Baseline Assumptions: Truth, Fact, Presumption.

In the previous installment (which you can read here), I went over some of my personal background. My homeschooled, religious, cult-adjacent upbringing. My toxic long-term relationship, the experience of isolation paralleled by the pandemic. And ultimately, the increasingly negative impact of these experiences on my pscyhe.

The reason this route was necessary, was to set the stage for what would eventually become my current relationship to fact, truth, knowledge, and belief.

None of my approaches to truth seeking have come pre-installed, assumed, or passed down. They are the results of intentional consideration. What few beliefs I have held over from my so-called "past life" with my ex were subjected to intense scrutiny, fought over, defended, repeateadly modified and refined. There is nothing I present for public consumption that I have not thoroughly examined or considered. And as much as I pride myself on my willingness to change my opinions when faced with compelling information, there is no belief that I hold half-heartedly. If my stance changes, it changes with my full weight behind it.

Life Before

Material fact was the name of the game for me for a long time. If it couldn't be observed, measured, and defined, it was of no use to me. And even if it could be measured and observed, if the conclusions were derived without fully isolated control variables, I didn't want it. I needed absolute concrete certainty in all things.

At present, I operate under two systems. Truth and fact. Fact is still just as scrutinized as ever. If you claim to have found a terrestrian explanation to a terrestrian problem, it will be judged by terrestrian terms, and terrestrian scrutiny.

But, throughout all of my life, I have had experiences which have fallen outside of the realm of what "normal" explanations could provide. All of these experiences were written off as inconsequential, flukes, and not evidence of any kind of world outside of what is tangible.

It is not that I am anti-science, anti-consensus, anti-scientific method. It is that I am against the double standards for how when presented with (so-called) strange or unlikely observations, that fall outside the scope of what we've previously encountered. Our most defended reaction is to work to discredit the experience, than to treat it with curiosity. I am opposed to treating all information that the scientific method is unsuited for uncovering as not being information at all.

This is also ignoring racial biases in perceived quality of information, the way we discard indigenous knowledge, and that we treat knowledge as only what can be tested for in perfect, isolated-variable environments, completely missing out on the possibility for any kind of hollistic analysis. The birth and development of the white Western scientific method is constructed in a way which also fails in being able to measure the efficacy of therapeutic methods which rely on cooperation with the participants that they are administered on (and sure, you wouldn't want these methods to be the only ones available, but the way they aren't entirely devalued is folly).

Having run up against constraints of time, attention span, ability to take in new information, and focusing on general survival, I am not yet as educated as I would like to make the claims that White Western science is behind what non-White, non-"Western" (as dubious of a term as that is), peoples have figured out - but just you wait, I will read books, and get these thoughts in order one day. In the mean time, go listen to Midnight Scholars Society's podcast, and you'll start to get where I'm coming from.

Two books from people who know more about this than myself, and can express it better than I have: Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth by Stuart Ritchie (a critique of scientific institutions, limitations of testing and the method, from a scientist begging better work in the field through things like registering hypotheses prior to data collection, and more funding for replication studies, not an anti-science work), and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (which I, regretably, still have yet to read, but has certainly been a foundational influence of many of my influences).

I operated in this absolutely agnostic space for as long as I could. I resisted. I discarded, forgot, discredited myself. My internal experience meant nothing, despite the fact the internal existence being the only existence any of us will observe firsthand. I was tired of acting like secondhand information was more important than what I saw with my own eyes. I was tired of gaslighting myself, saying, "We know how the world works. That falls outside of it. You must be wrong."

Do we really know how the world works? If you're a true scientist, you say no. You test your falsifiable hypotheses for replicability, ensure the functionalities of your tools when they return abnormal data, but ultimately submit to belief in what you may quantify, and then put it up for review by your peers. Peers who, hopefully, evaluate your work with impartiality and commitment to the material rules you've all agreed to play by.

Most people are not scientists though. They are “realists,” an ideology divorced from the methodologies of science that capitalizes on the aesthetic of standard rationality, who will not accept even scientific findings whose implications created undesirable complications for themselves.

The world of academia, publishing, and peer-review has more safeguards than the average tabloid for sure, but it is far from impartial, unbiased, and without motive (and full of the same untrustworthy humans we are called to consider ourselves as, while assuming the best of these few who were set apart, undoubtedly handpicked by their superiors in the academic process, who we are also called to treat as impartial and unbiased, a fact that any university graduate can testify to as being false).

And if we really have hammered out all the big questions of what's real, what's not, what exists, what's just a figment of imagination, then why do so many people report experiencing things that contradict it? Why is anyone who disagrees with this select group of trusted people automatically accused of being a fraud, a scam, a quack (of which there are plenty - grift knows no limits), but the internal beliefs of those within a narrow sphere are somehow actually worth considering? I don't buy it.

