There are good reasons to believe that the multiverse interpretations of quantum mechanics is correct, and that the alternatives, such as the Copenhagen interpretation, have significant flaws. (For details, feel free to read the Quantum Physics Sequence at LessWrong.)

One of the more entertaining consequences of this interpretation is that since you will never experience being dead, you will only ever remember timelines in which you don’t die… and this can be projected indefinitely into the future – you will never /experience/ a timeline in which you die.

Certain trends can be extrapolated from this, as well. Only a certain portion of future timelines include an immortal you; by fiddling with a bit of probability math, you can derive the result that whatever timeline you are currently experiencing is most likely to be one which gives some of the greatest odds of you ending up becoming immortal.

Which brings us to the final point: Actually acting as if you /were/ immortal tends to lead to behaviours which /reduce/ your long-term odds of survival. (Eg, playing Russian Roulette, confident that you will never experience a timeline in which you lose.) Thus, even if you do end up working out all of the above math and believing in the consequences, the odds predict that you will act as if Quantum Immortality is /not/ actually true. At least, as long as your personality is the sort that would allow such a belief to affect your actions in that particular way.

Anyone who’s done all the math, believes QI is true, and /still/ acts conservatively and to preserve their own life – /they/’re somebody to watch out for.

 

(Oddly enough, shortly after I was born, I moved to a region where there are no significant earthquakes or volcanoes; no hurricanes or typhoons; no tornadoes; no wildfires or floods; no significant civil unrest; an excellent health care system; just the occasional heat wave or blizzard. So at least up until the point where I write this, the timeline I’ve been experiencing could have been one that maximized my own odds of long-term survival, which branches off at the point you read this into the timeline which maximizes your own odds of long-term survival from that point on. If you’re still around in a thousand years, come on over and say ‘hi’. 🙂  )

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