Norm
“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.” Nietzsche
“Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.” Zappa
The definitions of “norm” in various dictionaries are all terrifying. I don’t want to repeat any of them here—if you enjoy that sort of thing, look them up for yourself. But I can’t help but wonder why, knowing these associations with that dreary monosyllable, anybody would name their kid that? Here’s Norm. Say hello, Norm. Nice to see you, Norm. What do you aspire to, Norm? Nothing much, just the norm. Good Norm!
One of the more interesting books I’ve read lately is An Immense World by British-American science writer Ed Yong. If you’ve got to be stuck with a mere human brain, you could do worse than one like Yong’s—infinitely curious, teeming, barely containable in its banks. An Immense World is a dense book of expansive range, constantly overflowing in torrential footnotes as if he’s saying, I can’t help it, it’s just all so interesting!—all the more impressive for its affection and humor. It’s a complex attempt to answer a simple question: what does reality “look” like through non-human senses? That’s a profound question, as pregnant as how would reality look (feel) if you were moving at the speed of light?—or any question that wanders outside the box and expands the fenceline of our habitual mental confines. Our highest aspirations have always been flavored by a desire to escape the strictures of our minds—to venture where there is no language—that is, no mediation—as though the highest mental activity is to disbelieve its own preeminence.
I don’t think the idea of Berkeleyan immaterialism is as extreme as it sounds. After all, it’s only extreme from a perspective that takes its own primacy as a given, which is, of course, pretty extreme itself. Granted, given our deep habituation to our particular senses’ interaction with whatever, if anything, is there, it may seem a bit of a leap from “all reality is subjective” to “there is no objective reality”—but if the only reality we can perceive is the one we can process, and we are naturally predisposed to think it is the only one, but are at least able to entertain the idea that other systems of perception and interpretation, other consciousnesses, process it another way, is there really more than an associative difference between saying it is a different reality in every processor, and there is no single referent for the “something” that’s “there”?
For example, we think in terms of cause and effect because that’s how our brains evolved. Not reality—our brains. We simply have no way of separating those two things. But linear experience doesn’t have to be the only way of seeing. We might see holistically instead. Not as a chain of causation but as a pattern. A design, if you will. If we can stop thinking of “design” as something pre-planned. In chaos theory patterns underlie apparent randomness. The evolution of scientific thinking in general, especially over the last couple of centuries, has led us to be skeptical of the mental patterns we have inherited as absolute explanations of reality. Seeing cause and effect, we see linearly, on a timeline. But if we could see the whole of a phenomenon we might not see the parts as causal links but as features. We might see the mechanism as discovering, not creating, the pattern. Or rather, seeing them as simply two different ways of seeing, period. And that line of causation that we see as horizontal, or possibly vertical, could be intersected at any angle by another line, which sees its own as the base, and ours as the angle.
Applying the teleological “the watch necessitates a watchmaker” to the universe results in “God”—and is, logically speaking, invalid because there’s no evidence, and the analogy of the watch with the universe is richly false in many ways—and so the attempt to be empirical has resulted in the slight concession of “intelligent design.” I can’t understand why people who make that move can’t understand that by trying to argue on empiricists’ turf, they’ve already lost. They’re trying to see cause and effect where there is no access to evidence of cause. They can only guess or invent. Not that there’s anything wrong with that—a later post will deal with “intuition”—you just don’t want to be caught arguing against something using the techniques of that something.
Okay, there’s something there, but the further we deviate from the norm, the harder it is to name. I call that liberation.
August 19, 2023