The president from another dimension

Things are usually pretty simple, even if you can’t explain them. You can dive down a deep rabbit hole reading and thinking about what people on the Internet call “the Mandela effect.” That’s the collective false memories some of us have—like the idea that Nelson Mandela died in prison during the 1980s or that the kidlit franchise Berenstain Bears was once the Berenstein Bears. Or that comedian Sinbad played a genie in a movie called Shazam in the ’90s.

And because a lot of people insist they really remember these facts, there are some—notably “professional ghost researcher” Fiona Bloom—who insist these are real memories and that somehow a different reality has broken in on us, that through some “glitch in the matrix” some of us have migrated from a parallel reality in the multiverse to the one we currently share.

There’s an interesting idea that some people are taking almost seriously. It’s been suggested that experiments by CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) may have somehow caused the world to shift into an alternative reality where Donald Trump is president. And when Trump refers to things like terrorist attacks in Sweden, or thousands of Muslims cheering in the streets of New Jersey after 9/11, or says that no one knew that fixing health care would be so hard, he’s not lying. He’s just remembering events that occurred in the parallel universe he used to reside in.

Other things might be explained by this quantum skitter; maybe the polls that showed Hillary Clinton a practical shoo-in in the last election were artifacts from the old reality. Maybe the new universe doesn’t respect the curse of the billy goat—maybe that’s why the Chicago Cubs finally won a World Series.

A lot of the noise on the Internet about this is tongue-in-cheek, but some of it is serious as well. If you really want to explore the phenomenon, you can read a little about Schrodinger’s cat and Hugh Everett III, the father of the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum physics. It’s pretty interesting stuff. But as a practical matter, all we know is that shared false memories exist. It’s a weird fact about our world.

Many people can believe something without it being true. You can understand this intellectually, but it’s difficult to dismiss something you believe you know. For instance, I know that sometime in late 1969 or early 1970 I heard a version of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” that featured Leonard Nimoy reciting a passage in character as Mr. Spock. I remember lying in my bedroom in our house in Rialto, Calif., listening to radio station KFXM when the song came on.

But it never happened. After looking for that version off and on for decades, I’m convinced it doesn’t exist. (I’ve heard the William Shatner version; that’s not what I’m thinking about.) Maybe I dreamed it. Anyway, I made it up. The point is, all of us are capable of believing in things that simply aren’t true.

We have all sorts of ways of deceiving ourselves, some benign and some genuinely dangerous. Most of us try very hard to reconcile that which we believe with the actual world. This is called confirmation bias. and we’re all guilty of it to some extent.

And in an era where the authority of traditional sources of information like newspapers and broadcast journalism has been dangerously eroded, we’ve seen the rise of all sorts of specialty sites propagating dubious “news” and conspiracy theories. And a lot of people attend to them almost exclusively, because it’s easier to trust information that affirms your beliefs. If you believe, based on your own experience, that the world is flat, you might welcome any pseudo-scientific theory that supports that view. If you want to believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya or that the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center was an inside job, you can find plenty of videos of professorial-looking people talking about those things on the Internet. If you are of a certain bent of mind, it’s easy to dismiss almost any “official version” as a pack of lies designed to mollify “the sheeple.”

It’s very easy to style oneself as the last honest person, as a contrarian able to face up to truths too terrible to be told. Especially if you’re able to pick and choose “facts” that support your position.

The world is not so simple that Occam’s razor—the idea that the most parsimonious theory, the one with the fewest assumptions, is usually the right one—can be applied across the board. Conspiracies do exist; we know this because it’s generally pretty hard for people to keep secrets. But vast conspiracies that involve thousands of people are unlikely.

I don’t believe we have jumped into a new reality. I think we simply get things mixed up (Shaquille O’Neal played a genie in a movie called Kazaam in the ’90s, while Sinbad’s fashion style often ran to the genieesque), that our memories are imperfect and we’re highly suggestible. We don’t pay attention to details. And, for whatever reason, people manufacture and spread misinformation. Some of which we accept uncritically. (Mostly because we want to.)

And while quantum theory is fascinating, it’s mainly a useful thought experiment that explains the otherwise inexplicable behavior of the smallest particles of matter. CERN’s research isn’t aimed at discovering a way to travel between dimensions or across time; it’s more about exploring the structure of the universe through experimentation with subatomic particles. It’s math and science, and while its theoretical implications can get pretty wild and woolly, they’re of limited practical use when you’re doing your taxes or cooking dinner.

I’m willing to accept that the world is a waking dream, and that there are epistemological limits of our understanding.

But I don’t blame CERN for this administration. We’ve gone down a rabbit hole, but not that one. pmartin@arkansasonline.com

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