Sean Carroll

Therefore, the strategy should be to ignore basically that world, that cosmological scenario, and try to construct a cosmological scenario in which people like me have reliable memories.

But you want to say that's a little bit of a cheat.

Okay.

Well, OK.

I mean there's almost no daylight between us here.

I think I'm almost totally on board.

But maybe there's like a little difference of emphasis here because the way that I would put it is, look, yeah, I cannot rule out on the basis of either reason or evidence –

That I'm a Boltzmann brain.

I cannot rule out that I'm a brain in a vat, living in a simulation, being dreamed by an evil demon, all sorts of different things.

But they're not ways to go through life.

If there were no other option, then I would really, you know, have an existential crisis.

But the other option is I come up with a cosmological theory that doesn't have Boltzmann brains in it.

And that's not that hard to do.

So let's do that with 99% credence.

Wait, the first was being a human being, regular, ordinary observer.

Okay, I don't like it.

Okay.

For a reason that is connected to something I think you said earlier.

Yeah.

I think something almost exactly along these lines was proposed by Hartle and Schroednicki.