Complex Numbers

Jersey Devils

Reality is weird.

I mean, the universe is overwhelmingly, mind-bogglingly, surrealistically weird.

Peek outside your ordinary, day-to-day, Newtonian experience, and things get really bonkers.

And yet...

And yet, for some reason I have experienced but do not comprehend, people still have to invent weirdness, as if reality weren't strange enough.

Case in point:

https://gizmodo.com/ongs-hat-the-early-internet-conspiracy-game-that-got-t-18322...

Ong's Hat: The Early Internet Conspiracy Game That Got Too Real

Ong’s Hat is one of the internet’s earliest conspiracy theories, but before that, it was a place, a ruin almost 3,000 miles away from Santa Cruz, deep in the woods of New Jersey’s Pine Barrens. Rumors swirled for years that something profound had once happened there, a confluence of mad science and the paranormal that had warped reality itself, opening a door into strange, unfathomable worlds.

It's rare that one can trace the actual origins of a legend. Things get lost to time and entropy, the people involved die, and ideas morph and take on traits of similar ideas. If it lasts long enough, it becomes part of popular consciousness: Bigfoot, the Roswell Incident, various religions, etc.

But this is one of those rare cases, its origins clearly set out as deliberate fiction. And in much the same way as Orson Welles' radio broadcast of War of the Worlds was reported to cause people to think it was reality (reports which, incidentally, were themselves overblown, thus resulting in a kind of mythception as many still believe many people were fooled), this had the effect of actually warping reality.

By which I mean this: At some point, it doesn't matter whether something has a concrete reality or not, because all it takes is a belief in the thing to evoke thoughts and actions exactly as if it were real. To avoid offending too many people, I'll bring up Santa Claus as an example. We're all adults here, and we know that there's no physical being possessing all the traits attributed to Santa Claus. And yet, every Christmas, many of us like to pretend there is - and in pretending, give him a kind of reality.

Humans have a tenuous grasp, in general, on the line between fact and fiction. Some things we know are fiction - Harry Potter, e.g. Some things we know are fact, such as the JFK assassination (even if the details surrounding it are subject to myth-making). And then, some things... well... depending on the individual, some things blur the distinction.

This may be a uniquely human trait. I don't know. I suspect it's related to our propensity for coming up with new ideas. After all, in order to create an invention, we first have to imagine it - to make it a reality in our heads. Some imaginings can be made to become physical things, and thus we go from chipping a wheel out of stone to sending robots to Mars.

Clearly, though, this trait has a dark side, in that imaginings become obsessions, as with the Ong's Hat thing linked here.

I'm just not sure we can have the one without the other.