Quantum immortality is a thought experiment that runs roughly like follows:

  1. If the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, each “choice” (however this may be defined) creates a branching point: there will be a universe that explores each possibility. Simply put, if at an intersection you can choose to go left or right, in one universe you’ll always go left, and in another you’ll always go right, and the history of each universe will then evolve independently, and continue branching along each subsequent choice.
  2. Which one of these many many universes will you (the awareness reading this text) experience? You are clearly in one of them: your awareness does not span universes. (At least, I would expect so. My apologies if it does! Please drop me an e-mail, I’ll buy you a coffee.)
  3. A person, pretty much by definition, is incapable of experiencing their own death. So you are clearly experiencing a universe in which you are not dead. (Again, my honest apologies if you are! Please drop me an e-mail, let’s chat.)
  4. What if this rule is universal? What if your awareness will always continue along a path of these possible universes where you remain alive (or perhaps just aware), however unlikely that may be?

Disclaimer: This is purely a thought experiment. Do not take this seriously. As far as anyone can tell, you only have one life: do not throw it away.

This idea has some interesting consequences! The following is a short story by Robert Charles Wilson, originally published in 1998 (!), that explores this:

Divided by Infinity

As I said, interesting idea! It would imply that you get away with any crazy shit! For starters:

  1. Buy a lottery ticket.
  2. Set up some mechanism that will kill you immediately and without warning, should it turn out that you have not won the lottery.
  3. Profit??

Obviously this is not fool-proof, and, err, certainly not lifestyle advice! This would just be testing the likelihood of whatever mechanism you have set up failing against the likelihood of you winning the lottery. Examples of how this may come to be include but are not limited to:

  • If you hire somebody to kill you, they will have an accident or something else that prevents them from completing their task.
  • If you set up some kind of machine or contraption, it will fail. The more fail-safe you make it, it will start failing in increasingly less plausible ways.
  • The lottery gets cancelled.
  • You win the lottery, but after the fact, your ticket turns out to be invalid or counterfeit.

Another interesting consequence of this thought experiment is that it only confers “immortality” to your own subjective awareness or viewpoint. It does not protect others! So if you watch somebody else try e.g. the above, the result will most likely be the predictable one: they die. In your perspective that is, or rather, in the universe that you are experiencing. In their subjective perspective, they will survive; it will just not be a universe that you can ever experience or interact with.

Finally, we have been talking about immortality, but the premise does not actually promise that. It only promises a continuity of awareness. This does not protect against you suffering a horrible accident that will leave you alive and aware, but miserable! The possibilities start with the run-of-the-mill horribleness that comes from inhabiting a physical body (e.g. going blind or becoming totally paralyzed), but actually go much further: you could find yourself at the mercy of aliens experimenting on you, or your consciousness (and awareness) being uploaded into a computer and then being subjected to… whatever.

I will leave this here before it gets any darker. :)

To end this post on a lighter note, here is an only tangentially related but fun short story video about a guy using a One-minute Time Machine to try to pick up a woman. Enjoy:

(Thank you Melvin for the recommendation!)