Brains, minus the vat

…across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can
recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s
hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make
fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even –
in the most absurd and troubling example – a naked brain floating in
space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of
energy and probability. And so these fragments – in particular the
brains – would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged
universes, or than us. Or they might be us.

Here is more, the piece also contains a serious scientific discussion of the possibility of reincarnation.