann brain emerges in the vastness of the space. But the space and time required is much greater than our observable universe, which is what I was referring to in the first case.
I guess my second sentence is intended to mean that any real universe gets through four billion events of the requisite size (cosmic rays) pretty quickly.
The interesting part of the hypothesis, as I understand it, is less that the probability of a Boltzmann brain approaches one as the universe grows older (trivially true) and more that the amount of negentropy needed to generate a universe is vastly, sillily larger than that needed to generate a small self-aware system that thinks it's embedded in a universe at some point in time -- and thus that anthropic considerations should guide us to favor the latter. This is of course predicated on the idea that the universe arose from a random event obeying the kind of probability distributions that govern vacuum fluctuations and similar events.