Quantum Immortality

What is quantum immortality? How do we get from quantum physics to thought experiment suicide machines and what does it all say about the nature of our reality? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick dive into the multiverse. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
And today we're going to be talking about broadly a
topic that we've touched on a number of times here before,

(00:23):
and that is immortality. We've touched on it in terms
of religion and mythology. We've touched on it from the
standpoint of our our great fear of mortality and death
and therefore our longing for immortality and basically every aspect
of our lives. And we have also talked about it
a little bit in terms of improving human longevity. And

(00:46):
I'm sure we've talked about it a good bit in
reference to Highlander, because Robert, you've been watching that movie
for about thirty five years, I think since you started
it in like three second increments or something. Yeah, I'm
watching it on a streaming service in five to ten
minute sections. It's a race against time to see if

(01:06):
I can finish Highlander before it's removed from this particular
streaming service. You know what they call that kind of
lunch break, it's the quickening. I tend to call it
a squatt and gobble because you're just kind of like
squatting in your in your living room, just eating as
fast as possible and watching just a little bit of
Highlander and then going back to work. Now, how does

(01:26):
the Highlander version of immortality stack up against all the
normal kinds of immortality you find in mythology and religion.
I think you would probably agree with me that it's
not the deepest treatment of immortality and mortality in in
in our collective storytelling. But it does hit on some
of the main points, right, Like, oh, immortality sounds great,

(01:47):
but then when you actually have to do it, it's
kind of a pain. Um. Well, I'd say a lot
of religious visions are actually like that. They tell you,
you know, a lot of religions include some version of immortality,
whether it's a sort of linear survival after death of
the soul, or there's a kind of eternal cycle of
reincarnation or something like that. In any event, it very

(02:08):
often is not necessarily encouraged for you to look too
closely at the details of immortality. Right, But this Highlander
is essentially another version of the wandering immortal story where
they're kind of stuck with it it what seems like
it would be a blessing is kind of a curse.
I feel like human perceptions of immortality, they tend to
break down to this imagined things that would normally terminate

(02:32):
or undergo a phase shift but magically don't have to.
So the desire to for immortality is often either a
reaction to just the reality of death and mortality itself,
which is very understandable. Uh, kind of defines our existence
is modern humans, or it comes from a desire for
a certain state of existence to continue unchanged. But it

(02:54):
does often kind of come back to this idea of stagnation,
you know. Um, Like the thing I want is really stagnation.
The thing I'm afraid of is change, um you know
I and I wonder if if that's what we see
in Highlander, you know, in these characters like Connor McLeod
and Ramires. You know this Connor changed? Is he changed

(03:16):
by his experience in the film? I mean certainly that
the Kurgan, the villain isn't. Um. It seems like it
would be more interesting if you like switched around backgrounds
and had like the Goody two shoes becomes the villain
and the and the the ancient villain becomes the modern hero,
that sort of transformation, but instead these are very stagnant characters. Well,
it's actually part of the ancient mythological tradition of immortality

(03:39):
that if it comes with too much change, it's actually
a curse rather than a blessing. Uh. Think about Aos
and Tiffannus in Greek mythology. We we've talked about them
recently or where the ideas Aos, the goddess of Dawn,
has this lover, this mortal human lover named Tiffanus, and
she wants him to be able to live forever. So
she cries to Zeus and says, please grant him and

(03:59):
more to Lity, and Zeus, being the jerk that he has, says, okay, done,
makes Tiffanness an immortal, but doesn't grant him eternal youth.
So he's gonna live forever, but he's just gonna get
older and older, and that seems to be implied to
be a fate worse than death. Yeah. You know another
treatment on this that I really like Richard K. Morgan

(04:21):
in his book Altered Carbon uh, and then also in
the Netflix series that just recently came out, that that
is basically that first book brought to life on the screen.
In this show, you have essentially immortality via digital consciousness,
digitized human consciousness moved from body to body, and typically
you have a very grim vision of what that would mean.

(04:42):
It basically means that the the worst, you know, richest
decrepit individuals in society, they're just gonna grow more and
more awful because they have more they have an increased
lifespan in which to be awful and become jaded to
their various uh um, you know, inappropriate pleasures. Yeah, we
have a concept that the elderly tend to become wise

(05:03):
in their old age. I mean, who knows if that's
actually true, but well there's at least an impression along
those lines. But it seems to be premised on the
knowledge that death is coming. What if wisdom is contingent
on that. Yeah, it takes me back to our episode
on Chinese immortality and some of these Dallas concepts of
like the the elder enlightened being where you're aging is

(05:23):
a transformation into a different state. But so many of
these ideas of immortality, it's like, yeah, you get to
remain young forever, uh forget without really thinking about what
that would do, how that might warp the individual. But
what if there was a concept of immortality that in
fact didn't imply any of these changes, right. It didn't

(05:44):
say that you're going to make a phase transition to
another kind of being. It didn't say that your soul
is going to leave your body. It didn't say any
of that. It was just a literal, physical, straightforward statement
that everything is going to be normal. There's no magic,
except you'll just happen to never die. What sounds good
is their catch, Whether or not it sounds good. This

(06:06):
is what we want to talk about today, a physical
possibility of immortality presented as a thought experiment with a
lot of perhaps flawed underlying assumptions. So you're unfortunately not
going to walk away from today's episode probably with the
assumption that yes, all humans will live forever based on
the laws of physics, but we do want to explore

(06:27):
that as a possibility. Yeah, nothing we're going to talk
about here today is actually going to impact your life,
except in the way maybe you think about your existence.
Quite true, unless it does impact your life, in which
case this is going to be very important. We're barely
talking about quantum mechanics, and it's already tangled up it
or not here, right, So we should make the transition

(06:47):
to talking about physics, because this is going to be
a physics spaced episode talking about interpretations of quantum mechanics. Uh,
and so I guess we should begin with just a
little bit of the discussion of weirdness of scale sale.
If you listen to this podcast, you've probably heard at
least a little bit about the deep strangeness of physics
at scales much bigger or smaller than the energy, mass, distance, speed,

(07:12):
and so forth that we deal with on a day
to day basis. On, for example, vast scales, we live
in a universe apparently dominated by dark matter, these gigantic
gravitational anomalies that can't be seen or touched except by
the way that they've been space time and hold galaxies together,
and on these huge scales, the dominating physics regime, the

(07:34):
kind of physics that makes the biggest difference is not
the kind of physics that governs our everyday lives, but
of Einstein's general relativity, where time is not a universal
measure and can appear to slow down or speed up
from different vantage points. Where mass changes the geometry of
space time itself and can warp or even trap light itself.

