The Existential Crisis Iceberg

sometimes and rarely I'm on Tik Tok and not long ago on that app I came across the so-called existential crisis Iceberg now as far as I can tell this was originally posted on Reddit by a user called kvic into r/ iberg charts I don't know if they made it they were just reposting it but the version on Tik Tok has over 5 million views and half a million likes so it's obviously captured some people's imagination and I thought we could take a look we start at the top of the iceberg with everyone has their own

complex life this doesn't seem like an entirely radical realization but it's a common enough Revelation that it has a name they call it s which is defined by one website as the profound feeling of realizing that everyone including strangers passing in the street has a life as complex as one's own which they're constantly living despite one's personal lack of awareness of it like I say this isn't super revolutionary on the surface everybody knows that you're not the only character in this play but we do almost always feel like the main character and we kind of

forget that to everybody else even to our closest friends we are just access iies to their life we're Side characters to their play it's quite profound when you really sit with it for a while and realize that this world is just brimming with conscious experience most of which you'll never even know about that alone get to engage with much less experience next worry about future again very straight forward you start to realize that there are things in life that matter when you grow out of your childhood you realize that you can't spend all day long

just thinking about your next meal or who you're going to play with at lunchtime no you've got to think about things like taxes and owning a house and all of that kind of fun stuff and it's clear to see how this can lead to an existential crisis especially when this goes wrong doesn't really require much more explanation so I think we'll just move on okay so now we're on the next level on the tip of the iceberg simulation Theory you'll almost certainly have heard of this it's the idea that we could all just be living

in a simulation this is something of a modern take on Renee decart's evil demon hypothesis and decart's way of entertaining this idea is to imagine that there's an evil demon who's constantly deceiving us into thinking that the world around us exists in the way that it does but in fact it doesn't and we're all just being deceived all the time time a modern take on this is the idea that we're living in a simulation you think that you're in a real world with real people and real objects but actually you're in a computer simulation and

your brain is just being prodded electronically to produce fake experiences and this is broadly known as radical skepticism if it can be questioned then we should question it and we begin to realize that we basically have no justification even for some of our most foundational beliefs like the existence of the external world and just thinking that this is possible is enough to send some people into an existential crisis but enter Nick Bostrom who popularized what's known as the simulation argument not just the idea that we could be living in a simulation but the argument that

we probably are Bostrom does this by saying that Humanity will inevitably be able to simulate Human Experience if you look at technological progress things like AI it will be no time before we're able to comprehensively simulate entire worlds on our computers but says Bostrom if these are true simulations of the world then that world in the simulation will itself develop the ability to simulate worlds and the world that they simulate is if a proper simulation will itself be able to simulate worlds and they'll be able to simulate worlds and they'll be able to simulate worlds

and so on so you have this sort of chain of simulated world all beginning with the first world which is the only one that's actually real and not simulated and Bostrom says what's more likely that we happen to be in the very first real world or that we're in one of the potentially billions or trillions of simulated realities just on sheer probability we should think we're almost certainly in a simulation for what it's worth I'm not super convinced by this mostly because I'm suspicious that we will ever be able to simulate human consciousness that's a

big topic and perhaps one for another video but I have had Nick Bostrom on my podcast and we did talk about AI Consciousness I also have a whole video explaining the meaning of the evil demon and decart's famous phrase I think therefore I am all available in the description below next why does anything exist this is one of the most naive philosophical questions that anybody can ask it's one of the first questions that anybody can ask and one of the most profound why is there stuff if you consider the possibility that there could have been

nothing it seems like there could have just never existed anything ever and yet there's stuff there are chairs and there are trees and there are minds and there are colors and there are all kinds of weird things I mean there may even be things called morals if you're a moral objectivist there are all kinds of weird things that exist either materially or immaterially none of that had to be and this can cause an existential crisis I think in two ways because when you start trying to answer this question you might say well I guess it

just exists for no reason and we'll never know which is is quite existentially troubling but if you determine that there is some answer as to why anything exists there's some reason that you've discovered maybe it's because God created the world and designed it in this way then you've introduced something like purpose and purpose that's externally put upon you and now you have this teeology in your life whether you like it or not so when you really reflect on the fact that there could have been nothing but there is stuff you're either going to be left

