The Nuts and Bolts of Boltzmann Brains

Do your ever have the feeling that your entire reality is just a momentary hallucination inside a randomly formed space brain? If so, then this is the podcast episode for you! In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick discuss the existential nightmare of Boltzmann brains, a thought experiment that questions the nature of self and cosmos. Plus, expect some discussion of Descartes’ evil demon, brain in a vat and the Hindu concept of Māyā.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey are you welcome to stuff to
Blow your Mind? My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm
Joe McCormick, and I want you to imagine yourself waking
up in a cube shaped room that is entirely purple

(00:26):
Florida ceiling, with no obvious doors or windows. You have
no idea how you got there. One minute, you're going
to sleep in your bed at home. The next you
wake up and you're in the purple room. So you
wonder about your surroundings for a second, and you're like,
how could I just be in a purple cube? And
then something tickles at the back of your mind. Oh, yeah,

(00:49):
those purple room kidnappings. See About ten years ago it
was announced that for research purposes, the Institute would once
a year need to randomly select a hundreds citizens and
lock them in a purple room for a day. After
your day in the room is finished, they let you
out and they give you all the ice cream you
can eat. So it's annoying, it's an inconvenience. Your plans

(01:11):
for the day get superseded, but nothing too big to
worry about. Then again, something else tickles your mind? Oh yeah,
the purple room killer. This is an infamous at large
serial killer who once every five years, kidnaps one person
and locks them in a purple room before murdering them. So,

(01:32):
given that all you know is you're in a purple
room and you don't know how you got there, should
you worry from inside? There's no way to tell whether
the purple room you're in corresponds to one scenario or
the other. So how do you know if you're just
going to be inconvenience for a day or if your
life is in danger? Yeah? Is this gonna end in
ice cream? Or is this going to end in bloody murder?

(01:55):
And not bloody murder? The flavor of ice cream that
has become popular with the kids, actual murder. Wait, I
can't tell if you're kidding? Is that a real flavor
of ice cream? Um? It is? Now I'm envisioning. Okay,
can't you see it? It's I'm thinking it's like a vanilla,
maybe a coconut with great tense red bin and Jerry's flavor. Yeah,
it's got like cherries and it's got what some bits

(02:15):
of red velvet cake in it? Yeah, kids go wild?
For the taste of bloody murder also just got some
human bones in it. For some reason, it freezes. It's
a little tough. Well, so if you were actually in
a scenario like this, far fetched as it is, you
could figure out whether you need to worry or not
by doing some simple statistics. And I've made it pretty

(02:36):
obvious which side is more likely. Every year, a hundred
people wake up in purple rooms as institute research subjects,
but they're going to be fine. That means every five years,
five hundred people are in this position. Meanwhile, every five years,
only one person wakes up in the clutches of the
evil purple room killer. Fact is more people who wake
up in purple rooms are going to be institute research

(02:58):
subjects who are going to be fine, that they are
going to be purple room killer victims. So, barring other
information that would change the probabilities, the logic here is
solid and you should probably relax. You are much much
more likely to be one of the people who's going
to be okay. So why would we start with such
a bizarre, far fetch scenario. Well, today we're gonna be
referring to quite similar logic to explain why some philosophers

(03:23):
and physicists have argued that at any given moment, though
you do exist in a sense, it is overwhelmingly likely
that I don't exist, and Robert doesn't exist, and you
don't have a body, and you don't have a past,
and there is no planet Earth, and all you actually
are is a brain floating in space that is momentarily

(03:46):
hallucinating sense, experience, and the memory of your entire life.
And within a couple of seconds you're going to be
destroyed by the vacuum of the cosmos. In case you
couldn't realize already, this is going to be thought experiment episode.
We're gonna be talking about, but basically different thoughts based
on real science. Yeah, Yeah, the best ones generally are. Yeah.

(04:08):
So in other words, this episode is going to tackle
a much requested subject. We've gotten several emails asking for it. Today.
We're gonna be talking about Boltzmann brains. Yeah, And I
think this is a good topic to finally get around too,
because it's one that I think people have been recommending
it for years and years. And I'll occasionally pull it
up and I'll sort of look at the basics and

(04:28):
I'm like, I don't know. I don't know if I'm
in the mood for the this this week. You know,
it'll it seems like maybe there'll be a little heavy.
But here we here, we are in the studio about
to dissect these space brains for everybody. Now, you're probably,
if you're not familiar with the argument, thinking like, how
on earth could you say it's more likely that I'm
a brain floating in space than that I'm a person

(04:50):
with an actual life living on a rocky planet. We'll
get there. We're gonna take you along step by step. Yeah,
and and ultimately, the the idea here is not that
you should question your personal existence or that you should consider, like,
seriously consider the possibility that you are a brain floating
and floating in space, but it forces us to reconsider

(05:12):
what we know and what we think we know about reality. Yeah,
about physics and cosmology. Now, actually, some people would argue
that you should consider your brain floating in space, but
we're probably not going to make that case today. But
we'll see, we'll see where it takes us. So there
are multiple ways of arguing that it's overwhelmingly likely that
all that stuff is true. You don't your body doesn't exist.

(05:34):
Planet Earth doesn't exist. You're just a brain floating in
space hallucinating whatever you think is going on right now.
And I'll start with a pretty simple way of arguing this,
probably the simplest one. It's the infinite universe full of
space brains. Now, Robert, we've talked before on the podcast
about the idea of the ultimate fate of the universe.
Right based on current evidence, we can't know for sure

(06:00):
how the universe will look given X time into the future,
but we can have a pretty good idea based on
current evidence. And there are definitely types of scenarios that
are within the range of possibility. Is given the evidence
of today and of the past, some look more likely
than others. For example, uh, one of the things that's

(06:21):
often floated as a possibility is the idea of the
big rip, which predicts that the dark energy in the universe,
the cosmic in the cosmic expansion energy, will ultimately increase
in density and it will accelerate the rate of expansion
of the universe and ultimately rip apart and disintegrate all matter.
There is also the models like the Big Bounce that

(06:42):
predicts a kind of cyclical version of the universe, that
the universe will expand and then reach a certain point
and then start to contract again back down to a singularity. Yeah.
This is kind of like the fluctuating creation to disc
destruction of the universe that it actually closely mirrors the
model that presented in in Hinduism, where there's creation and
the destruction creation and world destruction just going on forever

(07:04):
and ever. And there actually is more than one way
in modeling the cosmos to get multiple universes happening over
and over again in a cycle. And we'll be exploring
one of those ways today, not so much the Big bounce,
but a different one. But I think the ultimate fade
of the universe that the majority of physicists think is
most consistent with the evidence we have today is the

(07:25):
lambda cold dark matter universe. Basically the idea that the
universe just continues steadily expanding and cooling, heading out toward
total entropy until stars use up their fuel and burn out,
and then for a long time there's just a universe
full of black holes and dust floating in space, and
then even the black holes disappear over trillions of years

(07:47):
due to Hawking radiation, and eventually the universe tends toward
total equilibrium, a kind of uniform, random sea of cold,
useless energy that lasts for infinite time. If you've ever
been trapped in a waiting room, say, with a group
of people, and the conversation just gets gets increasingly mundane,

(08:07):
increasingly boring, until just utter awkward silence sets in, that's
kind of what's happening here, Like the universe just gets
more and more boring until it just reaches this absolute
level of infinite boredom. Right, And this is almost sort
of like a perfect consequence of the idea of entropy
in general. Right. The second law of thermodynamics states that

(08:28):
within a closed system, entropy will always increase over time,
or maybe more precisely, I think physicists would rather say
that entropy in a closed system will not spontaneously decrease.
And there are a lot of ways of paraphrasing this
to explain what it means and the point of you know,
things we understand in an everyday way. One of them

(08:49):
is that within a closed system, so imagine just a
closed box where nothing on the outside is interacting with
the inside. Within a closed system, order will over time
tend to disorder organized things tend to become disorganized. Eggs
crack and break and run all over the place and
decompose and lose their shape and their chemical energy and

(09:11):
sort of tend to turn into ambient heat. Things fall apart,
as as Yates would would put it, Uh, and to
to go back to my loose analogy of the the
individuals stuck together within an in an increasingly boring conversation.
It's like you have you have six people and they're
running out of things to talk about. They better hope
somebody funny looking walks by that will give them something

(09:34):
new to talk about, right, or something will pop up
on the television set that's playing in the waiting room
and provide some new nugget of conversation for them to
tear into. That would be like somebody putting a new
egg in the box. It's like introducing some new piece
of structure to a system that is tending towards total equilibrium. Yeah.
Refreshing of the air or water inside of a closed rarium. Yeah.

(09:57):
Another way this is often understood is that then a
closed system, useful energy, meaning energy that can be used
to do work, will over time become useless energy that
cannot be used to do work. So over time, chemical
energy and kinetic energy and so forth will decompose into
ambient heat. And this process cannot be reversed. You can't

(10:19):
take a room of a constant temperature and do something
useful with that temperature, unless maybe you expose it to
an equal to another area that has a different temperature. Yeah.
I'm reminded in this too of various post apocalyptic movies,
right where nobody can manufacture certain goods or things or
products anymore, and so they're steadily used up, and then

(10:41):
the things they were made of or used up as well. Yeah. Yeah,
and an energy can be like that. Useful energy turns
into useless energy. I think maybe the simplest best way
to explain what entropy really means is that over time,
in a closed system, like in a closed box, things
tend toward equilibrium. These things I've mentioned before order useful work.

(11:04):
They're all characterized by structures of difference or specialness. So
if you've got a closed box and you've got to, say,
a robot walking around in it, that's very far from
equilibrium because most of the box is empty space with
air in it, and then one part of the box
has a lot of energy potential organized into some matter
and a robot that has a power source and all that.

(11:27):
But then over time, the robot will sort of tend
toward evening out with the other stuff in there. The
battery will run out, it'll stop moving, it'll radiate heat
into the room. Closed systems over short or long periods
of time tend toward random uniformity, or what's known as
high entropy. When you hear the phrase high entropy, you

(11:48):
can just think of like sameness, a sort of sort
of sea of equilibrium where there's nothing special or interesting.
A house of robots where all the robots are broken. Yeah,
and this is going to bring us to the physicist
Ludwig Boltzman. So. Boltzmann was an Austrian physicist to live
from eighteen forty four to nineteen o six, and Boltzmann's

(12:11):
greatest contribution to modern physics was what's come to be
known as statistical mechanics and the kinetic theory of gases.
And this is a theory that explains the behavior and
states of gases by thinking of them as a collection
of individual particles. The statistical model of the random movements

(12:31):
of the many in this cloud can be thought of
as equivalent to sort of the properties of the whole,
like the thermal energy of the whole. And so he
he has a way of looking at a cloud of
gas and saying, actually, what we're seeing when a cloud
of gas behaves a certain way is the statistical average
of all the tiny particles in that cloud of gas,

(12:52):
all acting at the same time. And one of his
key insights was that high entropy states, remember those things
where there's just equilibrium, there's just sameness and a lack
of specialness or a lack of order. High interpee states
are characterized by apparent randomness and uniformity, and that closed
systems tend towards these states because and this is the

(13:15):
key part, there statistically more likely. This might be a
little abstract, and it might take a minute, but we
will try to use some illustrations to make sense of this.
High intropee states are statistically more likely, and that's why
the universe evolves towards them from low intropee states. So,

(13:36):
as an illustration, imagine you've got a clear plastic aquarium
inside which is a pure vacuum. There's no matter or
gas or anything inside this clear aquarium. At all. And
let's say you pump some yellow gas into the aquarium
through a nozzle on one side. What do you expect
to see? Robert m Hmmm, Well, there's I mean, the
first thing that comes to mind would be watching the

(13:58):
gas flow into the space. But I realized that my
expectations there are based on sort of observations of fluid mechanics,
So I'm expecting more of a floral bloom than maybe possible. No, no, no,
I think you're right. You would you would see the bloom.
You would see first the yellow gas is going to
be clumped up where the nozzle is, and it will

(14:19):
spread out from the nozzle and it will sort of
bloom out in the floral way, like you're saying, into
the space. But over time, let's say you watch this
happen for a few minutes and the nozzle gets shut off,
what would you expect to see a few minutes later,
everything's gonna dissipate and it's going to sort of fill
the space in in an equal way. So it just

(14:39):
maybe be like a what a slight yellowish tint to
the to the vacuum, right, it will disperse in order
to completely and uniformly fill the aquarium containing it. And
according to Boltzmann, the reason this happens is because if
you expect the particles of gas to manifest continuous random motion.