(07:55):
Now shrink down to roughly human sized scales, and suddenly
the laws of physics appear or to change. They don't
really change, but different physical phenomena become the most salient,
become the most important types of calculations to do when
you're trying to figure out how things are moving and
how one physical thing is affecting another. So this normal scale,
general relativity doesn't matter very much. We can throw baseballs

(08:18):
and shoot cannons and smash watermelons and all that stuff
without taking general relativity into the equation. And this scale
is generally best described by Isaac Newton's classical mechanics. This
is also the realm which physics is intuitive. Right at
this scale, everything seems to fly and fall and push
and resist in a way that makes sense to us. Yeah,

(08:39):
this is the This is the room in which we
we have evolved to thrive exactly. That's the important point.
It's kind of hard to remember this, but we should
do our best to internalize the fact that this middle
scale of physics, the Newtonian scale, does not actually make
any more sense in an objective point of view than
the other scales do. It's just the scale at which

(09:00):
our brains evolved. So presumably, if we happen to be
evolved star sized organisms, things like general relativity would be
intuitive and would make natural sense to us, and Newtonian
physics would be crazy, weird stuff that goes on down there. Well,
one way that I like to think about it is
the explanation that you can think of classical physics as

(09:22):
the Earth's crust and quantum physics as the underlying mantle,
and then you have to keep in mind that there
are things about Earth's mantle. They only make sense if
you take into account Earth's in our core. I think
that's a good analogy, because if we do keep zooming down,
we of course get get to what you just mentioned,
quantum mechanics, this next realm where things change. Yet again,
you get too extremely small scales on the scale of

(09:43):
elementary particles and tiny objects like atoms, protons, electrons, photons
of light, and at this scale the physics regime changes
so that things stop behaving in a way best described
by either general relativity or classical mechanics, and they int
behave according to a theory we now know as quantum
mechanics or quantum physics. And this came about because, you know, originally,

(10:08):
say the dawn of the twentieth century, scientists were trying
to figure out how things like atoms could behave as
reconciled by classical mechanics. They were trying to look at
things like the orbit of electrons around the nucleus of
an atom and say, okay, does that work in a
classical mechanics way, like the way planets orbit around a star,
And it just didn't work. So they had to figure

(10:28):
out what's actually going on here, and eventually they came
up with the theory of quantum physics, which is now
predicted mainly by what is called I've been saying his
name wrong my whole life. I think that the Shreddinger equation.
I've been calling him Schrodinger. I've been saying Schrodinger as well.
I feel like I've heard Schrodinger from everybody. Yeah, I
think I've heard it, but I don't know. I think

(10:49):
shredd Shreddinger is shredding. It's hard to even say. I
want to go Schrodinger Shreddinger. It's all because of Shreddinger.
It does it sounds more wholesome than than than cats
and boxes, uh, than that are neither dead nor alive,
or are both dead and alive at the same time. Yeah, so, well,

(11:10):
you'll probably hear us say it both ways in this podcast.
I apologize for that, but there's gonna be just no
getting around it. I guess it depends on how the
wave function collapses each time, but um so anyway. It
is named after the Austrian physicist Irvin Shreddinger, and Shreddinger
derived the equation in the mid nineteen twenties and ever
since then it has been profoundly useful and profoundly confusing.

(11:35):
And this is because quantum mechanics is simultaneously one of
the best most predictive theories in all of science, and
at the same time it clearly implies a reality that
makes absolutely no intuitive sense to us mammals that evolved
to deal with classical physics on the Newtonian scale. It
is bonkers and completely defies our expectations of how the

(11:57):
world should work. And there are a bunch of different
ways you could explain this, but just to pick the
simplest version for now, that the Shreddinger equation can be
used to predict the behavior of tiny particles like atoms
and electrons over time. So just the way that you
can use Newtonian equations to predict something like the arc
of a cannonball or the force of a falling boulder,

(12:19):
you can use the Shreddinger equation to predict the behavior
of tiny particles like electrons or photons. But a Newtonian
cannonball is experienced by us and described by physics as
a single solitary object with one starting point a single
ending point in a clear trajectory. A particle on the
quantum scale does not behave that way at all, but rather,

(12:40):
according to the shredding Ear equation, it behaves a lot
like a pattern of waves in a fluid, and this
means it can have what can seem like multiple contradictory properties.
For example, a particle can, from our point of view,
appear to have multiple different positions, velocities, or spin directions
at the same time. And this range of possible simultaneous

(13:05):
behaviors is what's known as the wave function. The wave
function is all of these potentialities that seemed to be
simultaneously true about a quantum object or system, and this
wave function exists in an abstract infinite dimensional space that's
known as the Hilbert space. Now again, of course this

(13:25):
makes no sense to us, but it's proven to a
degree that's almost beyond dispute. Like one of the most
classic proofs of the wave function behavior of quantum scale
objects is the double slit experiment. Yes, this is where
we get the same. When you're out of slit, you're
out of peer. Right now, that's a different situation. I
don't know what you're talking about. Old beer ad slit
speer sla. We've actually just been looking at old beer

(13:49):
ads here on the podcast. There apparently was an old
Miller ad that had gigantic monsters in it where they
grab a truck full of miller and just chugged the truck. Yeah,
now that one's awesome. I think that was that was
from from when I was a kid, or in junior
high or something. I remember seeing that one, the Schlitz
beer ad where they have this whole when you're out
of slits, you're out of here. Uh, it's one I

(14:10):
never actually saw, but was referenced on Mystery Science Theater
three thousand. Growing up. So one of these these these
many pop culture references that I have no direct experience with,
only a secondhand experience with them from watching MST. Isn't
it sweet that all of these beer commercials are imprinted
on your childhood? Yeah, well it's some of them were

(14:31):
not too bad. Some of them had monsters in them.
But the double slit experiment to get to get it
back to quantum mechanics here, the basic idea is pretty simple.
The experimenter shines a light on a barrier that has
two narrow slits in it, and then the experimental studies
the interference pattern produces on a screen. So you've got
like two walls in order, and the first wall that

(14:54):
the light has to go through as the two slits,
and then the back wall has a screen on it
that the light can be projected on after it goes
past the first wall. Right, And I should also add
that this was first performed by Thomas Young in eighteen
o one. Now, light has a dual nature, it's both
wave like and particle like. In the experiment, light travels
through both slits and creates this interference pattern. And if

(15:16):
you send a single photon through photon being the light particle, right,
the single unit of electromagnetic energy. So you send a
single photon through it still forms an interference pattern as
if the single photon travels through both slits simultaneously. If
you hear me laughing, it's because at this point in
our notes, Robert has inserted an image from the movie

(15:38):
Time Cop two of what actor Ron Silver, Yeah, he
played the villain. And here we have two different the
villain from different time periods encountering each other and kind
of looking at each other with amusement and or confusion.
And I think both of these responses are are apt
when contemplate and quantum mechanics. I mean, basically, though this

(15:58):
is a simple experiment. Who observes something that should not
be at least as far as classical physics is concerned. Yeah,
the the idea that at the quantum level, a single
object can appear to inhabit multiple places at one time.
It produces this wave of like effect when it should
be more like, you know, we think on a classical level,
would be like a ball thrown at something. It's one object,

