If anyone has a less crazy method of avoiding these dilemma's though, please, please, please let me know.
Ignore them?
Why do you need answers to these questions, so intensely that being unsure is "making [you] a little sick"? There is no Omega, and he/she/it is not going to show up to create these scenarios. What difference will an answer make to any practical decision in front of you, here and now?
There is no Omega, and he/she/it is not going to show up to create these scenarios. What difference will an answer make to any practical decision in front of you, here and now?
While Omega is not real, it seems possible that naturally occurring things like false vacuum states and Boltzmann brains might be. I think that the possibility those things exist might create similar dilemmas, am disturbed by this fact, and wish to know how to resolve them. I'm pretty much certain there's no Omega, but I'm not nearly as sure about false vacuums.
Imagine that the universe is approximately as it appears to be (I know, this is a controversial proposition, but bear with me!). Further imagine that the many worlds interpretation of Quantum mechanics is true (I'm really moving out of Less Wrong's comfort zone here, aren't I?).
Now assume that our universe is in a situation of false vacuum - the universe is not in its lowest energy configuration. Somewhere, at some point, our universe may tunnel into true vacuum, resulting in a expanding bubble of destruction that will eat the entire universe at high speed, destroying all matter and life. In many worlds, such a collapse need not be terminal: life could go one on a branch of lower measure. In fact, anthropically, life will go on somewhere, no matter how unstable the false vacuum is.
So now assume that the false vacuum we're in is highly unstable - the measure of the branch in which our universe survives goes down by a factor of a trillion every second. We only exist because we're in the branch of measure a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of... all the way back to the Big Bang.
None of these assumptions make any difference to what we'd expect to see observationally: only a good enough theory can say that they're right or wrong. You may notice that this setup transforms the whole universe into a quantum suicide situation.
The question is, how do you go about maximising expected utility in this situation? I can think of a few different approaches: