23 KiB
[BST] Rational Lovecraft
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Author: u/None *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3n2xem/bst_rational_lovecraft/
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Score: 13
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Created: 2015-10-01T08:51:15
Post:
I wrote a post in /r/magicbuilding about using a fourth spatial dimension as a magic system, and then in /r/SciFiConcepts about how it might work in a sci-fi setting.
Then I slept on it, and had some strange dreams.
In my dream, I was walking over a heath. The heather was in bloom, and it was wonderfully fragrant. A breeze brought a hint of salty waves and rotting seaweed, and I knew the sea was not far.
Without warning, the sky opened with a terrible noise, and a tangled mass of orbs and twisting tentacles of pulsating slime grew out of nothing. From the motion of the glowing spheres, I sensed a malign intelligence. I turned to run, but fell; it was as though the world lurched and I couldn't quite find my balance. It had grown to a stupendous size, blotting out the sun and casting its dark shadow over the heath.
A cold wind swept down, as from a thunderstorm, carrying with the the smell of carrion and slime, but it made not a sound. Even the birds and the crickets were silent, the only sound I heard was the shivering heather and the tired groaning of distant trees. As I lay trembling, I knew its name. Yog-Sothoth, the All-in-One and One-in-All of limitless being and self.
As suddenly as it had appeared, it vanished. Or else, I woke up. I'm not quite sure, but I do know I lay in bed for quite a while longer, before I fell into a dreamless slumber.
So, unfortunately, I didn't actually have this dream, but damn, if it doesn't feel good to try to tell a rational Lovecraft story.
It works so well:
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amorphous creatures with intelligence that dwarfs ours as we dwarf amoebas; beings from beyond time and space that dwell in dimensions coterminous with our world, yet wholly separated;
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impossible geometries;
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visitors that step from Antarctica to Pluto in a single bound; islands and continents that fade out of existence;
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experiences that drive people literally insane because of their brain's inability to cope with 4-dimensional experiences.
All of these are pretty easy to model if we postulate a universe with 4 spatial dimensions, in which our 3-dimensional universe is a small part.
####Here's the setting:
A petri dish in a cosmic laboratory, with Azathoth as laboratory director. The petri dish scenario also explains the interest the Old Ones have for us (as is indicated by their mere presence and involvement with humans), and the dispassion they show for the human condition.
The biggest problem I have with this idea is that a petri dish scenario is very "normal". It's something we, as humans, can understand and relate to, and it would be preferable if the motives of the Old Ones are entirely incomprehensible to us. But that doesn't turn into a story we can work with, so we'll stick with the petri dish scenario. The actual goal or nature of the experiment(s) of which we are a part is a different question. Is it a kid's science fair experiment? A high-end corporate science lab? A research project at university? The setting in which this experiment is taking place, the scientific questions under scrutiny, and the methods and equipment with which the experiment is conducted are wholly beyond our ability to conceptualize, so perhaps that is sufficiently "weird" to work as a Lovecraftian story?
####The story:
So, then, the protagonist is taking a leisurely seaside stroll and encounters a passing visitation of Yog-Sothoth, with which he is familiar from the works of HP Lovecraft. Being a bit of a nerd, he had some sample tubes in his picnic basket, intending to grab water from some tidal pools to look at in his microscope later. He manages to scoop up some of the ectoplasmic slime that had dripped off of it, and seals it before it evaporates. From there, the reader discovers that the protagonist is a bit of a wide-spectrum scientist, who makes it his mission to find out more about Lovecraft and the factual basis of his mythos, applying his skill and knowledge of a variety of scientific disciplines to make sense of all the strangeness. At the end of the story, he develops a way to communicate to Azathoth, the boundless daemon sultan at the center of infinity, and appeals for better treatment by the laboratory staff, at which point the protagonist is removed from the experiment and the story ends.
What are your thoughts?
Comments:
u/MugaSofer [+18] (an hour later)
Well, the main problem is that 4D objects don't seem to actually drive people insane...
But! This may actually be good news, because I never got the impression that was what caused the insanity in original Lovecraft. Rather, it was Cosmic Horror - the horror of finding out the Cosmos is nothing like what you imagined, and also crap.
Lovecraft protagonists go insane from the revelation, not AoE attacks that deal 1d6 SAN damage. Well ... except when they encounter beings with literal mind-control. Or psychedelic drugs. Or possibly the Colour. OK, so there are a few things that deal direct SAN damage.
