Your Consciousness Shifts to a Parallel Universe When You Die, Bold Theory Suggests

Perhaps we really are immortal, according to quantum physics.

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story…

• A mind-bending theory called quantum immortality suggests that your consciousness shifts to parallel universes after you die.
• The theory is an offshoot of several other hypotheses that rely on there being multiple universes.
• While some experts are skeptical of the idea, they agree that it still provides value to the field of quantum physics as a whole, whether or not our consciousness is actually immortal.

Our consciousness persists throughout our whole lives. From the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep, it’s the thing that is constantly with us, shaping our perception. So, when we die, what happens to our consciousness? While science doesn’t have a firm answer to that yet, quantum physics can produce an odd interpretation. It’s called quantum immortality—a theory that assumes we continue living in other universes after we die in this one.

Quantum immortality is an offshoot of the “Many-Worlds” theory, proposed by then-PhD student Hugh Everett III at Princeton University in 1957. Very simply put, Everett suggested the many-worlds theory when trying to conduct measurements in quantum mechanics. In a twist on the observer effect—a phenomenon where a system is disturbed by the very act of observation—he proposed that every observation of the quantum state (or wave function) of an object will split off a copy of our universe. And as observations pile up, so will alternate universes.

While not everyone agreed with the many-worlds notion (quantum pioneer Niels Bohr being one of them), studies on the theory continued—especially in the 1980s. For example, MIT physicist Max Tegmark, PhD, investigated a related notion known as “quantum suicide.” It ponders whether you would die in all universes, should you deliberately die in this one. Tegmark posed this as a thought experiment, however, which would be difficult or impossible to solve as we cannot access other universes.

By association with these theories, some proponents of quantum immortality say that our consciousness straddles many universes. This, of course, takes a broad leap, assuming there are multiple, parallel universes. So is it possible that when you die in one universe, your consciousness would shift to another universe? While we cannot access these other universes in our own living experience, the theory supposes, some part of your consciousness would persist forever, jumping from one lifetime to the next—whether or not you realize.

Peter Lewis, PhD, a philosophy professor at Dartmouth College who examines the philosophy of physics, argues the quantum-immortality theory has fallacies. The first issue, he explains, is that consciousness appears to be a physical phenomenon based on brain activity.

“The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is going to say that physical reality, like branches in time, moves forward into a number of copies,” he says. “But if consciousness is a physical phenomenon, it’s going to be embedded in one of those branches.” So in other words, there could be no consciousness-jumping between universes, because your physicality is stuck in this one.

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