Boltzmann Brain Altruism

[pataphor]

There hasn't been a post for a long time here, so my apologies in
advance for waking up people here who forgot they were still reading.
The thing is, even if I don't expect an audience, I need some place to
formalize my thoughts in, that is not just my personal hard disk but
that is also not subject to the usual pull and push of
some contemporaneous audience that is just not ready to accept the
future, or worse, alternative viewing angles on the current state of
affairs.

The problem is, with the current interconnected system it doesn't really
matter anymore where one posts stuff, and I am already anticipating a
time where my personal disk or computer screen are as visible to the
world as if I would create a blog for my thoughts, or commented on one,
or posted on some heavily socially policed media site, no, even more
visible, because of the increasing need for non cliche viewpoints, even
if only the product of people still trying to find spaces at the ideal
remote from the public to keep intelligent discourse viable.

Instead of the medium being the message, we now seem to have arrived at
a more soviet Russia dark humor type of situation where the blogs
read you.

I try my best to limit the feedback loop, by stopping to read the blogs
I was pushing off from, as most of my energy still seems to be outrage
fueled, but that energy kind of dissipates when any kind of speculation
about the merits of the capitalist system or the concept of property is
interpreted as the result of me supposedly being communist, leading to
all kinds of dorky humor feedback on sites I don't even post to, just
used to read. It's like the ideas I was criticizing lead to their non
overt background supporters feeling personally attacked, causing them
to behave like these toy puppets that always come up again after one
pushes them over, with the rebalancing effort being instinctive rather
than fully articulated.

Although I am not a book or literature oriented postmodernist I have
sympathized for a long time with some of the ideas behind it, the most
important of it being the ideas around narratives and framing.

So that is my justification for taking stuff here, combined with this
probably being a mostly deserted place where not many people, if any,
would take offense of my repurposing this space temporarily for
describing some phenomena that probably even would have ended up on
postmodernism's plate anyway had it bothered to continue to exist in
the future, or in some alternative reality, where my target audience is
supposed to hang out.

With all the before being as it is, I will still try to tentatively
form a gestalt that combines three of my recent outrages and
fascinations; the fist being time crystals and their potential for
enabling space travel, be it that in my interpretation of how that
would work is more like them possibly forming interdimensional portals,
like in that ancient 'sliders' TV series, although less prioritizing
our current dimension, or 'world' as depicted there; the second outrage
is about the canceling of Richard Stallman and how that was kind of
initiated in the past with Linus Torvalds distancing himself from the
seemingly overzealous direction the GPL was moving towards, with, in my
interpretation, the new commercial coding co-pilot developments kind of
proving him still right after all, maybe even not being acting strong
enough, though admittedly being forced out of his philosophical
position by personal attacks might have cowed him some; and the third
thing, that should complete the gestalt, would be the initial outrage
that started my line of thought, before I even knew I would decide to
move the 'discussion' here, I mean can there be a discussion in empty
space, unless talking to virtual opponents that arise from someone just
reading stuff on the interwebs, the idea that the way the
narrative around altruism, and not only that, but also the discussion
about fear for future AI tech developments, is centered around
individual humans existing all by themselves, suppressing the idea that
consciousness does exist in a distributed way among many brains,
could not come into existence in a flash by itself, and is heavily
dependent on circumstances and what came before.

Maybe the current ideas about altruism are just the result of the
people talking about it not knowing about conditional probabilities
which would also refute the idea of Boltzmann brains, but since these
'scientific' ideas originated in a cognitive environment (STEM?) where
people are heavily biased towards individualism and great man
theorizing, they couldn't see this easy confounder. Or maybe both
Boltzmann brain altruism and our current fears about dystopias caused by
technological progress and artificial intelligence suffer from a
worldview where fears for the future act like blinders for the dismal
status of the world we are living in now, from which all these things
most likely would be the extension of, if we keep failing to address
them.

It all comes down to a failure to see what things could have been, out
of fear of speaking out against the status quo, with these terrible
futures acting as justifications for not acting in the here and now,
because after all, we're not doing all that bad, compared to the past,
and especially, compared to the worst imaginable things happening in
the future.

Just like elementary particles not being able to emit radiation in all
frequencies, as this would lead to some kind of infrared catastrophe
where all matter would evaporate into radiation, we cannot help but
concentrate or quantize our altruistic efforts into just a few
different portions.

But even if doing that we have to take into account what will happen
after sending out the money that is supposed to ease our conscience,
and for that we have to take a harsh look at the situation on the
ground far away, and since we're not even able to see the situation on
the ground here, any effort that doesn't try to integrate local and
distant narratives seems bound to fail for the same reason that
Boltzmann brains fail to materialize.

Imagine being wrapped in a convex hull of time crystals, acting like
some kind of super lube for the space time we're in, enabling one to
'rotate' to a different direction, without using any energy, or at
least via a method where one could get the same energy back when
rotating back towards the point of departure.

To your surprise, when you exit this hull on the other side, for ease
of telling the story let's imagine it's a cylinder with a single
entry/exit door that rotates trough space time, and on the other side
there is some 'primitive' society having just performed the ritual for
summoning you. You are baffled, assuming you were the ones traveling
there, but to the contrary, from their point of view, in some kind of
weird Einsteinian observer dependent reference frame corollary it is
now them having called you over (or maybe they were just blogging, you
know).

Anyway, how would the idea of property hold up in such a situation, or
for that matter, would you switch to the most rigorous Stallmanian
interpretations to prevent your intellectual property, I mean the
continuity of your effort, being taken over by some alien fiction?

[Jeffrey Rubard]

Do you suppose there are other kinds of "brain altruism"?

[Jeffrey Rubard]

What would Wilhelm Wundt think, for instance?