A Case of Immortality

Follow me, onto a stream of thought and into the uncanny world of consciousness and quantum immortality.
But first now, a detour already, into the dark forest behind the mill, and a strange decor of infinities…

In Daniel Kehlmann’s excellent novel Tyll — a retelling of the folklore legend of Till Eulenspiegel — Claus, the boy’s father and miller, is obsessively occupied with a particularly confusing problem.
He is thinking about a heap of grains, and what happens when grains are taken away from it. Precisely at which grain, while they are being patiently removed, at which one does the heap cease to be a heap and does it become just a bunch of grains?
His experiments lead him to believe that it is certainly possible to remove enough grains that you end up with something you cannot call a heap, regardless of your optimism to view it as one, but he simply cannot pinpoint the exact grain where the heap transforms into its new shape, into a bunch.
As well, so he remarks accurately and solemnly, the same occurs in the opposite direction, when grains are added to nothing and slowly seem to transform into a heap. The mystery troubles him deeply, feverishly, and in the end rather fatally.

Claus Eulenspiegel is unable to solve his problem, and unable to let go of it. With our modern abilities to navigate these types of paradoxes we naturally realise he has sunk deeply into a rabbit hole of semantics, and largely of concepts that have lost their precise meaning before the user of these concepts has realised it. The transition of “heap” to “bunch” is not sudden and smudges even the boundaries between exact science, semasiology, and philosophy. However, there are two deeper paradoxes hidden beneath Claus’ obstruction, and they are perhaps my favourite paradoxes to think about, and to challenge people’s thoughts with.

The first fundamental paradox hidden beneath Claus’ weary problem is Zeno’s paradox. Zeno actually proposed a set of paradoxes which all revolve around the same thing — I feel they are all equivalent although some philosophers tend to want to over-engineer their discrepancy.
Everyone knows the story of the tortoise and the hare, and the story of the never-arriving arrow, in some form of detail, but let me tell you the paradox in a different way that I feel still dumbfounds many. I’ll also try it without illustrations so bare with me and conjure a visual image in your head.

Take a ball, a perfect rubber ball, with the unique property that it bounces back instantly at exactly one half of the distance it fell. It bounces back precisely one half, yes, in a perfectly imagined world where there are no complex physics going on regarding the friction of the ball with the floor or the air, and nothing happening with its internal elastic forces. The ball simply bounces back up exactly one half of the distance, and then falls down again, and back up another half of that, falls back down the same length, back up another half… The motion behaving the same as you’d expect from a rubber ball if it were perfectly made and everything around it was just perfectly clean.
Now, the mysterious question to ask is, how long does this ball bounce?

Needless to say, most people tend to primarily consider the option that the ball will never stop bouncing. Half of a half of a half of… whatever there was before, is still “something”, so there is always room for the ball to bounce back down from, and thus the ball will never lie still. It will simply always have some jiggling motion because there is always another half of a distance for it to move. People might start bringing up things like Planck length, atomic vibrations and quantum uncertainty at some stage but as most will agree that is really not the point of the thought experiment and the Poirot-like reveal, a reveal that takes some people time to accept as the truth, is undisturbed by them.

This moustache-curling denouement occurs when you consider the time the ball is in the air.
If the first drop of the ball takes 1 second, and the ball bounces back instantly, then, the bounce back up will add one half of a second, and the fall back down from that will add a further half of a second to the ball’s total airtime. We are two seconds down, and the ball has now completed one drop, a bounce back up, and a fall back down on the floor.
It will then bounce back, with one fourth of its original distance, which will take one fourth of a second, and then fall down another fourth of a second. This makes two and a half seconds in total.
If you repeat this, thousands, millions, billions of times — for as we agreed above, there is no reason the ball would ever stop doing this — you will end up with something like 2.999999999… seconds.
The thing is — and here Claus looks up from his stack of grains to grin at you — you will never get the ball to bounce for 3 seconds or more.

When you first dropped the ball, you can fast forward 3 seconds and there is no way that the ball can still be moving. There’s simply no time left for it to do anything and it cannot be moving for longer than 3 seconds, whatever it did in the meantime (in our case, it bounced up and down an infinite amount of times!). So, you will be forced to conclude, the ball only bounces for three seconds.

