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The Egg (2009)
- vegadw 2y agoThis story makes me cry every time I read it, at the line "You were victimizing yourself". It's not an ugly cry, but a sort of somber pain. I think humans are predisposed - probably evolutionary - to remember the bad more than the good. The world, nature, is unkind and our survival doesn't much depend on our ability to recall positive feelings beyond procreation and good food. 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.
- Klaster_1 2y agoKurzgesagt adaptation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI
- numinix 2y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoUMY-I_m7c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoUMY-I_m7c This was my introduction to it!
- jt-hill 2y agoWait, this is Andy Weir? Like, that Andy Weir? Like, The Martian and Project Hail Mary Andy Weir? I had no idea.
- Chiyote 2y ago[flagged]
- rpmisms 2y agoYep. The Martian began as basically a blog, you know.
- voidUpdate 2y agoHe has a whole load of short stories on his website, and a whole series about a mermaid too
- pkilgore 2y agoPleasant way to start today thanks for submitting.
- zidad 2y agoLove it! I liked his other short stories as well: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35502775-the-egg-and-other-stories https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35502775-the-egg-and-oth...
- A_D_E_P_T 2y agoHah, it's literally Schopenhauer's hell: Humans as both the tormenting demons and as those doing the suffering. In this case, one human -- which further frames suffering as an inescapable, masochistic cycle. "You were victimizing yourself" says the demiurge. 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.
- _def 2y agoWell if you only focus on the bad stuff that happens during a human life, sure.
- A_D_E_P_T 2y agoAs old Schop said: "Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. 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." 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...
- bccdee 2y agoThat'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 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.
- flenserboy 2y agothat would torque me off so bad...
- pavlov 2y agoI 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.
- syncr0 2y agoYou can set Safari to automatically open all web pages in Reader mode. Then for websites you regularly visit and want a non reader mode render, you can whitelist them for that.
- agos 2y agoit's literally two clicks
- pavlov 2y agoWhen you know and remember it exists. Most people never find the feature.
- prawn 2y agoIf it's not possible now, I wonder if there could be a meta tag whereby a site owner could assign a page to use any reader-mode available in the browser as a first preference?
- xutopia 2y agoI 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.
- Chiyote 2y ago[flagged]
- maxhille 2y agoFunny coincidence - I just finished the Project Hail Mary audiobook this morning and loved it. Any recommendations for the next audiobook?
- dmcc365 2y agoMickey7 is pretty good if you enjoyed Project Hail Mary. Alternatively, the Murderbot series.
- tstrimple 2y agoThe main thing keeping me from the murderbot series is the value prop. They are incredibly short which doesn’t play as well with a credit based purchasing system. For seven credits I get a little over 20 hours of content. Project Hail Mary is 16 hours for one credit.
- Tenoke 2y agoI've always liked the story but if I was presented with that revelation I'd be questioning to what extent these other me's are really me and how really everything else (genetics, environment) is shaping behaviour and I'm what? A vessel that gets all the memories at the end? >“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.
- thehappypm 2y ago50 billion different innies
- p2detar 2y agoBack then what I liked about this story was the fact that a single "soul" experiences itself across infinite timelines. 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.
- curtisszmania 2y ago[dead]
- jpm_sd 2y ago(2009) See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Egg_(Weir_short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Egg_(Weir_short_story)
- Chiyote 2y ago[flagged]
- aitchnyu 2y agoMarcus Aurelius was meditating these thoughts in the last 13 years of his life running between the Germanic and Persian fronts while extremely sick. He believed he was one being participating in the universal Nous(Mind), and time and outer space yawns around his human lifetime. 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.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoI loved that! Thanks for posting it.
- voidUpdate 2y agoI read this some time ago and really enjoyed it, and personally, it does align somewhat with how I feel about the world. I don't treat it like a bible or anything, but the concept of, at some point, being the consciousness inside of everyone, past and future, does make a certain amount of sense to me
- geor9e 2y agoIs there any website of more science fiction extra-short stories that are this short? I know sci-fi might not be the preferred term for stories that are this philosophical or borderline religious, but I don't know a better term.
