Category Archives: Philosophy

How They See

Cover of An Immense World by Ed Yong
An Immense World by Ed Yong

Ever since I read An Immense World by Ed Yong (cover above), I’ve been obsessed with the term “Umvelt“. It’s a German word that, aside from the host of semiotically-charged terms in that Wikipedia entry, basically refers to how an organism perceives, interacts with, and navigates the world. It’s all about the senses.

We humans have five (well, a lot more than five, but we won’t get into that) sense: taste, smell, touch, vision, and hearing. With these senses we get all the information we need about the world around us in order to figure it out and what’s going on and how it affects us. Different people have different levels of access to different senses (e.g., a person who is blind or visually impaired has less access to the sense of sight), of course, so it’s impossible to say that any two humans experience the world in exactly the same way.

Animals do it differently. Dogs experience the world primarily through their nose, which is why it’s important to let dogs sniff as many things as they want when taking them on a walk. Cats are similar, though as apex predators (yeah, right, you five-pound ball of fluff trying to crawl up my leg) they also rely on their vision and hearing.

Currently, we have a foster kitten who is blind, and I’ve been watching her make her way through the world. When she’s walking around the kitten room, she uses her nose and her whiskers extensively. Sometimes she bumps her head lightly against the wall, but mostly her other senses serve her well; she can make her way around the room, bipping around obstacles she has memorized, playing with toys, and sniffing around the room to find water, food, treats, and the litter box. It’s actually rather astonishing.

Bright, the blind kitty
This is Bright, our blind foster kitty, who, along with her brother Merry, is available for adoption.

But a cat’s Umvelt is different than a human’s. We don’t rely on our noses and whiskers as much as they do. So there are differences.

Further away from us evolutionarily, we get bats who use echolocation to find food (contrary to myth, apparently, bats are not blind; they can see just dandy) and explore the world. Most humans can’t do that (though some blind people have learned to “click” and experience the world around them with that sort of echolocation). Some birds are able to sense gravity differently than we do, or the magnetic fields of the earth to figure out how their migration routes.

Whales, insects, birds, bats, cats, dog, even plants all experience the world and have sensory input from it. Every organism has its own Umvelt.

In critters that have brains, that brain is usually the central processing unit of all those senses; however, that’s kind of diffuse as well. An octopus’s brain is in its head, but each arm of an octopus has its own neural processing unit, its own brain, which can process the sensory input from that one arm and respond to it while sending that information on to the rest of the organism and… Well, octopuses are amazing and confusing animals.

There is evidence that much there are sensory inputs for much larger “meta-organisms”, such as a huge fungal distribution, or a colony of social insects, or even forests; Yong does not go into these so much, so you’d have to read another book, Ways of Being by James Bridle.

Cover of "Ways of Being"
Cover of “Ways of Being” by James Bridle

Ways of Being is a much more philosophical book, and I won’t go into here because even though I finished reading it a couple of weeks ago, I still have to process it.

What does all this have to do with Christmas and the holidays? I don’t know if it has anything to do with Christmas and the holidays. I just thought it was neat.


Today I recommend the Zombies are Human series of novels by my friend Jamie Thornton. I’ve maintained for a long time that it’s impossible to do a fresh take on the zombie genre, but Jamie’s done a great job of doing just that. The series starts with book zero, Germination, and goes from there. Read, read, and keep reading. You’ll enjoy these.

Germination: Book Zero of the Zombies are Human series
Germination: Book Zero of Jamie Thornton’s Zombies are Human series

Even zombies enjoy Holidailies.

A Morbid Topic: Life, Death, and Wisdom

The cover image for the "Strange Customs" podcast
Sasha Sagan’s podcast, “Strange Customs”

I was listening to the latest episode of “Strange Customs“, the podcast hosted by Sasha Sagan (yes, daughter of Carl), and the topic of death came up. I try not to be particularly morbid or maudlin, but it’s something to think about. So I started thinking about life and death and wisdom.

I am, as you well know by now, a Christian — specifically, I am an Episcopalian, though I haven’t stepped into an Episcopal church since the Before Times. Thus, I do believe in an afterlife. I differ from many Christians in that I make no belief statements about what that afterlife might be like. Is it spending an eternity in the presence of God, just soaking up their infinite glory (yes, I use they/them pronouns for God, since I believe God transcends gender)? Is it just like life on Earth, except you get to hang out with the likes of Socrates and Einstein? I don’t know. Frankly, I think it’s beyond the comprehension of us living human beings. It’s trite, but I like to think of the process of dying as similar to the process of being born: when we are developing in the womb, we have no idea what life will be like on Earth. Similarly, as we are developing on Earth, we have no idea what the next stage of our existence will be.

