I think of the classic Boltzmann brain thought experiment as a brain that thinks it’s human, and has a brain state that includes a coherent history of human experience.
This is actually interestingly parallel to an LLM forward pass, where the LLM has a context that appears to be a past, but may or may not be (eg apparent past statements by the LLM may have been inserted by the experimenter and not reflect an actual dialogue history). So although it’s often the case that past context is persistent between evaluations, that’s not a necessary feature at all.
I guess I don’t think, with a Boltzmann brain, that ongoing correlation is very relevant since (IIRC) the typical Boltzmann brain exists only for a moment (and of those that exist longer, I expect that their typical experience is of their brief moment of coherence dissolving rapidly).
That said, I agree that if you instead consider the (vastly larger) set of spontaneously appearing cognitive processes, most of them won’t have anything like a memory of a coherent existence.
I think of the classic Boltzmann brain thought experiment as a brain that thinks it’s human, and has a brain state that includes a coherent history of human experience.
This is actually interestingly parallel to an LLM forward pass, where the LLM has a context that appears to be a past, but may or may not be (eg apparent past statements by the LLM may have been inserted by the experimenter and not reflect an actual dialogue history). So although it’s often the case that past context is persistent between evaluations, that’s not a necessary feature at all.
I guess I don’t think, with a Boltzmann brain, that ongoing correlation is very relevant since (IIRC) the typical Boltzmann brain exists only for a moment (and of those that exist longer, I expect that their typical experience is of their brief moment of coherence dissolving rapidly).
That said, I agree that if you instead consider the (vastly larger) set of spontaneously appearing cognitive processes, most of them won’t have anything like a memory of a coherent existence.