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What do we see? The answer seems obvious: we see the objects and events that populate our local environments. And just what constitutes an object or event? This question leads directly down a well-known metaphysical rabbit hole, but an intuitive answer might begin by noting that the world behaves according to certain highly regular statistical patterns—or recurring relationships between incoming stimuli. For example, if two stones are sitting next to each other, and you push the left side of the rightmost stone, the right side of the rightmost stone moves along with it—whereas the right side of the leftmost stone stays put. It is tremendously useful to be able to predict such patterns when interacting with our environments, and so we directly see them in the form of discrete objects.(As Steven Pinker (1997, p. 317–18) once noted, if you want to know what an object is, just grab some and pull; the stuff that comes with your hand is usually the object, and the stuff that does not is not.) Similarly, temporal events intuitively exist insofar as the local statistics of the environment tend to change only gradually at most times, but then relatively suddenly at other times. Consider, for example, a student attending various classes throughout the schoolday: what was going on at the end of one class might have been rather similar to what was going on at the beginning of that same class, yet perhaps radically different from what was going on at the beginning of their next class. And this same point can be phrased in terms of predictability: the statistics that describe our local environments will be far more reliable predictors of what is about to happen at some times (while …