Thursday, September 12, 2019

Disproving the Boltzmann Brain with Evolution

The Boltzmann Brain idea is that the thought in your brain at this very moment could be the result of randomly bouncing particles (e.g. particles in a soup or gaseous state). So maybe you're not actually here reading these words. Maybe the universe we know, the milky way, and earth doesn't actually exist. You're just a product of a momentary serendipity of particles randomly bouncing in a very specific way which just so happened to correspond to this exact thought you're thinking of, about reading these words. The past didn't actually happen.

Proponents of the Boltzmann Brain idea claim it's way more likely you're a Boltzmann Brain than a real brain, because there must be such a surplus of disordered particles (like randomly bouncing gas) that surely the thought in your brain is a result of one of those processes rather than one which takes millions of years.

My counter to the Boltzmann Brain is that the estimated probabilities are all wrong. Yes, there is a non-zero chance that a bunch of randomly bouncing particles suddenly, out of nowhere, produced the very specific complex thought your brain is thinking right now. But there is a far greater chance that they did it with a more gradual process. The particles became stars and planets. Some of those particles became chemicals, which became rudimentary life, which eventually evolved into humans, which became you. I contend that the latter scenario is way more likely than the former scenario, and the reason is evolution.

If you think about it, once you have the most basic form of life and DNA (or really just any self-perpetuating thing that mutates and can thus be subjected to natural selection; it does not have to be DNA as we know it), there becomes an arms race for greater awareness and intelligence for survival, and it's only a matter of time before the emergence of interesting and sentient life. In other words, once you have the scaffolding for evolution, life will naturally tend towards higher and higher complexity, just as surely as water falls downward, or as entropy increases in a closed system.

What is more likely: That a group of particles spontaneously formed a thought, or that a group of particles spontaneously formed the barebones scaffolding which allows for pre-single-celled life? We know that a thought of a brain is extremely complex, whereas all that's needed for evolution is some basic form of information which can be passed on and mutates once in a while -- this starts a snowball effect whereby intelligence has a high chance of arising naturally and is practically inevitable. Thus, taking evolution into account, it seems far more likely that you evolved out of more basic building blocks via a long and gradual process, than that you're a Boltzmann Brain.

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