Vastness
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Mar 10, 2006
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This thread, probably, is best taken as a fun perspective based on some reading I've been doing recently and the apparent implications for the nature of reality.
I don't make any claims as to the actual likelihood of this being the case - and, as with all efforts to understand what exactly reality is, knowing this will not make much difference to how we live our lives, not should it, necessarily.
Anyway - recently been doing some reading about Boltzmann Brains:
To summarise - if the material universe arose from a localised quantum fluctuation in the false vacuum that is the substrate of our cosmos - and we know that quantum fluctuations occur on much smaller scales all the time - we should expect that far less complex objects should spontaneously pop into being at a much higher frequency than an entire universe. This being the case - I refer again to the quote above, for emphasis - it is more likely for a single brain to spontaneously and briefly form in a void (complete with a false memory of having existed in our universe) than it is for our universe to have come about in the way modern science thinks it actually did.
A pretty fascinating idea in itself. Since these brains would only exist for likely an infinitesimaly small moment - their very existence a mere random pattern on the surface of the aether - it's perhaps likely that a single unit moment of consciousness is all that is experienced, and therefore the duration of the existence of the entire imagined reality built up from within it. To start off a little easy before veering into the progressively more insane - it provides a pleasingly literal version of a cosmology in which it's ALWAYS TRUE that the moment is all that exists.
To expand upon the insanity a little, I've also been reading recently about quantum entanglement, and specifically, how it relates to time - time might be an emergent phenomenon of whatever mystery lies behind quantum entanglement.
This may not be the only interpretation - but it's one that makes sense to me, and is at the very least, one possible interpretation. This potentially means that the arrow of time is, truly, an illusion - temporal events are not occurring in sequence, in truth, but their actual distribution is impossible to discern - they could be distributed across vast volumes in space, higher dimensions, and other "layers of reality" for want of a better word, which we currently have no conception of. We know that entangled particles can remain entangled independent of distance, and can be entangled across both space, and across time (I admit I'm having trouble understanding how cross-temporal entanglement fits into the idea of time itself being an emergent phenomenon of quantum entanglement, unless there is some kind of "objective time" on top of this... but I don't think my lack of a complete understanding will diminish the thought experiment I'm going to posit in a moment).
Referring back to Boltzmann brains, a typical conception perhaps is that if the universe is a simulation within one of these, the brain in question is essentially the brain of a god, and thus capable of imagining our entire reality, and all of us within it.
An alternative explanation however, is that all of us are Boltzmann brains, and we also inhabit a shared reality. I posit that the Boltzmann Bulk (a term I just coined now, obviously borrowed from the Brane Cosmology of string theory - let me just quickly nutshell the pertinent point):
Each of these brains simulates reality for a moment - just one moment - before it flickers out again - but it is likely not the only brain experiencing this reality. I posit that entanglement phenomena are at play here, that the as yet unexplained nature of quantum entanglement will serve as a link between different brains imagining the same reality from a different perspective - but at the same moment. These moments do not have to flow in sequence. Assuming there is some kind of "objective time" being proposed here, the imagined end could come right at the beginning, the middle at the end, and everything all scrambled in between - but they will still be ordered in time by their entanglement - all experiences of a single moment, isolated lights of consciousness as we understand it flickering incessantly in the void, every flicker an entire universe, but also only a single moment. Other moments can exist though - entanglements can occur across time and across space. Of course - when we are all fluctuations in the void, experiencing reality moment by moment - the time between one moment, to the next time the unique pattern of our consciousness flickers back into being, but one moment advanced, and again, the subjectively "later" moment could objectively appear first.
But there's no time limit here - and potentially know limit to space - for the purposes of this thought experiment - the upshot is that we could all be conscious beings, interacting with each other - but still all exist within our own universe, separated by inconceivably vast stretches of time and space.
I want to requote that last sentence because it's just so important and somewhat mindblowing to me that this has been studied rather than just being an interesting and oft-quoted piece of wisdom.
Time is an emergent phenomenon for internal observers, but absent for external observers.
If we are all Boltzmann Brains flickering into existence moment by moment - it could be a billion years or more for an outside observer where your existence is just not an active part of objective time, but a dormant piece of greater reality. A friend you speak to and have known for years, might not actually be born yet - to an external observer, the Boltzmann Brain containing the imagined reality of their birth moment might not happen for several trillion years after the Boltzmann Brain containing the reality in which you experienced meeting them for the first time in school or whatever. Both these events might take place in flickers in the quantum foam separately by distances so inconceivably large that to mention numbers would be meaningless. But as internal observers - we cannot tell, and the entanglements of our imagined realities neatly group our perceptions of time and space into a coherent order that we can understand, even if that order might be entirely illusory.
Of course... this is, to an extent, idle speculation, as it (probably) makes no real difference to how we live our lives - nor should it. Regardless, to me that's not relevant to the deliciously absurd beauty of this idea.
