4 ms·

> 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 stor

> 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.

bccdee 2y ago
Right—I agree that they'll be fine once they hatch & become a greater being. I was responding to this comment: > 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. which suggests that there's something horrifying about the cycles of forgetting that take place inside the egg, while the protagonist is still human.
singleshot_ 2y ago
If you “touch” a piece of paper, aren’t your electrons a fraction of a distance above the paper, and not coplanar at all?
- yetihehe 2y ago
  Only if that paper is a perfectly flat and non-elastic surface. When you touch real everyday paper, it has pretty fuzzy soft layer, some atoms of your finger will be below "average" level of that paper's surface.

bccdee 2y ago

Right—I agree that they'll be fine once they hatch & become a greater being. I was responding to this comment: > 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. which suggests that there's something horrifying about the cycles of forgetting that take place inside the egg, while the protagonist is still human.

singleshot_ 2y ago

If you “touch” a piece of paper, aren’t your electrons a fraction of a distance above the paper, and not coplanar at all?

yetihehe 2y ago
Only if that paper is a perfectly flat and non-elastic surface. When you touch real everyday paper, it has pretty fuzzy soft layer, some atoms of your finger will be below "average" level of that paper's surface.