Yes, the question sounds crazy. Everyone dies, right? We see death all around us, and if we’re sufficiently aged, we’ve seen it happen to loved ones and friends. But…
…(and I’m not going to pretend to understand the math behind it all) the “Many Worlds” hypothesis of quantum mechanics concludes that there are an almost infinite number of parallel universes that exist. At each moment, new universes are springing into existence all over the universe. What if we (from just our own perspective) follow a path of least resistance that allows us to stay alive forever? Sure, we’ll all certainly die in every other person’s universe, but not in the one that we continue to exist in.
Perhaps as you approach old age, you start to realize this. And when you become the oldest person in your universe, it becomes obvious. And then you remember this OP and try to come back to comment, but alas, I’m already dead in your universe, and you’re already dead in mine.
*I also want to say that this thought occurred to me without the influence of any drugs or alcohol. Just my morning black coffee.
If so, then we will all eventually become gods in our own little universe. If this is how things go, then it’s sad to see that Hitler is still alive somewhere out there, ruling the world in his own universe. But on the other hand, each one of his victims also is still out there somewhere, having lived long enough to spit on his grave and more.
In Hindu mythology, this comes up again and again. There are many examples of them, here is one :
In Hindu philosophy, Eternity is not the same as Immortality
Eternity = Has no beginning or End (timeless)
Immortal = Has a beginning (birth) but no End
In general, people who never die get bored and wish to die in most stories.
Not so crazy. That idea as a thought experiment has been kicking around for some years now.
The variation, quantum suicide, posits that a man has access to a trigger that will either kill him or do nothing depending upon whether an atomic particle has decayed or not. So 50/50 chance. There is an observer to this experiment. The observer will see the man pull the trigger only once to a few times before he kills himself. But the experience of the man himself is that his consciousness will always follow the quantum outcome of survival, so he can pull the trigger a million times and never be killed.
The problem is that this view privileges the timelines in which the person is alive over the timelines in which the person is dead. There’s no reason to do that: Quantum mechanics, or indeed any physics at all, does not contain the concept of “consciousness”, and a slowly-cooling corpse with a bullet hole through the brain is just as capable of being an “observer” (in the versions of quantum mechanics that even contain that concept) as a living person.
In fact, it’s worse than that, even, because the “Many Worlds” interpretation is one of the formulations of quantum mechanics which doesn’t contain the concept of “observer”.
My biggest problem with all this is that nobody can prove there are multiple universes. It may be theoretically possible, but so are other theories about the universe, all of which are unprovable.
That may change in the future, but until then, using Occam’s razor, the simplest theory for what happens when you die is that you no longer exist in the one universe we know. Your life ends, and you’re done. Same with a cat, dog, or fly you killed a few minutes ago. You don’t need to continue living in some other theoretical universe(s). I, for one, wouldn’t want to live on forever even if somehow I could. Death is a completely understandable and natural occurrence for all living things.
I read a short story not long ago about just this very hypothesis. In some universe you just never die. Damned if I can remember title or author though. Alastair Reynolds? Adrian Tchaikovsky? Not sure.
Let me try to summon @Andy_L , our SF lit ID expert
Yeah, I was just mentioning it as a thought experiment that exists. I long ago figured it was a fallacy that, even accepting a branching many-worlds scenario, there’s no reason why the suicider’s consciousness would automatically transfer to the branch in which he lived.
The one I remember reading(not the title, though) was one person recounting what it was like to be immortal. Essentially, living through endless cycles of Big Bang/Big Squeeze, feeling the heat and pressures involved, drifting through space and feeling the cold and vacuum, etc. Decidedly unpleasant.
“The Garden of Forking Paths”, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, plays with this idea:
[a writer in the short story] “believed it an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times.”
“This web of time – the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries – embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not.”
Sorry, no. The only details I recall is that the individual who postulated that he couldn’t die decided to prove it by shooting himself in the head. Which left him dead. But others involved wondered if they were just in the wrong branch of the multiverse.
It’s not a transfer, but a continuation. The universe where the bullet went into your head, you are dead, but you continue on in a universe where the bullet did not go into your head.
The idea is that you will personally experience an eternity, beating any odds against your chances of survival, as if there is even an infinitesimal chance, that is the universe in which you survive.
Some of these could be quite nice. If you are a smoker, it’s not that you somehow avoid lung cancer forever, but rather that we invent a cure for cancer. You aren’t living forever because somehow death overlooks you, but because we have stopped the again process, and everyone lives indefinitely.
Some could be horrific, as continuity of conciseness does not mean continuity of quality of life.
If it does exist, then there’s nothing we can do to take advantage of it or avoid it, so while it’s an interesting philosophical question, it’s not one that you should use to inform how you live your life.
The Many Worlds interpretation was not just invented from whole cloth. The motivation is that there are real experimental results to explain, the utter weirdness of quantum mechanics. Occam’s Razor cannot be used to just dismiss an explanation for observations that require explanation. It is only of use to choose among proposed explanations. But no other interpretation of quantum mechanics is “more parsimonious” in Occam’s sense. If anything, there’s a strong case to be made that Many Worlds is the simplest and most natural interpretation.
As David Deutsch has pointed out, all evidence points to the fact that we will fairly soon be able to build a quantum computer with a few thousand qubits that can carry out computation that would be impossible in a single universe, even if every particle in an entire single universe were dedicated to the computational task. If parallel universes are not (in some sense) real, where is this computation happening?
I don’t think Many Worlds claims to “privilege” universes in which you are alive. The argument is very similar to the weak anthropic principle, explaining the apparent fine tuning of cosmological parameters with a model in which universes with all possible parameter values exist, but in universes where parameter values are not conducive to the existence of matter and the evolution of life nobody is around to observe them. The idea would be that we are simply unaware of the branches in which we are dead, but would continue to be aware of the branches in which we are alive. “Awareness” in this basic alive-vs-dead sense does not require any deep explanation of consciousness, just an objectively functioning brain vs non-functioning brain.
I think the difficulty lies with the fact that in the Many Worlds interpretation we are constantly splitting into a vast number of parallel instances of ourselves, none of which are aware of the myriad other instances post-split. Since it doesn’t subjectively feel like such a splitting into multiple living copies of ourselves is happening under normal circumstances, who can say what it would feel like in a split where one instance died and the other continued living? But it seems to me that this kind of question of the subjective sense of identity arises in much simpler forms of splitting, like the classic Star-Trek transporter-malfunction thought experiment where two identical copies are created.
I’ve never quite understood this objection. It seems to come from the perspective that splitting is a new experience that should somehow feel different to some other normal experience. But if we are constantly splitting off into new universes then we’ve been doing it the whole time we’ve been conscious and it feels like it always has done. Whatever experience of being we have includes the feeling of splitting into multiple universes, it always has done, so why should we expect some feeling that something different is happening.
