introduction

Everything gets Strange when we look at it closely enough. Few things are completely as we expect according to our internal model, and the smaller our focus gets the Stranger the subject of our focus can become. Same with hugely going (cosmology) big but few of us ever do that. Science keeps explaining Strangeness and the Strangeness gets pushed a bit furhter back or a bit deeper, but it's still there, and of course it just gets Stranger and Stranger the more we regulate what we can perceive, what we can't perceive becomes a little bit more a departure from the expected. Most of us though look at things in the microcosm at times, or study something closely enough, intensely enough, to see the Strangess at the edges, to see how it departs from what we expect, or, at times, even what science expects.

Big science and small science always departs from any kind of seemingly rational and stable explanation. Quantum theory is either a fudge made for the sake of science or it's just too weird to talk about in polite society - many people have destroyed careers just trying to talk about Quantum weirdness. Douglas Adams is right though, when we see or experience something Strange (capital s - a higher order of strangeness than the usual strange) we just don't talk about it, many will consciously make the effort to forget it and if they can't do that they'll pretend they forgot it.

People carry Strange things with them and can get very angry when someone is so impolite and inconsiderate to bring it up in their presence. Have you noticed how upset people get when you try to talk about ghosts, UFOs or even 'Paul is Dead' in any kind of serious way? People are flippant, then they insult you, then they get really angry when they realise they have no arguments that can refute you with. So they just say "science!" which is the modern waving a cross at the supernatural or scary weirdness to make it go away.

Increasingly we are as a species realising how fake the universe we live in actually is. On several levels in fact. Firstly the only grip we have on any kind of "reality" (which is a completely undefinable world) so I can't use it with any kind of exactness except we all usually know what we mean when we say it - and except that we don't all mean the same thing by any means which more or less rules out any kind of sensible (another meaningless word) discussion that can lead anywhere. Philosophy, while yielding useful and interesting ideas along the way is essentially a futile exercise because we are completely in the dark with no independent data whatsoever. We exist in a model our brain makes for us. There are a few sets of inputs, people describe the 5 senses though there are more, of light waves, sound waves, pressure from touch, the chemical (or quantum) sensation of smell and the (??) sensation of taste. And taste is mostly smell anyway. So we construct a whole reality from our boot-up data which we inherit (hardwired, structures in the brain and wider nervous system that force us to analyse the data we receive in a certain way and help us build and maintain our model).

As we go on I'm going to make some assumptions/ definitions, and here's one:

1. science - is the methodology we call science that works to an extent and is pretty great if you like technology and understand certain aspects of what we call reality.
2. Science, capital S, the religion and what probably most people think is science, but it isn't.

But this isn't a philosphy book, or a book about the occult, or conspiracy theory, this is my biography, and I've experienced weird shit in my time and I want to talk about it.