On a scale from pseudoscience to Hard Science how seriously is Quantum Immortality taken by people who Quantum for a living?
Was mainly wondering because I see it being promoted by things like Kurzesgtat (I know I butchered that) and other popular Science promoters.
Yet anytime I see anyone, even Roger Penrose himself, supposit that mind is any way connected to Quantum phenomenon it is attacked mercilessly and rushed out of the room like a crazed bloodied up goat that somehow snuck into a nursery.
So I am a little confused. By what mechanism would Quantum Immortality even work if science is so sure there is nothing like a soul jumping timelines?
That’s one of the reasons I don’t like Kurzgesagt. They present too many things as facts with the same conviction as an archeologist declaring a dildo was used in religious ceremony.
Watch PBS Space Time instead. They explain how scientists arrived at certain conclusions and why they might still be bullshit.
Not at all. Yes, there are a few such as Penrose and Josephson who have dabbled in this nonsense, but very few in the community take it seriously.
Why do very few in the community take it seriously?
Because empirical evidence is lacking.
I thought Penrose wasn’t a many worlds fan?
Quantum immortality was a concept in quantum mysticism invented by Hugh Everett, the guy who originated the Many Worlds Interpretation. It’s not even taken seriously by defenders of Many Worlds. Major proponents of Many Worlds like Sean Carroll even admit it is nonsensical and silly.
Imagine if a company perfectly cloned you. If you then died, do you expect that your consciousness would suddenly hop into the clone and take control over them? No, it makes no sense. The clone is effectively another person. If you die, you would just die. The clone would keep living on because the clone ultimately isn’t you.
The obvious problem with quantum immortality with it is that if you truly believe in Many Worlds, then the other branches of yourself in other copies of the universe are effectively like clones of yourself. You dying in this branch of the multiverse doesn’t somehow magically imply your consciousness can hop into another branch where you are still alive. “You” as in the “you” on this branch where you die would just die, and the other “yous” would continue to live on.
Penrose’s ideas are not taken seriously either, because the arguments for them are comedically bad. Pretty much all physicists are in unanimous agreement that quantum computing needs to be well-isolated from the environment and incredibly cold, the opposite of a human brain, and so there is zero chance the brain is utilizing quantum computing effects.
Penrose’s argument is, and I kid you not, that it is possible for humans to believe things they cannot prove, for example, we cannot currently prove Goldbach’s Conjecture but you can choose to believe it, and therefore he concludes human consciousness must transcend what is computable. Since no algorithm can compute the outcome of the collapse of the wavefunction with absolute certainty (as it is random), he then thinks that the human brain must therefore be using quantum processes.
I genuinely don’t know how anyone can find that argument convincing. The barrier towards creating artificial intelligence obviously isn’t that AI has a tendency to only believe things that are rigorously computable. In fact, it is quite the opposite, AI constantly hallucinates and makes statements that are obviously false and nonsensical. The physical implementation of the neural network can be captured by a rigorous mathematical model without the output of what the neural network does or says being all rigorous mathematical statements. There is no contradiction between believing the human brain is not a quantum computer and that humans are capable of believing or saying things that they did not rigorously compute.
Penrose then partnered with Hameroff to desperately search for any evidence that there are any coherent quantum states in the brain at all. They start with their conclusion they want and desperately seek something out that might fit it. All they have found is that there might be brief coherent quantum states in microtubules, but microtubules are not a feature of the brain, but of eukaryotic cells generally, and they play a structural role as a kind of lattice that keeps the cells together. Even if they are right that microtubules briefly can have a coherent quantum state, that does not get you one iota closer into proving that the human brain is a quantum computer in the sense that coherent quantum states actually play a role in decision making or conscious thought.
Thank you for actually explaining it.
Most of the time when I ask about Orch-OR I get people saying “It’s fairy dust!111” without explaining why the idea is bad.
That said the fact that we still don’t have an explanation for human conciousness (Emergent Property is just the modern day “Spontaneous Generation”), especially since Integrated Information Theory was branded pseudoscience, is a problem that no one wants to touch.
