Space and Indecision

[spaceandindecision]

Boltzmann brain thoughts

The concept of the Boltzmann brain has a completely important and legitimate role in serious science. On principle, we ought to derive a theory from principles which minimize the chance that we'll be wrong given what we know. If the phase space of the universe is infinite, then great, we don't need to worry about Boltzmann brains. But if the phase space of the universe is finite, then a random walk in that phase space would create a density map Mj of the phase space after j steps, and all of these density maps would converge to what I could only imagine would be a canonical way of defining the density of the phase space. I would define a Boltzmann object to be a typical instance of a given kind of object emerging from a thermal equilibrium. For example, a Boltzmann cat would be a cat floating in empty space that's probably barely functioning. It would certainly be more likely for a cat's brain to be floating in space than for a whole cat to be floating in space, hence the concept of the Boltzmann brain. I think it's perfectly valid to imagine Boltzmann objects as well. Overwhelmingly, Boltzmann creatures would outnumber non-Boltzmann creatures. Even more specifically, Boltzmann creatures experiencing what we now are experiencing would vastly outnumber non-Boltzmann creatures experiencing what we are now experiencing. In other words, if we committed to such a theory, then we must conclude that we are most likely a Boltzmann creature despite the evidence to the contrary. Okay, so why are we probably not Boltzmann creatures in reality? Well, when we form a theory we should commit ourselves to any principles we might know of which would increase the chances that our theory is correct. Here is a really simple principle that makes perfect sense: Conclude that you are a Boltzmann brain (with eyes) if and only if you see what appears to be a high entropy state of the universe. If you see what appears to be a state of the universe significantly out of thermal equilibrium (other than yourself), then conclude that you are not a Boltzmann brain. Imagine that we live in in a universe where the phase space is finite, and there are Boltzmann brains everywhere. If every being capable of it,  in that universe, adopted the principle mentioned, then overwhelmingly they would almost all correctly conclude that they were Boltzmann brains (with eyes), because almost all of them really would be and would be observing empty space. On the other hand, this principle would lead a nonBoltzmann brain to the wrong conclusion. But this is a small price to pay, because the principle leads almost all instances of creatures to the correct conclusion. In other words, the principle works extremely well in a universe with hordes of Boltzmann creatures. Of course in a universe where there are not hordes of Boltzmann creatures, the principle also works extremely well, and in our particular case (as beings not seeing empty space) would lead us to the correct conclusion.

Now, does this mean that a person placed into a vacuum, perhaps inside of a space station, would need to worry about whether or not they were a Boltzmann brain? No. They would have memories of seeing low entropy states, and with a similar principle they could reasonably conclude that they were still not a Boltzmann brain. The general concept is to look for peculiar evidence of a low entropy state of the universe that exists other than those configurations which are apparently important to your ability to analyze and ponder the theoretical implications of Boltzmann brains. For example, even a Boltzmann brain wondering if it was a Boltzmann brain would have a certain order, and complexity, and so on. And this would be no mystery to the Boltzmann brain (if it pondered enough), because in order to even have ideas about Boltzmann brains and to experience a visual field (we assume there are eyes for now) requires a pocket of low entropy. The point is to not expect evidence of any additional, unnecessary low entropy configurations. Something as simple as a memory about being a child would be a peculiar low entropy configuration, as the state of your memory being in such a precise configuration has almost nothing to do with your capacity to analyze the problem of Boltzmann brains.

In the next section I go deeper into pondering Boltzmann brains by trying to imagine them and their possible trajectories of self-reflection.

Of course we experience hordes of evidence that we did not emerge from a state previously in thermal equilibrium. We are not Boltzmann brains, but it might be possible to put someone in our world into a situation where they really might convince themselves rationally that they are a Boltzmann brain, or at least heavily entertain the possibility. The requirement would be to scramble or otherwise change the chemical behavior of their brain in such a way that they are unable to discern any evidence of peculiar low entropy states existing, but are still able to wonder about whether or not they are a Boltzmann brain. My best guess as to how to achieve this state in real life would be to first inform a person about Boltzmann brains until they understood what they meant well enough to introspect on their own about whether or not they were a Boltzmann brain. They should be very comfortable with the concept. They would then be instructed to ponder this question while they were in some way induced with a combination of drugs and environmental changes that lead to ego death or severe loss of memory, to the point that they no longer knew who or perhaps what they were. Additionally, their environment might be bombarded with noisy signals (such as white noise). If you can’t bombard one of their senses with noisy signals, then just deprive it of any signals at all. With some luck, and the proper treatment, they will find themselves in a state of not knowing who they are, and of observing a noisy universe. The last requirement is that they somehow remember to think about whether or not they are a Boltzmann brain. If they do, then they might think they are a Boltzmann brain. However, they would still only believe this if they were deceived. One might argue that the very fact that this person is experiencing noisy signals in different ways is evidence that they have either an unnecessary sensory apparatus or an unnecessary computational feature. After all, the only requirement for the principle is that our being can ask of themselves with comprehension the question: am I a Boltzmann brain? Most Boltzmann brains wouldn’t experience anything more than a kind of abstract self-awareness and understanding of the Boltzmann problem. From the outside a Boltzmann brain would most likely be a small and cold molecular system floating in low radiation space. It almost certainly would not be a brain consisting of cells and neurons, but it might be organic. From the inside it would be essentially thoughts in a void. We could imagine that some might have small radiation sensors, or experience some kind of form of motion or of statistics in order to be able to begin to grasp basic concepts of physics and mathematics. They might undoubtedly experience some interesting things, but there would be a theme of minimalism. 