If there is a Heaven, then I think everyone will be surprised by who else makes it there. Except I’m not sure there IS a Heaven or a Hell. Again: I don’t know what the afterlife is like. Jesus hinted that there might be a physical resurrection, but I don’t know how to interpret that.

We’re not granted much time here in Earth. We are born, we live for a few decades, possibly a century at best, and then we pass on. Personally, I don’t think that we can gain a whole lot of wisdom in that period of time. We can talk all we like about how older people are wise for their years, but if we all meet a maximum of wisdom over our lifetime, we’d all be more alike. Instead, everyone is wise in their own ways. What kind of wisdom would we gain if we lived to be two hundred years old? Or five hundred? Or a thousand?

Okay, maybe that doesn’t make any sense. Eh, I’ll leave it in.

Of course, you don’t have to be old to be wise. Young children have their own wisdom to share. Adolescents do as well. It simply behooves us to pay attention and listen to what they have to say.  Wisdom is wisdom, no matter where you find it.

The third Jumanji film, Welcome to the Jungle, is a fun film to watch. Dwayne Johnson, Karen Gillian, and the rest are a delight, and so is Danny DeVito. In the beginning of the film, Danny DeVito, whose character journey is, I think, the heart of it, states, “Being old is a curse”.  At the end, after all his life-and-death adventures and building up his relationships with his friends and family members, he changes his tune: “Being old is a blessing.”

Me, I’m currently five-five years old. I don’t consider myself “old”, though I suppose by some measures I am. I don’t think of my age as a curse, even as my body self-sabotages itself occasionally and close friends and family members pass on. I like to think that as I do get older and become a wizened old man, I will gain some wisdom, and be more like Danny DeVito at the end of the film. Life is a blessing, Old age is a blessing. Death itself, for whatever reason, might be a blessing.

We’re not given a whole lot of time on this tiny Earth. The time we have we should spend listening to others, being kind to them, caring for them and this precious Earth that we find ourselves on.

Personal Choice and Societal Ethics

LRRR!
LRRR, ruler of Omicron Persei 8

TL;DR: If you are able to get the COVID-19 vaccine and do not do so, then you are responsible for the consequences.

Now, before I get into this, may I remind you I have a degree in Philosophy and I’m not afraid to use it? Because I do, and my sense of ethics, particularly in relation to societal terms, was heavily influenced by some pretty heavy-duty thinkers, including Immanuel Kant and John Rawls, and, to a lesser extent, John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham. Practically, I’m a utilitarian by nature, but I find the hedonistic aspects of the Good as defined by Mill and Bentham a bit tricky. I like Kant’s Categorical Imperative, and while I find Rawls a little too optimistic about human nature, I still like his notions of justice as fairness.

So, having said all that to establish (to some extent) my philosophical bona-fides, let’s go.

I’ve been concerned about the COVID-19 pandemic from the very beginning, when I first heard about a new SARS-related disease spreading rapidly through the Wuhan district in China. Given the international connectiveness of the world, it was only a matter of time before it reached the States, starting with New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles, the big port cities. The first community contracted case was, I believe, seen in UC Davis Medical Center here in Sacramento. To be perfectly honest, I was less concerned about it until then-President Donald Trump announced that he had it under control; at which point, I knew we were screwed.

Politics aside, I figured we’d see the pandemic and vanquish it fairly quickly; within a couple of months at most. I figured we’d find a vaccine and people would rally around it and we’d all be better and this thing would go away soon. Obviously, that didn’t happen. The vaccine didn’t come into nearly a year into the pandemic, and the newest (at this time) variant of the SARS-COV2 virus, the Omicron variant, is blazing through our population like wildfire. All told, we have nearly one million people dead in the United States, millions more are sick, our hospitals are overrun, and the health care system is on the brink of collapse.

It didn’t have to be this way.

The pandemic and its mitigation measurements have become politicized, which is a shame. Conspiracy theories surround the vaccine, and notions of mask wearing, social distancing, and vaccine mandates have been decried as socialism and tyranny by certain parties (never mind that said parties probably don’t actually know what socialism is). There is one refrain that bothers me the most, and that is that getting the vaccine and wearing masks are individual choices not to be imposed by the state.

I have Thoughts about that.

Vaccine mandates do work. People who get the vaccine are less likely to come down sick with COVID-19, and if they do catch it, they are less likely to require hospitalization, and far less likely to die from it. They are also less likely to spread the disease to other people. And where vaccine mandates are in place, more people definitely get it. Sure, some people resist the mandate, but employers (such as hospitals — and it blows me away that there are health care workers who refuse the vaccine — and government services such as police departments) report that less then 1% of their employees quit over the mandates.

“But it’s all about personal freedoms and individual choice!” say the ones who (maybe) recognize the utility of the vaccine but who do not believe in vaccine mandates.

And they’re right. Whether or not to get the vaccine is a personal choice. But it’s one with societal consequences. As I said above, getting the vaccine significantly reduces the probability that you will spread COVID-19 if you catch it. which is a good thing. If you’re unvaccinated and contract the disease, then you have a much higher chance of spreading it, even if your symptoms are mild or simply nonexistent. If you do exercise your personal freedom to refuse the vaccine, though, and then you contract the virus and spread it to someone who is unable to get the vaccine because they are too young or are immunocompromised or some other legitimate reason (and I don’t believe in religious accommodations here), then you are responsible for the consequences.

Society has a responsibility, I believe, to protect its most vulnerable members: the elderly, the very young, the injured and sick. This comes right out of my Christian value set. If you are a member of society, then you have the responsibility to partake in that protection. My utilitarian mindset is in favor of the greatest good for the greatest number, and that greatest good means good health.

This is also why I believe governments have the authority, nay, the responsibility, to restrict travel to those have been vaccinated and test negative for the virus. If an athlete from another country tests positive for the virus, or has publicly refused the vaccine, then the government has the responsibility to keep that person out.

“YOU CAN’T FORCE ME TO GET THE VACCINE!” yells the societal libertarian. This is true.

But you should be held responsible for the consequences of not doing so. And if, say, your elderly grandmother, your immunocompromised neighbor, or your child’s playmates, if any of them contract COVID-19 because of your own anti-vaccine position, then you are responsible for the outcome.

If you disagree, feel free to let me know. I’m not likely to change my mind, though. I’ve done my due diligence in informing my opinion and philosophy here, so I believe my conclusions are sound and valid.

Kindness as a Cosmic Virtue

This is not the “official” video of Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot”, but it’s my favorite.

My favorite line of this speech is at the end:

To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

I agree whole-heartedly with this quote, with the entire message of this speech. It’s why I find the state of the world right now so distressing: Far too many people find far too many ideologies that allow themselves to be cruel to each other. Anti-semitism is on the rise now. Racism is on the rise. Kindness and sympathy are cast aside, and that casting is seen as a virtue by folks on both sides of the political divide.

But in the end, what matters is how kind we are to each other. Neil DeGrasse Tyson said:

For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And along the way, lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.

Every kindness and cruelty that we experience or visit onto others takes place on the same tiny little dust mote in the same Cosmos. I don’t think this is at all meaningless; on the contrary, being kind is a vast responsibility. A cosmic one.

When Peter Capaldi ended his tenure as the Doctor in the British TV series Doctor Who, before he regenerated into Jodie Whitaker, he gave a marvelous speech about the importance of being kind in the cosmos. I can’t remember it, and I can’t find it online anywhere (maybe I just haven’t looked hard enough). But some of the Twelfth Doctor’s words about kindness remain embedded in my brain: “Without hope, without witness, without reward. Be kind.” And also: “Love hard, run fast, be kind.”

And, of course, in the Star Trek episode “City on the Edge of Forever”, Kirk tells us that somewhere in the galaxy in the 22nd century some poet suggests that “Let me help” is a more loving statement than “I love you.”

So in the middle of this vast Cosmos, be kind to the Earth and the people who inhabit it. It is, after all, all we have. And as Carl Sagan also said, “For such small creatures as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.”

A Wee Little Post

I love this quote from Neil DeGrasse Tyson:

“For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.”

I think this is a good guidepost for living life, so I am going to work it into my own daily living.

