Musings on the Nature of Reality - a blog

[Deb]

I just received a subscribed email notice of the most recent post on this blog. I don't know when or how I came across the blog, but I may leave a comment or something and invite the author (Jim Elvidge) to SoS. I like the way he thinks.

I thought this post was extremely interesting, considering our recent discussions about changing our memories of the past. Some high points of his post:

"When one remembers something, according to research, one is not remembering the original event, but rather the last time that you recalled that particular memory. As such, memories are subject to the "whisper down the lane" syndrome of changing slightly with every recollection."

"However, that does not at all explain why large numbers of people would have the same memory of something entirely fallacious. Which brings me back to the latest of this genre of anomalies: Did Dolly Have Braces?"

He goes on to describe a scene in the old James Bond movie Moonraker, where everyone remembers a character, Dolly, having braces. But if you watch the scene NOW, she does not have braces. The braces played a very important role in the scene, so now the scene no longer makes sense.

"So, here, it seems, the universe (ATTI, all that there is) is really messing with us, and didn't even bother to clean up all of the artifacts."

"The flaw is in the assumption that "we" are all in the same reality. "We" are each a segment of organized information in "all that there is" (ATTI). Hence, we feel individual, but are connected to the whole."

His post about the Berenstein bears is pretty entertaining too.

[Batfan007]

Dolly needs a makeover, YIKES!

I just finished reading The Storytelling Animal, which also talked a fair bit about memory, cognitive dissonance, and how we constantly fill in the gaps, missing information or mis-remember things, even things we did earlier today rather than say ten years ago.
The book also had some interesting data/studies showing how people mis-remembered things, and when asked to explain their memory / reasoning (when shown concrete evidence that the thing from the task/test they were asked to remember was different) ALL of them had different explanations as to why they remembered something false of different than the actual thing presented to them.

really interesting reading, that was just one chapter or so, the rest was more about story in general, and how it serves us socially as a species, survival thing, method of communication and passing down wisdom and a bunch of other stuff. Also has the most convincing argument for why everyone lies, all the time, often without knowing it, arguing that we are basically incapable of telling 100% truth, as usually only remember accurately about 90% of whatever happened, and fill in the blanks whenever we recall things.