(15:02):
Think about that continuous random motion for every single particle
in that cloud. There are many many more ways for
continuous random motion to make these particles appear to uniformly
fill the aquarium. Then there are ways for continuous random
motion to make those particles do any other particular special
thing like clumping together in a sphere at the center

(15:25):
of the tank. Right, random motion of the particles could
make the particles clumped together in a sphere in the
middle of the tank, But that is overwhelmingly the minority
of the ways that these particles could randomly arrange themselves. Right, Yes,
so all these other formations are possible, but we know

(15:46):
that the just the the the even distribution of particles
is the most likely. Right, It's going to be so
overwhelmingly likely that that's all you're ever gonna see. Randomness
overwhelmingly favors uniform to attributions. Random distributions always favor equilibrium.
And I want to use another image to try to
drive this point home. Okay, think about a black and

(16:09):
white image of ten thousand pixels square in which every
pixel is randomly filled within with either a black pixel
or a white pixel. And let's say you have a
computer program that generates these random pixel fields. So every
time you run the computer program, it puts out a
JPEG that's ten thousand pixels square in which every pixel

(16:31):
space is randomly filled in either black or white. And
let's say you run that program a hundred times. What
are your one hundred images gonna look like? I would
say most of them? Are you just going to be nonsense?
Most of them are just gonna be dots? Yeah, they're
The overwhelming probability is that they will all look exactly
the same. They will be uniform, gray, static. What's the

(16:55):
probability that this computer program is going to turn out
an image that draws a picture of b Arthur juggling chainsaws?
I would say very slim, extremely slim. It's possible that
it could draw that, because there's enough space that a
person could draw something like that in there, But the
probability of that happening is so low that it's never

(17:15):
ever going to happen in our lifetimes. You could run
the program a billion times and you would never draw
that picture. I mean, this is basically the monkeys pounding
on typewriter to produce the words of William Shakespeare exactly right.
But here's the kicker. Let's say you run this program
infinity times. What would it generate? Then? First of all,

(17:37):
we know, like you couldn't actually do this right, because
there would be physical limitations on running a computer program
infinity times. The computer would eventually break down as the
universe tends toward its ultimate fate. Whatever energy sources powering
it would probably run out. Well, let's just say, for
the sake of argument, you could run this program an
infinite number of times. Well, in that case, not only

(17:58):
would it generate a picture or of b Arthur juggling chainsaws,
it would draw an infinite number of those pictures and
an infinite number of variations on them. You'd also get
Scooby Doo juggling chainsaws. You'd also get be Arthur juggling
butterball turkeys. You'd also get the American flag. You'd also
get weird variations on the American flag that just have

(18:19):
like a bunch of clowns drawn on it. You get
every possible picture. You could get an infinite number of times. Yeah,
and in this we're really back in the Library of Battle.
We've discussed on the show before, the idea this thought
experiment of UH an infinite collection of books, not only
all books that exist, but all possible books, most of
which are nonsense. Right, So we're establishing that given infinite

(18:43):
time to try variations, even though randomly assorted configurations of
things will almost always turn up, you know, uniform randomness
that looks like nothing to us, given infinite time, they
will inevitably and infinitely turn up things that are ordered
and look special and look interesting and look like pictures

(19:05):
we recognize. So what happens when we map this back
onto not a computer program drawing pictures, but to say,
particles in a gas cloud will address that when we
come back from this break. All right, we're back. So
we've we've essentially set the stage for order to emerge
from chaos and spontaneously over vast periods of time. Just

(19:29):
based on pure probability, right, order tends to never emerge
from chaos because we don't have enough time to let
that happen. But if you've got infinite time to play with,
then not only could order come from chaos. It inevitably
will there's no preventing it from happening, and it will
happen an infinite number of times. Now, let's go back

(19:51):
to the gas particles we were talking about earlier. I
described this scenario where there is an aquarium where you
pump some yellow gas into it and you just watch
this aloud disperse. Once the cloud fills the aquarium is
just gonna sit there, equally dispersed in the aquarium forever,
and it's never gonna change. For all reasonable scenarios, this
is never going to decrease in entropy and organize itself

(20:13):
into something orderly. No matter how many times you run
the pixel randomizing program in your lifetime, you're never gonna
see anything other than a random field of gray. But
what if you were able to study the yellow gas
in the aquarium for infinity time, Well, then the same
principle would hold true. Right, According to Boltzmann's discoveries, you
can describe the behavior of the particles in a gas

(20:36):
cloud by constant random motion continuous random activity, and so
that means that randomness over time would organize the gas cloud.
If given infinity tries to perform local decreases in entropy.
So over infinite time, there will be moments when the
random motion of gas particles in the in the cloud

(20:57):
will coalesce into a yellow sphere in the middle of
the aquarium, and then into a yellow cube on one
side of the aquarium, and will cause them to write
short reviews of Adam Sandler movies in the gas on
the side of the aquarium and every possible arrangement for
which there are enough particles. Not only that, but again,
given infinite time, the gas will arrange itself this way

(21:19):
an infinite number of times. Now here's the real brilliancy
move of Boltzman. Extrapolate this to the entire universe. Are
you with me, Robert, Yes, Yeah. We're gonna take the
same idea of order occasionally emerging out of chaos, and
we're going to apply it to this universe of ours,
which in which we see order emerge out of chaos.

(21:42):
I want to refer to a graph that I got
from Sean Carroll's website. Sean Carroll is a Caltech physicist
who will be referring to several times in this episode
because he's dealt extensively with the idea of Boltzmann brains
and so he asks you to to go along with
Boltzman's idea of a universe like this to image engine
a graph where on the x axis you've got time.

(22:04):
So as you go along the bottom of the graph
x axis, time develops, and then on the y axis
you have entropy. So the higher up you go on
the graph, the more everything is the sea of sameness,
with nothing special or ordered or interesting or useful. And
then as you go down towards the bottom of the graph,
you get order, you get complexity, you get useful work.

