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The Egg (2009)

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Re: The Egg (2009)

#61

Post by bccdee »

IanCal wrote: post #34
bccdee wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And it plays out over a trillion or so years. Horrifying. 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 dis…

If it were true, the idea that I was Hitler and everyone that worked at unit 731 is pretty horrifying. > 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 .

> 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.

Re: The Egg (2009)

#62

Post by bccdee »

wat10000 wrote: post #56
bccdee wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true at all though. This is how a baby thinks about a needle. Often pain is less painful than we expect, and pleasure is pleasantly surprising. > 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 f…

I have a hard time thinking of any kind or quantity of pleasure that would outweigh some of the more horrible fates that some people have had.

Sure. I'm not saying the good outweighs the bad in every individual life. But you're explicitly picking the most extreme examples, and this is a claim being made about life in general.

Re: The Egg (2009)

#64

Post by wat10000 »

bccdee wrote: post #62
wat10000 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a hard time thinking of any kind or quantity of pleasure that would outweigh some of the more horrible fates that some people have had.

Sure. I'm not saying the good outweighs the bad in every individual life. But you're explicitly picking the most extreme examples, and this is a claim being made about life in general.

I believe the point is that the person in The Egg experiences every extreme example.

Re: The Egg (2009)

#65

Post by mariusor »

Ashymad wrote: post #48
siliconc0w wrote: post #44

I asked Weir about the The Egg at a signing and whether he planned to write anything similar- I got a weird vibe back, "I shat it out over a weekend" - like be kinda resented it or possibly just people asking about it.

Honestly I am not surprised. I imagine he wrote it quickly as this fun quirky look at the universe but then it got extremely popular, kurzgesatz video released and all. A lot of people based their personal beliefs off of the story. Imagine you write a small story for fun but then it becomes nearly a religion. It must be a little frustrating for Andy.

Which is strange, because unlike his other works, this one actually has something a reader can introspect about instead of, you know, just reading "efficacy porn".

Re: The Egg (2009)

#66

Post by pavlov »

agos wrote: post #53
pavlov wrote: post #12

I really wish browsers would default to Reader mode for documents like this. 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.

it's literally two clicks

When you know and remember it exists. Most people never find the feature.

Re: The Egg (2009)

#67

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

bccdee wrote: post #25
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's nothing any more horrifying about this than about bog-standard reincarnation. 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…

The guy in the story has as much free will as anyone does. Just because everything's stitched together with time travel, doesn't mean the individual instances of the character aren't making authentic choices in each moment. Free will doesn't mean our choices are non-deterministic and detached from our circumstances and history; I don't know why that would even be desirable. Compatibilism is the only coherent stance o…

> The guy in the story has as much free will as anyone does. Just because everything's stitched together with time travel, doesn't mean the individual instances of the character aren't making authentic choices in each moment. Free will doesn't mean our choices are non-deterministic and detached from our circumstances and history

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.

Re: The Egg (2009)

#68

Post by malshe »

xutopia wrote: post #13

I can't recommend this author enough. Project Hail Mary and The Martian are amazing works of science fiction. Project Hail Mary is actually amazing as an audiobook.

You are absolutely correct, Mary is amazing as an audiobook. Loved both his books.

Re: The Egg (2009)

#69

Post by bodine30 »

jpm_sd wrote: post #24
xutopia wrote: post #13

I can't recommend this author enough. Project Hail Mary and The Martian are amazing works of science fiction. Project Hail Mary is actually amazing as an audiobook.

I enjoyed The Martian (novel and movie) but I didn't care for Artemis or Project Hail Mary. I thought the characters and dialogue were fairly weak, even though the underlying ideas were clever. Also I thought that "main character amnesia" was a frustrating plot device (in PHM). Overall, his authorial voice reminds me a lot of YouTube hosts? Perhaps that's just the cultural moment we're in.

I had similar feelings for PHM, but it was hard to put a finger on why. I enjoyed it well enough to make it to the end, but I think I have a limited appetite for his "authorial voice". I read it directly after The Bone Clocks and remember thinking I missed David Mitchell's "voice" and wishing there were a way to experience books through another author's voice. Outside the copyright concerns, this could be an interesting use case for AI, a cover band for literature. It's definitely the only way we'll ever get Wes Anderson Star Wars

Re: The Egg (2009)

#70

Post by jjcm »

xutopia wrote: post #13

I can't recommend this author enough. Project Hail Mary and The Martian are amazing works of science fiction. Project Hail Mary is actually amazing as an audiobook.

Some other recommendations depending on what you liked about The Egg/Project Hail Mary/The Martian:

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.

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