Also ... I'm not quite sure if Azathoth and his ilk are superintelligent. Azathoth is the blind idiot god at the centre of all things. Superintelligence fits well into the Lovecraft mythos, but it's just another Vast Cosmic Power that humans can't hope to oppose.
u/None [+10] (an hour later)
Well, we haven't encountered actual 4D objects. Seeing an intersection of an actual 4D object, in real space, could be a real trip! But I think the insanity part really comes in when the poor human tries to explain to others what he's seen, and is then put in an asylum and given antipsychotics and electroshock therapy to "cure" him of his delusions.
The superintelligence bit is necessary from the perspective that you'd need a different level of cognitive tools to make sense of a 4D sensorium. Think about this: a 2D guy in 2D-land sees a square as a line segment (the front face), which is blocking his view of the back face. A 3D guy in 3D-land sees a cube as a square (the front face), which is blocking his view of the back face. He can see a whole square at once. A 4D guy in 4D-land sees a hypercube as a cube (the front face), which is blocking his view of the back face. He can see a whole cube at once.
How do we conceptualize this? Is the cube "sliced up" and arrayed so the guy can see all the slices? That's one way of looking at it, since a square area can be seen as a collection of line segments, but it's not really correct, because a 2D guy would then imagine hose line segments arrayed around him, somehow. No, he just sees right through solid objects, not as though they are transparent, but as though they aren't in the way. The 4D rubik's cube applet that /u/QuantumTroll referred to in a comment somewhere renders the 3D faces on a 2D screen, but doesn't really help conceptualize 4D perception because you can see both the front and back faces of the hypercube at the same time, yet you can't see the fronts and backs of the hypercube faces at the same time. So that's wrong, as well. Now imagine a lab assistant picks one of these squirming bodies they've been observing, and feeds it a bit of 4D qualia (somehow), without giving it the cognitive tools to process the information. Snap! Another one for the looney bin.
Does this mean the 4D beings are more intelligent than us? Not necessarily. As you said, Azathoth is "the blind idiot god", so that doesn't jive well with smarter. As daemon sultan, I see Azathoth as possibly the lab director. He's the progenitor of all the Outer Gods because the Outer Gods are the laboratory faculty and staff. They have a typically low opinion of his scientific merits, because he's a bureaucrat and a manager, not a research scientist. Azathoth is the supreme ruler; he makes or breaks budget decisions, he hires and fires, he makes the decisions. Regardless, he does all these things in the more complex 4D universe that we know next to nothing about, so my guess is that he is more intelligent in an objective sense, although to us (and perhaps also to his faculty and staff), he is a dimension of pure and absolute chaos.
u/None [+9] (6 hours later)
This is a total aside, but I'd read an office drama about laboratory politics among the Great Old Ones, gladly. Also, check out Fine Structure on qntm for a somewhat similar conceit.
u/iamthelowercase [+1] (a day later)
That description makes me think of "Ow My Sanity". Which was a webcomic (it's pretty dead now) described as "Ah My Goddess but with the Cthulu Mythos".
u/Subrosian_Smithy [+1] Nudist Beach (2 days later)
Such a great comic, shame it's abandoned.
u/notmy2ndopinion [+5] Concent of Saunt Edhar (13 hours later)
As an aside, we do dimensional extrapolation on a regular basis.
Visualization is a big challenge with 3D medical imaging being displayed on a two-dimensional screen. We mainly view "slices" for CT and MRI scans for static images, but there are 3D modeling that work better for the lay public, but it usually conceals the important information. For echoing densities with ultrasound so we take one "spatula slice" for the classic view, but there are other dynamic imaging views that take movement into account like M-mode imaging (which takes a line segment of the spatula slice as the y-axis and then shows what it looks like over time along the x-axis.)
I can't wait until we have 3D holograms, because we will have a whole new axis to play with for imaging analysis.
http://www.criticalecho.com/content/tutorial-2-modes-ultrasound
u/None [+3] (23 hours later)
Yea, I was thinking about MRI's too, haha.
The truth is that it's unlikely 4D anything would cause a psychotic break in anybody. But I need some sort of rational hook to explain the Lovecraftian insanity trope, and the idea that genuine 4D qualia are too much for a human brain to handle isn't so far-fetched.
Cutouts and transparencies and slices and overlay highlights and all the other visualization techniques applied to 3D data from any source are useful, but still not really 4D. It's just projecting depth data into some other parameter, like alpha intensity. A 4D view of a brain would be able to see how translucent the various parts of the brain are, at the same time as their position in 3D space, their color, texture, etc.
