My Personal Mandela Effects

Just to warn you: much of this is going to sound seriously delusional.

You could be forgiven for scepticism about Mandela Effects (MEs) and there is a case for confabulation. My approach to other people who report widely held collective memories which differ drastically from those of others is to try to adopt an active listening approach rather than something which might be seen as closer to a scientific one, because often the claim that the world has almost flawlessly shifted around them and therefore that evidence is no longer available to test their beliefs means that it would be unfair to apply the scientific method. There’s rationality and there’s the scientific method, and the two are not the same. This means that certain positions which could be rationally believed but not tested are not only excluded from science, as they should be, but also deprecated because they can’t be fitted into science. That’s different from them not being true.

My definition of the Mandela Effect is that it’s a widely held memory discrepancy. One group of people, often not in prior contact with each other, agree that a certain observable thing, often a memory, was not the way another group of people remember it to be. It’s named after the common experience that many people appear to remember that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s, which led to a successful revolution to overthrow apartheid. In “fact”, Nelson Mandela was released in 1990, became president of South Africa and died in 2013. There is an element of the idea that one is entitled to one’s own facts about this, and it’s easy to illustrate examples of how this might happen with agreement between the people who are “wrong”. I always think of the Welsh placename Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch with the four consecutive L’s towards the end. It’s a difficult name to remember and if one knew little about the Welsh language and therefore couldn’t make sense of what it means, one could easily remember that there was a different number of L’s at that point, and it’s also possible that a large number of people might remember it that way.

I want to make a couple of observations in this post about the nature of my own MEs and what the existence of MEs might suggest about the nature of reality. Some people believe they have

Imagine for a second that a ring of ants is crawling, almost vertically, down a white mug with a red handle on one side and a blue one on the other. At the top, they will have approximately the same experience although most printed designs on the mug would lead to some discrepancies which, however, could be reconciled by interviewing the ants about their experience. Yes, these are unusually anthropomorphised ants. When they reach the level of the handles, some of them will crawl over the red handle, some over the blue one and some will continue to walk over the main body of the cup. When they reach the bottom, unaware of their different paths, they will have different memories of the past. Some of them will remember crawling over a blue surface, some over a red one, and some over a white one. Nonetheless, all of these memories are accurate.

We are living at a time of particularly strong connectivity between people and new opportunities to compare experiences. We assume that the worlds of other people are somewhat similar to our own. However, it isn’t clear that knowledge, as it were, forms a united whole or that there is an objective world out there to be observed. There are, for instance, discrepancies between how leech experts and other annelid experts classify leeches and discrepancies between psychological and educational approaches to learning. Maybe they’re all true. Maybe the world is not a simply-connected surface like a plane or a sphere, but, as it were, has “handles”. This would lead to an underlying truth about the nature of reality becoming obscure.

Belief in the Mandela Effect is easily stigmatised and it’s also true that many people who do believe in it have other unpopular opinions. However, delusional people often tend to have few false negatives in their belief systems. Someone might falsely imagine they are a targeted individual, but if their partner really is cheating on them they’re more likely to notice. Likewise, there may be a load of discredited and unusual beliefs also held by people who believe in the ME, but to argue that this makes the ME itself dubious could be a form of the ad hominem fallacy. I’ve gone into my detailed arguments on the ME here and in several other places on this blog. What I don’t do is link these beliefs of mine to anything else which is widely held but poorly supported. I realise this leaves me out on a limb, but I’m used to that. My views on panpsychism do as well. So be it.

The signal to noise ratio with respect to MEs may be very low and I deliberately avoid considering most of the pop culture ones such as Isaiah 11:6. It could even be argued that my own MEs are that only by name because they are not very widely held. The situation is in fact that I share the beliefs I’m about to mention with two other people I know face to face. One of them is someone who lived in the same village as me when I was a child. The other is someone who lived two counties away from me, whom I first met when I was nineteen and we only realised we had the same discrepancies during the ‘noughties. In both cases, the person concerned mentioned the discrepancies to me before I mentioned them to them and there was also a permanent written record of the discrepancies I made in the early 1980s written down in a notebook in a sealed box in the loft of my parents’ home which as far as I know nobody else has seen. Therefore, the possibility that my memories were modified by the interaction or my own recall is not plausible, and the possibility that either person who shares them was playing a prank is also pretty unlikely. I’m not aware that either of them was ever in the attic of my parents’ house and nor can I think of any reason why either of them would be.

