Considerations of immortality usually bring to mind the idea of unending existence, a freedom from the concerns of annihilation and death.  Often times, talk of the immortality of the soul arises in conjunction with the subject of immortality. In this address I should like to make some remarks on the possibility of immortality, but only after laying out four troublesome concerns which seem to present roadblocks to such a possibility, at least in terms of maintaining one’s personal identity. I will close with but a suggestive argument, but one which hints that these apparently disparate concerns might actually be but a single problem, and a resolvable one at that.

 

I. Unending existence is too simple a condition for immortality.  As a thought experiment, suppose a doctor relates to his patient that a strange new serum has been discovered.  Upon taking this serum, all of the standard biological processes which lead to aging are cured: (1) the effects of reaching the end of a finite turnover of cells are no longer noted in the patient, (2) chromosomal aberrations cease, thus eliminating copying errors when cells duplicate, and (3) the accumulation of metabolic, inadvertently destructive or post-translational errors from cell division (along with waste products) no longer occur.  The only side effect, unfortunately, is that it uses the full gamut of sodium, potassium, and calcium ions in your brain to jump-start the serum process; the brain is destroyed instantly. 

 

Would this strange new serum be good news?  Not at all, since unending biological functioning is not what is at issue in immortality. Ultimately, one desires some sort of permanent preservation of personal identity, not just unceasing metabolic integrity.

 

II. Neither is a freedom from the concerns of annihilation and death sufficient to capture what is desired.  Essential to many of the world’s religions is a doctrine of an eternal afterlife. But well known narratives from Christianity and Islam show why freedom from annihilation and death could (in principle) not be good news:

 

"Then the rich man also died, and was buried; And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame. But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented. And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence." (Luke 16:22-26 King James Bible Translation)

 

"Those who are wretched shall be in the Fire:  There will be for them therein (nothing but) the heaving of sighs and sobs:  They will dwell therein for all the time that the heavens and the earth endure, except as thy Lord willeth:  for thy Lord is the (sure) accomplisher of what He planneth. And those who are blessed shall be in the Garden:  They will dwell therein for all the time that the heavens and the earth endure, except as thy Lord willeth:  a gift without break.  (The Noble Quran, 11:106-108)"

 

Instances from other religions could be adduced.  The lesson here is that mere perpetual existence is not enough. Ultimately, one wishes that this existence be of a desirable quality.

 

III. When talk of a "soul" arises, immediately concerns of psychology and metaphysics become relevant.  Suppose, as yet another thought experiment, an engineer produces a wondrous new nano-technology machine.  At two key moments during life, he might eagerly announce, a human would step into this device.  At the first trip into the device, a full molecular scan of all 10^27 atoms (or so) in the body is recorded.  At the second trip into the device, ideally many years later, the molecular structure of the body is instantly dissimilated.  Furthermore during this second trip, a reference is taken of the earlier scan, and an appropriate amount of organic goo is added or subtracted to precisely match the configuration of materials original to the 10^27 atoms as configured at the first scan.  As an application – Jones at 30 walks in; Jones at 30 walks out.  Years later, Jones at 80 walks in; Jones (allegedly) at 30 walks out. Has the engineer done Jones a favor?

 

The engineer has not done Jones a favor, even if Jones could, as it were, "wash, rinse, and repeat" this whole cycle indefinitely. First off, it is anything but clear that the human exiting the machine at the second trip is Jones, that he is or has the same “soul.”. Call the person who steps out (whether he is Jones or not) "Jones*". Presuming that memory is a physiological structure encoded by neural pathways, Jones* would not preserve the memory of Jones, since Jones* would not have the encoded neural pathways of an 80-year-old, but only of a 30-year-old. Hence, all that Jones was (after 30, anyway) as the collection of memory experiences upon second entry into the device is lost; thus, Jones is effectively dead. Immortality would offer little if the best results obtainable were a recurring coda of temporal duplicates.

 

Second, even if  the eager engineer were to modify his machine (due to popular demand) so as to configure all the neural pathways of Jones* to match Jones, this would still present problems.  Jones does not want a perfect duplicate to exit the machine at the second trip, but Jones himself wants to exit the machine.  Granted, if all were done discretely, Jones’ wife, Jones’ mistress, and Jones’ poker buddies would think that Jones* was Jones, and even Jones* himself might think he was Jones, but thinking that such-n-such is true is hardly a guarantee that such-n-such really is true, as any jilted lover can attest.

 

Third, the Jones/Jones* problem is at issue in religious accounts of resurrection.  Since humans share substantial portions of their molecules with others who have preceded them in history (i.e., coffins leak, eventually, and nature cycles the organic material back through the biosphere), any resurrection cannot use all the original molecular collection for each individual to be resurrected. New material would be required; thus, worries about a duplicate thinking that s/he was the original person arise for the pious as well as for the pagan.

 

Apparently, on any account where immortality requires a remanufacture of a body in order to maintain personal identity, seemingly insurmountable difficulties present themselves.

