A Timeline In Which John McAfee Cheated Death Through 'Quantum Immortality' And Destroyed The Central Banks

John McAfee indulged his eccentricities, to be sure - but to conflate eccentric with a lack of intelligence, or means, would be a mistake. McAfee may have given us some strong hints of something...

We all know that John McAfee, who was variously employed by NASA, Xerox, Booz Allen and Lockheed Martin (before founding McAfee Associates) was very into advancing crypto — he saw it as the future.

Unfortunately, we also know that McAfee died June 23, 2021 — last year — while in a jail cell awaiting extradition. The media and authorities have claimed it was a suicide, yet for more than a decade McAfee had made hints and references to something known as “quantum immortality,” sometimes alternately referenced as “quantum suicide.” (More accurately, a quantum suicide reveals quantum immortality. More on that in a second.)

According to The Guardian, “A Wired Magazine reporter who spent six months investigating his life that year recounted an incident in which McAfee played Russian roulette – repeatedly pulling the trigger on what he claimed was a loaded pistol, pointed at his head – to illustrate a point.”

The 2012 Wired Magazine interview, in which McAfee explains quantum suicide.

The relevant part of the December 2012 Wired piece:

He loads the bullet into the gleaming silver revolver, spins the cylinder.

"This scares you, right?" he says. Then he puts the gun to his head.

My heart rate kicks up; it takes me a second to respond. "Yeah, I'm scared," I admit. "We don't have to do this."

"I know we don't," he says, the muzzle pressed against his temple. And then he pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. He pulls it three more times in rapid succession. There are only five chambers.

"Reholster the gun," I demand.

He keeps his eyes fixed on me and pulls the trigger a fifth time. Still nothing. With the gun still to his head, he starts pulling the trigger incessantly. "I can do this all day long," he says to the sound of the hammer clicking. "I can do this a thousand times. Ten thousand times. Nothing will ever happen. Why? Because you have missed something. You are operating on an assumption about reality that is wrong."

You are operating on an assumption about reality that is wrong. That was his point.

McAfee was strange, but he didn’t have a reputation for deception — quite the opposite. He was straightforward in his strange views, gave many interviews, and wasn’t shy about his personal love for sex, alcohol, and guns.

Software guys are usually a bit smarter than the rest of us.

As in, an order of magnitude smarter — they are master at an artificial, abstract domain that yet acts like reality in many ways. Software code is simply their physics. It’s their ruleset, and they master it.

There’s a lot of interesting discussion on Reddit and some of the metaphysics message boards about people experiencing quantum immortality after either a failed suicide attempt (like a gun misfiring, when it should have fired) or an unexpected close call with death (like a car veering into the person’s lane and a head-on collision being averted by milliseconds, or surviving a private plane crash, etc).

I realize this is a strange topic, and I definitely do not condone experimenting with suicide nor fatal accidents. Contact a mental health professional if you’re feeling depressed yada yada.

If our world is a personalized quantum simulation of some kind, which is exactly what famed sci-fi author Philip K. Dick claimed in his later years (Minority Report, Adjustment Bureau were both based off his books), what then?

To believers in quantum immortality, more specifically, we aren’t just in a simulation… we are in one that is effectively infinite, with effectively infinite choices. It’s called the Many Worlds interpretation in physics.

You wake up, and drive to work. That’s one universe.

But there’s another universe where you woke up hungover, or tired, and called in sick. You stay at home for the rest of the day watching TV — and every moment after you called in sick is different from that other universe where you went to work as you usually do… a “branch” or “fork” occurs, and you’re now living in a whole new timeline or slice of the infinite multiverse. Because it’s effectively a computer, when a universe branches, it has all the accoutrements and trappings of the previous universe, yet it is different — history in this new world necessarily unfolded somewhat differently, so perhaps you notice Mandela Effects… that some key past historical events didn’t happen as you remember them.

In this theory of things, the world is already created — it’s just a bunch of quantum computer code running somewhere — but your choices decide how things will unfold for you.