An Update, and some more philosophical musings

First of all, I’m sad to report that I’ve been laid off from my job of fifteen years. It was a good job, and I know the decision was hard for management to make, I got a good severance package from the University, and all in all it was… Well, it was painful, but I would say it was amicable. The department and I met up a couple of weeks after the event for a farewell get-together, and I feel like I got some good closure to that chapter in my life. I’m still sad, though.

What’s next? I’m not sure. Definitely looking for a new job (and if you check out my resume, you’ll get a good idea of my skill set). Waiting to see what happens next.


It’s Halloween time, of course, which is my favorite time of year. I like scary stories, Jack-o-lanterns, ghosts, all that silly stuff. And it means there’s a lot more scary stuff to consume. Specifically, lots of scary content on Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Last night, in particular, I watched a few episodes of an original Netflix show called Haunted. Basically, it has people sitting with friends and family and recounting horrifying events from their pasts. For example, the first episode, entitled “The Woman in White”, was about a man’s life-long experience with the ghost of a woman from an apartment he and his family had lived in when he was a child. His telling is interspersed with reenactments of the events. The makeup on the ghost was well-done, and the way she simply appeared in the kid’s closet were really spooky. Well done as far as that goes.

It was the episode on alien abduction that really struck me, though. I’ve been fascinated by the concept of alien abductions for many years; not because I believe in aliens that abduct people in the night and perform ghastly experiments on them, but because the story of the abduction is so similar to fairy abduction stories of yore, including missing time, bright lights, similar-looking creatures, and even the occasional sexual encounter.

So I began to wonder, back in the late 90s, about these similarities, and I wrote a story called “LTM” (for Long-Term Memory) in which I tried to create a “third mythology” that would explain the two experience archetypes and unite them into a single story. It was a bad story, full of passive voice and vague characters with no agency, and I don’t intend to share it with you (and it definitely hasn’t aged well; the men in black and UFO stories are straight out of the time it was written in and all hearken back to The X-Files).

Then I began to wonder about ghosts, demons, and other paranormal entities, and about the human brain’s ability to misinterpret what’s happening around it and tell a story to itself about what it experiences when it doesn’t quite understand what it’s experiencing. I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head, but this is a personal blog so I don’t have to. But maybe there’s something going on or something that the brain sees that it doesn’t understand so it pulls into its cultural background and assigns a story to that input. If one person sees, say, a strange face lurking above them in the dark, they may say “Ghost!” because that’s what they’re used to thinking about when it comes to such things, while another may say “Demon!”. Furthermore, even among the people who say “Ghost!” there might be those who believe the ghost they see has malevolent intention, and some will believe it’s benign.

So maybe there is some sort of external event going on that we can’t interpret, so we assign cultural archetypes to it. Perhaps there something that causes us to see flashing lights, feel like we’re floating, and like we’re seeing bizarre creatures doing awful things to us. In pre-movie times, when we had no cultural story about aliens, we would interpret such events as fairy abductions. In our modern era, where we don’t think about fairies as existing but we have aliens built into our cultural milieu at all levels, we think of alien abductions. Personally, I’m inclined to think that such events are purely phenomenological in nature: entirely within the mind. I’m open to the possibility that something external is going on, but I haven’t seen any evidence that there is.

Anyway. This is the sort of thing that my brain thinks of at this time of year (well, at any time of year, but Halloween season brings it out more fully.

What goes on in your mind during Halloween season?

A Thought for the Ontologically Inclined

The other day I was watching Mighty Mouse (one of our foster kittens) playing with a little felt ball in the kitten room. She’d pick up the toy in her mouth, run around with it for a bit, drop it, bap at it, run after it, pick it up again, then run around like mad with it in her mouth again. It was incredibly silly, and very cute.

So I got to thinking about the toy itself and what it represented in Mouse’s brain. Cats are primarily predators (except possibly for Nutmeg, our 16-pound “potato cat”), so many of their play behaviors would be hunting behaviors in the wild. So what, to Mouse, did that little felt toy represent? A bug? A bird? A mouse? Some other small mammal? I mean, she clearly knew it wasn’t food, since she wasn’t eating it, but something about that toy was definitely triggering her latent hunting behavior.

From there, my brain, as it is wont to do, spun on to the same question but about human brains. What high-level behaviors of ours are actually representative of something else? I don’t mean simple symbology, such as looking at the Washington Memorial and thinking of — Well, you know. I mean those higher-level “noble” pursuits that we make so much of. Let’s say science, for example. We as a civilization1 pursue science pretty doggedly (cattedly?), and we’ve made great strides in our understanding of the cosmos and how it works.

