Consciously, mindfully, averting misfortune

An early morning insight, between sleep and wakefulness: {{ We can preclude catastrophe; we merely need to consider the catastrophe and discount the possibility of it happening. That conscious act collapses the wave function* }} 

This is the notion of quantum luck. Misfortune often strikes unexpectedly. Rule it out by expecting it, by thinking about it, considering it... and at that moment the wave function collapses. [The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics postulates a multiverse in which an infinite number of universes co-exist, each sparked by collapsing wave function. So there is a universe in which you leave home consciously considering the possibility of your house being burgled – and you return home to find that it has been burgled. But not in this universe.]

The obverse is quantum luck is indifference to fate, to random misfortune. The obverse to quantum luck is also complacency; the thinking-by-default that if I were lucky yesterday, I'll be lucky today and I'll be lucky tomorrow. No. You will only be lucky today and tomorrow if you are grateful that you were lucky yesterday. You have to consciously feel that gratitude for this to work. Being mindful, aware, grateful.

You live in a world shaped by priors, things that have already been established, over which you have no control. Accident of birth is the most significant prior. But a whole series of unfoldings is constantly unfolding, possibilities that turn into realities. Fate, random events... 

You are studying for an exam. By chance you come across a fascinating article that explains some question that has been bothering you for some time. You set out this thinking in your exam essay – and it lands you a higher score, which gets you into a better university, where you meet the love of your life... Or not. Once the possibility has crystallised into reality, it becomes a prior from which further events unfold. Good and bad. You can't change the past, but you can influence the future. By action, obviously. But also by conscious consideration. Guided by a desire for good, rather than by ego.

The doomsday scenarios that we guard against. A supervolcano eruption. An asteroid strike. A devastating pandemic. A coronal mass ejection of the sun that knocks out all electricity on earth. Somewhere, on our planet, someone is considering each of these possibilities, and is thus guarding us against them. Last week's 8.8-magnitude earthquake off the coast of Kamchatka was the sixth-most powerful ever recorded and yet the death toll was zero. Good preparation (mass evacuations following tsunami warnings? Mitigation through better civil engineering)? Or – as news came over the airwaves of earthquake, could it have been the conscious hopes of millions of people around the world?

Mystical Judaism has the ideal that there are 36 righteous people (the lamed vovniks) who between them sustain the world. Mindfully watching out for all us sinners. Are there just 36 of them? Did God make the world in six days? I feel that yes, there are conscious folk out there watching for us at macro level just as I am consciously aware of averting misfortune at the personal level. 

Religion is a story we tell ourselves. Science is a story we tell ourselves. Which do you believe? Or do we each weave our own narratives to explain reality? Can God be boiled down to a physical formula? Can science explain the soul?

* I asked Google Gemini to explain the collapse of the wave function in quantum mechanics in simple terms: "Imagine you have a spinning coin in the air. Before it lands, it's neither 'heads' nor 'tails'; it's in a fuzzy state of being both at once. This fuzzy state is like the 'wave function' in quantum mechanics. It contains all the possible outcomes, each with a certain probability. The 'collapse of the wave function' is what happens when you catch the coin and look at it. The act of observation forces the coin to 'decide' on a single outcome – it becomes either definitely heads or definitely tails. All the other possibilities vanish instantly. In quantum mechanics, this is a central idea: until we measure or observe a particle, it exists in a superposition of all its possible states. The moment we measure it, its wave function 'collapses', and it settles into just one of those states."

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