Do you believe in the Mandela Effect?

[Acing It]

I don't believe in it. I think it's some sort of conflation bias where cultural emblems are conflated into one. The actual Mandela one's source is a bit unclear to me though, but a lot/most/all of it is not dissimilar to optical illusions where our brain either fills in the blanks or lets us see what should be there. It's also not unlike stereotyping where our mind makes assumptions about what things should be like or look like before the blanks get filled in by actual cognition or observation. Our brain can be a very convincing con artist! Whether parallel universes exist or not is an entirely different matter. 

 

edit: just remembered, there's also the monkey business illusion to illustrate have fail prone our brain is. 

Edited April 29, 2022 by Acing It

[dwest]

16 hours ago, Calliers said:

Another reason they would create a simulation is for things like trying to understand natural patterns of things like plate tectonics and the weather and economies and markets as well. Also maybe to understand how cities and populations spread and the way cities deal with traffic management both in the air and on the ground.

To me this was all included in my comment about creating life and seeing where it goes. So, not in disagreement as to an intent for a simulation.

In any situation, the comment doesn't change in terms of accuracy. There'd be no reason to believe that people who could edit a simulation, to alter a known element, would have any difficulty in altering it throughout memory. As there would be nothing special about memories compared to what's showcased on a billboard. That was my point, so if they edited one somewhere, it'd be edited everywhere.

The Mandela Effect would have no significant difference, however, if it was an internal-to-the-simulation phenomenon that the digital entities were participating in, and living organisms in a non-simulated universe doing the same.

The only reason why the Mandela Effect even surprises anyone is because basically:

 

9 hours ago, Lysandre, the Star-Crossed said:

I don't think memory is as rigid as we sometimes seem to think it is. Between the power of suggestion. misattribution of information, misinformation, and the like I'm convinced that memories can be intentionally or unintentionally fabricated or modified. 

Has been shown to be the most accurate understanding of memory. It's easily shaped, reshaped, altered, and adjusted by intentional or unintentional stimuli. And the only thing that makes it feel more solid is retelling the story of the memory that you had, at which point, you end up altering it (unintentionally). So, it's not surprising people think of the Mandela Effect as shocking, because they don't think of their memory as altered/alterable, but it shouldn't be surprising if we accepted the best understandings we have of how the brain handles memory (which is to say, not very accurately at all).

[coolshades]

I believe in it because it's happened to me.  I swear I remember reading about John Lennon's death in the newspaper, but he died two years before I was born.  It's always freaked me out.

[sunflowerdragon]

I feel like I don't believe in the mandela effect mainly because it feels like a reach to say alternative universe before you say that some times human brains are just kinda weird