with this really uncomfortable agnosticism about why you're here in the first place or possibly land on an answer which might just revolutionize your entire life acknowledge J M of death okay this one's pretty straightforward when you realize that you're going to die for the first time it can be a little bit scary most people know they're going to die some people think they might be able to escape it we'll see how that goes for them but most people think that they are mortal fine but when was the last time you really acknowledged it I don't

mean just accepted that it's true I mean sat down for 20 minutes and thought about nothing other than your own mortality and really tried to comprehend what it means that one day you will not exist I did this once when I was a teenager and I don't think I've ever done it since partly because it scared the absolute living out of me these days I'm a little more agnostic about the nature of mind and the existence of God and the afterlife and so I suppose that that provides me with some comfort but I must say

that when it comes to existential crisis it doesn't get much more straightforward than realizing that your time is limited on this planet having said that some people do think that the shortness of life is what gives it its meaning they say that if life were infinitely long then every day would be meaningless it's like having infinite money in your bank account what's $1 to you it's meaningless it it has no value essentially whereas if you've only got $100 in your bank account then $1 can be quite a lot of money to you so the acknowledgement

of death may lead to an existential crisis but it may also lead to a recognition of the very thing that gives life meaning in the first place okay we're moving down a level sympathy is created by self-pity I'll admit that I don't actually know exactly what this is getting at I suspect it's something like the idea that our care for other people is actually only a derivative of our care for ourselves is it just some evolutionary wiring and if if it is evolutionary wiring then why would it evolve surely Evolution favors what will help me

to survive so why would I evolve a capacity for caring about other people oh well it must be that in some way caring about other people is good for me that might be a true evolutionary account of how morality evolved but it's not a very wholesome one especially when you consider your love and care for your friends and realize that that might just be some kind of evolutionary trick like I say I don't know if that's what this is actually getting at it's just my best guess last thursdayism what on Earth is that well put

simply it is the supposition that the entire universe and everything in it was created last Thursday that's it why would anyone believe this well as far as I can tell nobody actually does it's more like a thought experiment which is why maybe it doesn't belong on the existentialist Iceberg the idea is that you can't disprove that the Universe was created last Thursday it might have been and all of your memories might just be an illusion that were created at the same time so okay nobody really believes this but why does the thought experiment exist it

generally comes up in two contexts the first is this radical skepticism again the idea that we can't justify some of even our most basic fundamental philosophical beliefs the second context is specifically young Earth creationism this is a branch of Christianity that believes the universe is about 6,000 years old now one of the great mysteries for the young Earth creationist is the existence of really old stuff like really old stuff millions of years old type stuff things like mountains or fossils these are much older than 6,000 years old so how does the young Earth creationist account

for them well enter the so-called om hypothesis the idea that God created the world 6,000 years ago but with the appearance of old age why would he do this well your guess is as good as mine but some suggestions include the functionality of the world it needs things like mountains and so God created them looking really old but also it could be a religious test God knew that one day Humanity would evolve secular science and it would start telling us evil things like the Earth is older than 6,000 years old so God put these things

here to test us to make sure that we'll stay faithful even in the fath Cas of opposite evidence whatever the reason for people believing in this apparent age hypothesis last thursdayism is kind of a parody of this to show how ridiculous it sounds and how ridiculous it is therefore I think it could be existential crisis inducing in the context of radical skepticism but no more than something like the simulation Theory so I don't really know why it's this slowed down if you want a healthy brain you need a healthy diet and that is where today's

sponsor ag1 can help ag1 is a daily health drink a blend of over 70 vitamins minerals and other ingredients including gut friendly bacteria antioxidants high quality mushrooms and more as I've been trying to improve my physical health ag1 has been a crucial help just one scoop once a day contains the nutrients you need to support your energy and gut health as well as your focus and balance for the work that I do focus is incredibly important and with minerals like copper phosphorus and chromium ag1 is a great morning Habit to keep me on track during

the day these minerals help to unlock the energy from the food that we eat and as the sun science gets better so does ag1 it's already been through 53 different iterations all in the service of producing the best supplement possible so if you want to give it a shot and incorporate all of this into your morning routine try ag1 subscribe now and get a free bottle of vitamin D as well as five free ag1 travel packs with your first subscription go to drink a1.com within reason to get started today you are alone in your brain

