Colloquium Series: Miriam Schoenfield (UT-Austin)

Please join us as professor Miriam Schoenfield from UT-Austin gives her talk on Friday, April 19, 2024 at 3:00pm in DeBartolo Hall, room 136.

Talk Title: "Why I’m not a Boltzmann Brain" (Joint work with Sinan Dogramaci)
Abstract: If the universe is big enough, or exists long enough, it is nearly certain that the universe’s full history includes enormous numbers of short-lived brains, having experiences just like mine, but that came into existence through the random interactions of particles. Some have taken the existence of these “Boltzmann Brains” to raise a skeptical challenge: If most of the brains having experiences like mine are of the Boltzmann variety, aren’t I most likely one of them? In this paper we offer a Bayesian solution to this challenge.