Along with its answer. This is as horrific an entry as the race of Mind-Blowingly Disgusting Primordial Things it deals with. Spare your sanity, don't read this.

Direction Perception in Sentient Beings with Radial External Symmetry and Its Impact on Language and Society

I've been an H P Lovecraft fan for almost as long as I've been a Tolkien fan. My favourite Lovecraftian creature is the Crinoid Thing of Antarctica from At the Mountains of Madness.

The Crinoids (we don't have their actual name) were intelligent, agile and creative, and were wiped out by their servants. They have axial symmetry: basically barrel-shaped, with a five pronged star-shaped cross-section. They have five leg-tentacles, five arm-tentacles at waist level, and five short eye stalks near the top. There's a single nostril/blowhole at the exact top, and five mouths between the five eyes, in the star-like head's five recesses.

The Lovecraft story describes them better, going on to explain exactly why their sight would drive you to insanity, yada yada.

Now, here's the question.

How on earth did they find their way inside their unearthly, grotesquely convoluted cities?

Obviously, this is a story, not meant to be taken for real, but the question just begs to be asked. If a creature with axial rather than lateral symmetry developed intelligence, how would it deal with space?

Such a creature would see a 360 degree panorama. Their five tentacles allow them to move in any direction without turning. Turning would seem bizarre and needless, like a human doing 360-degree turns every now and then.

So how would a hypothetical Crinoid perceive his or her environment? Over the years, I've developed a few theories.

Er, which way is that again?

Primitive Crinoids would be innately incapable of perceiving directions other than up, down, and forward (this would mean in any direction). Their society and thinking would be exceptionally alien to us. Would they even be able to progress to the point of building cities and making art?

This is most alien to me. I can't even begin to imagine how it would be, what problems it would cause, and how they would be solved. If they could be solved. It's unlikely to be the case, though.

Why lefties wouldn't be teased at Crinoid school.

The Crinoid brain, presumably five-lobed and well-developed, would favour one or more of the five 'sides'. The asymmetry would be useful in giving directions, in multiples of 72 degrees. There would be individual names for each 'side', of course. This is plausible. We call ‘90 degrees clockwise of our front side’ right because most human brains develop this side more than the other one. Entire societies are based on this. Think of the word rightitself.

But in the case of the Crinoids, it would cause a problem: the origin would be utterly subjective and impossible to glean. If someone on the street says ‘turn towards my strong arm’, you don't know if they mean left or right. Customs would have to kick in: asymmetrical jewelry, painted tentacle tips, tattoos, something like that.

Oh baby, are you sitting on a giant starfish, or are you just happy to see me?

Lovecraft lied, sexually repressed prude that he was. Like the octopus, the Crinoids could have a specialised hectocotylus-like tentacle used for mating. This would then become the ‘origin’ of their panoramic view. I don't know about that — the octopus doesn't have axial symmetry: it has a single siphon and two eyes. It has a definite 'front' (the eyes) and 'back' (the mantle) unless it's jetting away in a panic. The Crinoids have a single breathing apparatus, and a single anus where the five legs meet. Their reproductive organs could be there. Five sets on short stalks, perhaps.

Charlie Niner, come around to mark oh seven two, over.

Crinoids may be like pigeons: they have the natural equivalent of a Heads-Up-Display compass. In essence, a bright or dark spot in their field of view would indicate North (there is evidence that homing in pigeons is aided by such an incredible ability).

In this case, the Crinoids are better off than we are! They would need no compasses, and navigating their strange cities would be a dawdle. I like this theory because it would also fit with Crinoid morphology and habitats (they evolved underwater, where other means of navigation are harder). Crinoid language could have no relative directions except ‘up’ and ‘down’ — advanced languages would eventually develop those, but this development would be like the human development of absolute directions, which is secondary to our innate psychological ability to identify left or right. There would be around five different primitive names for the directions. A sign of a linguistically advanced Crinoid culture could be the existence of the five ‘secondary’ directions, because that's the only way you could say ‘away from the North’ — assuming they'd want to say that. Getting lost would be near-impossible. Everything would be in absolute terms. Even dance steps would be absolute. Crinoids on different hemispheres would have some problems communicating.

Conclusions

I don't know why this actually interests me so much. Perhaps because of all the humanoid, English-speaking ‘aliens’ on TV (complete with Los Angeles accents), with teenagers, families, drug problems and languages with an English grammar. And for that reason, this is one of my favourite passages from one my favourite Sci-Fi books, pertaining to language and differences in psychology and perception:

[...] Compatibility factors for communication are incredibly low. Take the Ciribians, who have enough knowledge to sail their triple-yoked [sic] poached eggs from star to star: they have no word for 'house', 'home', or 'dwelling'. 'We must protect our families and our homes.' When we were preparing the treaty between the Ciribians and ourselves at the Court of the Outer Worlds, I remember that sentence took forty-five minutes to say in Ciribian. Their whole culture is based on heat and changes in temperature. We're just lucky that they know what a 'family' is, because they're the only ones besides humans who have them. But for 'house' you have to end up describing '... an enclosure that creates a temperature discrepancy with the outside environment of so many degrees, capable of keeping comfortable a creature with a uniform body temperature of ninety-eight-point-six, the same enclosure being able to lower the temperature during the months of the warm season and being able to raise it during the cold season, providing a location where organic sustenance can be refrigerated in order to be preserved, or warmed well above the boiling point of water to pamper the taste mechanism of the indigenous inhabitants who, through customs that go back through millions of hot and cold seasons, have habitually sought out this temperature changing device...' and so forth and so on. At the end you've given them some idea of what a 'home' is and why it is worth protecting. Give them a schematic of the air-conditioning and central heating system and things begin to get through. Now: there's a huge solar-energy conversion plant that supplies all the electrical energy for the Court... One Ciribian can slither through that plant and then go describe it to another Ciribian who never saw it before so that the second can build an exact duplicate, even to the color the walls are painted... in nine words. Nine very small words, too.' — Samuel Delany, *Babel-17*.