Fluke

Hindus refer to the Brahman, the concept of total unity for all that exists in the universe, in contrast to the atman, or individual soul, which only has the illusion of independence from the whole.

These ideas are related to a concept called survivorship bias, in which we can only observe that which has survived. Much of our knowledge of cavemen comes from cave paintings. It’s possible some didn’t live in caves and painted more often on the bark of trees, so we should think of them as treemen. But the trees are long gone, so we can’t say, whi

Nature converges on similar solutions to common problems. Our world flits between contingency

“Turtles all the way down” has become a shorthand for an infinite regress, in which each explanation stands atop another, which stands atop another, on and on. That’s how contingency works. In a contingent world, you’re the culmination of a nearly infinite web of events, arranged with just the right strands and interlocking pattern to produce your

There is a fundamental division in philosophy, between the atomistic and the relational view of the world. The atomistic view holds that our individual nature is separable, the same way that one can describe any material in the universe by subdividing it into constituent atoms. Study the components, not how they interact. As the philosopher Elizabe

Evolution provides us with a crucial lesson: undirected experimenting is essential.

We’ve evolved to overdetect patterns. It’s safer to mistakenly assume that a rustling noise is caused by a lurking predator than to ignore a lion by dismissing the rustling as a random bit of wind. To survive, our brains have become supersensitive to movement and to understanding intent.

Survivors determine the future. Ruthless, but effective. But biologists

We tend to look for one cause for one effect; we tend to imagine a straightforward linear relationship between causes and effects (small causes produce small effects, while big causes produce big effects); and we tend to systematically discount the role of randomness and chance, inventing reasons even when reasons do not exist, averse to the uncert