at any given instant there are a certain (yet infinite) set of cosmic circumstances by which you could meet your end. however, there are equally an infinite set of probablities in which you live. ( okay these aren't infinite, because there are only a certain amount of possibilites in the universe, but they might as well be infinite.) since in the scenarios where you die, your brain no longer experiences reality, you only continue consciousness in realities where you live, which are basically infinite. therefore you will never experience death. too bad about suffering though, if anything that increases your consciousness. but i do have a moral philosophy about that aspect of this idea. thoughts?
Maybe you never will experience death, but you will surely die. And there is only one reality in which you live and die, the rest are just possibilities in which you might have lived if you did not die.
^except that every instant is the birth of countless new realities. so if you die in one instance, you would simply continue living in another. this is due to quantum effects. if a pencil is perfectly balanced on its end then it has an equal chance of falling in any direction, and all of those possibilities are as real as the others, and all are experienced by the pencil simultaneously.
Hi, Esoterik Appeal. I'm a student of pyschology and I just have one question. Like, do you really believe this rubbish?
This fails to take into account that your body can only last so long, anywhere... Unless it's actually possible to be actually immortal in a single universe; eventually all the yous who didn't get killed in some other way die of old age...
Quantum effects are limited to the subatomic world. However, our brains might actually behave like this. The latest issue of Discover magazine, interviewing Roger Penrose, tells of this.
belief is the vehicle of bigotry and chauvenism. it is an idea that answers many questions for me, and something that i take comfort in. show me something to prove it incorrect and i will rethink it or drop it all together. as i said, there are nearly infinite possible timelines. in at least one of those your civilization will find the key to immortality, through medical means, "fountain of youth", alien aid, etc.
What good does it do you for some other version of yourself to exist in another reality? That's not you, that's just a copy that has many of the same properties as you. YOU can still die. The fact that in some other universe a being much like yourself is still walking around won't be of any comfort to you, because you'll no longer exist. This idea is not widely accepted in quantum physics, despite what some authors of “popular” science-related books would have you believe. Most physicists today don’t believe this to be true.
Esoterik Appeal That this rubbish makes you comfortable, I have no doubt. But what are some of the many questions that it answers for you? This is ridiculous. Go pick up a pencil and perform your experiement. Observe that the pencil doesn't always fall over in the same direction. Now, WAIT! Before you conclude comfortably that you are immortal because there are an infinite number of other realities "outside" of this exsistence wherein you are dropping pencils that are falling in the other directions...Before you perform this mystical act of mind destruction... I'd like for you look a little harder at what the results of the eperiment might mean. For instance, that where the base of the pencil meets the table, there is not flat and even contact. Or that the mass of the the pencil is not uniformly centered over that point of contact. Hmm...I know it sounds crazy, but just consider it. But I speculate that the above doesn't really matter. I'm guessing that you aren't really that confused about how pencils fall over. I'm guessing that the answer to MY original question lies in either the comfortableness of the idea or the fact that it "answers many questions for you". If you would like to specify some of those many questions or write something about the comfort that the idea gives you, I, as a student of psychology would be very much interested.
Not necessarily. These things may not actually be possible at all, which I imagine is the case, or it may not be possible for them to happen before your own death. Whole thing is pretty pointless, though, as someone else pointed out. Who cares if a billion people just like you live on; You Don't. And people like to blissfully ignore this, but immortality would probably suck...
Perhaps we have focused too much on immortality from the perspective of our own subject-self living on. Maybe we are all immortal due to our forever serving as a bridge between what was and what will be. The decisions we make indeed ripple out in infinite implications. Most are too subtle to matter to us, yet they are there. Some are not so subtle. But if we can think of a person's definition in terms of their relationships with the world (which, indeed, all things only have meaning in relation), then we are already immortal. And if we adopted that perspective, then we might not be so afraid of death. And if we are not so afraid of death, then we might live more authentically, and do what our conscience suggests rather than what the world appears to support or be ready for. And if we did that, then what the world "is" and tolerates would indeed change faster than we realized it could.
exactly. and that's the part i think that you may be interested in Brian. but you can go ahead and drop the condescension. there are some of us that think that psychology is rubbish. i'll bet a lot of people can think back to a close call, a car accident, household mishap, etc. where they by all rights should have died. i've had a couple of these my self and escaped serious injury. but in fact i did die, only the lines of reality in which i did no longer exist to me except in a purely hypothetical sense, at least as far as i can see. but i wasn't maimed either, which i could definitely experience. why? well, i lead what seems to me a pretty decent life. and my measure of that is the effect i have on others. your goal in life should be to leave the world a better place than you found it. being a good person is more important than being a "great" person. and perhaps your reward for doing good is "favorable rolls of the dice." this is the fuzzy spiritual side to my thinking: choice plays a role in the quality of reality that you experience. happiness is not just sheer luck. but that's really just commom sense isn't it? as for the assertion that you indeed die, while countless copies of you go on leading their lives isn't really correct, a least by my reasoning. your life just keeps going. your reality has the potential to be limitless different possibilities, but you only experience the one in which you're living. if a situation rises where you die, that part of your thread of reality stops, and you just keep going on still alive. its like you're running along and slam into a brick wall and also pass through it. this doesn't happen in our macro-world, but is a basic tenent of the quantum universe. and these effects are what ultimately determine our reality.
if a pencil is perfectly balanced on its tip, its not going to fall. Something has to act on the pencil to make it fall. And that act was the result of something in the past. Now your saying the pencil exists in an infinite amount of unvierses all exactly the same before the pencil drops and the pencil will fall ultamiltley in every possible direction. Explain how this is possible because all the universes are the same before the pencil drops. You claim the reasoning for this is quantum indeterminacy and it doesnt affect the macro world (the world in which the pencil exists) yet this results in an infinate amout of realities. Please clarify what your saying because im a bit confused. If QI affects the Macro world then your theory makes more sense, otherwise go home.
the basis of what i'm saying is that the probabilities of the quantum world are expressed in the macro world. how was that not clear?