In this world where we live, we have senses, we understand the face of the world through vision, smell the breath of this world through smell, taste the sour, sweet and bitter spicy of food through taste, perceive the sounds around life through hearing, and know through touch that snow is cold and pillows are soft.
These senses communicate to us the properties of an object, and consciousness helps us to make a connection between the object and the attribute.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="3" > Descartes' theory of demons</h1>
When it comes to consciousness, we have to refer to the demonic question of Descartes. We know that sometimes seeing is not necessarily true, ear hearing may be virtual, and VR can deceive your brain through visual hearing.
So if there is a demon who can change and deceive my senses at will, how do I know that I am not deceived by this demon now, and how can I be sure that what I perceive now is not fantasy but reality?
In Inception, dreamers can create dreams, can make up dreams, and even control dreams, they need to have the ability to distinguish between reality and dreams, otherwise they will be trapped in the dream forever and cannot wake up. Totems are the exits of such a dream, and they discern whether they are in an illusion or reality by having only the totem they know. What "totem" can we use to prove the truth or falsity of our perception?
I think, so I am. Politics also often uses this sentence as a topic to distinguish between materialism and idealism, of course, this is not to discuss the right and wrong of this sentence. In his demonic theory, Descartes searched for the answer to "how can I be sure that this is the real me", and he never got the final result.
It was in such a philosophical category that Boltzmann used physics to make a fierce dissection.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="9" > Boltzmann's brain</h1>
Boltzmann made the idea that self-awareness is a low-entropy state. If the known low-entropy universe comes from the fluctuations of entropy, then there will also be many low-entropy self-consciousness in the fluctuations.
In layman's terms, after a series of movements and changes in the universe, a series of physical reactions will occur, and physical reactions will cause changes in entropy. Self-consciousness is a low-entropy state, and a series of physical reactions that occur in the universe will inevitably appear in a certain low-entropy state, that is, a certain self-consciousness will be formed. Boltzmann's brain refers to the self-consciousness generated by this low-entropy state.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" What is self-awareness > data-track="12"? </h1>
When we see a lemon, even if we don't really eat it, the mouth will reflexively secrete a lot of saliva, which is the message transmitted by the brain to us: the lemon is very sour; when we watch the movie stimulation screen, even if we know that we are not experiencing the picture in the movie, the body can't help but tense; when playing VR high-altitude games, you know that you are on the flat ground, but the picture in front of you can make you step by step.
Corresponding to us, we can intuitively contact a series of properties of objects through the five senses, consciousness is to get the information of attributes and objects, can make cognition, thinking, such as after tasting lemons, the next time you see lemons, self-awareness can convey its very sour properties, and then the brain will make some corresponding natural responses. Boltzmann's brain is the equivalent of an object with no senses but only consciousness.
Knowing Boltzmann's brain, he immediately followed up with thinking according to his theory.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="16" >What is entropy? </h1>
Entropy is a measure of the degree of order of microscopic particles within the thermodynamic system.
We know that freshly baked meals can smell strongly from a long distance, and when it becomes cold, it can only be smelled when it is close. Microscopically explained, the molecules of piping hot meals are in a state of extreme disorder, and the relatively ordered air molecules that come into contact with extremely disordered vegetable molecules will absorb a part of the kinetic energy and begin to become relatively disordered.
In the same way, the first wave of air molecules that absorb kinetic energy is then transmitted to the surrounding air molecules, because of the loss of energy, so this propagation distance will always end at a certain point. The higher the temperature of the meal, the more intense the state of its molecules, so that it can also travel far in the air.
Among them, the meal is in contact with the air, and the propagation process of the air molecules is the transmission process from the low entropy state to the high entropy state, also known as the law of entropy increase; the propagation process of the meal molecules is the process of transmitting from the high entropy state to the low entropy state, which is called entropy reduction.
According to the law of entropy increase, in an isolated system, it always tends from the ordered state to the disordered state, that is, the entropy increase process; in an open system, the energy exchange is generated internally, from the high entropy state to the low entropy state, but part of the energy in the process will interact with the environment, causing a certain loss, so the overall entropy will tend to decrease.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="22" > about the original state of the universe</h1>
The universe is an isolated world, so the original universe should be in a low-entropy state, and then slowly move towards a high-entropy state, and the expansion of the universe is also confirming this. But in fact, the world in which we observe the universe is relatively orderly and low-entropy, which deviates from the original results.
Boltzmann proposed a conjecture that the universe was supposed to be in a high-entropy state, and that its random fluctuations could cause some of the environment to be in a state of low entropy. Although the law of entropy increases, the lower the degree of chaos in things, the lower the probability, it will still happen in such a large environment as the universe. It is precisely because of the occurrence of such a low-probability event that the environment in which we live has been produced and intelligent beings have been produced.
According to the theory mentioned above, the high-entropy universe fluctuated, and by chance such a low-entropy environment was formed, evolving into the current world and the emergence of human beings. Then the large universe, the number of low-probability events is by no means the only one, black holes, stars, these highly ordered matter is also through the irregular collision of many particles in the universe, accidentally formed.
In the process of generating several low-entropy states, several self-consciousnesses will be generated, and there are actually many such Boltzmann brains floating in the universe.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="27" > anthropic theory</h1>
Strongman's choice theory holds that a physical universe must match the intelligence of the consciousness that observes its existence, and there is no possibility that we will not be allowed to appear. And only after the emergence of species, it will be passed down in the form of culture, and will reach other universes to communicate with it.
It expresses the idea that in the universe that conceived us, it is always so precisely regulated, if there is a slight deviation, our life will not appear, and there will be no intelligent creatures thinking about the origin of everything in the universe. The rhetoric sounds a bit arrogant, we are still in the early stages of exploring the universe, and the search for other intelligent beings is what we have been doing.
The weak anthropical theory holds that there is more than one universe in the world, each with its own evolutionary process, and that human beings are only one of many evolutions.
This theory seems to provide a correct view of a good order in the universe. Assuming that there is a universe that can support intelligent life, then in fact such a universe must exist, and our universe is undoubtedly one of them. However, multi-choice intelligent design is not limited to the assumptions of the multi-choice universe theory.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="32" > conclusion</h1>
Boltzmann's brain was ultimately unable to verify whether it was true or false, and perhaps there were literally thousands of conscious bodies floating in the universe, but some only survived for a moment, and some could always maintain their own stable state.
We are undoubtedly lucky, from the long process of evolution, with wisdom, learn to think, and constantly unlock our own mysteries, but also began to be curious about the vast mysteries of the universe. One day, humanity will also get a definite answer.