Humans are not in control of reality. That’s a fact.
No matter how much we try and control our lives, it is unfortunately not up to us where we go. It is up to an inexhaustible number of random factors that come together to determine the circumstances of our lives and the random events that happen. When and where you are born, who you’re born to, natural disasters, the people you happen to meet, etc. Everything in our life that we appear to have control over can be overridden in seconds. Even the idea that you have control over your own choices could (philosophically but impractically) be false. We don’t have control over memories either. The buildup of amyloid causes dementia and removes all of our memories.
There are, of course, more supernatural interpretations, such as the idea of a heaven or an underworld, gods/deities, magic, and whatever else that hasn’t been proven to exist. But what about the idea that reality is constantly changing?
I’ve thought about this before, like for example if the world is simply a playground for some higher form of life, whether it be a god or the people controlling us in a simulation. Of course, this is just out of curiosity. But something struck me today. I was talking to my father when we both happened to remember something different. I was so sure that I was right that I looked for the physical evidence, only to be dumbfounded when I was proved wrong.
This caused me to joke that I couldn’t possibly be wrong, and reality simply changed. But then, it really hit me. What if it had? What if the thing that I had remembered as true was in fact what happened, but reality had changed such that the physical evidence of my past shows otherwise?
This is a question that would be extremely interesting, not because of its practicality, but because of how it could be used in stories. In fact, I only just now remembered that a concept of rewriting history did in fact happen before, but not supernaturally. In 1984, George Orwell intentionally points out how the government rewrites all physical evidence such that if you remember something, that memory can be completely altered. However, this is the human explanation of this. It also stands that reality itself is not being altered: members of the Party that do this for a living don’t always get indoctrinated that easily, such as the protagonist. It also stands that Big Brother, the supreme leader of the Party, would know the real facts because he is the one intentionally deceiving these people.
Of course, the question is whether this could happen supernaturally, as if reality was changing itself. However, we’re not going to be able to answer that question. But it is a very cool concept and could potentially be used as an idea for a fictional novel. We’ll leave it at that, because if we think about it any further, we’ll go insane trying to understand all the possibilities.