I read the wikipedia article, but I just don’t get it…
In: 37
The underlying idea is that the laws of physics perfectly permit any collection of atoms to form some kind of structure capable of sapience, purely by happenstance. It’s vanishingly unlikely, but very much possible.
You can’t tell if you’ve actually experienced your whole life, or if you’re just a weirdly shaped lump of molecules in an asteroid belt somewhere that just randomly came into existence with all of its memories included.
The real gimmick of the theory is that if the universe is infinite, then there are infinitely many places for that random formation of consciousness to occur, so it’s actually _likely_ that you’re a Boltzmann brain rather than, well, you.
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