(22:26):
On Boltzman's view, the baseline sort of the ground state
of this universe. What the universe is almost all of
the time is maximum entropy. So imagine the graph has
a line at the very top just going straight across
along the x axis, but at the top of the
graph total maximum entropy, thermal equilibrium. Nothing interesting at all

(22:47):
happens in this universe. It's this vast sea of cold,
undifferentiated sameness. But if you follow this line along the
X axis of time through history, every now and then,
the line will randomly dip down some distance from the top,
because this is due to random fluctuations. Right, A random
fluctuation will produce a lower entropy state, which will then

(23:09):
regress back towards the maximum entropy. So you're so you're
imagining a line going across the top of the graph
and every now and then dipping and then coming back
to the top. Most steps are very small, but some
are bigger, and the bigger the dip, the rarer it is.
But if you let the if you follow the x
axis forever for infinity time, eventually one of those dips

(23:30):
will inevitably go all the way down to the bottom
of the graph, a state of maximally low entropy, which
in functional terms would be like a rebooting of the
local entropy of the universe, giving us tons of order,
tons of specialness, tons of useful energy. It would be
a big bang, a sort of like boom periods in

(23:52):
in complex systems, emerging and coming together. Right. So, what
Boltzman is trying to show is that using his idea
of entropy fluctuation, it's just randomly occurring through infinite time.
You could, in a maximum entropy universe suddenly spontaneously generate
a big bang, which would essentially start the universe over.
It would create a universe with what appears to be

(24:15):
an arrow of time. Now we're almost getting to the brains.
The area of time is no small matter either way
of explaining why we have causality in the universe, right right,
So there they're going to be problems with Boltzman's model,
But this is what he's trying to imagine, is that, Yeah,
so we've got causality in the universe. We've got entropy,

(24:35):
we've got the arrow of time. The universe seems to
develop from one direction to another. Entropy doesn't go backwards usually,
So why does it look like that? Well, maybe it
looks like that because we are on one side of
this dip in the line on the graph. Right, We've
fluctuated into a state of maximally low entropy, and now

(24:56):
we're on our way back to the ground state of
high entropy. This is true if this actually were how
the universe was shaped, and this is how the history
of big bangs developed, one implication would be that though
our universe will eventually cool and dissipate and tend toward
total disorder, there will be an infinite number of other
future universes fluctuating randomly out of equilibrium in the future,

(25:21):
which is maybe kind of comforting. Right. You can imagine
if this line on the top of the graph just
keeps going on, even though our universe may one day
die a heat death, it may one day just go
to thermal equilibrium. It will fluctuate back into existence again.
All right, Well, there's there's hope in that in a
very like distant cosmic sense. Yeah, But there is a

(25:41):
super creepy dark implication if this is the case, and
this is where it turns back in on ourselves and
becomes less this this remote physics thought experiment kind of thing,
It becomes a personal thought experiment when based on our
perceptions are individual perceptions of reality exactly, a high ent
p universe full of dispersed matter and energy, tending toward

(26:03):
equilibrium and lasting forever you're in that state, that's your
ground state. If this were to happen, you would have
infinite time for random fluctuations within the universe to depart
from equilibrium and form not just big bangs, but all
kinds of ordered systems. So you might occasionally get big bangs,
but actually much more frequently you'd get smaller fluctuations creating

(26:26):
smaller objects. So you'd have a mostly uniform random universe
with the extremely rare fluctuation into existence of a fish
with wings, and of a steel ball bearing and of
a glass of lemonade, and even a human brain complete
with memories and ongoing sensory hallucinations. And you're saying, wait

(26:48):
a minute, that sounds far fetched. You're right, it is
far fetched. This would never happen, not in a billion
billion years, unless you had infinite time. And then if
you had infinite time or or a functionally infinite amount
of time, not only would it happen, it's guaranteed to

(27:08):
and it would happen an infinite number of times. That's
the power of infinity. Though. Yeah, it opens up the
possibility for virtually everything to do occur. So, because on
some models of the universe, these brains would be infinite
in number, they would out number normal brains produced on
a cooling planet by evolution. And thus the argument you

(27:31):
are statistically more likely to be a temporary random brain
fluctuating into existence in deep space time then you are
to be one of these normal biological brains produced by
evolution on a rocky planet. The fluctuating brains over the
course of the entire universe's history are more numerous. Thus

(27:53):
you're more likely to be one of them than you
are to be one of us. All right, Well, I'm
with you. I know this can be a difficult thing
to sort of wrap one's head around. I also have
to say that as we were reading over the material,
I found myself hearing the descriptions in my head read
in in the form of the Galaxy song from Monty

(28:15):
Python that people might remember from the Meaning of Life.
How's I go? Uh? You know, so, remember when you're
feeling very small and insecure, how amazingly unlikely is your birth?
You know, like that, I'm I'm singing the wrong part
with the wrong tune, but you get the idea. Yeah,
it's all about the you know, the size of the
universe and how insignificant humans are when you when you

(28:37):
try and factor us into the whole grand design. Well,
I mean that can be a comforting thought sometimes, yeah,
and and and also a terrifying one. You're just like, Wow,
I'm I'm nothing. I had the same situation. Um just
recently my trip to Kauai with my family. We we
we got to see the canyon there in Kauai, which

(28:58):
is beautiful. It's it far grander than one might expect
visiting an island out in the middle of the Pacific.
But I get the same same impression that I get
gazing out at something like the Grand Canyon. There's all
this space, all this emptiness, and it's just it's just overwhelming.
It's so vast, and I just feel so small and insignificant.
And then it's no wonder that small children don't see

(29:20):
what the big deal is, because they can hardly conceive
of of life and death, and therefore the idea of
just a vast, yawning emptiness is just kind of boring
to them. Once you try to conceptualize infinity, it really
does change your perspective on everything, because infinity is an
inconceivable concept. Yeah, and when I'm talking about a canyon,

(29:43):
I'm not I'm certainly not talking about infinity. I'm talking
about a finite amount of space. But it's an amount
of space that is far greater than what I have
sort of baked into my usual world view. Well, it
hints towards infinity. It does to see something much vaster
than yourself and and realize it is also vanishingly insignificant

(30:04):
and in the face of the universe. Yeah, and then
and and the whole area of infinity. We actually have
an episode of two from the back catalog on the
nature of infinity and infinities, talking about the the whole
thought experiment of the infinity hotel. What happens if you
have a hotel with an infinite number of rooms and

(30:24):
then a bus load of of infinite guests show up,
and then a second bus shows up, etcetera. I mean
a lot of these thought experiments about infinity tend to
indicate that there's something wrong with your starting assumptions, and
that maybe actually where we're going with the Boltzman brains here,
hopefully that's what we are. Otherwise you're gonna have to
accept that you are statistically a Boltzman brain and not

(30:46):
a biological organism involved on the rocky planet. So you
might be asking a question like you, I know, I
for a while didn't understand. Wait a minute, why does
this this model of the universe predict more Boltzmann brains
than regular are observers in an infinite universe, wouldn't there
be an infinite number of both? Right? You get an

(31:06):
infinite number of big bangs creating rocky planets, with evolution
giving rise to infinite uh normal biological observers, then you'd
also have infinite Boltzman brains floating in space, fluctuating out
of nothing. Why would space brains, which we have no
proof that they exist, why would they have privileged status
over actual organic brains, which, unless everything is an illusion,

