Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1: And today we're going to be talking about broadly a
Speaker 1: topic that we've touched on a number of times here before,
Speaker 1: and that is immortality. We've touched on it in terms
Speaker 1: of religion and mythology. We've touched on it from the
Speaker 1: standpoint of our our great fear of mortality and death
Speaker 1: and therefore our longing for immortality and basically every aspect
Speaker 1: of our lives. And we have also talked about it
Speaker 1: a little bit in terms of improving human longevity. And
Speaker 1: I'm sure we've talked about it a good bit in
Speaker 1: reference to Highlander, because Robert, you've been watching that movie
Speaker 1: for about thirty five years, I think since you started
Speaker 1: it in like three second increments or something. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: watching it on a streaming service in five to ten
Speaker 1: minute sections. It's a race against time to see if
Speaker 1: I can finish Highlander before it's removed from this particular
Speaker 1: streaming service. You know what they call that kind of
Speaker 1: lunch break, it's the quickening. I tend to call it
Speaker 1: a squatt and gobble because you're just kind of like
Speaker 1: squatting in your in your living room, just eating as
Speaker 1: fast as possible and watching just a little bit of
Speaker 1: Highlander and then going back to work. Now, how does
Speaker 1: the Highlander version of immortality stack up against all the
Speaker 1: normal kinds of immortality you find in mythology and religion.
Speaker 1: I think you would probably agree with me that it's
Speaker 1: not the deepest treatment of immortality and mortality in in
Speaker 1: in our collective storytelling. But it does hit on some
Speaker 1: of the main points, right, Like, oh, immortality sounds great,
Speaker 1: but then when you actually have to do it, it's
Speaker 1: kind of a pain. Um. Well, I'd say a lot
Speaker 1: of religious visions are actually like that. They tell you,
Speaker 1: you know, a lot of religions include some version of immortality,
Speaker 1: whether it's a sort of linear survival after death of
Speaker 1: the soul, or there's a kind of eternal cycle of
Speaker 1: reincarnation or something like that. In any event, it very
Speaker 1: often is not necessarily encouraged for you to look too
Speaker 1: closely at the details of immortality. Right, But this Highlander
Speaker 1: is essentially another version of the wandering immortal story where
Speaker 1: they're kind of stuck with it it what seems like
Speaker 1: it would be a blessing is kind of a curse.
Speaker 1: I feel like human perceptions of immortality, they tend to
Speaker 1: break down to this imagined things that would normally terminate
Speaker 1: or undergo a phase shift but magically don't have to.
Speaker 1: So the desire to for immortality is often either a
Speaker 1: reaction to just the reality of death and mortality itself,
Speaker 1: which is very understandable. Uh, kind of defines our existence
Speaker 1: is modern humans, or it comes from a desire for
Speaker 1: a certain state of existence to continue unchanged. But it
Speaker 1: does often kind of come back to this idea of stagnation,
Speaker 1: you know. Um, Like the thing I want is really stagnation.
Speaker 1: The thing I'm afraid of is change, um you know
Speaker 1: I and I wonder if if that's what we see
Speaker 1: in Highlander, you know, in these characters like Connor McLeod
Speaker 1: and Ramires. You know this Connor changed? Is he changed
Speaker 1: by his experience in the film? I mean certainly that
Speaker 1: the Kurgan, the villain isn't. Um. It seems like it
Speaker 1: would be more interesting if you like switched around backgrounds
Speaker 1: and had like the Goody two shoes becomes the villain
Speaker 1: and the and the the ancient villain becomes the modern hero,
Speaker 1: that sort of transformation, but instead these are very stagnant characters. Well,
Speaker 1: it's actually part of the ancient mythological tradition of immortality
Speaker 1: that if it comes with too much change, it's actually
Speaker 1: a curse rather than a blessing. Uh. Think about Aos
Speaker 1: and Tiffannus in Greek mythology. We we've talked about them
Speaker 1: recently or where the ideas Aos, the goddess of Dawn,
Speaker 1: has this lover, this mortal human lover named Tiffanus, and
Speaker 1: she wants him to be able to live forever. So
Speaker 1: she cries to Zeus and says, please grant him and
Speaker 1: more to Lity, and Zeus, being the jerk that he has, says, okay, done,
Speaker 1: makes Tiffanness an immortal, but doesn't grant him eternal youth.
Speaker 1: So he's gonna live forever, but he's just gonna get
Speaker 1: older and older, and that seems to be implied to
Speaker 1: be a fate worse than death. Yeah. You know another
Speaker 1: treatment on this that I really like Richard K. Morgan
Speaker 1: in his book Altered Carbon uh, and then also in
Speaker 1: the Netflix series that just recently came out, that that
Speaker 1: is basically that first book brought to life on the screen.
Speaker 1: In this show, you have essentially immortality via digital consciousness,
Speaker 1: digitized human consciousness moved from body to body, and typically
Speaker 1: you have a very grim vision of what that would mean.
Speaker 1: It basically means that the the worst, you know, richest
Speaker 1: decrepit individuals in society, they're just gonna grow more and
Speaker 1: more awful because they have more they have an increased
Speaker 1: lifespan in which to be awful and become jaded to
Speaker 1: their various uh um, you know, inappropriate pleasures. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: have a concept that the elderly tend to become wise
Speaker 1: in their old age. I mean, who knows if that's
Speaker 1: actually true, but well there's at least an impression along
Speaker 1: those lines. But it seems to be premised on the
Speaker 1: knowledge that death is coming. What if wisdom is contingent
Speaker 1: on that. Yeah, it takes me back to our episode
Speaker 1: on Chinese immortality and some of these Dallas concepts of
Speaker 1: like the the elder enlightened being where you're aging is
Speaker 1: a transformation into a different state. But so many of
Speaker 1: these ideas of immortality, it's like, yeah, you get to
Speaker 1: remain young forever, uh forget without really thinking about what
Speaker 1: that would do, how that might warp the individual. But
Speaker 1: what if there was a concept of immortality that in
Speaker 1: fact didn't imply any of these changes, right. It didn't
Speaker 1: say that you're going to make a phase transition to
Speaker 1: another kind of being. It didn't say that your soul
Speaker 1: is going to leave your body. It didn't say any
Speaker 1: of that. It was just a literal, physical, straightforward statement
Speaker 1: that everything is going to be normal. There's no magic,
Speaker 1: except you'll just happen to never die. What sounds good
Speaker 1: is their catch, Whether or not it sounds good. This
Speaker 1: is what we want to talk about today, a physical
Speaker 1: possibility of immortality presented as a thought experiment with a
Speaker 1: lot of perhaps flawed underlying assumptions. So you're unfortunately not
Speaker 1: going to walk away from today's episode probably with the
Speaker 1: assumption that yes, all humans will live forever based on
Speaker 1: the laws of physics, but we do want to explore
Speaker 1: that as a possibility. Yeah, nothing we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about here today is actually going to impact your life,
Speaker 1: except in the way maybe you think about your existence.
Speaker 1: Quite true, unless it does impact your life, in which
Speaker 1: case this is going to be very important. We're barely
Speaker 1: talking about quantum mechanics, and it's already tangled up it
Speaker 1: or not here, right, So we should make the transition
Speaker 1: to talking about physics, because this is going to be
Speaker 1: a physics spaced episode talking about interpretations of quantum mechanics. Uh,
Speaker 1: and so I guess we should begin with just a
Speaker 1: little bit of the discussion of weirdness of scale sale.
Speaker 1: If you listen to this podcast, you've probably heard at
Speaker 1: least a little bit about the deep strangeness of physics
Speaker 1: at scales much bigger or smaller than the energy, mass, distance, speed,
Speaker 1: and so forth that we deal with on a day
Speaker 1: to day basis. On, for example, vast scales, we live
Speaker 1: in a universe apparently dominated by dark matter, these gigantic
Speaker 1: gravitational anomalies that can't be seen or touched except by
Speaker 1: the way that they've been space time and hold galaxies together,
Speaker 1: and on these huge scales, the dominating physics regime, the
Speaker 1: kind of physics that makes the biggest difference is not
Speaker 1: the kind of physics that governs our everyday lives, but
Speaker 1: of Einstein's general relativity, where time is not a universal
Speaker 1: measure and can appear to slow down or speed up
Speaker 1: from different vantage points. Where mass changes the geometry of
Speaker 1: space time itself and can warp or even trap light itself.
Speaker 1: Now shrink down to roughly human sized scales, and suddenly
Speaker 1: the laws of physics appear or to change. They don't
Speaker 1: really change, but different physical phenomena become the most salient,
Speaker 1: become the most important types of calculations to do when
Speaker 1: you're trying to figure out how things are moving and
Speaker 1: how one physical thing is affecting another. So this normal scale,
Speaker 1: general relativity doesn't matter very much. We can throw baseballs
Speaker 1: and shoot cannons and smash watermelons and all that stuff
Speaker 1: without taking general relativity into the equation. And this scale
Speaker 1: is generally best described by Isaac Newton's classical mechanics. This
Speaker 1: is also the realm which physics is intuitive. Right at
Speaker 1: this scale, everything seems to fly and fall and push
Speaker 1: and resist in a way that makes sense to us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the This is the room in which we
Speaker 1: we have evolved to thrive exactly. That's the important point.
Speaker 1: It's kind of hard to remember this, but we should
Speaker 1: do our best to internalize the fact that this middle
Speaker 1: scale of physics, the Newtonian scale, does not actually make
Speaker 1: any more sense in an objective point of view than
Speaker 1: the other scales do. It's just the scale at which
Speaker 1: our brains evolved. So presumably, if we happen to be
Speaker 1: evolved star sized organisms, things like general relativity would be
Speaker 1: intuitive and would make natural sense to us, and Newtonian
Speaker 1: physics would be crazy, weird stuff that goes on down there. Well,
Speaker 1: one way that I like to think about it is
Speaker 1: the explanation that you can think of classical physics as
Speaker 1: the Earth's crust and quantum physics as the underlying mantle,
Speaker 1: and then you have to keep in mind that there
Speaker 1: are things about Earth's mantle. They only make sense if
Speaker 1: you take into account Earth's in our core. I think
Speaker 1: that's a good analogy, because if we do keep zooming down,
Speaker 1: we of course get get to what you just mentioned,
Speaker 1: quantum mechanics, this next realm where things change. Yet again,
Speaker 1: you get too extremely small scales on the scale of
Speaker 1: elementary particles and tiny objects like atoms, protons, electrons, photons
Speaker 1: of light, and at this scale the physics regime changes
Speaker 1: so that things stop behaving in a way best described
Speaker 1: by either general relativity or classical mechanics, and they int
Speaker 1: behave according to a theory we now know as quantum
Speaker 1: mechanics or quantum physics. And this came about because, you know, originally,
Speaker 1: say the dawn of the twentieth century, scientists were trying
Speaker 1: to figure out how things like atoms could behave as
Speaker 1: reconciled by classical mechanics. They were trying to look at
Speaker 1: things like the orbit of electrons around the nucleus of
Speaker 1: an atom and say, okay, does that work in a
Speaker 1: classical mechanics way, like the way planets orbit around a star,
Speaker 1: And it just didn't work. So they had to figure
Speaker 1: out what's actually going on here, and eventually they came
Speaker 1: up with the theory of quantum physics, which is now
Speaker 1: predicted mainly by what is called I've been saying his
Speaker 1: name wrong my whole life. I think that the Shreddinger equation.
Speaker 1: I've been calling him Schrodinger. I've been saying Schrodinger as well.
Speaker 1: I feel like I've heard Schrodinger from everybody. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think I've heard it, but I don't know. I think
Speaker 1: shredd Shreddinger is shredding. It's hard to even say. I
Speaker 1: want to go Schrodinger Shreddinger. It's all because of Shreddinger.
Speaker 1: It does it sounds more wholesome than than than cats
Speaker 1: and boxes, uh, than that are neither dead nor alive,
Speaker 1: or are both dead and alive at the same time. Yeah, so, well,
Speaker 1: you'll probably hear us say it both ways in this podcast.
Speaker 1: I apologize for that, but there's gonna be just no
Speaker 1: getting around it. I guess it depends on how the
Speaker 1: wave function collapses each time, but um so anyway. It
Speaker 1: is named after the Austrian physicist Irvin Shreddinger, and Shreddinger
Speaker 1: derived the equation in the mid nineteen twenties and ever
Speaker 1: since then it has been profoundly useful and profoundly confusing.
Speaker 1: And this is because quantum mechanics is simultaneously one of
Speaker 1: the best most predictive theories in all of science, and
Speaker 1: at the same time it clearly implies a reality that
Speaker 1: makes absolutely no intuitive sense to us mammals that evolved
Speaker 1: to deal with classical physics on the Newtonian scale. It
Speaker 1: is bonkers and completely defies our expectations of how the
Speaker 1: world should work. And there are a bunch of different
Speaker 1: ways you could explain this, but just to pick the
Speaker 1: simplest version for now, that the Shreddinger equation can be
Speaker 1: used to predict the behavior of tiny particles like atoms
Speaker 1: and electrons over time. So just the way that you
Speaker 1: can use Newtonian equations to predict something like the arc
Speaker 1: of a cannonball or the force of a falling boulder,
Speaker 1: you can use the Shreddinger equation to predict the behavior
Speaker 1: of tiny particles like electrons or photons. But a Newtonian
Speaker 1: cannonball is experienced by us and described by physics as
Speaker 1: a single solitary object with one starting point a single
Speaker 1: ending point in a clear trajectory. A particle on the
Speaker 1: quantum scale does not behave that way at all, but rather,
Speaker 1: according to the shredding Ear equation, it behaves a lot
Speaker 1: like a pattern of waves in a fluid, and this
Speaker 1: means it can have what can seem like multiple contradictory properties.
Speaker 1: For example, a particle can, from our point of view,
Speaker 1: appear to have multiple different positions, velocities, or spin directions
Speaker 1: at the same time. And this range of possible simultaneous
Speaker 1: behaviors is what's known as the wave function. The wave
Speaker 1: function is all of these potentialities that seemed to be
Speaker 1: simultaneously true about a quantum object or system, and this
Speaker 1: wave function exists in an abstract infinite dimensional space that's
Speaker 1: known as the Hilbert space. Now again, of course this
Speaker 1: makes no sense to us, but it's proven to a
Speaker 1: degree that's almost beyond dispute. Like one of the most
Speaker 1: classic proofs of the wave function behavior of quantum scale
Speaker 1: objects is the double slit experiment. Yes, this is where
Speaker 1: we get the same. When you're out of slit, you're
Speaker 1: out of peer. Right now, that's a different situation. I
Speaker 1: don't know what you're talking about. Old beer ad slit
Speaker 1: speer sla. We've actually just been looking at old beer
Speaker 1: ads here on the podcast. There apparently was an old
Speaker 1: Miller ad that had gigantic monsters in it where they
Speaker 1: grab a truck full of miller and just chugged the truck. Yeah,
Speaker 1: now that one's awesome. I think that was that was
Speaker 1: from from when I was a kid, or in junior
Speaker 1: high or something. I remember seeing that one, the Schlitz
Speaker 1: beer ad where they have this whole when you're out
Speaker 1: of slits, you're out of here. Uh, it's one I
Speaker 1: never actually saw, but was referenced on Mystery Science Theater
Speaker 1: three thousand. Growing up. So one of these these these
Speaker 1: many pop culture references that I have no direct experience with,
Speaker 1: only a secondhand experience with them from watching MST. Isn't
Speaker 1: it sweet that all of these beer commercials are imprinted
Speaker 1: on your childhood? Yeah, well it's some of them were
Speaker 1: not too bad. Some of them had monsters in them.
Speaker 1: But the double slit experiment to get to get it
Speaker 1: back to quantum mechanics here, the basic idea is pretty simple.
Speaker 1: The experimenter shines a light on a barrier that has
Speaker 1: two narrow slits in it, and then the experimental studies
Speaker 1: the interference pattern produces on a screen. So you've got
Speaker 1: like two walls in order, and the first wall that
Speaker 1: the light has to go through as the two slits,
Speaker 1: and then the back wall has a screen on it
Speaker 1: that the light can be projected on after it goes
Speaker 1: past the first wall. Right, And I should also add
Speaker 1: that this was first performed by Thomas Young in eighteen
Speaker 1: o one. Now, light has a dual nature, it's both
Speaker 1: wave like and particle like. In the experiment, light travels
Speaker 1: through both slits and creates this interference pattern. And if
Speaker 1: you send a single photon through photon being the light particle, right,
Speaker 1: the single unit of electromagnetic energy. So you send a
Speaker 1: single photon through it still forms an interference pattern as
Speaker 1: if the single photon travels through both slits simultaneously. If
Speaker 1: you hear me laughing, it's because at this point in
Speaker 1: our notes, Robert has inserted an image from the movie
Speaker 1: Time Cop two of what actor Ron Silver, Yeah, he
Speaker 1: played the villain. And here we have two different the
Speaker 1: villain from different time periods encountering each other and kind
Speaker 1: of looking at each other with amusement and or confusion.
Speaker 1: And I think both of these responses are are apt
Speaker 1: when contemplate and quantum mechanics. I mean, basically, though this
Speaker 1: is a simple experiment. Who observes something that should not
Speaker 1: be at least as far as classical physics is concerned. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the the idea that at the quantum level, a single
Speaker 1: object can appear to inhabit multiple places at one time.
