I’m not convinced though, that thoughts are necessarily just the activities of the brain. Leaving aside the role of the whole human body in the course of thought, this could be something like assuming that you can tap into the wifi with a transistor radio or power your car with crude oil. How do we know that the neural event isn’t just a carrier for another phenomenon that the neurons can interpret as a collective, but which would be opaque to an MRI or PET scan?
Read MoreIf the wi-fi is out, if the power’s out and there’s nowhere to go but you have candles, dice, notebooks and a copy of the core book, you can tell stories until it comes back on. As an aside, the Broken Hands Team actually already did that one evening while waiting for the power to come back on: no need to sit in the dark, but also no need for Netflix or video games or anything of the sort. That’s why the hobby is great – it’s analog, and it’s flexible. If games are art – and I would say that they are – then the medium for them is the social contract.
Read MoreThe root of this, I believe, lies in the privileging of “realism” over other modes of expression in aesthetics. By this, I mean the idea that art is supposed to be a mimetic reproduction of things that would “really happen”. Leaving aside, of course, the number of really-occurring events that get you treated as insane if you acknowledge.
Read MoreThis isn’t just a stew of reactionary race science and competitors for world’s most divorced man, though, but one could be forgiven for thinking that. No, this is the veneer of rationality chipping away to reveal the idiocy underneath. What we have here is the fruit of a deprived reason finally coming to harvest – the same reason that claims that the STEM fields are inherently superior to the humanities in the academy, but shuffles people into business school more than STEM, anyway.
Read MoreThis makes cosmic horror an interesting genre – what we are looking for in it is something that we tend not to think of as anywhere near desirable: we are looking for someone to assure us that an individual person’s life doesn’t matter. This is not simply a way of understanding cosmic horror, but a way of using cosmic horror as a lens through which to read other events.
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