[spacemonkey]

who's to say that when you do jump off a building, you don't survive. yes, in some universe you might die, but you could still end up a vegetable and have to wait around all those years until the big one. what if you end up after all those deaths in a vegetative state?

[Emu]

What determines whether your consciousness is in one universe or another? In a system of infinite parallel universes, there is at least one in which I am an eggplant. What's keeping me from spontaneously switching into that universe and turning into an eggplant, regardless of jumping off of buildings and such?

[Chris]

Well... presumably you jump into a universe which is completely identical to your own, except for the fact that you didn't die -- ie. one that diverged from your own at the instant of decision.

[Owyn]

What you guys all on about, all it said was tits :S

[snail]

Yeah, cheers for the boobs appearing on my screen in the middle of the uni computer lab Yahtzee...

[Chyld]

If you want lots of tits, watch Devils Advocate...

...Sorry, to the matter in hand now.

That's quite disturbing, in that there's a good chance I've commited suicide over my crummy ex girlfriends several billion times now. What a waste of blood that would be.

And the fact is, I'm going to do it over several million more skanks as well! how depressing...

*rams a knife into his chest*

What do you mean, I missed my heart, lungs, and all things knife-prone-to? AARGH!

[Amber-Nicole]

This is interesting, considering the boys at the lunch table were talking about quantum theories just the other day. Something about parallel universes and a dead cat in a box. A box of hot lava and poison gas. And then it turned into hot poison lava. Jordan was explaining something about a cat in a box, and if you open the box, then the cat dies. Everyone wanted to know what killed the cat, so we came up with all the random possibilities, like lava.

[Girdag Fireskull]

You mean Schroedinger's cat? The cat in a box with a radioactive source that may or may not go off. Without opening the box, you can't tell whether it is alive or dead, so it is neither. It is only with opening the box that you can find this out, so the opening determines whether the cat is alive or dead.

Or something like that.

[SimeSublime]

For info on Schroedinger's Cat, see my post midway down this page:
http://www.chefelf.c...s%20pants&st=60

Also have to add in that the infinte possiblities sound more like Entropy and Chaos Theory then Quantum Mechanics to me. Quantum Theory proposes the creation of seperate universes, but also says that they collapse upon observation. As a side note, the graph posted with the article shows the probability that a particle is at a give place. The verticle lines represent the physical boundries holding the particle(say, the particle is bouncing left and right inside a box, and they are the walls). The dotted line shows that classically speaking the particle is more likely at any given time to be found on the edges of the box, and less likely to be found in the middle. The Psi naugh squared is the interesting bit. That shows the probability of the particle being at a given displacement according to Schrodinger's Equation and the laws of QM. As you can see, in this system the particle is more likely to be found in the centre of the box, but more amazingly is that there's a chance that the particle has broken the boxs walls somehow and now exists outside its boundries.

[Dark Comet]

Cor.

[Emu]

If you had committed suicide in the past, and at the moment of death you instantaneously switched into a universe wherein something unlikely happened to prevent you from being killed, then wouldn't you remember the whole incident? (almost being killed but surviving anyway)

[SimeSublime]

No, as your conscience would cease to exist on point of death, so as to stop paradox's you would jump before the action happens. If you were to remember the action taking place, then that would seperate you from the you that your jumping into, hence placing you in a different reality entirely. As such, there are now three universes. One in which you survive normally, one in which you die, and one in which you remember dying, but didn't. If we take into account the fact that there are billions of people in this world, and that there are infinite worlds, and this is happening all the time, things soon get out of hand. Thats why I dislike the infinite universe theory. It lacks the order inherent in what we understand of the universe.

[Creaux]

No, as your conscience would cease to exist on point of death, so as to stop paradox's you would jump before the action happens. If you were to remember the action taking place, then that would seperate you from the you that your jumping into, hence placing you in a different reality entirely. As such, there are now three universes. One in which you survive normally, one in which you die, and one in which you remember dying, but didn't. If we take into account the fact that there are billions of people in this world, and that there are infinite worlds, and this is happening all the time, things soon get out of hand. Thats why I dislike the infinite universe theory. It lacks the order inherent in what we understand of the universe.

The simplest explanation for something is usually the best and all that.

[Dark Comet]

Occam's Razor, right?

By the same token, we're getting abducted by aliens all the time and getting our memories erased after they've done whatever they wanted to do with us. Similar theory, but it doesn't prove the existance of aliens.

Still, I wanna believe in the alternate reality thing. It means that we're not restricted to simply one possible choice thats been pre-ordained, like Fate would have us believe. I really don't like the idea of fate. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I'll tell you what IS pretty much fated to happen - the human race dying out. Unless we evolve to survive the inevitable ice age/planetary cooking thats due in a few milennia, or ship out to colonise another planet, then we've pretty much had it as a species.

I personally think we've cocked up royally in regards to the whole caring-for-the-planet thing. I mean, what do human beings do? They move to a place, consume eveything, then move on when there's nothing left to take or do. Unless we find a new way to power all the supposed stuff we need to live, and rebuild our planet, we're totally screwed.

I apologise if I've gone off at a bit of a tangent. It's food for thought though.

[Chris]

QM doesn't really come to your rescue... as much as it provides for the possibility of multiple possible outcomes, it provides nothing in the way of choosing which outcome is "the real you." It just makes it impossible to predict.

Also, if observation collapses quantum phenomena, how do we explain observable quantum phenomena, like single-photon diffraction (ie. throw a single quanta of light through two parallel slots, and observe a diffraction pattern when there are no other photons around to have interfered with one another)