ITC 68: Quantum Immortality?

In The Crease (ITC) is where history, mystery, and the human condition collide. Hosted by J E DOUBLE F, each episode blends storytelling, analysis, and dark humor to explore the strange, the forgotten, and the unsettlingly relevant.

🎧 New episodes release bi-weekly.
📅 Current Season: ITC Season 4 (Episodes 61–80).

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
M HM.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Streshold as step through past impressive future. We are not
a time.

Speaker 3 (00:35):
To think think think think think think time you think,
you think, you do think.

Speaker 4 (01:41):
So this is itc also known as in the crease,

(02:23):
the place where history, mystery, science, and sometimes a whole
lot of speculation all converge on the thin ice of reality.
I am your host J E. Double Leffn. Tonight we're
asking a question that shouldn't have an answer, but it might.

(02:47):
In our last two episodes, we flirted with death and
dance with reality itself. Episode sixty six, with near death
experiences in the afterlife, took us into the whispered edge
of the void, the people who flatlined, the visions they reported,
and the strange consistency behind stories that no one should
have remembered. And we asked that episode what happens when

(03:12):
you die? And then we wondered what if you don't?
Then in episode sixty seven, we pulled back the curtain
a little bit on quantum physics, hopefully in a fun
and unique way that didn't bore people to death. Now, specifically,
we talked about the delayed choice experiment. A particle can

(03:34):
retroactively decide its own history, as if reality waits for
you to make up your mind. We weren't just bending calls,
and in fact, we were punching holes in it. And
this all leads up to tonight's episode, because if consciousness
can persist beyond biological death, and if reality doesn't lock

(03:57):
it in until it's observed, then there is a possibility
an uncomfortable mind warping late night thought probably he had
too much to drink or smoke that you cannot unthink possibility.
What if, from your point of view, you never actually

(04:23):
die now, not because you're invincible, not because you've made
some sort of deal with the devil, or you know,
taken more than your fair share of daily multi vitamins,
but because reality always finds a way to fork. So
there might be a way where one version of you

(04:44):
flips through you. The observer always wake up, even if
it's in another branch, another outcome, another timeline, and we
call this a quantum immortality hYP Now, and before you
roll your eyes or screamed multiverse nonsense into your coffee mug,

(05:07):
just remember, we've already accepted that particles can exist in
multiple states until measured. We've already proven that light can
act like a wave or a particle, depending on whether
we look at it. We have even proven that looking
can change the past. So tonight we're going to explore

(05:29):
what it means when the observer is you. Now, you've
you've felt it, haven't you that moment where something maybe,
sort of probably should have killed you? I know I did.
I'm like, what four and a half weeks past that moment,
It's very real to me, that close call, that unexplainable

(05:51):
save that falling tree, that missed, the crash, that somehow
didn't happen, the breath you forgot to take, but somehow
house still did. Statistically, something should have gone wrong. Maybe
it did, Maybe it does in another version of reality,

(06:12):
one you no longer occupy, but in this one you're
still here. I'm going to bring up a quote here
real quick. You're alive. You've always been alive, you just
didn't know it. That comes from a Highlander, and that's

(06:32):
sort of where we're going to begin tonight. So let's
begin with something simple. You close your eyes, the lights
go out, your breathing slows, and then your heartbeat stops.
To everyone else, you're gone, Well what happened? And stay

(06:56):
here with me? Now? What if to you, something else happened,
a flicker, a jolt, a jump cut, and suddenly you
wake up just somewhere else. Now, this is a bit
of a terrifying and yet seductive premise of the quantum
immortality hypothesis. It's not a belief system, it's not a cult,

(07:18):
it's not a poorly translated anime plotline. It's kind of
a cold logical extension of quantum mechanics, if you take
it far enough, derived not by mystics but by physicists.
And it says this, if the universe splits every time
a quantum decision is made, then there is always a
version of you that survives, and your consciousness will only

(07:41):
ever continue in that surviving branch. So from your perspective,
you never die. But that doesn't mean you're lucky. It
might actually mean something worse. So let's rewind to the name.
Teen fifties and a world full of crew cuts, cold

(08:04):
War tension, and probably the golden age of radio. A
graduate student named Hugh Everett the Third stepped into the
physics world like a barefoot profit and a cathedra full
of mathematicians. His thesis that the equations of quantum mechanics
didn't need to collapse into a single outcome. Instead, all

(08:25):
outcomes happened simultaneously, each in its own branch of the universe.
And this is what we now call the mini world interpretation.
Imagine you're at a crossroads. You can go left or right. Now,
classic physics says pick one. In reality continues, Everett's version

(08:46):
says go left and right. The universe splits two versions
of you continue, each unaware that the other exists. Now terrifyingly,
think of this. Apply it to everything, every decision, every
decay of an atom, every coin flip, every missed heartbeat.

