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I said I'd write about snails and kittens.
I present to you the cyclops kitty. For the somewhat squeamish: It's a kitten with one large dark eyeball instead of two.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ghostgecko alerted me to its existence.
The weird thing is that to me, this kitten does not appear all that horribly deformed. It just kind of looks like a kitten with one eye, or an alien of some sort. Like it would be totally OK and functional in an environment where only having one eye would be an evolutionary advantage. (I actually tried to figure out an environment where this would work, and came to the conclusion that this is impossible in a three-dimensional universe.)
This was kind of the cap of something that gelled my worldview. See, for a while I'd been working on two very different, but not contradictory, philosophies:
1) Philip K. Dick and H.P. Lovecraft were right, and the universe isn't the way we think it is, and what's behind it is scary as hell and doesn't care about you;
2) Crispin Glover and Danny & Tim were right, and strange things are beautiful and strange people are strong, despite appearing ugly or weak.
These are wild simplifications of philosophies that I've been building up in myself for a few years. This is partially because I never really had a coherent worldview before that wasn't based on the thought, "My Hebrew school teachers are going to make me breathe mustard gas," and partially because I started paying very intense attention to these people, their work, their philosophies, and the people that loved them and emulated them, during a period of time (the first year or so of college) that I was developing intellectually in a way that I never had before. I probably latched onto these because they reflected and clarified what was already a semi-defined worldview formed from my own philosophical quandaries and insecurities left over from middle school and high school.
I woke up at 6 AM yesterday morning and suddenly realized (or maybe remembered) what the question was that I'd been asking all along. It's not "what is the nature of reality?", because that's far too vague of a question to have any meaningful answer. It's "Why are there things that are different?" Which is a really clumsy way to put it. Let's see: "Why do things deviate from the norm? Why is the universe not a perfectly ordered, perfectly logical machine in which organisms are generated, live out their functions, and quietly terminate without ever having encountered any obstacles or glitches?" In a completely mechanistic, logical universe, this would be how it works.
Great, thanks for pointing that out, Rachel. Good to know that you're trying to justify your morbid interest in cyclopean felines by turning it into a grand theological question. What's the point?
I figured out an answer that combines my two pet worldviews, my deep underlying question, and works as a metaphor and a sort of serenely paranoid myth-story about reality at the same time. Also it slices and dices and makes coffee.
The myth-story is this:
We see a fairly normal, pleasant world, one in which we can live, one in which things happen according to certain rules. The ohh-so-horrible reality consists of quantum uncertainty, essence of R'Leyh and horrific Lovecraftian monsters to the thousandth power, a shifting chaos that a mind used to the order of this world would recoil from. The illusion exists because it must, and the reality because it does. The reality breaks through the illusion in the form of defects, entropy, deformities, monsters, diseases. It is by realizing the beauty and interest inherent in these things that we can slowly accept the chaotic reality behind the illusion.
You can ignore the above if you like. It's really just a very dramatic version of what I think is a fairly reasonable way to look at things, which is the really important part of this entry:
Generally, we're told that the world is a fairly logical place, where things are supposed to work, or even strive towards a Platonic ideal of function and form, and that if they do not do this, then there is something wrong. This is an illusion; the reality is that the universe is indifferent to human ideas of beauty or perfection. A glitch or a flaw is not wrong, but merely different, a kind of experiment thrown up by chaos for no reason other than that it can be; it may be a dead end, but it may also even lead to a new ideal, more beautiful or stronger in turn than what it displaced.
That's what makes sense to me. That's really what I've been asking for such a long time.
I feel absolutely fantastic. I'm going to bed.
I present to you the cyclops kitty. For the somewhat squeamish: It's a kitten with one large dark eyeball instead of two.
ghostgecko alerted me to its existence. The weird thing is that to me, this kitten does not appear all that horribly deformed. It just kind of looks like a kitten with one eye, or an alien of some sort. Like it would be totally OK and functional in an environment where only having one eye would be an evolutionary advantage. (I actually tried to figure out an environment where this would work, and came to the conclusion that this is impossible in a three-dimensional universe.)
This was kind of the cap of something that gelled my worldview. See, for a while I'd been working on two very different, but not contradictory, philosophies:
1) Philip K. Dick and H.P. Lovecraft were right, and the universe isn't the way we think it is, and what's behind it is scary as hell and doesn't care about you;
2) Crispin Glover and Danny & Tim were right, and strange things are beautiful and strange people are strong, despite appearing ugly or weak.
These are wild simplifications of philosophies that I've been building up in myself for a few years. This is partially because I never really had a coherent worldview before that wasn't based on the thought, "My Hebrew school teachers are going to make me breathe mustard gas," and partially because I started paying very intense attention to these people, their work, their philosophies, and the people that loved them and emulated them, during a period of time (the first year or so of college) that I was developing intellectually in a way that I never had before. I probably latched onto these because they reflected and clarified what was already a semi-defined worldview formed from my own philosophical quandaries and insecurities left over from middle school and high school.
I woke up at 6 AM yesterday morning and suddenly realized (or maybe remembered) what the question was that I'd been asking all along. It's not "what is the nature of reality?", because that's far too vague of a question to have any meaningful answer. It's "Why are there things that are different?" Which is a really clumsy way to put it. Let's see: "Why do things deviate from the norm? Why is the universe not a perfectly ordered, perfectly logical machine in which organisms are generated, live out their functions, and quietly terminate without ever having encountered any obstacles or glitches?" In a completely mechanistic, logical universe, this would be how it works.
Great, thanks for pointing that out, Rachel. Good to know that you're trying to justify your morbid interest in cyclopean felines by turning it into a grand theological question. What's the point?
I figured out an answer that combines my two pet worldviews, my deep underlying question, and works as a metaphor and a sort of serenely paranoid myth-story about reality at the same time. Also it slices and dices and makes coffee.
The myth-story is this:
We see a fairly normal, pleasant world, one in which we can live, one in which things happen according to certain rules. The ohh-so-horrible reality consists of quantum uncertainty, essence of R'Leyh and horrific Lovecraftian monsters to the thousandth power, a shifting chaos that a mind used to the order of this world would recoil from. The illusion exists because it must, and the reality because it does. The reality breaks through the illusion in the form of defects, entropy, deformities, monsters, diseases. It is by realizing the beauty and interest inherent in these things that we can slowly accept the chaotic reality behind the illusion.
You can ignore the above if you like. It's really just a very dramatic version of what I think is a fairly reasonable way to look at things, which is the really important part of this entry:
Generally, we're told that the world is a fairly logical place, where things are supposed to work, or even strive towards a Platonic ideal of function and form, and that if they do not do this, then there is something wrong. This is an illusion; the reality is that the universe is indifferent to human ideas of beauty or perfection. A glitch or a flaw is not wrong, but merely different, a kind of experiment thrown up by chaos for no reason other than that it can be; it may be a dead end, but it may also even lead to a new ideal, more beautiful or stronger in turn than what it displaced.
That's what makes sense to me. That's really what I've been asking for such a long time.
I feel absolutely fantastic. I'm going to bed.
