Your note about this being the wrong reality reminds me of a thing. Everett's daughter suffered from mental illness and eventually killed herself, in the note she left she mentioned something about going to visit her dad (who had passed before her) in another reality :-(
His son is also the front man of the Eels, and the album electro-shock blues is a lot about his sister and was a way to process the loss of his father, sister, and mother, if I'm remembering it correctly.
You and I have talked before about mental shtuff, and I've had, and will have, my own struggles with shenanigans too, listening to this album and reading about Everett and his life and work and family and what what not was comforting, albeit sad.
It's all super sad stuff to compare your experience to I know, I say it mostly to commiserate with you, to try and remind you that you're not alone in your frustration. :-( I love you Shello, I don't think this is the wrong reality for you, I think a Shello sized hole in it would make this a sadder, less beautiful place, at least for me.
Now on to some thoughts on the yous that are you and all that good stuff :-)
How do you know you're the you that fell asleep last night? Did that you die when it lost consciousness and the new you is a completely new entity with the same thoughts and feelings and memories? This is related to the teleportation/consciousness paradox. At an even more extreme examination, how do you know you have continuity from instant to instant? If we're all just Boltzmann Brains constantly experiencing small snapshots before our next conscious brain quantum mechanically phases into existence and we experience the next snippet of false reality, how are we to know when we cannot have any intrinsic sense of a lack of continuity by definition?
I'm not saying I believe we're all dying and being reborn every instant, I'm just saying the idea of continuity of conscious experience isn't so robust as to not be able to poke some pretty unsettling holes in it even with just regular life style stuff, let alone quantum suicide style hole poking.
If you're interested, Max Tegmark has some fun stuff to say about it. I personally prefer the audio narration of his book "Our Mathematical Universe" (like, seriously, that friggin book is boss as shit! and if you want I'll totally share my copy of it with you on audible, because I'm friggin obsessed with audio books, jesus christ I'm a nerd D-:!)
All of that brings me to the next observation. Why does a change in someone else have to be interpreted as them being a different thing now? Regardless of the correlation with some event (remember, correlation is not necessarily causation) you never know if the correlation is coincidental, or at the very least (in a world where nothing happens by chance) is related to something you're misinterpreting?
People change over time, and, as it's generally accepted that people are conscious entities basically onto themselves, doesn't that mean they'll naturally drift through different opinions and viewpoints and develop new, or lose old habits and what not?
Reality without the complexity of other independent, conscious beings is pretty mercurial and nuts. Adding to that a whole world's worth of other living things moving their own moves and shaking their own shakes seems like a hard enough thing to pin down, let alone attempt to categorize into versions of themselves they're supposed to be versus versions they seem to be.
There's also the whole egotistical issue top be wary of as well, who's to say what is or is not the thing that makes someone who they're supposed to be or not? I'd personally like to hope I can change, and can lose some of the old characteristics my friends used to use to describe me, while picking up new ones. Eventually I'm sure old friends will say they don't know who I am anymore, and I'd be kinda put off if someone told me I wasn't the right me anymore, it'd feel like they were attempting to take away my personal agency.
Like in most things I say this to explore the space of these ideas, not to make any hard stances on anything. Everything is too complicated to not sit on the fence about, so... lol I guess that's all I had on this part of the thing :-)
You might check out capgras delusion too :-D that's an interesting one in regards to the different mom thing. Brain disorders can be so interesting :-D! I mean... and a bummer too and all that, but man is this all so friggin interesting!
(side note about mom's crying in other realities, it also doesn't mean the mom's not also perfectly happy and stoked in other realities as well, and if she's happy or sad or whatever at the same moment in those other realities, then that means it was something that happened in the past of those other realities that caused her current condition, so you're like, doubly removed from the causal connection to her current states, both reality-wise, and temporally, so, wouldn't focusing on the attempts to maximize love and happiness and minimize sadness in the only accessible mom type thing you currently have access to be the best thing to aspire to do?)
Okay, quick couple things about quantum suicide and that stuff.
First off, killing him again wouldn't bring him back, unless I'm missing a logical trail between those two concepts, they seem like a non sequitur (still, the joke of killing yourself to start a quest to find him, just to kill him for committing suicide is pretty hilarious :-D)
Secondly, the quantum suicide stuff doesn't mean you'll jump to some other random reality, it means the continuity of your own uninterrupted experience will, instead of including you dying, will start including increasingly outlandish occurrences that prevent your death.
Again, I'd like to reference Max Tegmark's chapter on quantum suicide from his book "Our Mathematical Universe" because he does an excellent job discussing the concept in it. The end result is that if you set up a quantum suicide machine just right (and this is in itself a huge issue too, because even the slightest mistake in the set up and execution PPPPUUUUNNNN!!! of the machine will collapse the superposition and result in a non-quantum uncertainty based situation, resulting in your actual and unquestioning non-experience of quantum suicide, which is also kind of an explanation for a common eventuality of the situation, so even that really is in some sense, the machine doing its job... kinda...), you'll experience a single reality still, but it'll just be a really friggin weird one the more you use the quantum suicide machine. I'm getting tired and it's getting late so I'll leave it at that for now and keep reading the thing :-)
The realities we used to know are infinitely far away and always receding, if they even ever existed at all :-) All life is change, all things shall turn to dust, why regret what you can't hold on to? I personally try to look fondly back, learn what I can, and focus on using it to make cool stuff now and in the future.
Mmmmmm :-) I like your thoughts on the observer that collapses the wave function that is us, Is Us , that's a powerful concept that can be a fun foundation for a definition of god as an emergent shared ideal, and is also related very heavily to the way quantum systems interact and cause decoherence :-D! But!!!!!! I personally reject the sloppy use of the word observer in the Copenhagen interpretation, because it falsely asserts that consciousness is required to make something an observer. I fall a little more on the side of thinking of observation more as just "interaction with" meaning anything can be an observer. Even things we would consider not conscious. (I've been exploring pan psychism for a while now though, so I don't want to say that even inanimate objects aren't "conscious" but that's a conversation for another time...
Those four options for the outcome of people's lives will happen no matter your involvement. Those things are happening to everyone all the time, even people you've never met (that is, if you believe people you've never met even exist. That's a little too on the side of hard solipsism for me. I've notices that way of thinking tends to devalue other's existence and feeds a very egotistical mindset that I think is disadvantageous. But, that's just my own personal experience with the exploration of those solipsistic concepts.
Dude :-) he got to 80, and was able to pass on his genetics. By those two milestones alone he won the game of life twice over. Parents deaths are always complicated through, and I do commiserate with you.
For me it's when I hear the song "House of the Rising Sun" as that was one of the last things I talked to my dad about before he was killed, and it has grown to encompass some of my regrets about my relationship with my father.
Mmmmmm :-) I like the last paragraph, what a lovely way to conclude the post!!
Holy crap this is a long comment. I should edit it, but it's also 6am and I have to be at the recording studio in 6 hours so......... Good night! :-D!
Heya Lockness!~
I'm trying to keep my comments shorter these days;
I thought about this recently. And no, the one that went to sleep and the one that woke up are both different. I've had a long week of learning, so I will not entertain the ideas surrounding quantum suicide anymore.
This whole adventure did lead to some answers, but I'm going to keep them to myself for the time being. A Shello sized hole would be a problem, luckily one that won't be happening here!
With love,
@shello