On a hike this weekend my daughter and I talked about the similarities of the branching and bifurcating patterns in the melting ice on a pond, the branches of trees, still photos of lightning, the circulatory system, and the filaments in fractals.

Find some images of the entire huge scale structure of the universe. It looks a bit like… a brain.

What does this mean? Probably not nothing, but probably not “the cosmos is the mind of god.” It probably means that we live in a universe that tends to produce repeating nested patterns at different scales.

But maybe that’s part of what makes it possible to evolve or engineer brains that can understand it. If it had no regularity there’d be no common structural motifs.