Probability combined with the law of large numbers combined with the realities of cosmological scales of space and time entails some very weird things. Which are nevertheless certainly true. I’m not speaking of Nick Bostrom’s bizarre argument that we must be living in a simulated universe (Are you Living in a Simulation?), which doesn’t really work, because it requires accepting the extremely implausible premise that most civilizations will behave in the most horrifically immoral way imaginable, and for no practical reason whatever (in all good sense, by far almost all sims that anyone will ever generate will be games and paradises, not countless trillions of aimlessly tedious worlds with thousands of years of pointless wars, holocausts, plagues, and famines). Rather, I’m speaking of Boltzmann Brains.
If the universe were to slowly expand forever, even if it were to fade into a heat death of total equilibrium, even then, simply due to the laws of probability, the random bouncing around of matter and energy would inevitably assemble a working brain. Just by chance. It’s only a matter of time. Maybe once every trillion trillion years in any expanse of a trillion trillion light years. But inevitably. And in fact, it would happen again and again, forever. So when all is said and done, there will be infinitely many more Boltzmann brains created in this universe than evolved brains like ours. The downside, of course, is that by far nearly all these brains will immediately die in the icy vacuum of space (don’t worry, by far most of these won’t survive long enough to experience even one moment of consciousness). And they would almost never have any company.
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But the worlds lucky enough to get them will experience some pretty cool, or some pretty horrific, fates. In some, this god will be randomly evil and create civilizations just to torment them for fun (and let me reiterate: this may already have happened; in fact it may already be happening right now, in universes or regions of spacetime vastly beyond ours). In others, this god will be randomly awesome and create a paradise for his gentle children.
…
This will happen. It probably already has happened. It probably is happening as I type this. It’s a logically necessary truth.
…there are an infinite number of identical copies of you on an infinite number of identical copies of Earth. You all always make identical decisions.
…there are an infinite number of identical copies of Earth, except that each of them is also occupied by Thor.
…as above, but it’s the Thor from Marvel Comics.
…there are an infinite number of Earths with alternate histories because they have dragons on them.
…on an infinite number of those Earths, the dragons are all nazis.
…billions of times every second, an infinite number of identical copies of you spring into existence in the depths of space and immediately die freezing and suffocating.
…there are an infinite number of people who are just like you except they’re serial killers.
…identical copies of everyone you love are being tortured to death right now.
…by identical copies of you.
…there’s still no god.
…there’s no hope of ever fixing the universe’s horrors, because if it were possible it would have been done already.
…an infinite number of identical copies of me are hoping that the universe isn’t infinite.
Maybe you’ll enjoy the following as well:
Which reminds me of the following:
Bostron’s Quantity of experience: brain-duplication and degrees of consciousness comes to the rescue again. Beware of basilisks (the ones here are different, but no less numerous).
Thanks, but those are significantly less interesting.