chapotraphouse

What if you and I have been going at this for a while?

Well if none of your memories carry over it's certainly not you anymore.

Poincare recurrence is, as far as we understand the laws of the universe, totally possible. If you think of the set of possible states of the universe, the current state it's in is necessarily in that set. Then, because it's a closed system, it necessarily has to come back to that state eventually. The hard part to grasp of how that's physically possible is that, of course, classical thermodynamics tells us that there's an arrow of time that points in the direction of increasing entropy. But looking at statistical thermodynamics, it turns out that it's only the case that it's overwhelmingly more likely that a system, in the macro scale, goes in the direction of increasing entropy. A system spontaneously becoming more ordered is possible, just so very unlikely that it will take a completely unimaginable amount of time to happen. Heat death could reverse itself and little by little build up into a new big bang after silly amounts of time. Like, Tree(Graham's Number) silly.

Why doesn't it imply that? We can put a number on the chance that particles randomly come together to reform minds. That number is arbitrarily small, but it's not zero, hence why we are considering arbitrarily large time scales.

There's an account on tiktok that gets new reptiles and amphibians all the time and names them fun names and they live in one of the best terrarium setups I've ever seen and i was a reptile guy for a while.

I want to live there please

That sounds heavenly.

new jersey

Please, no

Entropy "reverses" itself literally all the time in micro scales. All entropy means is that the likely states of a system are more likely to occur (when I phrase it that way it sounds redundant to the point of absurdity, but that actually is what it means). If you look at the interface between two identical metal lattices that can exchange electrons, the most likely state is the one where the number of electrons remains the same at both sides of the interface. But at any given time, it's possible for an imbalance to come about and for there to be a few more electrons in one side of the interface. Larger imbalances are less likely, of course, but it would even be possible for all the electrons to move to one side; there's no physical law that says that the system has to keep evolving to become more and more disordered, it's just the most likely thing to occur. For all practical considerations in timespans measured in googol years or less, it's not worth considering this for macro scale systems. But if you want to entertain the notion that time goes on infinitely, googol is a laughably small number.

If you like acollieastro's stuff I think Alpha Phoenix explains the quirks of entropy in a similar way here that you might find to be a better explanation than my comment.

Isn't entropy a statistical proccess? Given arbitrarily large time scales, a disordered system can briefly become ordered.

Random things repeat all the time, though.

I wasn't even thinking about the Boltzmann brain scenario, I was just considering the chance that literally everything could reform like this as we take time out to infinity, all slightly different permutations too

A consciousness can be split: for example, if you separate the lobes of a person's brain, put each lobe in a new body, then regrow the missing lobes, you get two people who each can claim they are the original.

Don't even need to separate the lobes, let alone create separate bodies for this.

On the other hand, if consciousness can't survive an interruption, then I start to wonder if we are constantly dying from one instant to the next, a series of clones like frames of a film.

Meh, in real life it's experimentally and experientially identical to consciousness surviving an interruption. This is just like solipsism circle jerking. Use diamat