TLDR; My thoughts on two questions: What if Boltzmann brain suffering is important? And what if there was something we could do about it? 

I am not sure how much, if any, of this post I actually endorse, it started out as a joke. But it was an interesting idea that I wanted to share, so I am posting it for draft amnesty week. 

Boltzmann brains are a thought experiment that’s often been used to discuss epistemics and decision making around small probabilities. Our current physics suggests it might be possible for random chance to spontaneously form any configuration of particles, including a human brain with a full set of memories, given enough time. So, if you’re concerned about events with extremely low probabilities, then you should be even more concerned that you’re actually a Boltzmann brain that has popped into existence and will vanish in the next three milliseconds. By the way, the main antagonist of Guardians of the Galaxy 2 is actually a planet-sized Boltzmann brain. 

If you accept Boltzmann brains as being real, and you accept some fairly modest assumptions about the future of the universe, then it creates a problem. Because for every one of you, there might be an infinite number of Boltzmann brains who think they are you. So if you take anthropic reasoning to its logical extreme, then you should assume that you are a Boltzmann brain. We’ll come back to that idea in a minute.

We always talk about Boltzmann brains in discussions of epistemics. But I want to talk about them as an effective altruism cause area. What if Boltzmann brains suffer? Since it’s more probable to only form a half-working brain than a perfectly formed one, I would guess that many of them do experience suffering in the fractions of a second that they actually exist. And there might be infinitely many of them! After the heat death of the universe has destroyed everything else, they’ll just keep popping up every once in a while, for an infinite amount of time into the future. 

There’s a part of me that wants to claim that the most important duty of humanity is to ensure that this infinite amount of suffering never happens. And that part says that preventing the suffering would be possible if we… destroyed the universe. Not just destroyed all life or blew up all the planets, but actually destroyed the universe at such a fundamental level that even subatomic particles as we know them cannot exist. And there already exists a speculative way this could happen: false vacuum decay. 

There are three favored hypotheses for how the universe will end, as explained in what might be the Wikipedia article with the most intense title ever. 

1. The Big Freeze (or Heat Death): The universe will continue expanding forever, growing colder and darker as stars burn out and galaxies drift apart. 

2. The Big Crunch: The expansion of the universe will eventually reverse, leading to a collapse back into a singularity.

3. The Big Rip: Dark energy will eventually tear apart galaxies, stars, planets, and even atoms as the expansion accelerates uncontrollably.

But there’s also a fourth scenario, sometimes called The Big Slurp. The idea is that ***something something Higgs Field something I don’t quite understand***, so the universe is currently in a false vacuum that could spontaneously decay into a true vacuum, destroying everything that exists in a bubble that expands at the speed of light. This idea has been brought up by Bostrom as an example of a fundamental physics-related existential disaster. 

But I think it could be the solution to our suffering brain problem. If we found a way to trigger false vacuum decay, it could potentially alter the fundamental constants of the universe and prevent the brains from ever popping into existence in the first place. (ChatGPT agrees that it would work!) 

One interesting consequence of doing this is that it handily solves the anthropic reasoning conundrum I mentioned earlier and lets you conclude that you’re not actually a Boltzmann brain. Maybe Boltzmann brains don’t actually outnumber humans, because future humans are successful at destroying the universe and preventing the brains from existing. This is basically the Grabby Aliens solution to the Boltzmann Brain problem. 

But we absolutely cannot destroy the universe yet. That would be a disaster. Because false vacuum decay only travels at the speed of light, and most of the universe is moving away from us at faster than the speed of light. (Expansion of the universe is weird, I know.) So if we want to stop this infinite amount of suffering, we need to figure out a way to shrink the universe. Like dark energy, but the opposite. So humanity needs to exist at least until we invent both reverse dark energy and a false vacuum decay bomb. I can just imagine a weird sci-fi story where the villain is trying to prevent the universe from being destroyed, and the heroes have to stop him. 

We don’t actually know if false vacuum decay is real. And if it is real, it will eventually happen by itself, without our intervention. But if false vacuum decay is not real and Boltzmann brains are, then our future physicists will need to find some other way to sufficiently destroy the universe. If humans don’t do it, then we’d better hope that some alien civilization develops a philosophical framework that compels them to take on the task. (I love the idea of effective altruist aliens.) 

Also, for anyone worrying about the electron suffering thing, destroying the universe enough to eliminate all the Boltzmann brains would almost certainly eliminate all the electrons too. So two for the price of one! 

In summary, humanity needs to survive long enough for our physicists to figure out how to prevent Boltzmann brains from forming and suffering for the rest of infinity. It’s an interesting example of a finite action creating an infinite amount of good, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen one of those before. But anyway, preventing human extinction from superintelligent AI or engineered pandemics or nuclear war are probably really good things. Someone once suggested that superintelligent AI would specifically work to prevent false vacuum decay, so that’s an extra reason to make sure it doesn’t go out of control. Also, fundamental physics might one day be the most important career path for EA’s, though that’s probably very far away. 

Finally, Brian Tomasik once wrote that “Any sufficiently advanced consequentialism is indistinguishable from its own parody.” This article wasn’t originally meant to be serious, more of just a wild sci-fi idea that I needed to write down, but now I find it strangely motivating. We’re just little lumps of carbon on a tiny blue dot in space. But the things we’re doing can have enormous consequences, possibly even on a cosmic scale. It makes me want to do something good in the world.