I guess I'm in the minority that doesn't find this story uplifting. The memory reset is the biggest problem, since it doesn't allow the main character to learn from his mistakes. At the end of time, the main character will have his memories and personalities merged. Then he'll look back on countless lifetimes of the same mistakes and regrets. It would be like if someone slipped you some Ambien (to prevent memory formation), played the same prank on you 20 times, then showed you a video of it after you sobered up. "Ha-ha, you fell for it every time! Classic!" Except instead of 20 times it would be billions (possibly trillions) of lifetimes. And instead of one prank, it would be countless heartbreaks, regrets, failures, and insecurities.
And that's only looking at the character's own "choices." (Is it really a choice if you can't stop yourself from becoming John Wilkes Booth?) The cruelty inflicted by nature would be much greater. Disease, famine, famine, disease, famine, typhoon, famine, rattlesnake bite, famine, tsunami, etc.
Now I wonder if a sugar-coated Lovecraftian horror story was the author's intent. No other kind of god would set up a system where you're forced to repeat the same mistakes for billions of years.
I see were you are coming from, and for sake of intellectual discussion of speculative fiction even up-voted. But I think there's a whole load of possibilities you've missed.
The most basic one is simply that you're attributing human values to something decidedly not human. That learning from each mistaken life is actually a desirable feature. Perhaps only the aggregate matters. Perhaps, in fact, that which is being studied is so alien to us that we can't see how they are in fact learning through the process. Perhaps the point of existence is experience itself, rather than to be able to make decisions based on that experience. Perhaps we do learn from what we don't directly remember - that glass of warm water still effects the finger we dip in ;)
Then there's the passage of time and characters. Let's pretend for the sake of being able to follow an argument that concepts of "before" and "after" can be applied at all. Perhaps all those minds which we consider horrendous are the earlier ones, and those which come after are increasingly better? Perhaps it is the complete opposite, as we all have the wrong idea as to the way around things should be!
And, of course, we should be careful when interpreting "With each new life you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect". After all, we are assuming it is the experiences and learnings of the life which give those results, rather than the process itself. Perhaps it is not that at all, but rather those are simply a bi-product of whatever is really going on. The foetus requires stimulation and its nascent mind simply occupying whilst it grows and matures, and the nature of that stimulation has no effect what so ever.
I must admit, though, I have a fondness for your lovecraftian horror twist interpretation ;)
Years ago, there was a PBS documentary about the Buddha. [1] In it, one of the guests was addressing a question about the Buddhist belief in reincarnation. He dismissed the popular notion of reincarnation, where one was Napoleon or Cleopatra or the like in a previous life, instead likening it to repeating puberty over and over and over again.
It's not a question of being forced to make the mistakes. I think you're making a bit of a "forest for the trees" kind of mistake in the way you're looking at it. Accepting, for sake of argument, the story's premise of a one-soul universe, in each successive life, I'm choosing my mistakes. Ideally, I'm choosing new and better mistakes each time — much like the oft-cited entrepreneurial advice to keep making new and better mistakes.
It's not uplifting, it is a parable of karma. It is posing the claim that we are all one life, and you should seek to uplift all of humanity, because you will live every life, even the lowest.
Or that you should uplift the best life of humanity, because you will live it.
But generally, work for a distribution that you would prefer.
It is a spin on Bentham(?)/Rawls(?) Philosophy that you should choose a social contact/morality that you'd find acceptable if you didn't know who you would be born as.
Don't know that this is what the author put in, but what I took out was that he doesn't consciously remember the lives, but there's associative memory. In the Ambien hypothetical, you could imagine all sorts of different flinch reactions developing, without a conscious memory underpinning them.
I thought the author meant, this is how you get "moral progress", and why history becomes less barbaric.
But then, that would require most of the future lives to come at the end of his timeline. Which doesn't really make sense. Shrug.
Interesting. I'd always made the assumption that something, at least, transferred from one life to the next. I figured that the worst and most selfish lives happened 'first', and the absurdly selfless lives happened 'last'.
He would experience all of the mistakes, regret, pain, suffering, and all that bad stuff, but he will also experience all of the love, joy, laughter, and all the other good stuff. In the end, one of his single lives still went through the same motions of all of his other lives together, just at a smaller scale.
That is how we mature in life. We learn and grow from our mistakes and accomplishments. Our pain and our joy. You can, as many do, see life as just one big shithole of pain, but you would still be missing out on another side of it.
That's at least what I got out of the story. I thought it was lovely.
My thoughts exactly. I feel there's something interesting there that doesn't quite work. There needs to be a stronger link between re-living life and steadily 'improving', whether this 'improvement' is something alien to us (as mdisraeli suggests), or whether these improvements fit our human view of things.
For example, the story could focus on a subset of 'humanity', some kind of smaller community, and highlight how the protagonist, through inhabiting all people in this community, broadened and deepened his understanding and/or compassion. This subset could be a family, for example, or a set of different 'archetypes' (leader, priest, caretaker, slave, etc.).
Wouldn't it be interesting if there were some way to undo the reset of memory, and you gained control over the continual reset to the point where, in fact at the end of this life, you no longer get the memory reset, but can remember everything, understand everything, and know who you are in the great cosmos.
Many religions have tried. Maybe one day one of them will make it through that barrier. Perhaps the nature of the game is that we play it until we learn not to play it any more - by making another game, perhaps ..
> No other kind of god would set up a system where you're forced to repeat the same mistakes for billions of years.
If the alternative were ultimate boredom, you might. Consider the possibility that you're not repeating mistakes so much as continuously immersing yourself in an environment that relieves boredom, an environment that also allows for personal/god growth.
I've read this several times before, and this bit always gets me, as they say, "right in the feels":
“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’ll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn’t have time to grow contempt for you. Your wife will cry on the outside, but will be secretly relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If it’s any consolation, she’ll feel very guilty for feeling relieved.”
It's just so human. It's almost confrontational in its degree of, "That's just how shit is sometimes," but it's delivered with utter compassion. That juxtaposition captures so much of how I feel about the human condition.
That model seems ineffective. While it operates in parallel, spawns a plethora of threads and does, I imagine, aim to end in eventual consistency, it also seems to lack any form of shared state. If I was me I would make sure I overlap myself on each new instance and not deal with that restart time. I'd also suggest picking a different tool rather than the current one... I think I might be using LISP (Lost In Self Protocol).
Completely off topic, however I read this originally right around when Lost went off the air.
I always wished this is how Lost ended: with Jack being told by Jacob that he was actually everyone on the plane (which is why they all had a weird connection), and all these lives were him waiting to be "born" into running the island.
I wasn't a Lost follower (my gf at the time was, so I heard most of the plot without paying much attention.) By the end I was expecting to be some kind of nonsense (like it did,) but I was expecting more like a room full of monkeys with typewriters. Seriously.
On HN, we want to hack the way our systems work. We want to see through the obscurity and complexities advanced systems have brought along and find the most elegant and quickest way to challenge and control them. Why can we not look at hacking religion? Why can we not hack philosophy?
I like this story, but more than that I like the fact that it has reached page 1 on HN. I think many people here are not looking for self-realisation in the form of a startup that brings them big bucks, but hey - self-realisation.
I'm in the camp of people that considers religion a hack already - a psychological manipulation of emotions and thoughts to bring about a particular state of being and behaviour. In many cases it's a beneficial symbiosis - and in others a spiritually parasitical one - between the 'host' religion and the 'client' believer.
So what does it mean to 'hack' region? To further twist it to your own purposes? That's been happening for millennia - large organisations have been honing their practises, others are constantly 'disrupting' it with alternatives.
Don't forget this is all make believe. You won't need to re-live the lives of everyone there ever was, as implied in this creative writing.