(16:21):
but it's not. And you have to wonder how can
this be true? Like objects in our experience never appear
to be in more than one place at one time.
A baygel does not behave like a wave pattern in
which you know their peaks and troughs at different locations. Right.
A bagel is just a single solid object that doesn't
move unless you move it. Yeah, I think, I mean

(16:43):
we we we mentioned time cop in passing here, and
I don't think a deep scientific reading of time cop
is is essential here. But this in other films do
kind of get into this territory when you have the paradox,
right of of the same character encountering themselves from a
different time. Um, well, anytime something that is I mean,
how can that be, right, something somebody is in two

(17:05):
places at once. Yeah, it's used in fiction because obviously
it never happens on a macroscopic scale and reality. So
the contradiction here is between the fact that the Shreddinger
equation is obviously correct and the fact that it predicts
stuff that makes no sense and we never see. And
so it's led to the need for what are called
interpretations of quantum mechanics. Pretty Much everybody accepts the underlying

(17:30):
theory of quantum mechanics. You'd be a fool not to.
It's incredibly experimentally verified and very predictive, but there's a
lot of disagreement about what it means and how it
actually connects to our experience of reality. So, Robert, you
mentioned the dead cat in the box earlier. Yes, this
is going to be a feature of what's been for
a long time the leading interpretation of quantum mechanics. So

(17:54):
you've got different interpretations that we're going to talk about
two mainly today, but there have been actually a bunch
of different interpretations. The two we're gonna be focusing on
are the Copenhagen interpretation and what we will later discuss
as the many Worlds interpretation. But the Copenhagen interpretation was
created in the nineteen twenties by the physicist Nil Spoor

(18:14):
and Werner Heisenberg, and the Copenhagen interpretation essentially postulates a
world governed by quantum mechanical probabilities, and these probabilities get
decided on through a process known as wave function collapse.
So you've got these multiple possibilities at the same time.
That's the way of function. Uh. And then they're going
to say it collapses, So what does that mean? So

(18:37):
imagine you've got a quantum level particle like an electron,
and you're trying to figure out where is it going
to be? Is the electron going to be on the
right or is it going to be on the left.
What the Copenhagen interpretation says is that this wave function
is in a state of unresolved potential called superposition, and
the electron could be on the right, and it could

(18:57):
be on the left, and in fact it's neither one.
But it's in this state where there's a fifty percent
probability of each And here's where it connects with our
world of solid macroscopic objects that are in only one
state in one place at a time. The Copenhagen interpretation
says that the wave function collapses into only one of
its potential configurations once somebody observes it. Now, this has

(19:22):
led to a lot of people reading all kinds of
crazy esoteric things about consciousness into quantum mechanics, right right, Yeah,
basically what is the role of the observer and everything? Yeah,
But I think a lot of those, uh, those consciousness
type ideas are based on a misinterpretation of the grounding
of the Copenhagen interpretation and a misinter misunderstanding of the

(19:44):
fact that the Copenhagen interpretation is not a sure thing
that it is an interpretation, not the theory itself. But
this is again, this is where the cat comes in
the idea that the cat is simultaneously dead and alive
inside of this box where where random life or death
is going to occur. Right, So that, yeah, this is
going to be how they map it up from the

(20:05):
quantum realm into the macroscopic world and how does our
reality connect with these probability distributions on the quantum level. Uh, So,
you've got an electron. It's neither on your left nor
on your right, but in a state of superposition where
there is simultaneously a fifty probability of finding it on
each side if you look with precision, and it just

(20:28):
stays this way, suspended it with these possibilities until somebody
observes it, meaning you use some kind of device or
method to figure out exactly where that particle is. And
then the once somebody does that, then it's actually only
one place it was in superposition. Then you looked at it.
Now it's on your left. It's not crazy. That crazy

(20:48):
situation to to really wrap your head around. If you
sort of think of it in terms of like TV
production or something. You know, if you're on one of
these shows, we have to guess what's behind the curtain,
and there's something behind each curtain, but only one curtain
is actually gonna be opened. Oh yeah, and a kind
of solipsistic way. It's almost not hard to believe that
the universe only only matters when I look at it.

(21:11):
But yeah, So, despite the fact that many physicists have
felt fine relying on this interpretation for the decade since then,
I mean, one thing we should point out is that
you can do all kinds of useful quantum mechanics science
and and even use it for technology without knowing which
interpretation is correct. And in fact, it sometimes doesn't matter
which interpretation is correct. The math of the theory works

(21:32):
either way, right, Yeah, absolutely, But many continue to protest
that the Copenhagen interpretation is nonsensical and it leads to
these apparent absurdities like as as you mentioned, Robert the
cat in the box, the famous Schrodinger's cat or Shreddinger's cat. Yeah,
we've we've already referenced a couple of times. You should
probably just lay it out for us here exactly how

(21:53):
this experiment goes. Uh, However, you know I do have
a soft spot for cats. Yeah, let's let's get rid
of cats. Don't want to kill a cat again. We
people talk about killing cats way too much in science.
Maybe they're anti cat. I'm going to bring in a
unicorn because we've established that maybe unicorns aren't as perfect
as everybody thinks they are. This particular experiment funded entirely

(22:17):
by Tim Curry, Lord of Darkness. Full disclosure. Okay, so
I've got a unicorn in a box. This box is
totally opaque and nobody can see what's happening inside. There
no cameras inside. You don't know what's going on there.
And there is a device inside the box that will
instantaneously incinerate the unicorn if it's triggered. And the device

(22:39):
gets triggered based on a quantum superposition event. So there's
a particle that has a fifty chance of spinning clockwise
and a fifty chance of spinning counterclockwise. And if when
you check the particle, it's spinning clockwise, the unicorn dies,
and if it's spinning counterclockwise, the unicorn lives. But this

(23:01):
would mean that the unicorn is both literally alive and
dead at the same time inside the box until somebody
looks inside the box to observe what happened. And at
the moment somebody looks inside the box, then suddenly the
unicorn is actually just either alive or dead, but until
somebody looked, it was both. Robert, do you think that

(23:23):
describes the universe we live in? Um? I don't think it.
It does not really describe the universe that we perceive.
That's the thing. Yeah, the universe we live in is
vast beyond our abilities to process it. Yeah, so yeah,
it's the answer is kind of yes and no at
the same time. I mean, I feel kind of despose. Again,

(23:45):
we want to be clear that we think the universe
does not need to adhere to our intuition. So just
the fact that something seems unlikely to you or to
me doesn't make it actually unlikely to exist in the world.
But just going on a gut level, one does has
come to feel less and less right to me, And
so I'm kind of disposed against the Copenhagen interpretation. I

(24:07):
think all that means is that it doesn't necessarily feel
right to me. That doesn't mean it's not true. I
feel like it lines up well with like with with
with personal anxiety, you know, because it's essentially because when
when you're anxious about the future, you the bad things
that can happen are as real as the good things
or just the mediocre things that could happen, and the

(24:28):
bad thing is only really gone when you actually reach
the point where where the particle has spun left. You know.
So there is something about about the about this particular
explanation that I think does match up with some of
the ways we perceive our world. Yeah, definitely lines up
with some emotional realities. Maybe less so with physical objects. Definitely.