(31:30):
actually space brains. Uh, you know, unless that is the case,
we have definite proof that they exist. If you go
back to our random pixel field program, remember we were
discussing earlier, the computer program that randomly creates images by
randomly filling in one pixel at a time black or
white in a big field. If you give that program
infinite time, how often will it draw a smiley face

(31:51):
on a grid of pixels that's a hundred by a hundred.
And then, given infinite time, how often will it draw
a smiley face on a grid of pixels that's a
million by a million pixels. Both occurrences are extremely rare
in real time, and both will happen an infinite number
of times given an infinite number of tries. But the

(32:11):
one hundred by one smiley face will nevertheless happen much
more often than the million by one million smiley face
because it remires. It requires a smaller number of coincidences.
Here's one for you. Hopefully this is not going too
far off the point, but imagine Connor McCloud from the

(32:32):
Highlander films lives forever an infinite number of an infinite
number of years, infinite number of days. Uh So that
means we need to think how many times is he
going to use the restroom versus how many times is
he going to cut off somebody's head? All right now,
not factoring in the idea that there's going to be
a finite number of immortals, etcetera, just know that those

(32:54):
are two things that Connor McLoud does. If you watch
these films and present that he has normal biological functions.
He's going to use the bathroom and he's gonna cut
off heads. But the frequency uh, at which he goes
to the bathroom is going to be greater than the
frequency at which he cuts off heads, unless unless he's
like a really prolific headcutter. Offer maybe, but I'm still

(33:15):
I'm still going with the assumption that he's going to
urinate more than he decapitates, and you've given an infinite lifespan,
he is going to cough infinite heads and he's gonna
take infinite leaks and infinite poops. But the poops and
the leaks are going to be greater infinities than the heads.
This has been gorgeous. Uh so yeah, So let's extrapolate

(33:38):
that to the universe again. There's an infinite universe full
of stuff in equilibrium and their entropy fluctuations, and those
entropy fluctuations can create things they can create. And let's
say I want to use an entropy fluctuation like that
to create regular human observers the revolution, just like us. First,
I need to get a universe sized amount of matter

(33:59):
and inner g randomly into one place, so will form
a new Big Bang and create lots of useful energy
stars galaxies, which in turn create planets, some of them
habitable on which some are on, some of which intelligent
life will evolve and observe the universe. Again, on this
model that can happen. Random entropy fluctuations are going to

(34:19):
eventually produce big bangs, but because that requires so much
more of the content of the universe to randomly fluctuate
into an ordered state, it will happen far less often
than random fluctuations turning into smaller objects like a fish
with wings or like a brain. So it's actually more

(34:40):
likely and thus more common for a brain to spontaneously
appear in space than for a big bang to spontaneously coalesce.
So what are we talking about when we're talking about
brains in these thought experiments. That's a good question, because
what we're really talking about is observers. Right, you're just
trying to account for the fact that you are able

(35:02):
to be here saying, wait a minute, what kind of
universe am I in? Right? Anything that could say wait
a minute, what kind of universe am I in? Counts
as an observer, So it technically wouldn't really need to
be a biological brain made out of all these weird
fatty cells and neurons, like our brains are made out
of the objects produced by fluctuation that that you supposedly

(35:26):
probably are. Don't have to be brains like this. Brains
are just chosen because their physical objects that we know
from experience can produce the effect of a conscious observer.
But technically, unless I'm missing something, what the Boltzmann brain
logic should actually predict is that brains in the universe
are going to be outnumbered by structurally the most structurally

(35:48):
simple objects containing the smallest number of atoms or the
smallest amount of energy that are still capable of producing
conscious observation, and these objects will even out number the
boltzman On brains that outnumber the normal biologically evolved humans
and other aliens. So in all this you we're not
merely talking say like a self aware nebula or a

(36:10):
living planet, but it could also be something like a
conscious speck of dust. Right. That's contingent on whether or
not it's possible for a spec of dust to be conscious.
We don't know. We we don't know what the minimum
physical conditions for conscious observers are. Of course, fluctuations resulting
in specs of dust of any possible sort will vastly
outnumber fluctuations resulting in brains or computers or conscious watermelons

(36:34):
or conscious horses and space or whatever. There will be
an infinite number of all of them, but there's probably
going to be more specs of dust than there will
be those other things. Of Course, a great takeaway from
this is if this universe is actually the one we
live in, if there actually is an infinite universe or
a functionally infinite amount of time in the universe, then
all mythological beasts, imagined and unimagined, will at some point exist. Well,

(36:58):
there's a silver lining. I guess it depends on who's
an adjative world you're attaching yourself to, you know, if
you're diving into a bunch of Lovecraft and hr geek
or I don't know how how beautiful that ultimately is.
But um, but hey, it means there's there's a planet
of works out there somewhere in the vast, infinite sea

(37:19):
of being God bless the entropy fluctuations. That's just great. Now,
I guess I guess we've got to get to the
big question, which is that we've now outlined this thought experiment.
But does it mean that we have to be convinced
by it? Are we doomed to accept that we are
statistically in fact Boltzmann brains. I want to assure you

(37:40):
some very smart physicists are you know, you don't have
to accept that that's the case, even though it does
seem statistically more likely, because there might be problems with
the assumption going into this thought experiment, and we're going
to explore that later in the episode. All Right, we're
gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back. Alright,

(38:00):
we're back with more brains. Now, these types of thought
experiments about like what an observer can know just starting
from the point of knowing you exist and being aware
of your own consciousness. That this is not originated with
the Boltzmann brain problem. Right, this goes like way back
into history. I know Descartes did stuff like this. Yeah,

(38:21):
Reneed de Carte lived a fift through sixteen fifty. Uh.
He incidentally he died at age fifty three, the same
as Terence McKenna. Oh. Yeah, we were just recording another
episode where we talked about Yeah, he would have relished that. Now,
if if we're to sum up the work of Reneeda
cart And a single sentence, it is of course I

(38:42):
think therefore I am. That's what he's most famous for. Right. Yeah.
Descart was a big fan of using logic and reason
as opposed to using your senses. Right. Uh. And he
was a duelist. He saw the mind and body is separate.
The essence of mind is thought, and body is an
extension of it. Thoughts are not extended into space, but
the body is. He also proposed a thought experiment that

(39:04):
is sort of a forefather to these weirdo space brains.
We're discussing here the evil demon. So he presented this
in his work Meditations on First Philosophy Colon, in which
the existence of God and the immortality of the soul
are demonstrated. That's one heck of a title, that's from one. Well,
a lot of times people forget this. That like what