Speaker 1: It produces this wave of like effect when it should
Speaker 1: be more like, you know, we think on a classical level,
Speaker 1: would be like a ball thrown at something. It's one object,
Speaker 1: but it's not. And you have to wonder how can
Speaker 1: this be true? Like objects in our experience never appear
Speaker 1: to be in more than one place at one time.
Speaker 1: A baygel does not behave like a wave pattern in
Speaker 1: which you know their peaks and troughs at different locations. Right.
Speaker 1: A bagel is just a single solid object that doesn't
Speaker 1: move unless you move it. Yeah, I think, I mean
Speaker 1: we we we mentioned time cop in passing here, and
Speaker 1: I don't think a deep scientific reading of time cop
Speaker 1: is is essential here. But this in other films do
Speaker 1: kind of get into this territory when you have the paradox,
Speaker 1: right of of the same character encountering themselves from a
Speaker 1: different time. Um, well, anytime something that is I mean,
Speaker 1: how can that be, right, something somebody is in two
Speaker 1: places at once. Yeah, it's used in fiction because obviously
Speaker 1: it never happens on a macroscopic scale and reality. So
Speaker 1: the contradiction here is between the fact that the Shreddinger
Speaker 1: equation is obviously correct and the fact that it predicts
Speaker 1: stuff that makes no sense and we never see. And
Speaker 1: so it's led to the need for what are called
Speaker 1: interpretations of quantum mechanics. Pretty Much everybody accepts the underlying
Speaker 1: theory of quantum mechanics. You'd be a fool not to.
Speaker 1: It's incredibly experimentally verified and very predictive, but there's a
Speaker 1: lot of disagreement about what it means and how it
Speaker 1: actually connects to our experience of reality. So, Robert, you
Speaker 1: mentioned the dead cat in the box earlier. Yes, this
Speaker 1: is going to be a feature of what's been for
Speaker 1: a long time the leading interpretation of quantum mechanics. So
Speaker 1: you've got different interpretations that we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: two mainly today, but there have been actually a bunch
Speaker 1: of different interpretations. The two we're gonna be focusing on
Speaker 1: are the Copenhagen interpretation and what we will later discuss
Speaker 1: as the many Worlds interpretation. But the Copenhagen interpretation was
Speaker 1: created in the nineteen twenties by the physicist Nil Spoor
Speaker 1: and Werner Heisenberg, and the Copenhagen interpretation essentially postulates a
Speaker 1: world governed by quantum mechanical probabilities, and these probabilities get
Speaker 1: decided on through a process known as wave function collapse.
Speaker 1: So you've got these multiple possibilities at the same time.
Speaker 1: That's the way of function. Uh. And then they're going
Speaker 1: to say it collapses, So what does that mean? So
Speaker 1: imagine you've got a quantum level particle like an electron,
Speaker 1: and you're trying to figure out where is it going
Speaker 1: to be? Is the electron going to be on the
Speaker 1: right or is it going to be on the left.
Speaker 1: What the Copenhagen interpretation says is that this wave function
Speaker 1: is in a state of unresolved potential called superposition, and
Speaker 1: the electron could be on the right, and it could
Speaker 1: be on the left, and in fact it's neither one.
Speaker 1: But it's in this state where there's a fifty percent
Speaker 1: probability of each And here's where it connects with our
Speaker 1: world of solid macroscopic objects that are in only one
Speaker 1: state in one place at a time. The Copenhagen interpretation
Speaker 1: says that the wave function collapses into only one of
Speaker 1: its potential configurations once somebody observes it. Now, this has
Speaker 1: led to a lot of people reading all kinds of
Speaker 1: crazy esoteric things about consciousness into quantum mechanics, right right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: basically what is the role of the observer and everything? Yeah,
Speaker 1: But I think a lot of those, uh, those consciousness
Speaker 1: type ideas are based on a misinterpretation of the grounding
Speaker 1: of the Copenhagen interpretation and a misinter misunderstanding of the
Speaker 1: fact that the Copenhagen interpretation is not a sure thing
Speaker 1: that it is an interpretation, not the theory itself. But
Speaker 1: this is again, this is where the cat comes in
Speaker 1: the idea that the cat is simultaneously dead and alive
Speaker 1: inside of this box where where random life or death
Speaker 1: is going to occur. Right, So that, yeah, this is
Speaker 1: going to be how they map it up from the
Speaker 1: quantum realm into the macroscopic world and how does our
Speaker 1: reality connect with these probability distributions on the quantum level. Uh, So,
Speaker 1: you've got an electron. It's neither on your left nor
Speaker 1: on your right, but in a state of superposition where
Speaker 1: there is simultaneously a fifty probability of finding it on
Speaker 1: each side if you look with precision, and it just
Speaker 1: stays this way, suspended it with these possibilities until somebody
Speaker 1: observes it, meaning you use some kind of device or
Speaker 1: method to figure out exactly where that particle is. And
Speaker 1: then the once somebody does that, then it's actually only
Speaker 1: one place it was in superposition. Then you looked at it.
Speaker 1: Now it's on your left. It's not crazy. That crazy
Speaker 1: situation to to really wrap your head around. If you
Speaker 1: sort of think of it in terms of like TV
Speaker 1: production or something. You know, if you're on one of
Speaker 1: these shows, we have to guess what's behind the curtain,
Speaker 1: and there's something behind each curtain, but only one curtain
Speaker 1: is actually gonna be opened. Oh yeah, and a kind
Speaker 1: of solipsistic way. It's almost not hard to believe that
Speaker 1: the universe only only matters when I look at it.
Speaker 1: But yeah, So, despite the fact that many physicists have
Speaker 1: felt fine relying on this interpretation for the decade since then,
Speaker 1: I mean, one thing we should point out is that
Speaker 1: you can do all kinds of useful quantum mechanics science
Speaker 1: and and even use it for technology without knowing which
Speaker 1: interpretation is correct. And in fact, it sometimes doesn't matter
Speaker 1: which interpretation is correct. The math of the theory works
Speaker 1: either way, right, Yeah, absolutely, But many continue to protest
Speaker 1: that the Copenhagen interpretation is nonsensical and it leads to
Speaker 1: these apparent absurdities like as as you mentioned, Robert the
Speaker 1: cat in the box, the famous Schrodinger's cat or Shreddinger's cat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we've we've already referenced a couple of times. You should
Speaker 1: probably just lay it out for us here exactly how
Speaker 1: this experiment goes. Uh, However, you know I do have
Speaker 1: a soft spot for cats. Yeah, let's let's get rid
Speaker 1: of cats. Don't want to kill a cat again. We
Speaker 1: people talk about killing cats way too much in science.
Speaker 1: Maybe they're anti cat. I'm going to bring in a
Speaker 1: unicorn because we've established that maybe unicorns aren't as perfect
Speaker 1: as everybody thinks they are. This particular experiment funded entirely
Speaker 1: by Tim Curry, Lord of Darkness. Full disclosure. Okay, so
Speaker 1: I've got a unicorn in a box. This box is
Speaker 1: totally opaque and nobody can see what's happening inside. There
Speaker 1: no cameras inside. You don't know what's going on there.
Speaker 1: And there is a device inside the box that will
Speaker 1: instantaneously incinerate the unicorn if it's triggered. And the device
Speaker 1: gets triggered based on a quantum superposition event. So there's
Speaker 1: a particle that has a fifty chance of spinning clockwise
Speaker 1: and a fifty chance of spinning counterclockwise. And if when
Speaker 1: you check the particle, it's spinning clockwise, the unicorn dies,
Speaker 1: and if it's spinning counterclockwise, the unicorn lives. But this
Speaker 1: would mean that the unicorn is both literally alive and
Speaker 1: dead at the same time inside the box until somebody
Speaker 1: looks inside the box to observe what happened. And at
Speaker 1: the moment somebody looks inside the box, then suddenly the
Speaker 1: unicorn is actually just either alive or dead, but until
Speaker 1: somebody looked, it was both. Robert, do you think that
Speaker 1: describes the universe we live in? Um? I don't think it.
Speaker 1: It does not really describe the universe that we perceive.
Speaker 1: That's the thing. Yeah, the universe we live in is
Speaker 1: vast beyond our abilities to process it. Yeah, so yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the answer is kind of yes and no at
Speaker 1: the same time. I mean, I feel kind of despose. Again,
Speaker 1: we want to be clear that we think the universe
Speaker 1: does not need to adhere to our intuition. So just
Speaker 1: the fact that something seems unlikely to you or to
Speaker 1: me doesn't make it actually unlikely to exist in the world.
Speaker 1: But just going on a gut level, one does has
Speaker 1: come to feel less and less right to me, And
Speaker 1: so I'm kind of disposed against the Copenhagen interpretation. I
Speaker 1: think all that means is that it doesn't necessarily feel
Speaker 1: right to me. That doesn't mean it's not true. I
Speaker 1: feel like it lines up well with like with with
Speaker 1: with personal anxiety, you know, because it's essentially because when
Speaker 1: when you're anxious about the future, you the bad things
Speaker 1: that can happen are as real as the good things
Speaker 1: or just the mediocre things that could happen, and the
Speaker 1: bad thing is only really gone when you actually reach
Speaker 1: the point where where the particle has spun left. You know.
