Both the swampman and the spontaneous textbook are optimized, just by the inventor of the thought experiment rather than by anything that happens inside the thought-experument-world.
Suppose you encountered a swampman (in the sense of seeing a random person appearing out of nothing in a saltmarsh) but in this case we, the thought experimentors, draw randomly from the set of quantum fluctuations which are physiologically human and can speak English. The vast majority of “thoughts” and “memories” that a swampman would report would be utter nonsense, and not correspond to logic or reality.
Likewise, a randomly-fluctuated-into-existence-written-in-English-textbook would mostly contain false statements, since most possible statements are false.
If you did actually (by some insane miracle) encounter either of these things in real life, your priors should be on the random nonsense case, not the “it also happens to appear optimized even more” case.
(That is, if you were sure that the swampman/textbook was created by random fluctuations. If you actually see a person assembled from nothing in a swamp, you should probably freak out and start assigning high probabilities to God, aliens, simulators and—the big one—your own insanity.)
By positing a swampman with a coherent brain, or a textbook filled with true facts, there genuinely is an optimization pressure and it is you!
Both the swampman and the spontaneous textbook are optimized, just by the inventor of the thought experiment rather than by anything that happens inside the thought-experument-world.
Suppose you encountered a swampman (in the sense of seeing a random person appearing out of nothing in a saltmarsh) but in this case we, the thought experimentors, draw randomly from the set of quantum fluctuations which are physiologically human and can speak English. The vast majority of “thoughts” and “memories” that a swampman would report would be utter nonsense, and not correspond to logic or reality.
Likewise, a randomly-fluctuated-into-existence-written-in-English-textbook would mostly contain false statements, since most possible statements are false.
If you did actually (by some insane miracle) encounter either of these things in real life, your priors should be on the random nonsense case, not the “it also happens to appear optimized even more” case.
(That is, if you were sure that the swampman/textbook was created by random fluctuations. If you actually see a person assembled from nothing in a swamp, you should probably freak out and start assigning high probabilities to God, aliens, simulators and—the big one—your own insanity.)
By positing a swampman with a coherent brain, or a textbook filled with true facts, there genuinely is an optimization pressure and it is you!