Maybe a Boltzmann brain with my specific mental states is more likely than a universe containing a real brain with my specific mental states? As you can tell I don't understand this very well, but I just wrote 7 TF:AR entries (only 44 to go!) so I get to babble for a while. Maybe Kris has devoted some thought to the problem; it's the sort of creepy idea that would keep him awake.
Update: This weblog entry seems to be saying that I don't understand it because I don't believe the underlying argument about the structure of the universe. If I did believe that argument I'd understand Boltzmann brains, and then immediately agree that the whole thing was ridiculous and change my mind.
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(1) Thu Jan 17 2008 22:37:
I hadn't heard about Boltzmann brains before reading this NYT article, but I knew vaguely that inflation was making cosmologists come up with strange ideas. It's a great idea, and one that deserves to be explored in fiction, but I don't understand why a Boltzmann brain is supposed to be more likely than an orderly universe containing billions of real brains. If I'm reading it right, a Boltzmann brain and a universe are both possible results of a random fluctuation in the meta-universe. But a Boltzmann brain is very complicated and a universe is just a set of initial conditions. Basically I'm a computer programmer and the instructions for a universe that will eventually contain brains seem a lot simpler (therefore more likely) than the instructions for a brain. The universe is a lot larger than the brain, but if these things are budding off from the meta-universe I don't think our concepts of size are relevant.
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