Speaker 1: So there is something about about the about this particular
Speaker 1: explanation that I think does match up with some of
Speaker 1: the ways we perceive our world. Yeah, definitely lines up
Speaker 1: with some emotional realities. Maybe less so with physical objects. Definitely.
Speaker 1: Uh so, yeah, well we'll see. I mean, again, we
Speaker 1: can't rule it out. It it's still been the the
Speaker 1: interpretation that's been fa by the majority of physicists since
Speaker 1: the advent of quantum mechanics. But like we said earlier,
Speaker 1: it's not the only way, And to get to our
Speaker 1: discussion of physical immortality, we're gonna have to explore another
Speaker 1: interpretation of quantum mechanics that arose in opposition to the
Speaker 1: Copenhagen interpretation. We will start looking at that when we
Speaker 1: get back from a break than alright, we're back, so
Speaker 1: we're gonna start talking here about the many worlds interpretation,
Speaker 1: which I believe we've we've probably touched on on the
Speaker 1: show before, because it is one of these that spins
Speaker 1: off into very uh fantastic comic book realms, right, the
Speaker 1: idea of alternate realities, other worlds where other things have happened,
Speaker 1: essentially the Library of Babble, yes, but with a specific
Speaker 1: physical mechanism causing it to come into existence. And so
Speaker 1: we will do our best to try to explain this here. Now,
Speaker 1: we've been talking about the Copenhagen interpretation, the idea that
Speaker 1: you've got a quantum mechanical system that's in superposition sort
Speaker 1: of both in a simple way, it's both left and
Speaker 1: right literally at the same time until you look at it,
Speaker 1: at which point it becomes just one or the other.
Speaker 1: And so observation causes the collapse of the way of function,
Speaker 1: and it just becomes a normal physical reality, just like
Speaker 1: the kind of single, solitary reality that we're used to
Speaker 1: looking at. Here's the main difference between that and what
Speaker 1: we're about to talk about, the many worlds interpretation. In
Speaker 1: this interpretation, a particle does not exist in superposition between
Speaker 1: two possible outcomes and then collapse into one. Outcome or
Speaker 1: the other. When we look at it instead, it exists
Speaker 1: as a wave function in this superposition where there it
Speaker 1: has multiple different qualities at the same time, it's both
Speaker 1: left and right. It's in this state as a wave
Speaker 1: and then it stays that way, and it just keeps
Speaker 1: staying that way, and that's how it works. So it's
Speaker 1: another way the bad thing that ends up not happening
Speaker 1: actually does happen, but it's in essentially another timeline. Yeah,
Speaker 1: pretty much. So this was first proposed by the physicist
Speaker 1: to you ever at the third when he was a
Speaker 1: graduate student at Princeton in nineteen fifty seven. And it's
Speaker 1: not the core of the theory that there are multiple universes,
Speaker 1: but you cannot deny that. When you take this theory
Speaker 1: to its logical conclusion, it puts us in and a
Speaker 1: multiverse of infinite timelines, right, infinite timelines, infinite parallel universes,
Speaker 1: each different from the last. Now, and some of these universes,
Speaker 1: it again comes right back to basically what we described
Speaker 1: in the Library of Babel, and some of these universes,
Speaker 1: the difference is going to be really slight, such as
Speaker 1: a parallel universe where everything is exactly the same, except
Speaker 1: you had a bagel for breakfast instead of cereal. Um.
Speaker 1: Then there's also one, for instance, there's a universe where
Speaker 1: Highlander one Best Picture of the fifty nine Academy Awards. Well,
Speaker 1: now I want to take issue with you there for
Speaker 1: a second. It predicts that you could possibly have every
Speaker 1: variation on the universe that is allowed by the laws
Speaker 1: of physics. I'm not sure if the laws of physics
Speaker 1: rule out to Highlander best Picture win. Well, there's papers
Speaker 1: will have to be written about that, so we'll have
Speaker 1: we'll have to see some peer viewed papers on that
Speaker 1: that question, Joe. Basically, the idea, though, is for each
Speaker 1: possible outcome to a given action, the world splits into
Speaker 1: copies of itself, instantaneous processes that Everett calls decohesion. But
Speaker 1: before I move forward on on the oscars, I guess
Speaker 1: a better argument would you could say that there's a
Speaker 1: version where that year the Academy awards Children of a
Speaker 1: Lesser God one as opposed to Platoon, which actually won. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, so what it would actually mean is that
Speaker 1: the outcomes of these universes split every time there are
Speaker 1: different possible branches of a quantum superposition. Now, the question
Speaker 1: would be how often are differences in reality determined by
Speaker 1: a quantum superposition going into its different possibilities. Presumably the
Speaker 1: answer to that is a lot, because I mean, quantum
Speaker 1: mechanics underlies all kinds of stuff that's happening all the time.
Speaker 1: It underlies things that are happening inside people's brains, It
Speaker 1: underlies things that are happening in physical reality and the
Speaker 1: interactions between objects. Small random differences in how a quantum
Speaker 1: superposition event breaks off could lead to macroscopic effects down
Speaker 1: the line, and some of these effects could be rather severe.
Speaker 1: So you could have other universes which would differ in
Speaker 1: ways that alter reality on a grand scale. For instance,
Speaker 1: imagine a parallel universe with no gravity um. Some cosmologists
Speaker 1: use the theory is that handy explanation for why life
Speaker 1: evolved in our universe at all? Their answer is simply, well,
Speaker 1: they're ac countless universes where life never evolved, and various
Speaker 1: universes in which it evolved along similar lines as ours.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a way to get around the Copernican principle, right,
Speaker 1: the idea that Earth and and therefore earth life and
Speaker 1: the human experience should not have a privileged position in
Speaker 1: the cosmos, right, Uh yeah, I mean it's essentially that's
Speaker 1: sort of anthropic reasoning, the anthropic principle like why do
Speaker 1: we live on a planet that's capable of supporting life?
Speaker 1: The idea under that is like, well, where would you
Speaker 1: expect to live? Would you expect to live on a
Speaker 1: planet that couldn't support life? Um? Yeah, And there are
Speaker 1: a lot of interesting questions about whether that type of
Speaker 1: reasoning is valid or not. I'm not up. I used
Speaker 1: to read about this kind of stuff, but it's been
Speaker 1: a while since I did. Well, it's it's like, how
Speaker 1: how is it possible that I'm alive and I haven't
Speaker 1: been killed by Jason Vorhees. Well, there there are multiple
Speaker 1: alternate realities where I have But where else could I
Speaker 1: be thinking about this at this point in my life
Speaker 1: than a universe in which I have not. Now, that
Speaker 1: kind of reasoning will come up again in a big
Speaker 1: way in a minute. So we should be clear that
Speaker 1: the existence of possibly infinite parallel universes is a consequence
Speaker 1: or an implication of Everett's interpretation of quantum mechanics, not
Speaker 1: the core assumption of it. The core assumption is just
Speaker 1: the universality of the wave function. It just says the
Speaker 1: wave function is real. All of the different possibility of
Speaker 1: the wave function are real. They actually exist, and they
Speaker 1: never collapse. But Everett believe that if you follow the logic,
Speaker 1: if you extra polate that out to the macroscopic scale
Speaker 1: that we live on, the only way to make sense
Speaker 1: of it is that bifurcating realities constantly split off from
Speaker 1: one another and exist independently. Uh. And just just a
Speaker 1: few interesting biographical notes. Everett recounted in the nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: that the many World's interpretations sprang up one night when
Speaker 1: he was talking with a couple of Princeton classmates about
Speaker 1: the implications of quantum mechanics. It was quote after a
Speaker 1: slash or two of sherry, And that seems kind of right, right, Like,
Speaker 1: the many worlds interpretation has got to be a sherry
Speaker 1: based interpretation. It is like, not a vodka based interpretation.
Speaker 1: Nor is it a beer induced interpretation. Yeah, it does.
Speaker 1: It does sound like the sherry is essential here. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And another thing that's essential is the simplicity of it. Right.
Speaker 1: The core selling point of the many worlds interpretation is
Speaker 1: that we've tested the mathematical reality of quantum theory. We
Speaker 1: pretty much know it's right. So what does the math say.
Speaker 1: Despite how outlandish the physical implications of the many worlds
Speaker 1: interpretation seem, you can make a pretty strong argument that
Speaker 1: it is the simplest possible interpretation of the math of
Speaker 1: quantum theory. If you just look at the mathematical features
Speaker 1: of the way of function and you try to take
Speaker 1: away all your intuitions about how things should work, it's
Speaker 1: the simplest possible way to make sense of it, and
Speaker 1: about it being the simplest theory Evert actually wrote in
Speaker 1: a letter to the physicist Brice de Witt in nineteen seven, quote,
Speaker 1: I do believe, however, that at this time the present theory,
Speaker 1: meaning the many worlds interpretation, is the simplest adequate interpretation.
