Speaker 1: The mistake that we make when we think of the
Mandela effect is that in some ways we maybe see
it as something that is a problem or something that
is a kind of weakness of the human psyche. But
if you take it from a symbolic perspective, it's actually
the very opposite. This is, in some ways the strength
of human psyche is to remember patterns and to want
to stick things to the greater pattern, so that you
have this sense that the world is meaningful and that
the world has coherence.
Speaker 2: This is Jonathan.
Speaker 1: Peshel, Welcome to the symbolic world. The past decade or so,
people have been talking more more about what they call
the Mandela effect. This effect was coined by someone in
two thousand and nine who realized that she had false
memories about Nelson Mandela was certain that he had died
in prison, and although he never died in prison, obviously
he left prison and became the president, and so she
coined it the Mandela effect. And what it is really
is that we realize that many people, not just us,
have false memories of certain details of the world, and
that for some reason, we all have the same false memory.
Some famous examples, of course, include the monopoly Man, who
people remember having a monocle, although he doesn't have a monocle.
There's the Fruit of the Loom logo that is a
bunch of fruits together, but people remember having a cornucopia
behind the fruits. And the other one that's quite famous
is the Berenstein Bears and how the Berenstein Bears people
think that Berenstein is written at the end with the
ei n, where in fact it's Berenstein with ai n
at the end, and everybody kind of remembers. And you know,
it's funny because I myself, when I started to learn
about this, realize that I also remembered things in the
way that the Mandela effect remembered them. That is, I
had Bensteinbar's books when I was young, and I always
thought that it was written ei N. I always you know,
if you ask me, is there a cornucopia in the
Fruit of the Loom logo, I would have told you yes.
And the same with the monopoly Man. Now what's interesting
is that, there, of course, have been the wildest theories
about the Mandela effect, you know, one of which is
the idea of a glitch and the matrix, the idea
that we live in a simulation, and that there's mistakes
in the simulation, and for that reason things change and
you don't realize, and then somehow what people remember and
the actual reality of the world are not the same.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: People talk about how, you know, maybe it's time traveling,
some kind of time travel thing that changed the past
or something like that, and you know, some kind of
wild science fiction like explanation for it. But you know,
of course, psychologists explain this in the more reasonable manner,
which is that the way that we remember things, the
manner by which we tend to remember, is a kind
of compression agent. You know, our mind likes to remember
things in a certain way, things that make more sense,
in a kind of narrative fashion, a way that is
easier to remember, and also gets fused with other memories together,
including for example, people commenting on it, people parrotying it later.
You know. So the famous example, of course of Darth Vader,
who in the Empire strikes back.
Speaker 2: We remember him saying Luke, I am your father.
Speaker 1: When in fact he doesn't say that, he says, no,
I am your father. Now, what the psychologist will say
is that, you know, the there's a contraction you know,
you remember Luke, I am your father, rather than no,
I am your father, because no I am your father.
If you isolate it, it doesn't hold. It doesn't have
the narrative strength of saying the name of the person,
because the no makes it a little segment in a conversation,
whereas when you say, Luke, I am your father, then
all of a sudden it has a kind of completeness
to it that makes it easier to remember, you know.
And the same for all the other ones. For example,
if you think of the monopoly man, the monopoly man
having a monocle just conforms to ideas of a kind
of nineteenth century fop, you know, elite rich man. For example,
the Planter's peanut logo has a monocle and it also
has a top hat and a cane in a similar
way as the monopoly man. And so these these images
get fused, and then when you recall something, they kind
of get fused together. Now, of course, I think this
is a much better explanation, But what's missing in the
psychologics explanation is of course what we could call the
symbolic Take the symbolic approach, and this is the one
that I want to kind of delve into with you
right now.
Speaker 3: Greeting's friends, cosmographers, fellow symbolists. This is Joshua from Eighth
Day Books, inviting you to join me and studying a
remarkable cosmic coincidence. Why is it that writers, philosophers, and
prophets from many times and places have all told us
that contemplating the night sky makes our own souls similarly
more beautiful and more ordered. Hebrew and Hindu, Greek and Chinese.