(24:53):
Uh so, yeah, well we'll see. I mean, again, we
can't rule it out. It it's still been the the
interpretation that's been fa by the majority of physicists since
the advent of quantum mechanics. But like we said earlier,
it's not the only way, And to get to our
discussion of physical immortality, we're gonna have to explore another
interpretation of quantum mechanics that arose in opposition to the

(25:15):
Copenhagen interpretation. We will start looking at that when we
get back from a break than alright, we're back, so
we're gonna start talking here about the many worlds interpretation,
which I believe we've we've probably touched on on the
show before, because it is one of these that spins
off into very uh fantastic comic book realms, right, the

(25:37):
idea of alternate realities, other worlds where other things have happened,
essentially the Library of Babble, yes, but with a specific
physical mechanism causing it to come into existence. And so
we will do our best to try to explain this here. Now,
we've been talking about the Copenhagen interpretation, the idea that
you've got a quantum mechanical system that's in superposition sort

(26:00):
of both in a simple way, it's both left and
right literally at the same time until you look at it,
at which point it becomes just one or the other.
And so observation causes the collapse of the way of function,
and it just becomes a normal physical reality, just like
the kind of single, solitary reality that we're used to
looking at. Here's the main difference between that and what

(26:23):
we're about to talk about, the many worlds interpretation. In
this interpretation, a particle does not exist in superposition between
two possible outcomes and then collapse into one. Outcome or
the other. When we look at it instead, it exists
as a wave function in this superposition where there it
has multiple different qualities at the same time, it's both
left and right. It's in this state as a wave

(26:46):
and then it stays that way, and it just keeps
staying that way, and that's how it works. So it's
another way the bad thing that ends up not happening
actually does happen, but it's in essentially another timeline. Yeah,
pretty much. So this was first proposed by the physicist
to you ever at the third when he was a
graduate student at Princeton in nineteen fifty seven. And it's

(27:09):
not the core of the theory that there are multiple universes,
but you cannot deny that. When you take this theory
to its logical conclusion, it puts us in and a
multiverse of infinite timelines, right, infinite timelines, infinite parallel universes,
each different from the last. Now, and some of these universes,
it again comes right back to basically what we described

(27:31):
in the Library of Babel, and some of these universes,
the difference is going to be really slight, such as
a parallel universe where everything is exactly the same, except
you had a bagel for breakfast instead of cereal. Um.
Then there's also one, for instance, there's a universe where
Highlander one Best Picture of the fifty nine Academy Awards. Well,
now I want to take issue with you there for
a second. It predicts that you could possibly have every

(27:54):
variation on the universe that is allowed by the laws
of physics. I'm not sure if the laws of physics
rule out to Highlander best Picture win. Well, there's papers
will have to be written about that, so we'll have
we'll have to see some peer viewed papers on that
that question, Joe. Basically, the idea, though, is for each
possible outcome to a given action, the world splits into

(28:15):
copies of itself, instantaneous processes that Everett calls decohesion. But
before I move forward on on the oscars, I guess
a better argument would you could say that there's a
version where that year the Academy awards Children of a
Lesser God one as opposed to Platoon, which actually won. Yeah. Well,
I mean, so what it would actually mean is that

(28:37):
the outcomes of these universes split every time there are
different possible branches of a quantum superposition. Now, the question
would be how often are differences in reality determined by
a quantum superposition going into its different possibilities. Presumably the
answer to that is a lot, because I mean, quantum

(28:58):
mechanics underlies all kinds of stuff that's happening all the time.
It underlies things that are happening inside people's brains, It
underlies things that are happening in physical reality and the
interactions between objects. Small random differences in how a quantum
superposition event breaks off could lead to macroscopic effects down

(29:18):
the line, and some of these effects could be rather severe.
So you could have other universes which would differ in
ways that alter reality on a grand scale. For instance,
imagine a parallel universe with no gravity um. Some cosmologists
use the theory is that handy explanation for why life
evolved in our universe at all? Their answer is simply, well,
they're ac countless universes where life never evolved, and various

(29:41):
universes in which it evolved along similar lines as ours.
It's kind of a way to get around the Copernican principle, right,
the idea that Earth and and therefore earth life and
the human experience should not have a privileged position in
the cosmos, right, Uh yeah, I mean it's essentially that's
sort of anthropic reasoning, the anthropic principle like why do
we live on a planet that's capable of supporting life?

(30:03):
The idea under that is like, well, where would you
expect to live? Would you expect to live on a
planet that couldn't support life? Um? Yeah, And there are
a lot of interesting questions about whether that type of
reasoning is valid or not. I'm not up. I used
to read about this kind of stuff, but it's been
a while since I did. Well, it's it's like, how
how is it possible that I'm alive and I haven't

(30:24):
been killed by Jason Vorhees. Well, there there are multiple
alternate realities where I have But where else could I
be thinking about this at this point in my life
than a universe in which I have not. Now, that
kind of reasoning will come up again in a big
way in a minute. So we should be clear that
the existence of possibly infinite parallel universes is a consequence

(30:45):
or an implication of Everett's interpretation of quantum mechanics, not
the core assumption of it. The core assumption is just
the universality of the wave function. It just says the
wave function is real. All of the different possibility of
the wave function are real. They actually exist, and they
never collapse. But Everett believe that if you follow the logic,

(31:07):
if you extra polate that out to the macroscopic scale
that we live on, the only way to make sense
of it is that bifurcating realities constantly split off from
one another and exist independently. Uh. And just just a
few interesting biographical notes. Everett recounted in the nineteen seventies
that the many World's interpretations sprang up one night when

(31:28):
he was talking with a couple of Princeton classmates about
the implications of quantum mechanics. It was quote after a
slash or two of sherry, And that seems kind of right, right, Like,
the many worlds interpretation has got to be a sherry
based interpretation. It is like, not a vodka based interpretation.
Nor is it a beer induced interpretation. Yeah, it does.

