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The Egg
- sharemywin 13y agobrings new meaning to "go f* yourself"
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- timurtamerlan 13y agohttp://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe
- InTheSwiss 13y agoReplying with a non-mobile link for those who are as lazy as I am when I see a .m Wikipedia link :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- crntaylor 13y agoThis would have been a significantly more enjoyable experience if the title of the submission didn't give away the ending.
- benaiah 13y agoI'm so glad I'd already read the story. This is the kind of title the mods should be changing.
- KamiCrit 13y agoThis place has mods?
- gojomo 13y agoOn the other hand, a title of "The Egg" might not have attracted enough views and upvotes for you to have seen it. There's a pique/spoil trade-off, now in social media more than ever. (In this case, the first line might have worked just as well, though: "You were on your way home when you died...")
- tvon 13y ago"The other hand" is a far better scenario. Odds are you'll see it at some point if this sort of thing interests you, far better that than to find it this way.
- anigbrowl 13y agoThe Egg (short Sci-fi story) would have been perfectly adequate.
- judk 13y agoSpeculative fiction, or parable, or fable, or theology.
- rkuykendall-com 13y agoI submitted this story to Reddit a few years ago with the title "You were on your way home when you died." Grabs your attention, but gives nothing away since that's just the first line. It's a great first line.
- jafaku 13y agoSeriously OP, why would you put the end in the title?
- joaorj 13y agosame reason american shows have the "still to come" segments? (but in this case, times 10 worst) I won't read because of op bad title choice :(
- bitcrusher 13y agoThat's alright... you wrote it anyway.
- kposehn 13y agoYou win the internet, forever, for that one :)
- vacri 13y agoThe story really isn't about the 'twist' at the end.
- justinpombrio 13y agoI wouldn't have been quite so aware of the title as I read if you hadn't pointed this out :-)
- jesalg 13y agoI would have liked it to be titled "Theory of Everything"
- raldi 13y agoWhat was the original submission title?
- emiliobumachar 13y agoI managed to get through it without making the link before it was pointed out in the ending. I guess I was just lucky.
- croisillon 13y agoHow is the story spoiled by the title, I don't get that?
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoWho thinks of the title when reading the storey? Its a kind of double-meaning thing - when I'm done reading, and think of the title again, I see the irony or secret or whatever. Its a good title because it adds to the storey when you're done.
- GhotiFish 13y agowell. The story seems to actually be called "The Egg" I don't feel it's any greater spoiler than "The Last Question" edit: oops
- spindritf 13y agoHow can you bootstrap such a world with only one soul? (I know, not the right question.)
- negamax 13y agoI think it's a fair question. But if God can be omnipresent, omni*. Then soul, which according to the story is a God in making can also have those attributes.
- walden42 13y agoOne soul manifests itself as endless possibilities, including you, me, and the world. That's the core of advaita vedanta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_Vedanta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_Vedanta
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mman 13y agoI think it works out fine here. You have one path through all lives, you can't be adam and eve at the same time but you can interact with yourself as either of them at some point in your path. Of course i think original sin should come pretty early in your path ;)
- jbigelow76 13y ago>How can you bootstrap such a world with only one soul? VC funding, baby! Don't worry about monetization yet, just work on scale.
- thenerdfiles 13y agoDo souls have @mixins?
- pirateking 13y agoThe theme and mood remind me somewhat of Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke - one of my favorite books.
- joe_inferno 13y agoThis is a little reminiscent of Mormonism (minus the 'only you and me' bit)
- sillysaurus2 13y agoI wonder when this was written?
- NaNaN 13y agoAugust 2009. The author told me by email.
- NhanH 13y agoI'd strongly suggest "Sum: 40 tales from the after lives" for anyone enjoy this story. It's a lovely collection of short stories with very similar writing style and theme.
- rosser 13y agoI've read this several times before, and this bit always gets me, as they say, "right in the feels": “Don’t worry,” I said. “They’ll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn’t have time to grow contempt for you. Your wife will cry on the outside, but will be secretly relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If it’s any consolation, she’ll feel very guilty for feeling relieved.” It's just so human. It's almost confrontational in its degree of, "That's just how shit is sometimes," but it's delivered with utter compassion. That juxtaposition captures so much of how I feel about the human condition.