They've all told us that looking up is the same
as looking in, and that we are as much citizens
of the sky as we are of earth. In February,
we will be looking at Pythagorean folk tales, biblical wisdom, literature,
and contemporary novelists to ask these questions. It'll be a
challenging course, but not technical. I teach medieval philosophy and
Renaissance literature, and I'm condensing a year's worth of information
into a few wonderfilled hours. Please join me for some Plato,
some poetry, and some practical skygazing, all to help us
pursue the art of imitating Heaven. See you very soon.
Speaker 1: I have talked about this several times, which is the
way that legends accumulate around characters, the way that legends
accumulate around important characters, and how the way we remember
things tends to snap to the pattern is the way
that I talk about it, which is that one of
the things that psychologists don't necessarily dive into is why
is it that certain images are easier to remember? Why
is it that certain images will be the ones that
we tend to move towards. How is it that the
specific element of something gets connected to a bigger image
that contains their the lower elements. And so, for example,
if you think of the you know, the the image
or the kind of image of a nineteenth century elite man.
You know, this is a mythological image in our culture.
It's kind of like a like a cowboy, you know,
is a mythological image in our culture. And there are others,
you know, let's say a gangster would be another one.
There are many contemporary mythological figures. And the way that
we come to these figures is of course through you know,
there are instantiations of it, and so you have different instantiations.
Speaker 2: Of cowboy, and then our mind.
Speaker 1: What it does is that it snaps it to a
common pattern and then what will happen is, of course
there'll be caricatures of that, so you'll have movie versions,
comic book versions. For example, when I grew up, there
was a famous cow boy called Lucky Luke, and he
was it's a Belgian comic book. It was there was
some traction for it in the United States, what is
mostly popular in Canada and in Europe, and Lucky Luke
was everything A cowboy was like everything that you can imagine.
A cowboy is like close to his horse, really good
at the shooter, he's got the hat, and you know
everything about it. He was almost like a like a
kind of compressed version. But what happens is, of course,
when these compressed versions come out, because they snap so
well to the pattern, they will infect you could say,
what's not In fact, they will affect the way that
we remember what cowboy is. It forms a kind of
you know, mythological core. And that is the way that
symbolism functions, is the way that memory functions. If you
think of how it is that a fairy tale becomes
a fairytale over you know, hundreds and hundreds of years,
it's that process is the process by which when we
remember things or we stories, we tend to want to
snap them to a more encompassing or a it's a
more mythologically accurate story. There is a kind of satisfaction
that we search for when we remember things, and some
things are not They don't have that nugget that will
make it memorable. And so if you do that over
iterations and iterations, you can imagine why stories would become
more and more mythological with time. How the way to
remember something, and it's very practical. The mistake that we
make when we think of the Mandela effect is that
in some ways we maybe see it as something that
is a problem or something that is a kind of
weakness of the human psyche. But if you take it
from a symbolic perspective, it's actually the very opposite. This is,
in some ways the strength of human psyche is to
remember patterns and to want to stick things to the pattern,
so that you have this sense that the world is
meaningful and that the world has has coherence. The truth
is that if you go into the details of any
image you know that is memorable, you'll find that there
are differences in everyone. This might sound ridiculous, but it's
like if you print to two versions of the fruit
of the loom logo, there will be differences between the
fruit of one and the other, right one, maybe the
color might be a little off the other one. The
color might be a little more saturated, you know, maybe
the line is not as thick. And there are different
versions because designers will create different ones. And so if
you look at every single Fruit of the Loom logo
that's ever existed, you'll see that it's changed. Maybe they've
changed some of the fruits, maybe they've adapted a few things,
made it simpler, more complex, whatever, you know. But we
just remember the logo and that is completely normal. And
you know that that's completely normal. So you couldn't function
in the world because you wouldn't be able to see.
You wouldn't be able to see that things are the same.
