Why do some people take “quantum immortality” so seriously?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Years ago I realized this on my own. I’m a fan of the Many-Worlds interpretation, and I realized that this would be a logical extension of it. I mentioned it to a friend of mine, and he said that it sounded like something he’d read about before called “Quantum Immortality”.

So, yeah, I guess you could say I believe in it. However, since it’s entirely untestable, I’m not in any hurry to put it to the test. I’m certainly not going to put a gun to my head and see if it misfires.

I will admit that, as a thought experiment, I’ve tried to figure out ways to use it to win the lottery. The problem is finding a way to guarantee that if you lose the lottery, you get killed with no other possible outcome. QI implies that you’ll live and be aware, not that you won’t be horribly maimed or mutilated.

22

Personally I’m more intrigued by the concept of “quantum immorality”, where every time you chose not to do something illicit, shady or whatever, you actually did it in another world.

This implies that somewhere, there’s a super-debauched version of yourself doing all those things you didn’t do for one reason or another. (or you could be that person if that’s the way you roll).

23

Well, the thing about quantum immorality is that you have to be discrete about it.

On the other hand, I have always though of immorality as being infinitely differentiable.

24

If I live to be the oldest living person, I will start to become very suspicious!

25

Downside is that you would just be alive, not necessarily well off.

You fall off that building, and you manage to live, but are paralyzed from the neck down. You get shot in the head, the gun doesn’t misfire, but it just lodges in your brain, causing you to experience convulsions.

If you rigged up a system to kill you if your lottery numbers don’t come up, then unless you’ve done some extremely rigorous engineering, it is more likely to fail than you are to win. Maybe it fails badly, and just leaves you maimed and crippled, and without any lottery winnings. It may also fail on a false negative, killing you just as you start feeling the excitement of having won.

Quantum immortality would be a natural extension of many worlds. If many worlds is true, then quantum immortality almost has to be.

There is also the proposal, that we are all results of quantum immortality, because if the universe is unstable, and reverts to a true vacuum, then the universe that we all inhabit is the one where that hasn’t happened yet. The universe may only be stable for a few milliseconds before ripping itself apart, but, by no coincidence at all, we find ourselves only existing in the ones that haven’t.

But, this is, similar to the “are we living in a simulation” discussion, purely a philosophical exercise. We should attempt to live our lives as though they are real, the consequences for are acts are real, and that we only have the one shot, the one timeline. Sometimes when I play the lottery, I think that it’s interesting that I am guaranteeing that in one of 300 million universes, I win, but also that in every other one, I am disappointed (well, I guess there are some where I may be content with lower tier prizes). But it is an amusing thought, not a life changing philosophy, not a way to live my life.

26

Could you please explain this bit? Beyond the uncontroversial statement that the probability you are alive, given that you are around to think about it, is high, how does Many Worlds predict anything special, at least not without a lot of assumptions and approximations? A world in which you are alive is already a superposition of a myriad of “worlds” in the Many Worlds sense; aren’t the details of such a state significant?

27

Many worlds doesn’t really do the superposition, but resolves superposition by stating that every outcome occurs.

As long as there is a non-zero chance of something happening, then it must happen in at least one of these offshoots. Including escaping death in the most unlikely of scenarios. Even escaping death through old age, somehow. There’s nothing that says that you have to be aware and conscious the whole time, just that your consciousness would exist in the future. You could be frozen and brought back, or even just come back from time to time as a Boltzmann brain, experiencing brief moments of consciousness even throughout the heat death of the universe.

Like I said, I treat this, even if it is true, as a philosophical exercise, rather than anything that is truly a real phenomena. I do consider movies or TV shows with improbably lucky characters to be results of quantum immortality, regaling us tales of their survivor bias.

28

I do the same, actually.

Furthermore, the question of “Well, why isn’t everyone immortal”, the answer is that they are- in their own, unlikely universes. If everyone were immortal in, say, this universe, then human life would be impossible- it’d be too crowded. Everyone previous to you has to be mortal for you (the observer) to even be born.

29

I like that thought.

Thank you.

30

One thing I’ve wondered about is just WHEN the timelines diverge? I mean, does it absolutely have to be at the split second that something lethal might or might not happen, like slipping in the shower and landing on your head, or could it have been 2 days prior when you say… bought Zest soap instead of Dial bodywash, and didn’t slip in the shower?

Only reason I ask is that thus far at 48, I can’t think of any heroic escapes from anything lethal that I’ve had, but I can think of a few examples of where choices I made turned out to maybe not get me killed further down the line, like not going on hunting trips with too much booze and not enough sense, etc…

31

If you ever passed an accident on the highway, there’s probably a universe when you left the house a few minutes earlier and were right in the middle of the action when the truck jackknifed - it’s hard to think of “going back into the house to grab the thing you forgot” as a life-saving action, but in those cases, it was.

32

No, the timelines are continuously diverging. It’s got nothing to do with potentially disastrous events. Every time a sub-atomic particle that has probability x of jumping one way, and probability 1-x of jumping the other way, does one or the other in our world, the many-worlds interpretation says there are some worlds where the particle jumps one way, and some where it jumps the other way.

In x/100% of those worlds, it jumped the one way, and in (1-x)/100% of those worlds, it jumped the other way. And this universe-splitting happens all the time, every time a sub-atomic particle can do one of multiple things.

Since there are a shitload of sub-atomic particles in the Universe, the world I was in when I started this sentence has already split into unfathomably many worlds by now, if many-worlds is true.

33

Oops - the 100 goes in the numerator. x*100 and (1-x)*100.

Saw it just too late to edit, of course.

34

Well, eventually one of you will find out. Out of all the googolplex^googolplex^googolplex^googolplex^googolplex^googolplex of you.

Whoopee. :wink:

35

All I know is there are at least three scenarios from my life where I should have been dead/killed, and one instance where I should have ended up completely paralyzed/be in a vegetative state.

36

:golf clap:

37

And that’s the problem with the whole notion. If it is true, then some version of yourself will continue to exist, but you yourself may not. You might currently be on that path that does not lead to immorality, in fact, you probably are, as the vast majority of your different versions are in fact doomed.

It could go all the way back to not having picked up smoking 30 years ago, or having quit a year, month, or even just a day earlier than you did. (I have no idea if you are/were a smoker, just using it is an example.)

38

To me, this calls into question the utility of thinking of these “worlds” as having any kind of independent reality, rather than as terms in a sum. Either way, it seems a leap to go from there to any kind of conclusion about the nature of consciousness.

39

That was the first thought that occurred to me as well. It’s exactly the sort of bullshit he loves peddling.

40

Well, except that as I (and others) have said, it’s completely untestable. There’s no way to tell if it’s true or not, so anyone who lives their lives counting on QI to save their bacon will (in all likelihood) end up very dead, very embarrassed, or both.

It’s basically just a fun little thought experiment, nothing more.