Many Worlds and Quantum Immortality....an ITLAD solution?

[Black Label]

From a science perspective, one of the controversial implications of MWI is effective immortality.

Any potential death situation is a quantum event, meaning there is an alternative outcome where death does not occur. Physisists such as Max Tegmark have proposed that from a first person perspective this may mean that we see ourselves living forever.

How this immortality is facilitated is a matter of controversy. Pessimists argue that it means that we will grow ever older and more infirm but without the ultimate relief of death. Others argue that in their/our timelines it will come about through advances in medical science (which, from our own 'here and now' perspective' doesn't seem that far fetched0.

Anthony, in ITLAD suggests that (and forgive me if I am paraphrasing here), at near the point of death the brain plays back the previous life in a way that creates the illusion of a life lived in real time to the person dying, yet might only be a nano-second to an observer of the dying person (say, a doctor in a hospital ward) and does so a huge number of times over and over again. But at the end of the day, the person still dies.

What I would like to suggest is a combination of both. When a person is at the point of death (and assuming that there is in fact no parallel world where the person gets well again and lives to be 500 or whatever), Many Worlds type events conspire to postpone the point of death to make life replays possible, even without the need for a reliving to take only a nano-second.

Perhaps what we are most likely to experience is a gradual deterioration of health in this life and then go into a near-death coma…..which offers, to say the least, more than ample time for life replays. Conceivably, someone could exist in a ’near death’ vegetative state for an indefinite length of time

Where quantum immortality is concerned, an argument against the idea against us living one life for an infinite length of time is that the chances of us finding ourselves alive at a ’normal’ age are almost infinitely low.

Meanwhile if we are destined to relive our lives over and over again ’in our heads’ for a near infinite number of times at or near the point of death, then the chances that this is exactly what I am doing now are nearly infinitely high…..in which case I am imagining typing this and imaging any replies. Of course I daresay Anthony would say the same thing about reading this from me.

So….. am I in fact lying in a vegetative state in a hospital ward a hundred years from now, ’Life On Mars’style?

[A Dark Philosopher]

From a science perspective, one of the controversial implications of MWI is effective immortality.
Any potential death situation is a quantum event, meaning there is an alternative outcome where death does not occur. Physisists such as Max Tegmark have proposed that from a first person perspective this may mean that we see ourselves living forever.

As with any of the ‘mathematical divisibility’ gedankenexperiments like Thomson’s Lamp, Zeno’s Bisection Paradox and Tegmark’s Quantum Suicide here, the common factor between the mathematics working on paper and the actuality not working in reality is TIME; whilst they have mathematical validity in theory, in practice they fail and the reason is TIME. In purely subjective time, the first person perspective, such immortality has mathematical credance as such occurs within the observation of the self and as the self is the only observer providing a timeline the probability density function expands exponentially with each quantum event within that subjective timeline. HOWEVER, this is not the case on secondary observation (as in the example of Tegmark's Quantum Suicide, if the person shooting the gun was alone, then they would be the prime, and only, observer, however, with an assistant in the room the whole perspective of TIME changes).

How this immortality is facilitated is a matter of controversy. Pessimists argue that it means that we will grow ever older and more infirm but without the ultimate relief of death. Others argue that in their/our timelines it will come about through advances in medical science (which, from our own 'here and now' perspective' doesn't seem that far fetched0.

With the inclusion of TIME what occurs is quite simple. When observable, each of the thought-experiments fails. TIME has no meaning outside of conscious observation, thus the concept of immortality or infinity are tautologous. Upon observation the very act of observation creates a finite element to the very observation itself, as the observation occurs in subjective time, which on observation by any other conscious being places such also on their, independent, Minkowskian timeline.

Anthony, in ITLAD suggests that (and forgive me if I am paraphrasing here), at near the point of death the brain plays back the previous life in a way that creates the illusion of a life lived in real time to the person dying, yet might only be a nano-second to an observer of the dying person (say, a doctor in a hospital ward) and does so a huge number of times over and over again. But at the end of the day, the person still dies.

