I’ve been leaving behind a few more dead timelines than usual lately. deja-vu-like flashes of mistakes I’m concurrently avoiding AND making at once. tripping down stairs that i actually made it safely to the bottom of. catastrophic car accidents that everyone actually ends up driving away from unscathed. I see it flash before my eyes and divert my course… I try to tell myself it’s just experiential pattern recognition providing examples of what could go wrong, why to be cautious and take care. But… Yeah, this hits freaky
Read Anathem by Neal Stephenson. Fantastic book that actually hits that topic, especially near the end.
This is too real, I absolutely ate it once in a hotel shower all alone. I was stunned and had the wind knocked out of me while getting waterboarded by the shower. I don’t think I ever felt so helpless and actually started thinking this is how it ends.
I used to want to be immortal. Now I understand those who don’t want to.
Ok, but hear me out. What if the universe is the insides of a quantum computation doing a Levin search based on reversible computation? Aka every time you truly hesitate before making a decision you’re doing a quick-save?
Edit: oh, and it’d be lazily evaluated in this case
Then who ever is playing this character is fucking dumb for even playing the game. Plz uninstall.
I’m an Orc from Warcraft II who keeps getting clicked on until I become self aware and yell “Stop poking me!”
How do I reload an old save. I think I messed up my build.
Crawling around a claustrophobic attic in a heatwave recently and I had a panicked moment where I decided I had better get out before hyperthermia made it so I physically couldn’t.
Pretty sure there is a parallel universe where firefighters are cutting holes in the ceiling to extract my rotting corpse from behind an aging air handler.
It isn’t always binary (dead vs alive) you are more likely to slip, fall and become disabled. How does that fit the quantum immortality?
As JcbAzPx said, you’ll continue in all timelines where you’re alive. No matter of how injured you are. Eventually, you’ll be just a brain kept alive through thermal fluctuation. (Theoretically, entropy can spontaneously go down, the chances of this happening going down exponentially the more entropy we’re talking about. Think about shuffling a deck of cards, and getting a completely sorted deck of cards. Certain at 1 card, 25% chance at 2 cards, and basically zero at a full deck, but still theoretically possible.) Eventually, you’ll be a disembodied brain suffering for all eternity from phantom pain.
My dude, you are just a cloud of random particles interacting in space whose unpredictable fluctuations have resulted in a structure exactly mimicking a human brain, complete with memories and knowledge of “the universe”
Boltzmann has entered the chat!
Quantum Hell.
Thanks, I hate it.
You continue in any time lines you’re still alive in. Even if you don’t want to be.
Relatable.
Ran from a wildfire recently when the wind turned suddenly. In a few universes I am now BBQ.
Yet in all universes, you taste delicious to me. ❤️
Damn I didn’t realise other people thought like this
Bold of you to assume other people exist
As far as I know, there’s no evidence of the many-worlds interpretation, which quantum immortality relies on.
Also, quantum immortality doesn’t mean you can’t die, it means you’ll go to hell when you do. Eventually you’ll be reduced to a state where you can only think, with no way to interact with, or senses the world at all, making you dead for any observer who is not you. And you’ll stay in this state forever.
Did you respond to the wrong comment
I was sort of still thinking of this quantum hell thought experiment, and wanted to write about it. I should probably have started my comment with “I believe the interpretation presented in OP’s post to be false because …”
Fair. I mean, quantum immortality is dumb and wrong anyway so it doesn’t really matter either way.
Quantum foam makes me roam…
Quantum puns make me …
I mustve died many many times cause the universe im in now sucks
Too real …
I sometimes think about this playing video games, especially Tomb Raider. The protagonist never ever failed. From their perspective they must feel invincible. Kind of explains Lara’s cocky attitude.
Game idea: narrative focused crpg, with a relatively straightforward plot, but the protagonist remembers every time you reload and his every death, progressively tries to figure out what’s happening, all while trying to actually succeed the original plot because that also seems important.
Undertale is this but it’s not focused on too heavily unless you play multiple routes.
Deltarune I think (I haven’t played it myself) has this kind of plot with the protagonist having an antagonist relationship to the player controlling them, but it’s more focused on player-made choices instead of save mechanics.
I would also like to nominate In Stars and Time, which is about timeloops and is very meta but not in the fourth wall breaking way.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5607616/
Re:Zero kinda has this plot
Not a game, but I remember a choose your own adventure style video series on YouTube where if you choose some early bad ends, the main character will start acting more and more reluctant to follow your choices.