(09:08):
You don't just live in one world. You're riding that
crust of infinite probability surf. You're not one version. You're
all of them. Except maybe you're not, because you're only
aware of this one, the one that didn't collapse, the

(09:29):
one that didn't fail. And this kind of leads to
something a little bit haunting. Let's go talk with Bredinger's cat,
and you shall we. Now we've all heard the thought experiment.
A cat is placed in a box with a radioactive
atom and a poison capsule. If the atom decays, the

(09:49):
poisoners release and while ah, the cat dies. If it
doesn't decay, the cat lives. But until we open the box,
quantum mechanics tell us that the cat is both alive
and debt, existing in a superposition of states. The act
of observation collapses the possibilities into one reality. Now, let's

(10:10):
say you are the cat, but you're not in a box.
You're in a hospital room. Your hard to stop, your
brain is second from flatlining. Everything is quiet, and yet
something collapses the wave function, and in one branch you
live from the outside. Your family grieves, your obituary is written,

(10:31):
probably poorly, and the world spins on. But you you,
you blink, you gasp, You somehow survive, And to you,
that's the only version that exists. That's quantum and mortality.
You didn't jump from one timeline to another. You didn't

(10:54):
suddenly gain the ability to dodge bullets like Neo and
the matrix, so that would be cool as hell. You
simply never experience death because in any universe where you
would have died, your consciousness just isn't there anymore. So
let's slow this down a little bit. It's not that

(11:16):
you become immortal in the traditional you know, vampire bit
and glowing our anime hair kind of way. It's that
death from a first person perspective becomes unobservable. You can't
experience not being conscious. You can't observe your own non existence.
So your consciousness always continues and whichever reality allows it to. Oh, yes,

(11:42):
this does stretch things. This isn't about waking up in
a new body or hoping hoping dimensions like some Saturday
morning cartoon. It's about your own subjective awareness riding the
wave of non fatal outcomes because that's the only stream
of information it can possibly experience. Now, this raises some

(12:02):
pretty disturbing implications. Say you fall off a building. That fall,
depending on the height, is fatal in ninety nine point
nine percent of timelines, but in one and all you
need is one. That's one of the few things the

(12:25):
Avengers movie got right. A branch exists where you hit
a canopy, bounce, land in a dumpster full of bubble wrap,
and walk away bruised but alive. If quantum immortality is real,
that's the one you continue in. But no one else does,

(12:45):
because in their version of reality, you're dead from their perspective,
You're gone from yours. You're still here again, but now
you're even more alone. And this is where quantum immortality
actually becomes a curse, because you do not get to

(13:08):
pick which branch, You do not get to pause, you
don't get to leave notes for the others. You just
keep going. You outlive the accident, then the disease, then
the war, then somehow a global catastrophe, then the solar flare,
then the probable alien invasion that did not come from

(13:29):
an office centauri, and then the heat death of the universe.
Because at every turn, no matter how improbable, your subjective
experience always finds that one narrow path that allows you
to continue, and it gets narrower every time. Now, let's

(13:50):
be fair here, mainstream science does not accept quantum immortality
has proven fact. The Many World's interpretation is popular among theorists,
but it's not universally accepted. There is no definitive way
to test this hypothesis either, because if you die, you
can't tell anyone what happens. It's kind of a one

(14:12):
player game. Now. Physicist Max Tegmark, who has written extensively
on consciousness and quantum identity, acknowledges the logic of the argument,
but also amits the unfalsibility problem, and I know I
butchered that word, but I'm not going to complain. Here's
the thing. It's compelling, it's elegant, it's possible, but it

(14:35):
doesn't mean we know if it's true. And that's what
makes it both haunting and oddly hopeful. So now let's
bring this back a little bit to something even disturbingly
familiar to probably most of you. Have you had a
moment where you should have died like I did five

