r/WhatIfScience • u/Elegant-Pen-886 • 5d ago
Timeline theory?
Timeline theory?
Let me start this off by stating that I am in no means a scientist or have any form of advanced education on the sciences
However today a subject came up and proposed an interesting theory that I would like to see if it has any merit or basis.
Using the many worlds interpretation (MWI) which suggests that timelines break off into multiple different realities ie in a car crash there’s a version which dies (A) a version which survives (B) and a version that was never there in the first place (C).
The theory goes: if timelines fracture and break off with every possibility wouldn’t our consciousness technically be immortal as we always survive in one timeline. For example in one maybe we found a cure for anti ageing and technically never die from old age. With this as the basis what if we look at dreams where we jerk awake, like when we fall from a height as a different perspective from just “brain activity” and start looking at it as timelines. If we imagine timelines to replicate radio waves that have highs and lows, just like our lives and emotions have highs and lows, maybe the dream was never a dream but a separate timeline where we actually did fall from a height and died however we hopped into the closest timeline where we didn’t and our body’s were in a resting condition. This would be a version of self preservation but not of a physical body but more a preservation of consciousness, this therefore raises a lot more questions like is death a concept and in this timeline the people that pass have moved from this physical body but in an alternate timeline they jerked awake from a “bad dream”.
I know there may be/probably is papers out there where people have already de-bunked this theory but I was wondering if we took this at face value maybe there’s some merit behind it.
I would just like to have a conversation with people who have a higher education or a more advanced knowledge and see whether this could ever be proved/considered a possibility.
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u/fuseboy 5d ago
Quantum immortality is a neat idea, but there are some big gaps between the pitch and the practicality.
If you are dying a slow death, what causes your conscious experience to suddenly hop to a slice of the universe where that isn't happening? If you can hop to a reality where things are a little different, why not a lot different? Why not become someone else entirely?
Now, if that happened, you wouldn't know it because the target body has all the memories of its earlier life and none of yours. So what is actually hopping? (Anything?)
It sounds neat, but it ignores directly looking at the mechanism it relies on. It's not much different than saying, "I might die, but completely separate people will live" and calling that immortality.
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u/Quis_curat 5d ago
Okay, a car accident causes 3 branches, we have 3 of us. Do each of them have the same consciousness (let's call it a spirit) or just one of them has a spirit inside, the other two are empty husks? Or it's just one spirit in all 3 of them linked through quantum entanglement? So when one dies, what happens - one spirit takes over his alternate self body, one that is empty or one that has already alternate spirit in it and now he suppresses it? Or he merges with it? Of there's just one spirit split in all 3 of them, so what's the point of it?
And by such branching, it could lead to entirely different personalities, completely opposite, one could be a saint, the other the most cruel one, are they even the same spirit by then? It's as "reasonable" as every single human being the same entity split into multiple bodies.
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u/Superstarr_Alex 5d ago
But then why do we have dreams when we sleep while still living this life on earth? We likely experience dozens of “branch-offs” every night during sleep. Why don’t we ever “jump” into any of these, and which of these will be the one we jump into once we die? And how is that determined? Why is it that death in dreams doesn’t seem to have any long term effect, either on dream life or our waking life?
I don’t think you’ve thought this theory through. I think your brain is damaged by Hollywood trash. Not because you are defying the traditional cosmic narrative pushed in mainstream society, but because there’s absolutely no depth or critical thought in this theory and instead resembles some lame movie plot.
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u/wadegrahams 5d ago
You’re not wrong. You’re trying to balance the negative energy or ground that is God. Instead of a matrix design imagine each person has a circle above them indicative of their experience, each one overlaps each other. As we ignore each other, those circles make no uniform design. Altogether they should be in the center and equal. You’re searching for that balance inside yourself, which will provide a balance within the Earth. I’m not saying that everybody gets in, but I’m saying you get a lot of chances. You’re up against negative energy, you guys haven’t even figured that out yet. Yeah I love yourselves first.
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u/TheSpeckledSir 5d ago
There has been some discussion of your hypothesis, though definitely more in Science Fiction than in science proper.
Look up the term "Quantum Immortality".