Adam Elga

That's consistent with stably thinking, OK, it says that it's reporting that it's made of a fried egg.

The corresponding stance in the Boltzmann brain case is that that Boltzmann brain argument acts as a kind of reductio.

It acts as a kind of ruling out of the everything's going sort of according to plan stance, namely the stance, science is to be trusted, nothing really freaky and weird is happening, and I'm not a Boltzmann brain.

And I think that that argument

does put a lot of pressure, maybe even rule out that stance.

But what I'd like to point out is that there's this other stable stance.

It's not a stance I am happy to take, but it at least seems immune to the instability objection.

And the stance is something like, I don't know anything.

It's something like,

revert to your prior it's like you've been locked in a room the entire life your entire life and you've been living by this encyclopedia and then you get decisive evidence that the encyclopedia was typed by a purely random process a monkey it's like what should you think well what whatever you should think at the very beginning when you were dropped in that room in other words either skepticism or there are various other less extreme uh escape routes you could think

know cosmology is off on the wrong track something's something wrong the universe is not big uh though that that experiment yep that the experiment must have gone wrong it must have been misleading i don't like any of these hypotheses uh i think they're bad i think the problem of boltzmann brains fully almost fully survives i find it just as unacceptable to be forced into this conclusion but it's not instability

that is the way you could go yes and i accept that the anti-skeptical um mindset could be a way out i want to try to push a slightly different version of that on you um and and see how see how you like it and this is this is a kind of strange um way i came to this view i i was this um

Sinan Dorgamaj and Miriam Schoenfeld wrote a great paper on Boltzmann brains.

And I thought, you know, you guys, just to augment your view, you should accept this thing.

And I told this to Miriam and she said, oh, you know, I'll think about it.

I'll think of that.

Seems interesting.

And I thought, you know, I don't believe this, but you guys should.

And then I started teaching on this stuff.

I'm really worried about Boltzmann.