- herokusaki 13y ago> It's just so human . Now that you've described it like that I realize that evoking that feeling is the selling point of most literary fiction. I also feel a bit ashamed I didn't realize this earlier. It's more precise than just saying something has "realistic characters".
- dhughes 13y agoAnother good short story similar to this is Asimov's "The Last Question." http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm
- ngpio 13y agoAnd "The Last Answer", which ironically ends with a question while "The Last Question" ends with an answer. And a bunch of others that aren't quite similar except that they're short, provocative scifi. Here's my list of favorites: * Ted Chiang - Understand - http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm * Ted Chiang - Exhalation - http://www.nightshadebooks.com/Downloads/Exhalation%20-%20Ted%20Chiang.html http://www.nightshadebooks.com/Downloads/Exhalation%20-%20Te... * Ted Chiang - Hell Is the Absence of God - http://www.ibooksonline.com/88/Text/hell.html http://www.ibooksonline.com/88/Text/hell.html * Sam Hughes - Ed stories - http://qntm.org/ed http://qntm.org/ed * Isaac Asimov - The Last Answer - http://www.thrivenotes.com/the-last-answer/ http://www.thrivenotes.com/the-last-answer/ * Aaron Diaz - Hob series - http://dresdencodak.com/2007/02/08/pom/ http://dresdencodak.com/2007/02/08/pom/ * Greg Egan - Closer - http://eidolon.net/?story=Closer http://eidolon.net/?story=Closer * Marc Stiegler - The Gentle Seduction - http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/GentleSeduction.html http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/GentleSeduction.html
- StavrosK 13y ago* Asimov - Spell My Name With An S - http://www.eco.uc3m.es/~pgomes/2-Personal/Asimov,%20Isaac%20-%20Spell%20My%20Name%20With%20An%20S.pdf http://www.eco.uc3m.es/~pgomes/2-Personal/Asimov,%20Isaac%20... * Clarke - The Nine Billion names of God - http://downlode.org/Etext/nine_billion_names_of_god.html http://downlode.org/Etext/nine_billion_names_of_god.html
- afriend4lyfe 13y agowow ngpio, this list is great. you've probably come across this one before as well but it's definitely a good one: "I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility" http://qntm.org/responsibility http://qntm.org/responsibility
- phhh 13y agoOld. Seriously who hasn't read this by now.
- vbuterin 13y agoI haven't, for one.
- thenerdfiles 13y agoDo souls have cryptographic hashes?
- asveikau 13y agoIf so maybe they should change the hash function, according to this short story billions of collisions have been found.
- kordless 13y agoAssuredly they do. It's intriguing you replied with this comment to the guy that will probably bring that to pass for all software processes.
- thenerdfiles 13y agoI know exactly who I asked this of, and that's why I asked it of him.
- kordless 13y agoThat would imply we're all thinking the same thing then. That continues to be interesting to me.
- thenerdfiles 13y agoThat we could all be considering a concept that has, even if true, a statistically insignificant measurable signature? God: Oh yes, yes! Souls... I remember those. Great idea at the time. Yeah, I wrote those a loooong time ago. They're causally insignificant now, I'm pretty sure. Obviously it's all automated by now. Or something Stephensonian, like the protofestering of a fledgling clan of digital spiritalists secretly brooding over the core belief-set of Hackerdom as it is scripted?
- auggierose 13y agoThat makes actually a lot of sense.
- oneeyedpigeon 13y agoUnlike that sentence structure :)
- gkoberger 13y agoCompletely off topic, however I read this originally right around when Lost went off the air. I always wished this is how Lost ended: with Jack being told by Jacob that he was actually everyone on the plane (which is why they all had a weird connection), and all these lives were him waiting to be "born" into running the island.
- eberfreitas 13y agoYes! That would be such a better ending... I would buy that in a second.
- RBerenguel 13y agoI wasn't a Lost follower (my gf at the time was, so I heard most of the plot without paying much attention.) By the end I was expecting to be some kind of nonsense (like it did,) but I was expecting more like a room full of monkeys with typewriters. Seriously.
