Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.
I’ve opened a new “Sandbox” thread as a post as the new “ignore commenter” plug-in only works on threads started as posts.
You missed my argument that it’s impossible for a BB to presuppose the Christian God. I can’t grant this claim till you respond to it.
and of course no one is arguing that BBs or universes are infinite.
peace
Yes, of course. I mean look at all the research dollars and thecnology being developed to detect and document the BB phenomena.
How hot should the wood stove be for spitting to be a reliable indicator of a hot or cold stove?
Yes of course as well as all the many times in my life where I discovered my mind wasn’t playing tricks on me. Happens all the time. More often than not actually.
It is the conclusion being correct or incorrect that is of more concern. the mind concludes based on sensory input and prior experience. Optical illusions exist. However, I’ve never experienced an imaginary car illusion while trying to cross a street. Experience tells me I can trust my senses/eyesight to detect the presence or absence of a car/truck/airplane in close vicinity making a crossing either an acceptable risk or not. My experience in this regard has proven quite reliable.
so reliable, in fact, I pass this experience onto smaller and younger models of humans. I even see other individuals doing the same thing. Imagine that.
Huh? What of you mean by ‘mental isolation’?
Well you don’t actually know that you only know that I have told you that is what I do. I could be lying.
However, the answer should be obvious if you’ve read my entire response.
If the medium is expanding, there’s even less likelihood of a BB forming. You need particles in proximity. If OTOH that expansion is irrelevant, why mention it?
gezze
You can’t detect BB phenomena. BBs are the inevitable result of a universe with no end.
Any evidence whatsoever that our universe will not stop expanding is evidence for BBs
depends on what you call hot.
Generally spitting works to show whether a stove is hot enough to make a difference… In my world anyway
How do you know it was not playing tricks?
Perhaps it was playing tricks and you just did not figure it out.
peace
How do you know this? How do you know you are in fact crossing the street and not dreaming the whole thing.
Please don’t say by trusting your untrustworthy senses and reason
How do you know what you think is experience is in fact experience and not imagination??
Please don’t say by trusting your untrustworthy senses and reason.
I mean the idea that everything you think is real everything outside your own mind is just the fruitful imagination of a BB.
Of course I don’t know you are not lying but I assume you are not because them are the rules 😉
I don’t know what lying would accomplish however.
It’s not the expansion per say that is evidence for BBs it’s the increasing unlikelihood of a subsequent contraction
peace
Why not?
No not really. See Alan’s response.
No it isn’t about me. Your the one with the spitting clam.
make a difference in what? How much tea is grown in China?
Experience. that and standing on the shoulders of knowledge of those who have come before me.
Or not.
What does claiming you know something when you don’t accomplish?
What would it matter if it were all just the imaginings of a BB. the richness and experiences conveyed would be satisfying enough. the experiences of growing up, relationships with others, growing old with someone, sex, training the dog to do parlor tricks etc appear to be all us BB need for a satisfying existence. Who could ask for anything more!
It lets you keep from thinking about the implications of your plight for a while I suspect.
I don’t know for sure what you might get out of it that is why I ask you “how do you know?”
weren’t we talking about burnt fingers ??
what claim is that? The claim that spitting on a stove will tell you if it’s hot?
you have really never spit on a stove have you 😉
Or imaginary experience and imaginary shoulders
The question is given your worldview how could you possibly know the difference between the two things?
Again it’s much more likely to be the case that your mind is playing tricks everyday and all the time sans God AFAIK
peace
Is that why you did it?
It would simply mean that you could not claim to actually know any thing at all.
The problem is that you do constantly do claim to know stuff. That is what the fuss is about.
That is sort of my position. The difference for me is that since God exists I can have all that and knowledge too!!!!!!!
peace
You mean your repeated failures to demonstrate the unreliability of my senses and reason?
Yeah, your inability to demonstrate what you insist you have demonstrated doesn’t concern me at all. Imagine that.
Did what??
