Philosophy of the Void

Today, I dropped part of a paper clipped document as I was using it to type a paper.  The odd thing was, it seemed to me that my brain registered the fact that it was a paper-clipped document before another part of my brain reacted by being surprised that part of the paper fell away.  After the fact, my brain seemed to construct a story about how it was first surprised and then understood that the document was separable because it was paper clipped.  The human brain seems naturally hard-wired to construct rational stories out of discontinuity.  It is well known in statistics that people are apt to find read patterns into random or uncorrelated scatter plots.  Notions of “luck” probably stem from something like this.  I suspect the prevalence of conspiracy theories is also due to brain activity of this sort.  It is also tempting to attribute elements of religion to the brain’s tendency to create stories out of disjuncture.  Somebody told me once the reason why monotheism is superior to polytheism is because it represents progress in the efforts of mankind to debunk stories that attributed various patterns in nature to the intention of deities.  If this is so, it seems to me monotheism is an odd place to stop.  In any case, the issue seems to be more about recognizing the possibility of randomness rather than descending into total randomness.