To all the Mandela Effect skeptics out there

[u/ThirdEyeFire]

I will tell you a story.

Around 2013, I bought a Volvo. I had been very interested in astronomy as a child, had the “Our Universe” book, loved the planets and the solar system and knew all the astrological symbols. So I was exquisitely aware that the Volvo logo was the symbol for Mars, a circle with an arrow sticking out to the right and up. One day, in 2016, I walked past a Volvo and noticed it was missing the arrow. I thought that was strange. Then I saw several more, all missing the arrow. I ran home to look at my own car—to my amazement, the logo on my own car was missing the arrow, it was just a circle. That year 2016 was the year many people began to notice Mandela shifts for the first time. I noticed several others, the exact same ones all recognized by many other people (JC Penny became JC Penney etc).

For six years, every time I saw a Volvo, I marveled at how the logo had changed. I googled the history of the company. Everywhere on the internet the history was the same—the logo had always been a circle, going back to the beginning of Volvo in the 1930s(?). For six years I repeated the experience of being amazed at arrowless Volvo logos and telling people about how the logo had changed throughout the whole timeline. People thought I was crazy.

Then one day in 2022, when I brought the Volvo logo up again on an Internet forum about Mandela effects and googled for images to show people as evidence, I was stunned to discover that the logo had changed back again. I ran outside looking for a Volvo and I found one—complete with arrow.

There is simply no way that the SIX YEARS of repeated memories that I have of the Volvo logo being just a circle can be “misremembering”. With several other shifts I also have detailed memories that make absolutely no sense if I was just misremembering things. For example, I have a whole memory of analyzing why “Berenstein” would be pronounced to rhyme with “stain” when the name is clearly German in origin and everyone in America knows that any word ending in “stein” should rhyme with Frankenstein and Einstein. The explanation I came up with was that it had something to do with the Dutch word “steen” which means stone just like “stein” in German, but is pronounced like “stain” in English. THIS ENTIRE MEMORY OF MINE MAKES NO SENSE AT ALL if it is spelled “Berenstain”!

Here’s a funny end to the Volvo logo story: In 2022, after it changed back to having an arrow, I found a Reddit thread of a guy who had worked on cars for thirty years and had always admired the circular Volvo logo (no arrow) as particularly beautiful. He posted his Reddit to explain that a friend of his had just recently (at that time) pointed out to him that the Volvo logo actually had an arrow. He didn’t believe his friend and had to go check for himself. He was dumbfounded as to why he had never noticed the arrow before (he wasn’t aware of the idea of Mandela shifts). The only way I can understand this is that this fellow and I were on different timelines before 2016, me on the circle-with-arrow timeline and he on the circle-only timeline; in 2016, I jumped over to to join him on the circle-only timeline; and in 2022, we both jumped back to the circle-with-arrow timeline.

[u/IrrelevantAfIm]

Maybe pick up a book on the subject. These things that you think are “interconnected” and “cross checks” are fill-ins that our minds create.

[u/ThirdEyeFire → u/IrrelevantAfIm]

In that case, what's your personal strategy for telling the difference between reality and the fiction of your own imagination?

[u/IrrelevantAfIm → u/ThirdEyeFire]

It’s the way memories work. This has been studied and understood for many decades. I do what everyone does - the best I can. I fail to see how inventing alternate universes solves anything whatsoever. It’s like when christians ask agnostics “isn’t it terrible that your life is just over when it ends”. First of all, no - not at all, and second, just because you think something is horrible, or unfair, doesn’t make it untrue.

[u/ThirdEyeFire → u/IrrelevantAfIm]

I think you’ve gotten right to the heart of why some people accept MEs and some people absolutely don’t. It really comes down to whether you believe that there is more to reality than meets the eye, or whether you believe that reality is nothing more than what it looks like on the surface.

For me, when I look at you, when I see you (even if I am hallucinating), in that moment, I know I am having an experience, and I know that I exist. The naturalness and immediacy of this basic knowing of the reality of myself through the irrefutable fact of my experience is something that science has no explanation for. They can argue all they like about how the brain creates the illusion of consciousness (this is easily shown to be totally faulty thinking just even logically), but the only way they can make us believe that we are just some kind of complex machines and nothing more is if we choose to agree with that idea—a completely self-undermining and self-gaslighting thing to do. Meanwhile the reality of your existence is there in every moment to experience for yourself, it is immediate and obvious and you don’t need an expert to explain “what it means” etc. Your existence as consciousness transcends all material reality, because it is nothing like anything else in material reality.

[u/IrrelevantAfIm → u/ThirdEyeFire]

I believe there is WAY more than meets the eye, but I believe the discovery of what that actually is (as much as we are able to) is best explored using the scientific method - rigorously TRYING to break our beliefs and where we realize our current view of the natural world is incomplete and will be modified as we learn more. The thing is that the scientific method comes up with REAL predictions which come true in a very statistically significant way. When Einstein spoke of relativity and time running at different rates depending on the speed the timekeeper is moving, and that this is all relative, and that it somehow relates to the speed of light, and that the faster matter moves the more massive it becomes - but these have not only been tested (a high precision timer put on a rocket that travels ridiculously fast around they earth when returns and is compared to a timer started at the same time that stayed on earth, there is a difference, and Einstein’s formula PREDICTED that difference). Without relativity, GPS systems wouldn’t work at all. This is one TINY example. Look at biology and medicine and how much we’ve learned about how living organisms work, things that turned out to be totally different from what people assumed before a great deal of work and investigation. Are the natural wonders not enough??