4 ms·

Hah, 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

Hah, 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 ago
Well if you only focus on the bad stuff that happens during a human life, sure.
- A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
  As 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 ago
    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 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.
    - wat10000 2y ago
      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.
      - bccdee 2y ago
        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.
        wat10000 2y ago
        I believe the point is that the person in The Egg experiences every extreme example.
        bccdee 2y ago
        They live each life separately, though, with no memories of their other lives. Joe from Idaho isn't suffering in the moment because of the experiences of some poor sap halfway across the world, even if they're both part of a greater continuum. The character will only regain memory of all the events when they "hatch" & become a god, at which point (being divinely capable of remembering billions of lifetimes) they will presumably have the mental fortitude to deal with that trauma.
        wat10000 2y ago
        As far as we know, people don’t remember anything after they die. Does that mean it’s no big deal to torture you to death? You won’t remember it.
wrinkl3 2y ago
Another (very) short story that plays with this idea is Neil Gaiman's Other People: https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/other-people/ https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/other-people/
- sdwr 2y ago
  The social plane is built upon the physical. What an out of touch, privileged, insulated attitude, having them the other way around.
nthingtohide 2y ago
Eternal afterlife is a incoherent concept. The Horror of Eternal Life | Isaac Asimov’s The Last Answer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9R16NV9Imo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9R16NV9Imo
bccdee 2y ago
> 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 discrete personality and life. You only become integrated as a single organism when the egg "hatches" and you join the broader society of adults.
- A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
  > 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 tale you've seen reported, you are going to experience it or have already -- and without learning anything at all.
  - bccdee 2y ago
    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 on free will. > and without learning anything at all Well, you learn something later, when the egg hatches. But blank-slate reincarnation also promises that you'll completely forget the trauma of being the elephant man, at least for the duration of the egg process. Surely the real burden would be remembering all those billions of lives with only your paltry human mind to bear it.
    - naikrovek 2y ago
      > Surely the real burden would be remembering all those billions of lives with only your paltry human mind to bear it. the being going through this in the story is not a human. a tiny part of them dips its finger into the universe created by the narrator and what is experienced is a human life, but the being experiencing those lives is not human. the human is the lower dimensional representation of the higher-dimensional being that the narrator is speaking to. if I touch a sheet of paper, part of me exists in the same plane as the paper, but I am not a piece of paper, I am a much more complex being. It is the same for the narrator and the person who just died and believed until this conversation that they were "merely" a human. the humanity of this being is the interface between them and their past selves. once they graduate/hatch from this egg, they are much larger than the sum of all the lives that they have lived. they contain all of those experiences, and will remember them all.
ivm 2y ago
> 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. That's German Romanticism which is the invisible 90% of the iceberg of the modern perception of religions, New Age ideas, and humanistic psychology. Here's a summary of how the Romantic thought has distorted the Western understanding of Buddhist teachings. I highly recommend it because once you know its signs, you'll start spotting it presence everywhere, not just in Western Buddhism: https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/PurityOfHeart/Section0009.html https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/PurityOfHeart/Section0009....
- Chiyote 2y ago
  [flagged]
NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
>it plays out over a trillion or so years At least the duration is short.

_def 2y ago

Well if you only focus on the bad stuff that happens during a human life, sure.

A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
As 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 ago
  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 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.
  - wat10000 2y ago
    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.
    - bccdee 2y ago
      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.
      - wat10000 2y ago
        I believe the point is that the person in The Egg experiences every extreme example.
        bccdee 2y ago
        They live each life separately, though, with no memories of their other lives. Joe from Idaho isn't suffering in the moment because of the experiences of some poor sap halfway across the world, even if they're both part of a greater continuum. The character will only regain memory of all the events when they "hatch" & become a god, at which point (being divinely capable of remembering billions of lifetimes) they will presumably have the mental fortitude to deal with that trauma.
        wat10000 2y ago
        As far as we know, people don’t remember anything after they die. Does that mean it’s no big deal to torture you to death? You won’t remember it.

wrinkl3 2y ago

Another (very) short story that plays with this idea is Neil Gaiman's Other People: https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/other-people/ https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/other-people/

sdwr 2y ago
The social plane is built upon the physical. What an out of touch, privileged, insulated attitude, having them the other way around.

nthingtohide 2y ago

Eternal afterlife is a incoherent concept. The Horror of Eternal Life | Isaac Asimov’s The Last Answer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9R16NV9Imo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9R16NV9Imo

bccdee 2y ago

> 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 discrete personality and life. You only become integrated as a single organism when the egg "hatches" and you join the broader society of adults.

A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
> 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 tale you've seen reported, you are going to experience it or have already -- and without learning anything at all.
- bccdee 2y ago
  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 on free will. > and without learning anything at all Well, you learn something later, when the egg hatches. But blank-slate reincarnation also promises that you'll completely forget the trauma of being the elephant man, at least for the duration of the egg process. Surely the real burden would be remembering all those billions of lives with only your paltry human mind to bear it.
  - naikrovek 2y ago
    > Surely the real burden would be remembering all those billions of lives with only your paltry human mind to bear it. the being going through this in the story is not a human. a tiny part of them dips its finger into the universe created by the narrator and what is experienced is a human life, but the being experiencing those lives is not human. the human is the lower dimensional representation of the higher-dimensional being that the narrator is speaking to. if I touch a sheet of paper, part of me exists in the same plane as the paper, but I am not a piece of paper, I am a much more complex being. It is the same for the narrator and the person who just died and believed until this conversation that they were "merely" a human. the humanity of this being is the interface between them and their past selves. once they graduate/hatch from this egg, they are much larger than the sum of all the lives that they have lived. they contain all of those experiences, and will remember them all.

ivm 2y ago

> 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. That's German Romanticism which is the invisible 90% of the iceberg of the modern perception of religions, New Age ideas, and humanistic psychology. Here's a summary of how the Romantic thought has distorted the Western understanding of Buddhist teachings. I highly recommend it because once you know its signs, you'll start spotting it presence everywhere, not just in Western Buddhism: https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/PurityOfHeart/Section0009.html https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/PurityOfHeart/Section0009....

Chiyote 2y ago
[flagged]

NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago

>it plays out over a trillion or so years At least the duration is short.