That is assuming the inside of objects are lit by some 4D light source, which is something I'm surprised nobody has brought up.
u/Sagebrysh [+1] Rank 7 Pragmatist (a day later)
If you want a 4d light source, simply assume that the sun emits light in 4-d not 3d. We don't see the 4d light because we don't see in 4-d. This is useful because it lets you figure out what direction the light is coming from and how it applies to create an image. Its important to note that while 4-d data is more then 3-d data, it overlaps heavily. 1/4 of it would be the same as that of a 3d entity with a perfect visual field (this is ofc assuming the 4d entity has a perfect visual field, which may not be the case. Humans don't have a perfect visual field).
u/Sagebrysh [+1] Rank 7 Pragmatist (a day later)
How do we conceptualize this? Is the cube "sliced up" and arrayed so the guy can see all the slices? That's one way of looking at it, since a square area can be seen as a collection of line segments, but it's not really correct, because a 2D guy would then imagine hose line segments arrayed around him, somehow. No, he just sees right through solid objects, not as though they are transparent, but as though they aren't in the way.
This is really interesting to think about, and I think that while it wouldn't drive people insane, our minds are just not really wired to see something in 4d, so we might not really be able to understand what we're looking at when we see it.
The first important thing to realize is that we have what ends up being a relatively narrow field of vision. There is a blind spot behind our heads that we can't see in. Other animals, with eyes on the sides of their heads, lack this blind spot and can see a complete circle around them.
So lets simplify down to a hypothetical point entity that can see in any direction in 3-d space at once. Lets say its a cube, so that when flattened out, a person could see through each face on a screen with a panel for each of the six faces. Now, to see in 4-d, we add not two, not four, but eighteen, taking us up to a total of 24 total faces. These are all directions perpendicular from one another. When looking into 4d, it would be akin to looking in a direction that is normally invisible, one perpendicular to all other directions.
So with 24 screens, you could see in every direction in 4d space. You would have 12 screens that would be seeing the views created by the two 3d cubes that form the hypercube, and 12 screens created by the faces of the hypercube between the two normal 3d cubes.
Would would this look like as visual data? that's getting a bit past my ability to visualize in my head, but I think you could path out light coming in from various directions around the object I defined above, and figure out what it would be like for the object to be looking at say, a tree in a field, but you might need to bust out a notebook and pen and do some visualizations to get a really clear idea. Its a starting point. Its certainly not maddening, but its definitely more sensory input then our minds are used to receiving. We can't even see in every direction around us at once. It would take some time and thinking to be able to make sense of what you'd be seeing.
As for seeing a 4-d object, we'd see a 3d slice of it. So it would start as a dot, and grow strangely in three dimensions as it passed through a point in 3-d space, then shrink again to nothing as it passed by. It would be like, suddenly, from nowhere, a point into the air bursts into a swarm of rising tentacles and articulating limbs, all seeming to grow and vanish rapidly like a flickering stop motion picture, swelling in space like a bloating tumor, a surface of all hands, claws, and tentacles and visual points, before rapidly shrinking away again to nothingness as it finally passes by.
u/TimTravel [+4] (11 hours later)
Well, the main problem is that 4D objects don't seem to actually drive people insane...
Yeah, I never understood Lovecraft's phobia of noneuclidean space.
u/None [+3] (12 hours later)
It's literally unimaginable, and so serves as a helpful symbol and metaphor for the unimaginable motives of ancient beings?
u/TimTravel [+3] (12 hours later)
u/None [+1] (12 hours later)
Heh. But you know what I mean.
u/TimTravel [+1] (12 hours later)
I'm not sure I do. It could look trippy and be very confusing, but I don't see how it could cause more than frustration and headaches.
u/None [+8] (12 hours later)
You're thinking too literally. He meant it as a symbol of the absolute terror within the unknown - he wasn't making a prediction about what the fourth dimension actually looked like, he was playing off of the old fears in the human psyche that make you see shapes in the shadows of trees when you huddle around a campfire at night. Only the shadows are monsters, and the flame is the world, and the night is vast and unknowable.
u/TimTravel [+1] (a day later)
Mathematical terms are very precise and literal. Using math language figuratively always seemed iffy to me.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
It's not, though! He didn't use math, he used the cultural associations and connotations of a particular set of mathematically definable terms in order to EVOKE emotion. If I say "he trembled as if some vast exponent forced itself digit by digit through sodium channels, and lit his neurons from within" I do not literally mean that an enormous exponent is shoving itself through his mind. I mean that he had just been exposed to an idea that's overturning some essential worldview he held. Why? Because exponentiation quickly creates numbers we cannot comprehend with our standard cognitive tools, and I'm associating the experience with something else.
Likewise with the non-Euclidean geometry. The specifics aren't important, for literature. What's important is that there are things which transcend our understanding of the world - they are alien, unpredictable, and horrifying.
Anything can be symbolic, in literature. Remember that. While rational fiction overlays another set of rules, it should not displace imagination, nor devalue the tools that our expectations of fiction are based on.
u/TimTravel [+2] (a day later)
This is starting to sound like what I call a "broken comparison".