- WCityMike 13y agoThe author of this wrote THE MARTIAN. I recommend it: http://smile.amazon.com/Martian-Andy-Weir-ebook/dp/B00EMXBDMA/ http://smile.amazon.com/Martian-Andy-Weir-ebook/dp/B00EMXBDM...
- judk 13y agoAmazon Smile link, first I have seen in the wild!
- coconutrandom 13y agoEpic book, totally recommended.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- squirejons 13y agoI think I will stick with cryonics. Thanks, anyway...
- otikik 13y agoWell I'm glad I wrote it.
- afriend4lyfe 13y agoThe Gentle Seduction is a similar short story in regards to singularity that The Egg reminded me of http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/GentleSeduction.html http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/GentleSeduction.html
- julianpye 13y agoOn HN, we want to hack the way our systems work. We want to see through the obscurity and complexities advanced systems have brought along and find the most elegant and quickest way to challenge and control them. Why can we not look at hacking religion? Why can we not hack philosophy? I like this story, but more than that I like the fact that it has reached page 1 on HN. I think many people here are not looking for self-realisation in the form of a startup that brings them big bucks, but hey - self-realisation.
- polemic 13y ago"Why can we not look at hacking religion" I'm in the camp of people that considers religion a hack already - a psychological manipulation of emotions and thoughts to bring about a particular state of being and behaviour. In many cases it's a beneficial symbiosis - and in others a spiritually parasitical one - between the 'host' religion and the 'client' believer. So what does it mean to 'hack' region? To further twist it to your own purposes? That's been happening for millennia - large organisations have been honing their practises, others are constantly 'disrupting' it with alternatives.
- mercer 13y agoI know a number of people who 'hack' religion, in the sense that they don't necessarily buy into all of it, but use it to further an agenda that I would consider good. My former pastor (and father) is one of them. I've also known a number of gay individuals who did not believe they were 'sinful' and yet actively worked within a religious framework that condemned them, because they felt the benefits were worth it. That said, most of them do believe quit a bit of their chosen religion.
- thatthatis 13y agoOf all the religious, non religious, philosophical, etc. texts I've ever read. This is the one I most hope is true.
- whyme 13y agoThat model seems ineffective. While it operates in parallel, spawns a plethora of threads and does, I imagine, aim to end in eventual consistency, it also seems to lack any form of shared state. If I was me I would make sure I overlap myself on each new instance and not deal with that restart time. I'd also suggest picking a different tool rather than the current one... I think I might be using LISP (Lost In Self Protocol).
- VexXtreme 13y agoIt's just a beautiful piece of fiction, not a computer program. No need to draw parallels with how software works, it's kind of pointless.
- whyme 13y agoWow, I guess I'll try not to have a little fun along the way... Sheesh.
- wellboy 13y agoI think the problem of a shared state is that you're starting the new life with many preassumptions, which is not good. To get the most learnings, you need to be completely open, unbiased.
- TophWells 13y ago>“You’ve been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven’t stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you’d start remembering everything. But there’s no point to doing that between each life.” Perhaps the restart time is necessary to update the shared state. Take the mind out of the universe, review its acquired experiences and integrate them into the combined soul, then reboot the mind and send it on its way. Odd that he should be conscious for this part though. I suppose the afterlife state is equivalent to dreaming: the brain has to review and absorb the day's memories, and semi-conscious hallucinations are an interesting side-effect.
- LukeShu 13y agoI hadn't read this, but I recognized the author's name as the author of one of my favorite (no longer running) webcomics[0]. I guess that means I would probably enjoy his other writings[1]. [0]: http://www.galactanet.com/comic/view.php?strip=1 http://www.galactanet.com/comic/view.php?strip=1 [1]: http://www.galactanet.com/writing.html http://www.galactanet.com/writing.html ... hmm, now I'm a little disapointed in myself that I didn't recognize the domain name too.
