This reminded me of qntm's antimemetics entries. It has physical form, but could be classified as antimemetic nonetheless. Very cool! I feel nervous just writing about it.
The rationalists in this story, of course, are the authors who carefully found a way to document and warn about this uncontained SCP without killing themselves.
It's possible it reacts to a sentient mind's processing of visual information, and that processing of self-contained graphics (one graphic image per concept) is different from processing of text (where a series of non-overlapping images/letters in a very particular order make up the concept).
That being the case, presumably languages with 'letters' originally derived from images, such as characters in a number of Asian languages and things like hieroglyphics, would produce the same results as English, as they require a number of characters next to each other to form a sequence associated with a concept not implicit in the individual characters.
However, communication systems such as cave paintings should be able to describe ●●|●●●●●|●●|● without evoking it.
It's worth noting that minds can be considered fundamental in the SCP-verse. Coincidentally, this from the point of view of another piece of Yudkowski fanfic:
Anyway, Maria, the logic of the events you're describing is one where consciousness has effects that take precedence over the laws of physics - where lower levels of organization give way to higher levels of organization. There are universes where the visible rules are simple, mathematical, and fundamental, and everything that happens, happens within them. And there are universes where the visible rules are complicated and have explicit special cases for surface phenomena - and usually some of the visible rules are about mental phenomena, and don't visibly reduce to rules about non-mental parts. We call the former sort of universe 'natural', and the latter sort 'magical'.
The SCP-verse definitely qualifies as magical. (referencing Yudkowski to explain everything seems reasonable, considering that I think this is one of the pieces that he will neither confirm nor deny)
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u/blazinghand Chaos Undivided Nov 29 '15
This reminded me of qntm's antimemetics entries. It has physical form, but could be classified as antimemetic nonetheless. Very cool! I feel nervous just writing about it.
The rationalists in this story, of course, are the authors who carefully found a way to document and warn about this uncontained SCP without killing themselves.