HOPE OF NOT DYING I

A series of incidents, seemingly concrete, led to This. It is tempting to see these as decisive, without which This would not have happened, and as such regret that the series of incident looked the way it did, because surely the outcome could have been better. Consider a Copernican inversion, viewing This as in some sense necessary, and rather rendering the causal event-chain as a contingent path to This. They do not matter, not in their particularity. We are here now, and the world is still around. Things could be radically different, and the leap to saying true randomness caused This requires equal amount of faith as saying This is necessary, is by some measure the right way, with risk of sounding dangerously Panglossian. For this is the dilemma, surely the right way is not for everyone to think that they can not go wrong, that the best will happen regardless, and to have this perspective in mind in day to day life. Neither do we want the perspective of deterministic randomness to take such a place. It seems intuitively obvious that we aught to be humble and follow nature in letting the illusion of free will dwell in us at all times, except when philosophizing, and perhaps during difficult times when a fatalist perspective can save the mind from annihilative despair. Or to quell self-doubt during critical moments in artistic creation. To have a metaphysical gearbox deployed pragmatically.

Yet, how can one argue for a world headed towards perfection, over one on a random path towards a random future? I'll try to outline my reasoning. Quantum physical behavior is unexplainable by the laws of causality intuitively induced from experience, unlike classical physics. When a quantum state collapses it does so in a "random" way, and for a long time physicists assumed this to be "truly random", such as the concept appears to us. But there is no way to define a random function constructively in mathematics without doing so in the negative, that is along the lines of "a choice-function without pattern", and thus there is no suggestion that randomness actually exists, even theoretically (in the positive, now if a definition based on negation is valid and could manifest physically is a point of debate as well, for now let's assume no). Since all of existence is seemingly made up of such quantum events that can go, not one way or the other, but in a number of ways, one can envision a hyperspace where each outcome of each quantum event is represented. The result is a web of possible worlds, splitting of branches every time a wave collapses into a particle, and in some cases having branches rejoin, when different sequences of quantum events end up leading to the exact same state. This is the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, which is currently favored by many physicists over the "traditional" Copenhagen interpretation, which gives fundamental positive ontological status to chance.

Furthermore it is a popular belief among physicists that space is actually infinite, that is truly infinite and not just as a figure of speech. It also does not show any signs of being compact, with matter existing in a limited region, but rather that matter is spread out quite evenly across this infinite space. The result of this is inevitable: an infinite number of (overlapping) regions, delimited by the horizon (marked by the background radiation) resulting from the expansion of space, each with a different constellation of matter. In ours, matter ended up coagulating into life. The fact that it is possible for this to happen at least once in this exact way means that it necessarily will happen infinitely many times throughout the space of delimited universes. That this follows is not obvious, but since we are here there is a chance that another universe will have exactly the same sequence of quantum events as ours did, ending up in the exact same state. No matter how small this chance is, the fact that it under these presumptions is larger than zero means that it will happen an infinite amount of times given an infinite amount of universes.

Where am I going with this? Well it means that throughout the infinite space there is an infinite amount of yous that have the exact same past that in this very moment are reading this text, and that constantly, for every particle in your surrounding that collapse, yous diverge, leaving this super-positioned stack of disparate yous, without making Your numbers any less than infinite. In fact, each divergence is infinite in itself. According to this view everything that could ever happen to you will happen to you, somewhere, to an infinite amount of yous. So why do you take the path that you do take? Within this argument this question remains open for cases where it absolutely does not matter (in the sense of your survival) whether one thing happen or another, but in the case of the annihilation of your mind physicist Max Tegmark speculates that the first person self simply experience the path where the self is intact, effectively rendering the first person immortal, without sparing other people (except from their own first-person perspective). Tegmark doesn't hold firmly to this belief, because he argues that death is not the matter of a quantum state collapsing one way or the other, but rather is a slow prolonged affair, where you effectively get cornered in the hyperspace, pushed out onto a branch where there is no world that you survive in. This means that there is a last fork where you enter the branch where death is certain, a single quantum event that takes you into the cul de sac rather than the web of life of the other way. It also means that at this stage an infinite amount of super-positioned selves WILL take the other way and live on, and it is no more frisky to speculate that the first person takes the path of life rather than death at these forks, a number of quantum events removed from the final tip of the branch of death. This is of course some outrageous speculation, that as mentioned before can be directly dangerous if assumed in a careless manner, but so is Tegmark's original thesis, and I do not see how this would be either more dangerous or more unlikely than his thesis is.