This is all true, and ultimately, everyone will have to accept that after 3 seconds, even this perfect ball is lying still. We can agree that it stopped just short of 3 seconds, but at what bounce did it stop precisely? Impossible to say, for it bounced an infinite amount of times before it stopped, so there never was a last one.

This does tend to get people all worked up, for good reason, with ultimately several ways to not accept this, aside from getting angry and throwing plates at the dinner host.
The first, is to come up with all sorts of excuses why the entire reasoning would be flawed. Gravity and parabolic motion are frequently brought in, or “friction” is brought into the room even though it was explicitly asked to wait outside, the fact that rubber balls take time to bounce, the sound of speed inside rubber… It can be a frustrating experience for all parties to dismiss these arguments as evading rather than deconstructing the central point in the argument.

A second argument, naturally, is to agree that perfect balls cannot exist. And indeed, they cannot. Perfect materials are impossible to create, not just because of engineering difficulty, but also from a very fundamental point of view of what it means to be a macroscopic “material”.

If a perfectly rigid material would be able to be created, you could create a very long rod with it, and have its end point “move” at the speed of light simply by swinging it gently in your hand, or have motions and messages propagate through the rod at faster than light speed.
Let me be clear there is certainly no diety tracking your engineering progress from above, to suddenly penalise you from creating such a material because it would violate “laws”; it is rather that the whole concept of motion through space and time is intertwined with these fundamental limits, they form the meaning of motion and interaction, which forms the meaning of connection between molecules, and ultimately this will limit the rigidity, elasticity, the very “meaning” of what it is to have “something” like a rubber ball.
So, this argument is true, the perfect ball cannot exist. The ball will invariably be experiencing opposing forces inside and outside, and ultimately forces will win from others and motion will cease because the ball and the universe around it come in a state of equilibrium. There is nothing for it, and so the rubber ball will never bounce an infinite amount of times and there is no way to harness this perpetually, and the paradox part of the situation seems to disappear in sheer boredom of keeping things real.

People who stop there might fall short in grasping the fundamental nature of the paradox that does very much still throb in the veins of our existence.
The ball, imperfect as it has to be, as everything around it has to be as well, is still made of small parts, and these are made of smaller parts still, smaller still…, until you can no longer speak of parts but you can only speak of theoretical aspects, attributes, measurable ‘definitions’ of energy that follow the law of energy conservation that we set out to be the foundation of interaction between things in the universe.
These fundamental things called “particles” do move in some perfect manner, similar to the setup of our perfect ball. And ultimately, predicting and understanding these motions does reveal itself to be much like when we fast forwarded the “3 seconds” above where an infinite amount of motions caused an end result, yet all of this at a much tinier and shorter scale. The analogy is not perfect, but it’s enough to keep the spirit of what it means for reality to be infinitely precise.
Quantum physics at its essence for now only makes sense to us by taking the same type of sum we did above, and concluding that the end result is of a certain quantity because it can’t be anything else.
We don’t know how else to marry the continuous, “flowy” interpretation of things in our imagination with the quantised, “blocky” behaviour that is observed in detailed experiments and that is used to predict macroscopic behaviour with an absurd level of accuracy.

You may wonder at this point, if you are still with me, what does this have to do with quantum immortality? What do Claus’ grains or the bouncing ball have to do with consciousness?
Well we will get there, but primarily for now it is useful to think about the disappearance of consciousness in the same way as the removal of grains. When a person loses consciousness through incapacity or death, it doesn’t happen all at once, it happens grain by grain, and it is impossible to know exactly at which physiological or neurological event the consciousness only was and no longer is.

Even though I briefly glanced one aspect of quantum physics with the “summation” part above, I didn’t go into the fundamental aspects of quantum physical observations — I intentionally left it open because it would distract from an already very long text, you can look up “path integral” if you want to know more about the summation thing I mentioned and crudely tied into Zeno’s paradox.
I won’t do dive deep here either, because I would much like Claus get stuck into a rabbit-hole of my own doing.

