Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

Journal of Physics Conference Series

Theoretical Quantum Immortality and its Mathematical Authority

Ce Han

Published Jun 1, 2021• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract Quantum Immortality usually refers to, in a classical sense, a person who is “lucky” enough to survive in any incident in the world. Such a quantity of luckiness is even big enough to keep that person away from the aging of the human body. That is, in fact, when we say that one becomes “immortal”. Throughout the history of the world, there have been many times when people tried to find out the secret of anti-aging, but this ambitious dream, obviously, has failed every time. This paper will discuss quantum immortality in theoretical and mathematical aspects and evaluate its authority, or possibility, of its existence in real life. In order to accomplish this evaluation, the concepts of the main two interpretations of quantum physics: 1)Copenhagen Interpretation(or non-MWI interpretation), and 2)Many Worlds Interpretation(or MWI)will be necessarily involved. Throughout this paper, the MWI is proven to support the theoretical quantum immortal state, which, in this paper, means to achieve an expected theoretical outcome in the Everett box experiment. In order to show how MWI will give its credit to quantum immortality, the idea of the Infinite Monkey experiment is demonstrated in detail. After that, discussions of the computable probability of the outcome of the Infinite Monkey theorem and its pathological distribution are involved. Regardless of the situation in the Everett box, whether it is pathologically distributed or not, the mathematical outcomes show that MWI will be the only possibility of achieving the quantum immortal state during the Everett box experiment, or quantum gun experiment. Finally, the paper brings out the evaluation of quantum immortality in a real life stance.

DOI
10.1088/1742-6596/1936/1/012015

Related papers

Quantum Immortality and Non-Classical Logic

Phillip L. Wilson

The Everett Box is a device in which an observer and a lethal quantum apparatus are isolated from the rest of the universe. On a regular basis, successive trials occur, in each of which an automatic measurement of a quantum superposition inside the apparatus either causes instant death or does nothing to the observer. From the observer's perspective, the chances of surviving $m$ trials monotonically decreases with increasing $m$. As a result, if the observer is still alive for sufficiently large $m$ she must reject any interpretation of quantum mechanics which is not the many-worlds interpretation (MWI), since surviving $m$ trials becomes vanishingly unlikely in a single world, whereas a version of the observer will necessarily survive in the branching MWI universe. Here we ask whether this conclusion still holds if rather than a classical understanding of limits built on classical logic we instead require our physics to satisfy a computability requirement by investigating the Everett Box in a model of a computational universe running on a variety of constructive logic, Recursive Constructive Mathematics. We show that although the standard Everett argument rejecting non-MWI interpretations is no longer valid, we can show that Everett's conclusion still holds within a computable universe. Thus we argue that Everett's argument is strengthened and any counter-argument must be strengthened, since it holds not only in classical logic (with embedded notions of continuity and infinity) but also in a computable logic.

arXiv:2007.09847•Jul 20, 2020•1 citation

Many-Worlds Interpretations Can Not Imply 'Quantum Immortality'

Jacques Mallah

The fallacy that the many worlds intepretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics implies certain survival in quantum Russian roulette-like situations (the 'Quantum Suicide' (QS) thought experiment) has become common enough that it is now necessary to publicly debunk this belief despite the risk of further publicizing it. 'Quantum Immortality' is an extension of the QS Fallacy (QSF) with some additional unlikely assumptions. The QS/QI ideas are examined here and shown to be false.

arXiv:0902.0187•Feb 2, 2009•2 citations

Forever and Again: Necessary Conditions for “Quantum Immortality” and its Practical Implications

Alexey Turchin

This article explores theoretical conditions necessary for “quantum immortality” (QI) as well as its possible practical implications. It is demonstrated that the QI is a particular case of “multiverse immortality” (MI) which is based on two main assumptions: the very large size of the Universe (not necessary because of quantum effects), and the copy-friendly theory of personal identity. It is shown that a popular objection about the lowering of the world-share (measure) of an observer in the case of QI doesn’t work, as the world-share decline could be compensated by the merging timelines for the simpler minds, and also some types of personal preferences are not dependent on such changes. Despite large uncertainty about MI’s validity, it still has appreciable practical consequences in some important outcomes like suicide and aging. The article demonstrates that MI could be used to significantly increase the expected subjective probability of success of risky life extension technologies, like cryonics, but makes euthanasia impractical, because of the risks of eternal suffering. Euthanasia should be replaced with cryothanasia, i.e. cryopreservation after voluntary death. Another possible application of MI is as a last chance to survive a global catastrophe. MI could be considered a plan D of reaching immortality, where plan A consists of the survival until the creation of the beneficial AI via fighting aging, plan B is cryonics, and plan C is digital immortality.

Journal of Ethics and Emerging Technologies•Dec 1, 2018•1 citation

The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: Many Worlds or Many Words?

