Even if the vast majority of entities with your current mental state are Boltzmann brains, you can only expect the mental operations to carry out the conclusion “and therefore I am likely a Boltzmann brain” to validly operate in the entities in which you are not, in fact, a Boltzmann brain. That operation, therefore, would only harm the accuracy of your beliefs.
Agreed, I think that’s a good reason. It’s related to the reason I don’t think I am a Boltzmann brain—most Boltzmann brains don’t have the memory that they exist due to evolutionary processes, since brains with that memory are an extremely small sector of all possible Boltzmann brains. And so it seems like the simplest explanation for me having that memory is that evolution actually happened (since the B-brain explanation is kind of wild). Though I haven’t thought super carefully about this and would like to hear other’s thoughts.
Even if the vast majority of entities with your current mental state are Boltzmann brains, you can only expect the mental operations to carry out the conclusion “and therefore I am likely a Boltzmann brain” to validly operate in the entities in which you are not, in fact, a Boltzmann brain. That operation, therefore, would only harm the accuracy of your beliefs.
Why can’t you have Boltzmann brains-that-carry-out-that-operation?
Because most Boltzmann brains are so ephemeral they would instantaneously collapse.
Agreed, I think that’s a good reason. It’s related to the reason I don’t think I am a Boltzmann brain—most Boltzmann brains don’t have the memory that they exist due to evolutionary processes, since brains with that memory are an extremely small sector of all possible Boltzmann brains. And so it seems like the simplest explanation for me having that memory is that evolution actually happened (since the B-brain explanation is kind of wild). Though I haven’t thought super carefully about this and would like to hear other’s thoughts.
If you’re a Boltzmann brain, that chain of reasoning becomes suspect, since you may not have actually made it at all and only believe you’ve made it.