On the same meditation retreat that led me to see a weed that lacked essence-of-weed, I also had an interesting encounter with a reptile. I was walking through the woods and, looking down, saw a lizard frozen in its tracks, presumably by the sight of me. As I watched it look around nervously and calculate its next move, my first thought was that this lizard’s behavior was governed by a relatively simple algorithm: see large creature, freeze; if creature approaches, run. But then I realized that, though my own behavioral algorithms are much more complicated than that, there could well be a
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