So theoretically, could humans kill an Old One/Eldritch Abomination...

Have you seen Conan? Dude is swole as fuck.

You have about as much of a chance of killing an Old One as stick figure you drew on a piece of paper would have killing you. They are literally on a plane of existance that you can not comprehend which is why you go instantly insane when you appear before you because the mind is unable to cope with their being.

One thing nobody's mentioned is that Cthulhu was already dead. Being dead is not a big deal to them, it's basically just like being asleep.

>In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits, dreaming

Eldritch Abomination, sure. Old One? Fuck no.

now could someone kill azatoth?
by someone i mean anyone, even the old ones.

I mean, the universe is Azathoths dream so almost certainly not, and even if you did, you'd be ending the universe in the process.

I would say its possible... but unlikely. Just as it is possible but unlikely for ants or bees to kill a person.

I like to think the internet is a baby great old one that acts as a collective hive mind, using memes and whatnot to connect humans mind to mind.

Azathoth could kill itself

Save us from our beastly idiocy

Well, it's slowly driving us all crazy so hopefully it'll offer some level of reprieve

now if this is a dream of azatoth, then how is the reality? i mean, the real universe where azatoth lives, did Lovecraft ever talked about it?

CHIM

and indeed, stands a pretty good chance of doing so

I like to consider the concept of Amaranth from Elder Scrolls in this scenario. Azathoth dreams because it cannot bear to be awake, because it is the only being which actually exists.

Dying really isn't something Great Old Ones can do, at least not in the sense we understand it. When stars aren't right, they're dead, but also dreaming. And when stars are right, they just wake up and resume whatever they were doing. You can't kill them in the same sense humans (or any other earthly for of life) can be killed, because that's simply not how they work. At best, you can survive long enough for the stars to stop being right and they go back to being dead. The Elder Things did it, and they were also mundane creatures made from regular matter, so theoretically humans could pull it off as well.

You have to remember that humans interacting with old ones is in most cases only interacting with them from the third spatial dimension.

Shooting a huge chunk out of Cthulhu could be compared to slightly scraping a part of the skin if we assume he exists within 4 spatial dimensions, but if we draw knowledge from stories like "Through the gates of the silver key" we know that many of the elder gods exists through even higher dimensions, making it more comparably to hurting a cell(a 1 dimensional unit) rather than the skin (a 2 dimensional thing).

Short answer: No.

>inb4 someone goes all asinine with the term "old ones" and "eldritch beings" you all know the point i'm making.

I like to think that we do live in the real world.

The world is just void, except for a lonely intelligence. The intelligence created the laws of physics which bond the universe, and made energy and matter through pure willpower.

He even gave himself a body. He must remain in a state where he is dreaming because if he stops the laws of physics the universe will dissolve to become the void again

I do not think he is unaware of the world, simply has to remain in a state where he creates everything. To wake would be his nightmare.

There isn't anything else.

It would be like killing a gamma ray burst.

The whole point is they're an allegory for the forces behind a scientific universe that could destroy us at any moment.

Yeah the whole point of the Lovecraftian Mythos is that the horror is in the sense that we as humans cannot do anything to stop these great creatures.

I wonder if he was influenced by Nietzsche?

>fuck up Cthulhu
Why do people always assume that was Cthulhu? I thought the story explicitly mentioned Cthulhu had a shitload of his spawn with him (I could be wrong on this). Only one thing 'woke,' would the king of the place really be the first guy to get up and start running around?

That's ok then.
We can't kill the Great Old Ones, and we won't even try.
We will kill the stars.

>he thinks "the stars are right/wrong" is literally about stars and not some medieval arab guy's interpretation of cycles of weird physics properties of the universe

We don't understand them, they barely notice us.

If they destroy us, it might very well be by accident and they will most likely neither realize nor care that we were there in the first place.

If it isn't by accident, it might be for reasons so alien to our mindset that one cannot even say it was evil or malicious :

As you said, it might just be a case of "that cosmical timeway needs to be built" and we happen to be in the way.

