
Disprove quantum immortality without risking your life (2019) - vankessel
https://vankessel.io/disproving-quantum-immortality
======
gwf
This is a really nice argument and I hope that Kevin and others continue to
pursue it. However, I think there is a subtle flaw in the presented argument
that is parallel to issues illuminated by Goedel's incompleteness theorem. The
problem, I believe, is with the assertion:

> 1\. The many-worlds interpretation is true.

> 2\. Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest.

> If all the previous assumptions are true, then at least one of these two
> must be false.

Both of these statements can be simultaneously true if we allow for a third
possibility that is logically consistent with the entire argument:

3\. Having near logical certainty and awareness that quantum immortality is
true is fundamentally incompatible with living on the subjective immortal
multiverse timeline.

This would actually be a robust assumption to have explicitly included at the
start, as it also makes intuitive sense. Afterall, if you absolutely knew that
quantum immortality was true, then you could (and likely would) walk around
taking obviously foolish risks without ever experiencing any consequences.
Such a universe would basically lack a coherent sense of cause-and-effect from
your subjective point of view. And if it was a universe where cause-and-effect
don't hold for you, then how could you have logical certainty about anything?

This means that if quantum immortality is true, you can never have logical
certainty of its truth.

This is very similar to how Goedel's incompleteness requires that there be
true statements that can't be proven as true because the existence of an
explicit proof would negate the statement itself, breaken the consistency of
the system of logic (and, hence, making it incomplete by necessity).

~~~
perl4ever
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.

~~~
jerf
"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
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
So, in the limit it's not observably different from death? Then it's death.

~~~
jerf
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.

~~~
red75prime
Branching of multiverse on every measurement event is an approximation. The
branches aren't fully isolated. I suspect that extremely low amplitude
branches undergo merger events, which makes it impossible to have coherent
timeline in them. But I'm completely out of my depth here.

~~~
jerf
I don't think that's an official part of the theory. It may be true, but I
don't think anyone's proposed it.

Defining "low amplitude" branch meaningfully would be a real challenge. As I
like to say sometimes, the probability of anything happening is
indistinguishable from zero. 15-16 billion years after the Big Bang, we've
already got a pretty low amplitude, one that would require something like
arrow notation (as I reference in another comment) to describe where we are
now relative to where the universe started. Heck, it takes arrow notation just
to describe how much probability mass we're shedding every _second_.

(It actually occurs to me after a discussion of this that I can tweak an
argument I've been growing over the years to prove that you can't have all
three of "a universe that never ends", "the quantum multiverse", and "a
coherent conscious experience".)

~~~
red75prime
A world where each and every person still lives would be pretty bizarre.
That's around 107 billion people.

~~~
jerf
Such a world is utterly dominated by the worlds in which you are kept
conscious, but nobody else is. If QI keeps you conscious for a billion years,
you'll be alone.

(I keep typing "you are kept alive", but that's not the promise. Only
conscious. Being "alive" will be extraneous to that.)

------
roywiggins
Hold on, assumption 2 does not seem right. There should be lots of versions of
you cheerfully experiencing timelines that involve an imminent lightning
strike, gamma ray burst, etc. Those things haven't happened yet, so those
worlds still have a conscious you in them. Retroactively declaring those
selves unconscious seems to be a much stronger idea than quantum immortality.

Also, there is a way to test quantum immortality for everyone, not just
yourself. Build a world-spanning doomsday machine. Give it to highly unstable,
paranoid people, and distribute the ability to trigger it widely. Perhaps add
in some geopolitical tensions, technical failures, ego, and military-
industrial collusion. Make it really unlikely that it will remain untriggered.
The longer we experience a world with such a device armed and ready, the more
likely quantum immortality is true. There would be all sorts of bizarre close
calls, and the world history would get more deranged by the year as timelines
trigger the device and drop out, leaving progressively weirder timelines to
survive.

But that would be crazy, nobody would ever build such a thing.

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

------
mrr54
I like the idea that we're all immortal from our own perspective. I don't
think this article contradicts it.

>Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest: Under
this assumption we can change the circumstances from a punishment to a reward.
Instead of a gun, imagine a doctor has information about your health. If he
tells you about it and you act on the information, you will certainly live a
longer life. The doctor will only tell you about the information based the
result of the quantum event. If the current assumptions are true, then you
should always experience the reality in which the doctor tells you about your
unknown ailment.

No I think this misunderstands the issue. Consciousness experiences the
reality in which it exists. There are two types of 'timelines', if you like:
those where your consciousness ends, and those where it doesn't. The only one
you can possibly be in is the one where it doesn't. You can't 'extend' your
life with QI. You won't live a longer life, you'll always life forever.

It's not quantum longeivity. It's quantum immortality. If the button you were
clicking killed you on a random bit being 1 and not on the bit being 0, then
you would survive clicking it.

OR, you would just not click on it. Because there're worlds where you click
it, and worlds where you don't.

