Merits of Cthulhu being real

[Ian Whateley]

Yog-Sothoth is the Gate. Yog-Sothoth is the Key. Yog-Sothoth is the master of Time and Space. How would you like to be evicted from Time and Space?

[JJ Burke]

do i get my deposit back? if not, i'll see yog-sothoth in small claims court, by cracky

[miz redavni]

Reality, in everyday usage, means "the state of things as they actually exist". [1] The term reality, in its widest sense, includes everything that is, whether or not it is observable or comprehensible. Reality in this sense may include both being and nothingness, whereas existence is often restricted to being (compare with nature). In other words, "reality", as a philosophical category includes the formal concept of "nothingness" and articulations and combinations of it with other concepts (those possessing extension in physical objects or processes for example).

In the strict sense of western philosophy, there are levels or gradation to the nature and conception of reality. These levels include, from the most subjective to the most rigorous: phenomenological reality, truth, fact, and axiom.

-phenomenological reality: On a much broader and more subjective level, the private experiences, curiosity, inquiry, and selectivity involved in the personal interpretation of an event shapes reality as seen by one and only one individual and hence is called phenomenological. This form of reality might be common to others as well, but at times could also be so unique to oneself as to be never experienced or agreed upon by any one else. Much of the kind of experience deemed spiritual occurs on this level of reality. From a phenomenological perspective, reality is that which is phenomenally real and unreality is nonexistent. Individual perception can be based upon an individual's personality, focus and style of attribution, causing him or her to see only what he or she wants to see or believes to be true.

-truth: According to the less realist trends in philosophy, such as postmodernism/post-structuralism, truth is subjective. When two or more individuals agree upon the interpretation and experience of a particular event, a consensus about an event and its experience begins to be formed. This being common to a few individuals or a larger group, then becomes the 'truth' as seen and agreed upon by a certain set of people — the consensus reality. Thus one particular group may have a certain set of agreed truths, while another group might have a different set of consensual 'truths'. This lets different communities and societies have varied and extremely different notions of reality and truth of the external world. The religion and beliefs of people or communities are a fine example of this level of socially constructed 'reality'. Truth cannot simply be considered truth if one speaks and another hears because individual bias and fallibility challenge the idea that certainty or objectivity are easily grasped. For Anti-realists, the inaccessibility of any final, objective truth means that there is no truth beyond the socially-accepted consensus. (Although this means there are truths, not truth).

-fact: A fact or factual entity is a phenomenon that is perceived as an elemental principle. It is rarely one that could be subject to personal interpretation. Instead, it is most often an observed phenomenon of the natural world. The proposition 'viewed from most places on Earth, the sun rises in the east', is a fact. It is a fact for people belonging to any group or nationality, regardless of which language they speak or which part of the hemisphere they come from. The Galilean proposition in support of the Copernican theory, that the sun is the center of the solar system is one that states the fact of the natural world. However, during his lifetime Galileo was ridiculed for that factual proposition, because far too few people had a consensus about it in order to accept it as a truth. Fewer propositions are factual in content in the world, as compared to the many truths shared by various communities, which are also fewer than the innumerable individual worldviews. Much of scientific exploration, experimentation, interpretation and analysis is done on this level.

This view of reality is well expressed by Philip K. Dick's statement that "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."


-QM: Quantum mechanics (QM) has kept physicists and philosophers in debate on the nature of reality since its invention. QM states that prior to observation, nothing can be said about a physical system other than a probability function which seems to be definable to a degree by assumptions about the system's elements. With observation a system's probability wave function will collapse into a precise quantity which is observable by the means of measuring the device applied. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states that there are certain measurements that reduce the accuracy of other measurements of the same system. Primarily, one cannot measure the location and velocity of sub-atomic elements such as an electron precisely because the more one looks for the former the less accuracy one can achieve for the latter. This imprecision introduces an uncertainty into the overall state of the system and the necessity of a choice on the part of the one making the measurement, namely which aspect will he find accurately at the cost of the other. This decision on the part of the measurer has created no small problem for objectivists who insist that at its core reality is objectively present whether anyone notices or not. Several experiments such as the double-slit experiment, and tests of Bell's theorem and the CHSH inequality have confirmed that the simple act of observing does impact the system's state in a noticeable way; since the detector itself has to be changed to detect anything at all, there is necessarily a change in the observed particle because of quantum entanglement. But also the state of correlated particles which have not been measured appears to be affected. Even the notion of cause and effect is brought into question in the quantum world where irreducible randomness cannot currently be avoided as a basic assumption. In theory large numbers of random quantum elements seen as a group from a very great distance can seem like cause and effect which is why our level of experience appears to function almost completely deterministically.

It has led some such as Amit Goswami, a theoretical nuclear physicist and member of The University of Oregon, to assume that there is no reality existing, independent of our own consciousness as observer. However, there is no clear evidence that human consciousness has any special role to play beyond the influence of instrument-settings on result. These phenomena can also be given the more cautious interpretation that quantum systems do contain properties, but not properties directly corresponding to measurements performed on the system by macroscopic instruments.[3]

i love this kind of stuff

[Rodr-Evil]

C is freakin' real!

[Eternities End]

I would like to be instantaneously pulled apart and squished into a small peace and hurled into a dimension with only cookies and naked ladies.

[JJ Burke]

when i put that into the what-if machine, it comes out like so:

oooh look girls, a soggy little hairy meatball from another dimension. let's have an erotic cookie fight.

[Eternities End]

damn I should of phrased the question in a less stupid way...

[tsathoggua]

Its not our thoughts that are shaping what you call "alternate" realities. It is the ... other realities, and the things which exist without being real, that shape our thoughts.

Hence, let's not use Cthulhu...Yog-Sothoth is not real. He still exists, and he can make himself real at will, and affect what is real, but there is really so little real stuff that it isn't really really in "his" interest to be really real.

really i think you all need a serious reality check, cthulhu is obviously real, FYI george bush is cthulhu

[TheEdge]

Cthulhu is all knowing.....

That excudes the Bush family

[tsathoggua]

This is the worlds newest old one dsvf'dzbk'ffetd
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... in_ape.jpg

[tsathoggua]

yoggy is not my name i am maaaad TheEdge will die at the hand of my bubbly bubbles OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[JJ Burke]

this looks like a job for jay pee!

[tsathoggua]

Holy crap whats happened here aleister HELP!!!