Philosophical Vegan Forum

Posted: **Sun Dec 08, 2024 2:11 pm**

If Quantum Immortality is true, what is the life experience of a farmed animal? Do farmed animals, in some parallel world, escape the slaughterhouse and live somewhere forever?

Posted: **Mon Dec 09, 2024 1:29 pm**

Most instances of farmed animals experience excruciating death, just as most instances of any human die. From a moral perspective animal agriculture causes great harm even if in an astronomically small subset of worlds some animals do not die by extraordinary luck.

Quantum immortality only accounts for possible worlds, not worlds we can imagine which may not all be strictly possible, and there may be a finite number (it is likely impossible that it is infinite).
If we're talking about stochastic things like cancer and ageing, or having the bad luck to meet a mugger and be shot based on a series of events influenced by chaos emerging from variables at the quantum level, there are a vanishingly small subset of worlds in which those things do not happen and death does not occur.
Perhaps in some world there is a tornado which damages a factory farm and an animal escapes, and a vanishingly small subset of worlds following that where that animal does not age and finds good luck in every other way, including perhaps being identified eventually as the oldest living animal on the planet and taken on a spacecraft to escape the death of the sun.
It's a little different from that for a human since during slaughter, the worker will just keep trying if by a series of miracles the equipment malfunctions, or by something more like a curse, a bolt to the brain misses and fails to kill multiple times (it's not a fun immortality, it's more of the botched suicide kind where you continue to live but in hell). If anything quantum immortality adds to the moral weight of animal agriculture, because for them any immortality is astronomically more likely to be a form of hell than a life anything would want.

Posted: **Mon Dec 09, 2024 4:09 pm**

brimstoneSalad wrote: ↑Mon Dec 09, 2024 1:29 pm Most instances of farmed animals experience excruciating death, just as most instances of any human die. From a moral perspective animal agriculture causes great harm even if in an astronomically small subset of worlds some animals do not die by extraordinary luck.

Quantum immortality only accounts for possible worlds, not worlds we can imagine which may not all be strictly possible, and there may be a finite number (it is likely impossible that it is infinite).
If we're talking about stochastic things like cancer and ageing, or having the bad luck to meet a mugger and be shot based on a series of events influenced by chaos emerging from variables at the quantum level, there are a vanishingly small subset of worlds in which those things do not happen and death does not occur.
Perhaps in some world there is a tornado which damages a factory farm and an animal escapes, and a vanishingly small subset of worlds following that where that animal does not age and finds good luck in every other way, including perhaps being identified eventually as the oldest living animal on the planet and taken on a spacecraft to escape the death of the sun.
It's a little different from that for a human since during slaughter, the worker will just keep trying if by a series of miracles the equipment malfunctions, or by something more like a curse, a bolt to the brain misses and fails to kill multiple times (it's not a fun immortality, it's more of the botched suicide kind where you continue to live but in hell). If anything quantum immortality adds to the moral weight of animal agriculture, because for them any immortality is astronomically more likely to be a form of hell than a life anything would want.

To me it seems like you are assuming the Terrifying Corollary is true. Why is that? As far as I can see, most proponents of Many Worlds Interpretation consider the Terrifying Corollary to be either unlikely or impossible. Hugh Everett 3 apparently believed in the Comforting Corollary, that he will never get seriously ill. That's why he was living the way he did: he smoked a lot and drank a lot, and he never exercised or went to a doctor. And that's why his daughter Elizabeth did suicide: she thought she would wake up in some parallel world where she didn't decide to commit suicide, presumably somewhere where her father is still alive. But, as far as I can tell, most of the proponents of Many Worlds Interpretation today consider it most probable that there is oblivion after death interrupted by brief periods of amnesiac consciousness.

Posted: **Thu Dec 12, 2024 9:38 am**

I’ve pondered quantum immortality to some degree. I don’t think I can give you an adequate answer. I may not understand the concept fully, so there may be mistakes in my interpretation. But if quantum immortality is true, then there should be a singular reality where nothing has died.

Posted: **Thu Dec 19, 2024 1:50 am**

teo123 wrote: ↑Mon Dec 09, 2024 4:09 pm To me it seems like you are assuming the Terrifying Corollary is true. Why is that? As far as I can see, most proponents of Many Worlds Interpretation consider the Terrifying Corollary to be either unlikely or impossible.

Why?
Is there an argument, or is it just something people don't like to believe?

teo123 wrote: ↑Mon Dec 09, 2024 4:09 pm Hugh Everett 3 apparently believed in the Comforting Corollary, that he will never get seriously ill. That's why he was living the way he did: he smoked a lot and drank a lot, and he never exercised or went to a doctor. And that's why his daughter Elizabeth did suicide: she thought she would wake up in some parallel world where she didn't decide to commit suicide, presumably somewhere where her father is still alive.

That is very silly, verging on mental illness if true. I would be interested in seeing where you got this.

teo123 wrote: ↑Mon Dec 09, 2024 4:09 pmBut, as far as I can tell, most of the proponents of Many Worlds Interpretation today consider it most probable that there is oblivion after death interrupted by brief periods of amnesiac consciousness.

That's a strange interpretation. If that's true that so many believe that, it probably speaks more to philosophical misunderstandings of consciousness.
People who would follow evidence against intuition to MWI may understand causality fairly well by virtue of that, but while I generally share that perspective I've found some of that crowd don't often have very coherent thoughts on the subjects of consciousness or free will or what subjective experience is. I don't think the latter is a given from the former.

Posted: **Thu Dec 19, 2024 2:18 pm**

brimstoneSalad wrote:Why?
Is there an argument, or is it just something people don't like to believe?

It's about the difference between consciousness and life: http://istvanaranyosi.net/resources/Sho ... 0final.pdf

brimstoneSalad wrote:That is very silly, verging on mental illness if true. I would be interested in seeing where you got this.

Well, read up the Wikipedia article about Hugh Everett:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Everett_III#Death_and_legacy wrote:A few days after her 39th birthday, Liz succeeded in killing herself ... She left a note, that read, in part: '... Please sprinkle me in water...or the garbage, maybe that way I'll end up in the correct parallel universe w/ Daddy.

Philosophical Vegan Forum

If Quantum Immortality is true, what do farmed animals experience?

If Quantum Immortality is true, what do farmed animals experience?

Re: If Quantum Immortality is true, what do farmed animals experience?

Re: If Quantum Immortality is true, what do farmed animals experience?

Re: If Quantum Immortality is true, what do farmed animals experience?

Re: If Quantum Immortality is true, what do farmed animals experience?

Re: If Quantum Immortality is true, what do farmed animals experience?