Speaker 1: The hidden variable theories are to me more cumbersome and artificial,
Speaker 1: while the Copenhagen interpretation is hopelessly incomplete because of its
Speaker 1: a priori reliance on classical physics, excluding in principle any
Speaker 1: deduction of classical physics quantum theory, or any adequate investigation
Speaker 1: of the measuring process, as well as a philosophic monstrosity
Speaker 1: with a reality concept for the macroscopic world and a
Speaker 1: denial of the same for the microcosm. So that's kind
Speaker 1: of a strong argument he's saying, right, like the Copenhagen
Speaker 1: interpretation says, Oh, yeah, the macroscopic world is real, but
Speaker 1: there's something about the quantum realm that isn't as real
Speaker 1: as our world is. Yeah, it kind of relegates it
Speaker 1: to like a ghost realm. Yeah. One of the books
Speaker 1: we're going to be referring to in this episode is
Speaker 1: Max tag mark book Our Mathematical Universe, and tag Mark
Speaker 1: writes about de Witt. He says, quote, when I later
Speaker 1: met Bryce, he told me he'd at first complained to
Speaker 1: you Everett, saying that he liked his math, but was
Speaker 1: really bothered by the gut feeling that he just didn't
Speaker 1: feel like he was constantly splitting into parallel versions of himself.
Speaker 1: He told me that Everett had responded with a question,
Speaker 1: do you feel like you're orbiting the Sun at thirty
Speaker 1: kilometers per second? Touche? Bryce had exclaimed and conceded to
Speaker 1: fee done the spot just as classical physics predicts that
Speaker 1: we're zooming around the Sun and we won't feel it.
Speaker 1: Everett showed that collapse free quantum physics predicts that we're
Speaker 1: splitting and that we won't feel it now, despite the
Speaker 1: fact that it does seem to make sense to a
Speaker 1: lot of people now. Unfortunately, it did not catch on
Speaker 1: in Everett's lifetime. When the Copenhagen interpretation remained dominant, and
Speaker 1: Everett was reportedly bitter about academia's rejection of his work,
Speaker 1: he left academic physics. He went to work at the Pentagon,
Speaker 1: where he was apparently involved in some Cold War nuclear strategy,
Speaker 1: and over time friends and colleagues reported that he had
Speaker 1: a lot of bitterness and negative affect and that he
Speaker 1: also struggled with alcoholism, and he eventually died pretty young.
Speaker 1: He died at the age of fifty one in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty two. And just as a side note about his family,
Speaker 1: one of Everett's children is actually Mark Oliver Everett, who's
Speaker 1: the singer of the rock band called Eels. Interesting, well,
Speaker 1: it makes me wonder if he has any songs about
Speaker 1: his his father. Yeah, he apparently does, as Actually I
Speaker 1: haven't listened to them. I haven't listened to a lot
Speaker 1: of Eels, but I remember I remember getting some mixed
Speaker 1: CDs when I was in high school that had some
Speaker 1: Eels songs. Eels fans will have to chime in and
Speaker 1: let us know, Yeah, let us know what we should
Speaker 1: listen to. But anyway, since Everett's death, the many World's
Speaker 1: interpretation has gradually become much more popular. Actually, the Polish
Speaker 1: American physicist of void check Zurich, has said, quote Everett's
Speaker 1: accomplishment was to insist that quantum theory should be universal,
Speaker 1: that there should not be a division of the universe
Speaker 1: into something which is a priori classical and something which
Speaker 1: is a priori quantum. He gave us all a ticket
Speaker 1: to use quantum theory the way we use it now
Speaker 1: to describe measurement as a whole. So essentially, it's a
Speaker 1: way of looking at quantum quantum theory and saying, no,
Speaker 1: it's all real, it all works, and it totally applies
Speaker 1: to the universe as a whole. It's not some weird
Speaker 1: special realm that we have to invoke strange types of
Speaker 1: causation to understand. But here's the question. If it's true
Speaker 1: that the wave function is real and universal and it's
Speaker 1: reality has effects that hold sway over the macroscopic world,
Speaker 1: that the world we live in. What does this mean
Speaker 1: for us? What should it be like to be a
Speaker 1: person living within a mini worlds universe? Yeah? Because it
Speaker 1: seems like, Okay, it's one thing to say that every
Speaker 1: time I make a choice, the timeline splits, but I
Speaker 1: still I still feel like I am an object moving
Speaker 1: along a timeline, even if even if I'm splitting, I
Speaker 1: have this singular experience unless I'm bringing in some sort
Speaker 1: of uh you know, magical, uh you know, religious idea
Speaker 1: of what my my, my consciousness is doing in other lives. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean we we can't have access to that, right,
Speaker 1: And here's actually the question. Here is the really interesting question.
Speaker 1: Why don't we have access to that? Right? What is
Speaker 1: actually happening in the physical realm? If the Many World's
Speaker 1: interpretation is correct, what is actually happening that puts those
Speaker 1: in another place and keeps you separate from them? Which
Speaker 1: is essentially the same as saying why does the wave
Speaker 1: function branch into separate realities? And the answer, as best
Speaker 1: I can tell, appears to lie in a quantum physics
Speaker 1: concept known as decoherents now. I mentioned earlier that Max
Speaker 1: Tegmark book that our mathematical universe, and he has a
Speaker 1: pretty good discussion of decoherents in his book Um. But basically,
Speaker 1: the way it works is this, as long as a
Speaker 1: quantum system in superposition remains physically isolated, all of its
Speaker 1: potential states can continue to interact with one another. But systems,
Speaker 1: of course, almost never stay isolated for long. I mean,
Speaker 1: how often would you expect a system in reality to
Speaker 1: stay isolated from any contact with the outside. If even
Speaker 1: a single photon from the outside of the system interacts
Speaker 1: with it, then the system undergoes what's known as decoherence.
Speaker 1: We mentioned this concept earlier, which means that it's potential
Speaker 1: states can no longer interact with each other. If they
Speaker 1: can know longer interact with each other, they essentially branch off.
Speaker 1: They become causally separate timelines, whereas before they were intertwined. So,
Speaker 1: in a basic sense, imagine you've got an isolated quantum
Speaker 1: system where you've got a particle on the left and
Speaker 1: the right at the same time in superposition. But if
Speaker 1: anything touches it, decoherence happens, and then it splits into
Speaker 1: different branches of the universe that can no longer affect
Speaker 1: one another. Thus, the wave function does not collapse. Decoherence
Speaker 1: just prevents these branches from messing with each other anymore. Now,
Speaker 1: we teased at the beginning that this would be coming
Speaker 1: to the concept of immortality. How do you get immortality
Speaker 1: out of any of the physics concepts we've been discussing
Speaker 1: so far. Well, I know the answer to this question,
Speaker 1: and I'm still not convinced that you do. But um,
Speaker 1: But basically, and you're gonna have to pull out a
Speaker 1: thought experiment. Yeah, and you're gonna have to have a machine.
Speaker 1: And as it seems to be this the running trend
Speaker 1: with with quantum mechanics thought experiments, it's going to somehow
Speaker 1: involve lethal violence. Yeah. One way this has been described
Speaker 1: we're about to get to something known as the quantum
Speaker 1: suicide experiment. And one way this has been described as
Speaker 1: Schreddinger's cat. From the cat's perspective, you make yourself the cat.
Speaker 1: So several physicists, apparently beginning with two independent lines of
Speaker 1: work by Hans Morevac and Bruno Maschaal in the nineteen
Speaker 1: eighties and then later by Max tag Mark, have proposed
Speaker 1: an apparently ingenious and perhaps flawed way to test whether
Speaker 1: the mini worlds interpretation is correct, and how that would
Speaker 1: affect personal subjective consciousness. We do not recommend this method
Speaker 1: at all. You should not try it out. But here's
Speaker 1: the method that's been described. You have to build a
Speaker 1: machine that will kill you. All Right, we're gonna take
Speaker 1: a break and when we come back, we will assemble
Speaker 1: this machine or a version of this machine than alright,
Speaker 1: we're back. So we've been discussing how the man world's
Speaker 1: interpretation would affect the subjective experience of life and death.