(39:25):
he's remembered for. I think therefore I am, But that's
for him part of a proof of God's existence. Yeah. Yeah.
It's kind of a case with a number of the
different ideas that he trots out right, and they can
be they can kind of be taken up by either side.
So when he's talking about the evil demon here, he's
it's essentially an exercise in Cartesian skepticism. He presents the
idea that everything that you think you observe could in

(39:48):
fact be an illusion inflicted upon you by an evil
demon as far as you know. Yeah, I mean, another
example he brings up in this is mistaking dream for
waking experience. So, in other words, are perceptions and sensations
they can deceive us. It falls to each of us
to be able to distinguish between true and false beliefs,
not to truly outwit a demon or escape from a

(40:10):
you know, particularly potent dream, but to navigate a reality
full of fallible data and ideas. And it's it's so
another way that's important to remain skeptical, uh, in one's world. Yeah,
I mean this is a this is the thing we
don't usually think about all that much from day to day,
but it is a philosophically interesting foundational question, which is

(40:32):
how much stock do you put in the evidence of
your senses. If you just deny the evidence of your senses,
you're locked into a pretty ridiculous place and you can't
really live a life. Right. But if you say the
it's impossible for the evidence of my senses to be wrong,
then you're opening up yourself to the possibility of like, Okay,

(40:54):
if you're experiencing a hallucination, you're not going to be
able to be convinced that the thing you're seeing is
in fact erroneous data. Yeah. Yeah, the first hallucination that
you experience, the first false memory that you encountered, would
be a potentially of life wrecking occurrence. Now there's a
there's a modern vary end of all this. Uh. And

(41:14):
this was first presented by Hillary Putnam in reason truth
in history in nine it is the brain in a
vat argument to go. Yeah, and you know we we
touched on versions of this. I believe there's a science
fiction story that we discussed by Daniel Dennetts. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
the one where his brain gets taken out of his body. Yes,

(41:36):
I think this story is called where am I? Yes, yeah,
and it uh he had a nice robust sci fi setting,
Uh that went along with this, and it's rather nice.
I recommend reading it. But and that was basically the scenario.
These scenarios usually involved a brain that's been removed from
your body and hooked up to a computer that deceives

(41:56):
you with the experience of being a living, embodied being.
But in Putnam's version, it's very stripped down. There are
no evil demons, there are no evil supercomputers, there's no
mad scientists all you have. Yeah, well, it's stripped down
for a reason because when you started adding in all
those details, you start you start tweaking it and asking questions, well,
how mad was the scientists? You know, you want it

(42:19):
as stripped down as possible to make it more plausible, right, yeah,
And and you all also it will become more obvious
why it so stripped down. But basically, all you have
you have brains, you have thats, and you have a
laboratory supercomputer that stimulates the brains. Anything else would just
be a complicating plot element. Okay, so what does Putnam
think about this? Okay, so well, there's what he thinks

(42:41):
and what the skeptic would argue. So simply put, the
skeptic would argue that we cannot know if the brain
in a vat hypothesis is false, and if it's true,
there's no difference in our reception of reality. Therefore, we
actually don't know any propositions about the external world because
these propositions would be false if the that hypothesis is true.

(43:02):
So the simple version goes like this, if you know X,
and X can be anything. Um, give me an example.
What's what's a truth you take? For granted, water when
heated sufficiently, turns into steam. Okay, if you know that
the heated water turns into steam, and I mean really
know it, then you know that you are not a
brain in a vat. Okay, yeah, okay, but here's the thing.

(43:26):
The second point is you do not know that you
are not a brain in a vat. You cannot prove this,
and so the third point is you do not know
that heated water turns into steam. I must say I'm
quite skeptical of the brain in a VAD argument, but
I mean, I respect, I respect the thoughtfulness of it.
There is a certain logic at work here. But one
thing we should be aware of is that the brain

(43:47):
in a VAT argument is not necessarily a parsimonious starting point,
like the imagining yourself as a brain in a VAT
could potentially be an extravagant scenario that's rather ad hawk. Yeah. Yeah,
And it's also worth noting that there are varying levels
of complexity on these the simple formulas, because, for instance,
Putnam's counter argument was that, yes, we can know that

(44:10):
we're not a brain in a VAT, and we can
do it via basic semantic considerations if on reference and
truth like a right. So the simple version, and this
is a simple version. Again, you can get increasingly complicated
with it. But first of all, if I'm just a
brain in a vat, then my then then my word
tree doesn't refer to trees, Okay, because I'm just this

(44:33):
this is I've never actually seen a tree. Yeah, because
I remember that that very stripped down description of the world.
I didn't say anything about trees. All. I said brain,
that supercomputer. So okay, So if I'm just a brain
in a vat, then my word tree doesn't refer to
trees at all. But consideration number two, my word tree
does refer to a tree. Therefore I am not a

(44:55):
brain in a vat. And again it gets more complicated
from there. They're increasingly more complex ruminations on that concerning
the semantic truth of the of of this whole tree thing.
Wait a minute, so how does he justify that his
word tree does refer to a tree? Because what's it
referring to if it's not? Okay, it's like saying, I'm

(45:18):
not saying that, it's just oh yeah, yes, a simple
sort of nod and go along with the situation. Like
he gets very very very very deep rather fast. But yeah,
it comes down to sort of like the internal logic
of well, essentially your brain, uh and and your reasoning um,
And he's saying, you can sort of you can argue

(45:38):
your way out of that paper sack. Well, you could
say that semantics in a way necessitate externality. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
the fact that we have this, this robust semantic system
to call upon. Now. Of course, we run into various
versions of this, right, various echoes of this and other
thought experiments, such as, say that the computer stance the

(46:00):
computer simulation argument reality. Yeah, the simulation argument often gets
brought up when the Boltspon brain argument gets brought up,
because there are definite similarities between them. Right, and then
we see so many interesting sci fi treatments of this.
We mentioned Daniel then a short story. But obviously the
matrix is an example of one not necessarily a brain
in a vada, but a body, a full body in

(46:20):
a vat that its dreaming a simulated world. Of course,
it's also worth noting that this whole, this whole concept
is is pretty ancient too. Uh. It's I mean of
like the external reality being an illusion. Yeah, yeah, I
mean you can go all the way back to the
Hindu concept of Maya, which which predates all of this. Obviously,
the concept that there's a veil of illusion cloaking the

(46:43):
phenomenal world and it gives rise to false apprehensions about
the nature of self and of cosmos. One has to
see through this veil. In Hinduism, to gain a full
awareness of deep reality or or or Brahmin. Are there
con create steps to how to see through it? Yeah? Well,
I mean that's kind of like where where the whole

