I was born during the day--but was it yesterday?

(Picture of brain candy found on Orientaltrading.com , a good source for your seasonal and party needs.)

I'm not sure exactly why I'm drawn to ideas like this, other than the speculative science fiction lover in me--but I found this article in The New York Times somewhat interesting, especially in the way the idea was described as "embarrassing" and "weird". The "Boltzman Brain" concept, when boiled down, has it that less energy is used if the observable order of things is a fluctuation: your virtual brain. So you "exist"--it's just the stuff you believe to be around you that might be a little negotiable. As in--you're imagining a completely possible world that isn't. Congrats. (Welcome to the Matrix.)

In other words, and here's where I don't see why the idea is so "weird, etc." is that it could be one of the more conservative notions for the stuff we can't explain. After all, we have no choice as observers but to look backwards at how the universe came to be, so we have strong feelings concerning our ending up in it. I live in an oxygen-rich environment where water is liquid and carbon-based things like me proliferate--yay, me. This kind of great good fortune (in retrospect) leads to the sorts of dumbth that the Hovindians spread about the unlikelihood of a planet being in the "temperate zone" and so forth. And even people with some acquaintance with statistics don't realize that if you try to calculate the probability of things which occurred in a random series as occurring just *exactly* so--you'd get crazy improbable numbers when, no, each event was a veritable coin toss, and we're looking at it from the last in series?

I dunno. I'm not really a math or science oriented person, but the idea that instead of all this super-specific highly ordered stuff happening, instead, sometimes, a mind or minds occurred that could grok order, were organized such as to play out the outcome of such a universe--like a computer program? Um, it sounds like something out of Vinge or Gibson to me. Or the movie "Wargames" with a very young Mathew Broderick. Just lots of series of cosmic tic tac toe run by the big old original program (whatever it was).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHWjlCaIrQo

(Whoa--couldn't make embedding work. Just say "click."