If the Multiverse Is Real, How Do You Know You're You?

I gave this talk at a 2017 consciousness conference with one claim: human beings are the most highly evolved form of the most common thing in the universe.
Then I showed how that same thing fooled Galileo, fooled William Herschel, and fooled my own experiment.

Recorded in La Jolla in 2017, with Stuart Hameroff hosting and Sir Roger Penrose in the audience.
We cover: why Galileo's biggest blunder was hiding in the Pleiades, what dust did to the BICEP2 result, why inflation seems to force a multiverse with exact copies of you, what that means for free will, and the Boltzmann brains most inflation models cannot seem to avoid.
If inflation is correct, the multiverse is correct.

Correction: on stage I credited Curtis, Slipher and Hubble with showing the Sun is not at the center of the Milky Way. That was Harlow Shapley, in 1918, using globular clusters.

00:00 The most evolved form of the most common thing
02:51 Often in error, never in doubt
04:41 Brain or universe? You cannot tell
09:16 What Galileo actually proved
13:17 Galileo's biggest blunder
19:15 Are we the center of the multiverse?
25:30 The signal that turned out to be dust
30:00 How do you know you are you?
32:59 Brains assembled by random chance
37:15 Is there any evidence for inflation?

Into the Impossible is hosted by Brian Keating, Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego and author of Losing the Nobel Prize and Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner.