Debbie Foster

How do you isolate the relevant causal factors behind any event, or any two events that seem to coincide? Any calculation depends on how you define an event, how you draw lines around pieces of data, how much weight you attach to which causal arrows, decisions that in the end must be arbitrary or guided by your particular interests and biases.

The theory that shamanism is a compelling technology for dealing with uncertainty explains the spectrum of shamanic activities. Illness, weather, and beached whales are not scattered, unrelated events but members of a single class: big outcomes that we want control over and for which we are apt to suspect supernatural involvement. Shamans are not

There is, Freud asserted, an intimate relationship between 'the story of the patient's suffering and the symptoms of their illness'. Hysteria is a disguised narrative. It will only be truly understood if traumatic experiences are ordered, like chapters in a book.

As Dorianne Laux wrote, "Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's."

If you went into the field for gold stars you were in for disappointment.

No, the point was the high of discovery. No one else understood—certainly not the ex, who went on to do something involving mortgages and making poor people poorer. How could she explain to him the way her mind felt as if it were chewing, digesting difficult concepts? That the

We must reclaim as much of ourselves as we can. We must discover a personal morality shaped by experience rather than 'tribal' prohibitions. We must wrestle our minds free of prehistory so that we can make better, rational choices.

The brain has nonlogical intelligence that isn't arbitrary. That intelligence evolved millions of years before Al's data-dependent circuits, investing our primordial ancestors with the ability to succeed in the unknown. At first, this ability was simply accepted as the way of life. But as our ancestors self-reflected, using their intelligence to

we can seriously entertain the experience-source hypothesis—that is, the hypothesis that basic religious convictions around the world are cultural reworkings of a recurring set of direct experiences and not (only) reworkings of indirect historical context

Design is what happens when we uncover rules latent in the world and use these to define the logic of a new, separate system. The inventors of chess abstracted the different capabilities of army divisions to invent the rules of a game that's entertained us for centuries. We can't change reality, but we can tinker with designed systems to encourage