(14:57):
plus weeks ago. You know that car crash that did
somehow miss that moment of breathless panic underwater, and then
you surfaced and a sudden illness that just stopped in
one hundred and five point nine degree fever, and boom,
half an hour later, you're fine. Maybe you chalkol it
up to lock. Maybe you gave credit to divine intervention

(15:19):
or the skill of the doctor who was under divine intervention,
or maybe it was just pure randomness. But what if
in every one of those moments you did die in
someone else's timeline, but not yours. You just kept going. Now,

(15:40):
at first, this does sound a little comforting. You can't die. Cool,
time to quit your job? And live off microwave burritos, well,
you know, while base jumping. But that's not that's not
how it works. You don't get every possibility. You can
only get the one that lets you survive, not thrive,

(16:03):
not when the lottery just somehow managed to survive. You're
probably wounded, probably disfigured, probably lost. You probably feel trapped.
You don't become a hero, you just become alone. Because
the reality of this theory is eventually you outlive everyone,

(16:27):
not because they died, but because you took a different path,
a different branch, and no one else followed. No, because
if we take quantum mechanics seriously, if we accept the
superposition of particles, the observer effect that delayed choice paradoxes,
then this is a door we have to look through,

(16:47):
not walk through. Just look and ask the question, what
if this is the last time you ever hear another voice?
What if this is the final branch? What if this
is the reality where you serve but no one else does.
Would you still want to live forever? Or would you
like every creature before you hope for peace? Because here's

(17:11):
the catch. Quantum immortality does not mean immortality. It just
means you never get to experience death, and that might
actually be worse. So let's take a step back. Forget

(17:37):
death for a moment, if such a thing as even
remotely possible, and it said, let's talk about you. Not
just you now sitting in your chair, driving your car,
suspecially eyeing the leftover meat looak in your fridge at
you know, one fourteen in the morning, not that I've
done that recently. I mean every possible version of you.

(18:01):
Because if many worlds is true, if the universe splits
with every quantum interaction, then there's a U who's a
plumber in Boise, or maybe there's you're a ballet dancer
in Prague, a you who never got that tattoo, and
the you who decided to get five more. There's a
version of you who died in a car crash at seventeen,

(18:25):
one who became a millionaire from an app that somehow
you here never invented. One who just didn't sneeze at
the wrong time and thus never rear into the state
senator's BMW. These versions of you, the whole messy lattice
of possibilities, are what we call Schrodinger's children, because in

(18:47):
a way, you gave birth to them. Every decision, every moment,
every hesitation. They are all the offspring of you, or
maybe you or the offspring of theirs. Now, in the
Many World's model, every quantum interaction splits the universe in

(19:10):
the different outcomes, not metaphorically, not maybe literally. You flip
a coin heads in one universe, tails in the other.
You stop for coffee. Congratulations, You just left behind a
version of yourself who didn't and who now maybe somehow
avoids a car crash and goes on to become you know,
I don't know, say president of Finland. Now apply that

(19:34):
to every choice you've ever made, not just the big ones,
small ones, the microscopic ones. That synops fire, that that
white blood cell win that fight, did that photon reflect
or absorb? Every binary fork calls out a new limb
into the tree of you, And before long it's not
a tree. It's a fractal, a tangled, recursive, infinite growth

(19:57):
of realities, some barely different home, highly unrecognizable. Now, as
we haven't been weird already, it does actually get weirder.
You have to ask yourself which one of these versions
is the real you? Now sure you're tempted to say, well,

(20:22):
this one, duh. You know, the one who's listening to
this amazing, awesome program, The ones who made the choices
you remember, the one who's got that same stubborn back
pain and the same awkward memory of waving at someone
who actually wasn't waving at you. Every other version of
you feels the same exact way. They remember their own past.

