What's This About the Boltzmann Brain?

Back in September of 2022, I wrote a piece entitled “You Are Not a Boltzmann Brain!” It was in response to an article I saw somewhere, and I no longer have the article to which I referred. However, when I look at the top performing pages on my website, that piece from 2022 is consistently in the top three. I don’t know why in the world people would search for “Boltzmann Brain,” but I figure I should discuss the idea again!

The Boltzmann Brain hypothesis

One of the primary pillars of our culture’s knowledge base is that the physical universe is what is real, and it exists apart from anyone or anything observing it. In this view, you and I are transient observers of our universe, and we humans have a finite amount of time, up to 100 years or so, in which to observe something that is essentially eternal.

Another such primary pillar is that however life may have first appeared on our planet, we are here because of purely physical processes obeying the laws of physics, chemistry and biology.

Virtually every one of us believes in these fundamental ideas so completely that they are rarely questioned. And yet, these beliefs beg the confounding question of how our consciousness, our human awareness, came to be. Physicists call that the “Hard Problem of Consciousness.”

Another way of asking this question about the origin of human awareness is, “Is it just a happy accident, a product of a particularly fortunate assembling of the elements of our physical world, that physics and chemistry should give rise to biology and consciousness?” --From Hoodwinked: Exploring Our Culture’s Profound Illusions.

People search for explanations all the time, and perhaps the most important explanation there could be is the one about why we exist. The Boltzmann Brain hypothesis arises out of this question.

Image from Wikipedia

Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906) was a principal figure in the development of thermodynamics, a statistical basis for understanding the universe. Rather than considering the behavior of each individual atomic component of the universe (an obviously impossible task), thermodynamics treats the world in macroscopic terms as huge collections of atoms and studies how those collections behave.

The Boltzmann Brain idea says that given enough space filled with the manifestations of energy we call particles, and given enough time for interactions among particles to randomly produce structures of matter, these fluctuations will eventually create a brain, such as yours, complete with all your memories. This concept recalls the so-called Infinite Monkey Theorem, which states that a monkey hitting keys independently and at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, including the complete works of William Shakespeare!

Deconstructing the Boltzmann Brain theory

One of the components of the Boltzmann Brain hypothesis is that complex structures of matter are made from random interactions among atoms. Randomness is the inevitable byproduct of the assumption that consciousness, and deliberate intent, are not involved in these interactions and therefore not required for creation itself. If the physical universe is essentially a machine, operating according to immutable laws, as it has been argued, there is no place for design, intelligent or otherwise.

Before issues like gender and wokeness, the culture wars included the argument about intelligent design by God vs creation by ordinary physical processes such as natural selection. The dichotomy between intelligent design, sometimes called Creationism, and creation by natural processes is largely assumed to be an either/or choice. However, I propose that these two ideas about creation are actually compatible with one another. Let me illustrate how this might be the case.

Consider our visual perception of objects around us. Light enters our eyes and is transformed by the rods and cones in our retinas into electrical impulses. These impulses travel along the optic nerve to the brain, and our brains make a three-dimensional picture from these signals. It is universally assumed that this picture constitutes a representation of an independent external reality with some degree of accuracy.

However, let’s ask the question, “Can I prove or somehow demonstrate that the picture in my brain represents a reality that’s ‘out there’?” I can think of no way to do that. I suggest that, equipped as we are with only our five senses, all we have as human beings is that picture in our brains. But notice… the brain, and the body that contains it, is also part of that picture!

That’s our reality, and we are the creators of that reality. If the physicality of the world is contained in each of our pictures of reality, then we can’t be that physicality. There is something within us that is aware of our pictures of reality, and I call it consciousness.

It seems to me that if you stand in that idea—that all we have is the picture of the world in our brains, our brains are part of that picture, and that picture is our reality—we have to conclude that consciousness is all there is, and in my view, consciousness is all there has ever been. Looking at things this way, there are no random fluctuations in some energy space that’s separate from consciousness; everything that composes our reality exists within our consciousness. There is only our interpretation of the signals we receive from the Universe. We mistake that interpretation, that picture, for a real, external physical world.

So, are we stuck with the way things are, or do we have free will?

Back in high school, I participated in a debate about whether or not the universe is deterministic. From the Oxford Dictionary, determinism is “the doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes external to the will. Some philosophers have taken determinism to imply that individual human beings have no free will and cannot be held morally responsible for their actions.”

In that high school debate, I chose to defend the deterministic view, since at the time I was enamored with the idea that the laws of physics were sufficient to predict the future evolution of the universe. My argument failed when my friend asked me, “What about free will?” I couldn’t make the leap from physics to intentionality.

Many of us believe that there never was a Creator of the universe, that the world we perceive is solely a product of natural processes, and the best we can do is deal with the world the way it is. Others believe that there was/is an untouchable Creator who, through some combination of purpose, vengefulness and humor, set things up for us to, again, deal with the world to the best of our ability.

However, the recognition that all we have is our pictures of the ‘external world’ tells us that in making these pictures we are creating the world that we experience. And since we are (presumably) intelligent creatures, we are participating in what can be called intelligent design. That intelligent design must therefore include all the interactions described by physics that appear random.

My proposition is that we can decide to think of an external world existing apart from us as an illusion. It’s an illusion that has apparently captivated us so completely as to render us incapable of solving our most pressing problems. Instead, I believe that we are each free to optimize our interpretation of the signals we receive from the universe—which amounts to creating our own reality—to our benefit and to the benefit of all.

How do we optimize our interpretation, our reality?

To optimize our reality, we first have to free ourselves from the idea that the world is just the way it is no matter how we feel about it. To do that, there are a couple of tools we can use to feel our way along. One such tool is to entertain a different explanation of what the world is and how we perceive it from the one our culture has pounded into us. I have already described one such alternative explanation above: the external world isn’t really external. We have mistaken our pictures of the world for the world itself.

The other tool I’ve used extensively is to experiment with the idea that my attitude about life and about the conditions I observe—my health, my experience of abundance or lack thereof—subtly shapes or colors those conditions. It matters whether I think of an uncomfortable experience as a setback or as an opportunity for growth. This choice is what I mean by an optimization of my interpretation of reality. And it really does make a difference!

The important thing to realize is that my brain is not a Boltzmann Brain. It is not the product of random fluctuations of the energy/matter fields. It is an intelligent design created by my desire to live the most satisfying, productive life possible. This intelligent design includes all of nature’s processes, from physics and chemistry to biology and psychology. These ideas are not incompatible after all!

Like the idea of an independent external reality, this is an unprovable idea as we ordinarily understand proof. It’s a story about life that feels much better to me than the one about being stuck with the world the way it is. It’s my story… and I’m sticking to it!