The following takes into account my understanding of the Many Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and a healthy dose of navel-gazing (warning -- a) I am in no way a physicist, and b) I’m only half serious about my “conclusions” and this is most probably BS...funny BS, though):

In the moment preceding my death (let’s say by a Mack truck), the universe branches off into an infinity of possible following moments. I turn, startled and frozen in place, to see the truck barrelling towards me, metres from my body. Next, anything can happen, and does happen. In the vast majority of universes, I am killed on impact, and I am dead and buried.

In a very small fraction of those infinite universes, however, I survive. When the wavefunctions of all the particles involved in my death are collapsed, there is a very small probability, for instance, that all the molecules which make up the truck suddenly jump a few metres to the other side of the road, and the truck passes by me without injury. Or I could be saved any number of other ways, and in all those universes, I live to see another day.

In our moment-to-moment experience, we’re collapsing wavefunctions left, right, and centre. The result of that continuous collapse is whatever the next moment is. In a moment, I will be split up into infinite selves, each an equally valid though unequally probableme”. When the truck hits me, in most universes I will be dead, so the apparent continuity of my identity and experience will end. Poof!

So, that continuity of identity will instead be forced to take one of the paths through the branching tree of universes which results in the continuation of my life. This will keep on happening. Again. And again.

Once I’m a hundred and fifty or so, with a variety of near-death experiences under my belt, I’ll no doubt be world famous. By five hundred, I will probably be in a coma and live only in dreams (since it would be extremely improbable for me to be conscious at that age) unless science has found a way to revive me by then. Of course, they’ll probably figure it out eventually, so eventually I’ll be walking again with an eternity to marvel at the fact that I’m still alive and to sort out The Really Hard Questions in Life (unless they've figured those out too). The same will happen to you too, in other universes.

In short, I can’t die because when I do I’m someone else...me. :)

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.