If the universe fluctuates around thermal equilibrium for all eternity, not only will most observers appear all by themselves from the surrounding chaos, but the same is true for the subset of observers with precisely the features that you or I have—complete with our purported memories of the past. Those memories will generally be false, and fluctuating into them is very unlikely, but it’s still much more unlikely than fluctuating the entire universe. Even this minimal necessary condition for carrying out statistical reasoning—we should take ourselves to be chosen randomly from the set of
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