If you take the contents of ITLAD alone then no, Tony doesn’t suggest that "at the end of the day, the person still dies. ", what ITLAD in its pure form suggests is an eternal return of infinite recurrences and infinite bifurcations. Tony himself is the first to acknowledge that his position on this has changed somewhat since he wrote ITLAD several years ago. Owing to the Cantorian mathematics and my Quanta of Time argument, plus the inevitable question of evolutionary benefit, the common consensus now indeed does appear to be as you describe here. And this is primarily because, again to use your scenario, the dying brain of the subjective self is observed within the phaneron of the Doctor and thus has a finite time, in the perspective of the observing Doctor, to live out the multitude of recurrences.

What I would like to suggest is a combination of both. When a person is at the point of death (and assuming that there is in fact no parallel world where the person gets well again and lives to be 500 or whatever), Many Worlds type events conspire to postpone the point of death to make life replays possible, even without the need for a reliving to take only a nano-second.

Can you please expand on what you suggest by "Many Worlds type events conspire to postpone the point of death to make life replays possible….", especially in the scenario of observed death in the phaneron of the observer?

Perhaps what we are most likely to experience is a gradual deterioration of health in this life and then go into a near-death coma…..which offers, to say the least, more than ample time for life replays. Conceivably, someone could exist in a ’near death’ vegetative state for an indefinite length of time.

Imagine the timeline of the Doctor. They observe you die. This occurs within their Minkowskian timeline and has a finite length to it, ie. From point A, the initial signs of your death and point B, your actual death. Now transpose this onto the timeline of you, in your dying brain. IF such led to an ‘infinite’ recurrence then you would NEVER reach point B in the timeline of the Doctor, but as I showed earlier, Thomson’s Lamp. Zeno’s Bisection Paradox and Tegmark’s Quantum Suicide are all disproven when set within observed Time, therefore as the Doctor observes you die, you cannot experience an infinite number.

A coma or vegetative state are irrelevant. And isn’t a coma just a punctuation of consciousness anyway?
*consciousness humour*

Meanwhile if we are destined to relive our lives over and over again ’in our heads’ for a near infinite number of times at or near the point of death, then the chances that this is exactly what I am doing now are nearly infinitely high…..in which case I am imagining typing this and imaging any replies. Of course I daresay Anthony would say the same thing about reading this from me.

So….. am I in fact lying in a vegetative state in a hospital ward a hundred years from now, ’Life On Mars’style?

This depends on whether you equate "You" with the biological body within your Virgin Life. If so then most likely yes, according to ITLAD/CTF theory that is. If you equate "You" more with the qualitative element of mind then you exist wherever your thoughts are. Take the Descartes disembodied mind idea as an example: If you could take your brain from your body and keep it alive would that be "You" or would "You" be the body that has been removed! Of course, if you accept ITLAD/CTF then you must accept my Virgin Life hypothesis, so effectively if existing within the Bohmian IMAX within one of many recurrences then we are existent within an immaterial reality co-existing within a material reality within the neurology of the dying brain in the Virgin Life.

So where do "you" reside?

[Black Label]

Can you please expand on what you suggest by "Many Worlds type events conspire to postpone the point of death to make life replays possible….", especially in the scenario of observed death in the phaneron of the observer?

MWI would imply that, starting from Point A:start of death, there would be a variety of quantum events in the brain/body that would mean that Point B:death would take a variety of lengths to be reached. So at that point there would come into existence a variety of dying patients and observing doctors who would in turn experience a variety of times taken o get from start of death to death.

There would be no ‘single’ observing doctor or dying patient, the death would take a variety of lengths of time to occur, and therefore the dying patient would find themselves in a timeline where the ‘death’ moment took a much longer time than average to occur…….allowing their consciousness to provide many life reruns within that enlarged timeframe.

Also correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding of Tegmark's quantum suicide was that he is arguing that he would literally experience a situation where the gun failed to fire an infinate number of times.....from his perspective. So his time reference frame would be no different from his assistant. It's just that they would exists in parallel worlds.

[A Dark Philosopher]

Can you please expand on what you suggest by "Many Worlds type events conspire to postpone the point of death to make life replays possible….", especially in the scenario of observed death in the phaneron of the observer?

MWI would imply that, starting from Point A:start of death, there would be a variety of quantum events in the brain/body that would mean that Point B:death would take a variety of lengths to be reached.

This really isn't what the Many Worlds Interpretation suggests. The actual paper by Hugh Everett III has only recently been freely released so I would advise taking a read through it. It is quite fabulous!
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/manyworlds/pdf/dissertation.pdf

Again, you must consider the TWO independent time-frames involved in your scenario and in that by which ITLAD/CTF is posited. While the patient may fall out of time, subjectively, they still remain objectively observed by the Doctor and thus co-existent in their subjective time-frame. Therefore Point A, in my scenario, to Point B may take many alternate lifetimes to the subjective consciousness itself, but to the independent mind observing, the whole process happens in a finite and very short period of their time.

So at that point there would come into existence a variety of dying patients and observing doctors who would in turn experience a variety of times taken o get from start of death to death.

From point A, within MWI, there could indeed be a variety of dying patients from the initial quantum event (although ITLADically their would also have to be a bifurcation, but that's just adding more problems), but not a variety of observing doctors with independent minds. The quantum split occurs within the mind of the subjective consciousness, not the other mind as well.

There would be no ‘single’ observing doctor or dying patient, the death would take a variety of lengths of time to occur, and therefore the dying patient would find themselves in a timeline where the ‘death’ moment took a much longer time than average to occur…….allowing their consciousness to provide many life reruns within that enlarged timeframe.

I really can't see how this could function at all, I'm afraid. If there would be no 'single' observing doctor or dying patient, then where actually IS the Doctor or the Patient? As I asked in the revious reply: "This depends on whether you equate "You" with the biological body within your Virgin Life.....or....If you equate "You" more with the qualitative element of mind then you exist wherever your thoughts are."

Thanks for your response and hope this answers your question.

My pleasure, but it doesn't really answer that specific question, nor address many of the other points I made in my response, but thank you for the expansion.
I go much further into this idea in another lengthy response of mine (this time with diagrams, albeit somewhat pants ones) in the following thread, so you may wish to have a read through to see if they help: FORUM: Logical Problems With CTF Theory

[A Dark Philosopher]

Also correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding of Tegmark's quantum suicide was that he is arguing that he would literally experience a situation where the gun failed to fire an infinate number of times.....from his perspective. So his time reference frame would be no different from his assistant. It's just that they would exists in parallel worlds.

Sorry, missed this last bit that you added afterwards. As I stated earlier, what must be considered is the independence of mind of an observer. In one version of the Quantum Suicide thought-experiment (and there are more than just Tegmark's: Hans Moravec, Bruno Marchal and arguably Larry Niven (in a fictional context) to name a few), in one version it is just the scientist with the gun whereas in others it is the scientist and an assistant. Now, in the case of the sole observer, ie, just the scientist, the paradox of conscious immortality is a mathematically accurate one as all is happening in just one time-frame.

HOWEVER, as I stated in the very first paragraph of my first response to this thread, the problems with any of the 'mathematical divisibility' gedankenexperiments, come with the introduction of TIME, and specifically the relative perspective of TIME of more than one independent mind observer (see Einstein's Special Theory Of Relativity).

In the scenario where the scientist is joined by the assistant the same scenario as the ITLAD/CTF glutamate flood is present. ie, we have two minds, where one dies to the observation of the other but to themselves, they do not.

Now, this also introduces the concept discussed in this thread FORUM: Brain Death - A Request For Help And Clarification where Tony and I discuss the often asked question regarding ITLAD and 'immediate death' via a bullet in the brain, as echoed in the Quantum Suicide thought-experiment, so you may find the content of that discussion helpful also.

[Spider-Man]

Many Mansions
By Iona Miller

We have found other worlds looking both ways, through the lenses of cosmology and quantum physics. Observations demand we change our worldview to include these parallel universes. Whether we look above or below, we see our universe with its 100 billion galaxies embedded in an even larger reality, the multiverse, with separate closed volumes of space and time.

Infinite space far exceeds the limits of our observable universe. Webs of parallel universes are equally possible. We can image them like balloons connected to one another by rubbery necks of spacetime, wormholes. The regions inside and outside the balloons and wormholes are outside spacetime. They don’t exist.

In shows like Twilight Zone, Star Trek, Quantum Leap, and Sliders the heroes traverse wormholes and black holes, travel through time, enter alternate dimensions, battle their own alter egos, or mysteriously begin living different life stories. Many of our common ideas about the nature of parallel universes come from these well-worn scifi themes.

We get the idea we might be able to detect them, share information with them, interact with them, even pop in and out of them. Most people embrace a single simple notion of parallel universes, if any. But there is no convergence of alternate views of parallel universes.

