7 ms·

I 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

by chroma 13y ago

I 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 ago
He 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 ago
Interesting. 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 ago
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 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/
- jonmrodriguez 13y ago
  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)
  - rosser 13y ago
    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.
mdisraeli 13y ago
...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, that which is being studied is so alien to us that we can't see how they are in fact learning through the process. Perhaps the point of existence is experience itself, rather than to be able to make decisions based on that experience. Perhaps we do learn from what we don't directly remember - that glass of warm water still effects the finger we dip in ;) Then there's the passage of time and characters. Let's pretend for the sake of being able to follow an argument that concepts of "before" and "after" can be applied at all. Perhaps all those minds which we consider horrendous are the earlier ones, and those which come after are increasingly better? Perhaps it is the complete opposite, as we all have the wrong idea as to the way around things should be! And, of course, we should be careful when interpreting "With each new life you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect". After all, we are assuming it is the experiences and learnings of the life which give those results, rather than the process itself. Perhaps it is not that at all, but rather those are simply a bi-product of whatever is really going on. The foetus requires stimulation and its nascent mind simply occupying whilst it grows and matures, and the nature of that stimulation has no effect what so ever. I must admit, though, I have a fondness for your lovecraftian horror twist interpretation ;)
- cjkarr 13y ago
  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 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Silver_Key [2] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Through_the_Gates_of_the_Silver_Key http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Through_the_Gates_of_the_Silve...
judk 13y ago
It's not uplifting, it is a parable of karma. It is posing the claim that we are all one life, and you should seek to uplift all of humanity, because you will live every life, even the lowest. Or that you should uplift the best life of humanity, because you will live it. But generally, work for a distribution that you would prefer. It is a spin on Bentham(?)/Rawls(?) Philosophy that you should choose a social contact/morality that you'd find acceptable if you didn't know who you would be born as.
- wpietri 13y ago
  Regarding the last line, I think you're thinking of the veil of ignorance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance
  - judk 13y ago
    Yes,thank you.
syllogism 13y ago
Don't know that this is what the author put in, but what I took out was that he doesn't consciously remember the lives, but there's associative memory. In the Ambien hypothetical, you could imagine all sorts of different flinch reactions developing, without a conscious memory underpinning them. I thought the author meant, this is how you get "moral progress", and why history becomes less barbaric. But then, that would require most of the future lives to come at the end of his timeline. Which doesn't really make sense. Shrug.
fit2rule 13y ago
Wouldn't it be interesting if there were some way to undo the reset of memory, and you gained control over the continual reset to the point where, in fact at the end of this life, you no longer get the memory reset, but can remember everything, understand everything, and know who you are in the great cosmos. Many religions have tried. Maybe one day one of them will make it through that barrier. Perhaps the nature of the game is that we play it until we learn not to play it any more - by making another game, perhaps ..
fargolime 13y ago
> No other kind of god would set up a system where you're forced to repeat the same mistakes for billions of years. If the alternative were ultimate boredom, you might. Consider the possibility that you're not repeating mistakes so much as continuously immersing yourself in an environment that relieves boredom, an environment that also allows for personal/god growth.
mercer 13y ago
My thoughts exactly. I feel there's something interesting there that doesn't quite work. There needs to be a stronger link between re-living life and steadily 'improving', whether this 'improvement' is something alien to us (as mdisraeli suggests), or whether these improvements fit our human view of things. For example, the story could focus on a subset of 'humanity', some kind of smaller community, and highlight how the protagonist, through inhabiting all people in this community, broadened and deepened his understanding and/or compassion. This subset could be a family, for example, or a set of different 'archetypes' (leader, priest, caretaker, slave, etc.).

by chroma 13y ago

ssully 13y ago

He 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 ago

Interesting. 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 ago

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 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/

jonmrodriguez 13y ago
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)
- rosser 13y ago
  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.

mdisraeli 13y ago

...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, that which is being studied is so alien to us that we can't see how they are in fact learning through the process. Perhaps the point of existence is experience itself, rather than to be able to make decisions based on that experience. Perhaps we do learn from what we don't directly remember - that glass of warm water still effects the finger we dip in ;) Then there's the passage of time and characters. Let's pretend for the sake of being able to follow an argument that concepts of "before" and "after" can be applied at all. Perhaps all those minds which we consider horrendous are the earlier ones, and those which come after are increasingly better? Perhaps it is the complete opposite, as we all have the wrong idea as to the way around things should be! And, of course, we should be careful when interpreting "With each new life you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect". After all, we are assuming it is the experiences and learnings of the life which give those results, rather than the process itself. Perhaps it is not that at all, but rather those are simply a bi-product of whatever is really going on. The foetus requires stimulation and its nascent mind simply occupying whilst it grows and matures, and the nature of that stimulation has no effect what so ever. I must admit, though, I have a fondness for your lovecraftian horror twist interpretation ;)

cjkarr 13y ago
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 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Silver_Key [2] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Through_the_Gates_of_the_Silver_Key http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Through_the_Gates_of_the_Silve...

judk 13y ago

It's not uplifting, it is a parable of karma. It is posing the claim that we are all one life, and you should seek to uplift all of humanity, because you will live every life, even the lowest. Or that you should uplift the best life of humanity, because you will live it. But generally, work for a distribution that you would prefer. It is a spin on Bentham(?)/Rawls(?) Philosophy that you should choose a social contact/morality that you'd find acceptable if you didn't know who you would be born as.

wpietri 13y ago
Regarding the last line, I think you're thinking of the veil of ignorance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance
- judk 13y ago
  Yes,thank you.

syllogism 13y ago

Don't know that this is what the author put in, but what I took out was that he doesn't consciously remember the lives, but there's associative memory. In the Ambien hypothetical, you could imagine all sorts of different flinch reactions developing, without a conscious memory underpinning them. I thought the author meant, this is how you get "moral progress", and why history becomes less barbaric. But then, that would require most of the future lives to come at the end of his timeline. Which doesn't really make sense. Shrug.

fit2rule 13y ago

Wouldn't it be interesting if there were some way to undo the reset of memory, and you gained control over the continual reset to the point where, in fact at the end of this life, you no longer get the memory reset, but can remember everything, understand everything, and know who you are in the great cosmos. Many religions have tried. Maybe one day one of them will make it through that barrier. Perhaps the nature of the game is that we play it until we learn not to play it any more - by making another game, perhaps ..

fargolime 13y ago

> No other kind of god would set up a system where you're forced to repeat the same mistakes for billions of years. If the alternative were ultimate boredom, you might. Consider the possibility that you're not repeating mistakes so much as continuously immersing yourself in an environment that relieves boredom, an environment that also allows for personal/god growth.

mercer 13y ago

My thoughts exactly. I feel there's something interesting there that doesn't quite work. There needs to be a stronger link between re-living life and steadily 'improving', whether this 'improvement' is something alien to us (as mdisraeli suggests), or whether these improvements fit our human view of things. For example, the story could focus on a subset of 'humanity', some kind of smaller community, and highlight how the protagonist, through inhabiting all people in this community, broadened and deepened his understanding and/or compassion. This subset could be a family, for example, or a set of different 'archetypes' (leader, priest, caretaker, slave, etc.).