According to the Many Worlds Theory (MWT) interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is the least convoluted and most widely accepted interpretation among quantum physicists, every time a quantum-random event happens—every time the Schrödinger wavefunction collapses—multiple new branches of reality, or timelines, are created in which each possible outcome of the event is realized.

While the chances are unimaginably small for most outcomes, just about anything is possible. For example, there is a vanishingly small but nonzero probability that your head will suddenly turn into a basketball in the next split second. This possibility must therefore be realized in some particular timelines.

This, interestingly, has some logical implications regarding personal immortality.

In the event that you die in certain timelines, in other timelines branching off from just before your death, atoms just happen rearrange themselves in such a manner that you avoid death, or quantum events otherwise lead to that result. You won’t experience those timelines in which you died, because you’ll be nonexistent in those timelines, but in the remaining timelines you’ll experience your continuing to live. This will happen no matter how many times you die in certain realities or how long you happen to live in a minority of them.

Since all of the above timelines are necessarily the causal results of their trunk timelines in the same way we observe causation, or the passage of time, in everyday life, this means that the yous that survive experience a continuity of self progressing from the would-be time of death into the future, at least in the timelines where the quantum events causing the avoidance of your death are not so drastic that the resultant form of “you” has lost its sense of identity.

Since there’s on meaningful way to say that those yous that lived are any less you than those that died, therefore, it’s only logical to say that you will experience life continuing onward into the future indefinitely.

That’s quantum immortality in a nutshell. The paradox comes in when we consider your life from the perspective of outside observers.

From the perspective of the rest of the worlds in the realities in which you continue to live, the frequency at which individuals miraculously avert death N number of times is in perfect accordance with mundane statistical prediction. There will be no flooding in these realities of people who are apparently immortal, because the chances of those particular quantum events in those realities that led to your continuing to live are just as small as the ratio of branching timelines in which you survived is to the ones in which you died. For every centillion realities, there will be like one person who happened to quantum-randomly avert death for, say, 500 years.

So, from the individual’s perspective, his or her chances of quantum immortality are 100%, while from the public’s perspective, they’re virtually zero, and the likelihood matches that predicted according to normal causality.

So there’s the paradox: quantum reality must totally be a real thing for the individual, even though it’s not real, and will never be statistically observed as anything beyond the mundane, from the perspective of the rest of the world and science.

There’s something very fundamental about the purpose of pain that nobody seems to understand or talk about.

Because of our rationalistic, materialist mindset, we assume the purpose of pain must merely be to cause us to utilize our motor neurons in such way to mechanically fix the problem, and maybe to deter us from doing things that will cause us pain in the future (obviously because pain indicates damage, and damage can be life-threatening and hinders our ability to pass on our genes to further generations).

But this completely ignores the power of the mind over bodily processes that has been scientifically demonstrated in the past, even concerning influence on very specific areas of flesh (of course, not speaking merely of motor control and our muscles).

The main purpose of pain is actually to draw our attention to the affected area, just that. By consciously focusing on the damaged area, we impart more life energy to it and thereby speed up the healing process. Your will for the pain to diminish is probably essential to the process, because, in order for the pain to go away, the site of the pain must be healed, so willing the pain away is implicitly willing the site to be healed.

This explains why evolution would have given us the ability to feel pain in our internal organs, which we could do nothing about on a physical level before the invention of medical science, which is when virtually all of our evolution took place. That is, if we couldn’t possibly do anything to mitigate the damage, then why bother to make us feel it?

So, the next time you experience a physical pain, focus directly on it, absorb into it, instead of trying to ignore it. It’ll heal faster, and hence the pain will go away more quickly.