This thinking about Boltzmann Brains also reminded me a lot of an epic trip I had a while back on 3-HO-PCP and Metocin, where at one point I had the sensation of being a "solitary consciousness, hanging in the void"... maybe I misinterpreted what that was... and it was actually a sudden, inexplicable awareness of what I was... a solitary consciousness hanging in the bulk, surrounded by darkness and silence...
One might argue, firstly, it's not likely we would all be imagining the same reality - but remember it's not exactly the same, and maybe it doesn't need to be, it's close enough - and remember, we're talking on scales of infinity here, nothing is too unlikely.
The second counterpoint to this idea (well, the second one I can think of, I'm sure there are many others) is that if we are each of us Boltzmann Brains, imagining all reality, even if it happens to be the same we're not actually interacting with each other, we're just coincidentally experiencing similar imagined realities... I don't really have a counterpoint to that, except that to me, this distinction just doesn't seem relevant. Maybe realities diverge often, but if this happens then we will no longer be within the same reality, but different branches of the quantum wavefunction - but for the ones that remain coherent ("entangled", if any scientists reading will forgive me butchering these concepts) are effectively the same reality, and if we're all imagining that same reality - then we're all as in the same boat as we were when we thought of our reality as a kind of enclosed bubble habitat rather than a coincidentally shared dream, of a sort.
One final implication of the illusory nature of time in the theory described above is the possibility that there is no objective arrow of time either. Time simply does not exist at all, but the universe exists as a static and unchanging crystal with multiple entanglements within it's lattice, and those that cohere in a certain way make up our perception of the flow of time, but to an outside observer, there is no flow - all frames of the past and future are already extent, and eternal, time being a timeless property like colour on the surface of the static crystals of eternity. If this is the case, the Boltzmann Brain multiverse works basically the same of course, except that we're not separated by objective time anymore - and all "moment states", frozen slides of imagined reality, all exist at once, eternally, simultaneously, but dispersed possibly accross inconceivably vast distances and probably across hyperspatial dimensions as well.
I hope I've provided at least some food for thought and conveyed my fascination with this wonderfully bizarre idea.
I don't make any claims as to the actual likelihood of this being the case - and, as with all efforts to understand what exactly reality is, knowing this will not make much difference to how we live our lives, not should it, necessarily.
Anyway - recently been doing some reading about Boltzmann Brains:
To summarise - if the material universe arose from a localised quantum fluctuation in the false vacuum that is the substrate of our cosmos - and we know that quantum fluctuations occur on much smaller scales all the time - we should expect that far less complex objects should spontaneously pop into being at a much higher frequency than an entire universe. This being the case - I refer again to the quote above, for emphasis - it is more likely for a single brain to spontaneously and briefly form in a void (complete with a false memory of having existed in our universe) than it is for our universe to have come about in the way modern science thinks it actually did.
A pretty fascinating idea in itself. Since these brains would only exist for likely an infinitesimaly small moment - their very existence a mere random pattern on the surface of the aether - it's perhaps likely that a single unit moment of consciousness is all that is experienced, and therefore the duration of the existence of the entire imagined reality built up from within it. To start off a little easy before veering into the progressively more insane - it provides a pleasingly literal version of a cosmology in which it's ALWAYS TRUE that the moment is all that exists.
To expand upon the insanity a little, I've also been reading recently about quantum entanglement, and specifically, how it relates to time - time might be an emergent phenomenon of whatever mystery lies behind quantum entanglement.
My added emphasis to the last line because this seems an incredibly important discovery, and I'm surprised it hasn't been widely reported! I guess maybe because it's just a little too obscure, not practically relevant to our lives, and maybe just not something a lot of people find exciting. But to me this seems huge - time is an emergent phenomenon for internal observers, but absent for external observers! This is both predicted by theory and tentatively backed up by experiment - again, this is huge!
This may not be the only interpretation - but it's one that makes sense to me, and is at the very least, one possible interpretation. This potentially means that the arrow of time is, truly, an illusion - temporal events are not occurring in sequence, in truth, but their actual distribution is impossible to discern - they could be distributed across vast volumes in space, higher dimensions, and other "layers of reality" for want of a better word, which we currently have no conception of. We know that entangled particles can remain entangled independent of distance, and can be entangled across both space, and across time (I admit I'm having trouble understanding how cross-temporal entanglement fits into the idea of time itself being an emergent phenomenon of quantum entanglement, unless there is some kind of "objective time" on top of this... but I don't think my lack of a complete understanding will diminish the thought experiment I'm going to posit in a moment).
Referring back to Boltzmann brains, a typical conception perhaps is that if the universe is a simulation within one of these, the brain in question is essentially the brain of a god, and thus capable of imagining our entire reality, and all of us within it.