These are the memories:

• A domestic robot was developed between 1971 and 1975 which was able to do simple household tasks and read text aloud.
• A much simpler robot, resembling a planetarium projector, was installed as an exhibition in the London Science Museum. It was able to follow movement, heat and light, and was run using cultured mole neurons as a controlling device.
• In 1977, a method was devised to assess children’s intelligence at the age of eleven which involved the use of magnetic devices to scan their brains and they were then sorted into selective and non-selective schools on the strength of the results. This led to a scandal when it emerged that there was no evidence to support its accuracy.
• Domestic recycling was routine by 1972.
• A technique was developed to neutralise toxic waste and convert it into two components, one like wet sand and the other a clear liquid, which was then used in municipal building projects. After a few years, people began to suffer severe health problems such as cancer from exposure to the waste, which was in fact not neutralised at all. I think this was supposed to be an alternative to landfill. It also led to a scandal when it became clear how many people had died or fallen ill as a result of this practice.
• The northern part of Wisconsin and Michigan broke away from their respective states in the late 1970s and formed a new fifty-first US state.

There are a number of oddities about these memories. One is that they don’t closely resemble the usual MEs because they have major consequences, which are of course not evident because they “didn’t happen”. For instance, two of them involve national scandals which had a big impact on thousands of people. In fact, several of these are linked by something like a major popular campaign. After some investigation, it turned out that there has been a movement to carve out a new US state from northern Michigan and Wisconsin, although this wasn’t widely known in the UK and doesn’t correspond to the fact that I saw newspaper headlines and magazine articles about this actually happening, in early 1979. The toxic waste and 11+ scandals share this feature, and it makes it all the more difficult to resolve. Then, the domestic recycling and toxic waste MEs are both connected to waste management. Finally, there is a link involving neurology between the Science Museum robot and the 11+ scandal, and a robotic link between the first two MEs I mentioned.

The question is then what to make of these links. The existence of scandals doesn’t seem to be a causal connection, although if there were to be a concerted attempt to suppress memories this would explain that. However, that way madness lies. It’s basically Targeted Individual territory, so I have to reject that idea for its sheer delusional status, and I also know that TIs correlate perfectly with people with delusional disorders in well-designed studies, so I can reject that explanation as referring to an external reality. The “planetarium robot” is oddly specific because it mentions the species of animal from which the nerve cells were, unfortunately, derived. I was reminded of all this by the news I wrote about here, but this is something happening in the mid-’70s when it was presumably not yet possible to grow mammalian brain cells in vitro, let alone organise them to the extent that they could control a robot. Distasteful though it is, cockroach brains have been used for this kind of thing, but again fairly recently.

What does it mean that there are thematic links? I can think of three possibilities and I’ll mention the boring one first. The boring one is that my mind, and those of the other two people, made connections on a similar theme regarding robots, neurology, waste management and political scandals. The last one is somewhat odd for children to be thinking about, but the scandals didn’t happen until the 1980s. A second possibility is that this was some kind of fake news project directed at children which led to us getting that impression which was somehow not available to adults, perhaps through ‘Newsround’ on children’s television. Possibly just a prank. However, I don’t perceive this as being entirely received through such channels. Memory is of course unreliable. The third possibility is the most intriguing and the closest to some of the most popular speculations about how MEs happen. The first three are all to do with information processing, either by machines or biological means. There could have been a single scientific discovery or technological innovation which led to all of them. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (now known as Magnetic Resonance Imaging or MRI) signals were first detected from human subjects in the late 1950s, and imaging was achieved in 1973. The scan in question might in any case have been done by electroencephalogram, in which case it could’ve been achieved much earlier. But there’s an interesting further connection here.

