English

Quantum Immortality and Non-Classical Logic

History and Philosophy of Physics 2022-05-04 v4 History and Overview Quantum Physics

Abstract

The Everett Box is a device in which an observer and a lethal quantum apparatus are isolated from the rest of the universe. On a regular basis, successive trials occur, in each of which an automatic measurement of a quantum superposition inside the apparatus either causes instant death or does nothing to the observer. From the observer's perspective, the chances of surviving mm trials monotonically decreases with increasing mm. As a result, if the observer is still alive for sufficiently large mm she must reject any interpretation of quantum mechanics which is not the many-worlds interpretation (MWI), since surviving mm trials becomes vanishingly unlikely in a single world, whereas a version of the observer will necessarily survive in the branching MWI universe. Here we ask whether this conclusion still holds if rather than a classical understanding of limits built on classical logic we instead require our physics to satisfy a computability requirement by investigating the Everett Box in a model of a computational universe running on a variety of constructive logic, Recursive Constructive Mathematics. We show that although the standard Everett argument rejecting non-MWI interpretations is no longer valid, we can show that Everett's conclusion still holds within a computable universe. Thus we argue that Everett's argument is strengthened and any counter-argument must be strengthened, since it holds not only in classical logic (with embedded notions of continuity and infinity) but also in a computable logic.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2007.09847,
  title  = {Quantum Immortality and Non-Classical Logic},
  author = {Phillip L. Wilson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.09847},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

14 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T17:14:05.201Z