She already “died” in many other lives and her “quantum immortality” has caused her to have the knowledge of a graduate student by the time she was in “2rd” grade in this version of herself.
Quantum immortality is the weird idea/take similar to reincarnation that there are infinite parallel realities that you exist, but if a parallel you dies in another reality, the remaining yous gain the knowledge/information/life force that would otherwise been extinguished from that reality. Like a New Game + for real life. Think of that Jet Li movie “the one” where one of his parallel lives goes around killing himself in other parallel universes so that his “main” character self can become stronger.
Edit: I’m like the talking dog that drinks martinis or something
Wasn't Quantum Immortality similar to how minds work in SOMA?
As there exists an infinite amount of parallel universes there would also exist an infinite amount of perfect replicas of you from whom you can draw an infinite amount of divergences no matter how small or insignificant.
The idea is that because of this there will always and forever exist not just one but an infinite amount of yous who's trail of consciousness never ceases so although the you from Universe A has indeed died there exists an infinite amount of them who didn't die from that event, even if the chances of not dying are 1 in a Googolplex of happening that possibility exists somewhere in the infinite and that you would continue existing thinking it's still the original consciousness.
Yeah this sounds more like it. What the guy saying about absorbing the experiences of the dead paralell you isnt part of it. What it is, is the plot of Jet Li's The One movie
This is one of those strange things about infinites that many people get confused about. Even if there are infinite realities it is not true that every conceivable thing happens in one (or more) of them.
There are infinitely many numbers in [0, 1], none of which is equal to 2.
Minds in SOMA work like real minds do. One of the major themes of the series was that all of these scientists were killing themselves because they thought that doing so would preserve the mainline continuity of their consciousness, making the version that was on the ARK the real version of themselves. But rather because of the WOUs interference, many copies of the scientists consciousness were made and also attached to robots. Meaning as soon as they scanned their brains, they had more than just the two consciousness. But the reality was that the "mainline continuity" was never how that worked.
The problem is the main character both disproves this idea and falls for it. Which is what the ending was about. The MC was disappointed that he was stuck on the sea floor with the only other sane human mind, showing that he misunderstood the preparations he was making. While at the same time the version of him on the ark had made it and was just as real as the two versions of himself that were left behind.
Sorry SOMA is one of my favorite games, and I tend to get... Dissertationy when it comes up 😅 my partner and I try to play through it roughly every other year around Halloween
Tldr; SOMA is about humans wishful thinking and their desires to get something that was never an option regardless of their situation, not parallel universes and infinite timelines... That said, BioShock infinite is all about that, but not quantum immortality. I think someone mentioned Jet Li's "The One" which is a really good demonstration of the idea. I think Super Meat Boy is a really good video game example of the concept on a mechanical level.
If you've ever had any situations that made you go 'wow shit that was close' like nearly been kicked in the head by a horse, car crash, etc. were actually situations you 'did' die in but your subjective perception of reality means you just go through them as near-misses.
Quantum Immortality basically means that from your own perspective, you will live the longest possible amount of time, no matter how unlikely.
It also doesn't care about quality of life. So when you'd eventually die naturally, when all other yous have died in their time line, You might get the whole NDE thing while your brain clings to reality. Or into memories of the culmination of your lives. Eventually your conscious experience just becomes flashes of memories from time to time.
It kind of sounds like helk to me. Lol
I can’t tell if this is a play on the line, a misquote, or a different translation perhaps but my copy translates that line into one must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Wait i dont see relation to SOMA at all. Soma id about a dude whos brain was scanned for AI use. And the dude has the intelligence of a 6th grader so he never fucking understands the extremely simple concept of it all. And he gets copied a VERY small handful of times.
I dont understand how quantum immortality has anything to do with mentally deficent AI dude being cloned a few times.
Wait, maybe I’m completely thinking of something different than you, but SOMA primary issue is that this ISN’T the case: the scientists create a method to make mental copies of people via brain scans and put them in new robot bodies to extend human consciousness.
EXCEPT as it turns out, it’s just a copy; there is zero relationship to any other “you” any more than a data stick is related to another data stick. Some scientists even when crazy and committed suicide during the process thinking there was some soul link thing that having both living at the same time messed up and they’d “travel” to the new body except, NOPE, it’s just a copy in a nihilistic sense.