So, my question to you is: are there yet higher-level orders of consciousness that could look down on us, view those ideals which we strive for, and wonder what they represent for us? We humans watch the cat play with a felt ball, and figure that the felt ball represents a bug; what would the aliens of Trafalmadore think we’re pursuing when we think we’re pursuing science?

Watching cats frequently makes me ponder the nature of human intelligence and the limits of our consciousness.

I know, this question is an easy one, one that should go up on Facebook or Twitter. I just want to save it here on my own blog.

Our Tiny Rock

Sometimes I have Deep Thoughts and have to find a way to express them. This is one of those times.

Sometimes I marvel about Earth and its inhabitants. In the grand, grand scheme of things, against the backdrop of the Cosmos, we’re barely a mote of dust. Smaller, even. We, and everyone we know and love, now and in the past and future, are just tiny biological organisms clinging to a small planet in a relatively small solar system in a mid-range galaxy in a universe the size of which beggars the imagination. Carl Sagan, in his famous “Pale Blue Dot” monologue, above, said it far better than I could ever hope to.

Sigh. I miss Carl Sagan.

Our downfall as a species is likely to be our hubris. We like to think that our daily struggles with each other and our morality plays have cosmic consequences. They don’t, of course, but our egos need to be fed; and when we elevate our human struggles to cosmic ones, we only cause harm to each other and often to the planet itself. We’re only sentient goo that thinks it’s better than it is.

Even as an Espicopalian, I’m aware of this.

The thing that baffles me about this is the number of people who think they’re “winning” at life when in reality we’re all going to end up in the same place. Accumulating wealth, power, and prestige is not going to let you win at life. You’re still going to die. And to acknowledge that fact and still play a game of “winning” is selfish; that vast aggregation of wealth will do you no good at the end. The best thing to do, I think, is to use whatever power and wealth you have to improve the lives of others. Part of this belief is fueled by my Episcopal faith, but I think part of it is just common sense, informed partially by a certain element of existentialism that I learned in college. We’re all going to die; why not make life pleasant for others of us who share the road?

 

Things I’m Putting Into My Head

I miss college. For the few who don’t know, I went to UC Davis, where I studied Philosophy. Now, to get your degree in Philosophy, you need to get — at least at the time that I graduated — 80 units total of Philosophy courses. You needed a minimum of 124 units to graduate from the University. And the University sort of forced you to graduate if you accumulated more than 225 units.

I graduated with 96 units in Philosophy, and 224.5 units altogether. This means that the majority of the classes I took in college were all over the board: religious studies, sociology, psychology, oceanography, botany, chemistry, and so on. Really, I had no idea what I was doing. I would just go through the catalog each quarter and sign up for any course that looked interesting with no rhyme or reason, just curiosity. I had no plan, just overall curiosity. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? I don’t know, but I think that curiosity, in general, is a good quality to have.

But I do miss learning in some sort of structured environment. So I’ve signed up for some online courses. The courses I’m taking now are:

  1. Getting and Cleaning Data, course three of the Data Science Specialization at Coursera. Why am I taking a Data Science specialization at Coursera? I’m not entirely sure. I’m enjoying it, but I’m finding it a bit overwhelming. The last course focused on the R programming language, which is used to analyze data and statistical information. Statistics was a hard course for me in college.
  2. Question Reality! Science, Philosophy and the Search for Meaning. This is a fascinating class. A lot of the material is stuff that I already know, having taken classes in it in college or just through reading widely in a bunch of different areas, but I’m still learning. I’m enjoying this class. I’m a week behind, so this week I’m trying to catch up, but other than that I’m having fun. I will say, though, that the interface at EdX is clunky and not very easy to use.
  3. Finally, I’m brushing up my Spanish skills using Duolingo. I took Spanish for three years during high school with a great teacher, but since I didn’t use it very much, I got rusty. I would try to use my Spanish from time to time, but never with much luck (one Spanish speaker I was trying to talk to asked me, in English, “What are you trying to say?”). But Duolingo is making me feel a bit more confident in my skill.

