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Disprove quantum immortality without risking your life (2019)

53 points by vankessel 7y ago

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asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
I don't think this really disproves quantum immortality? You never experience the gun firing because in all the universes where it fires you die so quickly you can't sense it. That doesn't mean the gun never fires. It just means that you only experience it in the event it didn't. This is kind of tautologically true. By definition, if you're alive, you haven't been shot in the head at point blank range. Particularly, assumption 2 is in no way required for the quantum immortality thought experiment to work.
marcofiset 7y ago
I've been obsessed with QI ever since I first heard about it. Every time I have a small glimpse of inattention, I always like to think that my consciousness just got transposed to another reality. Sometimes it's while I'm driving my car, and it makes it all the more trippy. However, I'm not sure I understand the logic behind their reasoning. > Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest. > you should always experience the reality in which the doctor tells you about your unknown ailment. If you experience the reality in which you live the longest, wouldn't the ailment just never come about? Going back to the gun and bullet example, your consciousness being transposed to the branch where none of that even happens, wouldn't the same thing apply to any disease that would develop within your body? You would just get transposed to the reality in which no such disease develop, extending your life even further.
- ALittleLight 7y ago
  >Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest. That formulation doesn't make sense to me. I would say it as "Consciousness can only experience realities in which it exists." Therefore you won't move into futures in which you don't exist.
  - vankessel 7y ago
    My reasoning behind this was that there can be multiple futures where you could exist and experience, but some of them shorter than others. E.g. A------B \ --------C If you are travelling towards B, once you reach it, you die. But you can't magically jump last second to parallel reality C, you can only branch from the present. Thus you would have needed to branch down to C in advance. Thanks for pointing this out, I will make my reasoning more clear in a future edit.
    - marcofiset 7y ago
      That's what I understood based on the gun example. However the same would hold true for any deadly disease you develop, wouldn't it?
      - vankessel 7y ago
        True, the doctor example is really just supposed to be segue into thinking about how a direct message could work. Although, perhaps facing death and recovering turns you into the kind of fellow who will live their life in a vastly different way leading to a longer life?
    - ALittleLight 7y ago
      Two points: 1. Delayed choice quantum eraser experiments suggest to me, unless I've misunderstood them (which is highly possible), that effects can affect causes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed-choice_quantum_eraser https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed-choice_quantum_erase... 2. Getting shot in the head isn't always fatal. The bullet could deflect off your skull, or even go through your brain and just not hit you. The bullet could experience spontaneous existence failure, or simply fail to interact with the matter in your body and pass through you. My limited understanding of physics says that things like these are possible but massively unlikely at large scale. However, if some set of things are possible but rare, and the only alternative things are impossible, then something rare will happen.
  - saalweachter 7y ago
    Oh, there's a horrifying contrapositive to that statement. See, what that statement is really trying to do is assert uniqueness of consciousness within a many-worlds quantum interpretation. Let's set up your standard quantum deathtrap: radioactive decay triggers the release of a deadly poison. And let's make it a really nasty poison, that is incurable but is going to inflict a good solid day or two of suffering as your organs fully liquify, so we have a nice, meaty, juicy thought experiment. So many worlds, bam, there are now two (sets of) worlds, one where the particle decayed in the specified time period and your organs are now slowly liquifying and one where you are let out of the death trap, footloose and fancy free, to live a long and happy life, or at least, longer than the you slowly stewing in their own juices. So what happens to your consciousness? Well, in a boring materialistic interpretation of the world and consciousness, "you" forked at the same time as the worlds divided, being an aggregate property of the atoms involved, and one of you is blissfully unaware that the other is in horrible agony, perhaps philosophically reassured that there is a version of them not suffering in another quantum universe. Under the proposition "Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest.", the you that is slowly liquifying doesn't live the longest, so it isn't conscious. It's a p-zombie, it acts like a conscious person without the underlying "experiencing" of it. Now, let's carry that on through some more steps. TV shows and movies like to make it seem like the many-worlds of quantum mechanics are caused by human decisions and the ups and downs of human life. The universe where you chose to go left instead of right, the universe where Hitler's painting career took off, etc etc. But they're caused by quantum events, and there are an uncountably large number of quantum events happening every microsecond as different particles of thorium in the Earth's radioactive core "choose" to decay, let alone what's happening in Betelgeuse. "Many" in "many-worlds" is an unbelievably large number, and you are only going to live the "longest" in one of them, which means you are a p-zombie in every other one, because your consciousness only experiences the one in which you live the longest. Now, what are the chances anyone else lives the longest in the same quantum world as you? Zero. Less than zero. Zero followed by so many zeros it's meaningless. Under this assumption, everyone you have ever known, everyone you have ever talked to -- me, even -- everyone you have ever loved was a p-zombie the entire time you knew them. Your parents? P-zombies. Your mee-maw? P-zombie. Your children? P-zombies. Which is ultimately a good thing, I suppose, because then you don't have to feel bad if they die before you, because they're just p-zombies, and you don't have to feel bad about all those times they saw you die in other quantum worlds, because it was mostly just p-zombies watching other p-zombies die.