Speaker 1: And there has been a type of experiment proposed by
Speaker 1: some physicists to test for the reality of the many
Speaker 1: worlds interpretation by experimenting with one zone life and death
Speaker 1: subjective experience. This is known as quantum suicide or the
Speaker 1: quantum suicide experiment. Now, Robert, you have come up with
Speaker 1: a a more a more fun version of this experiment
Speaker 1: than the usual one. The usual one involves creating some
Speaker 1: kind of gun that is designed to shoot you or
Speaker 1: not shoot you, based on a quantum event. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: this is this is max tech marks uh concept. Right,
Speaker 1: there's a there's at you said a machine gun in
Speaker 1: the original version. Yeah. He so he's got the idea
Speaker 1: of a machine gun that that has a trigger pull
Speaker 1: that's initiated by a potential quantum superposition that could go
Speaker 1: one way or could go the other. Like, You've got
Speaker 1: a particle that could be spinning right and it could
Speaker 1: be spinning left, and it's got a fifty percent chance
Speaker 1: of being either one. And if you check it and
Speaker 1: it's spinning right, the gun fires, and if you check
Speaker 1: it and it's spinning left, the gun does not fire.
Speaker 1: And it does this once per second. And then he says,
Speaker 1: the test is you put your head in front of
Speaker 1: the gun. Yeah, that's just I don't know, it just
Speaker 1: feels a little too too violent um for this podcast
Speaker 1: for some reason. So I thought, yeah, let's let's try
Speaker 1: something maybe a little more science fiction, a e uh
Speaker 1: in nature, a little less gun centric, and maybe a
Speaker 1: little more Dune inspired. Uh So, my apologies to to
Speaker 1: Max for for alterations here. Also, I guess, you know,
Speaker 1: apologies to Frank Herbert as well, just in case. But
Speaker 1: this is this is how it's going to roll out.
Speaker 1: We're gonna take you through the experiment. You're gonna start
Speaker 1: with a man or a young man. This is gonna
Speaker 1: be polo trades right essentially. Yeah, you can Okay, you
Speaker 1: can essentially think of it as polo trades and uh,
Speaker 1: he's gonna sit before a machine, a non thinking machine,
Speaker 1: mind you. This is designed to jab him in the
Speaker 1: arm with a meta cyanide poison needle, a k A
Speaker 1: M jabber based on the spin of a quad un
Speaker 1: quantum particle, so that gom jabber hits him, the jabber.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be instant death, just no no chance, okay.
Speaker 1: And it is instant. He won't even know it happened. Right.
Speaker 1: So the machine again is gonna gonna look at that
Speaker 1: quantum particle and and study its spin. If there's a
Speaker 1: clockwise spin on the quantum particle, then the gob jabber
Speaker 1: is gonna strike. If there's a counterclockwise spin on the
Speaker 1: quantum particle, the gom jabber just buzzes, threatening lee. The
Speaker 1: young man here keeps pushing the button and the gom
Speaker 1: jabber buzzes, buzzes and buzzes, but it doesn't move. Each
Speaker 1: time he pushes the button, it buzzes, but it doesn't strike. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: so what's happening here in this experiment? As you can tell,
Speaker 1: the experiment has a probability based outcome. After the first
Speaker 1: button push, there's a fifty percent chance that Paul is
Speaker 1: Paul will live in a fifty percent chance that he's
Speaker 1: going to die, and then this repeats. On the second try,
Speaker 1: there is a cumulative chance that he'll live, and by
Speaker 1: the third try half of that, and it just keeps
Speaker 1: going down until probability virtually guarantees that Paul Trades has
Speaker 1: been struck dead by the gom Jabber. But from Paul's
Speaker 1: own subjective point of view, this experiment actually might have
Speaker 1: a very different flavor assuming, and there are some assumptions
Speaker 1: underlying this, assuming that consciousness ends immediately at death. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, if consciousness survives death were obviously in a
Speaker 1: whole different ball game. But for Paul himself, there is
Speaker 1: only one option for Paul to discover. After each push
Speaker 1: of the button, he discovers he has survived. If the
Speaker 1: gom jabber strikes and he's instantly killed, he will never
Speaker 1: be aware of it. But in a universe in which
Speaker 1: the Many World's interpretation is correct, there is no opportunity
Speaker 1: for him to be the one who dies, since his
Speaker 1: subjective experience of those branches of the wave function does
Speaker 1: not exist. So if Paul is any thing, he can
Speaker 1: only be the version of himself that survives, and thus,
Speaker 1: if he starts performing this experiment, the only versions of
Speaker 1: him that exist to continue the experiment will be the
Speaker 1: ones that continually route his consciousness into branches of the
Speaker 1: way of function in which he survives. So he'll just
Speaker 1: keep pressing the button over and over and over again,
Speaker 1: and the only thing he'll ever experience is survival and
Speaker 1: this will happen an infinite number of times if necessary. Yeah, now,
Speaker 1: what are the drawbacks to this experiment? Well, there are
Speaker 1: obviously theoretical objections to the validity of the experiment, reasons
Speaker 1: to think that even if the Many World's interpretation is correct,
Speaker 1: the experiment wouldn't actually work, and we can explore those
Speaker 1: in a moment. But on top of that, there are
Speaker 1: some big problems, like you have to be willing to
Speaker 1: kill yourself, and you can never use this test to
Speaker 1: prove the Many World's interpretation to people other than yourself.
Speaker 1: It's not actually a scientific experiment because a scientific experiment
Speaker 1: needs to be able to be objectively verified, and this
Speaker 1: is experiment that, by necessity can only be subjectively verified.
Speaker 1: Even if it works as proposed, it would only be
Speaker 1: valuable to you yourself. The vast majority of people throughout
Speaker 1: the quantum multiverse watching you perform this experiment will just
Speaker 1: witness you killing yourself on the first try, or the
Speaker 1: second try, or the third try, and so on. And
Speaker 1: each time you press the button, a greater proportion of
Speaker 1: the people watching you throughout the quantum multiverse will just
Speaker 1: be watching you kill yourself. Plus, it's a perfect waste
Speaker 1: of a good con jabber, in my opinion. Now, assuming
Speaker 1: for a moment that the logic of this experiment is valid,
Speaker 1: and there are potentially strong reasons for thinking it's not,
Speaker 1: but just go with us for a second, it gets
Speaker 1: weirder because let's extend the reasoning beyond the confines of
Speaker 1: the experiment. Here are a few thoughts to consider in
Speaker 1: any dangerous real world situation that might lead to death.
Speaker 1: Whether you maybe just got a blast of neutron radiation
Speaker 1: in the face, or somebody tries to drop a garbage
Speaker 1: truck on you from a great height or whatever, there
Speaker 1: is always a small chance that something will happen to
Speaker 1: prevent you from dying. Would you agree Robert with me
Speaker 1: so far? Yeah, I would say, broadly speaking, that's true.
Speaker 1: It might be a very small chance, but there's always
Speaker 1: a small chance Superman could appear and jump in front
Speaker 1: of the bullet of the train it set. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: maybe not that, Maybe not that, because we don't want
Speaker 1: to violate the laws of physics. So there's always a
Speaker 1: small chance that without violating the laws of physics, something
Speaker 1: will happen to prevent you from dying in this scenario, right,
Speaker 1: there's always some sort of freak occurrence that could prevent
Speaker 1: it from happening. Yes, yes, So if there's a chance
Speaker 1: of survival that's consistent with the laws of physics, there's
Speaker 1: at least some branch of the universal wave function in
Speaker 1: which that chance becomes reality. So at some level, all
Speaker 1: threats to survival are quantum threats, and thus, if on
Speaker 1: these assumptions, if the Mini World's interpretation is correct, you
Speaker 1: should always expect to continue surviving, no matter how improbable
Speaker 1: the odds, because subjectively you have no choice but to survive.
Speaker 1: If there is anything that you are, you are the
Speaker 1: version of you that has survived, and so the vast
Speaker 1: majority of the versions of you throughout this quantum multiverse
Speaker 1: will die, but the subjective version of you will always
Speaker 1: live on in the branches of reality that break in
Speaker 1: favor of your survival. Now again, just to clarify, we're
Speaker 1: not advocating this as necessarily the truth about reality. But
Speaker 1: if you consider this this is a possibility, it is
Speaker 1: very strange to contemplate, right, Oh yeah. And I mean
Speaker 1: the thing is, though, I always wonder what stuff like this.
Speaker 1: Are we really talking about immortality here or just a
Speaker 1: mere thought experiment variant. It's kind of kind of worthless
Speaker 1: when you really think about it. You know, well, what
Speaker 1: do you mean by that? I mean, well, simply, for
Speaker 1: one thing, it doesn't it doesn't match up with those
Speaker 1: magical ideas of of of being forever young, of of
Speaker 1: of living your life across the span of centuries, etcetera.
Speaker 1: It's more about um narrowly, narrowly avoiding death as long
Speaker 1: as possible, and there is a there's a fixed term
Speaker 1: limit there, Yeah, exactly. I mean you could imagine that
Speaker 1: this is the quantum mechanics version of being tiffanous, right
Speaker 1: that you essentially and pretty much all universes decline as
Speaker 1: normally the laws of physics would dictate into a state
Speaker 1: where you are no longer in good health or whatever.
