Some wild metaphysics that seemingly everyone needs to accept?

A LessWrong philosopher proposes an unsettling thought experiment: how do you know you're not a "freak observer"—a cosmic coincidence, like a storm in the night sky that happens to generate a conscious experience indistinguishable from ours? Elias Schmied argues that while such observers can't arise in every possible universe, they could in most of them. And since we can never definitively rule out being one, we must act as if these universes actually exist. Schmied calls this metaphysical baseline "Tegmark three-point-five," existing between rival multiverse frameworks. The practical upshot: even if you're a computational accident in an impossible universe, you should still care about it, because decision theory requires acting as if these realities matter. It's metaphysical vertigo, but seemingly unavoidable.

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