I never AFAIK claimed to know something that I did not in fact know.
You on the other hand 😉
peace
Allan Miller,
Allan and I went back and forth on this in Torley’s BB thread, so I will give my current thoughts once and then stop.
As promised in that BB thread, I did ask Sean Carroll for more details on the process for creating BBs as an input question to his AMA (open to Patreon subscribers only). Unfortunately, Sean had a cold and had to stop the AMA before he got to my question.
I had not read the article of his that I linked in my previous post in this thread when I posted in the BB thread. Now that I have, I would rephrase or correct some of what I posted there.
In response to Allan’s points in his posts in this Sandbox thread:
See pages 9-11 for why the basic explanation of why pre-QM physics predicts BBs in the far future. The following section of the paper goes into more detail about how this explanation did not work under QM cosmology until we discovered dark energy. Under our current best understanding of dark energy, BBs again become possible for similar reasons to pre-QM physics. Sean does explore in detail some possible cosmological counters to this conclusion, but rejects them as our current best cosmology (otherwise he would not need the rest of the paper!)
The physics that matters to justify BBs is Statistical Mechanics. SM is our best understanding of how the macroscopic phenomenon like brains occur in a universe governed by laws which are time-symmetric. Since SM involves probabilities, the probability of a BB occurring by the process Sean describes in bigger than zero, although very, …, very small.
See section 5.3 of the linked article for why Sean C does believe we are living in the Ordinary Observer phase of the universe. Sean’s reason for believing this is given by David Albert’s argument based on “cognitive instability”.
I thought we were talking about those lyin eyes or lying mind. Fingers are either burnt or they aren’t.
Again how hot does the stove have to be for spitting to be of importance in the decision tree of touching or not?
Simple. It is pragmatic to do so. Look both ways before crossing is a good adage to live by in both imagine land and non-imagine land. I see many others that share the same view. How about you?
Nope not the case at all but I get that believing that is important in order to maintain your belief system.
I still don’t see how that makes BBs more likely, assuming you are talking about them being made of existing ‘stuff’. The universe could continue expanding indefinitely but with all galaxies consumed by widely separated black holes, for example. Just saying ‘Long Time’ doesn’t make the impossible possible. People need to be a lot more rigorous about physical conditions.
I don’t need to demonstrate that. I’m not even trying to demonstrate that
You know your senses and reason are often mistaken.
Often mistaken equals unreliable in this context.
That is before we even begin to address things like BB and EAAN and schizophrenia and mental disability or sensory disability.
If you can add all that up and can’t get to unreliable you are not thinking about it hard enough 😉
peace
You have no idea if I am telling the truth about crossing the street and looking both ways. Yet you claimed to ‘know’ that I do. Are you now claiming that you never made that statement?
You might believe it is the case that I look both ways before crossing the street but you do not know if that is actually the case.
BB aren’t impossible unless there is more to minds than physical stuff in fact they are more likely than human brains.
If you think that BB are impossible and at the same time think that minds are just physical things I would love to hear your reasoning.
peace
What does that even mean? Does often mean >50% or perhaps 100%? 10%? How unreliable are our senses?
Trying to count the frequency of misses while ignoring the frequency of hits is a fools errand.
You got me there Aristotle
peace
Right, that much I understand. What I don’t understand is how to make sense of Boltzmann brains in terms of Friston’s free energy principle. In the BB scenario, the universe is at maximum entropy thermodynamically speaking, so there’s no energy available for work. How can mere quantum fluctuations carry out any neurocomputational tasks?
I’m pressing this point because FMM is insisting that a naturalist needs to be able to explain why she’s justified in believing that she’s not a Boltzmann brain. If I understand the idea of BBs, though, it’s physically impossible that anyone could be a BB, because Boltzmann brains couldn’t perform any computational functions.
Reliable minus 1 = unreliable.
No, you determining that because as far as you know you’ve been right more in the past than not, you are right this very time with out giving a reason is a fools errand.
