[smokedetector1]

I dont need to logically disprove theories like this, because I experience myself in a way that you can't argue against. Trying to convince me my experience of myself is an illusion is, in my view, a horrible case of trying to fit reality to your model. Yet it's one that a surprising number of scientifically minded people enjoy doing, for some reason. Beats me.

[kempje]

Here's a different way of thinking about it. There are two things that are both very plausible: One - based on your direct personal experience - is that you are a non-boltzmann-brain-human living a normal life on earth. Two - based on well-accepted science - is that it is MUCH more likely for you to be a boltzmann brain than not.

Great; these two things are seemingly inconsistent. Which means one must be false. But if either of these is false, it's surprising! Because one is based on our direct experience of ourselves, as you have pointed out, and the other is based on well-established science. So what's interesting about Boltzmann brain (and similar) is that it shows that one part of our body of knowledge must be false. And this ought to motivate us to investigate exactly what it is that we have wrong.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

None of these are even the interesting points. Arguing about whether you or I are a BB is meaningless.

What I want to know is this: will BBs exist in the immeasurably far future? If they will exist, how fast could they possibly think, how long could they last, and what is the limit on their intelligence? Could they comprehend their own existence from first principles? In the short instants that they exist, would they realize how short their life expectancy is?

>Two - based on well-accepted science - is that it is MUCH more likely for you to be a boltzmann brain than not.

We're not each individual BBs (and you're not a lonely BB imagining the rest of us). It's closer to the truth that our entire universe is one big BB that just blipped into existence one moment billions of years ago. If we accept the concept of a Boltzmann Brain at all, then it must be that some configurations of one where parts of the brain are disconnected from each other and each spawns and intelligence... or even just unintelligent matter/machinery. Scale that up to a few billion light years wide, and that's us.

[kelnos]

If a BB could exist, it could also represent a type of intelligence that is so foreign to our experience that we wouldn't even recognize it as such, even if it could last long enough for us to encounter and study it.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Very likely BBs can't exist in our current high-stability regime, and only in the post-matter universe where vacuum-decay-style events occur more often would they manifest. I think they're incredibly far future only. As for the type of intelligence, it seems probably that they'd be completely alien to us, yes, as there must be modes of intelligence other than that evolved my social monkeys. Don't expect any of them to be friendly (though, what sort of violence they could hope to commit is beyond me).

[yodsanklai]

I don't think anyone wants to convince you that you're a Boltzmann brain. This is more a thought experiment. The fun is to try to explain on logical grounds why this isn't a viable option.

[kelnos]

Not sure why you're so hostile toward this. No one is saying that you're a BB; it's a thought experiment on the nature of reality.

And if you were a BB, you probably wouldn't know it, and how you experience yourself is irrelevant. That's kinda the point. The problem with the BB thought experiment is that it isn't falsifiable, at least not with techniques we have now.

[int_19h]

It's impossible to logically disprove a theory like this, because the entirety of your thought process would itself be a random fluctuation, never mind the inputs on which it is based.

The problem is that if you start with the reasonable assumption that you objectively exist and that your observations are valid, the model of the universe derived from those observations (or at least some otherwise viable models) includes prevalence of Boltzmann brains.