(31:48):
It does sound like the sherry is essential here. Yeah.
And another thing that's essential is the simplicity of it. Right.
The core selling point of the many worlds interpretation is
that we've tested the mathematical reality of quantum theory. We
pretty much know it's right. So what does the math say.
Despite how outlandish the physical implications of the many worlds

(32:10):
interpretation seem, you can make a pretty strong argument that
it is the simplest possible interpretation of the math of
quantum theory. If you just look at the mathematical features
of the way of function and you try to take
away all your intuitions about how things should work, it's
the simplest possible way to make sense of it, and
about it being the simplest theory Evert actually wrote in

(32:32):
a letter to the physicist Brice de Witt in nineteen seven, quote,
I do believe, however, that at this time the present theory,
meaning the many worlds interpretation, is the simplest adequate interpretation.
The hidden variable theories are to me more cumbersome and artificial,
while the Copenhagen interpretation is hopelessly incomplete because of its

(32:53):
a priori reliance on classical physics, excluding in principle any
deduction of classical physics quantum theory, or any adequate investigation
of the measuring process, as well as a philosophic monstrosity
with a reality concept for the macroscopic world and a
denial of the same for the microcosm. So that's kind

(33:14):
of a strong argument he's saying, right, like the Copenhagen
interpretation says, Oh, yeah, the macroscopic world is real, but
there's something about the quantum realm that isn't as real
as our world is. Yeah, it kind of relegates it
to like a ghost realm. Yeah. One of the books
we're going to be referring to in this episode is
Max tag mark book Our Mathematical Universe, and tag Mark

(33:34):
writes about de Witt. He says, quote, when I later
met Bryce, he told me he'd at first complained to
you Everett, saying that he liked his math, but was
really bothered by the gut feeling that he just didn't
feel like he was constantly splitting into parallel versions of himself.
He told me that Everett had responded with a question,
do you feel like you're orbiting the Sun at thirty

(33:55):
kilometers per second? Touche? Bryce had exclaimed and conceded to
fee done the spot just as classical physics predicts that
we're zooming around the Sun and we won't feel it.
Everett showed that collapse free quantum physics predicts that we're
splitting and that we won't feel it now, despite the
fact that it does seem to make sense to a
lot of people now. Unfortunately, it did not catch on

(34:16):
in Everett's lifetime. When the Copenhagen interpretation remained dominant, and
Everett was reportedly bitter about academia's rejection of his work,
he left academic physics. He went to work at the Pentagon,
where he was apparently involved in some Cold War nuclear strategy,
and over time friends and colleagues reported that he had
a lot of bitterness and negative affect and that he

(34:37):
also struggled with alcoholism, and he eventually died pretty young.
He died at the age of fifty one in nineteen
eighty two. And just as a side note about his family,
one of Everett's children is actually Mark Oliver Everett, who's
the singer of the rock band called Eels. Interesting, well,
it makes me wonder if he has any songs about
his his father. Yeah, he apparently does, as Actually I

(35:01):
haven't listened to them. I haven't listened to a lot
of Eels, but I remember I remember getting some mixed
CDs when I was in high school that had some
Eels songs. Eels fans will have to chime in and
let us know, Yeah, let us know what we should
listen to. But anyway, since Everett's death, the many World's
interpretation has gradually become much more popular. Actually, the Polish
American physicist of void check Zurich, has said, quote Everett's

(35:24):
accomplishment was to insist that quantum theory should be universal,
that there should not be a division of the universe
into something which is a priori classical and something which
is a priori quantum. He gave us all a ticket
to use quantum theory the way we use it now
to describe measurement as a whole. So essentially, it's a
way of looking at quantum quantum theory and saying, no,

(35:47):
it's all real, it all works, and it totally applies
to the universe as a whole. It's not some weird
special realm that we have to invoke strange types of
causation to understand. But here's the question. If it's true
that the wave function is real and universal and it's
reality has effects that hold sway over the macroscopic world,

(36:09):
that the world we live in. What does this mean
for us? What should it be like to be a
person living within a mini worlds universe? Yeah? Because it
seems like, Okay, it's one thing to say that every
time I make a choice, the timeline splits, but I
still I still feel like I am an object moving
along a timeline, even if even if I'm splitting, I

(36:32):
have this singular experience unless I'm bringing in some sort
of uh you know, magical, uh you know, religious idea
of what my my, my consciousness is doing in other lives. Yeah,
I mean we we can't have access to that, right,
And here's actually the question. Here is the really interesting question.
Why don't we have access to that? Right? What is

(36:53):
actually happening in the physical realm? If the Many World's
interpretation is correct, what is actually happening that puts those
in another place and keeps you separate from them? Which
is essentially the same as saying why does the wave
function branch into separate realities? And the answer, as best
I can tell, appears to lie in a quantum physics
concept known as decoherents now. I mentioned earlier that Max

(37:16):
Tegmark book that our mathematical universe, and he has a
pretty good discussion of decoherents in his book Um. But basically,
the way it works is this, as long as a
quantum system in superposition remains physically isolated, all of its
potential states can continue to interact with one another. But systems,
of course, almost never stay isolated for long. I mean,

(37:37):
how often would you expect a system in reality to
stay isolated from any contact with the outside. If even
a single photon from the outside of the system interacts
with it, then the system undergoes what's known as decoherence.
We mentioned this concept earlier, which means that it's potential
states can no longer interact with each other. If they

(37:59):
can know longer interact with each other, they essentially branch off.
They become causally separate timelines, whereas before they were intertwined. So,
in a basic sense, imagine you've got an isolated quantum
system where you've got a particle on the left and
the right at the same time in superposition. But if
anything touches it, decoherence happens, and then it splits into

(38:20):
different branches of the universe that can no longer affect
one another. Thus, the wave function does not collapse. Decoherence
just prevents these branches from messing with each other anymore. Now,
we teased at the beginning that this would be coming
to the concept of immortality. How do you get immortality
out of any of the physics concepts we've been discussing

(38:40):
so far. Well, I know the answer to this question,
and I'm still not convinced that you do. But um,
But basically, and you're gonna have to pull out a
thought experiment. Yeah, and you're gonna have to have a machine.
And as it seems to be this the running trend
with with quantum mechanics thought experiments, it's going to somehow

(39:01):
involve lethal violence. Yeah. One way this has been described
we're about to get to something known as the quantum
suicide experiment. And one way this has been described as
Schreddinger's cat. From the cat's perspective, you make yourself the cat.
So several physicists, apparently beginning with two independent lines of
work by Hans Morevac and Bruno Maschaal in the nineteen

(39:24):
eighties and then later by Max tag Mark, have proposed
an apparently ingenious and perhaps flawed way to test whether
the mini worlds interpretation is correct, and how that would
affect personal subjective consciousness. We do not recommend this method
at all. You should not try it out. But here's
the method that's been described. You have to build a

(39:46):
machine that will kill you. All Right, we're gonna take
a break and when we come back, we will assemble
this machine or a version of this machine than alright,
we're back. So we've been discussing how the man world's
interpretation would affect the subjective experience of life and death.
And there has been a type of experiment proposed by

(40:07):
some physicists to test for the reality of the many
worlds interpretation by experimenting with one zone life and death
subjective experience. This is known as quantum suicide or the
quantum suicide experiment. Now, Robert, you have come up with
a a more a more fun version of this experiment
than the usual one. The usual one involves creating some