~~~
phito
> I like the idea that we're all immortal from our own perspective

I think of this everytime I'm in a situation where I _just almost died_. I
don't really think it's the case but everytime it happens I update my my
credences and add 0.00000000000000001% to the chances that it could be true
:-)

~~~
pontifier
I think it was the movie "The Darwin Awards" that first introduced me to the
concept of "micro-morts". The idea that there are activities that carry a
small increase in the probability of death... Since then, I've seen other
evidence of that idea.

I read a story about a nomadic tribe that will not sleep under dead trees as
it is seen as bad luck. On any given night the chance that a dead tree will
fall on you is very small, but if you sleep under dead trees every night, the
chance that one will fall on you starts to add up, and it's likely to be your
eventual cause of death.

------
cdelsolar
I got the following message:

'j/.uG}mzgP8zs_4=q|_nN'{C@EpQ}=lzSt9+'l~SmqVyusft8BGgt)K"XKcly24N1cmZg_iz\z _$
/pt.`P".W-CwP>w4#2%axJHATmA}xg?_d%(8<W[QN&>7`wQCe3jIl^kPHQI#dp.

I think it would be just as likely for the message to say "Do the following to
extend your life" as it is for the supposedly random characters above being
interpreted a certain way. In this case, the characters that jump out at me
immediately are JHAT, 4 consecutive uppercase ASCII letters. Googling that
shows "'jhat' is a heap analysis tool that parses a Java heap dump and enables
web-browsing a parsed heap dump..." which leads me to think that by switching
over to being a Java programmer (I mostly code in Python/Go) that I can extend
my life. So that's something worth considering.

------
jml7c5
>2\. Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest.

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

------
asdfasgasdgasdg
I don't think this really disproves quantum immortality? You never experience
the gun firing because in all the universes where it fires you die so quickly
you can't sense it. That doesn't mean the gun never fires. It just means that
you only experience it in the event it didn't. This is kind of tautologically
true. By definition, if you're alive, you haven't been shot in the head at
point blank range.

Particularly, assumption 2 is in no way required for the quantum immortality
thought experiment to work.

------
shadowprofile77
First, obligatory short story (free open access on the site below) for this
entire concept. It takes things to their extreme conclusion and I liked it
very much with the way it experiments with QI:
[https://www.tor.com/2010/08/05/divided-by-
infinity/](https://www.tor.com/2010/08/05/divided-by-infinity/)

This brings me to my second point: in relation to the death of a close family
member a couple years ago from cancer. The end lasted a month and largely
consisted in its last days of a slow withering of conscious reasoning and
awareness. How exactly would something like that square with the notion of
consciousness suddenly jumping to the QI state in which it simply "persists"?
An argument around this was already made by Max Tegmark, who suggested that
the flaw in that reasoning is that dying is not a binary event. Instead it is
very often a progressive degeneration, with a continuum of states of steadily
decreasing consciousness. In other words, in most real causes of death (and
this squares with my experience), one experiences such a gradual loss of self-
awareness that an observer defies all odds only within the confines of a very
abstract scenario.

Furthermore, the obvious: QI does not at all save us from the loss of loved
ones who do die in our quantum branch. Even if it were true, and each
individual continues to perceive consciousness in a sort of immortal state of
constantly branching awareness, we objectively know that we see these people
die forever in our perception, with no allowance that I know of for a reunion
in the future. Thus, its ultimate outcome if you follow this logic is deeply
tragic: We keep living, seeing those we love die to our perception, while
these same loved ones go through the same process, even if in some other
branch other versions of both get to see said loved ones continue to live for
a certain time longer.