(20:46):
They have scars and triumphs and regrets and playlists. They
believe they are the real one, and guess what they
are to them, just like you are you now multiple
apply that by infinity. I know there's mathematicians out there
screaming at me. You can't do that. So we're gonna

(21:14):
get a little emotional here. You also have to imagine
a version of yourself who died five years ago from
a peanut allergy that's somehow developed in a different realm.
Another who died in childbirth. What about that one who's
living your dream life, the one who maybe never made

(21:36):
it out of that abusive relationship. Do you feel guilt
for them? Pride? Relief? Do you even owe them anything?
And can you even if you want it to? If
you're the version of yourself that survives, do you carry

(21:58):
their legacy, their trauma, or are you just playing dice
in a cosmic casino with infinite tables and the dealer
never explains the rules. Now, some philosophers have begun calling
this a collection of use the conscious ensemble, the idea
that your experience isn't just your own, it's part of
a larger pattern of identity, and it's something coronemic. And

(22:21):
Rick talked a little bit about tonight on Koran's Reading
Room show that preceded us. The idea that your experience
isn't just your own is part of a larger pattern
of identity. You're not an individual. Your a statistical blob
of probabilities that's been given a voice and shaped by chance. Congratulations,

(22:42):
you're kind of a walking quantum smear. Now you've probably
heard of Fermi's paradox, the where is everybody questioned about aliens? Well,
right here, but we won't go there. There's a lesser
known cousins of that where are all the dead mees?

(23:06):
If quantum immortality is true, they're everywhere and not where
you are, which leads us to kind of a Futurama
style paradox. Good news, everyone, you survived an infinite number
of deadly timelines to make it to this one. Bad news,
it was the crappiest one that let you live. Because

(23:29):
here's the kicker. The universe that lets you survive may
not be a kind one. It may just be technically survivable. Now,
an Act one, we talked about the horror of always
surviving even as others don't. And here in Act two

(23:49):
were kind of, you know, start to confront a deeper dread.
The versions of you that didn't make it might have
been better. That are partners, that are parents, that are people,
but they're gone, and you're still here, not because you're special,
not because you may even deserve it, but because probability

(24:12):
rode your way once more. So what do you do
with that? How do you hold that kind of identity?
If you think about it, it's kind of a survivor's
guilt at a cosmic scale if you let it. So
let's change some metaphors a little bit. You're in a

(24:35):
room full of mirrors. Each one reflects a slightly different
version of you. Some are thinner, some are older, some
are smiling, some are crying, some wearing a very very
unfortunate mustache. Now imagine you walk up to one mirror
and the reflection doesn't match. That's the version of you
who maybe didn't hear this podcast, the one who turned

(24:57):
it off five minutes ago because you're sick of hearing me.
The one who clicked on a TikTok video about raccoons instead.
I get it, they're cute. I understand. The point is
we live our lives assuming we are a singular, unbroken line,
a continuous story. The quantum theory suggests we are just
one thread and a tangled not of timelines, and most

(25:20):
of them are inaccessible. Like your siblings inchroedering yours box
trapped in different outcomes. Are you better or just you know?
Still going on.

Speaker 1 (25:36):
Now?

Speaker 4 (25:36):
Of course we have to go even deeper into the
ghost and the quantum machine. You have to ask what
is consciousness anyway? If your mind is just a pattern
of electrical signals in your brain, and if that pattern
can occur in many different quantum outcomes, then what exactly
are you? You're not a body well, because that's the cays.

(25:59):
You're not a time line because that fractures your pattern.
You're an experience, a sliver of awareness moving through space
time always from the inside. And as we all know,
patterns well, they do repeat occasionally. So even if you
died in a thousand timelines, if there's one where the

(26:20):
pattern continues, you experience. You have to think about a
concept from software. You are the loop that doesn't ever break,
that old fashioned ten high line twenty repeat line ten,

(26:41):
that just keeps going and going and going and going. Now,
let's you know, let's face it, it's the loop is
not because it's efficient, it's not because it's elegant. It's
just that the break never registers from the inside. So
as we're closing in on the break, I have a

(27:02):
little bit of a thought experiment for you tonight. When
you go to sleep, imagine this, As you drift off,
your consciousness slides toward a quantum fork, and one path
your heart gives out a quiet in no pain, just stillness,
and in another you wake up, just like always, that
alarm buzzing way earlier than you had hoped, the same

(27:24):
cracked mug of coffee, the same cat yelling at the
wall for apparently no reason. Now, from your point of view,
which path happened, You're right, the only one you can observe. Now,
imagine that fork happening every second, every breath, every twitch

(27:46):
of an eye, every misfired synapse. In every case, your
version of you continues, always the one that continues. It's
like a video game where the player never sees the
game over screen, just a jarring camera shift to the
moment right before. So we ask, again, if these countless