- chroma 13y agoI 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 formation), played the same prank on you 20 times, then showed you a video of it after you sobered up. "Ha-ha, you fell for it every time! Classic!" Except instead of 20 times it would be billions (possibly trillions) of lifetimes. And instead of one prank, it would be countless heartbreaks, regrets, failures, and insecurities. And that's only looking at the character's own "choices." (Is it really a choice if you can't stop yourself from becoming John Wilkes Booth?) The cruelty inflicted by nature would be much greater. Disease, famine, famine, disease, famine, typhoon, famine, rattlesnake bite, famine, tsunami, etc. Now I wonder if a sugar-coated Lovecraftian horror story was the author's intent. No other kind of god would set up a system where you're forced to repeat the same mistakes for billions of years.
- ssully 13y agoHe would experience all of the mistakes, regret, pain, suffering, and all that bad stuff, but he will also experience all of the love, joy, laughter, and all the other good stuff. In the end, one of his single lives still went through the same motions of all of his other lives together, just at a smaller scale. That is how we mature in life. We learn and grow from our mistakes and accomplishments. Our pain and our joy. You can, as many do, see life as just one big shithole of pain, but you would still be missing out on another side of it. That's at least what I got out of the story. I thought it was lovely.
- NoodleIncident 13y agoInteresting. I'd always made the assumption that something, at least, transferred from one life to the next. I figured that the worst and most selfish lives happened 'first', and the absurdly selfless lives happened 'last'.
- rosser 13y agoYears 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 making a bit of a "forest for the trees" kind of mistake in the way you're looking at it. Accepting, for sake of argument, the story's premise of a one-soul universe, in each successive life, I'm choosing my mistakes. Ideally, I'm choosing new and better mistakes each time — much like the oft-cited entrepreneurial advice to keep making new and better mistakes. [1] http://www.pbs.org/thebuddha/ http://www.pbs.org/thebuddha/
- smky80 13y agoThis seemed cute the first time I read it, and it explains the "why I am me?" question that most religions just don't. But I realized, this is would be an absolute disaster if true. True story: life more or less sucks if you aren't near a local maximum of a food chain.
- judk 13y agoI always thought the point of he story was to call attention to that fact and plead for empathy and compassion.
- dhoulb 13y agoI think there's an inevitability to his eventual hatching of superpowers. Whether or not he's good, bad, or indifferent to people, all he has to do is wait it out —til they're all dead — and he hatches into super universe monster. Pretty sweet.
- dhoulb 13y agoYeah, but then you hatch into a megabeing that can make and destroy universes. Swings and roundabouts.
- Xcelerate 13y agoThis would be horrifying if it was true. Think of how many billions of painful, terrible lives you would have to experience. Edit: I suppose it's just as horrible regardless of whether or not you experience them...
- exodust 13y agoDon't forget this is all make believe. You won't need to re-live the lives of everyone there ever was, as implied in this creative writing. "Once you’ve lived every human life throughout all time, you will have grown enough to be born". There's no magic number of humans that represents "all of them". It's odd to suggest that people (even aborted foetuses?) are only part of a giant equation, that permits one into heaven, or whatever is suggested here. Please, this is not a lot different than believing that the large round boulders on the hill were laid by crocodile spirits a long time ago. Lovely story and belief of a particular native people. But those boulders have quite a different origin - nothing to do with crocodiles, and their fate has nothing to do with crocodiles either. A conversation isn't waiting on the other side. Death is the end of conversation, not the beginning. We only hope it will mean beginnings and re-incarnations, but the chances are that when you die, you're done being human and you'll be onto something else. LOL, progressing up through the ranks of humanity to reach God-status. That is some messed up mass-ego injection.
- fargolime 13y agoIf you're choosing the reincarnation yourself (if only to relieve boredom), then it's no longer horrifying.
- thenerdfiles 13y agoThe rate of information increases. This is true of humans, gods, and all things. Some initial configuration is irrelevant to this fact of existence — that information describes it, so too, is part of the configuration that you play into. Many gods, one god, whatever — it is part of a being to know what is relevant at any point in time. If there are gods, your death is something that becomes information to them. The implication here is that even in their case, their ends become information to something else. The first to be surprised — to introduce new information — doesn't "win" or "sin". What's to be felt about the falsity that The rate of information increases. ?