(40:29):
kind of gun that is designed to shoot you or
not shoot you, based on a quantum event. Yeah, and
this is this is max tech marks uh concept. Right,
there's a there's at you said a machine gun in
the original version. Yeah. He so he's got the idea
of a machine gun that that has a trigger pull
that's initiated by a potential quantum superposition that could go

(40:51):
one way or could go the other. Like, You've got
a particle that could be spinning right and it could
be spinning left, and it's got a fifty percent chance
of being either one. And if you check it and
it's spinning right, the gun fires, and if you check
it and it's spinning left, the gun does not fire.
And it does this once per second. And then he says,
the test is you put your head in front of

(41:11):
the gun. Yeah, that's just I don't know, it just
feels a little too too violent um for this podcast
for some reason. So I thought, yeah, let's let's try
something maybe a little more science fiction, a e uh
in nature, a little less gun centric, and maybe a
little more Dune inspired. Uh So, my apologies to to
Max for for alterations here. Also, I guess, you know,

(41:32):
apologies to Frank Herbert as well, just in case. But
this is this is how it's going to roll out.
We're gonna take you through the experiment. You're gonna start
with a man or a young man. This is gonna
be polo trades right essentially. Yeah, you can Okay, you
can essentially think of it as polo trades and uh,
he's gonna sit before a machine, a non thinking machine,

(41:53):
mind you. This is designed to jab him in the
arm with a meta cyanide poison needle, a k A
M jabber based on the spin of a quad un
quantum particle, so that gom jabber hits him, the jabber.
It's gonna be instant death, just no no chance, okay.
And it is instant. He won't even know it happened. Right.

(42:13):
So the machine again is gonna gonna look at that
quantum particle and and study its spin. If there's a
clockwise spin on the quantum particle, then the gob jabber
is gonna strike. If there's a counterclockwise spin on the
quantum particle, the gom jabber just buzzes, threatening lee. The
young man here keeps pushing the button and the gom

(42:33):
jabber buzzes, buzzes and buzzes, but it doesn't move. Each
time he pushes the button, it buzzes, but it doesn't strike. Well, yeah,
so what's happening here in this experiment? As you can tell,
the experiment has a probability based outcome. After the first
button push, there's a fifty percent chance that Paul is
Paul will live in a fifty percent chance that he's
going to die, and then this repeats. On the second try,

(42:56):
there is a cumulative chance that he'll live, and by
the third try half of that, and it just keeps
going down until probability virtually guarantees that Paul Trades has
been struck dead by the gom Jabber. But from Paul's
own subjective point of view, this experiment actually might have

(43:17):
a very different flavor assuming, and there are some assumptions
underlying this, assuming that consciousness ends immediately at death. Now,
of course, if consciousness survives death were obviously in a
whole different ball game. But for Paul himself, there is
only one option for Paul to discover. After each push

(43:37):
of the button, he discovers he has survived. If the
gom jabber strikes and he's instantly killed, he will never
be aware of it. But in a universe in which
the Many World's interpretation is correct, there is no opportunity
for him to be the one who dies, since his
subjective experience of those branches of the wave function does

(43:57):
not exist. So if Paul is any thing, he can
only be the version of himself that survives, and thus,
if he starts performing this experiment, the only versions of
him that exist to continue the experiment will be the
ones that continually route his consciousness into branches of the
way of function in which he survives. So he'll just

(44:20):
keep pressing the button over and over and over again,
and the only thing he'll ever experience is survival and
this will happen an infinite number of times if necessary. Yeah, now,
what are the drawbacks to this experiment? Well, there are
obviously theoretical objections to the validity of the experiment, reasons
to think that even if the Many World's interpretation is correct,

(44:43):
the experiment wouldn't actually work, and we can explore those
in a moment. But on top of that, there are
some big problems, like you have to be willing to
kill yourself, and you can never use this test to
prove the Many World's interpretation to people other than yourself.
It's not actually a scientific experiment because a scientific experiment
needs to be able to be objectively verified, and this

(45:05):
is experiment that, by necessity can only be subjectively verified.
Even if it works as proposed, it would only be
valuable to you yourself. The vast majority of people throughout
the quantum multiverse watching you perform this experiment will just
witness you killing yourself on the first try, or the
second try, or the third try, and so on. And

(45:27):
each time you press the button, a greater proportion of
the people watching you throughout the quantum multiverse will just
be watching you kill yourself. Plus, it's a perfect waste
of a good con jabber, in my opinion. Now, assuming
for a moment that the logic of this experiment is valid,
and there are potentially strong reasons for thinking it's not,
but just go with us for a second, it gets

(45:48):
weirder because let's extend the reasoning beyond the confines of
the experiment. Here are a few thoughts to consider in
any dangerous real world situation that might lead to death.
Whether you maybe just got a blast of neutron radiation
in the face, or somebody tries to drop a garbage
truck on you from a great height or whatever, there

(46:09):
is always a small chance that something will happen to
prevent you from dying. Would you agree Robert with me
so far? Yeah, I would say, broadly speaking, that's true.
It might be a very small chance, but there's always
a small chance Superman could appear and jump in front
of the bullet of the train it set. Well, okay,
maybe not that, Maybe not that, because we don't want

(46:30):
to violate the laws of physics. So there's always a
small chance that without violating the laws of physics, something
will happen to prevent you from dying in this scenario, right,
there's always some sort of freak occurrence that could prevent
it from happening. Yes, yes, So if there's a chance
of survival that's consistent with the laws of physics, there's
at least some branch of the universal wave function in

(46:51):
which that chance becomes reality. So at some level, all
threats to survival are quantum threats, and thus, if on
these assumptions, if the Mini World's interpretation is correct, you
should always expect to continue surviving, no matter how improbable
the odds, because subjectively you have no choice but to survive.

(47:14):
If there is anything that you are, you are the
version of you that has survived, and so the vast
majority of the versions of you throughout this quantum multiverse
will die, but the subjective version of you will always
live on in the branches of reality that break in
favor of your survival. Now again, just to clarify, we're
not advocating this as necessarily the truth about reality. But

(47:36):
if you consider this this is a possibility, it is
very strange to contemplate, right, Oh yeah. And I mean
the thing is, though, I always wonder what stuff like this.
Are we really talking about immortality here or just a
mere thought experiment variant. It's kind of kind of worthless
when you really think about it. You know, well, what
do you mean by that? I mean, well, simply, for

(47:57):
one thing, it doesn't it doesn't match up with those
magical ideas of of of being forever young, of of
of living your life across the span of centuries, etcetera.
It's more about um narrowly, narrowly avoiding death as long
as possible, and there is a there's a fixed term
limit there, Yeah, exactly. I mean you could imagine that

(48:19):
this is the quantum mechanics version of being tiffanous, right
that you essentially and pretty much all universes decline as
normally the laws of physics would dictate into a state
where you are no longer in good health or whatever.
But things just keep preventing you subjectively from dying, right,
and then in that in most universes you would keep dying,