Or maybe they just forgot to close the dimensional fence and their "dog" went out for a century or two, just the time it took for them to notice it and call it back. Nevermind whatever local pest it might have played with in that brief moment.
Meanwhile, half a civlization might have been erased on our side.

Depends on the specific interpretation of the mythos.

Lumley and Derleth wrote mythos stories where the answer was basically "yes," most who knew what they were doing would probably have the answer be no. But there's a lot of variety to how different people have used the mythos, so it actually does vary. Even moreso for
>could humans kill an Eldritch Abomination?
since "Eldritch Abomination" just means "mythos-like monster" and could range from a deep one you could shoot in the face to "literally omnipotent".

Having physicists build devices that move us out of alignment from other theorized dimensions doesn't sound as badass tho.
It's more near-future realistic, since we can already do shit with gravity waves and it just takes big explosions, which might or might not mean making some nearby star explode, but it just sounds lame.

So you could kill him if he dreamt it... but then he would awoke and you would be gone.
And he would still be alive, staying awake for a while until the next short nap.

"Kill" one?

Even our concept of life and death are utterly insufficient to describe the process of making an Old One/Eldritch Abomination inert.

You don't quite seem to understand the difference in scale we're talking about here.

Then perhaps we can give them cancer.

Except that a great old one could just cut that part of and be just as fine imagine cuting in 12 spatial dimensions, and the "cell" was just a metaphor, since a cell isnt a one dimensional thing.

And, again, this is oversimplifying things since they by definition are to "big" and complicated for our tiny minds.

Azathoth isn't so much dreaming the universe as he is controlling it, every movement of every particle. But he's a blind idiot so he has no plan for it. He is the quantum random chance personified.

This means there is no "free will" in the Cthulhu universe. Which explains how time travel can work so neatly and without paradoxes.

Are you high or something?
"Free will" by any scientific standard does not exists. Its not even a thing in IRL.

Almost certainly not. Nietzche's overman isn't a wild insane berserker like that quote predicts.
Casualty is an insufficiently verified concept.

Not precisely. Human behavior appears to be largely deterministic, but determinism is not incompatible with free will. Just because you were "going to" make a certain choice doesn't mean you didn't make that choice.
Free will is one of those things that's really hard to nail down.

> Free will does not exist
Oh thank God, now I know why I can't quit this place. So who do I get to pin the blame on?

I really want to know the story behind this image.

The Japanese fish market is a harsh mistress, user.

>science doesn't know it, it must not exist

user, just because we didn't always know about atoms doesn't mean they didn't exist.

every prior event in your entire life basically. They all created the personality you have which is why you made the decision you did

>he thinks he can verify the existence of causality

Laughinghume.jpg

It does sound an awful lot like how a pessimistic sort of an old-fashioned morality might view it.

>personality cannot exist in a metaphorical vacuum

Free will means the freedom to do what you want. Your mind may be predisposed to certain behaviors but the conscientious individual can change their will as need be.

> On a board where dice are nearly worshiped
> Not relying on quantum probability distributions for a random element of 'free will' instead

>>Veeky Forums is that way, my deterministic friend

but the decision to change their will is going to be determined by how their past experiences shaped their expectations, opinions, morals, etc

>personality cannot be altered
>the past is the only thing that defines you

>Casualty is an insufficiently verified concept.
Unless you wan't to be scientific about it, in which case it is.

>The world of physics is deterministic
>Something operating through physics is not deterministic
Not trolling, just think before you shitpost alright?

Yourself. has a point. Just because a being watching everything in the universe could predict your every move doesn't mean its not your choice.

Right, so we must asume it exists? Or is the scientific method to assume it doesn't unless we are trying something new?

See reply above.