Commonly, people who believe in MEs as significant beyond being mere misremembering or confabulation see them as evidence that we’re living in a simulation or moving between parallel universes. I’ve discussed the simulation argument elsewhere, and I reject the idea of people moving between parallel universes because I don’t think personal identity is sufficiently cohesive for that to be possible. I do, however, believe that unusual brain states of certain kinds can lead to “crossed wires” between different versions of a person in different timelines and consequent acquisition of memories which have occurred for one of them but not the other. Although it’s difficult to imagine how significant quantum effects can occur in the warm, wet and rather large objects which constitute our brains, this still feels like the best explanation to me, and in fact I think the content of my memories supports this. If there is actually an alternate timeline nearby where brain science was advanced enough in the 1970s for the apparent false memories to have happened, it seems likely that there would be more people with unusual brain states of that kind in that timeline which would effectively lead to memories of it being transferred.

Yes, I am aware that this is an utterly bizarre explanation, but its weirdness makes it appeal to this brain. The initial reason I wrote these anomalies down was to use them as a basis for a creative writing project, as by that point I’d become aware that they didn’t appear to correspond to reality and therefore were suitable for use. I think I can still do that regardless of the plausibility of my explanation, and maybe if I do, I will find other people who also have these memories.

The Floccipaucinihilipilification Of Overinterpretation

Yesterday’s post was supposed to be about two things but when I reached the end I decided to hold the second bit over until today.

Just in case you’d prefer not to read it, it was about the odd multiple similarities between Celtic and Semitic languages. Up until a few days ago, I’d thought it was just me who had perceived, possibly falsely, that these two completely unrelated language families had many similarities. Then I came across a video which mentioned the various points that I’d noticed and connected them to I think three hypotheses or theories on the issue, and I realised that I wasn’t alone in noticing this. I’d also been assuming it wasn’t significant – just a series of coincidences.

This is similar to another incident, this time involving Biblical interpretation. In Genesis 18, Abraham is visited by three men, presumed to be angels. I first read this incident in about 1979 when I was eleven, and assumed it was a reference to the Holy Trinity. I later dismissed that as overinterpretation. Decades later, in the ‘noughties I think, I learned that this was exactly the interpretation others had given to it. Owing to the fact that I had been so young when I thought of it in this way, I dismissed it as childish, and it still has a childish air to me because so far as anyone can tell, there is absolutely no textual evidence anywhere in the Bible or the New Testament for the ontological Trinity. Although there was a verse which named all three persons of the Godhead, this is now generally considered to have been a later insertion as it isn’t present in the earliest versions of the text.

A further occasion on which something similar happened involved the General Theory of Relativity. I can’t remember my line of thought exactly, but it amounted to concluding that the cosmological constant must exist. This constant, often referred to as Λ, is the energy required by the vacuum to ensure that space won’t collapses in on itself. When I came to the conclusion that this must exist to make Einstein’s theory work, I decided that rather than that being a form of positive insight, it was a brainfart resulting from my immature and uninformed thinking and decided I must’ve misunderstood maths, the nature of the Universe or something similarly fundamental. In a similar experience to the one I had with the passage in Genesis about Abraham, I later discovered that Einstein had in fact reached the same position and become similarly embarrassed at its lack of parsimony. This doesn’t mean Λ actually has any validity of course, and Einstein abandoned it later when Hubble discovered space was expanding, but these are once again three incidents where I rejected one of my own ideas because of their apparent naïveté only to find later that “great minds” thought alike. You might think I found this validating but I didn’t. It actually makes me respect the opinions of the people concerned a lot less, because they had the same idea as the one I’d rubbished.