 

IV. Some views of quantum immortality approach the general issue of being immortal differently. In this section, I first dutifully paraphrase that which I do not fully understand – namely, a particular interpretation of quantum theory.  Second, I apply that which I do not fully understand to a thought experiment which is just barely sane. In a phrase, I will be speculating wildly, as philosophers will occasional do.

 

I begin, then, the dutiful paraphrase.  If one takes a position that the Schrödinger equation denotes all time everywhere, then one may consistently defend what has come to be known as The Many-Worlds interpretation of Quantum Theory. When a observer makes an observation (or takes a measurement), s/he takes the Schrodinger wave equation to model the entire system, which, recursively, includes both the object and the observer.  A surprising outcome is that such an observation causes the wavefunction to collapse into a plurality of branch lines, or “worlds.”  Of course, there are at least as many observation events as there are observers; moreover, since some observers (humans, for example) can take in multiple events simultaneously, there are a tremendous number of collapses in the wavefunction, hence branch lines.  Thus, there would be many, many worlds indeed.

 

Although the Many-Worlds interpretation is strange, the Mathematics is, so one hears¹, simpler; and, the number of required theoretical entities in Physics is, conveniently, lesser than in other interpretations of quantum theory. Nevertheless, it strikes not a few physicists as distasteful that there are an infinite number of (apparently) non-observable worlds.  For example, Stephen Hawking writes, "I must say that personally, I have been reluctant to believe in extra dimensions, but as I am a positivist, the question `Do extra dimensions really exist?' has no meaning. All one can ask is whether mathematical models with extra dimensions provide a good description of the

universe."²  However, even if not taken by the metaphysics, Hawking is optimistic about the model of the Many-Worlds interpretation.  He continues:

 

But what has convinced many people, including myself, that one should take models with extra dimensions seriously is that there is a web of unexpected relationships, called dualities, between the models. These dualities show that the models are all essentially equivalent; that is, they are just different aspects of the same underlying theory, which has been given the name M-theory

 

It turns out that all this has direct implications for personal identity as it applies to immortality.  To this point, Max Tegmark, in a 1997 paper³, suggests a rather odd experiment”

 

a physicist sits in front of a gun which is triggered or not triggered by radioactive decay. With each run of the experiment there is a 50-50 chance that the gun will be triggered and the physicist will die. If the Copenhagen interpretation [of quantum theory] is correct, then the gun will eventually be triggered and the physicist will die. If the many-worlds interpretation is correct then at each run of the experiment the physicist will be split into a world in which he lives and one in which he dies. In the worlds where the physicist dies, he will cease to exist. However, from the point of view of the physicist, the experiment will continue running without his ceasing to exist, because at each branch, he will only be able to observe the result in the world in which he survives, and if the many-worlds [interpretation] is correct, the physicist will notice that he never seems to die.⁴

 

Tegmark notes, however, that almost all satisfactory conditions for the relevant superposition equation will have any lab assistant in the experiment, “perceiving that he has killed his boss.”⁵  Yet the physicist himself does not experience death. Another well-circulated thought experiment runs along the same lines as suggested earlier by Tegmark:

 

Suppose a physicist detonates a nuclear bomb next to him. In almost all parallel universes, the nuclear explosion would vaporize the physicist. However, there is a small set of alternate universes in which the physicist somehow survives. The idea behind quantum immortality is that the physicist would only be able to experience the universes in which he survives, even though they may be a small subset of the possible universes. In this way, the physicist would appear from his own standpoint to be living forever.⁶

 

On analysis, the quantum cases appear to be merely augments of the earlier noted duplication problems of Jones/Jones*.  It may just turn out that mother nature or, for the pious among us, God, already (as a matter of physics) forced the issue long before humans were compelled to ponder the principles, if not consequences, of their own technology for attempted immortality. As things now stand, it appears that immortality advocates must respond to not only issues of serial duplication as in Jones/Jones* scenarios, but also to issues of parallel duplication, as seen in these quantum scenarios.  Indeed, I am prepared to offer a few remarks outlining one such response.  I shall dub my position, ‘Holographic Immortality.’ 

 

V. Let me introduce the following position: Holographic Immortality offers an interpretation of and a redress for both types of duplication issues just noted.  In order to explain this position, I will first give a thumbnail sketch of just what is a hologram.  I will next discuss how this ties into an emerging view on cosmology.  Finally, I will discuss how such a view on cosmology seems informative on the two earlier noted issues of duplication specifically, and how it also appears informative on the issue of immortality generally.

 

Consider how information is stored in a common photograph. A photograph is a collection of points which have recorded the intensity of a light wave which happens to have struck a particular spot on the film (or the plate, or the silicon panel, etc.).  By means of filtering, the color information may be recorded as well. Note that the intensity of the light is its amplitude, and the color of the light is its frequency (or, perhaps, complex of frequencies).  One often notes that photos are life-like, but attentive observers do not confuse a wall photo portraying a landscape with a window exposing a landscape.  This is because signals -- and light is a signal -- typically have another important property in addition to frequency and amplitude, what is known as ‘phase’.

