SCP-5719 / Discussion

This is the discussion related to the wiki page SCP-5719.

Author Post - Held inside a party catered by the mind, emotional behavior & irrational design.

Decibelles 11 Jan 2022 07:55

I'm looking for the place the spirit meets the skin, can't figure out why that place feels so hard to be in
We're all of us at this ill-fitting party, busy pretending to relate
And it's getting harder and harder to fake, acting like everything's in its place

Thanks to the following:

• Taffeta for mathematics help & clinical tone.
• minmin & EstrellaYoshte for general critique & clinical tone, & Estrella for suggestions with the final couple lines in the transcript.

Image credit:

Portal 1, Zwolle.jpg by Dqfn13, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. I had another image I wanted to include, but I need to contact its author first before using it. It's not that integral unlike this one; I just like the image.

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A lot of the philosophy here comes from extended conversations with my grandmother, a devout Christian who has been bravely fighting illness in a hospital for a number of weeks, as well as various meditations on rationalism based off of various conversations with people in Discord servers. I've also seen the number 17 a lot lately. It's probably confirmation bias. But I can't ignore its presence everywhere.

The article was also inspired, in part, by an SCP that I have philosophical objections to. It's not a bad SCP, but one I can't mesh with at all. So it's very vaguely a response article to that one. It's in no way integral to getting or understanding this article, but perhaps you may understand where I am coming from, in a sense.

Last edited on 11 Jan 2022 08:44 by Decibelles Show more

EstrellaYoshte 11 Jan 2022 08:00

It's a very lowkey anomaly, but the QnA is raw in a way few others managed to be.

Scorpion451 11 Jan 2022 17:24

I greatly appreciate this one as an Existentialist; several of these are the right questions.
+1

Decibelles 12 Jan 2022 03:14

I'm really glad you were able to appreciate it. Throughout the years, I've definitely had a number of differing & varying opinions on existentialism & how I relate to it, but I can't deny that ultimately, it has influenced me to some notable degree. I was actually really worried that, given the somewhat inherent opposition to rationalism (though, in my opinion, the two forms of philosophy are not entirely mutually exclusive), the article wouldn't play that well to to an existentialist. That it does sends a wave of relief through me. Thank you for enjoying it.

+1

PFFFT 13 Jan 2022 23:18

I quite like this one.

I feel as though the ending is meant to be left up to interpretation, but I'm curious about the anomaly itself. Is there a "reason" behind why it's showed up? Some sort of will of the artist that created the art?

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o7

Re: +1

Decibelles 14 Jan 2022 04:01

A bit of a long-winded answer, but hopefully this helps.

+ show block

I have my idea of what caused the anomaly, & without trying to lay down an explicit answer, I think in some manner, even if not entirely, the will of the artist(s) most definitely influenced turning the art piece into an anomaly. It almost certainly may not have even been intentional as well. Just a natural byproduct of the strength of their beliefs & the will of the universe.

In Christianity, there is the belief that God is technically "in all things", but extremely far from the sense that deism or pantheism believes in. Rather, despite being external to the universe He created, He also has a hand in all of its going-ons:

Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me," even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.

Meanwhile, with the belief of pantheism, regardless of how one defines the scope of pantheistic beliefs (emphasis mine):

If the essence of pantheism lies in strict classical identity, the issue of who is or is not a pantheist comes down to the somewhat arcane dispute whether there could be any conceivable aspect or side of reality which was not natural, and/or whether there could be any conceivable aspect or side of reality which was not divine, but these are abstruse points that can only take us away from **the fundamental pantheistic intuition of the overlap of God and nature, the intuition that that in grasping the reality before us we grasp God himself, not something separate or intermediary.**[1]

At the end of the day, these artists are still undoubtedly human. Being human, they would have certainly thought a lot about the nature of god, the universe, & what that means to them. They were freethinkers, after all. So what does that mean when god is part of everything, in all things? How does that shape up with rationality?

Thank you very much for enjoying.

Bibliography

1. Mander, William, "Pantheism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/pantheism/>

Last edited on 14 Jan 2022 04:42 by Decibelles Show more

Vaulheimer 14 Jan 2022 16:09

Clever look into a D-class’s fucked up world, and perhaps escape from it, too. I’m not quite sure what to make of the anomaly itself, but the discussion between the D-class and the anomaly was satisfying to read, with an open ending. +1

+50

Decibelles 16 Jan 2022 00:47

The first new work of mine since coming back to the site to hit the +50 milestone. Thank you all so much.

superb

sw1ff 10 Feb 2022 17:01

great story. d-class got it rough, man

(account deleted) 23 Mar 2022 14:30

This hits strangely. +1

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—j.w