2025 new p99 Gold server

[bcbrown]

Originally Posted by Jimjam [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

That reminds me of Feyman’s many paths but on a larger scale.

Are you talking about Feynman diagrams?

I've never made that connection, but now that you mention it I certainly see it. Have you read his book QED? I think you'd really like it.

I came across this idea in an absolutely insane book, Time's Arrow by Huw Price. The argument goes something like this. Imagine a shoebox filled with white and black stones. If you first place all the white stones on the left side and the black stones on the white side, after you shake it up they'll all end up jumbled. If you shake it again it'll stay jumbled. This is kinda what entropy is: ordered arrangements of matter tend towards becoming disordered over time. It's possible that if you shake the box it'll end up sorted with all white on one side and black on the other, but it's very unlikely.

This is what we mean by the "arrow of time": certain things tend to become more disordered in the future, and more ordered in the past. You'll never see a broken egg on the floor leap up and reform whole in your hand, even though it's physically possible for that to happen. Price's argument rests on the fact that our brains are physical arrangements of matter, and our memories are stored in that matter. Since it's vanishingly unlikely that the arrangement of matter could ever be as ordered as it was in the past, it could actually be more likely that the random perturbations of matter somehow formed such that we have a memory of a well-ordered past than that the well-ordered past actually happened.

Originally Posted by Cecily [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Kinda neat but simulation theory also feels like a secular version of religious escapism. Why I'm a big fan of nihilism to occam's razor all that shit into it does not fucking matter.

Yeah, I feel similarly. If a theory doesn't make any useful predictions that can actually prove or disprove the theory, it's not really worth spending too much time on. Can be fun to think about but in the end doesn't really matter.

[Ekco]

Originally Posted by Cecily [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Kinda neat but simulation theory also feels like a secular version of religious escapism. Why I'm a big fan of nihilism to occam's razor all that shit into it does not fucking matter.

yeah, as grey matter increases we create more and more complex belief structures as a defense mechanism against the great long sleep, next evolutionary leap will be merging all the abrahamics together like in Dune and remixing some AI in there and Hindu godheadism.

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it's chim i ain't gotta explain shit.

[Ekco]

Let's see what randomly arranged man-made horrors beyond our comprehension result from using the Boltzmann Brain paradox as a prompt

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[shovelquest]

but like what would it randomly create itself out of?

[bcbrown]

Originally Posted by shovelquest [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

but like what would it randomly create itself out of?

Two possible ways. The first is out of ordinary matter the same as what we are made of. Just a bunch of atoms sloshing around in space and at some point, however unlikely it may be, they all slosh around in just the right way to create the physical structure of a brain.

The second way is through quantum fluctuations. Quantum mechanics, an addition to being famously incomprehensible, is famously counterintuitive. There's a phenomenon called quantum tunneling where a particle can go from point A to point B without ever being in between. Imagine a mug full of coffee sitting on a table. Quantum tunneling would be like if the coffee could somehow travel from inside the mug to outside, on the table. Over time the mug could gradually empty out, not from evaporation, but from "leaking" out through the impermeable sides of the mug.

Perhaps even more counterintuitively, even in a completely empty vacuum, particles are constantly being created and destroyed. We all know about the law of conservation of matter: matter can't just be created out of nothing. But imagine that this law was enforced by a policeman who doesn't have eyes in the back of his head. You can create particles out of nothing when he's not watching as long as you destroy them before he turns around to look at you. You can have, for example, an electron and a positron created out of nothing that fly apart and then come back together to annihilate each other. The time scale where this can happen is something like 10^-20 or 10^-40 seconds.

This exact mechanism is how Hawking Radiation works. Stephen Hawking worked out how these quantum fluctuations, if they happen close to the event horizon of a black hole, can result in one of the two particles getting sucked into the black hole while the other escapes. This results in the black hole slowly losing mass over time.

So the other mechanism to forming a Boltzmann Brain in completely empty space would be through quantum fluctuations creating enough particles out of empty space.

[Sadre Spinegnawer]

Originally Posted by bcbrown [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Two possible ways. The first is out of ordinary matter the same as what we are made of. Just a bunch of atoms sloshing around in space and at some point, however unlikely it may be, they all slosh around in just the right way to create the physical structure of a brain.

The second way is through quantum fluctuations. Quantum mechanics, an addition to being famously incomprehensible, is famously counterintuitive. There's a phenomenon called quantum tunneling where a particle can go from point A to point B without ever being in between. Imagine a mug full of coffee sitting on a table. Quantum tunneling would be like if the coffee could somehow travel from inside the mug to outside, on the table. Over time the mug could gradually empty out, not from evaporation, but from "leaking" out through the impermeable sides of the mug.

Perhaps even more counterintuitively, even in a completely empty vacuum, particles are constantly being created and destroyed. We all know about the law of conservation of matter: matter can't just be created out of nothing. But imagine that this law was enforced by a policeman who doesn't have eyes in the back of his head. You can create particles out of nothing when he's not watching as long as you destroy them before he turns around to look at you. You can have, for example, an electron and a positron created out of nothing that fly apart and then come back together to annihilate each other. The time scale where this can happen is something like 10^-20 or 10^-40 seconds.

This exact mechanism is how Hawking Radiation works. Stephen Hawking worked out how these quantum fluctuations, if they happen close to the event horizon of a black hole, can result in one of the two particles getting sucked into the black hole while the other escapes. This results in the black hole slowly losing mass over time.

So the other mechanism to forming a Boltzmann Brain in completely empty space would be through quantum fluctuations creating enough particles out of empty space.

But you realize, the implication really is that all those laws you cited are part of this insta-brain. You say "enough particles." That assumes that some remnant of what we instantly phase into existence corresponds to non-instantaneous brain and/or some other substance.

This is why Boltzmann went nuts. Everything you mentioned, assumes the reality of what could more efficiently, be a transient hallucination of nothing.

[bcbrown]

Originally Posted by Sadre Spinegnawer [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

But you realize, the implication really is that all those laws you cited are part of this insta-brain. You say "enough particles." That assumes that some remnant of what we instantly phase into existence corresponds to non-instantaneous brain and/or some other substance.

This is why Boltzmann went nuts. Everything you mentioned, assumes the reality of what could more efficiently, be a transient hallucination of nothing.

I'll be honest, I have no idea what you're talking about.

[Sadre Spinegnawer]

Originally Posted by shovelquest [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

but like what would it randomly create itself out of?

Something is a statistical probability of nothing, as it turns out. We don't know and we can't know, what nothing is. Just try. It doesn't work. Next job interview, pull a Schulz.

[bcbrown]

Originally Posted by Sadre Spinegnawer [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Something is a statistical probability of nothing, as it turns out.

Succinctly put!

[Sadre Spinegnawer]

Actually, you could go far with that approach these days. Bad example.