ALittleLight 7y ago
I think assumption 4 is in error. >There exists a message in the encoding that can extend one's life. If quantum immortality holds then there is no message which will extend your life because you're already immortal.
- deleted 7y ago
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- vankessel 7y ago
  But there must be a mechanism for the immortality shouldn't there be? Let's go back to the gun example quickly. (assuming a perfect gun, no misfires, or lucky non-fatal shots) If quantum immortality holds and the experiment is run 8 times, you should see the sequence 00000000 right? This is a message too, because it deviates from expectation to shovel you down a reality you can experience. Sort of like Zipf's law where the less likely the result the more information it contains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law#Applications
gwf 7y ago
This is a really nice argument and I hope that Kevin and others continue to pursue it. However, I think there is a subtle flaw in the presented argument that is parallel to issues illuminated by Goedel's incompleteness theorem. The problem, I believe, is with the assertion: > 1. The many-worlds interpretation is true. > 2. Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest. > If all the previous assumptions are true, then at least one of these two must be false. Both of these statements can be simultaneously true if we allow for a third possibility that is logically consistent with the entire argument: 3. Having near logical certainty and awareness that quantum immortality is true is fundamentally incompatible with living on the subjective immortal multiverse timeline. This would actually be a robust assumption to have explicitly included at the start, as it also makes intuitive sense. Afterall, if you absolutely knew that quantum immortality was true, then you could (and likely would) walk around taking obviously foolish risks without ever experiencing any consequences. Such a universe would basically lack a coherent sense of cause-and-effect from your subjective point of view. And if it was a universe where cause-and-effect don't hold for you, then how could you have logical certainty about anything? This means that if quantum immortality is true, you can never have logical certainty of its truth. This is very similar to how Goedel's incompleteness requires that there be true statements that can't be proven as true because the existence of an explicit proof would negate the statement itself, breaken the consistency of the system of logic (and, hence, making it incomplete by necessity).
- marcofiset 7y ago
  > if you absolutely knew that quantum immortality was true, then you could (and likely would) walk around taking obviously foolish risks without ever experiencing any consequences. What if you get put on a path where you eventually die because of your recklessness, and that was the longest you would have stayed alive? Basically you already exhausted all possible paths but this one.
- vankessel 7y ago
  Thank you. I really like the point you are making, but I am unsure about a lack of cause and effect. When I think of cause and effect, I think of it as taking the state of the universe from state t+0 to t+1 using the laws of physics. All of it being deterministic, except for quantum mechanics. This indeterminism in QM creating the branches allowing one to escape death. Couldn't believing in quantum immortality be compatible with this? You could do things like firing a gun to your head, and it would misfire every time. You could jump off a building and would land in a passing open-topped garbage truck full of soft material. You'd experience all sorts of crazy coincidences, but all of them plausibly deniable and within the framework of cause and effect as we know it. With that said, I feel like what you are saying is true but can not fully formulate my thoughts on it yet. I agree completely that you can never have logical certainty of it's truth, but I'm not certain it's contingent on it being true. Perhaps we should instead say that QI is either true or false, but we can never prove which? This removes the implication but still makes sense in the context of Godel's first incompleteness theorem.
mrr54 7y ago
I like the idea that we're all immortal from our own perspective. I don't think this article contradicts it. >Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest: Under this assumption we can change the circumstances from a punishment to a reward. Instead of a gun, imagine a doctor has information about your health. If he tells you about it and you act on the information, you will certainly live a longer life. The doctor will only tell you about the information based the result of the quantum event. If the current assumptions are true, then you should always experience the reality in which the doctor tells you about your unknown ailment. No I think this misunderstands the issue. Consciousness experiences the reality in which it exists. There are two types of 'timelines', if you like: those where your consciousness ends, and those where it doesn't. The only one you can possibly be in is the one where it doesn't. You can't 'extend' your life with QI. You won't live a longer life, you'll always life forever. It's not quantum longeivity. It's quantum immortality. If the button you were clicking killed you on a random bit being 1 and not on the bit being 0, then you would survive clicking it. OR, you would just not click on it. Because there're worlds where you click it, and worlds where you don't.
- akvadrako 7y ago
  Yes. To add to this: it seems like to avoid sharp changes in experience, like at the point of death/non-death, QI seems to have an effect on the past. All else being equal, it should be less likely you’ll press a button giving you a 90% chance of dying then a button giving you a 50% chance of dying. It’s anyway probabilistic and there are lots of factors at play, so hard to disprove.
- phito 7y ago
  > I like the idea that we're all immortal from our own perspective I think of this everytime I'm in a situation where I just almost died. I don't really think it's the case but everytime it happens I update my my credences and add 0.00000000000000001% to the chances that it could be true :-)
  - pontifier 7y ago
