If you clean up the minutiae, they’ll no longer take up space in your daily life, and you’ll have more cognitive, emotional and physical attention to dedicate to the more important stuff. So, wipe out your ‘to do’ lists. Pay the bills if you can, replace the burned-out lightbulb, catch up with doctors’ visits and teeth cleanings (as soon as it’s safe to do so again, post-COVID-19). You could even subscribe to a meal plan to save you time and money on eating out. When you stop procrastinating and these mundane things are finally taken care of, they will no longer take up headspace. You’ll enhance your ability to be observant, present, inspired and curious, all of which will have a profound impact on building your serendipity muscle.

An unprepared mind often discards unusual encounters, thereby missing the opportunities for smart luck. But this is a learned behaviour. Preparation is about developing the capacity to accelerate and harness the positive coincidences that show up in life

My research suggests that serendipity has three core characteristics. It starts with a serendipity trigger – the moment when you encounter something unusual or unexpected. Next, you need to connect the dots – that is, observe the trigger and link it to something seemingly unrelated, thus realising the potential value within the chance event (sometimes referred to as a Eureka moment). Finally, sagacity and tenacity are required to follow through and create an unexpected positive outcome. While a particular chance encounter is an event, serendipity is a multifaceted process

our friendship is such that if something needs to be done, one of us just does it. That is, if the cost is reasonable enough, or need great enough, baseline communism is just assumed to apply.

By this reading, failing to thank someone for doing you a favor is synonymous with failing to pay a debt. This explains why such a failure invokes the feeling that would motivate you to pay it: guilt. Graeber notes that in the earliest writings on debt, the word is synonymous with guilt. I find it more accurate to view guilt as interest on a debt. It is not the guilt you owe, after all, but rather the effort; guilt is what accumulates, much like interest, the longer the loan remains outstanding.2

We reject, with extreme prejudice, the notion that the brain could harbor any independent intelligence, with an agenda other than our own. And if such a 'rogue' intelligence could somehow command verbal skills and talk to us — why, that would be truly subversive.

If you think about schizophrenia long enough, you're forced to the conclusion (however uncomfortable) that each voice is an independent network of neurons that lives inside the brain. But these voices aren't just passively housed in the brain — they're alive in there, in a very real sense.

In particular, we can assume that whatever our brains are capable of doing while we're asleep, they're capable (in principle) of doing while we're awake. This includes hallucinating voices. Hallucinations can happen to anyone (and they often do), but they're most common in schizophrenic patients, in something like 1% of the population.

Wait a minute. "Just" a dream? If a dream wasn't perfectly normal, it would be the weirdest thing that ever happened to you.

If you haven't read Jaynes — well, you should. It's some of the most mind-expanding material you'll ever encounter. ("Cognitive archaeology": how's that for a field of study?) As I mentioned earlier, the consensus on Jaynes is that his book is worth reading even if his thesis is completely wrong. That alone should pique your curiosity.

If an exorcist explains his work in terms of spirits that live outside the body, then he is quite simply mistaken. "What delusions!" we think. "Doesn't he know science?" But let's be careful here; it's too easy to get smug and self-righteous about this. If we simply walk away, we're leaving unanswered questions on the table. Science isn't (just) about discrediting bad explanations. It's also about providing good ones. And when it comes to things that smack of the "paranormal," we too often get caught up in the refutations, forgetting that there are real phenomena in need of explanation

Six months ago I would have brushed this off as childish fancy, but now I'm not so sure. I can't tell you with any degree of certainty whether tulpas are real or not, but the material produced by this community reads like a good-faith, practice-oriented, engineering effort to grow and train a new brain habit. Their practices are entirely consistent with the idea of agency-inherited-from-selfish-neurons. For example, to grow a tulpa, you have to spend many, many hours (on the order of 100) imagining it, thinking about it, talking to it, and visualizing it — in other words, feeding it with attention. Or here's the FAQ on how to get rid of one: Q: How do I permanently get rid of a tulpa? A: Ignore them and deny them attention until they entirely dissipate. This is not a pleasant experience for a tulpa, and if you have developed them for any length of time it may well be emotionally draining on you too. It is not a quick or easy process. Which sounds a lot like trying to kick an addiction.

It turns out there's a community — on the internet (where else?) — trying to intentionally cultivate these kinds of agents in their brains. Unlike other communities with a similar goal, this one is fully grounded in physical reality. They admit no woo-woo spiritual nonsense to their discussions or explanations; their effort is fully compatible with a materialist understanding of the world. The agents they're trying to cultivate are called tulpas. From the FAQ: A tulpa could be described as an imaginary friend that has its own thoughts and emotions, and that you can interact with. You could think of them as hallucinations that can think and act on their own. Alternately, from tulpa.info: A tulpa is believed to be an autonomous consciousness, existing parallel to the creator’s consciousness inside the same brain, often with a form (mental body) of its own. A tulpa is entirely sentient and in control of their opinions, feelings, form and movement. They are willingly created by people via a number of techniques.

In this view, the self is a social agent. It's both externally- and internally-facing, its role as much public relations as executive control. Now this is what I find especially profound. If we accept that the brain is teeming with agency, and thus uniquely hospitable to it, then we can model the self as something that emerges naturally in the course of the brain's interactions with the world.

Certain religious communities, such as the evangelicals studied by Tanya Luhrmann, spend a great deal of time and effort teaching themselves to 'hear' the (metaphorical) voice of God, or to interpret His will. "People train the mind," she says, "in such a way that they experience part of their mind as the presence of God." This 'God' is nothing more and nothing less than an internalized, personified agent representing society's interests. It's an interesting feature of our brains that society (or perhaps "elite society") can install these types of agents — God, the conscience, a sense of morality — to look after its own interests. This is reminiscent of the way the UN will install weapons inspectors or election observers inside otherwise-sovereign nations.

This American Life did a nice segment on addiction a few years back, in which the producers — seemingly on a lark — asked people to personify their addictions. "It was like people had been waiting all their lives for somebody to ask them this question," said the producers, and they gushed forth with descriptions of the 'voice' of their inner addict

They're also capable of co-opting the reasoning process to justify their desires.

Computers, though technically capable of supporting agency, aren't particularly hospitable to it.

Even a plant can be said to have agency, since it 'wants' to grow toward the sun.

Without resource contention, there's no need for selfishness. And this is, in part, why computers are less flexible and adaptable — less plastic — than brains.

Or if you blindfold yourself for eight weeks, as Alvaro Pascual-Leone does in his experiments, you find that your visual cortex starts getting adapted for Braille, for haptic perception, for touch.

I don't know how much of what I'm about to say is true. All I know is that it's damn interesting.

But to accept them, or at least our experiences of them, and yet give them a scientific explanation: there's a task worthy of our art. It demands that we look them in the eye and take them seriously, while standing absolutely firm in our materialist convictions.

In The Value Chain of the Open Metaverse, I wrote about a digital fashion company called DIGITALAX that “is based on a parent-child structure, in which the Parent NFT - the final piece - is composed of child NFTs representing all of the materials, patterns, and colors that go into the construction of the garment.” The NFTs that are all over your Twitter feed today are based on the ERC721 asset standard -- one token for one final item -- but DIGITALAX also uses the ERC1155 standard, used for semi-fungible tokens that represent a category of things without concern for exactly which one is used. In DIGITALAX’s case, a final digital dress might be backed by an ERC721 token, but different color patterns or materials would be backed by ERC1155 tokens, which would reward their creators every time the pattern or material is used.