Regardless of which path you take into understanding quantum theory and quantum experiments, you will invariably come at a point where you face the so-called “measurement problem”.
Something seems to be in a “superposition of different states” before you measure it, and is in “one state” after you have measured it.
The quintessential example here is the cat in the box, being in a superposition of all possible sorts of physically possible states. With a specific configuration of the system, you can have it so just about 49.99..% of those have the cat being dead, and just about 49.99..% have the the cat being alive. And then there’s another small percentage where you might, like Claus’ heap of grains, not be entirely sure what the cat is.
Some of the states where the cat is alive may be very rare ones, but still somewhat physically plausible. For instance, you open the box and a piece of a whisker has curled specifically to spell out the word “abracadabra”. Note that even in those extremely rare events where this has happened, the shaping of the word will happen in billions upon billions of different ways — the amount of molecules and particles in the whisker of a cat is so vast you cannot fathom the number.
As long as there is a physical possibility for something to happen, it will be one of the possible states of the cat.
When you open the box however, and measure everything, you and the cat are in one precise state, all of the electrons, all of the small measurable attributes are in a certain state and this game of super-positioning states can start over again with new influence from outside and from within the system.

It feels needed to point out that the entire ‘cat’ and your observation of it, with the entire complexity of your eyes, brains and any instruments that were required to observe the cat, are used as narrative vehicles to represent the much, much simpler, smaller and fundamental things that can be said to happen upon measurement.
In a way the cat in the box is a perfectly valid quantum system, but it does tend to dumb down a galactic amount of complexity in a way that confuses rather than assists people in understanding the quantum world.

There is a large consensus on what can be observed when opening the box with the cat, but there are all sorts of interpretations as to what happened before observing the cat, during observing it, and what happened after it. This is essentially the measurement problem and there have been various interpretations of it.
A lot of them go into the fact that actually something happened to you because the particles of your brain have invariably been interacted with and changed their configuration, which is what observing and memorising things really is.
Some of them deny there is even a measurement problem at all, and what happens during measurement can easily be explained by an algebraic construction, a viewpoint which I tend to agree with although it might be the one that is farthest removed from a visual, palpable thing we can all relate with.

Jim Baggott recently wrote a book “Quantum Reality” — which I have yet to read — that compiles a historical overview of interpretations and “doctrines”.
Again, it would be a distraction to go into all of them right now and I would never be able to do it with the accuracy needed to be taken seriously.
I’m looking forward to reading his book as some of the history behind the arguments has been muddled and it is good to have it cleared up somewhat which I believe is at least part of his intentions.

Note that most if not all interpretations are able to hit an aspect of Zeno’s paradox in yet another way, with the “act of measuring” in high-periodic intervals being able to “slow down” the evolution of a system compared to one where no measurements are being performed.
This is called the Quantum Zeno effect, which I cannot go into in detail, but which has been observed experimentally, and can be interpreted somewhat less magically by looking at measurement as conceptually “entangling” the surrounding universe with the measured system.
It will come back later when I briefly deal with some of the fallout of quantum immortality.

One essential point of view that I wanted to highlight is the many-worlds interpretation, which was originally summarised by Hugh Everett III in 1957 — Hugh Everett being the father of Mark Oliver Everett, known as E from Eels — a refinement of a viewpoint shared by several top figures in science, amongst which Schrödinger himself.
In this interpretation, summarised crudely here, the measurement of the cat, when opening the box, which causes multiple quantum systems (the cat, your eyes, your brain, or the thermometer you stick into the poor animal, …) to become entangled with each other in some resulting manner, can be interpreted by the universe having split into a multitude of different universes that each have a different outcome of these entanglements.
Inside each of these universes, the same laws of physics hold, and they are split off again, and again, at a breakneck pace creating billions up billions of these alternate worlds per second, for each observation event that causes particles to become “entangled” (I won’t dive in the details of entanglement, it’s not important, consider it as ‘sharing the same experience’).

It’s important to note that while Everett’s original summary was met with some criticism, it was formulated a lot more accurately and with a lot more insight than I’ve done it here. He was a person of science and of deep understanding, not someone with whacky ideas.
The interpretation of having “alternate worlds” is still only a semantic vehicle and there was no one debating actual alternate universes or how they might branch and visit each other, for instance. No, the meaning of the ‘alternate worlds’ is much more profound than this.
Simply put it is a way to avoid the notion of any events “collapsing” quantum states into this world, which is being replaced by the notion of having parallel worlds that never experienced any such “collapse”.