    I think it was the movie "The Darwin Awards" that first introduced me to the concept of "micro-morts". The idea that there are activities that carry a small increase in the probability of death... Since then, I've seen other evidence of that idea. I read a story about a nomadic tribe that will not sleep under dead trees as it is seen as bad luck. On any given night the chance that a dead tree will fall on you is very small, but if you sleep under dead trees every night, the chance that one will fall on you starts to add up, and it's likely to be your eventual cause of death.
jml7c5 7y ago
>2. Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest. This seems like a very strong version of the quantum immortality idea. I was under the impression that quantum immortality didn't suggest that there was only one path among the splitting universes where someone is "truly" conscious and experiencing reality.
yllorepap 7y ago
I believe I experienced a quantum immortality event. I went all the way through through the tunnel of white light in the hospital while being treated for a head trauma. The process of entering “the tunnel” was that of shedding the ego. Only when naked could the journey begin. When I had totally accepted my death and it’s ramifications upon others. My memory of death is one of unimaginable peace and serenity. Like being white light. Although it happened 10 years ago it’s hard being back alive really as every moment is suffering in comparison. When I was shoved back down into my body things seemed the same but later two of my close friends sat me down and told me I was treating them differently. I relate to almost all Mandela effects and have some strange memories my family deny.
shadowprofile77 7y ago
First, obligatory short story (free open access on the site below) for this entire concept. It takes things to their extreme conclusion and I liked it very much with the way it experiments with QI: https://www.tor.com/2010/08/05/divided-by-infinity/ https://www.tor.com/2010/08/05/divided-by-infinity/ This brings me to my second point: in relation to the death of a close family member a couple years ago from cancer. The end lasted a month and largely consisted in its last days of a slow withering of conscious reasoning and awareness. How exactly would something like that square with the notion of consciousness suddenly jumping to the QI state in which it simply "persists"? An argument around this was already made by Max Tegmark, who suggested that the flaw in that reasoning is that dying is not a binary event. Instead it is very often a progressive degeneration, with a continuum of states of steadily decreasing consciousness. In other words, in most real causes of death (and this squares with my experience), one experiences such a gradual loss of self-awareness that an observer defies all odds only within the confines of a very abstract scenario. Furthermore, the obvious: QI does not at all save us from the loss of loved ones who do die in our quantum branch. Even if it were true, and each individual continues to perceive consciousness in a sort of immortal state of constantly branching awareness, we objectively know that we see these people die forever in our perception, with no allowance that I know of for a reunion in the future. Thus, its ultimate outcome if you follow this logic is deeply tragic: We keep living, seeing those we love die to our perception, while these same loved ones go through the same process, even if in some other branch other versions of both get to see said loved ones continue to live for a certain time longer.
- logicchains 7y ago
  I agree. Under QI it's possible we end up as some disembodied conscious matter in a state of eternal agony; QI only says consciousness will persist, it says nothing about quality of life.
  - cdelsolar 7y ago
    When we die, our consciousness just gets transferred over to the atoms that make us up. Since there is no longer a self-contained "vessel" for it, specifically a hippocampus, we don't have any short-term or long-term memory anymore, but are still experiencing. That's why we can't remember time before we were born.
hyfgfh 7y ago
Can you prove a negative?
- saalweachter 7y ago
  1. I think I'm conscious. Therefore, under the axiom "Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest." I must be experiencing the reality in which I live the longest. 2. I am not the best version of me. I'm 40 pounds overweight, I have poor sleep habits, I wheeze going up stairs, I don't wear sunscreen when going outside in the summer. There is strong evidence that all of these things shorten my life. There's a couple of moles I occasionally worry about yet I do nothing. 3. So either the versions of me that keep perfectly fit, exercise just the right amount to maintain health without putting too much strain on the body, wear sunscreen, and keep a regular sleep cycle of an appropriate duration are inevitably doomed to die young (is there a 100% chance of a famine across all quantum worlds I exist in, where I'll need to survive off of my body fat for 3+ months?), I am not actually conscious, I just think I am(?), or the proposition "Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest." must be false. (Now obviously, you can't take my word for me being conscious, because that's exactly what a p-zombie would say, but you can ask yourself if you are conscious and if there is any way you can be better than you are now; if the answer is "yes" to both questions and you still believe in quantum immortality, you should start trying to figure out what inevitable catastrophe your life-shortening vices make you suited to survive, more than not having those life-shortening vices.)
- GoblinSlayer 7y ago
  Deductively, yes.
akvadrako 7y ago
As a counter, the best way to “prove” QI is true without risking your life is to live a really long time. A-priori that’s unlikely unless QI is true.
zzbzq 7y ago
It all hinges on #2, "Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest" which is a straight-up mistaken understanding of quantum immortality. I feel embarrassed for the author. With QI, you have to actually die, there's no other way around it.
- deleted 7y ago
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vhvjkyhkogvv 7y ago
One thing to keep in mind is our understanding of physics is only approximate so it's dangerous to draw too extreme conclusions. Approximate immortality is after all very different from actual immortality. We may well discover that the number of worlds is enormous but ultimately finite, and that the number of worlds you're in decreases exponentially with every risk you take.
kd5bjo 7y ago
There is an assumption here that all conciousness and experience ceases at the moment of death, which doesn’t agree with many people’s beliefs. If there is an afterlife, it is entirely possible you’ll find yourself in a universe where you have died.
cdelsolar 7y ago
I got the following message: 'j/.uG}mzgP8zs_4=q|_nN'{C@EpQ}=lzSt9+'l~SmqVyusft8BGgt)K"XKcly24N1cmZg_iz\z$/pt.`P".W-CwP>w4#2%axJHATmA}xg?d%(8<W[QN&>7`wQCe3jIl^kPHQI#dp. I think it would be just as likely for the message to say "Do the following to extend your life" as it is for the supposedly random characters above being interpreted a certain way. In this case, the characters that jump out at me immediately are JHAT, 4 consecutive uppercase ASCII letters. Googling that shows "'jhat' is a heap analysis tool that parses a Java heap dump and enables web-browsing a parsed heap dump..." which leads me to think that by switching over to being a Java programmer (I mostly code in Python/Go) that I can extend my life. So that's something worth considering.
- deleted 7y ago
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roywiggins 7y ago
Hold on, assumption 2 does not seem right. There should be lots of versions of you cheerfully experiencing timelines that involve an imminent lightning strike, gamma ray burst, etc. Those things haven't happened yet, so those worlds still have a conscious you in them. Retroactively declaring those selves unconscious seems to be a much stronger idea than quantum immortality. Also, there is a way to test quantum immortality for everyone, not just yourself. Build a world-spanning doomsday machine. Give it to highly unstable, paranoid people, and distribute the ability to trigger it widely. Perhaps add in some geopolitical tensions, technical failures, ego, and military-industrial collusion. Make it really unlikely that it will remain untriggered. The longer we experience a world with such a device armed and ready, the more likely quantum immortality is true. There would be all sorts of bizarre close calls, and the world history would get more deranged by the year as timelines trigger the device and drop out, leaving progressively weirder timelines to survive. But that would be crazy, nobody would ever build such a thing.
- roywiggins 7y ago
  Part of the reason 2) can't be right is that there are lots of versions of you that are similar, but not quite the same. Suppose you're born with a severe life-limiting genetic disease caused by a single de novo mutation that will kill you by age 20. But in another timeline, there's a person who was born exactly the same as you were, but without the mutation, who will definitely live longer than you. Are you and them the same person, so you're not conscious? Is your consciousness proof that you're not the same person, after all? Should we consider everyone with a life-limiting disease p-zombies?
dooglius 7y ago
> Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest. This is a huge straw-man. The claim is that it is that it takes a probability distribution that inherits from the underlying multiversal one, but weighted by your existence. All this proves is that the none of the n-bit random messages will cause you to immediately divide into at least 2^n copies of yourself. For more interesting discussion on ideas in this space, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument
klodolph 7y ago
I would say that this test is especially vulnerable to error, because all the auxiliary hypotheses being tested. The problem here is known as the Duhem-Quine thesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duhem%E2%80%93Quine_thesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duhem%E2%80%93Quine_thesis > The Duhem–Quine thesis, also called the Duhem–Quine problem, after Pierre Duhem and Willard Van Orman Quine, is that it is impossible to test a scientific hypothesis in isolation, because an empirical test of the hypothesis requires one or more background assumptions (also called auxiliary assumptions or auxiliary hypotheses). In recent decades the set of associated assumptions supporting a thesis sometimes is called a bundle of hypotheses. I’m not going to enumerate the auxiliary hypotheses being tested, but this is a particularly thorny problem in the philosophy of science, and it becomes less tractable as the problems you are solving become more complicated (like this one). My personal feeling is that the philosophy of science, as a field, is still quite immature.
GoblinSlayer 7y ago
>Since you can’t possibly experience the timeline in which you are dead Death is a slow process, of course you experience it from the start to the end.
summerdown2 7y ago
There seems to be a gap in the argument between step 2 and steps onwards from 4. The experiment assumes that, given the opportunity, the universe will give a person the knowledge of how to extend their life. But of course that knowledge could have been given at any point in their life up to then, and at any point afterwards. Why hasn't a computer glitch emailed you the contents of an immortality potion before now? The answer I would suggest is that this is not the optimum moment for life extension, and there's no reason the universe has to do anything if a better local minimum can occur. My corollary for this experiment would be: 4. There exists a message in the encoding that can extend one's life... but that message will only be given if a) Having the message actually results in the timeline that does what is needed, and b) There is not in fact a more optimum time that the universe might use later on. The problem is that absent points a and b, the experiment proves nothing. It could well be that you wouldn't have correctly responded to any message given here, but instead the universe will choose a moment when you're 65 to announce a life extension drug has just been released into the upper atmosphere.
emtel 7y ago
People have pointed out many flaws in this argument, but I haven’t seen what I believe is the simplest flaw: specifically, if QI as defined in the article is true, you can’t conclude that the universe will take every possible opportunity to extend your life, only that you will always fail to experience life-ending events. A failure to receive a message about extending your life is not a life ending event, as your life could be saved later through other means. And it doesn’t matter how unlikely those other means are, because your consciousness will simply follow the path in which it still exists, regardless of the likelihood of that path. And if you think about that for a minute, the prospect of QI ought to horrify you. What sort of being will you be in 1000 years, if the only thing preventing you from dying is the ability to follow infinitesimal paths through the evolving wave function?