It would be like saying that because the Patriots have won 3 of the last 5 Superbowls they are a lock to win next years and calling off the season.
peace
You are just declaring that without evidence. I say they are impossible in black holes, because matter is not even in an atomic state. I also say they are impossible when matter consists of widely spaced particles of mass-energy. Persuade me otherwise.
Even in those purely imaginary locales where the materials are present in reasonable proximity, you have to get them into an appropriate configuration without them following thermodynamic gradients on the way, just to have a thought (or 60 years’ worth of them in my case). I think that is impossible. I also think brains are just ‘made of stuff’. These positions are not incompatible.
In other words: 100(reliable)-1(unreliable)= 99(reliable) or 99% reliable. I like the odds!
I’ve given you my reason. Haven’t you been reading my comments?
no, not like that at all.
No there are many BB scenarios and not just 1
Wikipedia mentions
Via quantum fluctuation
and
Via nucleation
There are single-Universe scenarios and Multiverse scenarios and eternal inflation scenarios and scenarios we have yet to think of.
Because BBs are more simple than a human brain with all the associated structures all that is necessary (sans God) for a BB to be more likely than a human brain is for thermodynamics to apply
peace
Saying BB are possible is not the same thing as saying that they are possible everywhere
You are assuming a universally uniform distribution. That is not what we would expect. Lets say we live in an eternally expanding universe where matter is 99.999999999999999999999……% uniformly distributed. It would still be a vastly more likely that you are a BB instead of a real human.
peace
Your reason unless I missed somthing is because you trust your senses and reason.
I’m asking you why you trust them given that they are demonstrated to be unreliable.
Give me a reason to trust your senses and not just a “well they are not totally unreliable AFAIKT”
peace
Is that what our experiences with BBs suggests is true?
BruceS,
Something I was going to mention to you: Boltzmann’s ‘ideal gas’ is an approximation. It breaks down for dense gases. Unless SM has accounted for this in detail since, (I know next to nothing about it!), then my suspicion is that intuitions have been exported to solid systems without warrant. Real atoms must be moved around to assemble structure. They get in each other’s way, and they react. The idea that all microstates are serially accessible, or even possible, breaks down for solid structure, where the atoms themselves interact in a way that does not occur in ‘ideal gas’ models. Now, I don’t know to what extent ‘ideal gas’ thinking affects the argument on BBs, but I suspect it does to a significant extent. It’s dangerous to multiply up an approximation to this astronomical degree.
SM is statistical, sure. But consider a broken pot. Place the pieces close together and disappear for a few power-to-the-power years. Will this ‘statistically’ generate the original pot, with absolutely no sign of the breaks? How? How do the bits even move, when entropy has max-ed out, and if they do happen to get edges aligned how do the atoms meld to invisibly mend and recreate a continuous matrix, as if the pot were never broken? You’ve done most of the work – you’re not even trying to conjure up a pot from atoms; you’ve got the bits!
We can’t trust our experiences because reason based on experience has lead us to conclude that BBs are more likely than human brains ….
That is the point. Can you really not fathom what is being discussed here?
peace
You evidently missed something.
They also have been demonstrated to be reliable. More reliable than not which even your own math model supports.
reliable minus 1= unreliable; therefore the senses must be more reliable than unreliable.
Plugging in some numbers and using your mathematical model suggests a 99% reliability versus 1% unreliable.
If the universe consists of nothing but black holes, everywhere is inimical to their formation.
Quite the contrary. I am assuming lots of space and the odd black hole. In one scenario at least.
You are just handwaving. What is the nature of matter in the regions where BBs form?
You’ve concluded that BBs exist, inevitable you’ve said, not I.
Since “unreliable” means “reliable minus one,” then the question is beginning to look like “why do you trust your senses, given that one time you mistook a trash bag for a cat?” or “why do you trust your intellect, given that one time you divided 236 by 24 but forgot to carry the two?”
the same goes for human brains
Then there are no human brains in your scenario either.
