If BLEAK really were true, then nothing you do will have any effect on the future in any way whatsoever, so you may as well use the illusion of memory you have in this instant to do whatever seems to follow from those illusions. Not that you have any choice about what to do, since your choices are just as illusory as everything else and you almost certainly won’t exist in the next instant anyway (for whatever anemic meaning “next” and “instant” and other time-related concepts have in a universe with no causality whatsoever)
It’s even worse than the concept of Boltzmann brains, which at least have the epistemic decency of existing in a lawful universe.
you almost certainly won’t exist in the next instant anyway
Maybe I won’t exist as Epirito, the guy who is writing this right now, who was born in Lisbon and so on. Or rather I should say, maybe I won’t exist as the guy who remembers having been born in Lisbon, since Lisbon and any concept that refers to the external world is illegitimate in BLEAK.
But if the external world is illegitimate, why do you say that “I probably won’t exist in the next instant anyway”? When I say that each instant is independent (BLEAK), do you imagine that each instant all the matter in the world is randomly arranged, such that my brain may or may not be generated?
But the whole point of talking about external objects is that they do things and these things sometimes cause you to perceive something (this is the problem with Descartes’ purely extended matter, whose definition doesn’t talk about sensibility, in opposition to the scholastics’ sensible matter. This makes cartesian matter indistinguishable from the merely ideal shapes that e.g. a geometrical treatise might talk about). If the external world consists only in an inanimate snapshot of itself, then there’s no sense in talking about an external world at all. There’s no sense in talking about brains, or atoms, or Lisbon, or any other object. If you can’t shoot with a gun even in principle, if you can’t even hold it, is it really a gun? For this reason, I believe the instants in BLEAK should be understood as pure qualia. And the total population of possible instants, as possible experiences. Now, looking at the neatness of the organization of the first sample, the only one we’ve got, we might be compelled to expect that this wasn’t a coincidence, and the total population of possible experiences is biased towards coherent ones. But this would be like concluding that you must be somehow special for having a very rare disease, when in reality, in a world with so many people, someone or another was bound to get it. In the same way, even if this was a huge coincidence and most instants are pretty uninteresting and nonsensical, why shouldn’t another similarly coherent instant appear to me after millennia of me experiencing phenomenological white noise? And, since in these flashes of lucidity I can’t remember the white noise, but only (some of) the other coherent moments I experienced (since otherwise that would make the instant that contains the memories of the white noise also partly white noise), what difference does the white noise make? And that would mean that these perceptions are not so illusory after all. And I should expect to live normally, just as humans naturally expect. If I try to catch a ball, then, after an eternity of phenomenological white noise I won’t remember anyway, I will actually catch it and continue my life normally, whereas the Boltzmann brain should expect to have abnormal experiences. He should expect to deteriorate and die in the middle of outer space, instead of continuing his normal functioning.
But if the external world is illegitimate, why do you say that “I probably won’t exist in the next instant anyway”?
I never said that the external world is illegitimate. It’s just that in the universe as described, any particular features of it are completely transient.
When I say that each instant is independent (BLEAK), do you imagine that each instant all the matter in the world is randomly arranged, such that my brain may or may not be generated?
Yes that is exactly what I imagine, especially given the clarifying examples in the original post like “In fact, both companies might not even exist in the next instant”. Was this intended to mean that all the people in the companies exist, and the corporate offices with their logos and so on, but just the people experience different things and no longer believe that they’re part of some company?
Also yes, if such a universe covers enough of probability space then you (or someone very like you) may exist again in the future having memories of having experienced something approximating your life to date. In fact, many possible and plenty of impossible variations and continuations of your life to date. The impossible and nonsensical ones (by our standards) will vastly outnumber the possible ones that make sense.
If BLEAK really were true, then nothing you do will have any effect on the future in any way whatsoever, so you may as well use the illusion of memory you have in this instant to do whatever seems to follow from those illusions. Not that you have any choice about what to do, since your choices are just as illusory as everything else and you almost certainly won’t exist in the next instant anyway (for whatever anemic meaning “next” and “instant” and other time-related concepts have in a universe with no causality whatsoever)
It’s even worse than the concept of Boltzmann brains, which at least have the epistemic decency of existing in a lawful universe.
Maybe I won’t exist as Epirito, the guy who is writing this right now, who was born in Lisbon and so on. Or rather I should say, maybe I won’t exist as the guy who remembers having been born in Lisbon, since Lisbon and any concept that refers to the external world is illegitimate in BLEAK.
But if the external world is illegitimate, why do you say that “I probably won’t exist in the next instant anyway”? When I say that each instant is independent (BLEAK), do you imagine that each instant all the matter in the world is randomly arranged, such that my brain may or may not be generated?
But the whole point of talking about external objects is that they do things and these things sometimes cause you to perceive something (this is the problem with Descartes’ purely extended matter, whose definition doesn’t talk about sensibility, in opposition to the scholastics’ sensible matter. This makes cartesian matter indistinguishable from the merely ideal shapes that e.g. a geometrical treatise might talk about). If the external world consists only in an inanimate snapshot of itself, then there’s no sense in talking about an external world at all. There’s no sense in talking about brains, or atoms, or Lisbon, or any other object. If you can’t shoot with a gun even in principle, if you can’t even hold it, is it really a gun?
For this reason, I believe the instants in BLEAK should be understood as pure qualia. And the total population of possible instants, as possible experiences. Now, looking at the neatness of the organization of the first sample, the only one we’ve got, we might be compelled to expect that this wasn’t a coincidence, and the total population of possible experiences is biased towards coherent ones. But this would be like concluding that you must be somehow special for having a very rare disease, when in reality, in a world with so many people, someone or another was bound to get it. In the same way, even if this was a huge coincidence and most instants are pretty uninteresting and nonsensical, why shouldn’t another similarly coherent instant appear to me after millennia of me experiencing phenomenological white noise? And, since in these flashes of lucidity I can’t remember the white noise, but only (some of) the other coherent moments I experienced (since otherwise that would make the instant that contains the memories of the white noise also partly white noise), what difference does the white noise make?
And that would mean that these perceptions are not so illusory after all. And I should expect to live normally, just as humans naturally expect. If I try to catch a ball, then, after an eternity of phenomenological white noise I won’t remember anyway, I will actually catch it and continue my life normally, whereas the Boltzmann brain should expect to have abnormal experiences. He should expect to deteriorate and die in the middle of outer space, instead of continuing his normal functioning.
I never said that the external world is illegitimate. It’s just that in the universe as described, any particular features of it are completely transient.
Yes that is exactly what I imagine, especially given the clarifying examples in the original post like “In fact, both companies might not even exist in the next instant”. Was this intended to mean that all the people in the companies exist, and the corporate offices with their logos and so on, but just the people experience different things and no longer believe that they’re part of some company?
Also yes, if such a universe covers enough of probability space then you (or someone very like you) may exist again in the future having memories of having experienced something approximating your life to date. In fact, many possible and plenty of impossible variations and continuations of your life to date. The impossible and nonsensical ones (by our standards) will vastly outnumber the possible ones that make sense.