One of the main themes of my novel is that life continues after death. However, even in the afterlife there is a debate as to whether there is an after-afterlife. Spirits in the story aren’t immortal, so the burning questions remain. What comes after? Does anything come after? Is this really all there is?
Aside from any religious beliefs, I came across this very interesting thought experiment that implies that consciousness, from the observer’s perspective, will never cease. It’s called Quantum Immortality.
Many Worlds, One Perspective
So, what is Quantum Immortality? It’s an extension of the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. Simply(ish) each time there is a quantum measurement, that is when something is observed that has multiple probabilistic outcomes, each of those outcomes plays itself out in multiple parallel universes. A crude example is that every time you flip a coin, you’ve created one universe where it lands on heads, another where it lands on tails, and at least one more universe where there is a localized time freeze centralized on the coin making it float forever in a state of suspension, neither heads nor tails.
Okay, so how do we go from this to immortality? Everyone still dies, right? Well, here’s the thought experiment. You have a handgun. Inside is a mechanism that can detect the spin of a quantum particle when the trigger is pulled. If it’s spinning clockwise the gun doesn’t fire, but if it’s spinning counter-clockwise, BANG! It’s really just fancy scientist talk for saying the gun has a 50/50 chance of firing.
Now, if you take that gun and aim it away from you, it will fire half of the time. However, if you aim it at your head in a way that will definitely kill you… click. Click click click. Click. The gun will never fire. It’s like a cheat code for Russian Roulette.
So, how does that work? Well, according to the Many-Worlds Interpretation, the gun doesn’t have a 50/50 chance of firing, it both fires and doesn’t fire at the same time creating two universes that each play out one of the outcomes. However, assuming consciousness ends when your body fails, in one universe you die and no longer have a way to continue experiencing it. So, the only outcome you could possibly be aware of is the one where the gun doesn’t fire.
Now, this line of thinking can be expanded into real-world scenarios. If you’re in a car crash, there are many scenarios in which you die and many others where you survive. You’d only know when you survive. If you fall down the stairs, you only experience the times you didn’t crack your head open. Time also gets a little wonky here. If a nuclear bomb gets dropped right on your house, you’ll only know in the universes where you had already decided to be out of town.
But underneath all this lies a dark secret.
So, if we’re all quantumally immortal, why do people die? Well, like the prior section heading said, this only works from your own perspective. When you pull that trigger, you don’t experience your death, but everyone else in the universe you created does experience it. They now have to live in a universe that no longer contains your consciousness. That leads us to the darker name for this thought experiment, Quantum Suicide.
Each time you survive, there still exists universes where the world has to continue without you. This also has some terrifying implications. What if every time you stand up, you’re inadvertently creating a universe in which you get dizzy, fall over and hit your head? If something can happen, it does, all at the same time.
In some universe you suffocate every time you take a bite of food. Your plane always crashes. You get hit by that lightning bolt. You slip on a banana causing you to stumble onto that upturned rake where the handle swings up and smashes you in the nose breaking it to the point that you can’t smell the rotten egg smell they add to natural gas and you pass away in your sleep from the fumes every. single. day. of. your. life. You just don’t know it because that’s a different you’s life.
The only saving grace is that, until or unless we can observe other universes, there is no way to prove that any of this actually happens. There are plenty of other interpretations that respect your mortality. But those will perhaps be the subject of a different post.
