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Friday, September 5, 2008

Is reality really real?

If there is one thing that I have learned in 54 years on this planet, it is that this world is not what it appears to be.

Back in the 1990s, I heard a caller to a talk radio program (Art Bell) saying that he was taking a history course at a local college, and the textbook said that the Old West outlaw Billy the Kid had died in prison, but he remembered learning years before that a sheriff named Pat Garrett had shot Billy the Kid in the back and killed him. I checked it out, and sure enough, Billy the Kid had died in prison, even though I thought that I remembered the story that Pat Garrett had killed him.

Not long after that, I was telling my older and smarter brother about it, and he said that Pat Garrett shot Billy the Kid. So I checked it out, and sure enough, the history books had changed again, to say that Pat Garrett shot him during a jail break, killing him, so Billy the Kid did not die in prison. However, I thought that the original story was not about a jail break, but simply about Pat Garrett tracking him down on the road and ambushing him.

Other anomalies have popped up in a similar manner. For example, my older and smarter brother and I distinctly remember hearing news reports that Nelson Mandela had died in prison, yet he was elected President of South Africa when Apartheid ended.

Go figure.

Is somebody changing history, or do we have extremely faulty memories?

I prefer to believe that this world is more like a computer simulation than s solid reality.

What do you think?

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