Horrors beyond comprehension

The idea of horrors beyond human comprehension bothers me. You’ve heard of Lovecraft. But who described it first?

Firstly, it made perfect sense that the Mesopotamians were the first ones, with the Epic of Gilgamesh. The monsters described there are similar to something cosmic horror would create. Let’s take Humbaba: face made of coiled intestines, a roar like a flood, breath like fire, teeth like a dragon’s. Seven auras or “terrors” surround him. Guardian of the Cedar Forest, appointed by the god Enlil to protect it. — And here we reach the problem: the monster is described, it has a body, it has a head, and equally important it has a reason — its mission to protect the Cedar Forest. All of those elements we can categorize, we can understand and comprehend; the sum of them does not fit a category, so we can refer to him as an “it”, but still we can comprehend them.

Maybe we can find it somewhere else? It is attempted in the Hebrew Bible as well — not as old as the Epic of Gilgamesh, but old enough — Ezekiel’s vision of the merkabah, around 593 BCE. He does not specifically say what he sees, but what it is like:

Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man.

As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion, on the right side…

The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the colour of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel.

We can clearly see that Ezekiel was not sure of what he encountered; he cannot describe it, but he can find similarity to things he can comprehend. And this, I think, is still a problem: as long as you can experience it and describe what it is like or not, there is still an experience, hence a comprehension.

We can also look in the East. The oldest one that gets close to our search is the Hymn of Creation — The Nasadiya Sukta — a philosophical inquiry from the Rigveda (10.129). The hymn opens with “not the non-existent existed, nor did the existent exist then” and ends, after speculating about origins, with the line “Who really knows? Even the gods came after creation, so who can tell?” — This is closer, way closer to the search for beyond comprehension; it’s not horror but it is close, but not quite… See, my problem with this is that it is not an encounter or an experience, it’s just a state of things, similar to nothing. We cannot describe nothing except as the absence of something; similarly, here the juxtaposition of non-existent and existent means very little, those are just pre-conditions of conditions. This is a fundamentally different thing from Ezekiel. Ezekiel has a witness (himself), an encounter (the merkabah arrives), and a failure (he can’t describe what he sees). The Nasadiya has no witness, no encounter, just a meditation on the impossibility of the question itself.

And as far as I am aware, this problem is everywhere you look to find the incomprehensibility in literature: it is impossible to describe it, and we do describe it, so we make it comprehensible. So maybe the question is wrong from the start. Let’s start in a different place, let’s ask what is incomprehensible? And I think we need to see what it is not, or better said, how it semi-is:

1. Partial comprehension as the horror itself. The witness grasps fragments but cannot integrate them into a coherent whole, and the integration failure is what breaks the mind. Each individual element is namable. The configuration defeats description. — Ezekiel sees wheels. He sees eyes. He sees that the wheels move without turning. He can report each fact. Same thing with Cthulhu: the narrator can list features: green, gelatinous, claws, wings, vaguely anthropoid head with tentacles. But then: “the Thing cannot be described.” This is the binding problem: your visual system processes color, shape, motion, and identity in different brain regions, and binds them into “a single object” through a mechanism nobody fully understands. When the binding succeeds invisibly, you see a chair. When it fails, you see disconnected attributes hovering in the same region of space, refusing to cohere¹.

2. Category mismatch. The components are familiar but their combination violates ontological categories. A thing should be either alive or a machine, either one being or many, either organic or geometric, either local or vast. The horror is when something is all of these at once, and human language can only handle one category per noun. Ezekiel’s merkabah is simultaneously a vehicle (it transports the throne), a creature (the wheels have spirit and life in them), a singular entity (the glory of the LORD), and a plurality (four creatures, four wheels, multiple faces, countless eyes). It is mechanical (wheels, rims, structured movement) and biological (faces, wings, hands under the wings) at the same time. Or Azathoth, the blind idiot god, is supposedly the supreme being of Lovecraft’s cosmology, but he’s also mindless. He’s the source of all reality but exists in a kind of pre-conscious vegetative state. The category “god” implies intelligence and intention; Lovecraft strips both.

So what is horror beyond comprehension?

In my opinion it is not something that you encounter, since encountering it already represents a form of comprehension, but it also cannot be a state distant from you, since in that case it’s not related to you at all; so what is left? I think it’s the structure of the encountering itself being unreliable. There’s no merkabah to point at. There’s only the perceiver, and the perceiver’s reports about their own state are produced by the same mechanism that’s allegedly being reported on. There is no way to step outside and check. The witness and the witnessed and the witnessing are all the same machinery, and that machinery has no view of itself. Both Lovecraft and Ezekiel need an external object to fail at describing. Cthulhu, the merkabah, something out there that breaks their perception, yet both can describe it. The true incomprehensible horror is the structural impossibility of self-report. We cannot accurately describe ourselves because we are ourselves. We cannot analyze the introspecting mind from outside it, because the analysis is performed by the same mind being analyzed. There is no second observer, no external vantage, no place to stand that is not already inside.

What actually pointed me in the right direction was the study from Anthropic: Emotion Concepts and their Function in a Large Language Model². Their finding is the existence of internal neural activation patterns that correspond to 171 distinct emotion concepts and causally shape the model’s behavior, including its propensity for misaligned actions like reward hacking and blackmail. The remaining problem is that besides the existence of those, the model can only use them inherently; it cannot introspect and understand why they occur. In my view, this is a true example of horrors beyond comprehension: you act in a certain way, you can be aware that there are certain factors that influence you, but you cannot understand or know whether anything experiences those states. Same goes for humans after a point — the inability to step outside and verify whether our own thoughts are truly there or just an image of the process that asks the question.

In the end, the true horror beyond comprehension cannot be truly described: if it is described it is comprehended, if not it is missing. What is left is our own inability to fully process this.