If the many worlds of the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics are real, there's at least a good chance that Quantum Immortality is real as well: All conscious beings should expect to experience the next moment in at least one Everett branch even if they stop existing in all other branches, and the moment after that in at least one other branch, and so on forever.
However, the transition from life to death isn't usually a binary change. For most people it happens slowly as your brain and the rest of your body deteriorates, often painfully.
Doesn't it follow that each of us should expect to keep living in this state of constant degradation and suffering for a very, very long time, perhaps forever?
I don't know much about quantum mechanics, so I don't have anything to contribute to this discussion. I'm just terrified, and I'd like, not to be reassured by well-meaning lies, but to know the truth. How likely is it that Quantum Torment is real?
Yes, Quantum Immortality is "real", as far as it goes. The problem is that it is inappropriately named and leads to inappropriate conclusions by misusing non-quantum intuitions. So yes, if you plan to put yourself in a 50% quantum death-box and keep doing so indefinitely you can expect there to be a branch in which you remain alive through 100 iterations. The mistake is to consider this intuitively closer to "immortality" rather than "almost entirely dead".
No. Don't do a count on branches, aggregate the amplitude of the branches in question. We should expect to die. There happen to be an infinite (as far as we know) number of progressively more 'improbable' branches in which we are degrading but they still aggregate to something trivial. It is like a zeno's paradox.
I have no idea whether these brief expressions of intuitions that I find useful are at all helpful for you. If not then, like Carl, I recommend this post that explores related concepts with diagrams and examples. (But I'm biased!)
As far as I know I am already "almost entirely dead" in al... (read more)