The Boltzmann Brain

Paranoia is a term used by mental health specialists to describe suspiciousness (or mistrust) that is either highly exaggerated or not warranted at all. Paranoias can be classified into three main categories – paranoid personality disorder, delusional (paranoid) disorder, and paranoid schizophrenia.

Some scientists believe paranoia may be a reaction to high levels of life stress. Lending support to this opinion is the evidence that paranoia is more prevalent among immigrants, prisoners of war, and others undergoing severe stress. Sometimes, when thrust into a new and highly stressful situation, people suffer an acute form, known as "acute paranoia", in which delusions develop over a short period of time and last only a few months. Individuals with paranoid schizophrenia commonly have extremely bizarre delusions or hallucinations, almost always on a specific theme. Sometimes they hear voices that others cannot hear or believe that their thoughts are being controlled or broadcast aloud.

After this short description of paranoia I should introduce myself as a potentially excellent representative of the paranoid species: I was a political refugee, and for almost my whole life I have been thrust into highly stressful situations, I am premature child, I always thought and always felt like an alien amongst the mass of homo sapiens, and I have developed a few very strange ideas about this universe. For example: I really believe that the theory of the Boltzmann Brain Paradox is very probably correct. I truly believe in it.  It is my own paranoiac delirium.

This new painting is inspired by the latest ideas about Boltzmann Brains from Don Page, a physicist – “Unless our universe is decaying at an astronomical rate (i.e., on the present cosmological timescale of Giga years, rather than on the quantum recurrence timescale of googolplexes), it would apparently produce an infinite number of observers per commoving volume by thermal or vacuum fluctuations (Boltzmann brains). If the number of ordinary observers per commoving volume is finite, this scenario seems to imply zero likelihood for us to be ordinary observers and minuscule likelihoods for our actual observations.”

If that is true, it would mean that you and me, you reading this and I writing this, are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than persons with a real past and possible future (if we are lucky or unlucky enough). My and your memories and the world we think we see around us are illusions.
“Hence, our observations suggest that this scenario is incorrect and that perhaps our universe is decaying at an astronomical rate.” In other words it means our universe will die one day.

This is my paranoia – my hallucination. Millions of Boltzmann Brains are floating in my brain.