The implications are that while humans might convince themselves, in some very specific situations, that they are Boltzmann brains, they are not experiencing what a typical Boltzmann brain would experience. Human experiences have far too many features compared to a typical Boltzmann brain. We could go the other way, however, and try to create a simulation of a Boltzmann brain. Of course, at our current time in history, there are too many conceptual gaps in our understanding of the world for us to create anything resembling a Boltzmann brain. There is, however, always a nonzero chance that there will be some planets with intelligent aliens that create one or more authentic Boltzmann brain “replicas”. These might be called pseudoBoltzmann brains. The implications of pseudoBoltzmann brains are too numerous for me to cover, but I will go over the key points.

Let’s go back, for a moment, to the universe that we’re in, that we are pretty sure is not a fluctuation from a thermal equilibrium. Although it is likely somewhat rare, we know that it is possible for a biosphere to emerge from a single organism, and then produce a species that later creates pseudoBoltzmann Brains. The emergence of pseudoBoltzmann brains takes place in a universe while it is transitioning from low entropy to high entropy. The pathways through phasespace to these pseudoBoltzmann brains require the formation of some degree of hierarchical complexity, but they really exist. I could debate all day about why they exist but I won’t do that right now.

We can of course define a new kind of Boltzmann brain called a 2-Boltzmann brain, which is aware of the concepts of both Boltzmann brains and pseudoBoltzmann brains, and wonders which one it itself is. At this point we could go on in a similar manner to define a k-Boltzmann brain, although generalizing this to infinite ordinals is ill-advised as it leads to a pointless anarchy of thoughts. 

The most important thing I wanted to point out is that pseudoBoltzmann brains exist because some nonBoltzmann brains understood the Boltzmann brain problem and then, perhaps out of curiosity, decided to create a pseudoBoltzmann brain. In other words, I just wanted you all to know that, yeah, somewhere in the phase space of our universe there is a little tiny, little faint distortion...a tiny conspiracy of physics: a subset during the transition from low entropy to high entropy consisting of brains which were created by Boltzmann brain enthusiasts as Boltzmann brain “replicas”, and these brains are wondering whether or not they are a brain which emerged from a Poincarre recurrence event in a universe with a finite phasespace which had previously been in a state of thermal equilibrium at some point in the past. And now I’m festered by the abstract disease persisting and spreading in my mind, and now I’m regurgitating it online and it might infect others. What if this infection is actually a significant symptom of a society that just might lead to the creation of a pseudoBoltzmann brain at some point in the future? I mean, if nothing else is certain, then surely I’m just increasing the probability that a pseudoBoltzmann will one day be created, or even worse. And that means that I’m not only discovering this abstract concept, but I might be simultaneously a symptom of its true physical manifestation. And isn’t it a little bit weird that some organisms have evolved the capacity to try to understand how it is that they have came about, and in the process they discover that they are completely a part of the thing they are studying. I have quite a few thoughts on that as well, but I’ll stop here.

So anyway, the Boltzmann brain problem is important in physics. Its implications are actually very profound. At this point I’m aware that I could probably say anything other than Boltzmann and everyone would be happier for it. I apologize for scattering his name about like a high pressure gas in thermal equilibrium. In my view, he was a completely brilliant person, and I appreciate living in a time when I can learn about his ideas. 

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Some depressed thoughts

There exists some space of all possible mental experiences. Each of us, at any one moment explores one point of that space: one mental experience. A typical human mental experience consists of a great synthesis of sensory information, thoughts, emotions, and so on. Mental experiences can be anything you can imagine experiencing, and more. Is it possible to perceive and comprehend shapes in Graham’s number of dimensions? Not in this universe, but in theory yes. At least it’s possible unless you believe there is some special limit to the number of dimensions which can be appreciated by any possible being under any possible physics. Maybe a less controversial example would be eyesight. Even within the confines of this universe’s physics, the upper-bound on how good eyesight can be is large. You could have a creature with trillions of eyes on its body, and perhaps even great thin spikes covered in eyes. The brain of this creature might be enormous, or alternatively it might be small but incredibly efficient. The sensory neurons on this creature could be very numerous and very complex, and it could all be integrated within its mind and then analyzed. Imagine what kind of a mental experience such a creature would likely have as it gazed upon a frantic environment. It could see all of the electromagnetic spectrum in astounding details of depth and colors and shades. It might integrate and “witness” more sensory information in a second than all of earth’s organisms ever have combined, and all through its eyesight alone.

