101–110 of 159 posts
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 also suggests that the simulation is heavily parallel and complete knowledge of all episodes (rather all paths) makes you god.
This is within an iota of the precise cosmology of my religion of birth: 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.
This would have been a significantly more enjoyable experience if the title of the submission didn't give away the ending.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for explaining the Buddhist view. I don't know if you endorse it or not, but that sentiment really irks me. It reminds me of theodicy: Play with words enough, and you can claim the world is a beautiful place. Except, it isn't. It's worse than you can possibly imagine. Over 6 million children under the age of 5 died last year, mostly from disease. That's a Hiroshima bombing every week , killing only children un…
You're welcome. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm Buddhist, but I've found a lot of wisdom in and no small amount of inner peace through the Buddha's teachings. Play with words enough, and you can claim the world is a beautiful place. Except, it isn't. It's worse than you can possibly imagine. The beauty of the world and the morality of what happens in it are utterly orthogonal. You're conflating those things in a w…
He's right to conflate these things. Suffering is not beautiful.
The author of this wrote THE MARTIAN. I recommend it: http://smile.amazon.com/Martian-Andy-Weir-ebook/dp/B00EMXBDM...
This is within an iota of the precise cosmology of my religion of birth: 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.
Indeed, egg talking to himself would be better. Otherwise our existential problem isn't clarified just moved up one level of conscience.
Incompatible with Free Will 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…
What we like to call free will is just the deterministic result of processes to complex to be understood, modelled or predicted.
Old. Seriously who hasn't read this by now.