John F. G. Eastmond

The Doomsday Argument, Consciousness and Many Worlds

arXiv Preprint Archive August 15, 2002 John F. G. Eastmond

The doomsday argument, a probabilistic prediction of humanity's total lifespan, is fundamentally linked to consciousness. An infinite conscious lifetime is impossible even in principle. Consciousness cannot arise from a single set of deterministic laws; instead, it is generated by a superposition of brain states associated with many quasi-classical histories, each following different deterministic laws. The generalized doomsday argument makes no prediction in this framework, so the fact of consciousness itself provides evidence for a many-worlds interpretation of reality where the future is not predictable using anthropic reasoning.