Well I am of the same opinion of the philosopher Alexandr Bogdanov and the philosopher Jocelyn Benoist which is that indirect realism is based on very bad arguments in the first place, and this is the first premise of Chalmers’ argument for the “hard problem,” and so to drop it as a premise drops the “problem.” I would recommend Bogdanov’s book The Philosophy of Living Experience and Benoist’s book Toward a Contextual Realism. The uniting theme is that they both reject the existence of a veil that blocks us from seeing reality, and thus Chalmers’ notion of “consciousness” is rejected, and so there is no “hard problem” in the first place.
The “hard problem” is really just a reformulation of the mind-body problem, and Feuerbach had originally pointed out in his essay “On Spiritualism and Materialism” that the mind-body problem is not solvable because to derive it, one has to start from an assumption that there is a gulf between the mind and the body (the phenomena and the noumena, “consciousness” and physical reality), and so to then solve it would be to bridge that gulf, which contradicts oneself, as that would mean a gulf didn’t exist in the first place. He thus interprets the mind-body problem (later reformulated as the hard problem) as a proof by contradiction that indirect realism is not tenable, and so materialists should abandon this gulf at the very axiomatic basis of their philosophy.
There will never be a “solution” because it’s better understood as a logical proof that indirect realism is wrong. That means, no matter how intuitive indirect realism may seem and no matter how many arguments you think you can come up with off the top of your head to defend it, you should step back and actually rigorously evaluate those arguments as they cannot actually be correct and you must be making a mistake somewhere.
Wait, so conciousness isn’t real? What’s indirect realism?
I personally don’t believe it’s real in the way Chalmers defines it. You can define it in another way where it can be considered real, but his definition I don’t find convincing. Indirect realism is the belief that what we perceive is not real but kind of a veil that blocks us from seeing true reality. True reality then by definition is fundamentally impossible to observe, not by tools and not under any counterfactual circumstances.
What IS true reality?
Have a look at ‘Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit’ here: https://www.openculture.com/2025/09/the-carl-sagan-baloney-detection-kit.html These ideas are ‘common sense’ to ’ people who Quantum for a living’. Immortality - right or wrong- is WAY OUTSIDE what’s within the reach of day-to-day science.
Penrose is a talented and knowledgeable guy who’s can afford to ‘think outside the box’ without making crazy claims. The guy who thought up plate tectonics was ‘rushed out of the room’ for 50 years … until people realized the value of his idea.
The main points are there in text. If you want to hear more about each point, the YT video goes into them in detail.
The idea isn’t falsifiable. Therefore it’s not science.
It’s not dumb or foolish to think that ideas like this are plausible and cool. They may even be true, we just can’t tell the difference with science.
Quantum immortality is not the same thing as the idea that the mind somehow utilizes quantum processes. Quantum immortality is the idea that when you die you go some other branch of the multiverse and live on. The idea is the mind uses quantum processes is usually just a theory about the biological processes in the brain. The latter position is more open-ended and more plausible (we already know, for example, that the sense of smell utilize quantum processes so in general sense not that far fetched; things get more controversial when you start looking at specific theories).
I don’t know, but anecdotally, I statistically shouldn’t be alive - I’ve had at least 5 “holy shit I should be fucking dead” moments.
Well yeah, if you were actually dead you wouldn’t be here to make that observation. It’s survivorship bias.
It’s also statistically almost impossible not to have a ton of guys who almost died 5 times running around when there are so many humans in the world.
Well yeah, it’s a personal survivorship bias, but isn’t that the basis for quantum immortality?
Isn’t my experience exactly what would be expected if quantum immortality was true?
Survivorship bias as an argument doesn’t really work because you are already presupposing you are the one who survived. Of course if you assume that there is a multiverse of infinite copies of yourself and at least one of them survived an incredibly incredibly unlikely event, then by definition you would not die and would be the person who survives the event.
But it’s kind of circular. You cannot apply surviroship bias prior to conducting the experiment because you have no reason to believe that what you call “you” would be one of the survivors. It is much more likely, even if we assume the multiverse theory is true (see my criticism of it here) that what you would call “you” after the splitting of worlds would not be one of the survivors.
Let me give an analogy. Replace the very likely event of dying with something else, like losing the lottery. At least one branch of the multiverse you would win the lottery. Yes, if we bias it so we only consider the branch where you win the lottery, then by definition you are guaranteed to win the lottery if you play it. But that biasing makes no sense prior to actually playing the lottery. It is much more likely what you call “you” after you play the lottery would be one that sees themselves as having lost the lottery.
It’s also exactly what would be expected if it was false.
