What if those memories that differ between people are not because of bad memory, but because the actual events are different?
Sort of a quantum superposition, which collapses the wavefront in different ways for different people?
Maybe tie in multiple universes somehow, and events shift from one to the other.
Would certainly be interesting if true :)
> Sort of a quantum superposition, which collapses the wavefront in different ways for different people? Maybe tie in multiple universes somehow, and events shift from one to the other.
Then the observers with differing memories would actually live in different "multiverse tracks" (different universes with a common origin in the past) and would never interact with each other, ever again.
The fact that they can interact, even indirectly via a 3rd party like a cross-examiner, is proof that they live in the same worldtrack, and therefore the wave has "collapsed" the same way for both.
But don't worry we will have something similar to this in the not so distant future when editing video footage quickly and with picture perfect results makes it hard to determine if evidence is real.
Yes, except it's psuedoscientific crazy talk.
So like I remember one thing, but once the waveform collapsed it ended up being different. But my memories are either of what could have been (the other state of the waveform), or alternately memories from a different universe.
I thought it was an interesting idea so I wrote it. I'm not trying to start new physics.
There are some number of theorists that are working with multiple universe theories defined by 'choices' in the quantum world. Its hard to prove that such things exist (or don't exist) but one notion has that detangling a photon from its entangled counterpart has you "actualizing" in one of two possible universes. The GP thread posits macroscopic effects of that, which is both impossible to prove and an interesting conjecture.
Assuming that such interactions our possible, we have no reason to believe that the macroscopic effects would be to transfer intact memories between universes, or for the universes to be similar enough for us not to notice this effect explicitly, but different enough for events to occur differently for different people.
I'm not an adherent to the many worlds interpretation, and I claim no specific expertise in this space. That said, I read your comment as implying that a MWI would be, by definition, acyclic? To be honest I was thinking that might not be the case on the theory that you could arrive at the same universe by many paths. Some part of me wants infinity constrained slightly :-)
And because people don't usually falsely remember things in a way that is inconsistent with how things turned out only subtle changes would be transfered.
This is just an idea I'm playing with for fun, I'm not trying to start new physics.
If you can find video recordings of the same event happening differently, then this would be interesting.
The whole thing is that people don't remember falsely things that are in contradiction with how things played out.
They remember thing falsely in a way that could have actually happened - that's why they believe them.
So you would never have a memory like this that would be impossible - it would only be little things that could have gone either way.