The Empirical Past vs. The Remembered Past

If you don’t know it by now, I like to tell stories. While I enjoy spinning yarns on historical events that captivate audiences, I much prefer those drama-in-(my)-real-life vignettes that allow me to explore fun lessons I lived through. Indeed, one of the first Carosa Commentary columns published in these pages told a coming-of-age tale that really took place at the bus stop when I was in fourth grade. It was a three-part series (that began with “Terror at the School Bus Stop—A True-Life Story (Part I),” Mendon-Honeoye Falls-Lima Sentinel, January 11, 1990).

The trouble with these personal stories is that they’re personal. Unless I can figure out a way to weave them into the body of a universal anecdote, the only people who want to hear them are my family and, possibly, a few close friends (you know who you are). So, sorry folks, but the best of these stories will never appear in these pages. They’re confined to holiday dinner tables, parties, and that annual gift of a chapter of my late brother Kenny’s life that I present to his daughter (and my godchild) Teresa each Christmas.

Now, here’s the thing about those family memories. When I’d tell them, the kids would listen, sometimes fascinated, sometimes not, but they wanted to hear how it ended. Sure, I added some zest to keep their attention (they were kids, after all), but for the most part, I kept the account honest about actual events.

Or so I thought.

Immediately after finishing, my brother would always interject, “Now, this is what really happened…”

We were both there. How could we remember different versions of the same story?

I got to thinking about this the other day when I came across an article about quantum physics (see “Your Consciousness Can Reach Back in Time to Shape the Past, a New Theory Suggests,” Popular Mechanics, February 11, 2025). Quantum physics is a goofy thing, the details of which I’ll leave for another day. Suffice it to say, the gist of the article was time might not flow in the direction we think (i.e., past=>present=>future). There’s this concept called “retrocausality” that suggests the future can change the past.

Granted, this has long been known within the quantum realm of really tiny sub-atomic particles, but the Popular Mechanics piece suggests this could apply to human reality, too. The easiest way to picture it is this. Think of an old film reel. It consists of thousands of individual picture images (called “cels” in animation) laid out in chronological order. When played at the proper speed, the images flip forward, giving the impression that the objects in those images are moving. This represents the common notion of past=>present=>future we’ve all become accustomed to.

Retrocausality throws that nice natural order of things into disarray. Instead of being a sequence of images on one long reel, reality stacks all those images on top of each other. They all exist at the same time. Therefore, they can communicate and interact with each other. Instead of past=>present=>future, you have “”.

That’s not a typo. It’s all three words typed in the same space.

It’s kind of hard to read, right? If you’ve ever read Kurt Vonnegut, you will recognize this is the exact description of how Billy Pilgrim “slips” through time. To the characters in causal reality (i.e., the “real world”), it appears Billy is time traveling. In Billy’s acausal quantum reality, he’s just going about his everyday business. Time means nothing to him. I don’t remember if Vonnegut made a direct connection to quantum mechanics in his novels, but he wouldn’t have been off if he did.

The “quantum” leap made in the Popular Mechanics article jumped from talking about retrocausality’s effect on the physical world around us to its impact on the mental world inside our heads. In other words, it suggests we can change the past with our minds.

Which brings us back to my brother and me. Or, more specifically, our discordant memories.

Now, allow me to be a classical physicist (the type I’m most comfortable with, by the way). This type of scientist believes in strict determinism. That means time travels in that past=>present=>future sequence you learned about in school. For these folks, reality can be measured; you can take a snapshot of it, and the past represents a solid block of incontrovertible facts. It is, in a sense, empirical.

From there, let me become a quantum physicist. These folks live in a world of acausal relationships. It’s a world of coexisting conflicting dualities (technically called “the superposition of states”). The simultaneously both dead and alive Schrödinger’s Cat lives there. In this universe, the act of measuring changes reality. Only it’s not that simple. If you measure the same thing in two different ways, you’ll get two different and completely contradictory answers.

Confused? Welcome to my world.

Think of my brother and me as two different ways of measuring the same thing. We often presented two different and completely contradictory memories. Who was right? The only way to find out was to go back in time and watch what happened. It’s not too easy to do that (although having a contemporary newspaper account or video helps).

If we’re going down the quantum path, things get worse. A lot worse.

There’s this thing in quantum physics called “entanglement.” As the word implies, it describes the interaction of two separate particles, no matter how implausible. Extending this analogy to memory, it means current thoughts and emotions color how we view and interpret the past. This could “change” the past. For example, an innocent childhood act can be reinterpreted from an adult frame of mind as a malicious deed. A random decision could be reinterpreted as a premeditated action.

You see where this is headed. We go from the crazy milieu of physics to the strange brew of psychology to… heaven forbid! … philosophy.

What is the past? A physicist says it’s however you physically measure it. A psychologist will say it’s whatever you feel it is.

But what does a philosopher say? A philosopher will ponder whether the past represents a fixed reality or if it is a construct of our mental state.

Or is it both? The ultimate superposition of states.

Fasten your seatbelts. You just entered the dimension of imagination we call quantum philosophy.

Or at least I think that’s what really happened. If only Kenny was still around to fact-check me.