It really boggles my mind how you all could have missed the very basis of physics. Are you all trolling me or is this some ancient Veeky Forums meme i've had the luck of not running into during all these years?
Not being a fedora about it, but surely you must all understand that the basis of science is to assume only what has been proven unless we are trying entirely new stuff out. Or are you all the kinds of dudes who think that because nobody has disproved dragons its the logical thing to assume they exist?

Or are you the kind of people who assume that quantum mechanics must be random because we don't understand it yet even though everything else in the universe is deterministic?

>a person lives in a vacuum
>collective human knowledge has no value, the only things affecting you are your own sensory experiences

the act of learning that knowledge is a sensory experience

Yes.

The point of Lovecraft is that the universe is big and stupid (in the sense of "not intelligent/kind/planned"), and that nothing is above its rules, not even the things that seem like they are. Nothing is "exempt" from the rules of the universe, they just interact with them differently. The horror of Lovecraft isn't the cosmic horrors themselves, it's that the universe is massive and impersonal enough to contain them.

It's just that then other people wrote their fucking fanfiction and made it out like there was some grand agenda to these huge stupid beasts and that they were unkillable meme engines that made you go insane just by glancing at them and then Chaosium ran with it and made it worse.

The point of Lovecraft is that the Universe is big and nobody is the center of it. That's it.

>Freedom of will hasn't been disproven
>Therefor its the logical thing to assume it exists in contrast to all knowledge gathered so far rather than assuming it doesn't until it is proven

Oh is this the "deus vult" cosplaying stuff showing through?

Verify casuality as a concept empirically. It can't be done. Its assumed for the sake of convenience.

We assume that if a certain event follows another with consistency, its a universal law, but a single counter-example is enough to overturn an entire theory, no matter how complex or sublime.

Read Hume.
Read Godel.
Google "Black Swan problem" if you're too lazy to do that.

Also the idea that everything in the universe is deterministic is a massive assumption on your part that doesn't match the data on quantum mechanics at all. You're basically operating on Newtonian physics right now, every new piece of information we learn in physics suggests that the 1600s model of a clockwork universe is deeply flawed.

As to 'free will' the jury is still out on that concept, but if you mean metaphysical free-will, that would literally require that every individual be capable of violating casuality, at least to the degree that given identical causes, DIFFERENT effects could be produced.

>Right, so we must asume it exists?

Sure? It's your life man. Don't live it by what other people tell you to think.

Citation needed
>read a book about snakes
>see venomous snakes
>avoid them
>user cannot explain this action

I dont think you understand what a 4th or 5th dimensional creature would look like...

youtube.com/watch?v=0t4aKJuKP0Q&t=111s&ab_channel=Miegakure

you can't see how the sensory experience of learning about something being dangerous leads to the decision to avoid it?

It's a coin flip, homie. Whether or not you believe it exists is completely inconsequential so why worry about it?

The very basis of science when it comes to fundamental epistemological limitations like the inability to empirically verify causality is to ignore them because you can't get anything done otherwise, but that doesn't change the fact these shortcomings are still present.

Going by Lovecraft-only final destination no expanded mythos: unclear.

I mean, depending on what you mean by "eldritch abomination", sure. Humans killed all sorts of spooky shit in Lovecraft's stories. The U.S. government dropped depth charges on the deep ones. The MC of "The Lurking Fear" dynamites the mole-people monsters over in rural New York. The MC of "Dreams in the Witch House" fucking strangles the witch, and the MC of "The Shunned House" digs up the vampire and drowns it in acid. The trope of the main character turning into a helpless gibbering wreck upon seeing the monster is much overblown; humans can and do fuck the eldritch world's shit up.

Now, moving up the scale to the big guys like Cthulhu (and beyond)? Who the fuck knows. They weren't really designed with fighter jets and nuclear bombs in mind. The exact methods with which they would conquer the world are never fully described (although it's important to note that they rely heavily on humanity doing their dirty work for them; mind control is a hell of a drug). They're big. They're scary. They're not designed as primary antagonists but as looming existential threats. Could humanity "kill" them? I guess the answer is really going to depend on what the author wants.

