Writing Homework Help

1*Read the short article here: https://www.buzzfeed.com/christopherhudspeth/stories-of-people-experiencing-a-glitch-in-the-matrix-that-a

2*Then read some sample accounts from this article: https://thoughtcatalog.com/juliet-lanka/2017/11/25-people-give-their-glitch-in-the-matrix-story-that-made-them-believe-in-the-supernatural/ 

3* After reading the articles above, share one of your own “glitch in the matrix stories.” If you don’t have one (and about 1/3 of all people don’t), ask a friend or family member if they have one. If no one that you know does either, for the assignment also feel free to reflect on any of the accounts in the Buzzfeed or Thought Catalog articles above or that you find elsewhere on the web (there’s a bunch out there being circulated).

This post assignment has to do with glitch-in-the-matrix stories.

What are those? Glitch-in-the-matrix stories are simply very short, firsthand, nonfiction accounts about occurrences or phenomena so unsettling or puzzling that they cause us to question reality, self, time, identity, or nature in some way and thus doubt our usual way of understanding things or even to come to a new understanding of reality.

Typically, the subjects of glitch-in-the-matrix experiences range from encounters with the supernatural to dreams that seem to predict the future, moments of seeming telepathy or teleportation, weird coincidences, the mandela effect, experiences of synesthesia, mystical or spiritual experiences, strange scientific phenomena, odd animals or places or subjects we encounter, teleportation, or odd temporal experiences.

Please note though that while such glitch experiences may be paranormal (and often are), they don’t have to be.

For example, when I was stock analyst, it was common knowledge in my office that the stock market would react to unexpected natural disasters BEFORE they occurred–as if information were flowing backwards in time and subconsciously altering investors’ behavior. This caused me to research the physics of time and realize that time, according to many physicists such as Einstein, who adhered to a block theory of time, moves backwards as well as forward (which may account for some cases of intuition and is explored brilliantly in the movie The Arrival, which is based on a short story by Ted Chiang).

There are much more everyday examples of glitch in the matrix stories too because at the end of the day they’re simply something that causes you to radically reframe your sense of reality. For example, my wife never thought much about the conscious life of fish until recently and didn’t think they had long-term memories. But my daughter has a little beta fish and one day my wife knocked its bowl down off the stand. She saved the fish in time but ever since when she comes near it, it hides. “I totally see fish differently now,” she said to me one day, and then went onto read about animals—eventually coming to a world-altering conclusion that their intellectual and emotional lives were far richer than she’d imagined. For me, simply reading broadly in the sciences has blown my head open a bunch of times and forever altered the way I see the world, via research on the nature of the microbiome, on time, or on the nature of the mind (e.g. https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_my_stroke_of_insight?language=en).

I thought “glitch in the matrix” stories would be particularly interesting given your previous reading on Asma’s category of the unthinkable. Besides, they’re such a popular source for movies and stories these days. As well they’re central to how our understanding the world grows–both as individual and civilizations. We have a model of the world. Then something weird or surprising happens. Then we revise our model slightly. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.