(48:42):
you just subjectively would never experience it because you just
keep getting funneled more and more into that smaller minority
of universes where you go where you go on now.
According to Everett biographer Keith Lynch quote, Everett firmly believed
that his many worlds theory guaranteed him immortality. His conscious knows,
he argued, is bound at each branching to follow whatever

(49:03):
path it does not lead to death. That's interesting, and
especially it's strange since Everett died so young. Yeah, yeah,
and you know it, it's interesting to come back to done.
I feel like the weirdly enough that's This is exactly
the sort of thing that's touched on in Frank Herbert's done,
the idea that humanity should take this golden path instead

(49:26):
of the path to stagnation, which is chosen by taking
the safest route, by always making the safest small choice,
instead of figuring out what is the what is the
ideal long term route? Well, does this play into the
choice to take Spice in the Dune universe, Because in
the Dune universe, Frank Herbert wrote that, you know, one
of the main uses of spice, the stuff that's produced

(49:49):
by the makers um, is that it prolongs life, right,
it is the geriatric spice, that's true. Yeah, But but
then it's also you see its use with the Spacing Guild,
where the idea is of the space acent could has
their way. You know, they're just gonna always I mean,
they navigate space by figuring out how what path avoids
every possible catastrophe. And that's it's kind of like the

(50:10):
quantum immortality model here, except of space travel. There's a
quote to this effect from Laude deep In Frank Herbert
Stone quote the vision of time is broad, but when
you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door. And
always he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course,
warning that path leads ever down into stagnation. Well. Yeah,

(50:32):
if you look at life as um as sort of
you always have to take a risk in order to
do something meaningful, right. I mean, there's very rarely a
thing you can do that's very powerful and meaningful that
doesn't risk at least some small part of your your
at least sense of safety. Right. That might just be
psychological safety. But if you you extend that to the extreme,

(50:54):
would you become in this quantum multiverse in the many
worlds interpretation, and a progressively more boring person because you're
always being limited to the options of your life that
are always narrowing into this window of worlds where you've
taken the safer route, and the versions of you that
took the more dangerous route and took risks didn't make

(51:16):
it as far. Yeah, you can only lead to stagnation
that way, Like the only way to lead the golden
path is that all other paths were platinum, right, which
is kind of a depressing way to think about life.
But this is a strange thing because it doesn't It
doesn't even give you the opportunity. If you were to
assume that the mini worlds version of quantum immortality is real,

(51:39):
you wouldn't even have a choice in the matter, because
you could take risks. But subjectively, we know that you're
not going to do that because the versions of you
that did that will eventually disappear and you will have
no choice but to be funneled into this the safe,
stagnant existence spacing guild winds. Again. Uh so we should

(52:01):
definitely talk about problems and criticisms of this idea. Uh,
there are a lot of reasons to think that this
might not be the case, so as as we said earlier,
But we just want to stress again we are not
advocating the idea that you are immortal according to the
laws of quantum mechanics. Correct. We cannot be anymore clear
on that at that point, and even some of the
original authors of this experiment that they've come to doubt it.

(52:24):
Like Max teg Mark, the m I T physicists we've
been talking about. He proposed quantum suicide and quantum immortality
as thought experiments, but he acknowledges the tenuous nature of
the premises under them and actually doubts it could be
a reality based on plenty of concerns he has, Like
one problem is that tag Mark has these caveats to
the quantum suicide experiment and says that it would only

(52:46):
even work in theory if the determination of whether the
machine kills you is truly quantum, as in depending on
a quantum particle in superposition. It wouldn't necessarily work if
you were letting it depend on say a coin flip,
could be purely deterministic. Also, the machine must be guaranteed
to kill you on the kill setting. It couldn't. It

(53:07):
couldn't have a possibility of just injuring you. Also, it
would need to as we mentioned earlier, if it does
kill you would have to do so instantly, not gradually,
because you can't have the you can't have a chance
that it takes you a while to die after the
quantum coin toss and uh, and you're just sitting there
waiting to find out what happens, because then your consciousness

(53:29):
could get routed into that universe. So, just from like
a design standpoint, it would it sounds extremely difficult, if
not impossible, to create the right kind of technology. You
certainly could make it in your garage. Because it would
need to depend on the quantum. It would need to
never fail, like it could absolutely. If it could malfunction,
that would destroy the whole experiment, right, it at least

(53:50):
should have a very very small chance of malfunctioning. Now,
in criticism of the general idea of quantum immortality extending
beyond the quantum suicide experiment itself, but just like does
this apply to reality as a whole, should we all
expect to subjectively live forever um. Even though tag Mark
does seem to subscribe to the many worlds interpretation, teg

(54:11):
Mark says that most accidents and cause common causes of
death do not satisfy all three of these criteria, and
plus there's a bigger problem about tag Mark talks about
the fact that most life and death scenarios don't actually
break down into a clear life or death binary where
you've got continued consciousness on the one hand and non

(54:34):
continued consciousness on the other. But he says, you know,
it seems to be that there is a gradual reduction
of consciousness as one progresses toward death. And if this
is the case, then you could have the assumptions of
this violated, right if you can gradually ratchet down your
level of consciousness, you know, I mean it's true, I

(54:54):
mean we we in fact, I mean I don't sit
around fearing the termination of my consciousness. I fear all
the things leading up to it and surrounding it, you know,
all the consolation prizes. Yes, certainly, I mean, especially on
this view, because if you take the view that there's
literally nothing after death, there's nothing to fear there. Yeah,
I mean exactly. But that also brings up another big

(55:15):
problem is that we don't actually know exactly what happens
to consciousness at the time of death. And I'm not
saying that you have to propose, you know, religious type
answers about souls and afterlife and stuff like that. Obviously
some people believe in things like that. But even if
you don't believe in anything uh spiritual, supernatural, anything like that,
there's still things that could happen with the subjective phenomena

(55:36):
of consciousness other than just it blips out of existence, right, yeah,
like you come back as a goat, or or there
could be I mean, if consciousness is some kind of
process or substance, there's a there's perhaps some some way
in which it lingers or winds down slowly after death,
or is reduced to some kind of other, you know,
liminal or peripheral state after death. I mean, it's we

(55:58):
we just don't really know what happens. There's no evidence
about what exactly happens there also, to be honest, we
don't actually really know. If we're gonna pick nits, I
don't know what it means to survive from one moment
to the next as a being experiencing consciousness, except that
we all generally tend to be under the impression that
this is happening to us. I'm under the impression that

(56:21):
I'm surviving. But if we live in a universe where
constantly we're branching off into different branches, you know, out
of a quantum superposition and different timelines, how does the
baton get past? Does that make any sense? Late? Yeah,
I know. I mean this gets down to the basic
naval gazing that we've engaged in before. Regarding the present moment?