If human brains are possible at all BB are more likely
I don’t know, but if human brains can exist there then BB are more likely.
That goes for any scenario in any universe that you can imagine
peace
Nope, this is just wrong: reason based on experience has not led us to conclude that Boltzmann brains are more likely than human brains. Boltzmann brains are entailed by some assumptions currently being debated amongst cosmologists, and no one has yet settled the issue. In fact I’m increasingly skeptical as to whether they make any sense at all because (apparently) none of the cosmologists who have been toying around with the idea have consulted with neuroscientists.
No practically inevitable in a expanding universe sans God.
I don’t believe BB exist because I believe that minds are more than physical things and that humans are created in the image of God. You don’t have the luxury of that particular BB defeater
peace
It’s not about cosmology it’s about thermodynamics .
Is a very simple BB more likely thermodynamicly speaking than a human brain with the associated structure and history? If not why not?
It’s not about neuroscience it’s about universal Turing machines and the output of a very simple one is exactly equivalent to all the others no matter how complex it just takes a little longer to calculate.
peace
So? Do there need to be? I am trying to imagine high-entropy futures. That’s not where we live.
That doesn’t follow.
1) You are assuming that your understanding of “where we live” is correct. It might not be. It’s probably not if you are a BB
2) Why are you singleing out a particular future? Is there some reason to believe that BB can’t form here and now? If they can form here and now how do you know you are not one?
Why not?
BBs are simpler than human brains thermodynamicly speaking.
All things being equal simpler equals more likely.
If you can think of a reason why human brains could be possible and BB not I would love to hear it.
peace
I ‘don’t get it’ because it’s wrong, a non sequitur. I’m not trying to ‘justify knowledge in general and don’t need to do that or ‘assume the existence of knowledge’ to know things. You admit that I know things. We agree about that. You think that requires justifying or assuming the existence of knowledge in general. You are simply wrong about that.
Sure. Everything that is reasonable could be false. Everything I think I know and everything you think you know, we might neither of us really know. That is the human condition.
But one of us understands that nobody has to know how knowledge is possible for knowledge to be possible, and the other can’t grasp that and has delusions of grandeur about revelations to boot. Can you guess which is which?
If you are a BB, the physics governing your existence is highly unlikely to be the same one you imagine. Thermodynamics may not even be a thing. This is one of the big flaws in BB thinking. And also, you need a lot more rigour than ‘probably’. Your argument seems to be ‘I can imagine BBs therefore BBs’. That is easily refuted by negation, because I can’t.
The usual form of the argument is that BBs arise by fluctuation from thermodynamic equilibrium, given enough time. We are not in thermodynamic equilibrium, and there would not appear to have been enough time for the probabilistic argument, that almost impossible things are inevitable if you wait long enough.
If I was one, ‘here and now’, and the physics thereof, would be a product of my imagination, with no causative impact on my own formation.
You’ve done a survey, I take it. 🤔
…and yet my simple BB mind has constructed an entire universe of my imagination, including a complex imaginary brain, physics, mathematics (a subject I barely understand!), chemistry, sequential memories consistent with growth. I can imbibe imaginary alcohol or other drugs and imagine my faculties impacted. That’s quite some work for a Simple Mind. Wherever I go, the illusion remains consistent. I imagine dreams, where this is not the case.
But if BBs are possible, faulty ones will vastly outnumber working ones. All the memories in the wrong order, sensory inputs inconsistent such that I can’t touch the things I see or see the things I touch. And of course being a mere thermodynamic fluctuation, most BBs will wink out a microsecond or so after forming. My confidence in not being a BB grows all the time, and it started pretty high.
Human brains were not even possible without 4 billion years or so of evolution on a planetary surface orbiting a star, all the while following thermodynamic gradients with entropy increase. My own development needed food, and more. There is no ‘therefore’ connection to BBs, short-lived thermodynamic fluctuations against the normal entropic arrow.
