Old. Seriously who hasn't read this by now.
Honestly I have read this before too but it was in a 4chan screenshot, know I know it's just copypasta
The Egg (2009)
81–90 of 159 posts
Re: The Egg (2009)
#82How can you bootstrap such a world with only one soul? (I know, not the right question.)
Do souls have @mixins?
Re: The Egg (2009)
#83What 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.
Re: The Egg (2009)
#84Incompatible 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…
You keep using that word, "always". You understand this has a meaning only in temporal context, right? The narrator sequentializes the events in order to make them comprehensible, but that doesn't mean the Egg actually lived these lives sequentially on by one. Once you realize that, your argument about "always" disappears. Also the question of free will becomes much stranger than you put it. Imagine you filmed somebody and watching it later. Does the person on film lack free will because you can just jump to any place on the film and "predict" his actions? I think you won't make this conclusion. Imagine now somebody who does not perceive time linearly (we're in SF territory so we're allowed to). Would his existence mean free will does not exist?
Re: The Egg (2009)
#85I 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 form…
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 m…
What about the natural disasters? You're not choosing that pain and suffering. (Well, maybe a little bit nowadays through global warming, but at least before this century you weren't)
Re: The Egg (2009)
#86While 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.
Re: The Egg (2009)
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 m…
What about the natural disasters? You're not choosing that pain and suffering. (Well, maybe a little bit nowadays through global warming, but at least before this century you weren't)
This gets back to the popular notion of Karma, which says that when bad shit happens to someone, they somehow "deserved" it.
First off, I don't think Buddhism even has a notion of "bad". It recognizes that there is suffering, but it doesn't say suffering is bad; it merely says, matter-of-factly and without judgement, that suffering is a consequence of desire. In order not to suffer, the Buddha teaches, one must (among other things) be in accord with and accepting of one's circumstances, whatever they may be. Buddhism is very practical that way; there's the old saw about the Zen master who quipped, "Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water."
When "bad" shit happens, in that light, the suffering one experiences doesn't come from the thing that happened, but instead from wishing things were somehow different than they are. When you do that, you're diverting your awareness and mental energy from the reality that is manifest and present in front of you, and instead focusing on something that is not only not real, but can never be real.
And when you do that, you completely miss the fact that, up there, on that ledge, a lone flower has somehow managed to survive all the carnage around you. Had you not been preoccupied with wishing the world was other than it is, that flower would have reminded you that, even in the presence of destruction, life and beauty are resilient, and will ultimately triumph.
Re: The Egg (2009)
#88This 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.
Re: The Egg (2009)
#89First 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:)
Re: The Egg (2009)
#90I 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 form…
...how very human 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, th…
Lovecraft kind of covered this in his Randolph Carter stories. Check out "The Silver Key"[1] as a prequel and "Through the Gates of the Silver Key"[2] as the payoff. It's not the typical horror he's known for, but definitely incorporates his larger cosmic themes.
[1] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Silver_Key
[2] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Through_the_Gates_of_the_Silve...