It also goes the other way sometimes. I once studied James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’ as part of my A-level Eng Lit course. The last story in that collection, ‘The Dead’, includes a scene where one of the mourners at a funeral is in a different pew to the others, and I interpreted this as symbolising the synoptic gospels versus the Fourth Gospel. Now I’m sure there is nothing whatsoever in the text that supports that interpretation, but there it was. Dunning-Kruger means that this may reflect my lack of experience at writing practical criticism, but by that point although I may not have been at undergraduate level in that respect, I wasn’t exactly completely ignorant either. It’s something which sticks in my mind even now, decades after I’ve abandoned English Literature, and I do mean abandoned – I haven’t tried to read what might be considered “high brow” (that’s a racist term incidentally) literature since I was seventeen. My confidence took one heck of a hit, and as I’ve said before it’s quite a resounding one because the appreciation of literature, particular poetry, is the acme of the human condition. Our whole being, contingent though it is, is predicated on our capacity for language, and therefore failure to appreciate literature is for me, and I’m not applying this to anyone else, a sign of being subhuman. It literally means I’m worth less than other people because of this.

All of these thoughts have something in common: they’re “aha!” experiences which have at some point been assessed negatively, either by myself or others. In one case Einstein himself floccinaucinihilipilificated it. It’s an important process, to have an idea either valued or trashed by someone else, and it’s one of the benefits of being in an academic community. If you just come up with a conjecture and have nobody else to bounce it off, it might go nowhere or be potentially seminal. I don’t have that option, and in some cases it’s a pretty big problem that most of the people involved in a particular area lack it too. Herbalism, for example, seriously lacks a proper research community.

But it’s not just down to the community to support the individual. It also helps for the person needing the support to have the right attitude to the community, or perhaps to find a community worthy of respect for its methods. There are several prominent examples of communities which support a particular set of ideas which really shouldn’t be supported, and it isn’t even really a matter of opinion. One of these is the Targeted Individual (TI – American spelling) community. These are people who believe they’re being harassed, spied upon and stalked by electronic equipment and stalked by gangs who collectively harass them but which is plausibly deniable when perpetrated by each individual. Their beliefs are delusional but this in itself is not a problem because we’re all delusional. The reason they’ve risen to prominence in recent years is the fact they’re able to contact each other online and form communities which support these beliefs. Psychometric profiles of the people involved invariably show them to fit the personality of someone with a delusional disorder, and this very strong correlation is enough to demonstrate that most of them are not in fact subject to surveillance or gangstalking. Many people would go further and claim that much of CAM is of the same character. In some cases this really has become quite pathological, such as in the attempt to “cure” autism by giving children chlorine bleach. Hence it isn’t enough to have a supportive community and is often in fact harmful.

Often, it’s clearly isolation which leads to “madness” but there’s also the “madness of crowds”. The isolation which could be presumed to lead to delusions did not, however, get resolved by contact with others but was reinforced. This is because of failure of people with different kinds of belief to communicate, which is of course what might be called the “polarisation crisis”. People who disagree are now more likely to be understood as enemies than merely people who disagree right now, and therefore are not likely to be respected or listened to. Opinions seem to have become important badges of identity.

Even so, the problem of overinterpretation and appropriate degree of trust in one’s own ideas remain. A large number of people agreeing on something doesn’t make it true. Truth is, I suppose, not a democracy. Hence gangstalking and TIs. Conversely, even if you’re the only person who thinks something, that doesn’t make it false. There are countless examples of individuals having their own idiosyncratic ideas which have become very productive in the long term but which were roundly rejected by everyone else.

Here’s a fairly trivial example of a kind of geometric idea which could be entirely without merit and cannot be extended, but maybe it can. It’s one of mine of course. A point is an item with no interior, consisting entirely of an exterior, whereas space is an item with no exterior, consisting entirely of an interior. I had that thought I don’t know how many years ago and sometimes I wonder if it’s in any way productive. I’m aware that it doesn’t correspond to any mathematical idea I’ve ever encountered and it may be simply an idle observation, but what if it’s more?

So there are people out there who agree with me that Celtic and Semitic languages share many features. Some of them have acted upon this thought and attempted to explain it, which seems to give the idea some authority, but even if developed this may turn out to be a dead end, just a dead end pursued by more than one person. Ultimately the truth may be unknown in most areas of thought, but the discomfort of not knowing must sometimes be tolerated for the sake of sanity. I think it’s that feeling of certainty which drives people in groups like the TI community to keep believing.