Speaker 1: But things just keep preventing you subjectively from dying, right,
Speaker 1: and then in that in most universes you would keep dying,
Speaker 1: you just subjectively would never experience it because you just
Speaker 1: keep getting funneled more and more into that smaller minority
Speaker 1: of universes where you go where you go on now.
Speaker 1: According to Everett biographer Keith Lynch quote, Everett firmly believed
Speaker 1: that his many worlds theory guaranteed him immortality. His conscious knows,
Speaker 1: he argued, is bound at each branching to follow whatever
Speaker 1: path it does not lead to death. That's interesting, and
Speaker 1: especially it's strange since Everett died so young. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know it, it's interesting to come back to done.
Speaker 1: I feel like the weirdly enough that's This is exactly
Speaker 1: the sort of thing that's touched on in Frank Herbert's done,
Speaker 1: the idea that humanity should take this golden path instead
Speaker 1: of the path to stagnation, which is chosen by taking
Speaker 1: the safest route, by always making the safest small choice,
Speaker 1: instead of figuring out what is the what is the
Speaker 1: ideal long term route? Well, does this play into the
Speaker 1: choice to take Spice in the Dune universe, Because in
Speaker 1: the Dune universe, Frank Herbert wrote that, you know, one
Speaker 1: of the main uses of spice, the stuff that's produced
Speaker 1: by the makers um, is that it prolongs life, right,
Speaker 1: it is the geriatric spice, that's true. Yeah, But but
Speaker 1: then it's also you see its use with the Spacing Guild,
Speaker 1: where the idea is of the space acent could has
Speaker 1: their way. You know, they're just gonna always I mean,
Speaker 1: they navigate space by figuring out how what path avoids
Speaker 1: every possible catastrophe. And that's it's kind of like the
Speaker 1: quantum immortality model here, except of space travel. There's a
Speaker 1: quote to this effect from Laude deep In Frank Herbert
Speaker 1: Stone quote the vision of time is broad, but when
Speaker 1: you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door. And
Speaker 1: always he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course,
Speaker 1: warning that path leads ever down into stagnation. Well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you look at life as um as sort of
Speaker 1: you always have to take a risk in order to
Speaker 1: do something meaningful, right. I mean, there's very rarely a
Speaker 1: thing you can do that's very powerful and meaningful that
Speaker 1: doesn't risk at least some small part of your your
Speaker 1: at least sense of safety. Right. That might just be
Speaker 1: psychological safety. But if you you extend that to the extreme,
Speaker 1: would you become in this quantum multiverse in the many
Speaker 1: worlds interpretation, and a progressively more boring person because you're
Speaker 1: always being limited to the options of your life that
Speaker 1: are always narrowing into this window of worlds where you've
Speaker 1: taken the safer route, and the versions of you that
Speaker 1: took the more dangerous route and took risks didn't make
Speaker 1: it as far. Yeah, you can only lead to stagnation
Speaker 1: that way, Like the only way to lead the golden
Speaker 1: path is that all other paths were platinum, right, which
Speaker 1: is kind of a depressing way to think about life.
Speaker 1: But this is a strange thing because it doesn't It
Speaker 1: doesn't even give you the opportunity. If you were to
Speaker 1: assume that the mini worlds version of quantum immortality is real,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't even have a choice in the matter, because
Speaker 1: you could take risks. But subjectively, we know that you're
Speaker 1: not going to do that because the versions of you
Speaker 1: that did that will eventually disappear and you will have
Speaker 1: no choice but to be funneled into this the safe,
Speaker 1: stagnant existence spacing guild winds. Again. Uh so we should
Speaker 1: definitely talk about problems and criticisms of this idea. Uh,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of reasons to think that this
Speaker 1: might not be the case, so as as we said earlier,
Speaker 1: But we just want to stress again we are not
Speaker 1: advocating the idea that you are immortal according to the
Speaker 1: laws of quantum mechanics. Correct. We cannot be anymore clear
Speaker 1: on that at that point, and even some of the
Speaker 1: original authors of this experiment that they've come to doubt it.
Speaker 1: Like Max teg Mark, the m I T physicists we've
Speaker 1: been talking about. He proposed quantum suicide and quantum immortality
Speaker 1: as thought experiments, but he acknowledges the tenuous nature of
Speaker 1: the premises under them and actually doubts it could be
Speaker 1: a reality based on plenty of concerns he has, Like
Speaker 1: one problem is that tag Mark has these caveats to
Speaker 1: the quantum suicide experiment and says that it would only
Speaker 1: even work in theory if the determination of whether the
Speaker 1: machine kills you is truly quantum, as in depending on
Speaker 1: a quantum particle in superposition. It wouldn't necessarily work if
Speaker 1: you were letting it depend on say a coin flip,
Speaker 1: could be purely deterministic. Also, the machine must be guaranteed
Speaker 1: to kill you on the kill setting. It couldn't. It
Speaker 1: couldn't have a possibility of just injuring you. Also, it
Speaker 1: would need to as we mentioned earlier, if it does
Speaker 1: kill you would have to do so instantly, not gradually,
Speaker 1: because you can't have the you can't have a chance
Speaker 1: that it takes you a while to die after the
Speaker 1: quantum coin toss and uh, and you're just sitting there
Speaker 1: waiting to find out what happens, because then your consciousness
Speaker 1: could get routed into that universe. So, just from like
Speaker 1: a design standpoint, it would it sounds extremely difficult, if
Speaker 1: not impossible, to create the right kind of technology. You
Speaker 1: certainly could make it in your garage. Because it would
Speaker 1: need to depend on the quantum. It would need to
Speaker 1: never fail, like it could absolutely. If it could malfunction,
Speaker 1: that would destroy the whole experiment, right, it at least
Speaker 1: should have a very very small chance of malfunctioning. Now,
Speaker 1: in criticism of the general idea of quantum immortality extending
Speaker 1: beyond the quantum suicide experiment itself, but just like does
Speaker 1: this apply to reality as a whole, should we all
Speaker 1: expect to subjectively live forever um. Even though tag Mark
Speaker 1: does seem to subscribe to the many worlds interpretation, teg
Speaker 1: Mark says that most accidents and cause common causes of
Speaker 1: death do not satisfy all three of these criteria, and
Speaker 1: plus there's a bigger problem about tag Mark talks about
Speaker 1: the fact that most life and death scenarios don't actually
Speaker 1: break down into a clear life or death binary where
Speaker 1: you've got continued consciousness on the one hand and non
Speaker 1: continued consciousness on the other. But he says, you know,
Speaker 1: it seems to be that there is a gradual reduction
Speaker 1: of consciousness as one progresses toward death. And if this
Speaker 1: is the case, then you could have the assumptions of
Speaker 1: this violated, right if you can gradually ratchet down your
Speaker 1: level of consciousness, you know, I mean it's true, I
Speaker 1: mean we we in fact, I mean I don't sit
Speaker 1: around fearing the termination of my consciousness. I fear all
Speaker 1: the things leading up to it and surrounding it, you know,
Speaker 1: all the consolation prizes. Yes, certainly, I mean, especially on
Speaker 1: this view, because if you take the view that there's
Speaker 1: literally nothing after death, there's nothing to fear there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean exactly. But that also brings up another big
Speaker 1: problem is that we don't actually know exactly what happens
Speaker 1: to consciousness at the time of death. And I'm not
Speaker 1: saying that you have to propose, you know, religious type
Speaker 1: answers about souls and afterlife and stuff like that. Obviously
Speaker 1: some people believe in things like that. But even if
Speaker 1: you don't believe in anything uh spiritual, supernatural, anything like that,
Speaker 1: there's still things that could happen with the subjective phenomena
Speaker 1: of consciousness other than just it blips out of existence, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: like you come back as a goat, or or there
Speaker 1: could be I mean, if consciousness is some kind of
Speaker 1: process or substance, there's a there's perhaps some some way
Speaker 1: in which it lingers or winds down slowly after death,
Speaker 1: or is reduced to some kind of other, you know,
Speaker 1: liminal or peripheral state after death. I mean, it's we
Speaker 1: we just don't really know what happens. There's no evidence
Speaker 1: about what exactly happens there also, to be honest, we
Speaker 1: don't actually really know. If we're gonna pick nits, I
Speaker 1: don't know what it means to survive from one moment
Speaker 1: to the next as a being experiencing consciousness, except that
Speaker 1: we all generally tend to be under the impression that
Speaker 1: this is happening to us. I'm under the impression that
Speaker 1: I'm surviving. But if we live in a universe where
Speaker 1: constantly we're branching off into different branches, you know, out
Speaker 1: of a quantum superposition and different timelines, how does the
Speaker 1: baton get past? Does that make any sense? Late? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know. I mean this gets down to the basic
Speaker 1: naval gazing that we've engaged in before. Regarding the present moment?
Speaker 1: Am I now who I was a minute ago? Am
Speaker 1: I now who I will be a minute from now?