 

A photo does not preserve the phase(s) from the light field of the original scene, but a hologram does preserve such.  A hologram records the phase and amplitude information of a scene, along with a (typically) single wavelength for decoding the information.  When the information of a hologram is decoded, the light field phase and amplitude information matches the original scene, thus allowing an observer to detect depth within a (now artificially) rendered scene. Holograms are typically monochromatic (generally viewed in green or red), since only one frequency of wavelength, usually from a laser, is used in encoding.

 

As an engineering matter, the beams of light coming from the original scene are combined with the single wavelength encoding beam.  Since there will be a superposition of the light wave signals, these beams will interfere with one another and produce intensity fringes.  These fringes are recorded as diffraction patterns on photographic film.  Essentially, therefore, information from three-dimensions is stored into two dimensions. 

 

However, were one later to pass a properly tuned wavelength beam, once again, thru the film, the diffraction patterns would allow one to reconstruct the phase and intensity information, and subsequently allow one to see the resultant three-dimensional image from multiple perspectives, as is normally the case in perceptual experience.

 

One of the noteworthy properties of an encoded hologram is that every part contains the image of the whole scene.  In fact, one can cut off a part of a hologram and render an entire three-dimensional image through it. While each part of a hologram contains a particular perspective of the image, it nevertheless includes the entire scene. Put differently, while an attenuated information set, decoded through a small section, would yield a particular point of view, it would still contain information about the whole scene.

 

So ends, then, a thumbnail sketch of just what is a hologram. I now move to tie what has just gone before into an emerging view of cosmology.

Physicists are beginning to take seriously that our universe has more than the 3 or 4 dimensions which are typically plugged into a Newtonian physics equation.  Earlier, we noted a quote from Stephen Hawking referencing something called M-Theory.  M-Theory, sometimes loosely called ‘String Theory’ posits that there are 10 (or 11) dimensions.

 

Earlier noted was that  that holograms can store three dimensional information in two dimensional photoplates.  Also noted was how the encoding and decoding of such plates works to restore the originally encoded three dimensional image.  If we posit that the M-theorists are correct, then human existence might be more than 3 (or 4) dimensional.  From work in holography, it is well known that information for three dimensions can be encoded in two dimensions. I think this gives speculative warrant to the claim that information of n dimensions can be stored in n - 1 dimensions, at least in cases where there is a minimum of three dimensions available.⁷  Thus, while human personal identity might seem to end when measured against the 3 or 4 commonly reckoned dimensions, information about personal identity might be dynamically stored in other dimensions beyond the 3 (or 4).  Again, by reference to holography, with 7 or so more dimensions available, there seemingly is plenty of information space to maintain the necessary coherence for personal identity.

 

Recall the earlier outlined quantum duplication experiments as regarding the physicists. One of the assumptions in these experiments is that there is an exclusive physicist – namely “the physicist” who maintains personal continuity throughout the gun experiment, and "the physicist" who maintains personal continuity throughout the nuclear bomb experiment.  But note how this assumption slipped by so easily as an unargued claim in each story.  That there is "the physicist" might very well be false. How can this be so? Just as one can have the same ‘type’ of object, but more than one ‘token’ of that object, there might likewise be a confusion here between the type of continuer and the token continuer in these quantum scenarios.  Yes, there is one type of thing, a physicist in a very peculiar type of experiment, but there might be a whole lot of instances of this type of thing, where each distinct physicist is out of phase with his quantum counterparts. 

 

There is, however, an argument that might get around this admittedly very strange talk; but, it seems to entail a new spin on the old ‘God sees all of time at once’ argument.  Here the starting claim is that God’s creation, or for the less pious, nature, is holographical in structure.  Thus, the personal identity of any created agent, in this case some physicist, is not just one, but all of the collection of quantum agents.  As parallel to the elements in the case of a hologram, any one of the agents offers a perspective on personal identity, but only the full set of them is the complete description of the multi-dimensionality of who, in this case, the physicist, really is. This seems to offer an integration of both serial and parallel duplication concerns into one problem. 

 

First, the various Jones/Jones* serial duplication problems are understatements of the quantum continuer parallel duplication problems, since, on the assumption of the Many Worlds Theory, there is a “smear” of quantum possibilities. Recall that the quantum world suggests that not only are there an infinite number of futures, but they are realized in an infinite number of universes.  This means that Jones entering or leaving a duplication or reconstruction machine is happening in a myriad of different ways, or in as many ways as the wavefunction may collapse.

 

Second, all the quantum parallel duplication scenarios are not about a single token person living or dying at all, but about only one component of a more complex type.  Identities of persons are sets of tokens that belong to the same type of thing.  But we cannot envision what this means on our standard and folksy view of personal identity.  But of course there are lots of higher physics concepts that go against our natural intuitions, such as curved space, relative temporal frames of reference, and all the rest those otherwise irritating paradoxes of time and space.  And for that matter,  maybe we are becoming aware of yet one more counterintuitive concept – that our simple, folk-based intuitions about death radically understate what even our current, much less future physics offers for the possibility of immortality.

 

-- Brint Montgomery

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