Well, I don’t think the analogy holds up all that well. In the coin flip story we “know” that there was a time before the universe with two equally likely rules for the universe. In the world as it is, AFAIK we really don’t have a complete, internally consistent set of physical laws fully capable of explaining the universe as we experience it, let alone a complete set of all of them.
The idea that we live in some sort of low entropy bubble which spontaneously formed in a high entropy greater universe seems pretty implausible for the reasons you describe. But I don’t think we can come to a conclusion from this significantly stronger than “there’s a lot we haven’t figured out yet”.
Current physics models get around that question anyways. The way our brains work, there is more entropy after a memory is burned than before. Thus, time seems to flow from low to high entropy to us. If entropy was flowing the another direction, than our brains would think of another direction as past. The laws of thermodynamics are a side effect of how our brains process time.
Thus we can have low entropy → high entropy without a shit ton of Boltzmann Brains.
Well, I don’t think the analogy holds up all that well. In the coin flip story we “know” that there was a time before the universe with two equally likely rules for the universe. In the world as it is, AFAIK we really don’t have a complete, internally consistent set of physical laws fully capable of explaining the universe as we experience it, let alone a complete set of all of them.
The idea that we live in some sort of low entropy bubble which spontaneously formed in a high entropy greater universe seems pretty implausible for the reasons you describe. But I don’t think we can come to a conclusion from this significantly stronger than “there’s a lot we haven’t figured out yet”.
Current physics models get around that question anyways. The way our brains work, there is more entropy after a memory is burned than before. Thus, time seems to flow from low to high entropy to us. If entropy was flowing the another direction, than our brains would think of another direction as past. The laws of thermodynamics are a side effect of how our brains process time.
Thus we can have low entropy → high entropy without a shit ton of Boltzmann Brains.
The laws of thermodynamics arise in practically any reversible cellular automaton with a temperature—they are not to do with brains.
The laws of thermodynamics arise in our analysis of practically any reversible cellular automaton with a temperature.