I’d have expected something like this to be treated like reincarnation or other spiritual belief, but there actually seems to be a not insignificant number of people who treat it like an actual scientific theory. Are they just crackpots, or is there something else going on that I’m not seeing?
'Cause people be wack.
Because it’s actually something that, if certain theories are correct, would be true.
It’s just entirely pointless, as the probability that you live in the universe where you never die is infinitesimally small. And that the you who never dies would, after that non-death, have different experiences than you, so are they even really the same person?
I only know of one person who reportedly really believed in it (Hugh Everett).
I dunno. It’s weirdly reassuring, thinking that somewhere out there, there might be a version of myself who’s awesome.
Hah, haven’t thought about it in a long time, but more than 20 years ago I somehow read Frank J. Tipler’s “The Physics Of Immortality”. I can’t deny that I couldn’t quite follow his theory, mostly because I didn’t understand the physics, maybe because it all was bunk anyway, but I remembered one particular statement about the still to be confirmed Higgs boson, which was about that if the mass of the Higgs boson was below a certain threshold (I don’t remember the exact value, let’s say 100 eV), his theory was confirmed. Years later, when the Higgs boson finally got detected, the first thing I did was to look up it’s mass! Et voilà, it turned out to be 125 eV! Take that, Dr. Tipler!
In addition to this fact, the phrase “quantum immortality” also has that magic word IMMORTALITY in it. The prospect of death–the total and permanent destruction of one’s consciousness and self–makes a lot of people frightened, sad, or just generally bummed out. Quite a lot of people will cling to anything that seems to hint at a way of avoiding the unpleasant truth that they personally are doomed to the total and permanent destruction of their consciousness and self, regardless of whether this alleged way out makes any damned sense or not.
I just excavated my copy of Tipler’s book, and I got it a bit wrong, but my point stands. Tipler declared, as one his predictions, that the following sentence is a testable statement about his theory: “the mass of the Higgs boson must be 220 +/- 20 GeV”. It turned out to be 125.1 +/- 0.14 GeV. QED. Tough luck.
I see this a lot but but the Wiki page on Quantum suicide and immortality puts a lot of nuance onto it.
Hugh Everett did not mention quantum suicide or quantum immortality in writing; his work was intended as a solution to the paradoxes of quantum mechanics. Eugene Shikhovtsev’s biography of Everett states that “Everett firmly believed that his many-worlds theory guaranteed him immortality: his consciousness, he argued, is bound at each branching to follow whatever path does not lead to death”. Peter Byrne, author of a published biography of Everett, reports that Everett also privately discussed quantum suicide (such as to play high-stakes Russian roulette and survive in the winning branch), but adds that “[i]t is unlikely, however, that Everett subscribed to this [quantum immortality] view, as the only sure thing it guarantees is that the majority of your copies will die, hardly a rational goal.”
How does quantum immortality differ from the boring, run of the mill immortality?
As I remember (and I understood it), the universe is a supercomputer and preserves your and everybody’s information.
To the extent that I understand quantum immortality, and there is a non-zero chance that I don’t understand it at all, it’s founded on the many-worlds hypothesis being literally true. For every event that results in your death, there is a world which is exactly like that one except that you don’t die. Since you can only be consciously aware in the universe where you don’t die, your consciousness continues, so it can never truly die.
Old age is no barrier here. The oldest human ever confirmed lived to 122. But if a human can live to 122, there’s no logical reason why a human couldn’t live to 123. And if a human could live to 123, there’s no reason a human couldn’t live to 124. And so on. Ad infinitum. Literally. The chances of a human living to, say, 150 might be 1 in 10^googolplex^googolplex^googolplex^googolplex, but since there are infinitely many worlds, if it’s possible for you to live to be 150, it’s certain that you will, in at least one world. And if you can live to 150…
One thing that strikes me, though, is that it seems like there are more ways for me to live a hellish existence than a heavenly one. Probably many more. Maybe infinitely more. I personally don’t find quantum hell to be a reassuring concept.
Thank you.
In the early part of the last century, the word “radio” was associated with various magical properties – including all kinds of woo – because it was the miracle of the age, with seemingly unlimited and unknown potential. In reality, it brought us television and detailed images of distant planets, but neither immortality nor magical cures for disease. To some, anything preceded by the word “quantum” is roughly equivalent today, denoting awesome new phenomena that are poorly understood and sometimes paradoxical, making it very cool as an alleged explanation for everything from consciousness and free will to the existence of “the immortal soul”. It’s exactly the same kind of nonsense.
Hugh Everett’s “many worlds” hypothesis is not to be confused with this woo. It’s actually taken seriously by many theorists, though it has absolutely no practical real-world ramifications and probably never will. Quantum physics itself, of course, has all kinds of testable and practical ramifications.
It would also lead to absurd scenarios, if one were to try to commit suicide in various ways. Jump off a building, a huge gust of wind blows you back into the balcony below (tho you’ll be in traction for a awhile). Pull the trigger on a gun, it misfires, every time. Strap yourself to a nuclear bomb at ground zero, jump into a nearby black hole…
If it is true, eventually you will find out.
Sounds like Deepak Chopra malarkey.
It’s a videogame-like philosophy.
Say you’re playing a game, screw up and die. What do you do? You go back to a branching point - a saved game - try again, and live. Now there are two timelines; the timeline in which you died, and the timeline in which you lived. You continue with the latter timeline until you die again, and repeat the process. By the time you finish the game, there are hundreds of different timelines out there, in all but one of which you’re dead, but in that one remaining version of your character, you’re an amazingly talented and lucky hero, always making the right choice and living when you should have died. That’s the quantum immortality timeline.
People want to live life like it was a videogame, because you can always win a videogame, eventually.
I saw that Jet Li movie, sadly they never made that sequel, guess we didn’t live in the universe where that happened.
Many worlds or quantum mechanics or whatever you prefer to call it does not mean that you would stay alive longer than you normally would expect, due to quantum decoherence.
Some are obviously confusing that with a different matter, which roughly goes like, if the universe is infinite, then a back-of-the-envelope calculation appears to say that anything is probable, including clones of you, clones except some things are different, floating brains, etc.