Anyway, where was I? You have this great space of possible mental experiences, which is either infinite or very large. It turns out that some mental experiences consist of various states of misery and suffering, while others consist of various states of happiness and pleasure. Now on earth you have all of these beautiful creatures which are capable of wonderful mental experiences. Upon inspection, however, it turns out that those beautiful creatures are miserable, and hateful toward each other. They destroy each other constantly, for all kinds of reasons. Mostly it’s for survival, such as killing for food. Other than that, a lot of it is over some kind of conflict. You also have features of the environment which maim, kill, and frighten many creatures. You also have disease, starvation, dehydration, poisoning, and so on. 

The creatures that exist now did not evolve for good mental experiences. They evolved mainly to survive and procreate in a dangerous world with finite resources. It fucking sucks being a part of this biosphere. I would prefer to be free of this. It’s because of fucking recycling. All the shit that dies ends up being nutrients for something else. It would be bad enough if life on earth was just a malicious infection that spread over the globe, exhausted everything, and then ate itself until it died and decayed. But no, we recycle. Instead of exhausting everything and finally putting an end to this miserable world, we have formed a vast community of organisms who, after feeding on the dead remains of others, turn those dead remains into something more juicy for another organism which will eventually eat it. So we are a malicious infection frantically growing and dying in a sea of misery. Some lives aren’t great. You’re not even sure when it started, but when it did you had no idea what was going on. Eventually bad things start happening. You’re taken to your limits and beyond, and tested. You are beaten as you develop fears, hatreds, sorrows, coping mechanisms, habits, behaviors, and so on. For some people it just saps away their capacity for enjoyment altogether. Then life continues in this way to be a struggle, and ends with death. Anyway, I’m getting really caught up on the details. The point is that life arose on this planet from an ocean of chemical reactions. There’s no God who made us. There’s no mother of life. There are no souls waiting to be reincarnated. The universe does not conspire to help us. We’re a chemical reaction that got out of control on a tiny isolated planet. At this point we are the infection that is fighting and destroying itself while at the same time consuming its decayed remains to keep the ocean of misery and death storming.

Worse than that, in general relativity there is the interpretation that the universe is in a 4-dimensional Minkowski spacetime block. In reality the universe is not shaped like a block; the word block here is only meant to convey the notion that in this view the universe exists persistently across all of spacetime, just as a block exists persistently across all of its parts. In other words, every moment of our lives is trapped eternally in this universe. And let’s get serious, no one has seen an end to the universe. What we can say is that the observable universe is not the whole universe. There are galaxies which are leaving the observable universe. In order to claim those galaxies are disappearing you would have to think that there was something special about the earth’s location in the universe that we just happened to be positioned where every galaxy a certain radial distance from us is disappearing as it crosses the boundary. Those galaxies still exist, but they are now too far away for us to reach, even if we were immortal and traveled at the speed of light. For all we know, the universe might go on infinitely. There are even some models of cosmology where our universe might be one of the products of an eternal inflation process. For all we know the universe might be akin to a pathological mathematical structure. Mathematics is useful for describing the universe, and we know that mathematics can go to very bizarre realms. 

There could also be more universes out there. I fucking hope that some of them are full of creatures, or whatever life is like there, that are happy, and either get along or have no need to interact. I would even be satisfied with some of them being isolated gigantic self-aware creatures who are unimaginably happy because they have the intelligence and capacity to maintain their environment and to modify their own mind into a mind that goes through states of unimaginable happiness. Maybe in our universe, or in another universe, there are highly intelligent, altruistic, and empathetic species that reach a point where they can engineer systems that are conscious and ecstatically and persistently happy. Perhaps they might even change themselves to be more like these systems.

Anyways, this could go on for a while, but that’s it for me, for now. The point is that I’m diagnosed depressed, that sometimes I think life on earth sucks, and that I hope this situation is not representative of how things are for all the aliens that might be out there.

[spaceandindecision]

Introduction

The main purpose of this tumblr at this moment is to work on my writer’s block. I read and think a lot, but I don’t communicate a lot. By putting my thoughts into writing I can hopefully begin to lessen the inhibition I feel during the writing process. Another purpose is to potentially communicate with others on topics of interest.

I am a white male who is nearly 27 years-old. I live a fairly solitary lifestyle that is centered around video games and internet. I’m not in the mood to do a splurge on the details of my life at this moment, but I have had problems with depression. It is no real secret that spending time on the internet is a form of escapism for me. I happen to enjoy most people’s company. I often enjoy talking to people, even though I do it rarely.

