Talk:Quantum suicide

Alternative nuclear survival methods
"However, one could imagine situations in which this doesn't work. If you are 1 millisecond away from having a nuclear weapon explode right above your head, for example. Is a random quantum event really going to recreate a surviving copy of you somewhere else in the world, sufficiently far away from the explosion? Can the quantum vacuum really bubble up fully-grown human beings out of thin air?"

Is that really the only way we can think of for someone to survive a nuclear explosion? What if the event just causes some part of the bomb to fail, creating something that prevents it from detonating? This seems more likely than it creating a duplicate (which arguably would not save you, in any case). 198.111.39.224 (talk) 04:13, 9 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Technically, creating a duplicate of you 100 km away and destroying the current you is indistinguishable from all the atoms in your body spontaneously shifting 100 km away in the exact same direction. You can't label these atoms and verify that you're still composed of "the same" atoms and not different ones. That said, even though I tentatively believe in MWI (or rather consider it the superior interpretation given our present knowledge), I think QI is bunk, but for unrelated reasons. - LucidFox (talk) 13:17, 4 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Yeah, that particular statement in the article is poorly written. If the many worlds interpretation is the correct one, then there are probably plenty of universes out there in which you're not hovering below a nuke at the brink of death. No, spontaneous macroscopic teleportation doesn't happen, but the whole point of MWI is that there could very well be an infinite number of universes in which your life plays out as normal (or in which you don't even exist). - Grant (talk) 13:47, 4 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Indeed. We enter really murky waters if we stretch the QI argument to its logical conclusion, which would imply that "present me" is a sum of all possible histories that give rise to this specific physical configuration, with the memories and experiences encoded in my brain &mdash; which includes things like Boltzmann brains, simulations, and alternate histories that give rise to an exact copy of present me by sheer accident, in every possible universe, at every time. I have no real means to calculate the probabilities of myself being any of these things, including the possibility that the entire universe turns into something completely different the very next instant, or that I simply dissolve back into the interstellar matter that accidentally gave rise to my Boltzmann brain self. Obviously this is not what I've observed my entire life, so even if these scenarios are possible, their probabilities should be abysmally low. - LucidFox (talk) 14:07, 4 July 2014 (UTC)

This article assumes a very unintuitive and weird sense of self that one must have to hold this view... So, if I die in 99% of universes and am alive in 1%, I am actually still alive? No, I'd say you're more dead than alive, and that's only if you're going for the interpretation that the you in another world still counts as you. Is this really such a popular train of thought that is presented in this article? Nullahnung (talk) 13:56, 4 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Hugh Everett III, the founder of MWI, believed in QI, or at least claimed to. Obviously it's not empirically testable, but it's a famous enough quantum thought experiment, much like Schrödinger's cat, and like it, a fertile breeding ground for all kinds of quantum woo. - LucidFox (talk) 14:07, 4 July 2014 (UTC)

Existential crisis
So has this particular thought experiment caused anyone else to have an existential crisis? The "immortality" which this suggests is certainly not very comforting; being a prisoner inside your own consciousness...alone...forever.--Andled (talk) 03:41, 16 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Unless some of these many worlds suddenly stop aging from happening (and any that never had are not our world or would have anything resembling us in it), I'm going to die in all possible worlds at some point. So short of not thinking it out, this should never do anything but give you a slight headache.-- Mie kal  03:47, 16 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Except that quantum suicide does not rely on survival being likely, so even extremely unlikely events like localized reversals of entropy are included. Of course, this only leads to the preservation of consciousness, not of health. TiaC (talk) 06:09, 16 November 2014 (UTC)

Proposal to expand, edit, and add references
I often see crazy ideas based on Quantum Immortality on various websites (LessWrong for example), so since I've done some thinking on this, I thought I'd add some references to this article, then give some reasons why it is almost certainly false. I will be doing so gradually. Feedback is welcome. Crossroads (talk) 16:46, 29 June 2017 (UTC)
 * All done. Crossroads (talk) 22:39, 1 July 2017 (UTC)

The logical but
No matter how much quantum woo you consume you will not be around in 2150. 31.51.113.7 (talk) 21:22, 29 June 2017 (UTC)

Subjective Immortality
I have been thinking on this topic and it seems that some kind of subjective Immortality could be true, this is being discussed in this forum: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/quantum-immortality-without-mwi.997952/ For example:

"it seems that assuming physicalism, and an infinite universe in space or time, if Leibniz' Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles is true and apply to conciousness (and then, a person exactly like you is you) and the Infinite Monkeys Theorem is true, if it is physically possible reach 200 years old, one way or another, you will do it.

But in this case, it's not necessary a physical continuity, since a random Boltzmann Brain exactly like you at 200 years old is you too, indistinguishable from an "evolutionary" you, and so a 300, 400, etc."

Of course, this reasoning could be flawed, but I am unable to see why, some objections? 91.116.111.240 (talk) 18:27, 2 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Plugging infinities into physical or philosophical problems can lead to silly results. The universe is big, but there's no indication that it's infinite. 192․168․1․42 (talk) 20:30, 2 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Infinity is a long time, and anything can happen. I do think there is a form of subjective immortality at play here, but nothing akin to physical continuity. — Oxyaena Harass  21:19, 2 January 2021 (UTC)