Abstract
Plausible assumptions from Cosmology and Statistical Mechanics entail that it is overwhelmingly likely that there will be exact duplicates of us in the distant future long after our deaths. Call such persons “Boltzmann duplicates,” after the great pioneer of Statistical Mechanics. In this paper, I argue that if survival of death is possible at all, then we almost surely will survive our deaths because there almost surely will be Boltzmann duplicates of us in the distant future that stand in appropriate relations to us to guarantee our survival.
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Notes
See Albert (2000: 73–76) and Winsberg (2012: 396). We cannot be absolutely certain that all of the assumption of Poincare’s theorem hold of our actual universe, in particular that the phase space of our universe is bounded. But we may get low-entropy fluctuations even if some of these assumptions fail. In particular, Dyson et al. (2002) argue that even if the universe as a whole is not finitely bounded, we can treat our current region as if it is finitely bounded due to it being enclosed in a de Sitter horizon (see also Albrecht and Sorbo 2004; Carroll 2010: chapter 10; and Boddy et al. 2016).
Cosmologists worry about the troubling epistemological implications of this fact. The worry is that there will be fluctuations that lead to exact duplicates of our brains (“Boltzmann brains”) who have the exact same qualitative experiences as we have now. Moreover, there will be many more Boltzmann brains than regular observers. How then can I know that I am not a Boltzmann brain, in which case all of my memories and beliefs, including those that seem to confirm modern Cosmology, would be false? Cosmologists try to avoid this skeptical scenario, but none of the solutions would rule out these fluctuations entirely.
There are issues about how to characterize memories without already presupposing facts about personal identity. See Parfit (1984) for discussion.
As Paul and Hall (2013: 51–53) point out, there is a further question of what exactly replaces events such as M when we make these changes. How this issue is resolved will not matter for my argument.
My argument could be adapted for the case that the laws are indeterministic, but things would be more complicated. If the laws are indeterministic, it still is plausible that a different present state of the world would entail a different probability distribution over its state at all future times. But one would then need a recipe for evaluating counterfactuals given indeterministism (see Maudlin 2007: 30–31 for discussion).
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Acknowledgments
Anna Smajdor first got me thinking about the issues in this paper. She speculated that over an infinite span of time it may become a certainty that the particles that currently compose our bodies, due to statistical mechanical chances, rearrange themselves into the exactly same configuration in the distant future. My paper pursues a somewhat similar idea. I also would like to thank Anna Smajdor, Craig Callender, Andreas Hüttemann, Siegfried Jaag, and two anonymous referees for this journal for helpful comments and suggestions.
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Loew, C. Boltzmannian Immortality. Erkenn 82, 761–776 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-016-9842-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-016-9842-6