The Immortality of the Self

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A digital copy of you is just that. It's just a copy. You're not experiencing anything. You're gone. A quantum copy would be more or less identical to you. The memories, the personality quirks, the figures of speech, they would all be identical to you and you would exist in parallel universes. But we cannot freely move between these universes because we're very big. We consist of what 10 to the 26 atoms approximately. That's a lot of electrons. And so we cannot freely moved between these universes, like in the Hollywood movies, which went all the Oscars this year. However, theoretically, theoretically, it's possible. At the atomic level, electrons do it all

The quantum computer, which harnesses the power and complexity of the atomic realm, promises to be every bit as revolutionary as the transistor and microchip once were. Its unprecedented gains in computing power herald advancements that could change every aspect of our daily lives. There is not a single problem humanity faces that couldn’t be addressed by quantum computing.

Shermer and Kaku discuss: AI, GPT, sentience/consciousness, the end of humanity • decoherence • Uncertainty Principle • multiverse, parallel universes, and Many Worlds hypothesis • Einstein • the evolution of the computer • the origin of life • climate change solutions • feeding 10 billion people • gene editing • curing cancer • immortality • simulating the universe • UAPs and UFOs • chaos theory and indeterminism • Are we living in a simulation? • Is there a God? • the end of science?

Michio Kaku is the co-founder of String Field Theory and is the Henry Semat Professor in Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York. He graduated with a BA from Harvard and a PhD in physics from the University of California at Berkeley. He has hosted several TV specials for BBC-TV, the Discovery Channel, and the Science Channel. He hosts two national science radio shows, Exploration and Science Fantastic. He is the author of numerous New York Timesbestselling books including: The God Equation, The Future of the Mind, The Future of Humanity, Physics of the Future, Hyperspace, Parallel Worlds, Physics of the Impossible, and Beyond Einstein. His new book is Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything.