"Not as far as I know."
'Then it seems like you're teaching me to be moral for a reason that doesn't actually apply in the real world.'
"Get back in the box."
Imagine you write a small story for fun but then it becomes nearly a religion. It must be a little frustrating for Andy.
Life of Brian when he opens the window...
I want, desperately, to be the best steward in providing kindness and assistance to anyone and everyone I can within my means while also living the most fulfilling life I can and sharing my knowledge with others.
If anyone asks me if I'm religious, this is the answer. I've always thought of religion - for the rational, at least - to be a sort of known double-think. A known suspension of belief as a tool. When I need that tool, I think of the egg.
Whenever I think about how cruel someone is being to others, I take some solace in imagining that at some point, they too, will experience their own cruelty. Not in a "they deserve punishment way" but in a "they will understand, someday" way.
- 2018, 51 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17145811
- 2014, 153 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203095
The Egg - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37852535 - Oct 2023 (6 comments)
The Egg - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31687818 - June 2022 (1 comment)
The Egg – In Animation Format - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20856614 - Sept 2019 (1 comment)
The Egg (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17145811 - May 2018 (51 comments)
I am Andy Weir, and I wrote "The Egg". AMA - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15673764 - Nov 2017 (1 comment)
The Egg (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203095 - Feb 2014 (153 comments)
The Egg - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489497 - July 2010 (20 comments)
That everything is predetermined and that time is nonlinear is also something that should trouble every contemplative person.
It's basically a devil's brew of nihilism and determinism that frames existence as a solitary, predetermined journey toward an abstract goal (maturation into godhood?!) that renders individual lives expendable and morally ambiguous. And it plays out over a trillion or so years. Horrifying.
It's especially funny as the author, with very little awareness of what he was writing, tried to strike positive "we are all one" notes... And ended up with something that would give Ligotti nightmares.
Horrifying to whom? The character isn't suffering. They aren't aware of the passage of those trillions of years. There's nothing any more horrifying about this than about bog-standard reincarnation.
And so what if you're the only one? That's not really true in a functional sense. Every human you interact with is indeed a truly conscious individual with a discrete personality and life. You only become integrated as a single organism when the egg "hatches" and you join the broader society of adults.
Reincarnation tends to assume at least some degree of continuity and free will.
This thing assumes that you're eventually going to be, e.g., The Elephant Man, or that poor Japanese guy who got cooked by a megadose of radiation and the doctors wouldn't let him die. That, if there's a torture that you've heard of, or any cautionary tale you've seen reported, you are going to experience it or have already -- and without learning anything at all.
> and without learning anything at all
Well, you learn something later, when the egg hatches. But blank-slate reincarnation also promises that you'll completely forget the trauma of being the elephant man, at least for the duration of the egg process. Surely the real burden would be remembering all those billions of lives with only your paltry human mind to bear it.
the being going through this in the story is not a human. a tiny part of them dips its finger into the universe created by the narrator and what is experienced is a human life, but the being experiencing those lives is not human. the human is the lower dimensional representation of the higher-dimensional being that the narrator is speaking to.
if I touch a sheet of paper, part of me exists in the same plane as the paper, but I am not a piece of paper, I am a much more complex being. It is the same for the narrator and the person who just died and believed until this conversation that they were "merely" a human. the humanity of this being is the interface between them and their past selves. once they graduate/hatch from this egg, they are much larger than the sum of all the lives that they have lived. they contain all of those experiences, and will remember them all.
> if there's a torture that you've heard of, or any cautionary tale you've seen reported, you are going to experience it or have already -- and without learning anything at all.
which suggests that there's something horrifying about the cycles of forgetting that take place inside the egg, while the protagonist is still human.
Imagine two men. I will make this extreme for sake of example: One of them is Saint Francis of Assisi. The other is Oskar Dirlewanger, infamous SS war criminal.
Are they, as the story suggests, the same man? Is it the case that every choice they made in life can be attributed solely to circumstances and history -- and that both men, under the same circumstances, would make the same choices? (Being, after all, the same man, with the same soul.) Thus doesn't the story presume that there is no such thing as personality, and that the "soul" is a free rider -- all actions in life coming down to sheer biological and circumstantial determinism?
This total erasure of individuality -- with the same person doomed to exhibit all moral and ethical extremes -- is something I believe every philosopher would call a repugnant conclusion.
You can believe in compatibilism and still believe that there are actions that are inconsistent with your own nature. That, as the story suggests, you must become both torturer and tortured is horrifying.
> blank-slate reincarnation
At least it never implies, in any religious tradition, that you are all of your contemporaries. People would rightly recoil from such a teaching.
Just because a conclusion is repugnant doesn't mean it is beyond consideration.
> There's nothing any more horrifying about this than about bog-standard reincarnation.
Under that wouldn't I be one of many going through some different lives? Rather that there is only one person ever who goes through all lives.
So what? They're not really meaningfully one person until all the memories get collected. If they each start as a blank slate, they're all functionally separate people. It's not like they're experiencing loneliness during their lives because of any of this.
> If it were true, the idea that I was Hitler and everyone that worked at unit 731 is pretty horrifying.
That part is supposed to be uncomfortable, but I don't find it existentially horrifying. After all, given that Hitler exists, someone had to be him. Surely it's less horrifying for that person to also be all of Hitler's victims.
People look to religion and metaphysics for justice and salvation. This poor "Egg" guy is trapped in a trillion-year cycle of pain and injustice. I guess it's Buddhist hell, too...
> The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.
Getting eaten is the last 5 minutes of a prey animal's life. If you asked that antelope whether those few clumsy minutes of bleeding out outweighed a lifetime of frolicking through fields, all the children they sired, all the berries they ate, I think they'd be a bit offended.
Anyway, this has nothing to do with the story. This is a worldview committed to pessimism, where bad must always outweigh good because it is easier to upset ourselves by contemplating bad things than to soothe ourselves by contemplating good things, and therefore the bad must clearly predominate. There are very few things I'm willing to dismiss as a mindset problem, but this is one of them. Schopenhauer should have gone to therapy.
The Horror of Eternal Life | Isaac Asimov’s The Last Answer
That's German Romanticism which is the invisible 90% of the iceberg of the modern perception of religions, New Age ideas, and humanistic psychology.
Here's a summary of how the Romantic thought has distorted the Western understanding of Buddhist teachings. I highly recommend it because once you know its signs, you'll start spotting it presence everywhere, not just in Western Buddhism:
https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/PurityOfHeart/Section0009....
At least the duration is short.
4.23 All that is harmony for you, my Universe, is in harmony with me as well. Nothing that comes at the right time for you is too early or too late for me. Everything is fruit to me that your seasons bring, Nature. All things come of you, have their being in you, and return to you.
4.48 Mark how fleeting and paltry is the estate of man - yesterday in embryo, tomorrow a mummy or ashes. So for the hairsbreadth of time assigned to thee, live rationally, and part with life cheerfully, as drops the ripe olive, extolling the season that bore it and the tree that matured it.
7.9 All things are implicated with one another, and the bond is holy; and there is hardly anything unconnected with any other things. For things have been co-ordinated, and they combine to make up the same universe. For there is one universe made up of all things, and one god who pervades all things, and one substance, and one law, and one reason.
12.30 Everything harmonizes with me, which is harmonious to thee, O Universe. Nothing for me is too early or too late, which is in due time for thee. There is one light of the sun, though it is interrupted by walls, mountains and infinite other things. There is one common substance, though it is distributed among countless bodies which have their several qualities. There is one soul, though it is distributed among several natures and individual limitations. There is one intelligent soul, though it seems to be divided.
This was my introduction to it!
It would make "web 1.0" content much more usable, and would encourage people to create simple HTML because the default styling wouldn't look like crap.
Overall, his authorial voice reminds me a lot of YouTube hosts? Perhaps that's just the cultural moment we're in.
Artemis was good too.
If you liked explorative / conceptual Sci Fi, more for the thought exercise than anything else:
- Exhalation by Ted Chiang. A collection of scifi short stories that are quite thought provoking. Some sprinklings of religion in some of them.
- The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury. A classic, also a short story collection. Golden age scifi.
- Project Hieroglyph. A collection of authors that partnered with Phd students to write short stories based on their research papers. Great concept with great stories.
If you liked Andy Weir's focus on engineering/building:
- Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor. A man uploads himself into a Von Neummann probe and replicates himself to play Factorio among the stars.
- Destiny's Crucible by Olan Thorensen. MC gets sent to an alternate earth in a technological past, and attempts to re-introduce modern technology and build industry.
Any recommendations for the next audiobook?
Also there bobiverse series is great IMHO
Humans discover a place (I think on Mars), built by Aliens, but it's a deathtrap. So they send someone in to navigate the deathtrap using a clone, and a sort of remote control (something like Avatar).
Each time the clone dies, the person piloting it survives, but has gained the memory of what went wrong, and can try again (kind of like Edge of Tomorrow).
The point of the story is the very end, when the pilot makes it fully through the space.
Has anoyone every heard of this storay and know the name/author? (Bonus points of you know the anthology as well)
LOVE the Murderbot series, highly recommend.
See also:
What I found interesting though was the temporal like experience presented from the pov of God. It doesn't seem like the God in the story is omnipotent.
https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/...
Maybe start with this short ("I Don't Know, Timmy, Being God Is a Big Responsibility")[1] since it is similar to The Egg in my opinion.
[0] https://qntm.org/fiction [1] https://qntm.org/responsibilit
>“Every time you victimized someone,” I said, “you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you.”
I mean, not really, since I wouldn't do quite all those things as I am now. In this framework I'm just forced into doing those things by the factors going into those particular lives.
Thanks for posting it.