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?
I've just finished reading your post. Basically what is says is, if I care about reality I should care about all future branches, not just the ones where I'm alive (or have achieved some desired result, like a million dollars). Okay, I get that. I do care about all future branches (well, the ones I can affect, anyway). But here's the thing: I care even more about the first-person mental states that I will actually be/experience.
Let's say that a version of me will be tortured in branch A, while another version of me will be sipping his coffee in branch B. From an outside perspective, it's irrelevant (meaningless, even) which version of me gets tortured; but if 'I' 'end up' in branch A, I'll care a whole lot.
So yeah, if I don't sign up for cryonics and if Aubrey de Grey and Eliezer slack off too much, I expect to die, in the same sense that I don't expect to win the lottery. I also expect to actually have the first-person experience of dying over the course of millenia. And I care about both of these things, but in different ways. Is there a contradiction here? I don't think there is.
The two senses of "care" are different, and it's dangerous to confuse them. (I'm going to ignore the psychological aspects of their role and will talk only about their consequentialist role.) The first is relevant to the decisions that affect whether you die and what other events happen in those worlds, you have to care about the event of dying and the worlds where that happens in order to plan the shape of the events in those worlds, including avoidance of death. The second sense of "caring" is relevant to giving up, to planning for th... (read more)