Some options I know of:
- The Forgotten City
- Deathloop
- Stuck in Time
Returnal
All good, but not enough fourth wall fuckery in those time loops
Maybe the closest that I know of so far: Rue Valley?
Just looked it up, there happens to be a 50% sale for it on steam right now.
Slay the Princess kind of goes in that direction.
I hear good things about it, but am not particularly one for horror, still considering picking it up at some point though
It is horror, but it’s also not horror. StP brings so much more than just horror, it has comedic moments, romantic moments, thoughtful moments, and plenty of WTF moments. And, how it all plays out depends on what you choose.
Steam has a two hour return policy, so I would recommend getting the game, and trying out the opening to see what you think. It’s not for everyone, but if you’re the type who likes to think deep thoughts about the universe like OP posted, then you’ll probably enjoy this game.
So more the kind of horror that Gothic is (thinky horror) than the more visceral type? Because I actually love the more Gothic horror that’s more about making you sad than scared (like Frankenstein), I just hate the feeling of jumping at shadows after a scary movie/game
Quit the nonsense. It is plot armor
The universe seems to be as far as we know now physically infinite and homogeneous. That means all possible arrangements of matter exits. In any direction you can point there would be an atom for atom copy of the earth and it’s entire history including a copy ofe writing this comment as well as all others permutations. There’s no need for jumping to new universes at all depending on the nature of consciousness.
CMBR isn’t homogenous though within our bubble, how can we assume the universe beyond our horizon is the same. We are but fish in a pond
That depends on whether or not there was an infinite amount of energy in the Big Bang. Lacking that, you can’t have infinite matter (i.e. infinite copies and possible configurations) even if you have infinite space to put it in.
When current theories say the universe is infinite they also mean an even distribution of matter in that infinite space.
And for something like the big bang, when theories say that the universe originated from a singularity they actually mean the infinite sized universe had infinite density at one instance, not that it literally came from one single point.
So there is technically infinite energy in the universe, but all that infinite energy is still experiencing entropy at on average the same rate.
I don’t understand what you’re saying but I believe you
Imagine you have three coils, there’s only so many ways you can arrange them in a line. It’s essentially that idea but for matter
The universe seems to be as far as we know now physically infinite and homogeneous. That means all possible arrangements of matter exits.
There’s a couple assumptions being made here that allow for this hypothesis to be possible. We do not know if the universe is actually infinite, it’s just a possibility based on what we can currently observe (around 93 billion light years). Even if something is incalculably large, it’s still miniscule compared to the infinite that this hypothesis requires.
Secondly the universe is only homogeneous at a very large scale. The universe at a local scale is very diverse in its make-up, it’s only homogeneous at a scale of hundreds of millions of light years.
If we disregard these assumptions is it possible that there are near copies of our perceived realities in other places in the universe, maybe…but is it likely?
Most definitely. It’s assuming our current understanding is accurate, spacetime is flat and the universe is at a large scale homogeneous. As of now those are the main assumptions given what we know and what we can measure. Any stories we make about reality including science are at most our current best bet and nothing more. We can always learn something new that will rewrite anything we know currently. Like imagine we prove last Thursdayism is true.
Ah yes… The spiritualism of the intelligent. It’s different than religious beliefs, right?
No
Ah yes, the hubris of man. Cause we can totally prove logic works without using logic, right?
Ah yes, boobies …
I too enjoy boobies!
Which is more logical: some supernatural, indefinable thing or cold finality?
You can’t prove either, but one is foundational to shared delusions that drives commerce, hatred and war while the other is just peace.
Fair enough. Logic is your deity. Not a bad one, either. :P
Explain how it’s a deity. I don’t worship it. It doesn’t give me purpose. It’s not a comfort.
the other is just peace.
That sounds a lot like you consider it a comfort.
Nothing isn’t peace, it’s nothing.
You pushed the inexplicable, the black box, into a system. Deities/the unknown forces come in all kinds of shapes and formats, not only judeochristian / abrahamic. Maybe it’s not a deity, but it’s where the magic we can’t explain happens. We need axioms for anything, dude. I’m not anti-science, I just think all belief and knowledge is necessarily based in things that cannot be proven… and that’s ok.
Somewhere, somewhen, there is a version of me who made all the right decisions and is living a truly great life.
And everyday I give big props to them, while just doing the best I can each day and continue making questionable decisions sometimes.
There are also versions of you who made all the right decisions and are still living garbage lives because no decision in their control actually had an influence on the overall outcome. These versions are far more numerous.
