You flip a fair coin. Is the chance of heads 50%?
Of course not. Theoretically, maybe—but not in practice. In practice, the Earth could be destroyed one second from now.
That 50% only exists within the two outcomes you’re aware of.
And there are never just two outcomes. There are always outcomes and possibilities you don’t know about. Because you don’t know everything, and you certainly don’t know everything that could happen.

There are eight marbles in a jar: seven yellow and one pink. Is the chance of picking the pink one 1 in 8? No. A snake could have escaped in my neighborhood and snuck into my apartment. At the moment I reach for the marble, I could be bitten.
That’s exactly where science often goes wrong. My example might seem silly, but it’s valid. The gap between how something works in theory and how it works in reality has become far too wide.
Any example involving a coin toss and “50%” is by definition flawed. Translate this into probability theory and numbers, and you’ll start to see the problem.

What are scientists trying to do?
I think: to get a grip on reality. You want things to work a certain way. You want particles to move equally to the left and right. You want to recognize patterns and form mental models.
But reality doesn’t work that way. In real life, everything does what it wants (we live in total freedom). That’s why any formula that tries to describe reality in a definitive and timeless way (like E=mc²) is, by definition, incorrect.
It doesn’t work like that.
Don’t get me wrong—it kind of works like that. But not entirely.

Let me give you another example: numbers don’t exist. Numbers are far too rigid a way to understand reality.
With people, you might be able to say there’s only one “you,” but some objects naturally blend into one another. Chairs and tables, for instance. Or tables and tablecloths. With those, it’s much harder to define where A ends and B begins.

Why even theories like evolution are very, very shaky
It’s not about whether humans evolved from apes. The point is: when you look back in time, you only see the outcomes you’re able to observe.
With the coin toss example, if you look back at a trillion flips, you’ll see it didn’t land on heads exactly 500 billion times.
So the probability of 50% doesn’t really exist in real life.
But that’s not even the biggest issue. The real problem is that you're only looking at:
Observations = [given set of outcomes]
You don’t see what you don’t see.
Charles Darwin made a fantastic observation that held true in his time. But you can’t use the theory to explain everything.
Because you only see the peacocks with the big feathers who survived, but not the people who consciously chose not to have children. That happens privately and invisibly.
And because you can’t see everything, you also can’t be sure it all happened that way.

I’m not religious myself. But I can imagine the story of Adam and Eve and the Big Bang existing side by side.
That the universe has “begun” multiple times.
That when Adam and Eve lived, time didn’t exist yet. That everything ended, and then started again.
I don’t know, of course—but that’s exactly my point: we only think in terms of what we already know, within the set of known possibilities.
And then it indeed seems impossible that there was a snake and a tree of good and evil.
But it wouldn’t hurt to open our minds a little more.

Ik weet wat je denkt: je hebt bovenstaande tekst gelezen, en je denkt: dit is een gekkie, of toch religieus. Maar ik weet zeker dat ík het wel begrijp, en jij niet. Jij denkt namelijk alleen binnen de dingen die je al kent – en ik niet.

Voorbeeld: het verleden bestaat niet. Als we nu met z’n allen zouden bepalen dat er alleen ‘nu’ bestaat, is er zoiets als het verleden helemaal niet.

Want wat is het verleden?

Het verleden is iets dat in onze herinneringen leeft. Het is informatie die een andere vorm aanneemt. Namelijk:

Gebeurtenis → (collectieve) herinnering

We hebben dus helemaal geen geschiedenis. De dingen die zijn gebeurd, zijn discrete gebeurtenissen. Je kunt daar helemaal geen lijn in trekken. En daarom klopt evolutie niet. Je kunt geen lijn trekken tussen discrete gebeurtenissen.

Je kunt er wél een lijn in zien.

I know what you're thinking: you read the text above and you’re thinking, this guy's a weirdo, or maybe religious. But I’m sure that I understand it — and you don’t. You only think within the boundaries of what you already know, and I don’t.

Example: the past doesn’t exist. If we all decided, right now, that only the ‘now’ exists, then there would be no such thing as the past.

Because what is the past?

The past is something that lives in our memories. It’s information that takes on a different form. Namely:

Event → (collective) memory

So we don’t actually have history. The things that happened are discrete events. You can’t draw a line through them. And that’s why evolution doesn’t make sense. You can’t draw a line between discrete events.

But you can see a line in them.

Why acquiring new knowledge is only game there is

Imagine being a hacker. You are the only one that found a zero day exploit.

Or you are a physist, and you discover a new powerful bomb.

The ony quest there is, is bout knewledge. There is no other competition. If you know things that nobdody elkse know, oyou have power.

Therefore, this is the only game that people like me play. If you would give me an offer to be the president of the most powerful country in the world, I would be annyyed. That would be more of the same. Not something new. Not something we haven’t figured out thus far.

I know things that somebody knows. There are a lot of things nobody knows. And some of those things, I only know. Sexy right?