The truth of these theories is that they are far more complicated and numerous than any scifi, comic or movie has depicted. Attempts include Superman’s “bizarro world”, Robert Heinlein’s “All You Zombies”, Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves, Frederick Pohl’s The Coming of the Quantum Cats, “Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai Across the Eighth Dimension,” Jet Li’s film “The One,” LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven, Paltrow’s “Sliding Doors”, Phillip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, Gregory Benford’s Timescape, or the Carl Sagan storyline, “Contact.”

Also, the movies Frequency and The Dead Zone, Outer Limits episodes “A Stitch in Time”, “Tribunal,” “Patient Zero,” and “Decompression”, and a new scifi story “Divided by Infinity” by Robert Charles Wilson. You can probably think of many more.

As you read this you could be splitting into a virtual infinity of alternatives, unseen worlds each unaware of the others. In most theories, you are unlikely to see your other selves, even if you can imagine their existence. Physics calls this their “non-fungible” nature, which means they cannot be viewed or experienced. But don’t worry about comprehending this; it has nothing to do with fungi although many-worlds seem to sprout like mushrooms. Perhaps in some parallel universe, you’ve already gotten it.

If you find the notion of an endless progression of universes sprouting from one another hosting an infinity of unconscious doppelgangers unsettling and hard to fathom, you are not alone. Even physicists who embrace the concept find the idea deeply disturbing.

Most researchers now believe the many worlds hypothesis is an accurate view of reality, backed by well-tested theories such as relativity and quantum mechanics. It makes our paradigm of the observable universe obsolete, even though only a century ago we couldn’t see out of the Milky Way or into the atom.



Sliding Doors is on Thursday 4 December at 10.50pm on Channel 4.

[A Dark Philosopher]

Spider-Man: The section you have copied and pasted here is actually a small section taken from a full paper written by Iona Miller AND Richard Alan Miller entitled:

"The Universe Is Obsolete" - A Gallery Of Multiverse Theories
"So you think you have "boundary issues"? We have been challenged to overcome provinciality and learn to think regionally, nationally and globally. Global thinking is still a challenge. Now the siren call of Mystery invites us to explode our cosmic boundaries.

The limits of our observable universe (14 billion light-years and roughly 100 billion galaxies) have erupted out the top end and penetrated the infinitely small. Our universe may be even older, but time as we know it did not exist, nor can we see through the Big Bang to gauge it.

This universe is characterized by certain interacting life-supporting values (Rees):

1). The strength of the force that binds atomic nuclei making atomic structure possible;
2). The strength of the forces that hold atoms together;
3). The density of material in the universe;
4). Cosmic antigravity that controls the expansion of space;
5). The amplitude of ripples in the expanding universe that seeds macro-structures such as galaxies, solar systems, and planets;
6). The number of spatial dimensions (3-D).
How can it be a "uni-verse" if ours is only one of many? Universe used to mean "All that there is." That attribution has been co-opted by the term multiverse, although technically there can be many multiverses. We are reluctant to believe that parallel universes are a true description of nature. "

Spider-Man, have you read the full paper and the alternate hypothesis and/or read the full discussion in this thread between Black Label and myself?

How do you feel the "Many Mansions" section of the paper reflects our previous comments and why just that one section of the full paper? If you read further though the paper you will also see references (as reflected in this thread) to Tegmark, Buddhism, Vedic Cosmology etc, which make the considerations of Quantum Mechanics all the more interesting in relation to MWI and more so, in my opinion, the Many MINDS interpretation of Zeh, Arnold and Loewer. Indeed as this thread is particularly about The Quantum Immortality Thought-Experiment I'm surprised you didn't also reference the sections dedicated to Max Tegmark.

Thoughts?................................

[Spider-Man]

I picked just that section because I'm a movie geek, not a science geek! My thoughts are that thoughts are unreliable, so I prefer to go with feelings. My feelings are that it's all part of the strange cosmic game called life.

[A Dark Philosopher]

My thoughts are that thoughts are unreliable, so I prefer to go with feelings.

Doesn't this logically conclude that your initial thoughts that "thoughts are unreliable" are thus, themselves, also unreliable?
Just joking! Hope you read the full paper, some good writing in there in relation to this discussion.