15 January 2008

this explains a lot

A profound triviality:

It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science.

If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.
If the physical world occurs in a probabilistic matrix, then in the fullness of (eternal) time, every possible combination of matter and energy will be formed, and repeated ad infinitum. Thus reincarnation is entirely possible in this scenario, and also the eternal rebirth of the world and the universe. The most bizarre result of these calculations is that it would be easier for the random system to produce your naked brain in isolation than it is to replicate our current ordered world and its complex evolution. In this eternal cosmos, there may well be a huge number of your brains floating around in space, carrying the same fabricated memories, observing an illusory creation. And for all we know, this is just one such cosmic void, and you are just a naked brain freefloating in it and making all this stuff up. Netrebko, Kucinich, Cheney, dildos, teeth, La Gioconda, God ... all of it, shit and all.