About
I am Taylan Öztürk (a.k.a DrShahinstein). I grew up with computer and internet culture. Especially in my childhood, I used to play a lot of games and listen to a lot of foreign music. Today, we still broadcast games on youtube with friends on weekends. As I got older, I became more productive and turned to areas such as software programming, chess and philosophy. I have always been a person who tries to do what I do in the best way possible, so I have a considerable accumulation of interests. I enjoy life by doing things well, I like to compete, I like to be honest and open.
Since late 2019, I have been in the computer programming culture. I was twelve years old. It was the end of middle school and we were responsible for the high school entrance exam. My peers were studying hard. I would try to keep up, even if I couldn’t do it very well, because everyone was doing it. Everyone was doing it, but I realized that studying wasn’t doing me any good, not because I never liked studying, not because I was someone who avoided responsibility. The education system in Turkey is a political tool that, under the guise of providing education, serves as a political tool to distract people from art, from science, from their passions, from niche things they are good at. It serves to raise obedient workers, not free individuals who think, doubt and ask questions. Even in primary school, I used to compare a school to a prison. As I got older and more conscious, I realized how important it is to be curious and to love. I started to put school on the back burner. I started to treat classes as a simple responsibility, like making the bed, putting the garbage in the trash can. I gave priority to my passions. I started to gradually take the cultures I had further and further.
Being already involved in computer and internet culture led me to explore programming culture as well. I was interested in developing websites for a considerable period of time and gained a lot of experience in this field. At some point, I discovered Linux and the free software philosophy. I owe a significant part of my vision in my programming background to this discovery. Over time, I got involved in different fields such as low-level programming, desktop programming, Linux programs, reverse engineering. I let my curiosity guide me freely, and through this I acquired a serious programming culture, through which I met some amazing people, from whom I learned a lot. I even met my best friend on a programming forum.
Around the same time, I started playing chess online. As soon as I came home, the first thing I did was to play chess. It became an area of interest that I was very fond of. Chess philosophy, chess culture, is a sharp building block of my character, of my thinking. Sometimes you fight for as long as six hours, you have made fifty good moves, but you lose everything because of a small mistake you made on the fifty-first move. You are left with nothing but a bitter experience, and yet you know how to get up and shake hands with your opponent and congratulate him. That’s chess. That’s why I don’t see it as a game. It is more of an art of being a young man. People of this art have to be honest in order to move forward, because the more they deceive themselves, the more they will go backwards and not forward. The rules of chess are very simple. You can learn all the rules and play chess in half an hour. But just because something is simple doesn’t mean that it is easy. That is what is so wonderfully interesting about chess, and life is the same way. Thanks to such features, chess sometimes becomes more than an art, it becomes a book that teaches life lessons. Chess culture is indeed a very deep, aesthetic and instructive culture.
All these and many more have a place in human life, but they remain incomplete unless they are grounded in a view of life and a philosophy that is its manifestation. “Improve yourself,” we hear the advice from many people. “Study in better schools, earn good money, have a good profession…” Fortunately, humanity has developed a discipline called philosophy over the centuries, and it is precisely when I ask “but why?” that I can give people with a philosophical culture a jolt. I enjoy this jolt very much. For me, the most enjoyable and thought-provoking topics to talk about come to the stage through this question. Well-being theories, guides to living life well, the definition of good and bad, right and wrong… Really, “why should I improve myself?” Or why should I be a “good” person? Moreover, why is right and wrong so important? Can one’s efforts to improve oneself be characterized as right or wrong? More than that, what is the meaning of life?
Some thinkers ground the meaning of life in pleasure. They argue that pleasure should be maximized as much as possible before dying, that life can have meaning in this way. Some think that one should minimize pain rather than maximizing pleasure. Others think that pleasure can be the goal of ethics but not its standard. Or some people say, “there is God, we should live for his pleasure.” People say a lot of things, everyone drives different nails with different hammers; we are all different. So I say something too. Nothing is important. We are all just cockroaches, like antelopes dying by the river. Nothing we do has any lasting meaning. As we wallow in the meaninglessness of life, facing this meaninglessness is perhaps our greatest freedom. We are transient beings, like grains in an hourglass. Someone is born, someone dies, then someone is born again. The sun completes its orbit, then completes it again and again. We are human beings looking at this huge universe through the windows of our tiny lives on earth, and we have a certain amount of time in these windows. I find the answer to how to do this very personal. I enjoy doing things well, I try to do them better every day, that’s how I feel good. On the day I die, I want to feel joy, not fear.
Is man truly left unattended? Nobody knows that, to be honest. But I see the inevitable end of someone who does not believe in a theistic idea of God in nihilism. For someone who believes in a theistic idea of God, we cannot talk about this emptiness, this meaninglessness, because there is an objective reality: Right, wrong, values have a real meaning. Otherwise we human beings are no more than inventors of such concepts. All this aside, we need to realize this: We are beings evolved to survive. Our eyes perceive a certain spectrum of colors, we smell at a certain distance, we have a certain level of thinking ability, we have a certain level of muscular strength… The point is that we are programmed to survive and reproduce, not to understand existence. From this perspective, I would like to draw attention to what our beliefs do: We feel as if we understand things we don’t understand one more level, and we fill in the gaps by creating assumptions in response to an endless state of unknowing and unanswered questions. Some fill those gaps with gods, others, like me, fill them by saying “nothing really means anything, we are just tiny creatures witnessing the existence of the universe through our little windows”, others say that we are all gods, others say something else; as a result, nobody knows anything about anything, but they reach a certain satisfaction. Therefore, the idea that a nihilist who says there is no meaning, there is no value - these are philosophical points, otherwise every human being has values - will not be as happy as those who value things and create meaning is wrong. Because that person feels closer to the truth by saying “there is no value” and this gives him the satisfaction he needs. So in fact, what we all do as human beings gets to the same point, fulfills the same needs. The only difference is the difference in style. We all have sex but we have different positions :) It is sad that people can be at loggerheads with each other because our positions are different. Because people are idiots.
“And if your opinion is defeated, your honesty should still cry triumph over that!”
(Thus Spoke Zarathustra)“Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”
(to Kill a Mockingbird)“Nothing matters. We’re all just cockroaches, wildebeests dying on the river bank. Nothing we do has any lasting meaning”
(House md)