You would have one glass on another glass and you say, well,
this glass is different from this one, and you wouldn't
be able to notice that they're the same. Class So
the process by which we are able to fuse things
together in higher patterns is a completely natural thing to
do and something that we do all the time. And
the fact that someone is shocked because they look at
the fruit of the loom logo, and they realized that
they remembered it with a cornucopia. Realize that you do
this all the time at more minute levels. It's just
that now it's kind of happening at a level that
I can easily point to you. In most people, because
of their level of attention, are able to differentiate the logos.
You know, when I was young, I studied stamp collecting
with my uncle, who is like he was like a
world class stamp collector. And my uncle, what he was
trying to help me do was to notice the most
minute differences between stamps, and so we were learning colors
that we're so subtle that most people can't see the
difference between them, but they do exist. If you move
down into levels of attention that are more precise, and
you're able to notice difference at very very subtle levels,
if you train yourself to do that. But imagine that
this process by which we're able to either distinguish or
not distinguish difference happens at every single level of reality.
And so your mind says, the fruit of the loom
let logo is in the same category as the cornucopia,
and therefore joins it together. So that you see it
as the same, in the same way that you can
look at two stamps and you see them as the same.
But an expert at stamp collecting is able to make
the minute differences. Okay, So this is something that is
actually very useful for the human person to do, and
it's something that we shouldn't think that it's a necessarily
a mistake. It can be a mistake when it causes problems.
You know, the way that we remember things and the
way that we that say carry them forward is always
based on purpose. And so you know, if if there
was some reason in your life to differentiate the fruit
of the loom logo from a cornucopia, then that would
be useful for you to be able to tell the difference.
You know. And it's the same like if you if
you for some reason had to differentiate the the monopoly
man from the planters a logo, then that, you know,
then you would be able to tell the difference. And
if you point to it, then people will see the difference.
But until you point to it and you say, look
at this, at how different it is, your mind does
what it does and will connect things together in patterns
in in a way that is more related to a
kind of coherence of the world and maintaining a coherence
of the world. And so.
Speaker 2: You know what's.
Speaker 1: Fascinating about that is when people talk about out you know,
this idea that this would be an kind of proof
for simulation theory. You know, simulation theory is really a
large mistake. You know, the reason why it's a mistake
is that there is no baseline reality that doesn't mean anything.
The idea that there would be some kind of baseline
reality that doesn't have layers of representation on top of
them is ridiculous. That doesn't exist. All levels of reality
that we can encounter through consciousness have layers of representation
in the sense that they have a need for analogy
and of connecting things together and create and functioning in patterns.
And therefore the way that people of course perceive certain
things that would lead them to believing in this idea
of levels of simulation, they're usually just the way that
consciousness can functions, and they're usually related to just how language,
you know, condenses and how patterns of image making condenses
reality together towards patterns. You don't have to imagine a
science fiction like like huge science fiction version of like
aliens that created a simulation. Uh, and we are you know,
we live inside simulation, and that maybe there are different
like there are levels and levels of simulations.
Speaker 2: What that type of theory is pointing to.
Speaker 1: Is actually the layers and layers of pattern making that.
Speaker 2: That exists in the world.
Speaker 1: Now, whether or not we live in some kind of simulation,
it's kind of like in the matrix, it doesn't really
matter like that, whether or not there would have been
some alien race in the past that have created a
simulation in which we live, some very very powerful technological Uh.
These kinds of questions are are so useless, you know,
and they don't really help you navigate the world. They
don't help you kind of live in the world. But
if you kind of understand rather, you know, this idea
of a kind of levels of representation and levels of
contraction that exists in the world, symbolic contractions, then it's
much more useful.
Speaker 2: Than the simulation theory.
Speaker 1: So, you know, a good way of thinking about this
is to kind of think of this idea of the
hero's journey, you know, the famous Joseph Campbell schema for
a story where the hero leaves his home and then
goes out on an adventure and then returns to his home.
That image of you know, I tried to tend to
contract it even more. Which it's just procession and return.