Max Tegmark

As cutting-edge experiments display ever more extreme forms of non-classical behavior, the prevailing view on the interpretation of quantum mechanics appears to be gradually changing. A (highly unscientific) poll taken at the 1997 UMBC quantum mechanics workshop gave the once all-dominant Copenhagen interpretation less than half of the votes. The Many Worlds interpretation (MWI) scored second, comfortably a head of the Consistent Histories and Bohm interpretations. It is argued that since all the above-mentioned approaches to nonrelativistic quantum mechanics give identical cookbook prescriptions for how to calculate things in practice, practical-minded experimentalists, who have traditionally adopted the “shut-up-and-calculate interpretation”, typically show little interest in whether cozy classical concepts are in fact real in some untestable metaphysical sense or merely the way we subjectively perceive a mathematically simpler world where the Schrödinger equation describes everything – and that they are therefore becoming less bothered by a profusion of worlds than by a profusion of words. Common objections to the MWI are discussed. It is argued that when environment-induced decoherence is taken into account, the experimental predictions of the MWI are identical to those of the Copenhagen interpretation except for an experiment involving a Byzantine form of “quantum suicide”. This makes the choice between them purely a matter of taste, roughly equivalent to whether one believes mathematical language or human language to be more fundamental.

arXiv:quant-ph/9709032•Fortschritte der Physik•Nov 1, 1998•175 citations

Are there really many worlds in the "Many-worlds interpretation" of Quantum Mechanics?

Daniel Parrochia

Since the 1970s, the Everett-Wheeler many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of Quantum Mechanics (1955) has been much in the news. One wonders about the worlds in question, their branches, their splittings, their number. It is most often ignored that this language is not that of Everett, whom Wheeler very quickly stopped supporting. Moreover, for some interpreters, the real meaning of Everett ideas is not the coexistence of many worlds, but the existence of a single quantum one. In this context, what should we think of attempts to verify Everett thesis? What about the connexion between MWI and the cosmological multiverse? How to understand the links between the quantum world and the classical one? This article tries to answer some of these questions.

arXiv:2001.03771•Jan 11, 2020•0 citations

Some remarks on the mathematical structure of the multiverse

McKenzie, Alan

The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum entanglement experiments is at best incomplete, since the intermediate state induced by collapse of the wave function apparently depends upon the inertial rest frame in which the experiment is observed. While the Many Worlds Interpretation of Everett, MWI, avoids the issue of wave function collapse, it, too, is a casualty of the special theory of relativity. This requires all events in the universe, past, present and future, to be unique, as in the block universe picture, which rules out Everett style branching. The benefits of MWI may be retained, however, by postulating a multiverse of discrete, parallel, block universes which are identical to each other up to certain points in the MWI trunk before they diverge according to the MWI branching. The quantum probability of an event then emerges from the number of parallel universes in which the event happens divided by the total number of universes. This means that the total number of such universes is finite. Such a picture is more easily envisaged by thinking of it as a purely mathematical structure, as in the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis proposed by Tegmark. However, while Tegmark wished to avoid contamination from Goedelian self referential knots, not only does such contamination appear to be inevitable, it brings an unexpected benefit. The mathematical hierarchy required by the enigmatic footnote 48a in the paper by Goedel leads to an explanation for a unitary evolution of deterministic quantum rules across the multiverse while accounting for quantum uncertainty within an individual universe. Other aspects of this structure, called here the Plexus, are discussed, including awareness of existence and other questions raised by the hypothesis.