(47:05):
religion uh comes through, you know, the idea that there
are there are practices, there are steps, their rights, there
are ways to to achieve this. Uh. There, I'm going
to read a quick line from the Upanishads from the
first millennium BC. This whole world the illusion maker projects
out of brahmin and in it by illusion, the other

(47:26):
is confined. So, you know, a lot of of life
then comes down to like how do I how do
I see out of my illusions? How do I see
see through them and grasp like the true reality of
the world. The irony I think here is that that
is a great project, how do you see beyond your illusions?
But that one of your illusions could be that your

(47:47):
mind has been captivated by a probably false argument that
your world is an illusion. That's kind of the risk
to with the Boltzman sit scenario, Right, are we not
just creating another illusion and our attempt to grasp absolute reality? Well, yeah,
I think some physicists would say definitely yes. So I
think it's time to ask the question, is there any

(48:08):
escape from the Boltzman brain paradox? What would physicists say
about this paradox? Is there a way out of it?
Or are you trapped by the logic of you must
be statistically a brain floating in space. There are several
ways to answer this question. First of all, I think
we should start with something the physicist Sean Carroll points
out I mentioned him earlier. He says, the Boltzmann brain

(48:30):
paradox is quote cognitively unstable, and that means that while
it does seem true to us based on logic and probability,
it also undermines its own foundations. Because if we were
just a random fluctuation of a brain full of memories
and hallucinations of current sense experience, and our lives never happened,

(48:51):
and the past never existed, and all of the premises
on which the statistical argument that you are a Boltzman
brain is based would be hallucinatory and unfounded. In reality,
there would have been no Ludwig Boltzman right. There would
be no guarantee that the universe is one in which
the laws of physics give rise to random fluctuations. Also,

(49:12):
you would have no confidence that you could have real
problem solving intelligence since you've never actually tested it out
against the world outside, you never needed to evolve any
kind of problem solving reasoning. If you really were a
Boltzman brain, there would be absolutely no reason to think
that the process of thought leading you to believe yourself
to be a Boltzman brain was valid or sound. So,

(49:35):
and I could be misinterpreting this, But is that the
idea here that there's too much internal consistency in the
illusion for it too for our lives and our existence
to truly be an illusion of this Boltzman brain. Well,
it's that the argument for the fact that you're a
Boltzman brain is based on premises that you have obtained

(49:56):
through the history of scientific research, and like, the only
reason for you to think you're a Boltzman brain is
because the past did exist and we've done science and
you can use logic and all that. If if none
of that was actually true, and maybe the universe doesn't
have random entropy, fluctuations and all that, then how would
you know you're a Boltzman brain. Essentially, one would be

(50:18):
using maya two arrive at Brahmin, which is the reverse
of the proposition. Yeah, you'd be using something that is
necessarily an illusion in order to discover the fact that
you are an illusion. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. So
it's cognitively unstable. It undermines the very evidence and logic

(50:38):
that allowed us to arrive at the conclusion of the
Boltzman brain paradox. All right, well that works for me.
I'm willing to write that on a postcard and put
it in my pocket and pull that out the next time.
I'm terrified of the brains. Now. I think the way
Carol uses this is not that it necessarily disproves the
Boltzman brain hypothesis, but that it should make us suspicious

(50:58):
of it. That we still have to deal with the
idea that the universe looks like it might generate Boltzman brains.
From a physical point of view, you need to do
something about that evidence. We still have to deal with
the physics, right, So there's another possible answer. The number
of Boltzman brain observers in a universe relative to the
number of normal observers in a universe is determined by

(51:19):
what kind of universe you're in, And we don't know
exactly what kind of universe we're in. We have some ideas,
but there may be ways in which our picture of
the universe isn't quite right because some universes do not
generate more Boltzman brains than regular biological brains. So it
seems reasonable to think that we are likely living in

(51:39):
one of those types of universes that creates more biological
brains than Boltzman brains, and maybe doesn't create any Boltzman
brains at all. So what do those universes look like? Well,
I'd say there are two main ways of approaching this.
There might be more, but there are two main ways
I've come across. First of all, what if the universe
has a different history and ultimate fate. I would call

(52:02):
these states collectively infinity denial. If you live in a
state of infinity denial, they are not infinite or functionally
infinite amounts of time in which Boltzmann brains can arise,
meaning they'll probably never exist at all. I mean, remember
how crazily unlikely this is. You put yourself back in

(52:23):
real headspace for a second. A brain fluctuating into existence
in space unless there are pretty much infinite opportunities, that
is never ever going to happen. So in a universe
that has a fixed beginning and end and does not
have infinite time. Even if it has a very vast age,
you're just not going to see it occur, right, Well,

(52:44):
I mean it depends on how on what kind of
vast you're talking about, Like how many orders of magnitude
you go at some point. Obviously there's not like a
number infinity, but at some point the universe does become
so vast in time scale that you generate Boltzman brains.
But that's a kind of vastness that's incomprehensible to us.

(53:05):
But if there are these infinity denial limits on the
shape of spacetime in the age of the universe, then
Boltzmann brains are dead in the water. And I want
to use one example that Sean Carroll and Kimberly Body
have put forward, which is in their paper can the
Higgs Boson save us from the menace of Boltzmann Brains?
So essentially they explore the possibility that quote, the Higgs

(53:25):
field will decay via bubble nucleation sometime in the future,
dramatically changing the physics of our universe. So, to paraphrase,
the decay of the strength of the Higgs field will
periodically destroy the universe and cause it to transition into
a different type of vacuum with different laws of physics. Now,

(53:48):
that wouldn't be great for us, but that would be
interesting because it would avoid the Boltzman brain problem. Right.
If the physics properties of space change over time due
to the weakening of the Higgs field or or a
change in the Higgs field, then you would potentially have
a universe where there would not be these vast opportunities
in which Boltzman brains could arise. Okay, and again this

(54:11):
is another another scenario that would interrupt essentially the flow
of infinity exactly. And another way you could do this
would be the other side of the coin, which would
be fluctuation denial. What if the universe actually isn't able
to fluctuate a brain or any other kind of conscious
observer into existence, and the only way conscious observers can

(54:32):
come into existence is by regular old biological evolution. And
this comes back to the point you made about we
don't know what like we we don't know the limits
uh and the minimum requirements for consciousness about I think
we're talking about dust spects. Could a dust spect become conscious?
We don't know. But it's also likely that the only

(54:53):
way to arrive at consciousness is via biological evolution. That's
the only way we know about. I mean, there could
be other ways, and so that's one thing. A weird
possibility would be that what if you just like materialized
brains in space, but for some reason, brains like that
can't become conscious, that that's possible, Okay, Then you would