Perhaps you could explain why the physics that permits humans must inevitably produce BBs – particularly at the same time?
Cool then we don’t have a lot to talk about here. Perhaps we can interact later on another topic
How do you know this? 😉
seriously It depends on what you mean by “requires”.
Knowledge does not need justification in order to exist.
It does need justification in order for you to know it exists.
That is because knowledge is justified true belief. If you don’t have justification you don’t have knowledge concerning your belief that knowledge exists.
My justification for knowledge is the Christian God of scripture. I believe you know things because God reveals things to you. My belief is justified because God being God can reveal so that you can know.
You don’t have that particular option. Your belief in the existence of knowledge requires a different justification in order to be considered knowledge instead of just belief.
I’m asking for that justification. You have said that you are not interested in offering a justification so we are done AFAICT.
From the perspective of your worldview all we have is your unjustified claim to go by.
So if a BB claimed to have knowledge of the world outside his mind he would be mistaken, correct??? Can we agree on that??
He would be correct that he knows he is typing but he is mistaken to claim he knows anything about the world outside his mind.
That is because he is not justified in believing that there is a world outside his mind.
Do you follow?? If not why not??
I never once said that you had to know knowledge is possible in order for knowledge to be possible. I have said just the opposite probably a hundred times. Yet you are still claim that I am saying that.
Now I want to know why you have this blind spot you can’t get past.
peace
Right BB don’t really know anything much at all but they think that they do.
No my “argument” is that BB are more likely thermodynamicly speaking than human brains plus the associated structures. That is because BB are simpler
I’m not sure I’d call it an argument though it’s blatantly obvious.
I’m really not concerned about how BB arise.
The important thing is that they are more likely to arise than human brains
Yep, if your brain is just a Universal Turing machine then a BB can do everything it can do it just takes a little longer.
We all know of individuals who live their entire lives under one illusion or another. You think my belief in God is just an illusion. It’s as comprehensive as your belief in the outside world if not more so.
If I am under such an illusion and my brain is a universal Turing machine then a BB could do it just as well.
Right, that is exactly why BB are more likely to exist than human brains are.
peace
walto,
Walto
I think you should focus your attention on the example of the kid who claimed to know that her father was angry and at the same time that he was dead.
I think that you were getting closer to you getting it at that point.
Does she know her father is angry or not?
What if she offered a valid justification for the belief that her father is angry? Does she know it then?
What if she does not understand why her two beliefs are contradictory? Does her lack of understanding mean she knows her father is angry?
peace
No, I meant the BB argument. (Though I rather hope you’re joking, you don’t seem to ‘do’ humour).
That’s something of a mangling of the actual BB argument. You may have your own private version of ‘BB’, but you should probably call it something else if you don’t want people talking at cross purposes.
It is not at all obvious that a structure which constructs the entirety of its reality is simpler than one which simply perceives and experiences one external to it.
You’re not interested in how they arise, but you are sure they arise? One still has to ask: How? Imaginary structures with no means of actually being instantiated are a bit arcane, don’cha think? It is rather vital to something’s existence that it be possible. If we are to argue about their relative frequency, surely we need to know something about their constraints, about the parameters under which they are favoured?
You have no interest in how they arise, yet feel able to make a definitive statement about their relative frequency…
Trying to shoehorn something you appear only to think you understand into the conversation. It’s irrelevant bafflegab.
If I’m a BB, there are no other individuals, so I can draw no lessons from their imagined illusions, which are constructed by me.
What’s God got to do with this? You try to bring Him into every conversation. It’s like you’re obsessed.
That is a non sequitur. If the only known way of making brains is as I outlined, it does not follow that a form of brain made by unknown means is more common.
…
A general thought here: while you may be perfectly OK with it yourself, someone from a school of thought that generally has a massive problem with simple-system abiogenesis can dislocate its jaw and swallow spontaneous brains wholesale. I am perplexed.