The man, whose name was Captain H.R. Robinson, would tell anyone who would listen that he had discovered the secret of the universe. It was all contained in a single sentence but he could never remember it after his opium trances were over. During a long crazy night of dreaming about this secret, he managed to write down the pearl of wisdom, but when he looked at in the morning, all it said was, ‘The banana is great, but the skin is greater.’”
William James describes a man who got the experience from laughing-gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was: “A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.”
-- Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy
I wonder if both stories are real, or one is a memetic mutation of the other.
If it turned out that there actually were two different people who had the two different reported experiences, but that one of those people had been inspired by reading the story of the other, how would you classify that?
I’d say both are real. But if the “secret” written down and read in the morning was also similar (and this was because the second person remembered the other story and this influenced his visions) then I’d say it was a case of memetic mutation, in addition to being real.
Also:
I wonder if both stories are real, or one is a memetic mutation of the other.
If it turned out that there actually were two different people who had the two different reported experiences, but that one of those people had been inspired by reading the story of the other, how would you classify that?
I’d say both are real. But if the “secret” written down and read in the morning was also similar (and this was because the second person remembered the other story and this influenced his visions) then I’d say it was a case of memetic mutation, in addition to being real.