Author: Paul Ratner / Source: Big Think
- Boltzmann Brains are hypothetical disembodied entities with self-awareness.
- It may be more likely for a Boltzmann Brain to come into existence than the whole Universe.
- The idea highlights a paradox in thermodynamics.
The paradox of the Boltzmann Brain can really pull the rug from under you if you follow it to all of its logical and illogical extents.
This mind-churning idea proposes that the world is quite possibly just an effect of your disembodied consciousness and doesn’t really exist. And your sense of self is just a statistical fluctuation. It’s something that is more likely to come into existence by chance than the Universe that would have had to produce it.So are you really a Boltzmann Brain? Let’s look at the underlying thinking.
Our Universe is extremely vast and complex, still filled with as much of the unimaginable as what we have already figured out. It has laws like an arrow of time that seems to be flowing only in one direction. It’s got planetary bodies of various shapes and sizes. It also has us, humans, nature’s supreme creations (at least according to us). But all this amazing amount of varied matter is also very hard to pull off, requiring a tremendous amount of energy. We know that generally things tend to fall apart and decay.
What the influential Austrian physicist Ludwig…
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