arXiv:1602.04247•Feb 6, 2016•4 citations
Abstract Quantum Immortality usually refers to, in a classical sense, a person who is “lucky” enough to survive in any incident in the world. Such a quantity of luckiness is even big enough to keep that person away from the aging of the human body. That is, in fact, when we say that one becomes “immortal”. Throughout the history of the world, there have been many times when people tried to find out the secret of anti-aging, but this ambitious dream, obviously, has failed every time. This paper will discuss quantum immortality in theoretical and mathematical aspects and evaluate its authority, or possibility, of its existence in real life. In order to accomplish this evaluation, the concepts of the main two interpretations of quantum physics: 1)Copenhagen Interpretation(or non-MWI interpretation), and 2)Many Worlds Interpretation(or MWI)will be necessarily involved. Throughout this paper, the MWI is proven to support the theoretical quantum immortal state, which, in this paper, means to achieve an expected theoretical outcome in the Everett box experiment. In order to show how MWI will give its credit to quantum immortality, the idea of the Infinite Monkey experiment is demonstrated in detail. After that, discussions of the computable probability of the outcome of the Infinite Monkey theorem and its pathological distribution are involved. Regardless of the situation in the Everett box, whether it is pathologically distributed or not, the mathematical outcomes show that MWI will be the only possibility of achieving the quantum immortal state during the Everett box experiment, or quantum gun experiment. Finally, the paper brings out the evaluation of quantum immortality in a real life stance.
The Everett Box is a device in which an observer and a lethal quantum apparatus are isolated from the rest of the universe. On a regular basis, successive trials occur, in each of which an automatic measurement of a quantum superposition inside the apparatus either causes instant death or does nothing to the observer. From the observer's perspective, the chances of surviving mmm trials monotonically decreases with increasing mmm. As a result, if the observer is still alive for sufficiently large mmm she must reject any interpretation of quantum mechanics which is not the many-worlds interpretation (MWI), since surviving mmm trials becomes vanishingly unlikely in a single world, whereas a version of the observer will necessarily survive in the branching MWI universe. Here we ask whether this conclusion still holds if rather than a classical understanding of limits built on classical logic we instead require our physics to satisfy a computability requirement by investigating the Everett Box in a model of a computational universe running on a variety of constructive logic, Recursive Constructive Mathematics. We show that although the standard Everett argument rejecting non-MWI interpretations is no longer valid, we can show that Everett's conclusion still holds within a computable universe. Thus we argue that Everett's argument is strengthened and any counter-argument must be strengthened, since it holds not only in classical logic (with embedded notions of continuity and infinity) but also in a computable logic.
This article explores theoretical conditions necessary for “quantum immortality” (QI) as well as its possible practical implications. It is demonstrated that the QI is a particular case of “multiverse immortality” (MI) which is based on two main assumptions: the very large size of the Universe (not necessary because of quantum effects), and the copy-friendly theory of personal identity. It is shown that a popular objection about the lowering of the world-share (measure) of an observer in the case of QI doesn’t work, as the world-share decline could be compensated by the merging timelines for the simpler minds, and also some types of personal preferences are not dependent on such changes. Despite large uncertainty about MI’s validity, it still has appreciable practical consequences in some important outcomes like suicide and aging. The article demonstrates that MI could be used to significantly increase the expected subjective probability of success of risky life extension technologies, like cryonics, but makes euthanasia impractical, because of the risks of eternal suffering. Euthanasia should be replaced with cryothanasia, i.e. cryopreservation after voluntary death. Another possible application of MI is as a last chance to survive a global catastrophe. MI could be considered a plan D of reaching immortality, where plan A consists of the survival until the creation of the beneficial AI via fighting aging, plan B is cryonics, and plan C is digital immortality.
As cutting-edge experiments display ever more extreme forms of non-classical behavior, the prevailing view on the interpretation of quantum mechanics appears to be gradually changing. A (highly unscientific) poll taken at the 1997 UMBC quantum mechanics workshop gave the once all-dominant Copenhagen interpretation less than half of the votes. The Many Worlds interpretation (MWI) scored second, comfortably a head of the Consistent Histories and Bohm interpretations. It is argued that since all the above-mentioned approaches to nonrelativistic quantum mechanics give identical cookbook prescriptions for how to calculate things in practice, practical-minded experimentalists, who have traditionally adopted the “shut-up-and-calculate interpretation”, typically show little interest in whether cozy classical concepts are in fact real in some untestable metaphysical sense or merely the way we subjectively perceive a mathematically simpler world where the Schrödinger equation describes everything – and that they are therefore becoming less bothered by a profusion of worlds than by a profusion of words. Common objections to the MWI are discussed. It is argued that when environment-induced decoherence is taken into account, the experimental predictions of the MWI are identical to those of the Copenhagen interpretation except for an experiment involving a Byzantine form of “quantum suicide”. This makes the choice between them purely a matter of taste, roughly equivalent to whether one believes mathematical language or human language to be more fundamental.
Since the 1970s, the Everett-Wheeler many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of Quantum Mechanics (1955) has been much in the news. One wonders about the worlds in question, their branches, their splittings, their number. It is most often ignored that this language is not that of Everett, whom Wheeler very quickly stopped supporting. Moreover, for some interpreters, the real meaning of Everett ideas is not the coexistence of many worlds, but the existence of a single quantum one. In this context, what should we think of attempts to verify Everett thesis? What about the connexion between MWI and the cosmological multiverse? How to understand the links between the quantum world and the classical one? This article tries to answer some of these questions.
The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum entanglement experiments is at best incomplete, since the intermediate state induced by collapse of the wave function apparently depends upon the inertial rest frame in which the experiment is observed. While the Many Worlds Interpretation of Everett, MWI, avoids the issue of wave function collapse, it, too, is a casualty of the special theory of relativity. This requires all events in the universe, past, present and future, to be unique, as in the block universe picture, which rules out Everett style branching. The benefits of MWI may be retained, however, by postulating a multiverse of discrete, parallel, block universes which are identical to each other up to certain points in the MWI trunk before they diverge according to the MWI branching. The quantum probability of an event then emerges from the number of parallel universes in which the event happens divided by the total number of universes. This means that the total number of such universes is finite. Such a picture is more easily envisaged by thinking of it as a purely mathematical structure, as in the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis proposed by Tegmark. However, while Tegmark wished to avoid contamination from Goedelian self referential knots, not only does such contamination appear to be inevitable, it brings an unexpected benefit. The mathematical hierarchy required by the enigmatic footnote 48a in the paper by Goedel leads to an explanation for a unitary evolution of deterministic quantum rules across the multiverse while accounting for quantum uncertainty within an individual universe. Other aspects of this structure, called here the Plexus, are discussed, including awareness of existence and other questions raised by the hypothesis.