if you're a materialist where are you like where do you exist you probably kind of the same thing as your brain you are your brain in effect but where's your brain well it's kind of locked away inside of your skull just sitting there in the dark I mean we have sense data we have our eyes to see and our ears to hear but that's just going through nerves and being translated by our brain it's essentially an illusion I mean your eyes actually see things upside down and your brain flips it over again and you don't

directly engage with sound a vibration hits your eardrum and sends a signal down a nerve which gets translated by your brain into an experience but when you think about it you're actually quite disconnected from it all you're sort of like a person locked in a control room you've got a big Monitor and there are cameras outside so you can see the world and there are speakers and microphones so you can hear everything that's going on too but you're locked in that room and there's no way for you to get out and if one day the

monitor turned off and the microphone stopped working you would just be sat there alone in the dark and I suppose the scary thing is you are in that situation right now it's just that the monitor is switched on and the microphones are still working at least for now we are not alone it would be pretty scary if there were aliens out there not least because they might attack us for literally any reason but also because it should revolutionize our view of Life firstly for the religious the idea that humans are special and that God created

the universe with us in mind would be shattered in an instant but also all kinds of philosophy about humanity and what it means to be a conscious agent as opposed to other animals would be radically altered by alien life but for someone like me I don't know if this is super existential I might have put it a bit higher on the list afterlife skepticism if you believe in God and you believe in the afterlife then you are pretty consoled throughout most of your life that although your friends are dying you're going to see them again

and although you're going to die one day you don't need to worry because you're going to be somewhere better and you're going to be with all your friends again but then you start questioning it does it really exist or is it just a fantasy we've come up with for the purposes of consoling ourselves that can definitely give you some existential dread especially if it's the first time you've encountered the idea however many people get along just fine not knowing I suppose if you knew that there were no afterlife and your skepticism went all the way

in that regard then this would be pretty existential but we've already done the acknowledgement of death thing so I don't know why this would be lower down on the iceberg okay we submerge to the next level and we start with nihilism nihilism is sort of the crown jewel of existentialism in many ways it's the result of an existential crisis rather than the cause of one when you start questioning these things is there an afterlife maybe not oh I'm definitely going to die one day oh I don't know why I'm here the result of this is

to think nothing matters and even if something does matter I have absolutely no way to work out out what it is and I've tried but I can't get there so I'm just going to give up all hope in that project so nihilism is broadly The View that nothing matters that there are no objective values there are sort of different kinds of nihilism you can be an epistemological nihilist or just a moral nihilist or like a broad nihilist about everything but I think this all-encompassing nothing matters in any context is what people tend to think of

when they think of a nihilist I understand why it's here but like I say the other things on this list cause existential crisis this seems to be more the result of one we are alone a controver special Choice putting it below we are not alone there's that famous quote by Arthur C Clark two possibilities exist either we are alone in the universe or we are not both are equally terrifying the author of this chart has decided that they're not equally terrifying and us being alone is more scary than us not being alone I don't know

about this let me know what you think in the comments if we are alone in the universe then we're forced to contend with this image of us sort of being on this rock floating around in cold space and it does all feel a bit scary and isolated but but I will also say that if in this entire Incredible Universe there's only one place where life evolved I think that counts as some evidence towards theism I mean if life just evolves spontaneously we rightfully ask the question as fery famously did where is everyone if life can

just spontaneously evolve on planets then given the abundance of Life permitting planets in the universe where are they however if the entire universe was created with the express intention of Permitting human life on planet Earth that mystery sort of disappears it's of course replaced with the mystery of why the universe would need to be so big in the first place but I've discussed this in depth with my friend Joe Folly from unsolicited advice and that was in a podcast titled seven questions atheists cannot answer but I don't know what do you think what would be

more scary us being alone or us not being alone okay next being born before immortality I think this is getting at the idea that as science advances many people believe we might one day be able to overcome death itself and this day being of course in the future and maybe the near future we might well be living in the L mortal age so it kind of feels a little bit unfair that maybe our grandchildren will get to live forever but we just because we happen to be born before the Scientific developments that made it possible

will not get to live forever there are a few problems with this if you ask me one is that I'm not sure if science will one day overcome death but when it comes to immortality materially speaking I just don't think this is possible even if we develop the technology to avoid death on planet Earth One Day the Sun is going to eat the Earth and maybe if we've escaped the Earth by then that planet will one day die and wherever we've spread to that planet will one day die too and eventually the universe is going