- ghaff 2y agoI don't know of a website. But I bet there are published collections out there though I don't have one.
- gambiting 2y ago"The Machine Stops" is one that is always in my memory - not quite as short as this, but very short nonetheless. And impressive given that it was written in 1909: https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/Machine_stops.pdf https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/...
- skiman10 2y agoYou might enjoy some of qntm's work[0]. 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 https://qntm.org/fiction [1] https://qntm.org/responsibilit https://qntm.org/responsibilit
- siliconc0w 2y agoI 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.
- Chiyote 2y ago[flagged]
- ZeroTalent 2y agoThis is not plagiarism. These two works express their ideas in very different ways and with very different details, structures, and styles. That's like saying that Orwell's 1984 is a plagiarism of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We or that Harry Potter is a plagiarism of Ursula K. Le Guin's Wizard of Earthsea. You are just tackling similar topics. Maybe he took some inspiration from you. You should be proud instead of being butthurt for 15 years. By the way, the notion that all beings are manifestations of a single consciousness—or that we are all God—is far older than either of you.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- macavelli64 2y ago[dead]
- Chiyote3 2y ago[dead]
- K0balt 2y agoI think the concept is a common insight among people who introspect a bit. The first time I read the story I was surprised because it closely mirrored one of my own musings. In retrospect that’s probably because it is one of those “obvious” ideas that presents itself from the memetic environment of the moment. That’s also probably why it’s irritating to Weir that it practically became a religion lol.
- croisillon 2y agoRelated, some past submissions: - 2018, 51 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17145811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17145811 - 2014, 153 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203095
- dang 2y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: The Egg - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37852535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37852535 - Oct 2023 (6 comments) The Egg - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31687818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31687818 - June 2022 (1 comment) The Egg – In Animation Format - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20856614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20856614 - Sept 2019 (1 comment) The Egg (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17145811 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15673764 - Nov 2017 (1 comment) The Egg (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203095 - Feb 2014 (153 comments) The Egg - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489497 - July 2010 (20 comments)
- throw310822 2y agoIt's basically the same way you train an LLM, forcing them to reproduce all human writing. You'd have to RLHF the being produced by this egg to avoid him falling in Hitler patterns all the time.
- 0xbadc0de5 2y agoFeels vaguely reminiscent of Scott Adams' "God's Debris" which was also making the rounds in the 00's. Essentially just interesting thought experiments playing with the "what if" idea of a higher power.
- fogbeak 2y agoReading this on 4chan in high school is what got me into science fiction. Brings back memories! Very happy that Andy Weir got his due with The Martian.
- Chiyote 2y ago[flagged]
- okonomiyaki3000 2y agoJust the other day I was thinking this hasn't been posted to HN for a while. I'm glad to see it again. Although I feel no need for religion in my life, I recognize that most people seem to need it. So why not this? I think it's better than any of the other ones.
- wishinghand 2y agoDoes anyone remember the parody of this where the answer is an “abbatoir” and the character also has to be every animal?
- prettyblocks 2y agoIt would be cool to see how this conversation changes after various incarnations die.
- synergy7 2y agoVastly parallel reinforcement-learning-like self-play with no obvious in-game real-time feedback loop. No breaks to explicitly integrate experience into strategy ("... there’s no point to doing that <remembering> between each life.”). How the protagonist learns ("matures") in this game?
- OscarCunningham 2y ago'Am I to understand that right now, you and I are the same person in some sort of meta-egg?' "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."
- weard_beard 2y agoThe Show Must Go On.
- Gene5ive 2y agoOne of my favorite short stories
- disdi 2y agoI think the story presents a thought-provoking concept about life, death, and reincarnation. The idea that all humans are essentially different incarnations of the same soul, experiencing every perspective across time to mature into something greater, is both mind-bending and oddly comforting. It’s a clever twist on the meaning of existence, blending philosophy with a cosmic narrative.