Session 35 - Abraham Lincoln Walk-In - Wrong Date!

[APeacefulWarrior]

Ricdaw I concur with others in finding your post particularly brilliant. I however disagree with its principal premise, that being that the past consist of shifting probabilities, perhaps shifting in proportion to our present point of view. (“Present” here used in a temporal sense, not the eternal one.)

Even if we are on a “choose your own adventure” path whereby we continually pluck one path from an ambiance of infinite probabilities; and even if there are multitudinous versions of ourselves out there in the multi-verse – parallel dimensions where Truman chose not to drop the atomic bomb, or Lincoln chose not to preserve the union – we writing in the forums at this moment are on one particular timeline that is part of a continuum of countless, I contend, fixed decisions and choices before us.

I think I can partially reconcile this, or at least muse for a bit about something I've been pondering lately since I'm something of a history geek.

More or less, I think our history is becoming less probabilistic as technology advances. It's really only in the last 200 years that we've developed technologies - photography, audio recording, film, and now digital recordkeeping - which allow a truly permanent record of times go by. And because we now fill our lives with artifacts proving our own past, it makes it all but impossible for anyone to seriously believe that Truman didn't drop the bomb. We have a bazillon pictures of the Manhattan Project and the Enola Gay and Hiroshima and shadows laminated to walls and all that. It's effectively undeniable.

And since reality is largely consensus-based, that means our recent history has basically become fixed. It can't be fluid because we've developed systems which prevent it from being fluid.

(Whether this is good or bad, I don't know, and I'm not speaking to.)

But if you go back much further than the 1800s, and suddenly things start getting fuzzy, really quickly. And once you go back before the invention of printing presses, history really does start getting probabilistic, at least from our point of view. Actually getting what records exist to actually line up in some sort of comprehensible way is ridiculously difficult. Even the birth and deaths of incredibly major figures in history are often questionable.

Ricdaw brought up Jesus, who lived during the Roman times, and the Romans loved bookkeeping. But historians can't even agree on whether he lived at all, much less when and which of the Biblical accounts are correct. They pretty much just play the odds. Even though most believe there was a Historical Jesus of some kind, what he "actually" did is almost totally up for grabs. For that matter, it's the same with the prophet Mohammed. The early Arabs\Muslims were INCREDIBLY obsessed with keeping records of things, and there are even a few mentions of Mohammed in writings from various other groups around that time... but we can't seem to get the dates to quite line up. Other historians point at documents which suggest he may have lived a few decades later than traditionally thought, or may not have even originally lived in the Mecca area.

Between the problems with accurate timekeeping at the time, the problems of dating documents we find, the fuzziness of people's eyewitness accounts, and the propensity of historians of the past to lie through their teeth for political reasons, the vast majority of history prior to 1500 or so is basically a big foggy cloud with only occasional patches of visibility. Hell, I tend to suspect that one of the reasons military history is so popular is that wars are one of the few things pre-modern humans did which left so much corroborating evidence that we can actually say with some certainty that they happened.

Maybe we are on a single fixed timeline, but it's pretty much impossible to prove once you go back a few hundred years. And there's a lot of room for theories like Ricdaw was advancing to remain true.

And your post made me remember one other odd personal detail...

There will naturally be hundreds of millions of perceptions and vantage points on 9/11, say, but that doesn’t mean that each one describes what actually happened.

So, funny thing. My memory of 9/11 is being alone in the little studio apt I was renting at the time, fighting with constantly-crashing websites trying to get news of what the hell had actually happened. Yet when I brought it up a few years after the event, I had two friends who SWEAR that I was with them the whole time, and I was living in an apartment with one of them which -as I remember things- I didn't move into until a few months after 9/11.

Same day, but we have utterly conflicting memories of how it happened.

Funny about that.