(55:13):
never expect to be one of those observers. Then you
could say, Okay, it's more likely I'm a biological evolved organism.
It's kind of hard to imagine how that would happen,
like why those brains would be denied access to consciousness.
But that's possible, I mean without going down the rabid
hole of consciousness discussions. I mean, you can make the

(55:33):
argument for all the various species with brains on our
planet that are not conscious by various definitions of consciousness. Yeah,
as far as we know. But there's another way of
doing this that goes directly to the fluctuation potential of
space itself. For Bolt Samann brains to randomly fluctuate into
existence in the universe, we need a process by which

(55:54):
those fluctuations could occur. And so if we go back
to our clear plastic aquarium, those fluctuations were explained via
the apparently random motion of particles in a gas cloud
in a closed system. But in the universe, we're not
talking just about random motion of particles in a gas cloud.
We're talking about fluctuations decreasing local entropy, which would be

(56:15):
caused by quantum mechanical fluctuations in the vacuum energy of
space time. I know that's kind of abstract. I I
can't honestly get too deep in explaining what that means,
because that is that is deep cosmology, and it's way
over my head. But basically, the idea is that there
is virtual particle potential in empty space, and that it

(56:37):
appears like empty space has the power to undergo random
fluctuations which generate events and energy and temperature and stuff.
And we definitely observe what appeared to be vacuum fluctuations
in the universe. The solution here is a different way
of interpreting those fluctuations. What if they're not a property
of space itself, but of some other special condition, Like

(57:01):
what if space is not fluctuating, then empty space cannot
create a brain or anything else. And this is explored
in another paper by authors Sean Carroll and Kim Kimberly Body,
also with the author Jason Pollock, called disider space without
dynamical quantum fluctuations, Explaining it on his blog Carol Carol

(57:21):
summarizes this by saying, quote, what we call quantum fluctuations
aren't true dynamical events that occur in isolated quantum systems. Rather,
they are a poetic way of describing the fact that
when we observe such systems, the outcomes are randomly distributed
rather than deterministic lee predictable. But when we're not looking,

(57:43):
a system in its ground state, like an electron at
its lowest energy orbital around an atomic nucleus, isn't fluctuating
at all. It's just sitting there. And in disider space,
an empty space with a positive cosmological constant, all of
the fields are in their ground states. If we were
to probe empty disider space with a particle detector, it

(58:05):
would certainly detect particles, but there are no particle detectors around,
so in fact, the quantum fields are sitting there quietly
in a stationary state with no definite particle number. Therefore,
these kinds of fluctuations aren't really happening. Okay, now does
that defeat boltsman brains? I feel like it. It may

(58:26):
have defeated my brain. Yes, I mean you have to
get into the physics to explain. And again I can't
pretend to explain all of the ideas about the quantum
mechanical fluctuations of the vacuum energy of space. But essentially,
Carol and Body and Pollocure are are arguing that if
you take a certain view of what quantum mechanics means

(58:47):
on the cosmological scale of what's going on with with
quantum mechanics and empty space, then you actually don't have
a problem of fluctuations that could bring objects into random
existence if you've got an dead universe. So the idea
here is, we have a room full of typewriters and chimpanzees,
but most of the chimpanzees are dead. They're all dead.

(59:08):
They're nothing's typing. So yeah, you do have an infinite room.
You've got an infinite room full of infinite monkeys and
infinite typewriters, but none of them are typing, so that's
no fluctuations model. Essentially, Body, Carol and pollic are proposing
an empty, cold universe of space that doesn't produce Boltzman
brains because it is not like the aquarium full of
gas with its random continuous motion of particles. Instead, it's

(59:32):
an empty universe as long as nothing becomes entangled with it,
and it just sits there and does absolutely nothing, and
there are no fluctuations. Now, of course, all that's dependent
on their argument in the paper being correct, which I
am not a physicist. I can't adjudicate, and so I
don't have an opinion on that. But I do think
we've been given enough to consider that will at least

(59:52):
allow me to think I I don't have to be
convinced by the Boltzman brain argument, right Like, I feel
like we have we have some semana and cognitive arguments,
and then we have some physics spaced arguments, even if
they're a bit too lofty for most human brains. So
so we have we have some arguments against it, and
we can kind of pile those up, stack them up,
slip them in our pocket, and feel a little more

(01:00:13):
secure that we're we're not just some randomly hallucinating brain
floating in the cold, dead depths of space. I mean,
if you were, how would you know it? I don't
know you might as well look on the bright side
of life, right, and just assume that we're not enjoy
your a few seconds while you've got them. Yeah, it
might as well keep dreaming. I mean, why would you

(01:00:35):
want to wake up from that dream? But again, that's
kind of the argument of I guess that's the argument
of a lot of of philosophy and religion, right, the
idea that maybe the dream is not worth dreaming. Maybe
this is a dream you want to wake up from.
Maybe maybe it's not a pleasant dream anymore. Maybe the
more pleasant reality would be the uh, the Boltsman brain

(01:00:58):
floating and and uh, you of nothingness. I dissent, I dissent.
I argue that lower entropy is better. It is just
objectively better. All right, Well, hopefully our listeners out there
we'll have some thoughts on all of this. Are you
afraid of the Baltzman brain? Do you? What? How much
stock do you put in some of these arguments for
it and against it? And hey, I'd also love to

(01:01:20):
know just what are some of your favorite sci fi
examples of of this sort of idea? The sort of
brain a brain in a vat, a brain spontaneously generating
out of nothingness, in Space, best Brain in VAP movie's
got to be RoboCop two. Oh god, that is such
a good a good one. You know, why didn't they
do more of a philosophical treatment of that character of Kane?

(01:01:42):
Kane wonders Tom Noonton, Yeah, man, maybe that's in the novelization.
That would be. That would be wonderful. There's a novelization
of RoboCop two. I assume there has to be, like
the timing was right for there to be a novelization,
Is it Alan Dean Foster? Maybe? Maybe? But but that
but you know, that would be. That would be so
perfect if whoever did the novelization spent a whole chapter

(01:02:05):
two just just just really biting into them, the existential
worries of Kine. What am i? Am I really a
RoboCop two? Or am I just the brain of a
psychopath inside of a RoboCop? We've got to stop. You've
got to call it there, all right. Well, if you
want to interact with us, hey, head on over to

(01:02:25):
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Rate and review us wherever you have the ability to

(01:02:47):
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So if you would like to get in touch with us,

(01:03:07):
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