 Originally Posted by shadowofwind
As a sales pitch I think its a load of shit.
I think there's an element of truth in the concept though.
One of my coworkers wrecked his motorcycle a while back, and somehow landed unscathed and on his feet. Then when he went home some of the furniture and stuff wasn't where it had been. Later when he went back to the race track where he wrecked, the training protocol for the curve where he'd gone of the track was different, and they told him it had always been that way. In case its not obvious, the implication is that the world jumped to a slightly different state that combines results from histories where the wreck did and did not happen.
Of course there are many possible explanations for this (he's lying, the trauma altered his memory, someone sneaked into his house and moved his stuff, the guys at the track were lying or mistaken), and I can hear the distant sound of skeptic's heads exploding. His story fits the way I experience things though, even though my examples are more pedestrian.
A question I've had, which I've posted here before, is in what sense do the alternative worlds actually exist?
I think its sort of like math. The real number line is infinite, but its not as if its physically located somewhere and for every real number somewhere someone is witnessing it. And its also as not if a number suddenly becomes real when you first do a calculation with it. I think reality is abstract in that same kind of way, its just a different kind of structure of interrelationships. 'Energy' is a way of describing an aspect of those interrelationships, but I don't think it requires energy to create a reality as if you're creating it out of something else. Parallel worlds exist in the same kind of way that unused numbers exist, and they become real for you if you find a calculation, so to speak, that connects them with the world your in. And its possible for the state of 'our' world to jump to something slightly different that doesn't follow in a smooth continuous manner from what came before. Objects and events get spliced in that follow in a smooth continuous manner from things that could have happened before but didn't. The big difference between my view here and the conventional science fiction idea of alternative histories, is that I don't think the history has to be global, it can be a tangle of multiple smaller strands that can branch and join. Those strands are usually reconciled in a consistent manner, almost as if global consistency is a lower energy state. But when conditions are right for it there are flaws - the reconciliation of the strands gets caught in minima, so to speak, where they do not fit in a wholly consistent manner. An example would be where my friend's bike was wrecked but his body wasn't. (I'm not claiming his experience was real - I'm just using his story to illustrate the concept.)
I think that what we want influences what happens in the world, and not just by influencing the electrochemical activity in our bodies. How that works I have no idea, but if people want something strongly enough that's inconsistent with where things are headed, events can change in a discontinuous way. That's the 'quantum jump'. I take a dim view of 'thought science' philosophies where people try to maximize benefits for themselves by force of will. If you get richer that way, while not working to produce an equivalent increase in the riches of the world, someone else gets poorer. Many ostensibly spiritual people claim this isn't an issue, but I think its because they don't want to admit that they're predators, because they want to continue reaping the benefits of that kind of behavior. Obviously, there's a more honest approach to the same sort of thing though. A person can endeavor to make the world a little better for everyone, with a will to see the effects that one's efforts are really having and to make adjustments accordingly.
I've had things like that happen to me before.
I'd been living in my house for about six years. SIX YEARS.
Then one day, getting off the bus from school, I see this ugly evergreen tree right next to my house. Touching it. Touching MY HOUSE. It's almost two stories tall.
And like what the frick? When did we get that ugly tree?
So I call up my dad and I'm all "Dad, where'd that tree come from?" and he tells me it's always been there. Ever since we moved in.
WHY CAN'T I REMEMBER IT?
So, yeah, just saying. Tricky stuff. I'm still pretty stumped on that one.
This one's more easily explained.
....but anyway, after going gluten-free vegan, my mom and I finally found a good brand of bread.
I remember reading the ingredients several times on at least a few different occasions.
Again, no gluten and it was vegan.
Then one day we're shopping and we decide to get some of that bread.
But this time I read it, and it has eggs. And so, okay, not thinking too much about it, I assume that it's just a different type than the one we usually eat. So I find all the different types of bread by that one brand and they all have eggs. All of them, and it's like the fifth ingredient. RIGHT THERE... on the list of ingredients.
So I Google it.
That brand has never ever been vegan.
I figure I must have just missed it the first fifteen times I read the ingredients.
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