>Eldritch Abomination
A human, given enough fire power could probobly take out a shogoth/dark young but it would be tought
>Old one
Depending on the old one, a group of humans given enough fire power/the right spells might hurt one of the weeker ones, but not much
>the boat meme
Chthulu was not "hurt", he did not wake up at the right time and the story states that the boat did absolutly nothing. You know how you sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, try to kill a fly that is kind of annoying you and than go back to sleep regardless of killing it or not? More or less this happened

Fuck me yeah. You are right and i'm so dumb. I forgot you cannot model quantum mechanics empirically nor mathematically.

Its fine if you've only read some stuff online. Come do some real research before you try arguing this some stuff with a guy who does this for a living. Shitposting and quantum physics modelling and simulating that is

All these guys squabbling over each-other doing armchair physics is cute though, but i don't have time to reply to all of you.

>nobody is at the center of it
>Azathoth literally or metaphorically, whatever

>this totally means you can go on an Old One massacre rampage guys!! I know that's not what you're going for, but I've seen people try to take it there before
Just because the Old Ones don't have some fundamental meaning or purpose above ours doesn't mean that we're on an equal playing field with them, or even the same playing field. The universe is big and stupid, and it's entirely conceivable for, say, beings of certain dimensions to just wind up completely unequipped to ever adapt to exist on certain other 'levels'. Making the Old Ones untouchable by humanity doesn't significantly impact the themes, making them notably vulnerable does.

armchair science is always funny if you are actually in said field

It's not. What sense was stimulated? Mind is separate from body. I could've chosen to do something with the snakes if I wanted, like put them in a terrarium because I wanted them. But I didn't want to be near them because they're poisonous

>that quantum mechanics must be random because we don't understand it
Literal fail you get a D-

>that would literally require that every individual be capable of violating casuality, at least to the degree that given identical causes, DIFFERENT effects could be produced.

Why is this even desirable? Why do people want to feel like, given the exact same circumstances, faced with the exact same decision and information, that their personality/experiences/identity isn't a factor and their ultimate decision is down to a cosmic random number generator?

H.P. Lovecraft wrote a story where a guy with a barrel of acid killed a monster once and only went a little crazy doing it.

I feel like a guy who did quantum physics would be aware of a theorem from back in the '30s that says we have a pretty finite limit on how certain we are about a lot of important processes.

But whatever. If you're not divvying up your decisions into distributions and collapsing them with a RNG, can you really say you're ready to shit post for a living on Veeky Forums?

Nigga do you have any idea how many intuitive concepts are getting thrown out or ripped to shreds by modern science on the daily?

Fundamental concepts like time, space, particle, and wave are being redefined constantly, or found to be inadequate and having to be replaced with new more alien concepts.

How do you model causality in the simple A>B mode in a cosmos where events in the future can effect events in the past, throwing the whole concept of 'time' into question?

How do you believe in a domino universe when its becoming more and more likely that the randomness inherent in quantum mechanics isn't a fault in observation but a definitive part of the cosmos?

We live in a world where objects can literally be in two places at once, and you still cling to concepts like a geometric particle?

Have you read absolutely nothing past Isaac Newton? The point isn't that causality cannot be verified [it can, through logic and mathematics, just not through natural science since it itself is an axiom of natural science], nor is it that free will necessarily exists [it may or may not, its too early in the game to tell].

But the point is you ASSUMING a model of physics that runs entirely contrary to every new piece of data, because you ASSUME that in the end the old 1600s model will be re-proven, that the end of the tunnel is hard determinism, is not science but an article of faith.

Moron.

Because people dont want to face the fact that a lot of things they did, of their own free will, was stupid. Also they think it makes them feel "smart"

I am actually doing research in this field, but i think we are arguing different things since you probably don't consider the chance of a probability deterministic whilst most of us actually working with this shit do. I.e a particle existing in a probability field you can calculate is in itself deterministic with some CURRENTLY ASSUMED unknown factor. In no serious theory does "random" come in to it, only the fact that we cannot collect all the necessary data to calculate the outcome, which still doesn't mean its indeterministic.

