Quantum Immortality and Surviving Death
The many worlds theory suggests that quantum immortality is possible.
The Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests that there are many different universes that branch off from one another when significant events occur. Scientists such as Erwin Schrodinger and Hugh Everett have presented arguments stating that it’s possible for the consciousness of a human to travel from one universe to another at the moment of death. This survival is dubbed quantum immortality. What does this mean for how we interpret our universe and how does it line up with other aspects of the paranormal?
Schrodinger’s Cat
Schrodinger's cat could be an example of how quantum immortality could work.
Schrodinger’s Cat is a famous thought experiment created by Erwin Schrodinger. The idea is that we have a sealed box containing a cat, a flask of poison and a radioactive source. A monitor inside the box is set up to detect if a single atom of radioactivity is released. If this happens the flask of poison shatters and the cat is killed.
The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests that the cat is simultaneously alive and dead yet when someone looks inside the box to observe what has happened the cat is either alive or dead.
Schrodinger stressed that this doesn’t mean that the observer is controlling the outcome but rather that according to quantum mechanics both outcomes are simultaneously occurring but only one can be seen by an objective observer.
In reality we know that the cat can either be alive or dead. It’s not possible for both things to be occurring at the same time from our perspective but the accepted science of the way particles interact at the quantum level is different to the usual rules of physics.
Many-Worlds Theory
The Many-World’s Interpretation or Quantum Mechanics was suggested by Hugh Everett. He argues that when faced with quantum choices the universe would split into two separate universe, one where each different outcome took place.
This would mean that with Schrodinger’s experiment the cat is both alive and dead which fits with Schrodinger’s wave equation but the dead cat and the living cat are now in separate universes.
Quantum Immortality
Quantum Immortality is a concept that suggests that when Schrodinger’s Cat dies its consciousness is transported to the surviving cat in another universe.
This idea has been explored through Max Tegmark’s Quantum Russian Roulette thought experiment. This experiment requires a quantum trigger and a machinegun that is programmed to skip firing a bullet based on the trigger. The test subject must also be the observer. The quantum trigger must function on qubits - quantum bits that can be in more than one state of being at a time.
When the observer is put in the line of fire the chance of them surviving the encounter is incredibly small. If the experiment was set to happen a million times and the observer is still alive it would suggest that the observer must have survived by their consciousness moving to another universe as it would be impossible to survive by chance.
This is all pretty difficult to wrap our heads around as laymen but we can trust that these physicists who have spent their lives studying quantum mechanics know what they are talking about. If we can accept the Many-Worlds Interpretation as a potentiality what implications does this have for our lives and could this reality possibly explain some paranormal events that have so far defied explanation?
Personal Accounts
There are many examples online of people who have had strange experiences that seem to line up with the idea that or consciousness shifts to another universe upon death.
The common narrative in these accounts is that the person has an experience where they die where they feel it happening and are certain they have died only to suddenly be transported back to before the incident occurred.
Some of these events are so real to the people who have experienced them that they develop an intense fear of the situation from their experience, avoiding all related activities in their lives.
Skeptics would claim these are simply cases of false memory, where an imagined scenario becomes stored in memory as an actual event.
If we accept the Many-Worlds interpretation as a possibility perhaps some quantum superposition we don’t understand is connected with the life of each person or even each living thing.
When the person dies their consciousness travels to a new universe where they survived and an imprint of their death in the previous universe remains in their memory. The person is both alive and dead depending on which universe they are being observed from, just like Schrodinger’s Cat.
Does this mean we are all immortal? Perhaps certain types of unexpected death are associated with a quantum superposition that allows the consciousness to move to a new universe. Since death from old age or other natural and expected deaths are not dependent upon a single event they do not cause the same branching of universes to occur.
Paranormal Connections
If this theory is in fact reality what implications could this have for the paranormal? Here’s a few of our half baked speculations:
Connections between different universes may occur sporadically causing us to see things that don’t exist in our reality but do in others. Cryptids such as Bigfoot and the Skin-walker could be examples of this as in some reports these creatures seem to have properties that are not consistent with the known rules of our universe. They are said to appear and disappear and occur along other anomalies such as lights in the sky. Maybe all of these phenomena are caused by universes colliding and overlapping.
In a similar vein UFO’s and aliens may actually be interdimensional creatures. Perhaps an offshoot in evolution millions of years ago lead to a more advanced version of humanity that evolved to be physically different to us.
Perhaps ghosts are the consciousness of people who should have moved to a new universe but somehow remained trapped in the old one or trapped in between the two.
The idea of our consciousness avoiding death is similar to resetting to a save point in a video game. This makes us wonder could the whole thing just be an incredibly complex simulation as some scientists have suggested?
While this theory could explain a few aspects of the paranormal it still doesn’t provide any answers as to what happens to us after we die. Eventually we reach the end of our luck and die of old age or natural causes. What happens to our consciousness then is anyone’s guess.
If you enjoyed this article you may also enjoy learning about how we are able to feel when we are being watched or about our reality being a simulation.
Sources:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/1936/1/012015/pdf
https://hackernoon.com/quantum-immortality-summed-up-in-5-key-points
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-many-worlds-theory/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat
https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9709032?
https://www.newscientist.com/letter/mg22429930-200-mulled-multiverse-2/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/comments/18vrw1/to_anyone_who_thinks_they_have_experienced/