Speaker 1: I mean, when you start really focusing in on that,
Speaker 1: it starts becoming it starts feeling disjointed, perhaps disjoined, it
Speaker 1: in a way that could match up with this idea
Speaker 1: of branching realities. Yeah, how does the now you pass
Speaker 1: the token of subjective experience to the you of one
Speaker 1: moment in the future. Yeah, And what happens when the
Speaker 1: baton has dropped? Right? Yeah? Exactly? So? Uh, And again
Speaker 1: I'm not sure that presents a problem. I just say
Speaker 1: that's something that we're not certain we've really worked out yet, Right,
Speaker 1: What does it mean? For experience to exist across time,
Speaker 1: especially if that experience is branching into clones or copies
Speaker 1: of itself. Yeah yeah. When you start actually lining it
Speaker 1: up with the human experience, things are a little as certain.
Speaker 1: It's it's often easier to line it up with created things,
Speaker 1: like looking at chapters in a book or levels in
Speaker 1: a video game. Yeah yeah. So I don't bring that
Speaker 1: up to say that it like disproves the validity of
Speaker 1: the quantum suicide or quantum immortality thought experiments, But I
Speaker 1: just want to suggest that the periphery assumptions underlying these
Speaker 1: thought experiments are not as simple as and straightforward as
Speaker 1: they seem. Not even the physics assumptions, but just the
Speaker 1: assumptions about death and life and consciousness and survival uh
Speaker 1: as as even more doubt to throw on here. Max
Speaker 1: Tegmark himself explains that he later came to doubt the
Speaker 1: validity validity of his own quantum suicide experiment um, but
Speaker 1: for totally different reasons. He came to doubt the validity
Speaker 1: based on doubts about the concept of infinity as applied
Speaker 1: to physics, which he is in some sense skeptical about.
Speaker 1: Uh though he admits to being in the minority of
Speaker 1: physicists on this point. Now, I mentioned video games earlier
Speaker 1: and uh, and that's because I wanted to talk just
Speaker 1: a little bit about saves scumming. What does that mean?
Speaker 1: So I was familiar with save scumming from playing a
Speaker 1: fair amount of x COM and XCOM to the most
Speaker 1: recent incarnations of the x COM video game. I've never
Speaker 1: played these, so you've got to explain to me. So
Speaker 1: x Com is basically it's aliens have invaded or are invading,
Speaker 1: and you have to fight them using a squad of soldiers.
Speaker 1: And if you're playing just kind of like the vanilla
Speaker 1: version of the game, then each time you start playing,
Speaker 1: you get a random bunch of recruits and they level
Speaker 1: up as you a and then in each tactical mission
Speaker 1: you can lose the various men and women in your service,
Speaker 1: and the ones that survive they level up and get stronger,
Speaker 1: and you proceed through the game in an attempt to
Speaker 1: save the world, to outlast the doom counter uh and
Speaker 1: win the game. Now, the real hardcore fans like to
Speaker 1: play um an iron Man version of this. So this
Speaker 1: is where you have only one save file and no
Speaker 1: matter what happens on a given mission. You just keep going.
Speaker 1: You just lost your best guy due to something like
Speaker 1: freak accident or a terrible shot or a terrible choice
Speaker 1: on your part. Too bad. You just have to keep
Speaker 1: playing the game until you either reach the point where
Speaker 1: you cannot win, whether where the doom counter catches up
Speaker 1: with you um or you just get to the final
Speaker 1: encounter and you're not strong enough to beat it. But
Speaker 1: you can also do what is called saves coming and
Speaker 1: this is more in line I think with the way
Speaker 1: of a lot of people have played video games in
Speaker 1: the in the past, especially once, where you get to
Speaker 1: save as often as you want, as many times as
Speaker 1: you want, and in doing this, you simply go back
Speaker 1: to a previous save file every time something bad happens.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, okay, so it's kind of yeah, it's kind
Speaker 1: of like the saving function serves as like a place
Speaker 1: where you can save the timeline of the world before
Speaker 1: it branched off into its different many worlds. So it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: I just lost my best dude by having them look
Speaker 1: around this corner. I'll go back to a previous save
Speaker 1: game and I'll have him look around the other corner instead. Yeah,
Speaker 1: going between the different save files is like getting away
Speaker 1: to navigate the many worlds from above, and it leads
Speaker 1: to a certain kind of quantum immortality. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: even in a normal game, not like the one you're describing,
Speaker 1: you can't get to the final boss, say, in a
Speaker 1: version of the game where you died on the first level,
Speaker 1: like you you know, and that's all you did. You
Speaker 1: can't keep going on. You have to use a version
Speaker 1: where you survived and progress. Yeah, and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: And of course I don't want to imply that one
Speaker 1: way is better than the other when you're playing a
Speaker 1: video game. My approaches play the video game, however, makes
Speaker 1: you happy. But you know, Richard K. Morgan also got
Speaker 1: into this little bit in Altered Carbon because you have
Speaker 1: these these uh these super rich Methuselah as they call them,
Speaker 1: the meths who who put their consciousness in different bodies, um,
Speaker 1: different sleeves as they call them, and you have characters
Speaker 1: who will end up essentially saves coming with their body.
Speaker 1: Something happens that either you got them killed or drives
Speaker 1: them mad or makes them feel you know, too much guilt. Well,
Speaker 1: then they just revert to a previous save file. A
Speaker 1: previous version of their own consciousness, and they keep going.
Speaker 1: I mean, I wonder if some people, I wonder about
Speaker 1: psychological effects of video games that could put you in
Speaker 1: that state of mind without the ability to physically do
Speaker 1: what you're describing with the sleeves and the bodies. I mean,
Speaker 1: is somebody who plays a whole lot of video games
Speaker 1: with save files conditioning themselves too to act like that
Speaker 1: is the way the world works, even though it is
Speaker 1: not the way the world works. Now that that's an
Speaker 1: interesting question. I mean, we've certainly discussed on the show
Speaker 1: how things like you know, language is the sequential aspects
Speaker 1: of language might impact our our experience of reality. So yeah,
Speaker 1: why not? Maybe there's a book out there, the Mario
Speaker 1: and the Goddess, Uh, to get serious. I do think
Speaker 1: one thing that we should say before the end is
Speaker 1: I we've taken pains to try to highlight all of
Speaker 1: the reasons that you can't just trust that the quantum
Speaker 1: immortality thing is real, that the quantum suicide experiment would
Speaker 1: actually work. Um, there are a lot of reasons to
Speaker 1: doubt it, but we just want to emphasize again for
Speaker 1: serious reasons that the idea of quantum immortality is highly
Speaker 1: speculative and relies on a lot of assumptions which could
Speaker 1: be wrong. Maybe the many worlds interpretation is wrong. Even
Speaker 1: if the many worlds interpretation is correct, many of the
Speaker 1: assumptions underlying the experiment and how consciousness and survival and
Speaker 1: death and branching works could be wrong. So we should
Speaker 1: acknowledge that if somebody puts too much confidence in this
Speaker 1: view of the world, it could actually be dangerous. And
Speaker 1: I read a tragic story in nineteen whoever It's daughter Elizabeth,
Speaker 1: actually did commit suicide, and she reportedly left a note
Speaker 1: saying that she planned to join her father in another universe.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that means her suicide was motivated
Speaker 1: by a belief in many worlds immortality. It might not
Speaker 1: have been, But in any case, quantum immortality wouldn't work
Speaker 1: like that. But it seems to me that it's worth
Speaker 1: clarifying that even though this is an interesting thought experiment,
Speaker 1: it's by no means a good reason to attempt suicide
Speaker 1: or to throw caution to the wind and count on
Speaker 1: many worlds consciousness funneling to save you your Your life
Speaker 1: is valuable, how it is, pursue it, how it is yeah,
Speaker 1: and we we'd like to remind you that if you
Speaker 1: are troubled by suicidal thoughts, you are not alone. A
Speaker 1: sympathetic year is only a phone call away. In the
Speaker 1: United States, consider calling the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at
Speaker 1: one to seven, three, eight to five five, and visit
Speaker 1: suicide at Prevention Lifeline dot org for additional resources tailored
Speaker 1: toward general and specific needs such as those of youth,
Speaker 1: disaster survivors, Native Americans, veterans, loast survivors, l g B,
Speaker 1: t Q, and attempt survivors. And you'll also find a
Speaker 1: list of international suicide hotlines at suicide dot org. If
Speaker 1: you're actually thinking about it, get in contact. It matters.
Speaker 1: All right. That's the episode and we'll be back for
Speaker 1: more in the future. But in the meantime, you can
Speaker 1: check out all past episodes of Stuff to Blow Your
Speaker 1: Mind at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. You'll
Speaker 1: also find links out to our various social media accounts.
Speaker 1: They're huge, thanks as always to our wonderful audio producers
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