nauka: Boltzmann brain

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

The Boltzmann brain thought experiment suggests that it is more probable for a brain to spontaneously form, complete with a memory of having existed in our universe, than for the entire universe to come about in the manner cosmologists think it did. Physicists use the Boltzmann brain thought experiment as a reductio ad absurdum argument for evaluating competing scientific theories. In contrast to brain in a vat thought experiments, which are about perception and thought, Boltzmann brains are used in cosmology to test our assumptions about thermodynamics and the development of the universe. Over a sufficiently long time, random fluctuations could cause particles to spontaneously form literal…

Evidence: 50 • authority: 92

Disentangling Boltzmann Brains, the Time-Asymmetry of Memory, and the Second Law.. Are your perceptions, memories and observations merely a statistical fluctuation arising from of the thermal equilibrium of the universe, bearing no correlation to the actual past state of the universe? Arguments are given in the literature for and against this "Boltzmann brain" hypothesis. Complicating these arguments have been the many subtle-and very often implicit-joint dependencies among these arguments and others that have been given for the past hypothesis, the second law, and even for Bayesian inference of the reliability of experimental data. These dependencies can easily lead to circular reasoning.…

Evidence: 42 • authority: 92

Brain-based predictive modeling of mind-wandering and involuntary thought: the idiographic approach.. A substantial portion of waking life consists of mental experiences that arise involuntarily, including mind-wandering, spontaneous thought and rumination. Given that these experiences are fundamental to cognitive function and mental health, there has been growing scientific and clinical interest in using measures of brain activity to model and predict the momentary occurrence of these various forms of involuntary thought. In the most common machine learning approach in neuroimaging and electrophysiology research, model training data include neural features derived from a population of indi…

Evidence: 42 • authority: 80

False memories show up in the brain