The Absurdity of the Ordinary

Oftentimes, when I have just woken up or am just going to bed, I have this odd experience of not being "all there".  It's a hard feeling to describe, but it's as if my consciousness isn't entirely constrained to the here and now.

One of the interesting things about this state of mind is, it lets me look at life from a somewhat outside perspective.  One morning I got this odd thought in my head: "I'm a bag of jelly, ambulating across the room by expanding and contracting around pieces of hardened calcium.  I live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, hurtling around a sustained nuclear fusion reaction, which is itself  tracing a path around an enormous, spiral-shaped collection of nuclear fusion reactions and balls of rock."  And the strangest part of it is, people go about their lives every day as if this is the most normal thing in the world!

I've often gotten a similar thought while watching travel shows, particularly "An Idiot Abroad" (which I would recommend, though it starts to get a bit repetitive after a while).  There are people in other places who live lives totally dissimilar to anything in "modern" life.  Their ways seem strange and almost unbelievable, yet at the same time, had I been born as one of them instead, it would be perfectly normal to me.  The logical conclusion, of course, being that they likely see our ways as equally strange, yet we go about our lives and they go about theirs as if both lifestyles are "default" or otherwise normal.

The next logical question, of course, is "Suppose I had been born on some faraway planet, as a member of some species that has never encountered humans.  Would I consider that form of existence to be normal?"  The answer would probably be yes, if such a species had a concept of a thing such as "normal".  Humanity would be unfathomable to them, but whatever they experienced would be considered ordinary, no matter how strange a life form they would be.

Of course, our conceptions of alien life vary greatly - from "Star Trek" aliens that are basically humans with some minor alterations to downright bizarre multidimensional things.  One metaphor I've particularly liked to think about with regards to this is squid.  I believe it was a documentary on Humboldt Squid I had watched once that mentioned this - squid are actually fairly intelligent, yet this intelligence manifests itself in ways that wouldn't immediately register to humans as the actions of an intelligent creature, simply because they are so dissimilar.  Thus, learning to communicate with squid might someday help us communicate with other sentient life out there, if there is any, because that life is probably going to be as strange as, if not stranger than, the squid.  But of course, if you ask a squid, they're perfectly normal.  We're the weirdos with the skeletons, after all.