(28:06):
other versions of you exist, what do you owe them anything?
Are you a survivor, a ghost, a statistical and inevitability,
or are you the mistake, the last one, somehow still
crawling while the others got the rest. Of course, some

(28:26):
physicists weren't against taking this idea too literally. After all,
it is just a hypothesis, a mathematical possibility, unprovable and
deeply unnerving. But that doesn't mean it's not useful. Because
when we think of our lives a single pass, we

(28:47):
tend to grow obsessed with regret. We say things like
if I only had turned left, if only I had
said yes, if only I had asked that girl out.
But if this theory holds weight, you did, at least
some version of you did, and they're living with that now,

(29:09):
just like you're living with this. So let's say quantum
immortality hypothesis is real. You never die. From your point
of view, every fatal encounter binds a loophole, every terminal
diagnosis discovers a one in a million treatment, and every
final moment turns out to be well, not quite final.

(29:33):
And this goes on and on and on. Somehow you
cheat death once and then again and then again, until
the very concept of death becomes theoretical, a thing that
just simply happens to others. So we will be back

(29:53):
in a few minutes. After this brief intermission, I watched.

Speaker 1 (30:30):
Him life and staged again, chanted prayers through rotting skin,
toss the corn plague and suit.

Speaker 2 (30:49):
Smile.

Speaker 5 (30:50):
When the fire of it is the king he whipped
the priest.

Speaker 2 (30:58):
Just live.

Speaker 6 (31:00):
I walked away while the others guy, I'm last fall.

Speaker 5 (31:13):
Still standing when they lose it all, I've seen it rise.
I watched the crawl. Baby, I'm the last fall. They

(31:48):
storm the beaches, blot ashore, I'll.

Speaker 7 (31:54):
Let it smoke and watch the wall her Churchill Brown,
saw Hitler bree.

Speaker 5 (32:06):
And kissed the nurse on b Day.

Speaker 6 (32:13):
The flags all faded names for God, But I still
drink What time can I?

Speaker 1 (32:23):
Yeah, I'm the last of.

Speaker 5 (32:28):
All, still dancing through your easy bro.

Speaker 2 (32:39):
Oh, the barbs of brass.

Speaker 4 (32:41):
The curtain call.

Speaker 5 (32:44):
I stayed behind last one of y'all red dust, new thong.

(33:19):
We touched the sky.

Speaker 7 (33:24):
Sine Mars would be all lullaby. They built their domes,
they dreamed their faith. I drank a long past colony.
The stars burned out, their signals, died.

Speaker 4 (33:49):
And welcome back. Hope you all enjoyed that little break.
When we last left off, we talked about cheating death
again and again, and how death becomes something only others experience.

(34:11):
I mean, at first we would feel like this is
the ultimate gift. I mean, who at first glance wouldn't
want to live forever? But the truth is, eventually you
would be the only one left. Well, let's re visit
the metaphor branching timelines. The universal Universa constantly splits each

(34:36):
time your consciousness filters into the branch where you survive.
But there's no rule that says others do your friends
They made different choices, or they were at the wrong
place at the wrong time, or simply didn't land on
that surviving branch. Maybe they are still alive in some timelines,

(34:58):
but not this one. In this universe, this particular stretch
of collapsing probabilities. You ate it, and maybe no one
else did. That's when the loneliness will set in, because
you're not just immortal. You're now isolated, like a lighthouse

(35:19):
blinking over a dead ocean, still somehow sending signals, but
there's no one else to receive it. Not far too often,
we tend to fantasize about immortality, watch movies like Highlander
and others. We imagine centuries of wisdom, time to read

(35:41):
a hurry book ever written in every book that will
ever be written, time, maybe even see the stars, time
to love and lose and love again, and so on
and so on. The quantum immortality doesn't give you that.
It doesn't make you invincible, doesn't give you healing powers.
It just refuses to let you stop. You'll still get sick,

(36:07):
you'll get injured, you'll still get old. Somehow, there will
always be some slipper of a timeline, some branching thread
that somehow you don't quite succumb to. This will mean pain,
it'll mean suffering. It don't mean pushing forward when your
body is failing, your memory fading, and your bones hollowing

