Adam Elga

That is one standard Bayesian view.

Not a view that externalists need to go for because they think you really do learn that you're not the brain in the vat, but

The rest of us have to go for something like that, I think.

Well, the question is, why can't we say something similar about different self-locating hypotheses?

Consider the predicament of being a normal human being.

Compare that to the predicament of being a completely randomly created Boltzmann brain.

prior that favors the first sort of predicament over the second.

Okay.

Ordinary observer.

So if we had that, before we get off the boat and talk about the weaknesses of the few, look at what nice thing we get from that view.

We get to listen to the ordinary cosmology.

We don't have the weirdo.

I mean, we still have

We still have to appeal to a rather extreme version of that view because if we think that high duplication scenarios get favored, but that's kind of a separate factor.

But setting that aside for the moment, we at least have the possibility of thinking, you know what?

We may well live in a universe with lots of Boltzmann brains who have experiences like mine.

And I do know that I'm not one of them.

not because my experience distinguishes between those two scenarios, but just because the normal human scenario is intrinsically more plausible in rather the way that certain normal human scenarios are intrinsically more plausible than skeptical scenarios.

I haven't read that paper, but from what you've said –

The thing that I've said is a little bit more committal than that.