Can our universe have consciousness? For the first time, this famous question was asked by the famous scientist of the 20th century Ludwig Boltzmann, who suggested that the whole world around us develops according to the laws of entropy or a certain probability of the occurrence of an event. Given the fact that a complex body needs much more time to develop than a simple one, it can be inferred that a person’s appearance is much less likely than an independent brain. Is this so or is there some kind of mistake crept into Boltzmann's theory? Let's try to speculate on this together in this article.
If the theory of multiverses is true, then in one of the innumerable Universes something may well appear that is able to realize its existence
Can the mind come out of nowhere?
Despite the fact that under the phrase “Boltzmannbrain ”many imagine the human brain soaring in endless outer space, Ludwig Boltzmann described the result of spontaneous fluctuations rather as a kind of thinking substance that is able to realize its existence and to observe the world around it. So, the famous science fiction writer Stanislav Lem in his novel “Solaris”, where a giant ocean planet acts as a thinking substance, was able to show his vision of the “Boltzmann brain”. Modern physics scientists have gone even further, assuming that absolutely any creature in the Universe, including you and me, can turn out to be the “Boltzmann brain”. Due to the fact that the cosmos is constantly expanding, acquiring more and more new properties, the infinity of events inside it can give rise to a certain separate mind inside the universe. Such ideas, previously considered obscene for thought in the scientific community, are gradually beginning to become a full-fledged part of scientific knowledge, which is increasingly beginning to absorb theories not only from the field of physics and mathematics, but also philosophy and psychology.
See also: The brain has a mechanism of protection against the fear of death.
Ludwig Boltzmann - one of the founders of modern thermodynamics
Is our universe unique?
The Boltzmann Brain Problem You Can Tryto solve from the point of view of quantum field theory, which claims that in countless universes you can find as many countless copies of an event. In other words, the infinity of time and space is capable of creating with absolute accuracy everything that has ever been before. So, in the 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche talked about the idea of eternal return, in which history returns to its detailed reconstruction, if not in our particular Universe, then at least in one of its many copies.
They control all the universes and worlds tiny andsubtle fluctuations, which sometimes can be just a flap of a butterfly’s wing in the Amazon, which somehow became a link in the chain of events that led to the onset of a hurricane in Moscow. It is in this way that somewhere in the depths of the Universe an absolutely exact copy of our Solar system with our planet Earth and even all its inhabitants can arise. The probability of such an event, of course, is scanty. However, on the scale of the Universe, even the most incredible incident has the right to occur and exist. At the same time, the probability of a spontaneous occurrence of the Boltzmann brain, in this case, becomes much more real than even the appearance of an individual person.
And what do you think, is the theoryproving the possibility of the Boltzmann brain, realistic and having the right to exist? Let's try to discuss this issue in our Telegram chat or on the official Yandex.Zen channel.
Although such reasoning mayseem like only a fiction of a writer with wild imagination, modern cosmologists use the Boltzmann brain paradox as one of the most important theories of the emergence of the Universe and the appearance of a person in it.