retrospec | (no subject)

John R. Lunise
2/8 near Recolle
On the subject of horses, allow me to ask you a question: When you were a child, what was the name of the bear family who taught valuable life lessons in easily digestible books?
Chances are, you answered 'the Berenstein Bears'. And, as it happens, that is incorrect; it is the Berenstain Bears.
How can everyone misremember this? How can something so patently true turn out to be terribly false? Some people will tell you it is the 'Mandela effect', named after a shockingly large number of people believed Nelson Mandela died in prison... but simple mass misremembering is a fairly boring answer, isn't it?
Consider instead a possibility physics allows us: that infinite universes exist, that every possibility spawns a diverging universe. Consider then that these different universes must be ruled by mathematics and science, that were were able to observe them, some concrete, tangible difference must exist to distinguish them.
Consider also that the laws of physics as we know them are, in some cases, simply and utterly inoperable. The quantum scale, for example. Or a naked singularity. It is, therefore, conceivable that through some quirk of physics, some awesome miracle... we have merged or shifted into a world in which horses never existed, and chocobos always did.
Impossible, you say, and perhaps rightly so... but I have no better explanation.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Dirk Strider I'd buy it if it weren't for the fact that the transposition doesn't make sense.
Dirk Strider Sure, we could slip from a universe with horses to a universe where chocobos evolved instead.
Dirk Strider But we don't have a universe where chocobos evolved. Not in a way that makes sense.
Dirk Strider The biology texts should say that chocobos evolved from some chicken ancestor. They shouldn't say they're of the genus Equus and mate with donkeys to make mules.
Dirk Strider That isn't an alternate universe.
Dirk Strider It is, straight-up, a shitty job doing find + replace.

John R. Lunise That may very well be, since of course it is possible if not probable that we are living in a simulated reality.
John R. Lunise But since all of this is untestable, we have to ask what fits the available evidence, and in the absence of any other factors, what we prefer to believe.