(56:42):
Am I now who I was a minute ago? Am
I now who I will be a minute from now?
I mean, when you start really focusing in on that,
it starts becoming it starts feeling disjointed, perhaps disjoined, it
in a way that could match up with this idea
of branching realities. Yeah, how does the now you pass
the token of subjective experience to the you of one

(57:04):
moment in the future. Yeah, And what happens when the
baton has dropped? Right? Yeah? Exactly? So? Uh, And again
I'm not sure that presents a problem. I just say
that's something that we're not certain we've really worked out yet, Right,
What does it mean? For experience to exist across time,
especially if that experience is branching into clones or copies
of itself. Yeah yeah. When you start actually lining it

(57:28):
up with the human experience, things are a little as certain.
It's it's often easier to line it up with created things,
like looking at chapters in a book or levels in
a video game. Yeah yeah. So I don't bring that
up to say that it like disproves the validity of
the quantum suicide or quantum immortality thought experiments, But I
just want to suggest that the periphery assumptions underlying these

(57:51):
thought experiments are not as simple as and straightforward as
they seem. Not even the physics assumptions, but just the
assumptions about death and life and consciousness and survival uh
as as even more doubt to throw on here. Max
Tegmark himself explains that he later came to doubt the
validity validity of his own quantum suicide experiment um, but

(58:11):
for totally different reasons. He came to doubt the validity
based on doubts about the concept of infinity as applied
to physics, which he is in some sense skeptical about.
Uh though he admits to being in the minority of
physicists on this point. Now, I mentioned video games earlier
and uh, and that's because I wanted to talk just
a little bit about saves scumming. What does that mean?

(58:31):
So I was familiar with save scumming from playing a
fair amount of x COM and XCOM to the most
recent incarnations of the x COM video game. I've never
played these, so you've got to explain to me. So
x Com is basically it's aliens have invaded or are invading,
and you have to fight them using a squad of soldiers.
And if you're playing just kind of like the vanilla

(58:54):
version of the game, then each time you start playing,
you get a random bunch of recruits and they level
up as you a and then in each tactical mission
you can lose the various men and women in your service,
and the ones that survive they level up and get stronger,
and you proceed through the game in an attempt to
save the world, to outlast the doom counter uh and

(59:17):
win the game. Now, the real hardcore fans like to
play um an iron Man version of this. So this
is where you have only one save file and no
matter what happens on a given mission. You just keep going.
You just lost your best guy due to something like
freak accident or a terrible shot or a terrible choice
on your part. Too bad. You just have to keep

(59:38):
playing the game until you either reach the point where
you cannot win, whether where the doom counter catches up
with you um or you just get to the final
encounter and you're not strong enough to beat it. But
you can also do what is called saves coming and
this is more in line I think with the way
of a lot of people have played video games in
the in the past, especially once, where you get to

(59:59):
save as often as you want, as many times as
you want, and in doing this, you simply go back
to a previous save file every time something bad happens.
Oh yeah, okay, so it's kind of yeah, it's kind
of like the saving function serves as like a place
where you can save the timeline of the world before
it branched off into its different many worlds. So it's like, oh,

(01:00:22):
I just lost my best dude by having them look
around this corner. I'll go back to a previous save
game and I'll have him look around the other corner instead. Yeah,
going between the different save files is like getting away
to navigate the many worlds from above, and it leads
to a certain kind of quantum immortality. Yeah. I mean,
even in a normal game, not like the one you're describing,

(01:00:44):
you can't get to the final boss, say, in a
version of the game where you died on the first level,
like you you know, and that's all you did. You
can't keep going on. You have to use a version
where you survived and progress. Yeah, and uh, you know,
And of course I don't want to imply that one
way is better than the other when you're playing a

(01:01:06):
video game. My approaches play the video game, however, makes
you happy. But you know, Richard K. Morgan also got
into this little bit in Altered Carbon because you have
these these uh these super rich Methuselah as they call them,
the meths who who put their consciousness in different bodies, um,
different sleeves as they call them, and you have characters

(01:01:29):
who will end up essentially saves coming with their body.
Something happens that either you got them killed or drives
them mad or makes them feel you know, too much guilt. Well,
then they just revert to a previous save file. A
previous version of their own consciousness, and they keep going.
I mean, I wonder if some people, I wonder about
psychological effects of video games that could put you in

(01:01:51):
that state of mind without the ability to physically do
what you're describing with the sleeves and the bodies. I mean,
is somebody who plays a whole lot of video games
with save files conditioning themselves too to act like that
is the way the world works, even though it is
not the way the world works. Now that that's an
interesting question. I mean, we've certainly discussed on the show

(01:02:14):
how things like you know, language is the sequential aspects
of language might impact our our experience of reality. So yeah,
why not? Maybe there's a book out there, the Mario
and the Goddess, Uh, to get serious. I do think
one thing that we should say before the end is
I we've taken pains to try to highlight all of

(01:02:36):
the reasons that you can't just trust that the quantum
immortality thing is real, that the quantum suicide experiment would
actually work. Um, there are a lot of reasons to
doubt it, but we just want to emphasize again for
serious reasons that the idea of quantum immortality is highly
speculative and relies on a lot of assumptions which could
be wrong. Maybe the many worlds interpretation is wrong. Even

(01:02:58):
if the many worlds interpretation is correct, many of the
assumptions underlying the experiment and how consciousness and survival and
death and branching works could be wrong. So we should
acknowledge that if somebody puts too much confidence in this
view of the world, it could actually be dangerous. And
I read a tragic story in nineteen whoever It's daughter Elizabeth,

(01:03:19):
actually did commit suicide, and she reportedly left a note
saying that she planned to join her father in another universe.
I don't know if that means her suicide was motivated
by a belief in many worlds immortality. It might not
have been, But in any case, quantum immortality wouldn't work
like that. But it seems to me that it's worth
clarifying that even though this is an interesting thought experiment,

(01:03:42):
it's by no means a good reason to attempt suicide
or to throw caution to the wind and count on
many worlds consciousness funneling to save you your Your life
is valuable, how it is, pursue it, how it is yeah,
and we we'd like to remind you that if you
are troubled by suicidal thoughts, you are not alone. A
sympathetic year is only a phone call away. In the
United States, consider calling the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at

(01:04:05):
one to seven, three, eight to five five, and visit
suicide at Prevention Lifeline dot org for additional resources tailored
toward general and specific needs such as those of youth,
disaster survivors, Native Americans, veterans, loast survivors, l g B,
t Q, and attempt survivors. And you'll also find a

(01:04:26):
list of international suicide hotlines at suicide dot org. If
you're actually thinking about it, get in contact. It matters.
All right. That's the episode and we'll be back for
more in the future. But in the meantime, you can
check out all past episodes of Stuff to Blow Your
Mind at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. You'll
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(01:04:48):
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(01:05:15):
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