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  • Metaphysical Solipsism Justified by Extreme Luck
    You bring up an interesting point, but I don't think it sufficiently solves the philosophical problem I'm alluding to.

    Yes, unlikely things happen ALL THE TIME. There is nothing remarkable about something unusual happening, since there are an infinite number of opportunities for unlikely events to occur. Also, I recognize that throughout any person's life span, many extremely unlikely "coincidences" will occur.

    With that being said, our tendency is to use Occum's Razor to pick the hypothesis with the fewest and most believable assumptions.

    Let me see if I can do a better job of explaining my point. Allow me to give you another, slightly different thought experiment.

    Suppose you purchase a ticket to the Powerball lottery. The odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 292,201,338. Now, imagine that you ask your trustworthy friend (let's call him Aleksey) to hold on to the ticket, wait for the results to come in, and inform you of the outcome of the drawing. A few days go by, and when the winning digits have been announced, Aleksey calls you and tells you that "you won the grand prize of $40 million." No matter how trustworthy Aleksey may be, as a result of human error, it is still possible for him to misread the numbers. In fact, it is considerably more likely that Aleksey is mistaken than that you won the jackpot with odds of only 1 in 292,201,338, thus, your first inclination is to doubt the results and believe that Aleksey is mistaken.

    Just as the existence of a fake reality is generally considered unlikely, it is also unlikely that your trustworthy friend Aleksey would mislead you. Nevertheless, your first instinct might be to believe that Aleksey is mistaken, rather than to believe that you are a Powerball winner, since it is logical for you to favor the least unlikely explanation for the unlikely events that have occurred.

    Although unusual things happen all the time, a Powerball winner could argue that the nonexistence of other minds is significantly more plausible than the existence of a world in which he is the sole winner of the Powerball lottery.