Thank you to Donald D. Hoffman, whose book The Case Against Reality laid the groundwork for this tale, and whose pioneering research I’ve surely mangled beyond his recognition.

One of the chief proponents of Quantum Bayesianism is a man named Christopher Fuchs, who said: It’s not that the world is built up from stuff on “the outside” as the Greeks would have had it. Nor is it built up from stuff on “the inside” as the idealists, like George Berkeley, would have it. Rather, the stuff of the world is in the character of wha

There’s a form of argumentation in philosophy called reductio ad absurdum, which is when you prove a premise is untenable by showing how it leads, inexorably, to contradictory and absurd conclusions.

Under humorous stimuli, patients exhibited considerable activity in their dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which are areas known for processing incongruity—or a juxtaposition of incompatible elements that violate our expectations. These expectations, of course, are the mental models we’ve built from our memories and

Esteemed cleric Desmond Tutu used to always ask people: What’s the best way to eat an elephant? That was the setup for his world-famous elephant joke. And this was the punchline: One bite at a time. It’s not a great joke. I’m not sure that it’s even—technically—a joke. But the reason it works—to the extent that it does, which is barely—is that ther

Tom, do you know how evolution by natural selection works? — Mostly, yeah. — Then you know it’s not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent— — It’s the one with fins. — It’s the one who’s most responsive to change. — Oh, right. — To embrace the flow of life is, quite literally, the means and meaning of our existence. Th

In the late 1950s, American physicist Hugh Everett proposed that instead of wave functions collapsing into one outcome or the other—when you make a quantum observation—reality itself will branch in both directions, simultaneously, creating an infinite number of parallel worlds. But if it’s consciousness beneath the veil of maya—and not matter and e

Remember this when you’re considering the odds of your own existence—meaning the chances of your precise genetic combination emerging from the primordial ooze. As calculated by biologist Ali Binazir, those odds are 1 in 10 to the 2,685,000th power. That’s a one with two million, six hundred eighty five thousand zeros. It’s a number so absurdly larg

Doubt is what should, in theory, stop us from idiotic and reckless behaviors, like ransacking our own environment or blowing each other up with nuclear weapons. Belief—not faith—is the enemy of doubt. On the contrary, faith is a deep, whole-hearted embrace of our inner doubts and fears. It’s a trip into the inmost cave—not to conquer it and emerge