Example: My neighbor is like the sunset: he won't return my damn lawnmower.
Actually that one is less broken than it looks because the sunset actually won't return a lawnmower but hopefully you get what I mean.
u/rttf [+2] (a day later)
4D space (or ℝ^4 as mathematicians would refer to it) is very much a Euclidean space.
u/TimTravel [+1] (2 days later)
I am aware.
u/Transfuturist [+2] Carthago delenda est. (7 hours later)
Rather, it was Cosmic Horror - the horror of finding out the Cosmos is nothing like what you imagined, and also crap.
That's funny, because I never got that impression. People went crazy because of the psychic effects of the the Old Ones and Elder Gods.
u/chaosmosis [+1] and with strange aeons, even death may die (13 hours later)
I viewed these as the same thing. You can't see the creepy stuff without having your old worldview smashed to pieces.
u/Transfuturist [+2] Carthago delenda est. (17 hours later)
Insanity does not follow from existential horror. I doubt that's what Lovecraft intended.
u/chaosmosis [+0] and with strange aeons, even death may die (18 hours later)
I would argue that it makes sense, if the horror is extreme enough.
u/chaosmosis [+5] and with strange aeons, even death may die (13 hours later)
Sorry, but I hate the idea that they're doing a petri dish experiment. You could reasonably use that as your own personal understanding for why they're doing things, and keep it deep in the background, but from the perspective of the main characters their motives should be incomprehensible. Otherwise, you're not writing Lovecraft anymore. In my view, rational Lovecraft shouldn't be "let's figure out the secrets of the universe" but rather "let's figure out how to make decisions under extreme uncertainty".
Another personal interpretation might be that your characters are people inside a story book, and are being tortured for the amusement of the readers as well as the amusement of the Elder Gods.
u/None [+3] (23 hours later)
I think when writing rational fiction, it helps to have some idea what is motivating all agents in the story, and not just the protagonists. I'm not saying the reader should be told about the cosmic lab, and I'm not sure a protagonist could figure it out based on the seemingly random or arbitrary actions the Old Ones take, but it helps to have a frame to guide those actions (at least to me).
u/Sailor_Vulcan [+1] Champion of Justice and Reason (2 days later)
If this idea took place in the universe of "the Study of Anglo-physics" by SlateStarCodex, would it count as a simulated universe run by evil matrix lords?
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/03/the-study-of-anglophysics/
u/None [+4] (6 hours later)
What might be interesting: What happens when a culture that can access 4d space mechanically but not biologically without going insane meets a culture that can access 4d space biologically but not mechanically due to not having the tech level.
Also, imagine the universe as a 3D surface on a 4d shape, like a map is a 2d surface overlaid on a 3D object. What happens when the bacteria discover a new axis to move on, that they can use to crawl "up"?
u/AmeteurOpinions [+6] Finally, everyone was working together. (12 hours later)
Worm.
u/notmy2ndopinion [+3] Concent of Saunt Edhar (12 hours later)
Nice. Or Fine Structure by sam.
u/Transfuturist [+2] Carthago delenda est. (7 hours later)
Why would this only be in four dimensions?
u/None [+2] (a day later)
You're right. I kept it to four to keep it simple, but if we're talking Elder Gods and Old Ones, there's no reason they don't exist in five or more.
u/redrach [+3] (13 hours later)
I think attempting to explain how the fantastic creatures and so-called Elder Gods of the Lovecraft mythos function and where they derive their power from takes away much of the enjoyment from it.
That's not to say you couldn't have a rational fic set in the setting, it'd just be about a human trying to patch together as much as knowledge as he can so that he can help save humanity in the face of such overwhelming odds. Or heck, have it from the viewpoint of a cultist for a change. If there are hostile forces at work in the world, maybe the best way to survive is to find one you can deal with and use them against the others.
I've been toying with an idea for a while now about a cultist of Shub-Niggurath who infiltrates a group of archaeologists investigating some ancient ruins, only to have the entire group transported to somewhere else. Then one of their number is revealed to be a cultist of Hastur, who panics about being in enemy territory and desperately starts a ritual designed to ensnare those around it in a certain play...
u/None [+1] (23 hours later)
That idea sounds really fun, actually.
But yes, a rational fiction set in the mythos would be about a human trying to make sense of what's happening, which is what most of Lovecraft's stories were about. The difference is two-fold: the protagonist would go about his work in a more structured and reasonable way, with contemporary analytic techniques and modern technology, and the author needs a framework in which to cast the Old Ones and their bizarre powers (because the assumption is that they, too, are rational, but operate on different principles, for strange purposes, using otherwordly abilities).