- yc-kjh 13y agoIncompatible 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 the man was "of his (god's) kind". But if God does not have free will, he isn't the greatest possible being. The universe thus described therefore fails Anselm's Ontological Argument for the Existence of God. The hypothetical God who is identical to the God in this story, with the exception that He DOES have free will, is obviously a greater being. I conclude that this story cannot possibly describe Reality, as It actually Is.
- hobs 13y agoWith some specific FMRI tests, they have shown that your decisions are being made before your are consciousnessly aware of them, therefore what we would call free will is called into question as something that exists at all, and arguing our consciousness is not an artifact of many lower level processes is a hard sell. (to me anyway) Additionally: I don't see how the ontological argument ever was correct, "god is the most perfect, therefore he exists because an attribute of perfection is existence" is about the most ass backwards way of trying to prove the existence of anything, much less the creator of the universe. I conclude the this story is about as accurate as any other non-evidence based argument for some sort of creator and how they(it/he/she) works.
- yc-kjh 13y ago> your decisions are being made > before your are consciousnessly aware of them Yes, I'm aware of these studies. But they make the mistake of presupposing materialist reductionism a priori, as if it were actually true. Those who assume materialist reductionism have an entire set of questions they are incapable of answering, such as: 1) How can teleology arise from non-teleology? 2) Whence consciousness? 3) How can something come from nothing? There is a great deal of evidence that materialism is not the best explanation for Reality. If you want to see some of this evidence, read "Mind and Cosmos" by Thomas Nagel.
- leobelle 13y agoWhat 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.
- ctoth 13y agoWhile 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. [0] http://www.tor.com/stories/2010/08/divided-by-infinity http://www.tor.com/stories/2010/08/divided-by-infinity
- samatman 13y agoThis is within an iota of the precise cosmology of my religion of birth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashmir_Shaivism 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.
- diminish 13y agoIndeed, egg talking to himself would be better. Otherwise our existential problem isn't clarified just moved up one level of conscience.
- admnor 13y agoOne could imagine the concept recurring outward, since time has no meaning. Maybe when egg has lived all the lives he moves to the next level and finds that he was both egg and the "god", teaching himself.
- dhoulb 13y agoI was expecting that too. Son was okay, but a bit Jesusy. Self would've been more of a head scratcher.
- shire 13y agoFirst 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:)
- Geee 13y agoWe should love each other like we love ourselves.
- shire 13y agosome people can take the idea very literal lol
- dhoulb 13y agoI didn't take anything from it, just thought it was a very creative idea. I suppose there's a 'every experience makes you grow' angle - but I don't think the author was really trying to push it. It's mostly about the clever construction.
- terranstyler 13y agoThis would mean that life is an episode in a Monte-Carlo simulation traversing the state space of all possible human lifes. The story also suggests that the simulation is heavily parallel and complete knowledge of all episodes (rather all paths) makes you god.
- swatkat 13y agoWow! That was a good read. Advaita philosophy, and Karma Siddantha in a nutshell.
- RexRollman 13y agoI enjoyed the story. Thanks for posting this mickgiles.
- z3phyr 13y agoThat was G-Man
- stuaxo 13y agoAh, interesting - I've been thinking that if time isn't linear + there is reincarnation then only needing one soul is an obvious side effect, and then this story goes on to answer the next question that comes up. Of course, it's just a thought experiment - though it is interesting.
- codeulike 13y agoThe central idea - ROT13 ... gung rirel uhzna guebhtu gvzr vf gur fnzr fbhy orvat er-vapneangrq ... /ROT13 is also explored in parts of Transcendent, by Stephen Baxter, in which immortal far future beings ROT13 zhfg cercner sbe gurve vzzbegnyvgl ol rkcrevrapvat rirel yvsrgvzr bs rirel uhzna gung unf rire yvirq orsber gurz. /ROT13. It is also mentioned in The Thought Gang by Tibor Fisher as a possible metaphysics.
- VonGuard 13y agoI first read this on 4chan. I'm so glad to learn it wasn't created there... A truly life changing story.
- bennemann 13y agoI am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together. I am the eggman, they are the eggmen. I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob goo goo g'joob. Lennon
- voidlogic 13y agoSame premise as Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Stranger http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Stranger