Related to: When Anthropomorphism Became Stupid, Reductionism, How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3

"Reality is normal." That is: Surprise, confusion, and mystery are features of maps, not of territories. If you would think like reality, cultivate outrage at yourself for failing to intuit the data, not resentment at the data for being counter-intuitive.

"Not one unusual thing has ever happened." That is: Ours is a tight-knit and monochrome country. The cosmos is simple, tidy, lawful. "[T]here is no surprise from a causal viewpoint — no disruption of the physical order of the universe."

"It all adds up to normality." That is: Whatever is true of fundamental reality does not exist in a separate universe from our everyday activities. It composes those activities. The perfected description of our universe must in principle allow us to reproduce the appearances we started with.

These maxims are remedies to magical mereology, anthropocentrism, and all manner of philosophical panic. But reading too much (or too little) into them can lead seekers from the Path. For instance, they may be wrongly taken to mean that the world is obliged to validate our initial impressions or our untrained intuitions. As a further corrective, I suggest: Reality is weirdly normal. It's "normal" in odd ways, by strange means, in surprising senses.

At the risk of vivisecting poetry, and maybe of stating the obvious, I'll point out that the maxims mean different things by "normal". In the first two, what's "normal" or "usual" is the universe taken on its own terms — the cosmos as it sees itself, or as an ideally calibrated demon would see it. In the third maxim, what's "normal" is the universe humanity perceives — though this still doesn't identify normality with what's believed or expected. Actually, it will take some philosophical work to articulate just what Egan's "normality" should amount to. I'll start with Copernicanism and reductionism, and then I'll revisit that question.