If you move to rescue the child, you will be under stress and no child will end up being rescued.
Boltzmann brains aren’t actually able to put themselves under stress, any more than they can rescue children or even think.
Aside from this, I’m not sure I accept the assumption that I should care about the emotional experiences of boltzmann brains (or representation of there being such experiences). That is, I believe I reject:
If you are a boltzmann brain, none of this is real and you will blink out of existence in the next second. If you think a happy thought, that’s a good thing.
For the purpose of choosing my decisions and decision making strategy for the purpose of optimizing the universe towards a preferred state I would weigh influence over the freaky low entropy part of the universe (ie. what we believe exists) more than influence over the ridiculous amounts of noise that happens to include boltzmann brains of every kind even if my decisions had any influence over the latter at all.
There is a caveat that the above would be different if I was able to colonize and exploit the high entropy parts of the universe somehow but even then it wouldn’t be the noise-including-boltzmann brains that I valued but whatever little negentropy that remained to be harvested. If I happened to seek out and find copies of myself within the random fluctuations and preserve them then I would consider what I am doing to be roughly speaking creating clones of myself via a rather eccentric and inefficient engineering process involving ‘search for state matching specification then remove everything else’ rather than ‘put stuff into state matching specification’.
You’re right, an actual boltzmann brain would not have time to do either. It was just an illustrative example to get you to think of something like pascals wager with inverted near-mode and far-mode.
If you don’t like the boltzmann brain gamble, substitute something else where you have it on good authority that nothing is real except your own happyness or whatever.
It was just an illustrative example to get you to think of something like pascals wager with inverted near-mode and far-mode.
It was mainly the Bolzmann Brain component that caught my attention. Largely because yesterday I was considering how the concept of “Boltzmann’s Marbles” impacts on when and whether there was a time that could make the statement “There was only one marble in the universe” true.
Boltzmann brains aren’t actually able to put themselves under stress, any more than they can rescue children or even think.
Aside from this, I’m not sure I accept the assumption that I should care about the emotional experiences of boltzmann brains (or representation of there being such experiences). That is, I believe I reject:
For the purpose of choosing my decisions and decision making strategy for the purpose of optimizing the universe towards a preferred state I would weigh influence over the freaky low entropy part of the universe (ie. what we believe exists) more than influence over the ridiculous amounts of noise that happens to include boltzmann brains of every kind even if my decisions had any influence over the latter at all.
There is a caveat that the above would be different if I was able to colonize and exploit the high entropy parts of the universe somehow but even then it wouldn’t be the noise-including-boltzmann brains that I valued but whatever little negentropy that remained to be harvested. If I happened to seek out and find copies of myself within the random fluctuations and preserve them then I would consider what I am doing to be roughly speaking creating clones of myself via a rather eccentric and inefficient engineering process involving ‘search for state matching specification then remove everything else’ rather than ‘put stuff into state matching specification’.
You’re right, an actual boltzmann brain would not have time to do either. It was just an illustrative example to get you to think of something like pascals wager with inverted near-mode and far-mode.
It was mainly the Bolzmann Brain component that caught my attention. Largely because yesterday I was considering how the concept of “Boltzmann’s Marbles” impacts on when and whether there was a time that could make the statement “There was only one marble in the universe” true.