Cypher, a character in The Matrix (1999), realizes his world is artificial, leaves it to become a rebel, but then wants the machines to put him back in the artificial computerized world or “matrix.” He doesn’t want to know the truth any more.

Usually, our choices are so small and mild in comparison to the entire simulation around us that it doesn’t retroactively change mass-accepted historical events. Choosing to stay at home instead of drive to work one day isn’t such a profound change in the status quo that a President elected 10 years ago now has a different name in the history books or anything like that. Your world seems the same as it was yesterday.

Yet, if you blow your head off with a revolver or get killed instantaneously in a car crash, you’ve injected a massive change into the universe you were in: namely, your consciousness is no longer in it.

And quantum physics suggests the observer is key; without an observer, a simulation dependent on you interacting with it cannot exist, so your consciousness “collapses” into the nearest available parallel universe or time line: one very similar, where your body is similar, family is the same, politics are the same or similar, etc.

But months after the near-miss, where you almost shot yourself or almost died from a collision, things seem weird: some historical or cultural events, like the year a movie came out or who starred in it, are simply different from how you remembered them.

Your memory is not failing, in all other areas your recall and cognition are perfect, you even see a psychologist or two to make sure nothing is wrong.

But personally, in your own universe of understanding, you know you are somehow a visitor in a world very like yours — but not yours.

From a Many Worlds interpretation of reality, this all actually makes a degree of sense: your consciousness can’t exist in a vacuum, your sudden death creates a vacuum because a quantum world cannot exist without at least one observer, so you are jumped out (effortlessly and without any pause, as it feels to you) to a similar but different universe where you just didn’t die that day.

In such a world, past events will necessarily be a little different, in order to build up to the moment where you almost die, but don’t. The near miss, or the misfire.

And here’s where things get creepy: John McAfee gave that interview in 2012, where he apparently blew his head off with a revolver in front of an influential tech reporter, but nothing happened.

The same year “Mandela effect” stuff starts showing up online and on social media? 2012.

Because our computers are still quite limited in terms of memory and rendering ability, it’s hard for us to think of a simulation where infinite branches or different worlds can be supported — but assume for a moment that computing technology gets to a point where such rendering loads are easy, and that a branched universe is no less “real” or “high resolution” than the universe you jumped out from. They all feel equally real.

Then, it is possible we are in “John McAfee’s 2012 branch” universe, that at the moment his revolver’s chamber turned for a fifth time, a bullet went directly into his brain. This immediately collapsed or removed the consciousness from the branch in which McAfee shot himself in front of the Wired reporter.

Rather than being dead, from his perspective at least, McAfee feels himself alive today, in a very similar timeline where he can go on building experiences, friendships, and live out the remainder of his days.

Like McAfee, versions of us exist in an infinite number of variant worlds or branches, yet we are living in the one branch where McAfee no longer exists. That necessarily has an impact on world events; maybe cryptocurrency comes in stronger than it would have otherwise; maybe it crushes the central banks now. Or maybe the opposite — maybe this world needed McAfee’s presence for the unfoldment of crypto, and instead it fades in this time line or is outlawed by nearly every government.

A weirder refinement on these thoughts: if McAfee’s 2012 revolver suicide jumped him out of this world, then who was it that died last year? Well, it was the McAfee “post-suicide” — if our world is a rare or strange variant where somehow McAfee could shoot himself in the face back in 2012 but still live perfectly fine, then McAfee’s actual reported suicide in a jail cell last year (2021) jumped his consciousness out to an even rarer or stranger variant world: to a time line that can support McAfee almost killing himself in prison, but not succeeding.

Maybe in that world, where he fails to kill himself, the subsequent press coverage turns favorable or sympathetic for McAfee and the crypto world he so loved. The establishment, pushing this charismatic boomer programmer to near suicide… in the midst of a pandemic… ugly. Maybe that is enough of a push for crypto to come in; maybe McAfee is living in his ideal time line right now. Maybe he hit “next channel” enough times that he finally found his perfect channel, where it all works out just as he needed it to.

Just a little food for thought — but don’t eat too much!