~~~
logicchains
I agree. Under QI it's possible we end up as some disembodied conscious matter
in a state of eternal agony; QI only says consciousness will persist, it says
nothing about quality of life.

~~~
cdelsolar
When we die, our consciousness just gets transferred over to the atoms that
make us up. Since there is no longer a self-contained "vessel" for it,
specifically a hippocampus, we don't have any short-term or long-term memory
anymore, but are still experiencing. That's why we can't remember time before
we were born.

------
marcofiset
I've been obsessed with QI ever since I first heard about it. Every time I
have a small glimpse of inattention, I always like to think that my
consciousness just got transposed to another reality. Sometimes it's while I'm
driving my car, and it makes it all the more trippy.

However, I'm not sure I understand the logic behind their reasoning.

> Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest.

> you should always experience the reality in which the doctor tells you about
> your unknown ailment.

If you experience the reality in which you live the longest, wouldn't the
ailment just never come about?

Going back to the gun and bullet example, your consciousness being transposed
to the branch where none of that even happens, wouldn't the same thing apply
to any disease that would develop within your body? You would just get
transposed to the reality in which no such disease develop, extending your
life even further.

~~~
ALittleLight
>Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest.

That formulation doesn't make sense to me. I would say it as "Consciousness
can only experience realities in which it exists." Therefore you won't move
into futures in which you don't exist.

~~~
vankessel
My reasoning behind this was that there can be multiple futures where you
could exist and experience, but some of them shorter than others. E.g.

A------B

\ --------C

If you are travelling towards B, once you reach it, you die. But you can't
magically jump last second to parallel reality C, you can only branch from the
present. Thus you would have needed to branch down to C in advance. Thanks for
pointing this out, I will make my reasoning more clear in a future edit.

~~~
marcofiset
That's what I understood based on the gun example. However the same would hold
true for any deadly disease you develop, wouldn't it?

~~~
vankessel
True, the doctor example is really just supposed to be segue into thinking
about how a direct message could work. Although, perhaps facing death and
recovering turns you into the kind of fellow who will live their life in a
vastly different way leading to a longer life?

------
ALittleLight
I think assumption 4 is in error.

>There exists a message in the encoding that can extend one's life.

If quantum immortality holds then there is no message which will extend your
life because you're already immortal.

~~~
vankessel
But there must be a mechanism for the immortality shouldn't there be? Let's go
back to the gun example quickly. (assuming a perfect gun, no misfires, or
lucky non-fatal shots)

If quantum immortality holds and the experiment is run 8 times, you should see
the sequence 00000000 right? This is a message too, because it deviates from
expectation to shovel you down a reality you can experience. Sort of like
Zipf's law where the less likely the result the more information it contains
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law#Applications](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law#Applications)

------
dooglius
> Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest.

This is a huge straw-man. The claim is that it is that it takes a probability
distribution that inherits from the underlying multiversal one, but weighted
by your existence. All this proves is that the none of the n-bit random
messages will cause you to immediately divide into at least 2^n copies of
yourself.

For more interesting discussion on ideas in this space, see

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle)
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain)
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument)

------
summerdown2
There seems to be a gap in the argument between step 2 and steps onwards from
4.

The experiment assumes that, given the opportunity, the universe will give a
person the knowledge of how to extend their life. But of course that knowledge
could have been given at any point in their life up to then, and at any point
afterwards. Why hasn't a computer glitch emailed you the contents of an
immortality potion before now?

The answer I would suggest is that this is not the optimum moment for life
extension, and there's no reason the universe has to do anything if a better
local minimum can occur.

My corollary for this experiment would be:

4\. There exists a message in the encoding that can extend one's life... but
that message will only be given if

a) Having the message actually results in the timeline that does what is
needed, and

b) There is not in fact a more optimum time that the universe might use later
on.