53 points by vankessel 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

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I don't think this really disproves quantum immortality? You never experience the gun firing because in all the universes where it fires you die so quickly you can't sense it. That doesn't mean the gun never fires. It just means that you only experience it in the event it didn't. This is kind of tautologically true. By definition, if you're alive, you haven't been shot in the head at point blank range. Particularly, assumption 2 is in no way required for the quantum immortality thought experiment to work.

marcofiset 7y ago

I've been obsessed with QI ever since I first heard about it. Every time I have a small glimpse of inattention, I always like to think that my consciousness just got transposed to another reality. Sometimes it's while I'm driving my car, and it makes it all the more trippy. However, I'm not sure I understand the logic behind their reasoning. > Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest. > you should always experience the reality in which the doctor tells you about your unknown ailment. If you experience the reality in which you live the longest, wouldn't the ailment just never come about? Going back to the gun and bullet example, your consciousness being transposed to the branch where none of that even happens, wouldn't the same thing apply to any disease that would develop within your body? You would just get transposed to the reality in which no such disease develop, extending your life even further.

ALittleLight 7y ago
>Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest. That formulation doesn't make sense to me. I would say it as "Consciousness can only experience realities in which it exists." Therefore you won't move into futures in which you don't exist.
- vankessel 7y ago
  My reasoning behind this was that there can be multiple futures where you could exist and experience, but some of them shorter than others. E.g. A------B \ --------C If you are travelling towards B, once you reach it, you die. But you can't magically jump last second to parallel reality C, you can only branch from the present. Thus you would have needed to branch down to C in advance. Thanks for pointing this out, I will make my reasoning more clear in a future edit.
  - marcofiset 7y ago
    That's what I understood based on the gun example. However the same would hold true for any deadly disease you develop, wouldn't it?
    - vankessel 7y ago
      True, the doctor example is really just supposed to be segue into thinking about how a direct message could work. Although, perhaps facing death and recovering turns you into the kind of fellow who will live their life in a vastly different way leading to a longer life?
  - ALittleLight 7y ago
    Two points: 1. Delayed choice quantum eraser experiments suggest to me, unless I've misunderstood them (which is highly possible), that effects can affect causes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed-choice_quantum_eraser https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed-choice_quantum_erase... 2. Getting shot in the head isn't always fatal. The bullet could deflect off your skull, or even go through your brain and just not hit you. The bullet could experience spontaneous existence failure, or simply fail to interact with the matter in your body and pass through you. My limited understanding of physics says that things like these are possible but massively unlikely at large scale. However, if some set of things are possible but rare, and the only alternative things are impossible, then something rare will happen.
- saalweachter 7y ago
  Oh, there's a horrifying contrapositive to that statement. See, what that statement is really trying to do is assert uniqueness of consciousness within a many-worlds quantum interpretation. Let's set up your standard quantum deathtrap: radioactive decay triggers the release of a deadly poison. And let's make it a really nasty poison, that is incurable but is going to inflict a good solid day or two of suffering as your organs fully liquify, so we have a nice, meaty, juicy thought experiment. So many worlds, bam, there are now two (sets of) worlds, one where the particle decayed in the specified time period and your organs are now slowly liquifying and one where you are let out of the death trap, footloose and fancy free, to live a long and happy life, or at least, longer than the you slowly stewing in their own juices. So what happens to your consciousness? Well, in a boring materialistic interpretation of the world and consciousness, "you" forked at the same time as the worlds divided, being an aggregate property of the atoms involved, and one of you is blissfully unaware that the other is in horrible agony, perhaps philosophically reassured that there is a version of them not suffering in another quantum universe. Under the proposition "Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest.", the you that is slowly liquifying doesn't live the longest, so it isn't conscious. It's a p-zombie, it acts like a conscious person without the underlying "experiencing" of it. Now, let's carry that on through some more steps. TV shows and movies like to make it seem like the many-worlds of quantum mechanics are caused by human decisions and the ups and downs of human life. The universe where you chose to go left instead of right, the universe where Hitler's painting career took off, etc etc. But they're caused by quantum events, and there are an uncountably large number of quantum events happening every microsecond as different particles of thorium in the Earth's radioactive core "choose" to decay, let alone what's happening in Betelgeuse. "Many" in "many-worlds" is an unbelievably large number, and you are only going to live the "longest" in one of them, which means you are a p-zombie in every other one, because your consciousness only experiences the one in which you live the longest. Now, what are the chances anyone else lives the longest in the same quantum world as you? Zero. Less than zero. Zero followed by so many zeros it's meaningless. Under this assumption, everyone you have ever known, everyone you have ever talked to -- me, even -- everyone you have ever loved was a p-zombie the entire time you knew them. Your parents? P-zombies. Your mee-maw? P-zombie. Your children? P-zombies. Which is ultimately a good thing, I suppose, because then you don't have to feel bad if they die before you, because they're just p-zombies, and you don't have to feel bad about all those times they saw you die in other quantum worlds, because it was mostly just p-zombies watching other p-zombies die.