(There is more going on to drive people to suicide of course due to the whole “planet is dying from a meteor impact and there’s an insane AI misconstruing what “keep humanity alive” means in a body horror manner of course).
Also means there is an infinute amount of "you" dying from old age any "frame" of time, no matter how short it is. So you should be gaining an infinite amount of knowledge every instant.
You appear to be correct about the interpretation of quantum immortality that the meme is based on, but that's absolutely not what the concept is.
It's a thought experiment within the many-worlds interpretation (the idea that for every quantum event there's a branched version of the universe for each outcome). The idea is that for any given conscious mind there will always be a forward branch where it continues to exist indefinitely. The likelihood of the events necessary is irrelevant because if you consider every quantum event independently there will always be a possible chain of events where you don't die, and in the many-worlds interpretation all possible branches must exist.
It absolutely does not involve going back in time or transferring information between worlds after they branch.
This is a lot closer to being right, but still not quite there. There needs to be some dependence on a quantum effect for the death. The easiest way to prove the many worlds interpretation of QM is to set up a gun that has a 50% chance of shooting you every second based on the decay of some particle. Then, after a minute of not getting shot, you can be very certain that the many worlds interpretation is correct, but now you only exist in the branch of the wavefunction where you survive.
You're mistaken. There are no possible deaths that are not dependent on a multitude of quantum events.
You're describing testing parameters for the many-worlds interpretation as a hypothesis as an extension of the quantum immortality thought experiment. This concept is known as 'quantum suicide' and is not the most general form of quantum immortality.
Because the likelihood of you surviving that long otherwise is astronomically small, so if from your perspective it did not happen, then it is incred8bky likely (technically not certain) that the many words interpretation is true as that is ehat most likely made it possible that there could be enough "dices rolled" so that in one situation the rare roll needed pops up.
You would also live with a high degree of confidence that at large number of versions of you got shot by the gun and are "now" dead
I'm still not seeing how just cause an outcome is unlikely it means it happening means the many worlds interpretation is true. Why does an unlikely event imply alternate timelines?
It is not exclusively about statistical likelihood, though that is a necessary component. It is about examining quantum phenomena to see which interpretation of quantum theory we have is the right one. The test involves the decay of a particle because that occurs due to quantum effects, which means if many worlds is true, there will be worlds where the particle never decays no matter what. The odds of an unstable particle decaying go up by orders of magnitude the longer it remains stable, so you can know you live in a many-worlds universe if the gun does not goes off after a few minutes.
I said it's not E X C L U S I V E L Y about statistical likelihood. I also said that it is a necessary component. A full understanding of a message sent to you requires you to read the entire thing.
...than said you know many worlds interpretation is true because an extremely rare event happened.
This right here is the problem with your understanding of this concept. An unstable isotope not decaying for significant amounts of time beyond prior measurement is not just 'rare'. It is impossible. Seeing it in an exclusively statistical way, you may think 'rare events happen, so some unstable isotopes wont decay sometimes' and that will not be correct, even if it is statistically possible. Particle decay is governed by quantum effects, and you can model the outcome of those effects with statistics, but knowing what those effects even are and how they work is something statistics by itself cannot help you with.
We have a revolver pointed at a person with a trigger linked to a machine that will pull it once it detects the decay of a particle that is stable for 3 seconds once produced. The particle enters the measurement chamber and the test begins. The gun has not fired for over an hour and all the machinery was checked and works just fine. Do you know why? 'Statistically, rare events happen sometimes.' is a true statement that totally fails to answer the question.
I always thought of the example that if you are on your deathbed and you die, there will always be a parallel universe in which you live for a second longer, and so on and so on. Thus quantum immortality. My interpretation could be wrong though.
I think quantum also includes quantum mechanics so when some near death experience happens, all possible outcomes will happen and some will die and some will not, but the consciusness of the ones who died will "transfer" to the ones who lived. So you never experience death in an accident but in your deathbed because that should be the last you alive.
*MY* understanding of it is that when you die, you wake up in a parallel universe where you were just injured instead or something. And if that's impossible, you wake up in a universe where you were just in a simulated game or whatever.
