All of Zeruel017's Comments + Replies

Yes, there is no proof that they cannot possibly happen. It is a thing that theoretically could happen in a sufficiently boring universe, and there is no way to know whether our universe is sufficiently boring (but my prior odds are very much against it).

Over long enough timescales any interaction will reverse, and happen again, and so on. It's just a question of what fraction of time is occupied in each state. Or so the theory goes, at least.

Current models of physics do not rule out Boltzmann brains, but don't really support them either. Even the slightest variations in our expectation of the long-run future of the universe make them either essentially impossible, or possible but vanishingly rare. In no scenario are they anything like common. The main ingredient in any Boltzmann brain scenario is staggeringly large quantities of time in which nothing else happens except random thermal fluctuations. None of this tiny little trillion year nonsense, we're talking about a number of years that is so large that it would take you many trillions of years to even read the number. Obviously we do not have, and can not have, any support for that actually happening. On the timescales being discussed here, whether or not all matter becomes iron is irrelevant. Even if an iron atom has a 10^-1000 chance of encountering a ridiculously unlikely random gamma ray photon that spallates it into lighter elements, over these timescales that happens so many times that you can't hope to keep track of them all even if you had some entropy-proof enormous computer. It even happens to trillions of atoms in close proximity simultaneously so many times that you can't hope to keep track of how many times it happened. I cannot state strongly enough how mindbogglingly long these periods of time are. Immortal monkeys eventually typing at random the complete works of Shakespeare have nothing on these lengths of time; they packed up their typewriters with the job well done long before the first Boltzmann bacterium. Then unimaginably many Boltzmann bacteria would have to form and decay before the first instance of a Boltzmann bacterium that was one atom larger, and so on until you get enough atoms to form an actual brain. Predicting the future is hard. Being confident in predicting the future is foolhardy. Confidence in the existence of Boltzmann brains requires an immensely precise prediction about how reality must proceed over unimagin

Well the Boltzman Brain idea is deep into the Solopsistic corner of simulation-like hypotheses, so "we" is just as unproven as anything else in my instantaneous experience of memory.   My point is that the concept doesn't require continuity or persistence.  Experience feels continuous, but as far as anyone can tell, that mechanism is via memory and brain-state.  And brain-state does not imply that the only way to get that state is via a sequence of changes - perhaps it comes into being instantaneously by luck (or by some agency that's irrelevant to the thought experiment). 

It doesn't survive.  It exists just long enough for you to have one atomic moment of experience, then dissolves.  Continuity, causality, and movement through time is an illusion caused by happenstance of the memories that are part of this ephemeral random configuration.

Maybe "not even wrong" is not the best way to put it. Still, I think you would do well to focus on learning to avoid self-basilisking due to OCD or potentially other neurodivergent issues, rather than asking why any particular fear is unfounded. I am not a doctor though.