This seems to be really hitting on an issue that is only marginally related to Boltzmann brains and is made more confusing by the really counterintuitive stuff about Boltzmann brains.
Whenever one is trying to make any anthropic argument one has to ask what is an observer? If one believed in ontologically irreducible observers (something close to the classical notion of a soul in many cultures) this wouldn’t be a problem. The problem here arises primarily from the difficulty in trying to understand what it means for something to be an observer in a universe where no observer seems to be irreducible.
Incidentally, I sometimes think that the Boltzmann brain argument is an argument that something is very wrong with our understanding of the eventual fate of the universe. The essential problem is that the idea doesn’t add up to normality. I don’t know how much this should impact my estimates at all (such as whether it should make me slightly doubt current estimates that say we won’t have a Big Crunch). Anthropics can be really confusing.
I think you’re right—if there was a homunculus of some kind somewhere, then the problem apparently goes away (well, it goes inside the homunculus where it remains as unsolved as ever.) What is clear is that the complexity of our thoughts can’t exist in a small enough partial brain, it needs the whole thing to be there—just as with the PC. The complexity is perhaps being hidden in the fiction of continuing to provide the inputs?
The problem can be solved by considering that only one moment needs to be statistically accounted for at a time and then the next moment becomes statistically just as likely as the one before, associated only by anticipation and memory, existing completely independently however by its own random nature. The frequencies of conscious experience range only 5-50 per second, much much less of a data burden than say a planck level simulated reconstruction of an entire physical universe exactly required to create those moments for that lifetime. http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/in-no-time
This seems to be really hitting on an issue that is only marginally related to Boltzmann brains and is made more confusing by the really counterintuitive stuff about Boltzmann brains.
Whenever one is trying to make any anthropic argument one has to ask what is an observer? If one believed in ontologically irreducible observers (something close to the classical notion of a soul in many cultures) this wouldn’t be a problem. The problem here arises primarily from the difficulty in trying to understand what it means for something to be an observer in a universe where no observer seems to be irreducible.
Incidentally, I sometimes think that the Boltzmann brain argument is an argument that something is very wrong with our understanding of the eventual fate of the universe. The essential problem is that the idea doesn’t add up to normality. I don’t know how much this should impact my estimates at all (such as whether it should make me slightly doubt current estimates that say we won’t have a Big Crunch). Anthropics can be really confusing.
UDT does anthropics without reference classes.
I think you’re right—if there was a homunculus of some kind somewhere, then the problem apparently goes away (well, it goes inside the homunculus where it remains as unsolved as ever.) What is clear is that the complexity of our thoughts can’t exist in a small enough partial brain, it needs the whole thing to be there—just as with the PC. The complexity is perhaps being hidden in the fiction of continuing to provide the inputs?
The problem can be solved by considering that only one moment needs to be statistically accounted for at a time and then the next moment becomes statistically just as likely as the one before, associated only by anticipation and memory, existing completely independently however by its own random nature. The frequencies of conscious experience range only 5-50 per second, much much less of a data burden than say a planck level simulated reconstruction of an entire physical universe exactly required to create those moments for that lifetime. http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/in-no-time