to come to some kind of end whether it be a big freeze or heat death or whatever it's not the kind of environment in which I think conscious experience and materially existing human beings even can obtain but also even if that were possible would you want to live immortally in this heat death or big freeze Universe it doesn't sound super attractive to me and so the idea that I'm born before immortality is actually pretty consoling deeper we plunge dual Consciousness Theory okay this is a fun one dual Consciousness theory is broadly speaking the idea that

two consciousnesses can exist in one brain how can this happen well one way is as the result of a surgery called a corpus callosotomy your brain as you probably know is split into two hemispheres and these hemispheres are connected by a group of fibers called the Corpus colossum and this allows as well as impedes communication between your two hemispheres a corpus callosotomy is the severing or partial severing of the Corpus colossum and this is most commonly done as a treatment for extreme cases of epilepsy when the Corpus colossum is severed communication between the two hemispheres

is disrupted they can still communicate to a limited degree through other means but we do sometimes begin to see some weird things happening in 1908 it was reported that there was a woman whose left hand would sometimes attack her her left hand would grab her throat and try to strangle her and require her to use her right hand and the rest of her body to fight it off since then there have been many documented cases of this so-called alien hand syndrome where somebody's limb can do something completely contrary to their will and seem to have

a mind of its own this isn't always dangerous but it can result in people for instance pouring out a cup of coffee on the floor that they've just brewed or in some cases one hand might be trying to put on clothes to start the day whereas the other hand then goes to take them off because it wants to stay in bed or something this is an extremely interesting but of course also horrifying condition for a person to live with and it's best documented in cases where somebody has undergone a corpus callosotomy now you may know

that the right hemisphere of your brain broadly controls your left arm and the left hemisphere of your brain broadly controls your right arm and so if the hemispheres aren't communicating with each other it might make sense that your arms would start wanting to do different things and this is seen by some as supportive evidence that at least in cases of split brain patients like those who've undergone a corpus callosotomy that there are two consciousnesses sort of in battle with each other in this one human brain I recorded a podcast earlier this year with Ian mcgilchrist

author of the master and his Emissary which is about the two hemispheres of the brain and how they kind of do different things and have different ways of approaching the world so even if it might be most obvious in split brain patients it might still be the case that there are two consciousnesses within you you just don't notice it as much because your Corpus colossum is allowing them to communicate with each other and work in Harmony and this got me thinking about those split brain patients if you have alien hand syndrome and your left hand

is trying to do something and you have no idea what it's doing and can't control it if this is the result of two consciousnesses then you're only aware of the one that doesn't want the hand to be moving so where is the Consciousness that does want to move the hand is it sort of Trapped somewhere without any ability to speak or communicate the split brain patients have this Consciousness within them that's controlling that alien hand but it can't get out through the mouth or any other means of communication is that alien hand trying to tell

us something I don't want to think about it observation creates the universe okay it's generally thought that the material world around us exists whether we're here to observe it or not but some people think that the Universe only exists because of our observation or because of our mind sort of creating it I suppose the person to reference here is George Barkley and his philosophy of idealism this is the view that there are no material objects there's no Material World the only thing that exists are ideas in people's minds I don't have the time or the

expertise to go into George Barkley's philosophy in depth here but the basic idea is that the universe is kind of created by the mind or is an idea or set of ideas within the mind and the idea that the universe is created by observation suffers from a similar objection to George Barkley's worldview that objection is this if the universe only exists because it's being observed suppose I light a candle and then I Leave the Room an hour later I come back into the room and the candle has melted but if the universe only exists in

so far as it's being observed how is this possible if the candle only exists if it's being observed then when when I left the room it should have ceased to exist and when I came back it might have started to exist again but it should be in the same state that I left it it has to have existed in the meantime in order to have melted but how does it exist if the universe is created by observation in the context of George Barkley he had a very straightforward answer to this well the candle is still

being observed when you leave the room just not by you it's being observed by someone else can you guess who so George Barkley's idealism is at least in his view a novel proof for the existence of God God is the ultimate Observer who creates the universe now I think that if you believe the universe is created by observation then you do suffer from this objection a little bit and maybe are LED into the hands of this argument for God's existence so in the context of the existential crisis Iceberg well this might be something that doesn't