That’s a lot to deal with, especially considering that I’m working full-time and also writing regularly. I’m keeping track of it all and also what I’m doing with a combination of Remember the Milk and Habitica. The former keeps me organized, the latter keeps me on track. I am by no means a power user of either tool, but I’m getting the hang of them. Slowly but surely.

Slowly. But. Surely.

On another note, I’ve set myself a schedule of posting to this blog at least once a week. I know I’ve said that before, but this time I really mean it. I’ve even put it down on my Remember the Milk task manager.

Ia! Ftaghn! Cosmic Nihilism and the Cuteification of Cthulhu

Cthulhu

Time was, Cthulhu, the monstrous entity pictured to the left, was the most frightening thing imaginable. Not only was he a giant creature at least a mile in height, who lay dead yet somehow still dreaming in his sunken city of R’yleh, somewhere in the Atlantic… Not only could his dreams affect people in the waking world and control cults and sects throughout millennia… Not only could he rise up at any time and scour the Earth and lay it to waste… No, he’s just a harbinger of even worse things to come! He’s a priest of the old gods, entities that make Cthulhu himself look like a child’s plaything.

Yes, Cthulhu was, at one time, the most frightening thing imaginable for certain groups of people.

On Sunday at WesterCon I attended a panel entitled “Cosmic Horror in the Mainstream Media”. It was an interesting panel which, as is pretty much always the case when the term “cosmic horror” comes up, focused primarily H. P. Lovecraft and his influence not just on the horror genre but on culture at large. There was some debate about what the term “cosmic horror” means, and the panel agreed that it had to do with giant monsters, sanity-blasting, ancient magics, hidden knowledge, and so on.

I disagree.

To me, “cosmic horror” means a genre of horror entertainment which emphasizes the fact that nothing benevolent exists out there. It’s about nihilism, about the nothingness in the universe that doesn’t care a single whit about human beings. Sure, Cthulhu might incite a few cultists with his dead/not-dead dream state, but, really, Cthulhu probably doesn’t give a damn about human beings at all, aside from how tasty we might be.

There’s more to it than that, of course. Cosmic horror, to me, also implies “deepness”: Lovecraft’s horrors (and Lovecraft is still, for all his flaws, the undisputed master of cosmic horror) exist in deep space, in deep time, and in deep consciousness. It’s the intentional seeking out of these entities and cosmic nothingness and universal indifference that drives the poor Lovecraftian characters mad. What happens when you see Hastur and Azathoth palling around with each other at the chaotic miasma which is at the center of the cosmos? You lose all your sanity, that’s what.

But I think this sort of horror goes beyond just the Lovecraftian. While one might be hard-pressed to find examples in popular, mainstream culture, it’s definitely out there. I offered up AMC’s The Walking Dead as an example of this sort of nihilistic horror; and while even I have to admit this is a bit of a stretch, the cosmic nothingness, the idea that nothing benevolent exists, is still part of that show’s milieu.

This cosmic nihilism, I think, has always been with us. Some of the Greek philosophers expounded on it, but I think the ball really got rolling with Nietzsche in the 19th century. It began to pick up speed during the First World War, picked up some more momentum with the Second, and, during the Cold War, it ran rampant all over everything. I grew up in the 80s, and I remember the existential horror of knowing that Reagan or Khruschev could at any moment decide that they’d had enough and would press that red button.

So what do you do when you’re faced with this kind of horror? You can embrace it and write more Lovecraftian-style horror, or even apply some of that nihilism to your own horror or science fiction (Alien is cosmic horror whether you like it or not). You can also ignore it.

But you can also “cuteify” it. Indeed, a whole industry has grown up around making plush Cthulhu toys, silly songs about the Mythos, and so on. This is aplushcthulhu way of coping with Cthulhu and the empty, uncaring cosmos that he represents.

I personally have nothing against a cute Cthulhu. Heck, we have a plush Cthluhu that we put atop our Christmas tree every year. Plush Cthulhu is fun, goofy, and a neat way of coming to terms with the nihilism existential horror that is our daily existence.

I do know, though, that the cuteification of Cthulhu causes some problems for some people. That’s fine and understandable. They don’t like their cosmic, nihilistic, existential horror messed with.

So, the takeaway here is that cuteifying a horror is one way of coping with it. In my own fiction, I often take a comedic approach to Hastur, Cthulhu, Azathoth, and others. Does this mean that I’m also participating in the cuteification of Cthulhu?

I’ll leave the answer to that as an exercise for the reader.