ALittleLight 7y ago

I think assumption 4 is in error. >There exists a message in the encoding that can extend one's life. If quantum immortality holds then there is no message which will extend your life because you're already immortal.

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vankessel 7y ago
But there must be a mechanism for the immortality shouldn't there be? Let's go back to the gun example quickly. (assuming a perfect gun, no misfires, or lucky non-fatal shots) If quantum immortality holds and the experiment is run 8 times, you should see the sequence 00000000 right? This is a message too, because it deviates from expectation to shovel you down a reality you can experience. Sort of like Zipf's law where the less likely the result the more information it contains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law#Applications

gwf 7y ago

This is a really nice argument and I hope that Kevin and others continue to pursue it. However, I think there is a subtle flaw in the presented argument that is parallel to issues illuminated by Goedel's incompleteness theorem. The problem, I believe, is with the assertion: > 1. The many-worlds interpretation is true. > 2. Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest. > If all the previous assumptions are true, then at least one of these two must be false. Both of these statements can be simultaneously true if we allow for a third possibility that is logically consistent with the entire argument: 3. Having near logical certainty and awareness that quantum immortality is true is fundamentally incompatible with living on the subjective immortal multiverse timeline. This would actually be a robust assumption to have explicitly included at the start, as it also makes intuitive sense. Afterall, if you absolutely knew that quantum immortality was true, then you could (and likely would) walk around taking obviously foolish risks without ever experiencing any consequences. Such a universe would basically lack a coherent sense of cause-and-effect from your subjective point of view. And if it was a universe where cause-and-effect don't hold for you, then how could you have logical certainty about anything? This means that if quantum immortality is true, you can never have logical certainty of its truth. This is very similar to how Goedel's incompleteness requires that there be true statements that can't be proven as true because the existence of an explicit proof would negate the statement itself, breaken the consistency of the system of logic (and, hence, making it incomplete by necessity).

marcofiset 7y ago
> if you absolutely knew that quantum immortality was true, then you could (and likely would) walk around taking obviously foolish risks without ever experiencing any consequences. What if you get put on a path where you eventually die because of your recklessness, and that was the longest you would have stayed alive? Basically you already exhausted all possible paths but this one.
vankessel 7y ago
Thank you. I really like the point you are making, but I am unsure about a lack of cause and effect. When I think of cause and effect, I think of it as taking the state of the universe from state t+0 to t+1 using the laws of physics. All of it being deterministic, except for quantum mechanics. This indeterminism in QM creating the branches allowing one to escape death. Couldn't believing in quantum immortality be compatible with this? You could do things like firing a gun to your head, and it would misfire every time. You could jump off a building and would land in a passing open-topped garbage truck full of soft material. You'd experience all sorts of crazy coincidences, but all of them plausibly deniable and within the framework of cause and effect as we know it. With that said, I feel like what you are saying is true but can not fully formulate my thoughts on it yet. I agree completely that you can never have logical certainty of it's truth, but I'm not certain it's contingent on it being true. Perhaps we should instead say that QI is either true or false, but we can never prove which? This removes the implication but still makes sense in the context of Godel's first incompleteness theorem.

mrr54 7y ago

I like the idea that we're all immortal from our own perspective. I don't think this article contradicts it. >Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest: Under this assumption we can change the circumstances from a punishment to a reward. Instead of a gun, imagine a doctor has information about your health. If he tells you about it and you act on the information, you will certainly live a longer life. The doctor will only tell you about the information based the result of the quantum event. If the current assumptions are true, then you should always experience the reality in which the doctor tells you about your unknown ailment. No I think this misunderstands the issue. Consciousness experiences the reality in which it exists. There are two types of 'timelines', if you like: those where your consciousness ends, and those where it doesn't. The only one you can possibly be in is the one where it doesn't. You can't 'extend' your life with QI. You won't live a longer life, you'll always life forever. It's not quantum longeivity. It's quantum immortality. If the button you were clicking killed you on a random bit being 1 and not on the bit being 0, then you would survive clicking it. OR, you would just not click on it. Because there're worlds where you click it, and worlds where you don't.

akvadrako 7y ago
Yes. To add to this: it seems like to avoid sharp changes in experience, like at the point of death/non-death, QI seems to have an effect on the past. All else being equal, it should be less likely you’ll press a button giving you a 90% chance of dying then a button giving you a 50% chance of dying. It’s anyway probabilistic and there are lots of factors at play, so hard to disprove.
phito 7y ago
> I like the idea that we're all immortal from our own perspective I think of this everytime I'm in a situation where I just almost died. I don't really think it's the case but everytime it happens I update my my credences and add 0.00000000000000001% to the chances that it could be true :-)
- pontifier 7y ago
  I think it was the movie "The Darwin Awards" that first introduced me to the concept of "micro-morts". The idea that there are activities that carry a small increase in the probability of death... Since then, I've seen other evidence of that idea. I read a story about a nomadic tribe that will not sleep under dead trees as it is seen as bad luck. On any given night the chance that a dead tree will fall on you is very small, but if you sleep under dead trees every night, the chance that one will fall on you starts to add up, and it's likely to be your eventual cause of death.

