Boltzmann brains and A. J. Ayer's "There is a thought now".
Ages ago, it occurred to me that the only thing that seemed to exist without needing a creator, was maths. That 2+2 was always 4, and it still would be even if there were not 4 things to count.
(From the quotation's date stamp, 2007, I had only finished university 6 months earlier, so don't expect anything good).
But as you'll see from my final paragraph, I no longer take this idea seriously, because anything that leads to most minds being free to believe untruths, is cognitively unstable by the same argument that applies to Boltzmann brains.
MUH leads to Aleph-1 infinite number of brains*. I'd need a reason for the probability distribution over minds to be zero almost everywhere in order for it to avoid the cognitively instability argument.
* if there is a bigger infinity, then more; but I have only basic knowledge of transfinites and am unclear if the "bigger" ones I've heard about are considered "real" or more along the lines of "if there was an infinite sequence of infinities, then…"
eru
Human minds are fairly free to believe untruths. At least to a certain extent: it's rather hard to _really_ believe things that contradict your lived experience.
You can _say_ that you believe them, but you won't behave as if you believe them.
Ages ago, it occurred to me that the only thing that seemed to exist without needing a creator, was maths. That 2+2 was always 4, and it still would be even if there were not 4 things to count.
Basically, I independently arrived at similar conclusion as Max Tegmark, only simpler and without his level of rigour: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2018/08/26-08.28.24.html
(From the quotation's date stamp, 2007, I had only finished university 6 months earlier, so don't expect anything good).
But as you'll see from my final paragraph, I no longer take this idea seriously, because anything that leads to most minds being free to believe untruths, is cognitively unstable by the same argument that applies to Boltzmann brains.
MUH leads to Aleph-1 infinite number of brains*. I'd need a reason for the probability distribution over minds to be zero almost everywhere in order for it to avoid the cognitively instability argument.
* if there is a bigger infinity, then more; but I have only basic knowledge of transfinites and am unclear if the "bigger" ones I've heard about are considered "real" or more along the lines of "if there was an infinite sequence of infinities, then…"