The problem is that absent points a and b, the experiment proves nothing. It
could well be that you wouldn't have correctly responded to any message given
here, but instead the universe will choose a moment when you're 65 to announce
a life extension drug has just been released into the upper atmosphere.

------
klodolph
I would say that this test is especially vulnerable to error, because all the
auxiliary hypotheses being tested. The problem here is known as the Duhem-
Quine thesis:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duhem%E2%80%93Quine_thesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duhem%E2%80%93Quine_thesis)

> The Duhem–Quine thesis, also called the Duhem–Quine problem, after Pierre
> Duhem and Willard Van Orman Quine, is that it is impossible to test a
> scientific hypothesis in isolation, because an empirical test of the
> hypothesis requires one or more background assumptions (also called
> auxiliary assumptions or auxiliary hypotheses). In recent decades the set of
> associated assumptions supporting a thesis sometimes is called a bundle of
> hypotheses.

I’m not going to enumerate the auxiliary hypotheses being tested, but this is
a particularly thorny problem in the philosophy of science, and it becomes
less tractable as the problems you are solving become more complicated (like
this one).

My personal feeling is that the philosophy of science, as a field, is still
quite immature.

------
emtel
People have pointed out many flaws in this argument, but I haven’t seen what I
believe is the simplest flaw: specifically, if QI as defined in the article is
true, you can’t conclude that the universe will take every possible
opportunity to extend your life, only that you will always fail to experience
life-ending events. A failure to receive a message about extending your life
is not a life ending event, as your life could be saved later through other
means. And it doesn’t matter how unlikely those other means are, because your
consciousness will simply follow the path in which it still exists, regardless
of the likelihood of that path.

And if you think about that for a minute, the prospect of QI ought to horrify
you. What sort of being will you be in 1000 years, if the only thing
preventing you from dying is the ability to follow infinitesimal paths through
the evolving wave function?

------
vhvjkyhkogvv
One thing to keep in mind is our understanding of physics is only approximate
so it's dangerous to draw too extreme conclusions.

Approximate immortality is after all very different from actual immortality.

We may well discover that the number of worlds is enormous but ultimately
finite, and that the number of worlds you're in decreases exponentially with
every risk you take.

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

------
kd5bjo
There is an assumption here that all conciousness and experience ceases at the
moment of death, which doesn’t agree with many people’s beliefs. If there is
an afterlife, it is entirely possible you’ll find yourself in a universe where
you have died.

------
GoblinSlayer
>Since you can’t possibly experience the timeline in which you are dead

Death is a slow process, of course you experience it from the start to the
end.

------
akvadrako
As a counter, the best way to “prove” QI is true without risking your life is
to live a really long time.

A-priori that’s unlikely unless QI is true.

------
hyfgfh
Can you prove a negative?

~~~
saalweachter
1\. I _think_ I'm conscious. Therefore, under the axiom "Consciousness
experiences the reality in which it lives the longest." I must be experiencing
the reality in which I live the longest.

2\. I am not the best version of me. I'm 40 pounds overweight, I have poor
sleep habits, I wheeze going up stairs, I don't wear sunscreen when going
outside in the summer. There is strong evidence that all of these things
shorten my life. There's a couple of moles I occasionally worry about yet I do
nothing.

3\. So either the versions of me that keep perfectly fit, exercise just the
right amount to maintain health without putting too much strain on the body,
wear sunscreen, and keep a regular sleep cycle of an appropriate duration are
inevitably doomed to die young (is there a 100% chance of a famine across all
quantum worlds I exist in, where I'll need to survive off of my body fat for
3+ months?), I am not actually conscious, I just think I am(?), or the
proposition "Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the
longest." must be false.

(Now obviously, you can't take my word for me being conscious, because that's
exactly what a p-zombie would say, but you can ask yourself if you are
conscious and if there is any way you can be better than you are now; if the
answer is "yes" to both questions and you still believe in quantum
immortality, you should start trying to figure out what inevitable catastrophe
your life-shortening vices make you suited to survive, more than not having
those life-shortening vices.)