jml7c5 7y ago

>2. Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest. This seems like a very strong version of the quantum immortality idea. I was under the impression that quantum immortality didn't suggest that there was only one path among the splitting universes where someone is "truly" conscious and experiencing reality.

yllorepap 7y ago

I believe I experienced a quantum immortality event. I went all the way through through the tunnel of white light in the hospital while being treated for a head trauma. The process of entering “the tunnel” was that of shedding the ego. Only when naked could the journey begin. When I had totally accepted my death and it’s ramifications upon others. My memory of death is one of unimaginable peace and serenity. Like being white light. Although it happened 10 years ago it’s hard being back alive really as every moment is suffering in comparison. When I was shoved back down into my body things seemed the same but later two of my close friends sat me down and told me I was treating them differently. I relate to almost all Mandela effects and have some strange memories my family deny.

shadowprofile77 7y ago

First, obligatory short story (free open access on the site below) for this entire concept. It takes things to their extreme conclusion and I liked it very much with the way it experiments with QI: https://www.tor.com/2010/08/05/divided-by-infinity/ https://www.tor.com/2010/08/05/divided-by-infinity/ This brings me to my second point: in relation to the death of a close family member a couple years ago from cancer. The end lasted a month and largely consisted in its last days of a slow withering of conscious reasoning and awareness. How exactly would something like that square with the notion of consciousness suddenly jumping to the QI state in which it simply "persists"? An argument around this was already made by Max Tegmark, who suggested that the flaw in that reasoning is that dying is not a binary event. Instead it is very often a progressive degeneration, with a continuum of states of steadily decreasing consciousness. In other words, in most real causes of death (and this squares with my experience), one experiences such a gradual loss of self-awareness that an observer defies all odds only within the confines of a very abstract scenario. Furthermore, the obvious: QI does not at all save us from the loss of loved ones who do die in our quantum branch. Even if it were true, and each individual continues to perceive consciousness in a sort of immortal state of constantly branching awareness, we objectively know that we see these people die forever in our perception, with no allowance that I know of for a reunion in the future. Thus, its ultimate outcome if you follow this logic is deeply tragic: We keep living, seeing those we love die to our perception, while these same loved ones go through the same process, even if in some other branch other versions of both get to see said loved ones continue to live for a certain time longer.

logicchains 7y ago
I agree. Under QI it's possible we end up as some disembodied conscious matter in a state of eternal agony; QI only says consciousness will persist, it says nothing about quality of life.
- cdelsolar 7y ago
  When we die, our consciousness just gets transferred over to the atoms that make us up. Since there is no longer a self-contained "vessel" for it, specifically a hippocampus, we don't have any short-term or long-term memory anymore, but are still experiencing. That's why we can't remember time before we were born.

hyfgfh 7y ago

Can you prove a negative?

saalweachter 7y ago
1. I think I'm conscious. Therefore, under the axiom "Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest." I must be experiencing the reality in which I live the longest. 2. I am not the best version of me. I'm 40 pounds overweight, I have poor sleep habits, I wheeze going up stairs, I don't wear sunscreen when going outside in the summer. There is strong evidence that all of these things shorten my life. There's a couple of moles I occasionally worry about yet I do nothing. 3. So either the versions of me that keep perfectly fit, exercise just the right amount to maintain health without putting too much strain on the body, wear sunscreen, and keep a regular sleep cycle of an appropriate duration are inevitably doomed to die young (is there a 100% chance of a famine across all quantum worlds I exist in, where I'll need to survive off of my body fat for 3+ months?), I am not actually conscious, I just think I am(?), or the proposition "Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest." must be false. (Now obviously, you can't take my word for me being conscious, because that's exactly what a p-zombie would say, but you can ask yourself if you are conscious and if there is any way you can be better than you are now; if the answer is "yes" to both questions and you still believe in quantum immortality, you should start trying to figure out what inevitable catastrophe your life-shortening vices make you suited to survive, more than not having those life-shortening vices.)
GoblinSlayer 7y ago
Deductively, yes.

akvadrako 7y ago

As a counter, the best way to “prove” QI is true without risking your life is to live a really long time. A-priori that’s unlikely unless QI is true.

zzbzq 7y ago

It all hinges on #2, "Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest" which is a straight-up mistaken understanding of quantum immortality. I feel embarrassed for the author. With QI, you have to actually die, there's no other way around it.

