It’s not necessarily an either/or situation. Maybe this universe has started a few billions of years ago in a Boltzmann-like event, but since then it evolves, uhm, just like we think it does.
The analogy of the monkeys with typewriters is misleading. The laws of physics are local: what happens next does depend on what happens now; that’s unlike the monkey with the typewriter where the following letter is completely independent on the previous part of the book. If some random process would create a brain, in a body, in a room, then even if the room is immediately destroyed at the speed of light, still, during those few microseconds until the destruction reaches the brain, the brain would operate logically.
On the other hand, random processes creating the brain in the body in the room are much less likely than random processes creating only the brain, or only parts of the brain. So this requires some more though, and I am too tired now to make it.
But my point is that if you are randomly created exactly in this moment, you don’t have a reason to trust your reason… but if you were created a while ago, and your reason had some time to work, that’s not the same situation. In the extreme situation, if the universe was created randomly billions of years ago and then we have evolved lawfully, that’s business as usual: the details of random creation of the universe long ago should not be relevant for our reasoning about our reason now.
After some thought on why your argument sounded unsatisfatory to me, I decided that I have a much more abstract, much less precise argument, to do with things like the beginning of epistemology.
In the logcial beginning, I know nothing about the territory. However, I notice that I have ‘experiences.’ However, I have nore ason for believing that these experiences are ‘real’ in any useful sense. So, I decide to base my idea of truth on the usefulness of helping me predict further experiences. ‘The sun rises every morning,’ in this view, is actually ‘it will seem to me that every time there’s this morning-thing I’ll see the sun rise.’ All hypotheses (liike maya and boltzmann brains) that say that these experiences are not ‘real,’ as long as I have no reason to doubt ‘reality,’ form part of this inscrutable probability noise in my probability assignments. Therefore, even if I was randomed into existence a second ago, it’s still rational to do everything and say “I have no issues with being a boltzmann brain—however it’s just part of my probability noise.′
I haven’t fleshed out precisely the connection between this reasoning and not worrying about Carroll’s argument—it seems as if I’m viewing myself as an implementation-independent process trying to reason about its implementation, and asking what reasoning holds up in that view.
It’s not necessarily an either/or situation. Maybe this universe has started a few billions of years ago in a Boltzmann-like event, but since then it evolves, uhm, just like we think it does.
The analogy of the monkeys with typewriters is misleading. The laws of physics are local: what happens next does depend on what happens now; that’s unlike the monkey with the typewriter where the following letter is completely independent on the previous part of the book. If some random process would create a brain, in a body, in a room, then even if the room is immediately destroyed at the speed of light, still, during those few microseconds until the destruction reaches the brain, the brain would operate logically.
On the other hand, random processes creating the brain in the body in the room are much less likely than random processes creating only the brain, or only parts of the brain. So this requires some more though, and I am too tired now to make it.
But my point is that if you are randomly created exactly in this moment, you don’t have a reason to trust your reason… but if you were created a while ago, and your reason had some time to work, that’s not the same situation. In the extreme situation, if the universe was created randomly billions of years ago and then we have evolved lawfully, that’s business as usual: the details of random creation of the universe long ago should not be relevant for our reasoning about our reason now.
I think this is a good argument. Thanks.
After some thought on why your argument sounded unsatisfatory to me, I decided that I have a much more abstract, much less precise argument, to do with things like the beginning of epistemology.
In the logcial beginning, I know nothing about the territory. However, I notice that I have ‘experiences.’ However, I have nore ason for believing that these experiences are ‘real’ in any useful sense. So, I decide to base my idea of truth on the usefulness of helping me predict further experiences. ‘The sun rises every morning,’ in this view, is actually ‘it will seem to me that every time there’s this morning-thing I’ll see the sun rise.’ All hypotheses (liike maya and boltzmann brains) that say that these experiences are not ‘real,’ as long as I have no reason to doubt ‘reality,’ form part of this inscrutable probability noise in my probability assignments. Therefore, even if I was randomed into existence a second ago, it’s still rational to do everything and say “I have no issues with being a boltzmann brain—however it’s just part of my probability noise.′
I haven’t fleshed out precisely the connection between this reasoning and not worrying about Carroll’s argument—it seems as if I’m viewing myself as an implementation-independent process trying to reason about its implementation, and asking what reasoning holds up in that view.