I have various interests such as mathematics, science, human experience, philosophy, nonhuman experience, and so on. To be clear, I believe life originated from natural forces acting on their own.

I need to sleep, and normally I would delete this post, but that would clearly be a step backwards from my goal. I’m going to lie down and just think until I fall asleep.

[spaceandindecision]

My first rant

I just watched a documentary about people having romantic and sexual relationships with objects. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qnIpkiBTTM

It was a surprise for me, but apparently this is something that happens. At first, I’ll admit, I’m an asshole. I laughed. I laughed because it was unexpected and different. Sometimes people will say things a bit unexpected, possibly odd, and you aren’t sure how they would like you to react. I usually react with acknowledgement or curiosity. Those are safe bets. Laughing works sometimes, but it’s a gambit. If I’m by myself though, then I enjoy a good laugh. I’m not going to lie, when no one is looking over my shoulder, I’ll laugh at whatever I feel like laughing at. I’ll worry about any weird cognitive dissonance later. It’s too stressful, for me, to monitor my laughing in my private time. 

Anyway, after seeing all of this documentary, let me tell you, the topic of this documentary is no joking matter. These people, by all appearances, are deeply in love with various objects such as bridges, towers, buildings, rails, fences, and so on. These objects are also the centers of their sexual fantasies and activities. That might sound like enough, but these people (all women in the documentary) also focus, apparently, on their beloved objects and discovering new objects as at least a significant hobby. The point is that this isn’t just a mild excursion into object loving. This is a very emotionally, physically, and temporally intense part of these people’s lives. 

Okay, let’s talk about whether they are crazy or not. Look, first of all, the word crazy doesn’t have a clear definition. They appear to act out rationally when you consider what it means for them to be in love with an object. I don’t believe that the objects are sentient and communicating to them. The very most I could currently entertain is the idea that maybe there’s some strange “something to be like” essence to certain systems of particles and so on, but if there was, then it wouldn’t involve cognition or anything like that. It would probably be ineffable. Anyway, I believe whatever these people are experiencing, it’s real. I just don’t necessarily believe that it’s real in the same way that they might believe it’s real. In other words, I’m skeptical that an actual bridge is sentient and communicating to someone. On the other hand, I’m fairly convinced that, if they say the bridge is talking to them, then from their point of view the bridge really is, in some meaningful fashion, communicating to them. So the disagreement would be that some would say the messages are coming from the bridge, while I believe that the communication is taking place within the brain inside her head. Okay, that’s my guess. With all that said, it doesn’t strike me as terribly odd that someone would believe objects can communicate to them. I would probably suspect that they had some kind of mental disorder, but I think people are starting to realize that having a mental disorder isn’t a rare thing. And look, I’m just using the word mental illness as a category of recognized conditions of the mind that some people experience. This isn’t an analysis project on what a mental illness might mean exactly. If you are depressed, then in my own personal internal language you have a mental illness. That doesn’t mean that I think your negative rants about the world and life are delusional. Far from it. I myself don’t know whether the world is a shithole or not, but I do know that horrifying levels of suffering and misery exist. 

Anyway, I’ve gotten really off-topic. Let’s maybe summarize a few things real quick. I truly believe in their love and devotion to these objects. I think, even though it’s not something that I can personally imagine, that it makes sense. And you can see the feelings of immense heartbreak in these people that they’ve felt over how people have treated them. Not only do most or all of them have very rough upbringings, but they’ve been treated by many as outcasts and freaks for no reason other than that they love objects. You can see the emotional pain they feel over being forced to separate away from certain objects, and from being looked down upon or viewed as alien. For me, yes, their taste in sexuality is alien. I mean I fucked a pogo-stick when I was ten years-old, but only for the mechanical stimulation. Anyway, that part is alien to me, but I totally believe that it is real. But other than that, these people seem like they have thoughts and emotions that I could relate to. If they were off in their own world living happily, then that would be great, but instead they have serious ridicule and hate directed their way. It’s seriously messed up. You can tell that these people have deep emotions and that they are severely impacted when someone forces them away from an object they love. It’s not like the object they fell in love with is your purse, or your shoes. Their behavior with these objects is either benign, or inspiring. One woman became a world-renowned archer with the bow she loved. Another could play the organ wonderfully. What if there was some person who fell in love with a programming computer and worked on something important with it? Would you want to damage that or treat that person badly? As I said before, these objects are not just the center of their romantic and sexual lives, but apparently the center of their hobbies and spare time as well. 

So anyway, this documentary fascinated me and captured my imagination. These people seem like they’ve gone through a lot, and there’s some totally unnecessary ridicule, misunderstanding, and hate that gets sent their way.