We paid extra to see "Everything Everywhere All at Once" but we stopped viewing it halfway through: too chaotic and jumbled for our taste. The parts we saw made some use of an idea similar to Capgras syndrome. That's where I feel I know you until I become convinced that you look the same but you aren't. People I know have been replaced in some cases by identical-looking and sounding-creatures who in fact are different people altogether. Our younger daughter died at age 45 but exhibited this syndrome sometimes.
Joseph Capgras was a French psychiatrist who described people in the grip of this sort of erroneous conviction in a professional journal in 1923. With our daughter, who had a high IQ, was convinced of replacements or other ideas that her parents disagreed with, she sometimes expressed exasperation with our limitations and pedestrian minds. Our doubts of her convictions do not weaken them.
These days, with plenty of avenues for communication and expression of ideas, we can run into ideas that strike us as absurd, improbable or impossible. There are many calls for evidence to support notions but many of our modern ideas are difficult or impossible for the average citizen to gather evidence about. I was reading Dorothy H. Crawford in the excellent Oxford Very Short Introduction book "Viruses: A Very Short Introduction" and found this sentence:
It must have taken a huge leap of faith for people to accept that tiny, living organisms were responsible for diseases that had hitherto been attributed variously to the will of the gods, the alignment of the planets or miasmic vapours emanating from swamps and decomposing organic material. Of course, this realization did not dawn overnight, but as more and more microbes were identified, the 'germ theory' took hold and by the beginning of the 20th century it was widely accepted even in non-scientific circles that microbes could cause disease.
