Lost and the Cartesian Demon

At last, my promised theory on how to explain much of the strange goings on of Lost without resorting to (too much) mysticism.

The problem: there are too many random coincidences in the memories of the survivors to be explained consistently. How is it that the "numbers" and variations thereof turn up repeatedly in what would otherwise be meaningless minutiae? How is it that horse that Kate saw in a field in the middle of nowhere years ago is now on the island? How to explain the seemingly random encounters and relationships between the survivors months or years before they arrived?

We could assume that these are all coincidences, but that's dramatically unsatisfying and unrealistic. The same is true of assuming that some all-powerful force has manipulated the destinies of the survivors for years: Either it's a mystical or religious force (fate, God) that can never be explained, or we have to assume that the agency behind the island is nearly omniscient and omnipotent (and concerned with what looks like trivia for fans).

Instead, it's far more promising to assume that the "flashbacks" we witness are memories that are not entirely reliable, at least as reflections of what actually happened in the real world outside the island. Suppose the agency behind the island is playing with their recollections in subtle ways (either constantly or between when the crash happened and when they woke up on the beach). This isn't hard to imagine, given what the filmstrip discusses about the connections between the island and experimental psychology. With this manipulation in play, many "coincidences" become much easier to explain. I theorize that there was no horse in the field where Kate crashed, the memory was invented, so producing the same horse (by whom and for whatever purpose) was easy rather than magical. The same is true with all the trivial appearances of the numbers: injecting those false memories makes perfect sense if the goal is to ensure the residents of the island remember them and keep keying them into the computer. One could suppose that Hurley actually won the lottery with a totally different set of numbers, and had a string of bad luck, but now falsely remembers the numbers he used as "the numbers".

I suspect that none of this kind of memory manipulation is unheard of in today's psychology.

I don't know if this theory has been proposed before, since I don't read a lot of the speculation forums, but I think it makes a lot of sense. It's a subtle form of the "Cartesian Demon": the idea that you can't trust your perceptions because you have no way to distinguish between a genuine sensory experience and one created for you by a demon (or a holodeck, or the Matrix ... this idea has gotten a lot of pop culture play in the last decade).

Of course, what the ultimate purpose of all this manipulation is (assuming it's more than getting a bunch of total strangers to sit around typing numbers into a computer every two hours) I can't say, but at least it doesn't require suspending too much disbelief to suppose what's happening on the island could "really" happen.