cause an existential crisis it might actually solve one because it leads you right into the hands of an argument for the existence of God mystery of Consciousness well Consciousness is the most mysterious and yet familiar thing in the world we know absolutely nothing about it and yet we cannot perceive anything except through it I've spoken about this a lot so I won't go into detail here but that's kind of the existential part the idea that this fundamental thing about our experience the very window through which we perceive the world or are able to think at

all is something so foreign to us that we don't even understand the mechanism by which it works not only that but we don't even seem close to coming up with a solution to the mystery of Consciousness so the thing that's most fundamental to our experience as sentient human beings is a complete and utter and impenetrable mystery to us how fun okay next level deeper we plunge past and future exist simultaneously the most common view of time is the so-called a theory of time a theory states that the present is all that exists time genuinely flows

the past is no more and the future is yet to be but there's also the B theory of time this suggests that past future and present all exist on something like a Time block and that we're sort of perceiving one part of the time block and that's what we call the present on this view things like objects or people don't have three dimensions they have four dimensions they actually have four dimensions right now they have a dimension left to right forward to back up to down but also past to Future so the past version of

you from 5 minutes ago is as much a part of you now as the left hand side of your body is likewise future you is a part of you it's a bit like if I could only see my left hand and my right hand was behind my back I can't see it but it's still very much there this will have all kinds of implications for example free will if your future self kind of already exists can you really have any choice in what it does but also it gives us reason to doubt our intuition because

intuitively we do travel through time intuitively the past doesn't exist anymore but if the B theory of time is correct we have to abandon that intuition which tells us that the way that we initially view the world is often philosophically completely and utterly wrong now I find this interesting but not particularly existential at least not compared to the other stuff we've been talking about so I'm a bit surprised to find it this low down but maybe I've just misunderstood what the author is getting at and if the author is watching this video then well let

me know okay everybody's heard of determinism right well get ready for super determinism what is super determinism well normal storeo determinism is the view that everything happens in accordance with a determined chain of events if you could know the direction and speed of every atom in the universe then in principle you could predict everything that's going to happen in the future with 100% accuracy it's a little bit like how when you flip a coin it feels random but if you actually knew all of the physical conditions of the coin you could predict with 100% accuracy

whether it would be heads or tails determinism says that the whole universe works in this way things seem to be subject to chance but actually they're not at all now you may have noticed that anytime you ever bring up this subject ever to anybody the very first thing they say is what about quantum physics everybody's heard that quantum physics involves some element of Randomness that electrons don't actually exist in one place or another but there's some kind of wave of probability and that there's actually a lot of chance going on at the most micro level

of our universe well sure yeah maybe no one knows for certain what's going on down there but there is this view called super determinism which as far as I understand is sort of like determinism but applied to quantum physics I'm not a physicist so I'm kind of the wrong person to ask but as far as I understand superdeterminism allows us to do things like retain the actual reality of particles rather than having these Quantum probability clouds if you want to learn more there are some great YouTube videos on the subject including by people like Sabine

hossenfelder or Arvin Ash those two I think actually have differing views on the matter so maybe worth checking both of them out although I'm not sure because again I don't fully understand all of this stuff but basically I think that what's going on with super determinism is the removal of Randomness even at the quantum level why would this cause an existential crisis maybe because of free will if somebody believes in Free Will the idea that the universe is determined can be a big problem for their worldview I mean if the way everything is going to

go is completely determined from The Big Bang then you can't really be said to be in control of the future of your own actions so a lot of people take refuge in the idea that no there is some Randomness in the universe it's not all determined I think this is totally misguided I'm just going to be blunt here because Randomness is something which by definition you're not in control of either if something happens truly randomly it's part of the definition of random that you didn't have some determinate C in making it occur now in my

experience when I've argued that Free Will doesn't exist people often do bring up Quantum Randomness as a kind of retort so I understand why superdeterminism would cause an existential crisis for these people but to be honest the existential crisis should have been there anyway because of course even if there is Randomness in the universe you're not in control of it human life is a momentarily Universal anomaly I think that's supposed to say a momentary Universal anomaly that is to say that in the course of the universe something like human life or conscious existence is an

