I am normal, so I will call myself simply N. Most of the time, I talk to myself, therefore I should have a name here. Otherwise, you will experience hard time understanding who talks to whom, which is almost irrelevant in this text. So, you will not have hard time because of understanding who talks, but because in reality -as we like to use the concept whenever we do not want to think deeply- I am the one who writes stuff here, so I talk. There is no fiction except the fiction I created for myself, that I live in a world that seems three-dimensional and full of objects that look like me, and sometimes they are different. This is most of what I can say about anything and indeed everything.
One of the differences I have as a ‘special’ N is that I like to exaggerate different possible worlds. There is no day passing without the feeling that a person I know is just pure imagination of my inside. Then, outside is simply the sum of what is generated by my inside, for which I do not claim there is an impossibility of learning the truth: this reasoning does not necessarily lead to a kind of solipsism, but it does not also allow to argue for existence with externality arguments. An impossibility argument showing that there is no way to learn about something is apparently limited when one does not think about new methods that are not considered previously. If I want to summarize this, I will probably write something as:
Scientific method is a process of bringing metaphysics into physics.
Thus, scientific method as I understand is itself a metamethod: It does not limit itself to certain experimentation techniques (I am not claiming this is what happens ‘in reality’), but it is the activity of developing methods to know something about the unknown. After a certain method is established for discovering the unknown, there is an exploitation process. People use and develop the established method in everywhere it is applicable to the point some explorers rise against it. So, science is a cumulative process as Popper would say where you increase the degree of trust into the truth of a claim, but as evolution showed us life is full of local maxima. In other words (of an economist), there is a diminishing return for a specific method after a certain point it is applied to the problems. Moreover, there is the possibility of the method not being valid for a domain we want to discover in metaphysics (unless we do not want it).
I want you to meet some of my `generations’. I have a certain number of close friends which exactly exemplify one side (or if you like, `self’) of me: some are very successful in their career with their totally pragmatic approach to life, some question everything to the degree that living life is hard and monotone, and some exemplify the idol I created in my mind for my future prospects. In the end, the philosophy of the normal starts to kick in: What if I wanted to be exemplified by those properties after I met with all of them? Totally plausible, but outside of the plot.
What if I just want to be like my friend who is successful in her career and earns much more money compared to me? Then, I hide into my `self’ defending the road I follow by my grand ideals. What about the characters that can achieve both? Honestly, I admire them. Is the environment I created stable? Yes indeed. What if I meet a new person? I first look at whether I can rationalize my status with respect to the status of this person. Each of us live in very small worlds, and there should be a reason for it beyond physical capabilities. Beyond classical communication problems due to the high size of the population, there can be other problems due to the positioning of self in a certain social environment. This rationalization is done on many aspects including education, wealth, beauty, etc. Let me stop thinking about this, maybe I will write something related to group agents and the levels of different structures binding a collection of people. Apparently, this is a note for me not to forget what I intend to write. The point is not the fact that I need to rationalize my position in the local social environment I am present, but rather that I can generate those outside of me totally because of my imagination.
What is the danger of searching consistency? Picking up the last example, you will see many people claiming that since I am capable of thinking something like this, then others I see like me are probably capable of thinking it, which presumes the existence of others. But how can I proceed if I ignore the existence of others and solely focus on my own presence: although it is claimed that I have more evidence (first-person point of view), the level of epistemological access cannot determine a truth claim in general. The epistemological access, or in other words the trust into the methods we use for knowing about something, can be used to compare our belief when we compare different statements according to whether they are true or not. However, it cannot be used to determine the truth of a claim, and it is even not necessary. If a huge tree in Amazons falls, then it falls, and this is true no matter we can know it or not. On the other hand, the following claim about the relation between a truth and epistemological access seems more plausible to me:
For any truth, there exists a method that can spot the statement claimed to be true and show the truth of it.
Today is another day, and death is always near. Death is the concept when I think about nothing, not necessarily about the concept of nothing but literally nothing. Sometimes I think about nothing, which can be seen by most people as not thinking by definition. What a shame! Thinking is usually an empty activity in which you leave the room for your unconscious to come in, and you see its best friend, death following her. After all, today is one of those days that I can die because of some stupid reason. Such a stupid reason that I cannot rationalize the fact that I died in the afterlife, and such a stupid reason even if there is no afterlife, people I care about would not speak well after me. Fortunately, I am alive now, to the degree of my self-consciousness.
This morning, I woke up. Waking up is one of those phenomena in which you can experience a transition from being less conscious to more, an exact opposite channel for people using psychedelics. After waking up, I lived a normal life which should N live anyway. I believe that I can achieve something important, which I falsify every day. A life full of life is a life full of cycles. I experience this cycle every day: feeling useless and feeling godlike.
With a very high probability, I will wake up tomorrow. Before experiencing that cycle, I need to observe my cat. While I was a kid, I had the chance to read Abasiyanik, so I constantly observed the environment without building any intimate connection. Almost like a sufi, I chose to be blind to events, which take place continuously. The reason was simple: I do not want to feel anything when I think about death. At the same time, I do not want to feel anything when I think about people dying in Africa or the bird my cat tries to catch. A concept is neutral if things that I think about it are independent of the things I feel about it. I am a feeling being: I perceive my existence mainly because I feel I exist. I am totally unneutral to the things I love, but things that I love can be the shadows of the things that matter for the `grand stage’. Therefore, I must be neutral some way.
This morning, I am still not.
This excerpt is taken from `The Normal’, a book I expect to complete until the age of 40 because of this day. The concepts of inside and outside are at the heart of the philosophy of the normal, and I think they can be understood without a further explanation which is laid out in the full text. The ‘inconsistency’ and `discontinuities’ in the text are part of the normal, and exemplifies logical expressionism mentioned in the full text.