Laughing Mask: Too easy! There’s no time for you to make sure you aren’t a Boltzmann brain if you are a Boltzmann brain, although there’s plenty of Boltzmann brains who think they just completed such a survey!

Crying Mask: The Boltzmann brain paradox may seem to be true, under some interpretations, but—

Laughing Mask: Imagine if every night everyone on Earth dreamed they were you . . .

Crying Mask: . . . What?

Laughing Mask: No nothing, continue your point.

Crying Mask: As I was saying, simple solutions in how we deal with probability and physics might rule Boltzmann brains out.

Laughing Mask: As if it were a stand-alone issue! Consider that most cosmologists agree that there’s an infinite multiverse.

Crying Mask: As do I. All things happen.

Laughing Mask: Another way of saying nothing happens.

Crying Mask: That’s it? That’s your objection?

Laughing Mask: Imagine an infinite checkered quilt with a repeating finite pattern of three black squares and one white square. You randomly throw a dart at the infinite quilt. What is the probability that you hit a white square?

Crying Mask: That’s easy. One in four.

Laughing Mask: Now imagine that the quilt is the infinite multiverse, and each square is a possible version of your current conscious experience. The finite pattern of possible worlds, even though astronomically large, eventually repeats, which is why there are multiple copies of you on that quilt. Some will be identical to you in every way, some are different. But it is impossible to tell which square on the quilt you are. Now consider that reason is a highly ordered state of affairs. Coming to a logical conclusion, to a justified belief, is itself a highly ordered, highly organized state. Yet, Boltzmann’s insight was that there are always so many more disordered states than ordered ones. Astronomically more. Now you throw the dart, your act of self-identification in the multiverse. How likely are you to hit a version of you that has a reasonable and justified belief in the multiverse? Astronomically small. Justified beliefs can’t be supported in your embarrassment of worlds. Dis-proof via contradiction.

Crying Mask: Another overelaborate argumentative contortion!

Laughing Mask: Don’t you see that these problems, these paradoxes, that these are signposts! They all involve observers. In information theory, in causation, in philosophy, and yes, in quantum physics, in cosmology, in thermodynamics, in time and space! Don’t you see what all these signs are pointing toward?

Crying Mask: I see that you are suffering from pareidolia! Where you see great signposts I see scattered matchsticks. But I will let you play out your game. Tell me your madness and I’ll save my diagnosis for the end.

Laughing Mask: I . . . don’t know for sure. No one tries to fit anything together, make sure it’s consistent! Everyone is concerned only with local cohesion, not global. Except, perhaps, us consciousness researchers. In the end.