Contempt or Realism?

[Dna8]

'To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form—and the local human passions and conditions and standards—are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. '

-Lovecraft

[Aldaris]

His statement is indeed correct. It is quite frustrating, that most people have such a hard time comprehending it, no matter how smart they are. For example, there is no such thing as ‘goodness’, woven in the very fabric of spacetime, and in this sense, commiting a genocide is nothing wrong, as there is no such as ‘wrong’ either. As social species, however, we have not evolved in a way, that this would be intuitive to us, on the contrary, we have evolved to internalize certain values and to intuitively think, they are universal and objective, in some sense. Evolution just makes things work, it doesn’t care about conformimg to reality, which is the reason, why our ‘common sense’ is often extremely flawed.

[Dna8]

His statement is indeed correct. It is quite frustrating, that most people have such a hard time comprehending it, no matter how smart they are. For example, there is no such thing as ‘goodness’, woven in the very fabric of spacetime, and in this sense, commiting a genocide is nothing wrong, as there is no such as ‘wrong’ either. As social species, however, we have not evolved in a way, that this would be intuitive to us, on the contrary, we have evolved to internalize certain values and to intuitively think, they are universal and objective, in some sense. Evolution just makes things work, it doesn’t care about conformimg to reality, which is the reason, why our ‘common sense’ is often extremely flawed.

Nice post.

[Anthony PV]

'To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form—and the local human passions and conditions and standards—are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. '

-Lovecraft

Lovecraft is right. If you want to write serious sci-fi involving aliens from outer space, then you must depict as different as possible from humans. Not only in terms of how they look or how their bodies function, but also in terms of how they view the world, of what constitute good and evil for them, etc.

[Aldaris]

Lovecraft is right. If you want to write serious sci-fi involving aliens from outer space, then you must depict as different as possible from humans. Not only in terms of how they look or how their bodies function, but also in terms of how they view the world, of what constitute good and evil for them, etc.

Indeed. However, most sci-fi are basically humans with rubber forehead, especially psychologically, often with some exagerrated human trait, like aggressiveness, which works exactly the same as human aggressiveness in terms of which behavior pisses them off. This is of course ridiculous, as our perception of the world, including things like morality, about which we tend to think is universal is actually nothing more than the specific chemistry of our brains, which was beneficial to have, at some point in our evolutionary history.