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If quantum immortality is true, and I, knowing that, step in front of a car, how is it going to prevent my bones from breaking? I remember a haunting fantasy s

If quantum immortality is true, and I, knowing that, step in front of a car, how is it going to prevent my bones from breaking? I remember a haunting fantasy short story about a boy in a small town who accidentally meets and becomes friends with the man who digs all of the graves. Eventually he notices that somehow, the gravedigger knows when a grave is needed before a person dies, but won't say how or who. Often it is possible to guess though. One day, he's told that he'll never guess who the next grave is for, and indeed, he can't. So that night he finds out his parents have been in an auto accident, and therefore one of them is presumably going to die...and so he goes back and kills the gravedigger and buries him in the grave that was intended for one of his parents. The rest of the story is that once the gravedigger is dead, people in the town stop dying...but that is not a good thing - first his mother is paralyzed, then she has a stroke, then there is a fire... And the end is that the murderer becomes the new gravedigger to restore normality and now old, he hopes for someone to relieve him of the job.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
The other view is that QI is literally true, and it literally proves the existence of an immortal soul which transcends whatever happens to the body. So consciousness can never be killed. But it can be temporarily inconvenienced. The problem with this argument is that the universe continues to operate when we're asleep, in a coma, etc. It's almost as if it has an independent existence that doesn't rely on our personal experience of it.
- akvadrako 7y ago
  QI is usually explained in terms of many worlds, where there is an objective reality independent of our experience. Those concepts aren’t incompatible, if that’s what you were suggesting by your last sentence.
mannykannot 7y ago
Under many worlds, the you who did not step in front of the car avoids broken bones. If there is anything to quantum immortality, it is only in those circumstances where the probability of immediate death is strictly between 0 and 1. I suspect, however, that quantum immortality is merely the tautology that survivors, and only survivors, survive, and has nothing to do with interpretations of the QM formalism.
gpderetta 7y ago
>If quantum immortality is true, and I, knowing that, step in front of a car, how is it going to prevent my bones from breaking? Your body quantum-tunnels [1]through the car and emerges un scathered on the other side. IANAP, but I believe it is technically possible although the probability is astronomically close to zero. Butif QI is true, you would experience it. It is an example of the apparently logical impossilities that the parent is referring to if I understand correctly. [1] or fails to interact, or whatever. Again, IANAP.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  Yeah, but if consciousness is the invariant, then there are vastly more futures in which I don't tunnel through the car but just barely avoid brain-death. And when I say vastly, I'm pretty sure the ratio is larger than the number of particles in the universe squared.
jerf 7y ago
"If quantum immortality is true, and I, knowing that, step in front of a car, how is it going to prevent my bones from breaking?" Quantum immortality doesn't promise health. It promises consciousness. It is in fact a horrible idea and you better damned well hope it is false, because it looks a lot less like "I'm going to live forever in at least some fraction of the multiverse and be healthy and happy!" and rather a lot more like SCP-2718 [1]. Probably without the pain in question, but certainly with your consciousness stuck in a body that is literally minimally capable of being conscious and nothing else, past the heat-death of the universe, until the point where even quantum randomness isn't enough to keep you conscious, assuming that such a point can even arrive. QI doesn't protect your mobility, your senses, your health or happiness... just your consciousness. On the plus side, "minimal consciousness" doesn't necessarily entail a great deal of awareness of time passing. [1]: http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-2718 http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-2718 , for those not familiar with the format of the site, be sure to click the "► Play" on the bottom for the text I'm referring to. On the topic of SCP, the "End of Death" canon rather resembles your story, albeit moreso: http://www.scp-wiki.net/end-of-death-hub http://www.scp-wiki.net/end-of-death-hub
- red75prime 7y ago
  It also doesn't necessarily entail remembering who you are. So I think it's not that horrible: you lose more and more of your memories and your capabilities of forming thoughts and intentions, until it's just generic consciousness aware of itself doing nothing and of (what's left from) input stimuli.
  - dhimes 7y ago
    So, in the limit it's not observably different from death? Then it's death.
    - jerf 7y ago
      It's all the things. QI is basically just an consciousness-centric view of the already-understood truth that in the quantum multiverse, everything that can possibly happen does. It just means that there is some way in which you may actually experience some aspect of that, because your future conscious experience excludes all the universes in which you are not conscious. You can draw a subset of future universes in which you are minimally conscious, in which you're just a wee bit more conscious than that, in which you're conscious enough to be aware of your plight indefinitely, in which as I say in another message you're healthy indefinitely. You're not causing anything to be or not to be, you're just carving various subsets of radically differing, but non-zero, size out of the near-infinity of the full quantum multiverse, which exist whether or not you choose to regard them. So, you know, in a fraction of the universes in which you remain conscious that would require something like 1 over a number in arrow notation to describe, you'll be conscious enough to be perturbed. This is utterly, utterly dominated by the universes in which you're just sort of there. However, if you then choose to exclude those latter universes on the grounds that you consider that to be "dead", then that brings that tiny fraction back to the fore by virtue of eliminating everything else. It's a lot of definition chopping and manipulating rather enormous exponentials in the probabilities. However, there is still an underlying truth there, if the multiverse is true. It's just more subtle than the casual human view of "survival" or a brief gloss of the argument might entail. You have to think in quantum terms about whether or not this spin goes that way or the other, not in human terms like whether or not the gun fires. The latter is made up of an incomprehensibly large number of the former sort of things, and as you start talking about the fringe cases the quantum events require staggeringly enormous exponential probabilities to describe anything even remotely human-visible.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago

The other view is that QI is literally true, and it literally proves the existence of an immortal soul which transcends whatever happens to the body. So consciousness can never be killed. But it can be temporarily inconvenienced. The problem with this argument is that the universe continues to operate when we're asleep, in a coma, etc. It's almost as if it has an independent existence that doesn't rely on our personal experience of it.

akvadrako 7y ago
QI is usually explained in terms of many worlds, where there is an objective reality independent of our experience. Those concepts aren’t incompatible, if that’s what you were suggesting by your last sentence.

mannykannot 7y ago

Under many worlds, the you who did not step in front of the car avoids broken bones. If there is anything to quantum immortality, it is only in those circumstances where the probability of immediate death is strictly between 0 and 1. I suspect, however, that quantum immortality is merely the tautology that survivors, and only survivors, survive, and has nothing to do with interpretations of the QM formalism.

gpderetta 7y ago

>If quantum immortality is true, and I, knowing that, step in front of a car, how is it going to prevent my bones from breaking? Your body quantum-tunnels [1]through the car and emerges un scathered on the other side. IANAP, but I believe it is technically possible although the probability is astronomically close to zero. Butif QI is true, you would experience it. It is an example of the apparently logical impossilities that the parent is referring to if I understand correctly. [1] or fails to interact, or whatever. Again, IANAP.

perl4ever 7y ago
Yeah, but if consciousness is the invariant, then there are vastly more futures in which I don't tunnel through the car but just barely avoid brain-death. And when I say vastly, I'm pretty sure the ratio is larger than the number of particles in the universe squared.

jerf 7y ago

"If quantum immortality is true, and I, knowing that, step in front of a car, how is it going to prevent my bones from breaking?" Quantum immortality doesn't promise health. It promises consciousness. It is in fact a horrible idea and you better damned well hope it is false, because it looks a lot less like "I'm going to live forever in at least some fraction of the multiverse and be healthy and happy!" and rather a lot more like SCP-2718 [1]. Probably without the pain in question, but certainly with your consciousness stuck in a body that is literally minimally capable of being conscious and nothing else, past the heat-death of the universe, until the point where even quantum randomness isn't enough to keep you conscious, assuming that such a point can even arrive. QI doesn't protect your mobility, your senses, your health or happiness... just your consciousness. On the plus side, "minimal consciousness" doesn't necessarily entail a great deal of awareness of time passing. [1]: http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-2718 http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-2718 , for those not familiar with the format of the site, be sure to click the "► Play" on the bottom for the text I'm referring to. On the topic of SCP, the "End of Death" canon rather resembles your story, albeit moreso: http://www.scp-wiki.net/end-of-death-hub http://www.scp-wiki.net/end-of-death-hub

red75prime 7y ago
It also doesn't necessarily entail remembering who you are. So I think it's not that horrible: you lose more and more of your memories and your capabilities of forming thoughts and intentions, until it's just generic consciousness aware of itself doing nothing and of (what's left from) input stimuli.
- dhimes 7y ago
  So, in the limit it's not observably different from death? Then it's death.
  - jerf 7y ago
    It's all the things. QI is basically just an consciousness-centric view of the already-understood truth that in the quantum multiverse, everything that can possibly happen does. It just means that there is some way in which you may actually experience some aspect of that, because your future conscious experience excludes all the universes in which you are not conscious. You can draw a subset of future universes in which you are minimally conscious, in which you're just a wee bit more conscious than that, in which you're conscious enough to be aware of your plight indefinitely, in which as I say in another message you're healthy indefinitely. You're not causing anything to be or not to be, you're just carving various subsets of radically differing, but non-zero, size out of the near-infinity of the full quantum multiverse, which exist whether or not you choose to regard them. So, you know, in a fraction of the universes in which you remain conscious that would require something like 1 over a number in arrow notation to describe, you'll be conscious enough to be perturbed. This is utterly, utterly dominated by the universes in which you're just sort of there. However, if you then choose to exclude those latter universes on the grounds that you consider that to be "dead", then that brings that tiny fraction back to the fore by virtue of eliminating everything else. It's a lot of definition chopping and manipulating rather enormous exponentials in the probabilities. However, there is still an underlying truth there, if the multiverse is true. It's just more subtle than the casual human view of "survival" or a brief gloss of the argument might entail. You have to think in quantum terms about whether or not this spin goes that way or the other, not in human terms like whether or not the gun fires. The latter is made up of an incomprehensibly large number of the former sort of things, and as you start talking about the fringe cases the quantum events require staggeringly enormous exponential probabilities to describe anything even remotely human-visible.