The theory of Self Rendering Reality and the Mandela Effect [A science fiction-ey daydream]
NB: This is not a scientific paper or study, simply the thoughts and opinions of a bored DevOps and might include science fiction-ey kinda stuff. Don’t crucify me for getting stuff wrong, please :-)
Well since that is out there, let’s begin…..
As long as man has existed, there’s always been a bunch of questions that he has sought to answer. One of the most debated ones is ‘What is reality?’.
Throughout history we’ve been haunted and plagued by the need to know the gears and nitty gitties behind our very own existence and that what we perceive to be ‘real’. One might argue that man’s quest to find that which is greater than himself has and will continue to be an endless one.
As you cruise around reading through all opinions, two of the most famous theories that have sprung in this regard are:
Simulation theory states that everything including the Earth and the whole universe is a computer simulation being carried out by a far technologically advanced civilization. In layman's terms, we are just like the characters in the video game THE SIMS. If you were to think about this, it kinda makes sense that a group of beings can develop technologically to the point where they have enough computing power and capability to carry out this sort of large scale simulation. Furthermore looking at the previous milestones in AI, development of self-conscious systems although a bit far off into the future is no longer residing in the impossible stack. Various people have agreed that there is a 50–50 percent chance that we are in a simulation.
Interface theory: You know how icons appear on the desktop of your computer? For the non-technical people, here’s what happens. You right click on your desktop and simply create a folder. On the back end though, there really is no folder, In the simple terms, the operating system interacts with the hard disk and allocates memory blocks. When you create a folder, a special list is created which contains a list of other memory locations where information is stored [files]. The front end view from the desktop is just a user-friendly depiction of the way things are at the back. It sort of gives the correct picture but it isn’t the real deal.
The interface theory proposes that our reality works the same as a computer desktop. What we see visually isn’t the correct status of things but a bunch of useful icons which represent relevant information about the world.
Lemme start by saying that there are many criticisms to these and other such kinds of theories and some of them raise some really good points. For the benefit of my argument and out of sheer laziness, I shan’t go into them.
To illustrate the kind of conspiracy of existence that we are about to, we’ll have to make some assumptions and trust me when I say I am too lazy to write and argue them out so I’ll just drop them like bombs.
First, let’s assume that reality is a computer simulation being run by a bunch of bastards with mad computing power. Now, have you ever played an old video game? You notice that some parts of your environment render as you play. At any given moment, only the part of the map you’re playing is ever fully rendered. Now, this can be a method of saving up on resources especially when the game has a huge map. Why render the whole thing and the player isn’t really playing that part of the map? If we are in a simulation, that means that some bastards have us running on some futuristic servers. It would make sense that for them to save on computing power, they would employ the render on the go technique.
I bet you have heard the argument that reality is only ‘real’ under observation. This would be the classic case of this point, where the only real part of reality would be that part under observation which would be only part that has been completely rendered.
By the sheer fact that we have hopped on this simulation train, we’re admitting that our reality is being rendered and thus the interface theory would come to play. We are living on the desktop side of reality. the surfaces we walk on, gravity, colors, etc. These are just user-friendly depictions and pre-set global environment variables to allow us to easily interact with our ‘world’.
So we’re all just a bunch of lines of code in a dude’s computer. What does that have to do with the Mandela Effect?
The Mandela effect is based on the false memories phenomenon. A false memory is a phenomenon where an individual recalls something that did not take place or recalls something that actually took place but in a different way. E.g. Some people claim to remember Mandela dying at a different time than the rest of the world remembers, other people remember some famous books having different titles than they actually do now.
Well, I have to say that most citings of the Mandela effect are absolute bollocks and most false memories can be attributed to the psychological state of mind. I will, however, implore you to bear with this stupid idea for a while.
Just like any other object in a computer, I would assume that our memories are stored in an addressable block where we can call a method of some sorts to retrieve the memories at any time during the simulation. Now to treat the civilized society that has simulated us as any other civilized society, it goes without saying that the simulation would have bugs, bad design and the like. As far as we know, perfect systems do not exist.
Now keeping in mind the theory of multiple universes, we can assume that I as Patrick have been used in multiple simulations which I would consider different timelines of my existence. If these multiple universes were being run in the same servers or shared resources, it is completely possible for me in universe A to access memory from a memory address that has nothing to do with universe A if there were bad design issues or memory leaks.
if a certain class of objects ‘people’ happened to access such memories, their recollection of events would be totally different from the rest of the population. This would be a classic example of a Mandela effect.
Let’s say my favorite chocolate bar from universe A was called: sugar rush and the same bar had a different name in universe B: magic bar. If by some bad design I was able to access the memory addresses of universe B from universe A, I’d have completely different memories from everyone else at universe A.
Conclusions:
Assuming we were in a simulation, we would be correct by saying that any part of our reality would not render unless under observation by a conscious being. Hence, all unrendered parts of our reality although actually existing in the back end would be ‘unreal’. This means that any part of our world where there isn’t a single simulate is not real.
Being in a simulation, our version of reality would be an interface designed to offer the simulates [I don’t think that word exists :-)] a user-friendly way to interact with the environment.
Existing in a simulated multi-verse that is sharing computing resources like memory can have space for memory leaks and badly designed access permissions and rules can end up having several ‘people’ access some data that’s not meant for their ‘universe’. This would result in these ‘people’ having different recollections from the rest of the population.
Therefore, by assuming simulation theory is real, the interface theory and the Mandela effect don’t sound so stupid after all.
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Lemme know your thoughts or reservations about my daydream on the comments.
