Laughing Mask: You can’t just wave your hands and say everything is just the wave function with no exceptions when we’ve only stringently tested it with isolated atoms. Physics isn’t complete, it isn’t done yet, and yet we act like the current version is the bible. There’s going to be a twenty-second-century physics, and a twenty-third, and you’re arrogant in your statistically-unlikely assumption that you happen to live at the end of science. It’s not over till it’s over.

Crying Mask: Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. That’s not a flaw in physics, not a flaw in materialism. You’re just overly skeptical. Nothing wrong with that, but no reason to cast away the edifice. If your demands are so high, the burden of proof is on you.

Laughing Mask: As a stand-alone point, perhaps. But if a consequence of a belief is that you shouldn’t believe it, then that belief in invalid. You must not saw off the branch you are sitting on.

Crying Mask: I assume you have another point then, but I’ve been wrong before.

Laughing Mask: If materialism is true you’re more likely to be an alien’s dream than yourself. You are more likely to be the random interactions in a gas nebula than yourself. You are more likely to be a simulation running in a simulation running in a simulation than yourself. You’re more likely to be a brief improbable atomic configuration achieved by leaving a rock in a warm heat bath for a few quadrillion years. Any system at a state of high entropy generates, automatically and within it, parts that have lower entropy. Order from chaos, given enough time. The simpler that order is, the more likely it is. So if you’re just some configuration of physical or functional states of atoms, and the universe, multiverse, whatever, is astronomically large or infinite, then you’ll pop up over and over again. And since simpler order is more likely, you won’t be on this planet with these people, you’ll just be a brief conscious phantom, what’s called a Boltzmann brain. And if you are a Boltzmann brain, which in all vast likelihood you are, you have no reason to believe in contemporary physics. Therefore to believe in contemporary physics leads directly to disbelief in contemporary physics!

(This is followed by an extended wave of disembodied clapping from the many hovering masks arrayed in a darkened amphitheater around them. Each mask in the audience is a different emotion.)

Crying Mask: Do not applaud, you fools. There is a flaw. I know that I am not a Boltzmann brain because a Boltzmann brain would only exist for a moment, whereas I can check my own mind, check my own memories, which extend over time, thus proving I am not a Boltzmann brain.