Believing your internal experience is treated as dangerous. Even when you hold space that your experience may not align with anyone else's, it's dangerous. Even when you acknowledge that someone else's different internal experience could contradict your own and still be entirely true, it's dangerous. Even when you treat your internal experience as "subjective," and refrain from enforcing your responses to it on the outside world or on other people, it's dangerous.

To believe in yourself, your ability to see, and know things, that your feelings and intuition come from more than just misfiring electrified meat in your skull, will make you dangerous.

Once you start looking at life through this lens, you develop an accute sensitivity to how many experiences we are squarely not allowed to believe. You observe a car wreck on the side of the highway? Allowed. You see some kind of strange creature on the side of the highway? Well, now it's time to get suspicious and doubtful of your ability to perceive the outside world. It doesn't matter that your eye test results were the same in either case. (See how quick we are to discard our own gold-standard, quantifiable results when the tools that were measured begin to be used to build prohibited worlds?)

Life After

I made a choice to believe my internal experience in the end of 2022. I didn't announce it loudly. I just started doing it.

I saw what I saw. I felt what I felt. My internal experience of the unusual was just as real as my experience of the mundane.

And you know what?

I'm not crazy. I'm still functional. I'm still here. I have not spun so far away from this planet to be unable to connect with the material world around me.

Before this I had gotten so used to anticipating my viewpoints being attacked, being unable to defend them, and feeling the need to discard them, it made my life empty and hollow and practically unlivable.

After committing to trust myself, I quickly found that I stopped having the desire to explain myself.

I liked what I liked, disliked what I disliked, felt comfortable in certain spaces and not others, and wasn't in the mood to argue about it. My experiences didn't need external validation, and I wasn't going after it.

Immediately my perception of the world around began to stabilize when I stopped inviting in a discordant chorus of "Well, actually..."s to follow me everywhere.

"But what about confirmation bias?" I asked myself about that regularly. But here's the thing about confirmation bias - it functions to keep you where you are, to limit your ideas changing. And my opinions have continued to evolve and change and grow and develop. If I were just defending stances I already held, I wouldn't be able to so clearly see differences between my past self and present self, and the path it would take for those two to reconcile.

Bigger than these concerns, I worried about experiential and ideological isolation.

My past over-explaining tendencies were to reach consensus with others around me. I wanted to hear other people's explanations to take in as my own, to feel like we shared the same version of reality. I was desperate to not be alone in reality.

Since then, I have been forced to confront the fact that was true this whole time, even when I was still fighting against it - we are all alone in our experiences, and the subsequent beliefs we develop out of them. Maybe if we're lucky, we meet others who perceive the world with enough similarity that we may feel like we're having a shared experience, but it's never exact, perfect, or complete. We are alone from the inside out. No amount of self-denial and fact seeking will change this.

So I got quiet. I let my mind be a solitary space. It's been nice.

But now I have opinions and things.

And topics I want to talk about.

And a real desire to see if I can get people to be curious about things they weren't curious about before.

And a strong suspicion that what I say could actually be valuable or useful to others.

I'm going to say things I can't defend.

I'm going to make claims, and the source is going to be "gut feeling," or "personal observation," or "old-world knowledge."

I won't try and convince you that it would hold up under rigorous scientific testing. It's not meant to. It's not science. But for me, it's true. You're allowed to feel differently. You should feel differently. Just as long as we don't harm ourselves or others.

You may feel the urge to call me a scam, a fraud, a grifter, a snakeoil salesperson.

I can live with that.

But I'm not. I'm just dealing in unacceptable truths. Dangerous beliefs. Considerations that require discernment, regulation, and grounding to be consumed safely. If that's not you, that's not you.

I am considerate in what I present, and how I present it, but we live in a world that relies so much on the rejection of the validity of the internal experience, that that belief alone can render you unfit for serving in capitalism, and subsequently, "mentally ill" (DSM-V, where all psychological distress is measured in your ability to work or not, and quality of life is a footnote).

The normal, "What's accepted by normal standards?" handrails will not work in this space.

This is why I anchor around care to avoid harm to self or others.

Not deference to pre-existing systems, personal economic viability, and certainly not how likely it is that anyone deemed "sane" would be likely to agree with what I have to say.

Capitalism and conventional belief sets create and cause harm everyday, and it's treated as inevitable and acceptable, and to go against it is treated as illness in its own right.

Harm is what we avoid. Harm is what we try to resolve, heal, and minimize, equally to ourselves and people around us, even when it comes at the expense of the system.

If you can hang onto that, you can hang out over here.