(36:30):
into the chalk. Oh, this isn't the clean immortality of
elves or ai consciousness uploads. It's kind of the gritty
truth of biological immortality, of stubborn cells and duct tape
quantum probabilities. So let's say you're one hundred and seven

(36:50):
years old. You fall asleep one night and don't expect
to wake up, and at ninety nine point nine all
possible timelines guess what you don't, But it only takes one.
A branch that curbs slightly. Your heart decides to hiccup

(37:11):
and recover your blame. Brain flirts with oxygen starvation, somehow
pulls back, and your body just refuses to stop. You
open your eyes. It's now the next day. Everyone thought
it was over. You thought it was over, but you're
still here alone again. Then we'll just keep happening and happening,

(37:37):
and each time, mathematically your odds get worse, the path
gets narrow, the memory moments less pleasant. Eventually you're a
husk of yourself held together by a chance and threadbare possibility.
But yet, somehow, some way, you are still technically alive.

(37:58):
There's a Greek myth worth mentioning here, because if it's
one thing we do talk about. It's smith Sisyphus was
condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a
hill for eternity, only for it to roll back down
every time, over and over, no rest, no escape. Quantum

(38:18):
immortality is kind of a Sissyphis curse, But instead of
pushing a boulder, you're just surviving over and over while
the universe slowly just forgets you. Because eventually, statistically, it's
not just your loved ones who vanished at your city,
at your species. It's your planet, but some branch, some

(38:41):
observe one in a quadrillion timeline always somehow managed to
find a way, a version of Earth that you didn't
quite flood, a space station that doesn't lose power, a
food source that somehow manages to never run out, and
you stubbornly, painfully carry on. At some point, maybe you

(39:03):
find technology to prolong your function, neural augmentation, mechanical limbs,
cryogenic systems, maybe a robot body. You push into the
transhumanist endgame not because it's glorious, but because it's the
only remaining option, and you're cling to consciousness like a
moth clings to the last flickering lamp. And a void.

(39:25):
But the truth is, even machines break, stars do burn out,
and information does become corrupt. Eventually, even data dies unless
unless there's a timeline, some unfathomable, rare offs sheet where
your consciousness is somehow preserved just enough to continue, and

(39:47):
you're still there, somehow, watching waiting. Now here's another unsettling
part of this whole hypothesis. Every moment becomes more precious,
but also more unbearable because you remember not everything. Your
mind just can't hold infinite lifetimes. But you remember the

(40:12):
shape of loss. You remember laughing with someone long dead.
You remember the sound of a city simply doesn't exist anymore.
You remember sky collers no one else can remember anymore.
And with each new timeline, it's a little dimmer, a
little emptier, and a little colder, and eventually, as it
will always happen in this theory, it's just you and

(40:37):
the stars and silence. So imagine you've lived eight thousand lifetimes,
watch civilization rise and fall. You've outlived galaxies. Eventually, you
have to ask yourself, at what point do you become

(40:59):
a god? Is that what? This is a slow motion
hypothesis because from your point of view, you have become eternal, unkillable,
endlessly present. You observe everything a cosmic librarian stacking timelins
in an infinite archive of memory. Well, what happens when

(41:21):
no one's left to ask you a question? When no
one sees you? Can you still be a god if
there are no warshippers? Or are you just now an
echo a footnote in a library that burned down a
billion years ago? Now I get it. I'm on quite

(41:41):
a bit of an existential ledge here, But I love
pushing these boundaries. But let's rewind. What if this whole
thing isn't a curse? What if being the last of
all means being the last witness. Maybe quantum immortality doesn't

(42:02):
make you a god. Maybe it does make you a storyteller,
the one who remembers, the one who honors the other versions,
the one who carries the flame into the darkness. We
all do it, We all are built to do that,
even if no one else is left to hear it.

(42:24):
Maybe survival, even unearned survival, is an invitation to do better,
to learn more, to hold tighter to the meaning you
can make. Because yes, immortality might end up being very lonely,
but it also might just be the space where meaning
grows in silence and endurance in the stretch of impossible time.

(42:48):
So let me ask you something a little strange. Have
you ever just whispered to the dark, not in fear,
but maybe a sort of weird ritual, as if some
part of you believes there's someone listening that might be
the future, you will eventually become that thing in the
dark listening. Not a ghost, not even a god, just

(43:09):
maybe a version of you who couldn't stop surviving, waiting
and hoping, remembering that moment when it all started back
in the twenty first century, when some voice on a
podcast first ask what if you never died?