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vhvjkyhkogvv 7y ago

One thing to keep in mind is our understanding of physics is only approximate so it's dangerous to draw too extreme conclusions. Approximate immortality is after all very different from actual immortality. We may well discover that the number of worlds is enormous but ultimately finite, and that the number of worlds you're in decreases exponentially with every risk you take.

kd5bjo 7y ago

There is an assumption here that all conciousness and experience ceases at the moment of death, which doesn’t agree with many people’s beliefs. If there is an afterlife, it is entirely possible you’ll find yourself in a universe where you have died.

cdelsolar 7y ago

I got the following message: 'j/.uG}mzgP8zs_4=q|_nN'{C@EpQ}=lzSt9+'l~SmqVyusft8BGgt)K"XKcly24N1cmZg_iz\z$/pt.`P".W-CwP>w4#2%axJHATmA}xg?d%(8<W[QN&>7`wQCe3jIl^kPHQI#dp. I think it would be just as likely for the message to say "Do the following to extend your life" as it is for the supposedly random characters above being interpreted a certain way. In this case, the characters that jump out at me immediately are JHAT, 4 consecutive uppercase ASCII letters. Googling that shows "'jhat' is a heap analysis tool that parses a Java heap dump and enables web-browsing a parsed heap dump..." which leads me to think that by switching over to being a Java programmer (I mostly code in Python/Go) that I can extend my life. So that's something worth considering.

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roywiggins 7y ago

Hold on, assumption 2 does not seem right. There should be lots of versions of you cheerfully experiencing timelines that involve an imminent lightning strike, gamma ray burst, etc. Those things haven't happened yet, so those worlds still have a conscious you in them. Retroactively declaring those selves unconscious seems to be a much stronger idea than quantum immortality. Also, there is a way to test quantum immortality for everyone, not just yourself. Build a world-spanning doomsday machine. Give it to highly unstable, paranoid people, and distribute the ability to trigger it widely. Perhaps add in some geopolitical tensions, technical failures, ego, and military-industrial collusion. Make it really unlikely that it will remain untriggered. The longer we experience a world with such a device armed and ready, the more likely quantum immortality is true. There would be all sorts of bizarre close calls, and the world history would get more deranged by the year as timelines trigger the device and drop out, leaving progressively weirder timelines to survive. But that would be crazy, nobody would ever build such a thing.

roywiggins 7y ago
Part of the reason 2) can't be right is that there are lots of versions of you that are similar, but not quite the same. Suppose you're born with a severe life-limiting genetic disease caused by a single de novo mutation that will kill you by age 20. But in another timeline, there's a person who was born exactly the same as you were, but without the mutation, who will definitely live longer than you. Are you and them the same person, so you're not conscious? Is your consciousness proof that you're not the same person, after all? Should we consider everyone with a life-limiting disease p-zombies?

dooglius 7y ago

> Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest. This is a huge straw-man. The claim is that it is that it takes a probability distribution that inherits from the underlying multiversal one, but weighted by your existence. All this proves is that the none of the n-bit random messages will cause you to immediately divide into at least 2^n copies of yourself. For more interesting discussion on ideas in this space, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument

klodolph 7y ago

I would say that this test is especially vulnerable to error, because all the auxiliary hypotheses being tested. The problem here is known as the Duhem-Quine thesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duhem%E2%80%93Quine_thesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duhem%E2%80%93Quine_thesis > The Duhem–Quine thesis, also called the Duhem–Quine problem, after Pierre Duhem and Willard Van Orman Quine, is that it is impossible to test a scientific hypothesis in isolation, because an empirical test of the hypothesis requires one or more background assumptions (also called auxiliary assumptions or auxiliary hypotheses). In recent decades the set of associated assumptions supporting a thesis sometimes is called a bundle of hypotheses. I’m not going to enumerate the auxiliary hypotheses being tested, but this is a particularly thorny problem in the philosophy of science, and it becomes less tractable as the problems you are solving become more complicated (like this one). My personal feeling is that the philosophy of science, as a field, is still quite immature.

GoblinSlayer 7y ago

>Since you can’t possibly experience the timeline in which you are dead Death is a slow process, of course you experience it from the start to the end.

summerdown2 7y ago

There seems to be a gap in the argument between step 2 and steps onwards from 4. The experiment assumes that, given the opportunity, the universe will give a person the knowledge of how to extend their life. But of course that knowledge could have been given at any point in their life up to then, and at any point afterwards. Why hasn't a computer glitch emailed you the contents of an immortality potion before now? The answer I would suggest is that this is not the optimum moment for life extension, and there's no reason the universe has to do anything if a better local minimum can occur. My corollary for this experiment would be: 4. There exists a message in the encoding that can extend one's life... but that message will only be given if a) Having the message actually results in the timeline that does what is needed, and b) There is not in fact a more optimum time that the universe might use later on. The problem is that absent points a and b, the experiment proves nothing. It could well be that you wouldn't have correctly responded to any message given here, but instead the universe will choose a moment when you're 65 to announce a life extension drug has just been released into the upper atmosphere.

emtel 7y ago

People have pointed out many flaws in this argument, but I haven’t seen what I believe is the simplest flaw: specifically, if QI as defined in the article is true, you can’t conclude that the universe will take every possible opportunity to extend your life, only that you will always fail to experience life-ending events. A failure to receive a message about extending your life is not a life ending event, as your life could be saved later through other means. And it doesn’t matter how unlikely those other means are, because your consciousness will simply follow the path in which it still exists, regardless of the likelihood of that path. And if you think about that for a minute, the prospect of QI ought to horrify you. What sort of being will you be in 1000 years, if the only thing preventing you from dying is the ability to follow infinitesimal paths through the evolving wave function?