That is, All stories are procession and return. All stories
are leaving a certain state, moving into a state of
or being challenged, or moving into a state of confusion
or uncertainty where the place where you were gets undone
and then then something new or some new state is
brought about. Now every story has that pattern, like every
single one everything, not only every single story, every single sentence,
every single breath that you take. You know, it's basically
like the structure of reality. It's a metaphysical structure of
moving from the one into the many, and then from
the many into the one. It's a it's it's a cosmic,
cosmic principle. And so the thing is that every single
thing is a version of that, and everything, every single
thing will tend to click towards that. And then there
are instantiations of different levels of that and different types
of that, different versions of that at at lower levels
of representation as we look at the world, and those versions,
like the different types of instantiations of that are usually
related to particular circumstances, related to particular purposes, and that
is that is completely fine, but it's also okay to
kind of see all of these as a version of
the higher one. And so, now, what does this have
to do with the Mandel effect. Now, it's the same.
So the way in which for example, ancient cultures came
to the image of the cornucopia, you know, very intuitively,
is kind of like the way that ancient people came
to the image of fairy tales. That is, there's a
there's a kind of snapping to a pattern. There's something
about the relationship, and it's intuitive. We don't totally can
even know maybe know rationally what it is. There's something
about the idea of a horn and fruit that are
coming out of that horn that is related to the
point of the horn right moving opening up into many
and the seed, you know, becoming the fruit, the one
becoming the many. There's a kind of very powerful ontological
pattern that the cornucopia captured right from there to there.
And so then if you create underwear, especially underwear for boys,
that is related to this image of fruit of the loom,
you know, fruit of the fruit of the body, you
could say that is bringing about an image of fertility,
an image of how the seed becomes the fruit and
you wear it around your waists. There's a kind of
very deep fertility image in terms of what fruit of
the loom means. All of that comes together and then
will connect the logo of the company to the mythological image.
And it's completely normal that you connect it to the
mythological image because the mythological image the weight was arrived at,
was through this kind of you know, this ontological pruning.
That is, we don't even know how the story how
that image came about, but after centuries of it kind
of refining itself and.
Speaker 2: Existing in in the in.
Speaker 1: Our society, it has a very very deep mythological undertone.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: It captures the reality of the relationship between one and many,
between seed and fruit, between you know, fertility and children,
and then ultimately in underwear obviously, between the relationship between
underwear and reproduction, fertility and all that. And it does
it in a way obviously that's not gross or that
isn't you know, that's that's not explicitly sexual, but has
all of that kind of contain So it's not surprising
that when you engage with this type of imagery that
you would you know, that you would end up connecting
with the mythological version of what it is that you're
in stantiating, you know. And sometimes obviously it's not as
it is not as deep as the cornucopia. For example,
in the Berensteinberr's it's like, we've seen all the names
that end in in' written E I N all our life,
and I've never in my life seen a name that
ends a I N. And therefore, if I'm going to
remember that, then I'm going to snap it to the
pattern more, you know, more easily. And it's the same
with some of the more kind of gross versions of
the of the Mandela effect. But some of them, like
I said, the Fruit of the Loom one for example,
have actually a very kind of deep mythological aspect to them,
and that are showing you the way in which you know,
we remember things and how first of all it's not arbitrary,
and second of all it's towards purposes. And third of all,
they're at the top of the memory chain, you know,
is something that is universal and is kind of intuiting
the deep.
Speaker 2: Ontological structure of the world, and so hopefully this was
useful on a thought about the Mandel effect.
Speaker 1: Maybe you can share this video with the people that
go into alternative versions of history, that love to think about,
that love to talk about the fact of living in
a simulation, and hopefully people can see that.
Speaker 2: You know, although maybe we live in a simulation, I
don't know. It doesn't really matter to me.
Speaker 1: It's more useful to kind of understand these layers of
representation as being part of how it is that human
consciousness functions in the world. How remember how we form
language and how we form images. So thanks everybody for
your attention and I'll talk to you very soon.
Speaker 2: Byebye.
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