Speaker 1 (43:27):
Now?

Speaker 4 (43:28):
Of course I'd be a little remiss if I didn't
try to bring a little cosmic humor into this show,
because at a certain point, when you have survived a
thousand disasters, a thousand doom days, a thousand final warnings,
you start to see the absurdity. You live long enough,
and even the end of the universe becomes another Tuesday.
Like Douglas Adam wrote, the universe is big, really big.

(43:51):
You won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind bogglingly big it is.
But what he should have maybe at it in the
same time, and somehow you're still in it. Of course
he did addle this next bit. Even if you decided
to pretend to be dead for a year just for
tax purposes. Now this means, of course, you've earned your

(44:13):
towel and probably the irony of what I just said,
and hopefully the right to laugh at the void, even
if somehow you're the only one left laughing. So as
we know, the universe ends in decay, not in some

(44:38):
big fire, not in some massive, amazing battle, but in
a slow, inevitable unraveling of the order. And that's kind
of the punchline and the final joke of it all,
not because it's funny, but because it's absurd. Everything ends,

(45:03):
except maybe you. Now we've danced this quantum waltz for
now for three episodes, and hopefully you haven't gotten tired
of it. I've tried to bring a little bit of
education and entertainment along. But in ITC. Sixty six we
asked whether near death experiences were just neurofireworks, or were

(45:25):
they something more. We found patterns and stories from across
the globe. Lights, presence, peace, memory. Some in science called
them hallucinations, but we noticed something curious. No one ever
remembers being nothing even after flatlining. Then in itc. Sixty

(45:46):
seven we broke realities back to the delayed choice experiment.
A particle doesn't commit to being a particle until it observed.
Even after it's passed, the measuring device calls and effect. Well,
that seems, you know, optional now till time seems very flexible.
So we sort of concluded between these two episodes observation

(46:08):
isn't just passive, it's participatory. So now here in itc.
Sixty eight we face the deepest consequence. If consciousness is
the observer, and observation determines reality, and there is always
some timeline where you survive, then you might never die,

(46:28):
not in your own inexperience. But we have to ask
what kind of joke is that and what does it
mean for meaning? So let's talk a little bit about entropy.
Entropy is the measure of disorder in a system, the
arrow of time, if you will, the reason why your

(46:48):
ice cream melts instead of unmelts, why your knees don't
get less creaky with age. In physics, all systems move
toward entropy. The universe left to itself becomes more random.
Over time, heat diffuses, stars will burn out, order collapses.
So when we say the universe ends in heat death,

(47:08):
we mean everything spreads out, too thin to do anything useful.
No stars, no change, no contrast, just gray forever. Now,
I'll ask yourself if your consciousness must follow the path
where it survives? What happens when there's nothing left to
survive in when there's no warmth, no sound, no difference

(47:30):
between one moment and the next, Do you technically still
go on? Or are you just aware and a sea
of nothingness?

Speaker 1 (47:41):
Oh?

Speaker 4 (47:42):
Guess what? Congratulations, You're now trapped in the least interesting
possible hell one could imagine. The final entropy isn't external,
it's psychological. So let's try another of flora. Shall we
imagine you're stuck in a room with wallpaper. At first,

(48:03):
you notice the shapes, You count them, You trace them
with your finger. Years past, you start naming every curl,
mapped every imperfection, invent stories for every swirl. Decades the past,
you've seen patterns in the cracks. They begin to speak
to you. Centuries past, you start forgetting why you're even

(48:24):
in this room. Eventually, the wallpaper is the room you
now discovered You're not immortal. You're stuck going through every
name the galactics who to insult them. There is a
danger of meaningless survival because without change, experienced stagnates, and

(48:45):
without contrast memory to cays, and without death, there's no
punctuation in your story, just one eternal sentence running on
and on without breath or pause. And it's entropy that
has the true joke of all of this hypothesis, because

(49:06):
here's the punchline. Quantum immortality is not the conquest of death,
it is the exile from it. A comfort of death
is terrifying as it is lies in its finality. It
gives context, it ends pain, It makes a story a story.

