The Revelations by Erik Hoel (e ink ebook reader txt) 📕

the same laws don’t work at other scales. They lead to contradictions and absurdities. Particles with infinite force, that sort of thing. You people pick and choose your laws without thought as to how they all fit together.

Crying Mask: Even if that were true, there will be a theory of everything soon enough.

Laughing Mask: Since the invention of physics it always seems to do everything it’s asked until it doesn’t.

Crying Mask: I swear, your attitudes are positively medieval. You can’t escape the laws, they apply everywhere. Even in your precious wetware brain.

Laughing Mask: When was the last time you opened up the brain and looked? Here’s how you actually see if a system follows the laws of physics that we have. You create a model of that system on a supercomputer, a model system. And you build the model system out of your very best descriptions of fundamental physics, whatever you think the lowest level is, say, the wave function. Now, you put both the model system and the real system into exactly the same initial state. If their following state-space trajectories are totally identical, then yes, the real system was totally reducible to the microphysical laws. But if their trajectories differ then you know that you can’t model the real system using just the most microscopic laws of physics.

Crying Mask: That’s not a feasible test for any complex system! If you didn’t get the initial states just right, chaos theory would kick in, and then the state-spaces would diverge. How could you tell if the reason your results are different is really that the laws are different or just that there was some noise that’s been amplified?

Laughing Mask: Exactly! See, chaos hides emergence! How would anyone notice? It’s all heuristics and coarse-grains with complex systems. Just like how new laws of physics were needed once you started looking at the very small and the very large, new laws might be needed once you start looking at the very complex. You just can’t be sure that the physics of two atoms interacting in a void obtains in complex systems. Or conscious systems, for that matter. You have the laws for the microscopic and macroscopic, but where’s the mesoscopic?

Crying Mask: An impossible standard. You’d need a supercomputer the size of the galaxy to check that there’s no deviations from physics inside the human brain.

Laughing Mask: You can’t just wave your hands and say everything is just the wave function with no exceptions when we’ve only stringently tested it with isolated atoms. Physics isn’t complete, it isn’t done yet, and yet we act like the current version is the bible. There’s going to be a twenty-second-century physics, and a twenty-third, and you’re arrogant in your statistically-unlikely assumption that you happen to live at the end of science. It’s not over till it’s over.

Crying Mask: Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. That’s not a flaw in physics, not a flaw in materialism. You’re just overly skeptical. Nothing wrong with that, but no reason to cast away the edifice. If your demands are so high, the burden of proof is on you.

Laughing Mask: As a stand-alone point, perhaps. But if a consequence of a belief is that you shouldn’t believe it, then that belief in invalid. You must not saw off the branch you are sitting on.

Crying Mask: I assume you have another point then, but I’ve been wrong before.

Laughing Mask: If materialism is true you’re more likely to be an alien’s dream than yourself. You are more likely to be the random interactions in a gas nebula than yourself. You are more likely to be a simulation running in a simulation running in a simulation than yourself. You’re more likely to be a brief improbable atomic configuration achieved by leaving a rock in a warm heat bath for a few quadrillion years. Any system at a state of high entropy generates, automatically and within it, parts that have lower entropy. Order from chaos, given enough time. The simpler that order is, the more likely it is. So if you’re just some configuration of physical or functional states of atoms, and the universe, multiverse, whatever, is astronomically large or infinite, then you’ll pop up over and over again. And since simpler order is more likely, you won’t be on this planet with these people, you’ll just be a brief conscious phantom, what’s called a Boltzmann brain. And if you are a Boltzmann brain, which in all vast likelihood you are, you have no reason to believe in contemporary physics. Therefore to believe in contemporary physics leads directly to disbelief in contemporary physics!

(This is followed by an extended wave of disembodied clapping from the many hovering masks arrayed in a darkened amphitheater around them. Each mask in the audience is a different emotion.)

Crying Mask: Do not applaud, you fools. There is a flaw. I know that I am not a Boltzmann brain because a Boltzmann brain would only exist for a moment, whereas I can check my own mind, check my own memories, which extend over time, thus proving I am not a Boltzmann brain.

Laughing Mask: Too easy! There’s no time for you to make sure you aren’t a Boltzmann brain if you are a Boltzmann brain, although there’s plenty of Boltzmann brains who think they just completed such a survey!

Crying Mask: The Boltzmann brain paradox may seem to be true, under some interpretations, but—

Laughing Mask: Imagine if every night everyone on Earth dreamed they were you . . .

Crying Mask: . . . What?

Laughing Mask: No nothing, continue your point.

Crying Mask: As I was saying, simple solutions in how we deal with probability and physics might rule Boltzmann brains out.

Laughing Mask: As if it were a stand-alone issue! Consider that most cosmologists agree that there’s an infinite multiverse.

Crying Mask: As do I. All things happen.

Laughing Mask: Another way of saying nothing happens.

Crying Mask: That’s it? That’s your objection?

Laughing Mask: Imagine an infinite checkered quilt with a repeating finite pattern of three black squares