this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
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Cosmic Horror
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"cosmic horror... is a subgenre of horror fiction and weird fiction that emphasizes the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible more than gore or other elements of shock... themes of cosmic dread, forbidden and dangerous knowledge, madness, non-human influences on humanity, religion and superstition, fate and inevitability, and the risks associated with scientific discoveries... the sense that ordinary life is a thin shell over a reality that is so alien and abstract in comparison that merely contemplating it would damage the sanity of the ordinary person, insignificance and powerlessness at the cosmic scale..."
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Not really, they'd just need to exist in a dimension above ours. We can readily observe the lower three dimensions of length, width and depth because we exist in the one above that - duration. We can't observe time except by passing through it point by point. A being capable of observing actual timelines would have to do so from a vantage point above them.
The extra eyes and wings are just them being a fucking showoff.
You need one eye to see 2D. You need two eyes to see 3D. Presumably, you need 3+ eyes to see in 4D. Don't conflate spatial dimensions with the temporal one, it's oranges and apples.
Most of the "3D" we see is made up by our brains. For evidence of this, look at a photograph, and look at how far away things are.
Having eyes spaced apart does help us to tell the distance to things that are close to us, but that is only useful for a short distance. Our brains also track the parallax and occlusion of numerous objects, which helps over longer distances, but works just fine with 1 eye.
I think there are two ways eyes could work in higher spacial dimensions, you could either have an n dimensional eye, which percieves an n-1 dimensional image, and then an understanding of "distance" is used to fill in the remaining information, or (which may just be my own 3D-ness showing) you could have several 3D eyes in different directions, each percieving different 2D images, with enough overlap to fully see the n-dimensional space. That would take n-1 eyes to properly see.
You can see depth with a single eye, you just need to move your eye
Two eyes in animals are used either to get extra view angle (in a cow, for instance) or to give instant depth information (in a human or tiger for example) or for both (in dragonflies)
That's still using a temporal dimension to your advantage :P (cause without time you can't move).
You can get depth information from parallax, which can come from either capturing multiple moments or using multiple viewpoints. IDK if I would call this seeing in 3D, as you can still only see 2d surfaces, just with an additional data point of depth (Think of it like an array of data, with one eye, you get
res^2 * (r+g+b)data points, with two, you getres^2 * (r+g+b+r+g+b+d)instead of actual 3D which would beres^3 * (r+g+b)). Having 3 eyes just means you can estimate depth more accurately. Of course, in real animals with many eyes the eyes serve different purposes, such as having a different fov, resolution, color perception, etc.So what you're saying is we need 4D eyes to see 3D? Ahh, Kos... or some say, Kosm...
I always knew that spiders were from the ninth dimension.