(49:28):
But if you're always in a branch where you keep going,
you just don't get an ending, just increasingly improbable continuations, weaker, lonelier, stranger,
and eventually utterly pointless. The joke isn't that you survived.
The joke is that your survival, without purposes and indistinguishable
from decay, you didn't win. You just never quit running

(49:51):
the race. Now, there's a reason we love stories with endings,
not just the happy ones. Try to ones two because
Endings give shape to what came before. They give meaning
to choice. If Romeo and Juliet live, the story becomes
a melodrama. If Frodo stayed in a shower Shire, the

(50:14):
meaning of the ring is nothing. If dartha Vader just
lives forever, he never actually redeemed himself. Endings let us reflect.
Without them, you never know which part was the middle,
and without a middle, you can't grow. So rival becomes
an indefinite loop, a snake eating its tail, and yet

(50:37):
somehow it's just too tired to chew. I want to
return one last time to the delayed choice experiment, and
that quantum set up. A particle doesn't decide what it
is until after it's been measured. Time sort of becomes elastic,
and that now applies that to you. If your consciousness

(50:59):
is the observer observation collapses reality, then you are the
collapse point. This means you don't know what you are
until the moment of reflection. You were not the story
until you look back on it, which raises a perhaps
even more terrifying question. What if you never get the
chance to look back? What if your story just keeps
stretching forward but never wraps up. You have just become

(51:23):
Schrodinger's final cat, alive and alone, unmeasured and undefined forever
in suspense. Now let's bring this home, shall we. ITC.
Sixty six asked what happens after death that showed us

(51:43):
stories of light, presence, tunnels, and review, and why science
warned us against assuming too much. We couldn't help but
feel those experience meant something. ITC. Sixty seven decided to
shatter time, a little bit particle of deciding their own
past reality, responding to observation not necessarily physics. We maybe

(52:06):
even called it spooky at one point, and maybe it was.
Now in this episode we realize these aren't necessarily separate ideas.
There are steps in a terrifying, elegant staircase. One consciousness persists,
two observation shapes reality. Three. Therefore, you could safely assume

(52:32):
consciousness selects survival. It's not reincarnation, it's not heaven. It's
not even a glitch. It's a loop of probability, where
your awareness always finds that path forward, even when that
path is broken, even when it's not worth walking. I
think that's kind of the true horror, and maybe even

(52:56):
the beauty of quantum immortality. It doesn't give you control,
it gives you continuation, It does have that burden of
always opening your eyes. Again, Let's shift perspective one last time.

(53:17):
What if this isn't a curse? What if it's an opportunity?
What if survival without purpose isn't just a prompt waiting
for you to assign one. Maybe entropies joke only stings
if you insist on a punchline. But if you laugh along,
if you let the absurdity be the meaning, then maybe,

(53:39):
just maybe, the point of immortality isn't to matter forever.
It's to notice right now that you are here still, that,
after everything, the chaos, the statistics, the stars collapsing in silence,
you exist, And maybe maybe that should be enough. Not forever,

(54:02):
but for this moment. And maybe that's all reality ever
was a cosmic accident that feels like purpose because you're
side of it. So where does this leave us? Well,
after three episodes, three tangled quantum theories and a one
hundred existential rabbit holes, we end with a simple, impossible idea.

(54:26):
You might be the final observer of the universe, not
because you were chosen, not because you slapped someone's head off,
not because you're special, but because probability hasn't said no yet.
And in that space that's sliver between chaos and collapse,
you get to decide do you find meaning, do you

(54:47):
make it or do you keep running the simulation just
to see what happens next. Remember, whatever your answer, you've
made it this bar and that counts something. Now, in

(55:11):
two weeks, we're gonna take all that immortal curiosity that
we've had in the last three episodes and we're gonna
cash it in because, let's face it, if you are
going to live forever, you're going to need a hell
of a lot of money. So in ITC sixty nine,
the Exoplanet gold Rush, we're gonna present some stories of greed,

(55:34):
cosmic capitalism, asteroid mining, and why spice Space might be
the next El Dorado, and well it is ITC sixty nine,
So we're gonna have a few spicy jokes along the
way because episode sixty nine nice. Now, this has been
an increase, And if we don't see in two weeks,

(55:56):
just remember there is a version of you who will attend.
I hope everyone has a great evening,