So, assuming this to be correct then, what lies on the horizon? Obviously: eternal life. Everett himself, who first proposed the Many Worlds Interpretation, believed in quantum immortality. Now, will it be that you live on in the mundane world, with wars and diseases and death persisting, affecting others as it has in the past, with you being the sole survivor, ever aging, eventually gaining more and more attention for your peculiar case of undyingness? Perhaps - there certainly would be branches like these in hyperspace for each of us. But here I would like to make an argument of density: even though every possible event happens in an infinite amount of universes, some outcomes are more likely than others, making their presence more dense in hyperspace. If you then consider a far-of point in the future, say 1000 years from now, the universes of yous at that point can similarly be viewed as a set where certain conditions are more dense than others. It seems intuitive to me that the rare occurrences where you, as a totally unique individual just happen to live for this long for no apparent reason, is not the most common outcome. Rather I would imagine cases where science finds the cure for aging, where global peace is realized, and total harmony of humanity achieved are a more likely sequence of events. If such a series of events is slightly more dense than the other type in 1000 years from now, then it seems to follow that as events branch of from there it will keep dwarfing the other example as time goes on. This argument hinges on going with the more likely outcome when there is no other motivation for one way or the other, which is somewhat crude but common practice in speculative theoretical physics.

What this then outlines is a future of certain perfection, in the way imagined by many mystics and philosophers of history, a future heaven of eternal harmony for everyone, at least from their own perspective. In fact, this whole idea screams Leibniz. Now, does this hypothesis rule out free will? In short: no, not if there's an infinite amount of future eternal yous. In that case free will fits neatly in to choosing which future of eternal life you choose. If you are a psychopath that choose to annihilate all of life save for yourself you would live forever, alone. Does it rule out suicide? Yes: it would never work, you'd always survive despite the odds. So does this leave us with a nihilism, where your choice does not matter because you can not die? In some sense yes, but you get to chose your eternal future, for the best of your knowledge at least. Thus ethics still clings on, even if it ends up in an unusual position. How to untangle what ethics would be compatible with this thesis, and whether altruism and humanism can be preserved is open, it does not come to me at this moment. That is, the argument for altruism and compassion is not obvious. However, assuming that you do care for one or more others, what follows is total altruism. If you have a little you have it all. Why? Because you need not care for yourself, you will always persist. Others are not safe though, not from your perspective, so you have the imperative to act for others survival and well-being with all of your capacity. Of course, you might still want to reign in some altruism to save yourself from pain, so this bit is shaky I admit. More needs to be said here, but this seems to promise reason for a more total compassion than perhaps any philosophy, save certain extreme strains of altruistic religions such as Christianity (in fact this thesis seems to be almost homomorphic with Calvinism). Now, I said it does not rule out free will if there is an infinite amount of future eternal yous - this may, within this theory, not be the case. The case of a limited amount of future heavens are effectively the same as a single future heaven, and the result is determinism. Perhaps a universe in total harmony is so totally delicate that there is only one golden thread of events that lead up to it? Within this theory you would then be bound to this thread, and free will would be illusory. So this strange argument does not yield free will to us. It does however rid contingency and death, but at the cost of enormous assumptive leaps extrapolated from an interpretation of an incomplete model induced from empirical data. The model in this case is the standard model, which is almost certainly bound to be shown to be false, or rather to be an approximation that does not capture the whole truth, and if this would be so then the whole argument falls. It also hinges on the multiple interpretive leaps, so I want to emphasize just how shaky ground this thesis stands on - BUT, I'd argue that the thesis of realism (deterministic or not) stands on equally shaky ground. This is the real point. See this argument as an exercise in showing what a radical ontology it is possible to fit to the data points we have through science and through direct experience - a sort of critique against realism. How you apply it (and how you apply realism for that matter) to your life I do not feel mandated to advise you on. As I mentioned Everett believed strongly in quantum immortality, and he lived a very unhealthy life and died at 51 - at least from our perspective.