Note that in various polls, the many-worlds interpretation of what happens at the quantum level, is a very popular one among physicists. Interpretations of quantum physics are sadly also the area where a lot of physicists tend to take rather tribal positions — at least the ones who don’t cop out of taking any stance, — so it is unclear to what extent of the interpretation the true believers are. Here again, Mr. Baggott’s book should be interesting material.

Now, one of the interesting aspects of the many-world interpretation is what it does with the concept of “consciousness”, and with the ability of you, as a complex quantum system, to seemingly possess the ability to memorise and “experience” observations. One of the logical consequences is that, at each observational split into alternate worlds, your “consciousness” will only survive in a number of these alternate worlds.
For instance, in one alternate scenario you may simply get an aneurysm before you’re able to open the box to observe the cat (Hugh Everett III died of a heart-attack at the age of 51).
But, and now this is essential, flipping this around, there will also always be a world in which your consciousness survives!
Suppose we replace the cat with a random time mechanism tied to a nuclear bomb, the interpretation called “quantum immortality” will dictate there will always be a world where your consciousness still survives.
Regardless of how rare the events have to be for such a world to exist, it will exist, because of the infinite nature of quantum states, and if it exists, you will be able to experience it.
In one world, the bomb may suddenly no longer work because of some molecular or even mechanical situation, or in another very rare world a very strange beetle will have bitten you and given you the ability to withstand the explosion. Who knows what happens, as long as it is possible according to the laws of physics, it will happen in one of the alternate worlds. The beetle might indeed be stretching the limits of the possible, in that sense.
Crucially now, if any such a world can exist, your consciousness will survive in it, so there will always be a world you will be left to experience. While alternate versions of you will perish, there will always be a reality left for you to observe.
Meaning, you will never die, you will never be “done” with observing reality, since there will always be some world to branch off to.
Inherently you are currently, as you will always be, immortal.

According to quantum immortality, you could happily play Russian roulette, empty the gun against your head again and again, and while others will mostly witness the traumatising conclusion a little more than one sixth of the time in their own branches of the worlds, your own consciousness will always experience those very unlikely worlds where you survive, simply because it are the only worlds you can still experience, so you and your alternate copies will experience those.
You will experience worlds where the gun never sets off or doesn’t set off properly, where your age is stretched to absurd lengths through whatever inventions or accidents, and events would become increasingly unlikely to ensure your ’survival’ in observational outcomes.

According to what I’ve read, Everett himself believed in quantum immortality, as in he believed his consciousness to be invariably entangled with reality this way, forever.
It is unclear to me how far his beliefs and reasonings stretched, and as this becomes a personal manner I would not dare to assume he tested them in any sort of way.
Needless to say, if there were many people who have experienced this immortality on purpose, we should be seeing more “believers”, and we should be seeing even more stupid behaviour than we already are.
For some, that alone is proof that the theory is unlikely to be real, although that is largely a failed deduction — the odds of you sharing one of their unlikely realities is also small and thus unlikely to manifest itself in any statistics.

I have thought many long, long nights about quantum immortality as a young man, in my early twenties; I have conjured many experiments involving multiple scientists sharing the same nuclear-bomb rigged room, sharing their fates… but nothing makes this theory testable in any sort of way.
The theory is a rabbit-hole and can quite honestly ensnare you.
Three things have eventually let me see the light out of a seemingly impossible paradox and this challenge to the fabric of what it is to “be” something in this universe.