anomaly it's a sort of accidental flash that will come and it will go and the universe will go on mindlessly for the rest of Eternity it's a bit like that clip from True Detective where Matthew mccc's character rust I think his name is I haven't seen the show is in a car talking about how human consciousness is some kind of cosmic accident and he's being all nihilistic about it I think that's kind of the thought that's supposed to be captured here and obviously if we are just some kind of cosmic accident that's not the most

existentially fulfilling revelation in the world so I can understand why it would be on this list but again maybe I've misunderstood what it's getting at going deeper now we are underneath the iceberg the brain creates the flow of time to be honest I find this difficult to separate from the previous idea of the past and future existing simultaneously because if the past and the future exist simultaneously then where does time come from it's got to be an illusion of the mind so I think it's kind of similar to that boltman brain oh boy one way

to think about a boltzman brain is to consider that over an infinite amount of time extremely unlikely things are guaranteed to happen if the universe existed for an infinite amount of time and there were just atoms floating around everywhere then given that it's infinite these atoms would form spontaneous structures and then dissolve and every structure that you could possibly think of that can be made of atoms would at some point exist the second law of Thermodynamics says that entropy will always increase over time and entropy is the amount of order or lack of order in

a system in practice this means that if I spray an aerosol can over on this side of the room particles will be released and they'll be on this side of the room but given enough time they'll spread across the room and eventually they'll be spread evenly across the room why does this happen because atoms are randomly vibrating in different directions and given enough time they just happen probabilistically to spread out evenly but we are just talking about probability here it's not impossible in principle for all of those particles that came from that aerosol can that

are spread across the room to just spontaneously come together and jump into a water bottle on the table over there it's just so unimaginably unlikely that we can basically treat it as a law that that's never going to happen but suppose you had an infinitely existing Universe when you have an infinite amount of time unlikely events aren't just probably going to happen they're definitely going to happen it's a bit like the monkeys on the typewriters given enough time they'll produce the works of Shakespeare it's not clear that would actually happen in that example but you

get the point Randomness over an infinite amount of time is such that even the most EXT extremely unlikely events will happen in fact they'll happen over and over and over again because we're talking about an infinite amount of time here so the realization that boltzman of boltzman brain Fame had was that in this infinite Universe where everything that could be made of atoms is made sometimes brains will spontaneously form brains are just made of atoms after all and everything does get made and what's more brains can spontaneously exist with a bunch of false memories a

little bit like the simulation or last thursdayism the idea that brains can have fake memories of the past well sure I mean memories are just brain activity and that's just made of atoms so there will be brains that spontaneously exist with a bunch of false perceptions and false memories as a matter of certainty in an infinite Universe of atoms bumping around with each other and given the fact that these spontaneously existing brains with fake memories are going to happen much more commonly than actual brains evolved in the traditional way requiring the evolution of galaxies and

stars and planets and simple life and the evolution into human life and the evolution of Consciousness and all of this kind of stuff right if you want to create a real brain with real memories all of that needs to happen and that's got a much lower state of entropy than just the brain spontaneously coming into existence now of course that less likely State of Affairs will still happen remember everything happens in an infinite amount of time but it will just happen much less so in this infinite Universe of atoms bumping into each other there will

be far more of these brains which are known now as boltzman brains than there would be real brains with real experiences and just like with the simulation argument we have to ask what's more likely that you're one of these real brains with real memories or that you're one of these much more common boltzman brains and if you are a boltzman brain what does that mean it means that you right now are just a spontaneous arrangement of atoms in an infinite universe that at any moment is about to disassemble and you will exist no more so

ultimately this is another kind of radical skepticism it's a little bit more sort of sciency so it seems to have a bit more weight behind it but you'll have noticed that this relies heavily on the idea that there is an infinite past of atoms bumping into each other according to the same laws of thermodynamics that exist in our universe which appears to be a finite Universe which started 13.8 billion years ago of course maybe our universe is just one of many maybe something came before the Big Bang and maybe it stretches infinitely back into the

past but as no reason to think that atoms would vibrate and move in the same way so I think that the philosophical and scientific evidence that the universe is not in fact infinite is enough to do away with this hypothesis but again I am no expert on science I'm just a lowly YouTuber so if I have got this horribly wrong please go easy on me in the comments okay now we're at the bottom we're at the depths of the depths and we're dealing with Quantum immortality there is an interpretation of quantum mechanics put forward by