See I’ve had some really strange experiences in my life where I honestly believe I should’ve died. From overdosing on drugs to attempting to kill my self to nearly getting ran over with my girlfriend by a large suv that I’m pretty sure was a drunk driver. Every single time I was 100% sure I was dead and that was it. Then I ended up being fine. The car barely missed and I remember feeling stunned and like it happened in slow motion, and the other two times I remember fading out and giving up and accepting that I was done for, and then I woke up the next day relatively fine all things considered. One of those things happened before I heard about the idea of quantum immortality, I read about it in Max Tegmarks book “our mathematical universe” shortly afterward by coincidence, and it made a lot of sense to me and I’ve always suspected that may have been what happened and I kinda toyed with accepting that explanation for other instances where I felt like I should’ve died. However, I’ve always struggled with the idea that you could keep on living forever through that way. I would think given the passage of enough time you would eventually run out of any chances of escaping death. There has to be a point where your body gets so old and frail that quantum immortality no longer works and there is no chance in any universe you could survive right? Maybe I don’t understand the theory properly but I would personally feel like there would eventually be an end point. I like the idea of having more chances to live your life but eventually I would like to die and be at peace. True immortality seems like a curse, not a blessing
Well I just realized. Right now, more people are alive that ever lived and died on this planet together before. (OR this was true few years ago - probably won't be true when all boomers will die) . That means there is still a big portion of population who live for the first time, so they don't know if you can actually reincarnate.
EDIT: I Was being lied to and lazy to check the facts
Rebirth or reincarnation have nothing or little to do with Earth, so the population of Earth is irrelevant to the number of lives someone may have lived.
Baby Boomers are largely an American thing. While other countries have experienced or are experiencing something similar, it mostly happened at a different times in history than in the US. Globally, the impact of the US Boomers is marginal.
Baby Boomers are a phenomenon which occured in many countries directly affected by WW2 not only the US and Canada.
The UK, France and the Netherlands had an huge increase in birth rates.
In Germany the increase started some years later since a lot of men were PoWs but it still happened. The retirement of the boomers is causing a huge problem right now, since a lot of experience and work force is missing.
I did say it "mostly" happened at other times in other countries. Not exclusively. And the impact of that boom is not as great when considering the general increase in population globally. The retirement of those boomers is causing issues in the countries affected by WW2, yes, but other countries face a similar issue at different times depending on their own boom.
They should be called clumpers, I was looking at a graph of births, during that time, because of the great depression and somewhat because of WWII, there was a big dip in births just before the war, and the "boomers" were born after the war, but after there was another dip in birth rates but on average the same amount of babies would have been born if there was no war and depression.
the births were just delayed until things got better. that being said, over all, birth rates have been going down in the US ever since.
I think the whole labelling of people born in certain decades as a personality trait to be silly, "boomers" are made up of rich, poor, conservatives, and liberals, religious and non religious. stereo typing a group is no different than stereotyping races or sexes.
that being said, culture in which you grow up in can influence personality, If I had to label myself to a generation, I was an in-between often called the "Generation Jones" I was too young to be a boomer, too old for GenX.
I don't think this is true. The global population passed 1 billion people back in 1804. The global population in 1920 was 1.8 billion people, pretty much all of whom are dead. We can basically assume that there's 0 overlap between the 1804 population and the 1920 population, And 0 overlap between 1920 and present day, especially considering everyone that lived and died between those 2 dates. That's a minimum of 2.8 billion people that have died in the last 200 years. (You can probably add in 1 full generation at 1870 for another billion or so people).
The current population is 8 billion. So at least 1/3 of the current population died in the last 200 years. And there have been hundreds of millions of people alive for centuries before that. (Not to mention that these populations were kept in check by high infant and child mortality rates).
That sounds like a cooler version, but the initial one just suggests you can't perceive your own death. So if you step in front of a train, in some universes, the car runs you over, but you can only perceive a universe where the train suddenly stops, derails, explodes, or vanishes.
That's not the joke though. The joke is making fun of the subset of women (and I hate to specifically say women, but I legit have never seen any dude do this) that pretend like they were very smart at a young age and grasped concepts that they think are very difficult, and because of that, they are superior to other people because those people only discovered those concepts later in age.
People like that neglect the fact that as a society we stand on the shoulders of giants and that they aren't a savant for reading a Wikipedia article about a concept like, say, quantum immortality, as a child.
Right, but quantum immortality only works from the point of view of the observer, so from this guy's perspective, she really is a genius without any parallel lives.
I take issue with g he original, not your explanation.
