I’m trying to go cold turkey on NAB now (seriously), so this post is the kind of thing you should discourage, but just to address one quick and relatively clear-cut thing – in Phil’s response to my final post, he says
You also didn’t assert that the book did something it didn’t or vice versa. For instance, the claim that sparked “not even wrong” was “PS couldn’t use Lovecraftian horror as a framework,” which is bewildering because Lovecraftian horror is absolutely the framework, right down to the reasonable-seeming protagonist whose serious-minded efforts at untangling a mystery go horribly wrong.
We don’t seem to have been reading the post the same way. I mean of course your book was using Lovecraftian horror as the framework – IMO that’s the sort of thing that is so obvious that a flat denial of it is almost always a deliberate paradox meant as part of a subtler point. Just as, if someone began by writing “Barack Obama is not the president of the U.S.,” I would read on in search of what they meant by that, not think “well, actually, Barack Obama is the president of the U.S., I dunno what this fool’s on about”
I’m not sure I have a complete handle on the post in question but as I interpreted it, they were saying your book isn’t fully Lovecraftian in spirit because it focuses so heavily on the trio’s failures as thinkers, rather than portraying their discovery of monsters as the unfortunate consequence of thinking well and not knowing when to stop. Which @anosognosicredux claims is a key part of Lovecraft’s deal. I don’t know how right that is, but it struck me as interesting.
That’s about right.
To be clear, I was referring rather narrowly to the Basilisk. The basic Lovecraftian structure is not a sustained ambiguous tension between madness and the supernatural. That exists perhaps at first. But in the archetypal horror story, either the suspicion of madness is dispelled by revelation, or madness is confirmed, but the reader remains at a safe remove. Either way, the tension is dissipated by a return to normality, even with the existence of the supernatural, because the supernatural remains liminal.
In Lovecraft it does not. In Lovecraft, the suspicion of madness is dispelled, but there is no return to normality. The veil is lifted by rationality, and the supernatural is revealed not as some liminal existence, but the substrate of reality itself. The Lovecraftian supernatural adds up to normality, and vice versa.
Not that you don’t know this, Phil (hi! thanks for reading!). You just seem to take the wrong conclusion about Yudkowskianism from the Basilisk, and it has everything to do with not being Lovecraftian enough.
See, it’s not that Yudkowskians don’t know about cosmic horror. Quite the opposite: Yudkowskianism is built around it. It’s all about doing what we can against the monster at the end of this book. Yudkowskianism is all about monsters, and resisting them. If it were about pretending that the universe has a human face, it would indeed be pwned rather readily by something like the Basilisk. But it’s not. Yudkowskianism is about asserting your humanity with abandon against the chaotic void. It’s about moving in for that hail mary at the bottom of the ninth on the fourth down with thirty seconds left on the clock. For all his faults (and this is where he breaks with Lovecraft), Yudkowsky sees the abyss and, rather than giving in to despair, says, what if.
Whereas you seem to espouse going ahead and becoming a Cthulhu cultist. To each his own, I guess.
(with my apologies to @nostalgebraist)
I think this is … true.
Not that I always accept EY’s answer. But still, he does skate over the top of utter meaninglessness and just – not care that much about meaninglessness.
He really is an optimistic chap, to be honest. Personally I find it charming.
Also: we have a winner from the audience for Part 9! The Basilisk was ourselves all along, for we stare it in the eyes and wait for it to blink first! Phil withdraws into a pagan sex cult, mumbling something incomprehensible about “white culture” and “that which the erotic signifies” while we start calculating ICBM trajectories to Point Nemo. We are the true monster because our response to the monster is to become more terrifying than it itself and thus destroy it. While remaining cuddly and n e o t e n i c with the friends we made along the way!
hey neat, I didn’t even know I was playing
Such is the basilisk, it may arrive totally unexpectedly and unfairly. But I was expecting someone somewhere to basically output the argument I had skipped, and it was really delightful to see that this was indeed the case :D
And because Phil is playing a blatant popularity contest, showing that numerous people can independently arrive to the same, opposite conclusions seems somewhat vindicating too.
1 month ago · tagged #basilisk bullshit · 47 notes · source: nostalgebraist · .permalink
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