Hugh Everett called the many world interpretation this suggests that when Quantum events OCC occur every possible outcome actually happens and that the Universe kind of splits into different realities Each of which plays out a different possible outcome again I have a full podcast episode on this topic this time with David Deutsch a fervent believer in the quantum Multiverse if you're interested the link is down below but take for example shring as cat a Quantum event determines whether a cat will die or live and until you open the box the cat is both dead and alive

at the same time the many worlds interpretation says that there are simply two branching realities one in which the cat lives and one in which the cat dies but they both actually happen they're just different branches of reality that then just continue on independently of each other so now we can consider a slightly dark thought experiment known as Quantum suicide imagine the shring is cat setup but instead of the cat it's you there's a button that you can press which through the same Quantum mechanism has a 50% chance of killing you and a 50% chance

of letting you live you press the button and you're still alive okay lucky you you press the button again you're still alive you press the button again and again and again and again and again is this thing on you're still alive either the machine must be broken or you have beaten incredible odds I mean every single time you press that button the likelihood of your survival decreases to vanishingly small proportions so suppose you press the button a 100 times a thousand times 500,000 times and you're still alive what would that tell us well some people

suggest it would tell us that the many world interpretation of quantum mechanics is true if other interpretations are correct and there's a probability of outcomes and by pressing the button you realize one of them it shouldn't take very long for you to die whereas if it's the case that every single possible outcome does happen in some reality then consider this every time you press the button two branches of reality are created one in which you live and one in which you die now which one of those branches does your conscious experience go down that is

from your perspective which of those branches do you end up in well it kind of has to go down the one in which you remain alive it can't go down the one in which you die because you're dead there's no you for that conscious experience to continue in therefore every time you press the button your Consciousness has to go down the branch of reality in which you survive at least in this thought experiment subjectively speaking you can't die I mean there'll be many versions of you in different branches of reality which do die but your

Consciousness is going to follow that Branch where you stay lives thus on the many world's interpretation of quantum mechanics Quantum immortality and actually the final entry on this Iceberg you cannot die from your perspective I think is essentially getting at the same thing one biographer of Everett states that quote Everett firmly believed that his many world theory guaranteed him immortality his Consciousness he argued is bound at each branching to follow whatever path does not lead to death so what I was saying a moment ago about your Consciousness always following the branch in which you stay

alive this biographer is suggesting Everett believed this about life in general that you will always Escape your death because there will always be a Quantum reality in which you survived and that's where your Consciousness will go not just in this convoluted thought experiment but just in life as a whole now I don't know if ever actually thought this this is just one biograph's opinion but it's an interesting thought one interesting fact about Quantum suicide is that it can only ever verify the many world's interpretation it can't falsify it it can't prove it false because in

order to prove it false the person doing the experiment would have to die so if you keep on living you can prove the theory might be true but you can't prove with this experiment that it's false because this would involve dying first it also has to be you that does the experiment you could get somebody else to press that button for you but if you watch them die in front of you all you know is you're in the branch of reality in which they died you don't know where their Consciousness has gone the only person

who can ever know the result of the experiment is the person doing the experiment another biographer of Everett Wikipedia tells me pet to burn says that Everett also privately discussed Quantum suicide that is this weird thought experiment that we've just been talking about but adds that quote it is unlikely however that Everett subscribed to this Quantum immortality view as the only sure thing it guarantees is that the majority of your copies will die hardly a rational goal I don't know about that because it seems to me that the point is that yeah lots of copies

of you will die but the one that retains your conscious experience will always be the one that remains alive hey it's not super convincing but neither are many of the other attempts at immortality that humans have come up with in the past now this is at the bottom of the existential crisis Iceberg for a lot of people the idea of living forever would be great news but of course it's also true that many people are terrified of the prospect of immortality so if we've got no choice in the matter and we're all quantumly Immortal whether

we like it or not for some people that's good news for some people that's bad news and hey to rehearse one overused famous youtubery motto let me know what you think down in the comments but that's the existentialist Iceberg I may have got some of them wrong I may have got most of them wrong if you think that I did let me know in the comments thank you for watching don't forget to subscribe and I'll see you in the next one