A pessimistic view of quantum immortality

The basic idea seems to be that, as anything that can happen does happen and it is impossible to remember your own death, every living thing is immortal.

Note that this statement talks about a ritual of cognition, not about the world: it talks about what one can remember, but obviously it's possible to infer that in some circumstances you'll die, or that in counterfactuals following different past events you've died. So this kind of "immortality" is an artefact of an artificial limitation on the ways of conceptualizing real world, one that can easily be lifted and thus shown to be not about an actual property of the world.

Quantum immortality treats awareness and death same as Zeno treats Achilles and the Tortoise. By just focusing on the multitude of positions of Achilles before he reaches the tortoise, one can imagine that Achilles never reaches it, same as by focusing on the multitude of alternate positions of awareness before death, one can imagine that they will never die.

I'm guessing that Quantum Immortality is simply false for the exact same reasons that Achilles reaches the Tortoise nonetheless.

But even if its argument had been valid, I'd imagine that the pain, boredom, and time-awareness centers of your brain would be destroyed in the vast majority of worlds, so you wouldn't be "suffering" anything, you'd just be waiting until revival or final death.

Hell of a scary afterlife you got in this multiverse, Missy...

--The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover

When playing with nukes, wouldn't that leave a lot of copies of you dying in agony from radiation poisoning or something when the nuke fizzles? Got any data on the reliability of nukes?

I generally resolve this issue with the observation that the awareness of misery takes quite a lot of coherent brainpower. By the time my perceptions are 200 years old, I suspect that they won't be running on a substrate capable of very much computational power — that is, once I pass a certain (theoretically calculable) maximum decrepitude, any remaining personal awareness is more likely to live in a Boltzmann brain than in my current body.

You see, after the vast majority of possible worlds perceive that I am dead, how likely is it that I will still have enough working nerves to accept any new sensory input, including pain? How likely is it that I'll be able to maintain enough memories to preserve a link to my 2011-era self? How likely is it that my awareness, running on a dying brain, will process thoughts at even a fraction of my current rate?

I suspect that after death, I'll quickly drift into an awareness that's so dreamlike, solipsistic, and time-lapsed that it's a bit iffy calling me an awareness at all. I may last until the end of time, but I won't see or do anything very interesting while I'm there. And no worries about the universe clotting with ghosts: as my entropy increases, I'll quickly become mathematically indistinguishable from everyone else, just as one molecule of hydrogen is very like another.

Quantum immortality is pretty certainly real, but it also has to add up to normality.

For previous (fruitful) discussion of quantum immortality, see this post (linked from wiki page for Quantum immortality).

By the same logic of Quantum Immortality, shouldn't we expect never to fall asleep, since we can't observe ourselves while being asleep?

Take a game of russian roulette...In those in which you lose, however, you now have a gaping head wound...This means that while plaing russian roulette for money is unreasonable, playing russian roulette for money, using nukes instead of a revolver, is entirely reasonable and recommended :-)

I consider the title of this post misleading.

It's not just suicide attempts. We should also consider aging. Image 1000 years from now. You are still alive but no other human has ever lived past 130 or so. It would be time for you (the you in that Many Worlds branch) to conclude that Many Worlds is true and you're in for a bumpy eternity.

I could not follow why living longer raised the chance that the universe would contain an AI that would save you, however.

Another obligatory link is probably Divided By Infinity :-)

In the classical world, information can be copied and deleted at will. In the quantum world, however, the conservation of quantum information means that information cannot be created nor destroyed. This concept stems from two fundamental theorems of quantum mechanics: the no-cloning theorem and the no-deleting theorem. http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-quantum-no-hiding-theorem-experimentally.html It means that our consciousness is written elsewhere in the space due to a certain program. If somebody knows this program he can revive that consiousness.

I think this is an important topic. Quantum immortality is Very Bad if it turns out playing quantum Russian roulette is the right thing to do.

Although in fairness, you probably shouldn't expect to be in agony forever. After a certain point in time, you should expect most of your surviving, conscious branches to have lost as much brain function as possible while still remaining alive and conscious. I assume that means you'd lose inessential things like sensory perception or sanity.