"Once you’ve lived every human life throughout all time, you will have grown enough to be born".
There's no magic number of humans that represents "all of them". It's odd to suggest that people (even aborted foetuses?) are only part of a giant equation, that permits one into heaven, or whatever is suggested here.
Please, this is not a lot different than believing that the large round boulders on the hill were laid by crocodile spirits a long time ago. Lovely story and belief of a particular native people. But those boulders have quite a different origin - nothing to do with crocodiles, and their fate has nothing to do with crocodiles either.
A conversation isn't waiting on the other side. Death is the end of conversation, not the beginning. We only hope it will mean beginnings and re-incarnations, but the chances are that when you die, you're done being human and you'll be onto something else.
LOL, progressing up through the ranks of humanity to reach God-status. That is some messed up mass-ego injection.
What about pre-human hominids? Was he also all the Homo Ergasters? Homo Habilis? Australopithecus Afarensis? The great apes? All the mammals? All multi-celled life?
I don't get what's interesting about this story. It's pretty silly and not very enlightening.
The story is incompatible with free will. The only way the universe could be the way it is, with the one person living all those lives, yet always choosing such that the other people (him in another re-incarnation) also always choose as they (he) did, it would be necessary for free will not to exist.
But this would also mean that the "god" in this story also didn't have free will, because the man was "of his (god's) kind".
But if God does not have free will, he isn't the greatest possible being. The universe thus described therefore fails Anselm's Ontological Argument for the Existence of God. The hypothetical God who is identical to the God in this story, with the exception that He DOES have free will, is obviously a greater being.
I conclude that this story cannot possibly describe Reality, as It actually Is.
While we're talking about dark cosmologies, Divided by Infinity [0] is fantastic. I'll post it here as when I try to submit it as its own post it is automatically marked dead.
First time reading this story would be nice if someone can explain the takeaway from this? It's a very deep story but trying to rationalize the meaning or concept behind the idea of this story. Thanks:)
I didn't take anything from it, just thought it was a very creative idea.
I suppose there's a 'every experience makes you grow' angle - but I don't think the author was really trying to push it. It's mostly about the clever construction.
I'd strongly suggest "Sum: 40 tales from the after lives" for anyone enjoy this story. It's a lovely collection of short stories with very similar writing style and theme.
The central idea - ROT13 ... gung rirel uhzna guebhtu gvzr vf gur fnzr fbhy orvat er-vapneangrq ... /ROT13 is also explored in parts of Transcendent, by Stephen Baxter, in which immortal far future beings ROT13 zhfg cercner sbe gurve vzzbegnyvgl ol rkcrevrapvat rirel yvsrgvzr bs rirel uhzna gung unf rire yvirq orsber gurz. /ROT13. It is also mentioned in The Thought Gang by Tibor Fisher as a possible metaphysics.
On the other hand, a title of "The Egg" might not have attracted enough views and upvotes for you to have seen it. There's a pique/spoil trade-off, now in social media more than ever.
(In this case, the first line might have worked just as well, though: "You were on your way home when you died...")
Who thinks of the title when reading the storey? Its a kind of double-meaning thing - when I'm done reading, and think of the title again, I see the irony or secret or whatever. Its a good title because it adds to the storey when you're done.
[+] [-] chroma|12 years ago|reply
And that's only looking at the character's own "choices." (Is it really a choice if you can't stop yourself from becoming John Wilkes Booth?) The cruelty inflicted by nature would be much greater. Disease, famine, famine, disease, famine, typhoon, famine, rattlesnake bite, famine, tsunami, etc.
Now I wonder if a sugar-coated Lovecraftian horror story was the author's intent. No other kind of god would set up a system where you're forced to repeat the same mistakes for billions of years.
[+] [-] mdisraeli|12 years ago|reply
I see were you are coming from, and for sake of intellectual discussion of speculative fiction even up-voted. But I think there's a whole load of possibilities you've missed.
The most basic one is simply that you're attributing human values to something decidedly not human. That learning from each mistaken life is actually a desirable feature. Perhaps only the aggregate matters. Perhaps, in fact, that which is being studied is so alien to us that we can't see how they are in fact learning through the process. Perhaps the point of existence is experience itself, rather than to be able to make decisions based on that experience. Perhaps we do learn from what we don't directly remember - that glass of warm water still effects the finger we dip in ;)
Then there's the passage of time and characters. Let's pretend for the sake of being able to follow an argument that concepts of "before" and "after" can be applied at all. Perhaps all those minds which we consider horrendous are the earlier ones, and those which come after are increasingly better? Perhaps it is the complete opposite, as we all have the wrong idea as to the way around things should be!
And, of course, we should be careful when interpreting "With each new life you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect". After all, we are assuming it is the experiences and learnings of the life which give those results, rather than the process itself. Perhaps it is not that at all, but rather those are simply a bi-product of whatever is really going on. The foetus requires stimulation and its nascent mind simply occupying whilst it grows and matures, and the nature of that stimulation has no effect what so ever.
I must admit, though, I have a fondness for your lovecraftian horror twist interpretation ;)
[+] [-] rosser|12 years ago|reply
It's not a question of being forced to make the mistakes. I think you're making a bit of a "forest for the trees" kind of mistake in the way you're looking at it. Accepting, for sake of argument, the story's premise of a one-soul universe, in each successive life, I'm choosing my mistakes. Ideally, I'm choosing new and better mistakes each time — much like the oft-cited entrepreneurial advice to keep making new and better mistakes.
[1] http://www.pbs.org/thebuddha/
[+] [-] judk|12 years ago|reply
Or that you should uplift the best life of humanity, because you will live it.
But generally, work for a distribution that you would prefer.
It is a spin on Bentham(?)/Rawls(?) Philosophy that you should choose a social contact/morality that you'd find acceptable if you didn't know who you would be born as.
[+] [-] syllogism|12 years ago|reply
I thought the author meant, this is how you get "moral progress", and why history becomes less barbaric.
But then, that would require most of the future lives to come at the end of his timeline. Which doesn't really make sense. Shrug.
[+] [-] NoodleIncident|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ssully|12 years ago|reply
That is how we mature in life. We learn and grow from our mistakes and accomplishments. Our pain and our joy. You can, as many do, see life as just one big shithole of pain, but you would still be missing out on another side of it.
That's at least what I got out of the story. I thought it was lovely.
[+] [-] mercer|12 years ago|reply
For example, the story could focus on a subset of 'humanity', some kind of smaller community, and highlight how the protagonist, through inhabiting all people in this community, broadened and deepened his understanding and/or compassion. This subset could be a family, for example, or a set of different 'archetypes' (leader, priest, caretaker, slave, etc.).
[+] [-] fit2rule|12 years ago|reply
Many religions have tried. Maybe one day one of them will make it through that barrier. Perhaps the nature of the game is that we play it until we learn not to play it any more - by making another game, perhaps ..
[+] [-] fargolime|12 years ago|reply
If the alternative were ultimate boredom, you might. Consider the possibility that you're not repeating mistakes so much as continuously immersing yourself in an environment that relieves boredom, an environment that also allows for personal/god growth.
[+] [-] rosser|12 years ago|reply
“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’ll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn’t have time to grow contempt for you. Your wife will cry on the outside, but will be secretly relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If it’s any consolation, she’ll feel very guilty for feeling relieved.”
It's just so human. It's almost confrontational in its degree of, "That's just how shit is sometimes," but it's delivered with utter compassion. That juxtaposition captures so much of how I feel about the human condition.
[+] [-] dhughes|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whyme|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gkoberger|12 years ago|reply
I always wished this is how Lost ended: with Jack being told by Jacob that he was actually everyone on the plane (which is why they all had a weird connection), and all these lives were him waiting to be "born" into running the island.
[+] [-] RBerenguel|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eberfreitas|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timurtamerlan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] julianpye|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] polemic|12 years ago|reply
I'm in the camp of people that considers religion a hack already - a psychological manipulation of emotions and thoughts to bring about a particular state of being and behaviour. In many cases it's a beneficial symbiosis - and in others a spiritually parasitical one - between the 'host' religion and the 'client' believer.
So what does it mean to 'hack' region? To further twist it to your own purposes? That's been happening for millennia - large organisations have been honing their practises, others are constantly 'disrupting' it with alternatives.
[+] [-] samatman|12 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashmir_Shaivism
Except that, coming from that background, I expected the big reveal to be that the Egg is talking to himself, hatched.
As unprovable speculations about the nature of reality go, I rather like this one.
[+] [-] Xcelerate|12 years ago|reply
Edit: I suppose it's just as horrible regardless of whether or not you experience them...
[+] [-] exodust|12 years ago|reply
"Once you’ve lived every human life throughout all time, you will have grown enough to be born".
There's no magic number of humans that represents "all of them". It's odd to suggest that people (even aborted foetuses?) are only part of a giant equation, that permits one into heaven, or whatever is suggested here.
Please, this is not a lot different than believing that the large round boulders on the hill were laid by crocodile spirits a long time ago. Lovely story and belief of a particular native people. But those boulders have quite a different origin - nothing to do with crocodiles, and their fate has nothing to do with crocodiles either.
A conversation isn't waiting on the other side. Death is the end of conversation, not the beginning. We only hope it will mean beginnings and re-incarnations, but the chances are that when you die, you're done being human and you'll be onto something else.
LOL, progressing up through the ranks of humanity to reach God-status. That is some messed up mass-ego injection.
[+] [-] fargolime|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leobelle|12 years ago|reply
I don't get what's interesting about this story. It's pretty silly and not very enlightening.
[+] [-] bambax|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dhoulb|12 years ago|reply
Or WILL live as all of them on the way up, depending on your worldview.
[+] [-] yc-kjh|12 years ago|reply
The story is incompatible with free will. The only way the universe could be the way it is, with the one person living all those lives, yet always choosing such that the other people (him in another re-incarnation) also always choose as they (he) did, it would be necessary for free will not to exist.
But this would also mean that the "god" in this story also didn't have free will, because the man was "of his (god's) kind".
But if God does not have free will, he isn't the greatest possible being. The universe thus described therefore fails Anselm's Ontological Argument for the Existence of God. The hypothetical God who is identical to the God in this story, with the exception that He DOES have free will, is obviously a greater being.
I conclude that this story cannot possibly describe Reality, as It actually Is.
[+] [-] WCityMike|12 years ago|reply
http://smile.amazon.com/Martian-Andy-Weir-ebook/dp/B00EMXBDM...
[+] [-] otikik|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ctoth|12 years ago|reply
[0] http://www.tor.com/stories/2010/08/divided-by-infinity
[+] [-] smky80|12 years ago|reply
But I realized, this is would be an absolute disaster if true. True story: life more or less sucks if you aren't near a local maximum of a food chain.
[+] [-] judk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dhoulb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shire|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dhoulb|12 years ago|reply
I suppose there's a 'every experience makes you grow' angle - but I don't think the author was really trying to push it. It's mostly about the clever construction.
[+] [-] Geee|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NhanH|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codeulike|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crntaylor|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benaiah|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gojomo|12 years ago|reply
(In this case, the first line might have worked just as well, though: "You were on your way home when you died...")
[+] [-] jafaku|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raldi|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justinpombrio|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] croisillon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emiliobumachar|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jesalg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GhotiFish|12 years ago|reply
I don't feel it's any greater spoiler than "The Last Question"
edit: oops
[+] [-] thatthatis|12 years ago|reply