Longtin, Lou-Malou (2025) The Hallucination That Cannot Be: A Three-Axis Refutation of the Boltzmann Brain Problem. [Preprint]

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Abstract

This paper develops a comprehensive refutation of the Boltzmann brain problem along three converging axes — semantic,
ontological, and probabilistic — while maintaining the methodological humility appropriate to cosmological reasoning. First, the
concept of “hallucination” presupposes a reference reality; absent correspondence, the term loses its content and cannot bear
skeptical weight. Second, a “brain” requires a substrate — spatiotemporal location, energy gradients, causal connectivity —
without which mentality is unintelligible; positing a mind in literal nothingness is incoherent, and positing an alien substrate
collapses the “brain” metaphor itself. Third, within any sufficiently large ensemble of fluctuation-generated states, the
combinatorial space of incoherence dwarfs the space of law-like, self-consistent structures; as a result, coherent, persisting
observer-worlds constitute a measure-zero subset and are thus statistically negligible. Together, these considerations dissolve the
threat that Boltzmann-brain observers dominate anthropic reasoning and underwrite the continued trustworthiness of scientific
inference from within a law-governed cosmos.
This argument was developed independently through first-principles reasoning, with iterative dialogue using a large language
model to stress-test the internal coherence of the claims. The intellectual content, structure, and conclusions are entirely the
author’s own.

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Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Longtin, Lou-Malou loumnaloulongtin@gmail.com 0009-0007-9858-1243
Keywords:	Boltzmann brain; anthropic reasoning; hallucination; ontology; probability; cosmology; measure problem; cosmological inference
Subjects:	General Issues > Scientific Metaphysics Specific Sciences > Physics > Cosmology General Issues > Realism/Anti-realism General Issues > Thought Experiments
Depositing User:	Mr. Lou-Malou Longtin
Date Deposited:	22 Oct 2025 11:12
Last Modified:	22 Oct 2025 11:12
Item ID:	26998
Subjects:	General Issues > Scientific Metaphysics Specific Sciences > Physics > Cosmology General Issues > Realism/Anti-realism General Issues > Thought Experiments
Date:	16 October 2025
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/26998

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