If I Won the Lottery...

1 day ago
4 min read

I love hearing what people would do if they won the lottery. It is basically asking "how would you spend your time if all economic constraints were removed." I used to not have a great answer, but I know exactly what I would do. I would try to create a production company modeled on the Marvel Cinematic Universe/Studio, but I would focus the creative efforts on "Alternate American Indigenous History." American as in all of the Americas. I would build a team of Indigenous writers, directors, actors, historians, philosophers, designers, etc, etc. I would find people that really want to explore "what if..." What if these cultures had been able to evolve without European contact? Or much later contact? Or much different contact? Whatever the team decides. It is not my story to tell. It is just one I badly want to see.

I would also love to build a "shark tank" type mechanism. Something to find and support some of the great ideas out there.

But, the one thing I know for a fact I would do... Go back to school. I love school so much. I have also accumulated so much "if I knew then what I know now cargo" that i would have a much more focused experience the third (depending on how you count) time around.

This time I would study neuroscience. Maybe cognitive science. Maybe something that sits awkwardly between disciplines, where people aren’t quite sure what department to put you in. And I’d study something like this:

How does the way a body moves through the world shape the way a mind understands the self and the world?

The Starting Intuition

There’s an idea in cultural evolution, discussed in the book,"The Secret of Our Success," by Joseph Henrich, that humans benefited enormously from becoming terrestrial. Not just living on land, but living in a world where:

movement is largely across a surface
obstacles matter
paths matter
navigation matters

That creates certain pressures:

remembering routes
identifying landmarks
planning sequences of movement
coordinating with others in shared space

Now combine that with something else that makes humans strange. We don’t just move through the world: we manipulate it. For example, trees aren’t terrain for us. They’re:

shelter
tools
resources
symbols

We walk through the world, but we also restructure it.

A Suspicion

Here’s the suspicion I can’t shake:

Different ways of moving through the world might produce different kinds of minds.

Not in a vague “everything influences everything” way, but in a structured, testable way. A cow, a squirrel, a bird, and a human don’t just occupy different environments. They operate in different action spaces.

A terrestrial quadruped navigates terrain with constraints but limited manipulation
An arboreal animal treats vertical structures as continuous movement space
A bird operates in a volumetric, fluid environment
A human moves across terrain, but also:
- climbs occasionally
- carries objects
- builds structures
- uses tools
- shares space socially

The Human Case

Humans seem to experience space in a peculiar way:

Movement is primarily along paths (X and Y)
Vertical transitions (Z) are intentional, purposeful special events (climbing, lifting, building, digging)
Objects are not just encountered, they are repurposed

This produces a world that is:

segmented
structured
navigable
modifiable

And maybe, just maybe, that scaffolds how we think.

The Cognitive Consequence

If you take seriously ideas from (just to scratch the surface):

cognitive science (schemas, memory, prediction; see for example "The Experience Machine," by Andy Clark)
philosophy (analogy and abstraction; see for example "Surfaces and Essences," by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander)
neuroscience (simulation and constructed perception; see for example "Being You," by Anil Seth book)

You start to see a pattern:

Minds don’t store reality, they extract the core structure of repeated interactions with it.

We build:

schemas
patterns
expectations
metaphors

And many of those look suspiciously like:

paths
obstacles
containers
goals
transformations

In other words:

We may think in ways that mirror the structure of the world we repeatedly act within.

A Testable Direction

If I had the time and funding, I’d want to explore questions like:

Do species with different locomotor ecologies develop different cognitive biases?
Do children who climb, explore, and manipulate their environment develop different spatial or abstract reasoning patterns?
Do people raised in radically different physical environments (dense forest vs open plains vs mountains) develop different metaphor systems or memory structures?
Can we simulate different “movement worlds” and watch what kinds of representations emerge?

This isn’t just philosophy. It’s testable.

The Deeper Frame

There’s a bigger idea underneath this. Across biology, cognition, and culture, we keep seeing the same pattern:

Systems don’t store everything.They store compressed representations of what matters.

Biological evolution does it across generations (see for example "The Selfish Gene", by Richard Dawkins). Memory and learning does it across experiences (see for example "Why We Remember," by Charan Ranganath). Culture does it across groups (again, "The Secret of Our Success," by Joseph Henrich book).

So maybe: