Hacker News Reader

Comment by daseiner1 | Hacker News Reader

My chief complaint is that it’s functionally equivalent to belief in God. It strikes me as fundamentally the same instinct but reinterpreted in a manner palatable to the “i’m very logical and rational” crowd.

View on HN

Belief in God implies some effect on one's behavior, unless you believe in a completely impersonal Prime Mover that retires thereafter.

The notion that one is a Boltzmann brain doesn't really change anything. If you are, there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. So the only sensible thing is to assume that you aren't, regardless of probabilities.

I've seen a paper (probably by Bostrom) deducing normative statements ("oughts") from the simulation hypothesis (purely descriptive, "is"). Namely: the grad students running these simulations are more likely to switch off boring simulations. Thus, if we want to keep living in this world, we should strive to make it interesting.

I must say, with Trump, Brexit, war, and more Trump: Well done, folks!

Our world is boring though, cf Boötes Void. Those transcendental extrauniversal aliens invented quantum physics, what do you expect them to believe? If their world can create such immense simulations, maybe it's because their world is too fabulous and they look for serenity.

I don't agree. A belief in a god/gods generally also includes beliefs about what that god(s) wants or does. A Boltzmann brain would have no special powers apart from what a (very) specific arrangement of particles would have. There's no hint of them operating outside physics at all.

Also, there is at least a connection to experimental physics in that we can measure "virtual" particles (e.g. Casimir effect) and can calculate their probabilities etc. There's no such underlying experiment for God(s) that I'm aware of.

I think BB is bigger than God. God still has specific ways, while BB can simulate all experiences given infinite time, in parallel. So the universe where God exists and he will burn us in hell for atheism and mastrubation is just a tiny subset of what BBs can do. Cause if BBs are possible, they can do things a human cannot imagine about any God. Imagine a cubic meter randomly enumerating all quantum states within it, forever, ignoring consciousless ones.

Well, a BB may well be bigger than our conception/imagining of God(s), but there's a fundamental difference - BBs are constrained by physics etc whereas God(s) are supernatural and not constrained by physics.

That’s an interesting idea I’m not sure I agree with, it’s hard to formulate why, but I’ll try.

God itself can be supernatural, but feels like it can only affect a limited part of any universe due to the limitations in observer’s mind. If we could expand BB size indefinitely up to the size where it stays coherent (light milliseconds?) then that would basically cover everything that a consciousness itself could experience. This makes God infiniteness sort of redundant and unclear why it would be needed to generate a universe.

This echoes with my vague idea that hypothetical FGH-sized beings are indistinguishable from God(s) whose infinite part could actually create more issues than it might solve.

Iow, we have to define some Continuum of reality for God of omega+ size to operate on, not to mention Proper Class sized God. Our ancestors really overkilled this idea, but little did they know. So maybe we should take its infiniteness as “anything imaginable by an arbitrarily-sized BB” rather than its naive infinite meaning.

I'm thinking that there's a difference between God(s) and the conception of God(s). Any BB will be limited by e.g. speed of light which will limit how big they can get and still have coherent thoughts. I suppose we could get a super-massive Borg type of BB collective, but they're still limited by location/speed etc. God(s) would presumably not be bound by such limitations. (Not that I happen to believe in God(s)).

It really depends what is meant by "the same instinct".

The reason I don't agree with the parent comment is because to truly believe in a Boltzmann brain would seem maximally nihilistic.

Many people truly believe in God/gods at their deepest level. While the Boltzmann brain is an interesting thought experiment, I don't think anyone really takes it to heart the same way a Christian believes in Jesus.

Even while I would probably give the Boltzman brain a far greater probability than most, people don't go around telling other people this is all just a momentary, random fluctuation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com