One is a thought, a simple thought that seems to be Max Tegmark’s but I cannot be sure. It is also the thought that had me make you go on that detour with the grains and the elastic ball.
The thought is simple: consciousness is a multi-component system and is not something that survives or dies as an atomic unit.
In a horrifying interpretation, this means you will invariably start maiming yourself in some alternate worlds, taking the Russian roulette scenario in mind this is easy to understand. Your consciousness will be gradually diminishable, until the point it is no longer something that “is” or “isn’t”, until the point that one grain too much was removed and you are no longer there. Precisely at which grain that happens might be more of a semantic problem.
This is an interesting and strong thought, although it does bring us back to Claus in his solemn mill, taking grains off his heap, observing the heap until it no longer is one. It certainly doesn’t get you out of the hole completely.
It may actually end up confusing you even more if you take in the infinitely-bouncing ball. The alternate worlds your consciousness drifts in may become increasingly unstable and you may ultimately experience a “slowing down” of reality due to an infinitely dense stacking of observational events, a slowdown only experienced by yourself and not by anything on the “outside”, similar to the rubber ball. What horrible fate!

The second aspect is the fact that it does seem in fact very possible to be unconscious. You don’t have to go into the macabre studies done on guillotine executions to venture into this uncomfortable area. Simply being put under anaesthesia can shut off the brain — studies performed on dream-level activity seem to suggest these dreams occur when the brain emerges from its slumber. Again, this is not a complete solution, for many reasons, but it does become rather hard to ignore that there are plenty of alternate universes where the entanglement of your consciousness with reality is higher and thus more components of your consciousness fall into the “present” world. Still, it seems you experienced a world where your mind was not observing reality for a period of time. Combining with the first thought, it is quite a strong testable exit of quantum immortality really occurring.

The third and final thought I can share has to do with a second paradox underlying Claus’ solemn problem. It is another favourite, essential paradox to equip yourself with on conversations with strangers or friends. The paradox of the ship of Theseus.

Theseus, famed king of Athens, possessed a fleet of majestic ships, with one ship in particular being used very frequently on sieges.
It had reached legendary status having been featured in many tales and bard top 100 hit songs, and it now resides in a museum in the heart of Athens. (This is not true for Theseus is as real as Snow White, but no matter)
There is one problem, the ship has seen so much damage, and the museum is not very well maintained due to budget cuts, so that each and every part of the ship has by now been completely replaced by a different part. Nothing really remains, not a nail, not a shred of wood.
Is this ship then still Theseus’ ship?
What about the parts that were removed, if they’d be re-assembled, would they be another Theseus’ ship? Was there even a ship in the first place, or just the concept of a ship?
Was there only the concept of a heap of grains and is this why it defies quantitative definition?

The same can be said of the biological processes inside human body — and I for one believe consciousness to be a phenomenon that emerges from recursive complexity of biological, chemical, electrical systems, and nothing else that we cannot explain or emulate.
Our bodies are a collection of human cells — and bacteria — that are dying and renewing every facet of time.
Fewer people know that even the cells that seems to be “fixed” in position like on your skin or inside bones, tend to move around in our watery bodies, in maze-like patterns, something only recent research has revealed the details of.
Your body is so incredibly analogous to a river continuously replenishing itself, and any concept of “continuous self” you may have as well is very much an emergent phenomenon of which the illusion is easily broken.
Back when I used to drink alcohol, and drank too much, I could have, just like so many, black-outs that took away a part of a memory, the ‘self’ being warped and changed much like Claus’ heap of grains, slowly, but irrevocably into something else.
The Theravada belief that the ‘self’ isn’t constant but changes is strongly scientific in nature and observing the ripple of constant renewal can be a soothing mindful experience during meditation.

Either way, if the body and the self are constantly changing, the many-world consequence of quantum immortality does fall apart rather gently, to me. For, if it is an ever-changing system, and the change itself is part of the consciousness, it seems futile to consider one world to be a “better” or “worse” candidate for consciousness to remain. Each world would have the original “concept” of consciousness survive, much like Theseus’ ship still survives whatever was being done with it, and in that way it would also be meaningless to think about eliminating worlds from “being experienced”.
That, to me, is the strongest argument against quantum immortality being our fates.

Naturally, being shed of consciousness is a completely impossible thing to imagine. “Quantum immortality” as such, this possible consequence of the many-world theory is an important philosophical argument to at least experience and let your mind wander upon but there’s no reason to hope to resolve it.
Obviously it has an overlap with solipsism and that current fad of “simulation theories”, but I would love to spend an evening chatting with others about this and more concepts to come to new insights. I hope you share a similar interest or a rekindled interest!