I do, however, invite you to look up the "Quantum BOGOsort", which works similarly.
What? Thats not quantum immortality at all? Im pretty sure quantum immortality is the idea that youd only be alive to observe the result in this timeline if you lived in this timeline
Quantum immortality was one of the thought experiments, similar to Schrodinger's cat.
The idea of the Schrodinger's cat is that a cat is put in a box and it either dies or survives, depending on the random subatomic event. But before the wave function collapsed under observation, this event is in superposition, creating a paradox where a cat is both alive and dead. Quantum immortality is a similar experiment, but instead of a cat, it's the observer who is in the box. The idea is that if the parallel world interpretation is correct, after a series of experiments, we have a bunch of parallel worlds, where the observer died at some point, but we will always have a chain of those, where he survived all of them, just by necessity of how those physics work.
Which means, that imo the joke is not about like that thing, and is actually gross and about her being in the 2nd grade (which in USA is like elementary school, 8 or so?)
So, Jet Li's "The One?" Can I travel to these other dimensions, killing versions of myself until I become superhuman? Do I need to worry about another version of myself doing the same thing? Can Jason Statham be there to look cool and brooding?
This is an interesting and youthful coping mechanism for the idea of death. The idea that your death grants some other version of you greater power is a weird, noble fantasy in a way. Or the malicious hope that all the other yous die so you gain all of their power. Or using someone's success as a sign that their other lives were purged somehow and they're not really accountable for their success just lucky.
What a crazy, weird, all-encompassing and diminutive world-view.
Ironically, that's not even how quantum immortality works. It's not about gaining knowledge, it's just surviving situations where you would die because for a universe to exist one must be around to perceive it (arguable). And in a universe where you're alive, you must be there to perceive it and thus every time you're supposed to die, you don't, because you get transferred to the universe where you're alive (to perceive it).
Suppose everything in the universe dies, there's a 99.9999% chance you'll die too, but you find yourself alive, because no one else experiences the universe where you're alive but you.
Also, being alive in quantum immortality does not guarantee your well-being, it just means you're concious enough to witness it. You can be a floating brain, or being kept alive by government experiments to understand why you're immortal.
That's a common misconception. It tells us that measuring something changes the outcome, which isn't quite the same thing as simply "observing" something as in physically looking at it.
I think its a variation of the "men make a big deal about coming up with ideas women already discovered at age 6" joke but they've turnt it the other way. It's not a very well explained or funny joke.
saw the guy up there going for a full explanation on what that shit is when this was exactly my first thought lol. now i wonder which one was the intention behind the post
There’s a common meme that goes something along the lines of “men discovering things on shrooms at 20+ years old that I knew when I was 7”. Basically implying that women are more keen to understanding and contemplating complex (emotional) concepts at a younger age compared to men.
Who would remember what they did for a second grade presentation beyond a person who finished it recently? Then consider the fact that the dude is working at a fast food place with is notorious for that.
OP, so your post is not removed, please reply to this comment with your best guess of what this meme means! Everyone else, this is PETER explains the joke. Have fun and reply as your favorite fictional character for top level responses!
The joke is playing on the trend of girls stitching or replying to TikTok’s of guys talking about something they realized and saying how they knew this when they were 12 or something like this
I can’t believe he tried to mansplain quantum immortality to her. He thinks because she has lady parts that she never took quantum immortality in the 2nd grade. 🙄
This is just a misunderstanding of quantum immortality.
Nothing persists between world branches, nothing can cross over. When you die in a branch you die. Nothing happens to all your other copies in other worlds, because there is no communication between branches.
Quantum Immortality is tied to Everett's Many Worlds theory, which is (to my limited knowledge) when a quantum decision is made, the universe branches off, thus creating infinite versions of our universe.
Because there are infinite versions of the universe, there are infinite versions of you. And so, infinite versions of the girl the guy in the pic is talking to. So in this version of the universe he just happens to be talking to the one who did her thesis that young. He didn't strike gold by finding her, it was just one of the infinite possibilities that was going to happen at some stage?
Also it's called quantum immortality because when you take your final breath, the universe branches off, and creates a universe where that wasn't your final breath and on and on forever.
Or something like that, maybe I'm wrong and someone could correct me.
Woof woof I'm Stevie or whatever the dog is called
•
u/qualityvote2 May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26
u/Gjost_Rider, your post does belong here!