An alternative explanation however, is that all of us are Boltzmann brains, and we also inhabit a shared reality. I posit that the Boltzmann Bulk (a term I just coined now, obviously borrowed from the Brane Cosmology of string theory - let me just quickly nutshell the pertinent point):
...so the Bulk in this iteration of my idle speculation about unknowable things, is a substrate that occasionally births universes. Accepting for a moment the premises on which the Boltzmann Brain idea is based - as well as universes of all shapes and sizes, it's also churning up the odd disembodied brains, flickers of being existing only for a moment before dissolving back into this hyperdimensional ocean.
Each of these brains simulates reality for a moment - just one moment - before it flickers out again - but it is likely not the only brain experiencing this reality. I posit that entanglement phenomena are at play here, that the as yet unexplained nature of quantum entanglement will serve as a link between different brains imagining the same reality from a different perspective - but at the same moment. These moments do not have to flow in sequence. Assuming there is some kind of "objective time" being proposed here, the imagined end could come right at the beginning, the middle at the end, and everything all scrambled in between - but they will still be ordered in time by their entanglement - all experiences of a single moment, isolated lights of consciousness as we understand it flickering incessantly in the void, every flicker an entire universe, but also only a single moment. Other moments can exist though - entanglements can occur across time and across space. Of course - when we are all fluctuations in the void, experiencing reality moment by moment - the time between one moment, to the next time the unique pattern of our consciousness flickers back into being, but one moment advanced, and again, the subjectively "later" moment could objectively appear first.
But there's no time limit here - and potentially know limit to space - for the purposes of this thought experiment - the upshot is that we could all be conscious beings, interacting with each other - but still all exist within our own universe, separated by inconceivably vast stretches of time and space.
I want to requote that last sentence because it's just so important and somewhat mindblowing to me that this has been studied rather than just being an interesting and oft-quoted piece of wisdom.
Time is an emergent phenomenon for internal observers, but absent for external observers.
If we are all Boltzmann Brains flickering into existence moment by moment - it could be a billion years or more for an outside observer where your existence is just not an active part of objective time, but a dormant piece of greater reality. A friend you speak to and have known for years, might not actually be born yet - to an external observer, the Boltzmann Brain containing the imagined reality of their birth moment might not happen for several trillion years after the Boltzmann Brain containing the reality in which you experienced meeting them for the first time in school or whatever. Both these events might take place in flickers in the quantum foam separately by distances so inconceivably large that to mention numbers would be meaningless. But as internal observers - we cannot tell, and the entanglements of our imagined realities neatly group our perceptions of time and space into a coherent order that we can understand, even if that order might be entirely illusory.
Of course... this is, to an extent, idle speculation, as it (probably) makes no real difference to how we live our lives - nor should it. Regardless, to me that's not relevant to the deliciously absurd beauty of this idea.
This thinking about Boltzmann Brains also reminded me a lot of an epic trip I had a while back on 3-HO-PCP and Metocin, where at one point I had the sensation of being a "solitary consciousness, hanging in the void"... maybe I misinterpreted what that was... and it was actually a sudden, inexplicable awareness of what I was... a solitary consciousness hanging in the bulk, surrounded by darkness and silence...
One might argue, firstly, it's not likely we would all be imagining the same reality - but remember it's not exactly the same, and maybe it doesn't need to be, it's close enough - and remember, we're talking on scales of infinity here, nothing is too unlikely.
The second counterpoint to this idea (well, the second one I can think of, I'm sure there are many others) is that if we are each of us Boltzmann Brains, imagining all reality, even if it happens to be the same we're not actually interacting with each other, we're just coincidentally experiencing similar imagined realities... I don't really have a counterpoint to that, except that to me, this distinction just doesn't seem relevant. Maybe realities diverge often, but if this happens then we will no longer be within the same reality, but different branches of the quantum wavefunction - but for the ones that remain coherent ("entangled", if any scientists reading will forgive me butchering these concepts) are effectively the same reality, and if we're all imagining that same reality - then we're all as in the same boat as we were when we thought of our reality as a kind of enclosed bubble habitat rather than a coincidentally shared dream, of a sort.
One final implication of the illusory nature of time in the theory described above is the possibility that there is no objective arrow of time either. Time simply does not exist at all, but the universe exists as a static and unchanging crystal with multiple entanglements within it's lattice, and those that cohere in a certain way make up our perception of the flow of time, but to an outside observer, there is no flow - all frames of the past and future are already extent, and eternal, time being a timeless property like colour on the surface of the static crystals of eternity. If this is the case, the Boltzmann Brain multiverse works basically the same of course, except that we're not separated by objective time anymore - and all "moment states", frozen slides of imagined reality, all exist at once, eternally, simultaneously, but dispersed possibly accross inconceivably vast distances and probably across hyperspatial dimensions as well.
I hope I've provided at least some food for thought and conveyed my fascination with this wonderfully bizarre idea.
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Thanks again for taking the time to read my spiel yourself.