>Mind is separate from body
how? the mind is electrical signals travelling through a bundle of tissue. And if you want to be more literal about it, how about sight, you know, since you're reading a book

>i model quantum physics
>there not random
>hurr durr
I would take away your grant money for shit posting on Veeky Forums and being a complete fag

>Making the Old Ones untouchable by humanity doesn't significantly impact the themes, making them notably vulnerable does.

10/10

och no mate, im not in phisics, im in biology, this shit is way over my head, im just stating a fact that armchair science is funny to read

Even if you could establish that consciousness is tied to quantum probability (all evidence points to no) you're not carving out a space for free will that way. One could just as easily say you're swapping the puppet master from macro-scale atomic interactions in favor of quantum waveforms bubbling up and telling you what to do.
Determinism is orthogonal to the question of whether or not we have free will. You can have free will in a rigidly deterministic universe, and lack it in a probabilistic one.

Thanks super Agro crag!

>reading =/= stimulation
Jesus Christ that's obvious
>brain=/= mind
Does your brain determine who you are? Nope. We have the same brains. Your mind is not biological.

>Veeky Forums guy throws dice onto table
>Assumes it must be random because it looks random

>Science people watch quantum physics
>Assume it must be random and therefore doesn't bother researching it and doesn't try to rewrite the theory of everything to find out what actually determines the outcome.

Veeky Forums wins again!

If anyone is actually curious of current research try reading some actual papers on what is being tried out rather than watching youtube vids or TED's about it.

Its maddening when people are so misinformed and is probably spreading it around. Its like if people asked you why evolution made the back of the trachea soft so we can choke on food going down the digestive track.

>let me correct myself fundamentally

That itself is an assumption though. A 'probability field', which is to say a spectrum of possibilities lends itself to a different model of causality, unless we assume that once all data is known that we could model every outcome completely accurately.

>Ignoring, for a moment, the fact that the physical observation apparatus effects the thing you're observing sometimes preventing this.

What it really boils down to is this concept of casuality. The classic concept is that for any given effect there exists a definitive cause, and that cause, all else being equal, produces that same effect.

The new concept, which I am not endorsing, merely proposing as a possibility, is the possibility that given identical causes, a spectrum of effects may be possible, with the exact one produced being a result of a truly random process.

The only thing I AM endorsing as definite, is that you're being far too confident in hard determinism for what the data actually suggests.

When challenged, everyone on the Internet is a teacher or scientist.

Find me someone willing to admit to being a highschool dropout during a debate and I'll be impressed.

>quantum waveforms bubbling up and telling you what to do
vs
> Some desire state machine formed out a pattern matching feedback loop

I'm fine either way, honestly. One just fits in better with dice.

I think you learned your lesson

>reading =/= stimulation
all senses are electrical impules, what exactly is different about using your sense of sight to interpret words and images on a page versus using your sight to see something in front of you that makes one of them not stimulation.

whatever vague concept you see the 'mind' as being there is no empirical evidence it can exist without the physical processes going on in the brain, therefore the distinction between brain processes and 'thought' are redundant

Not the crazy physics guy and the bald anesthesiologist again

>Its maddening when people are so misinformed and is probably spreading it around. Its like if people asked you why evolution made the back of the trachea soft so we can choke on food going down the digestive track.

I'v gotten used to it, plus my field is not all that "special" in pop culture so people dont pretend to be know-it-alls in it. Sometimes it's even fun. On the other hand im a shut-in, so this might be the reason why i dont hear much biological bullshit

>I'm a researcher, guys, believe me!

>Its maddening when people are so misinformed and is probably spreading it around. Its like if people asked you why evolution made the back of the trachea soft so we can choke on food going down the digestive track.

Well thanks, now I do kind of want to know why crossing the streams occurs in nearly every vertebrate with lungs.