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.<p>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.<p>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.
I've read this several times before, and this bit always gets me, as they say, "right in the feels":<p><i>“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.”</i><p>It's just so <i>human</i>. 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.
Another good short story similar to this is Asimov's "The Last Question." <a href="http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm" rel="nofollow">http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm</a>
That 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).
Completely off topic, however I read this originally right around when Lost went off the air.<p>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.
On 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.
This is within an iota of the precise cosmology of my religion of birth:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashmir_Shaivism" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashmir_Shaivism</a><p>Except that, coming from that background, I expected the big reveal to be that the Egg is talking to himself, hatched.<p>As unprovable speculations about the nature of reality go, I rather like this one.
This would be horrifying if it was true. Think of how many billions of painful, terrible lives you would have to experience.<p>Edit: I suppose it's just as horrible regardless of whether or not you experience them...
What 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?<p>I don't get what's interesting about this story. It's pretty silly and not very enlightening.
Incompatible with Free Will<p>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.<p>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".<p>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.<p>I conclude that this story cannot possibly describe Reality, as It actually Is.
The author of this wrote THE MARTIAN. I recommend it:<p><a href="http://smile.amazon.com/Martian-Andy-Weir-ebook/dp/B00EMXBDMA/" rel="nofollow">http://smile.amazon.com/Martian-Andy-Weir-ebook/dp/B00EMXBDM...</a>
While 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.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.tor.com/stories/2010/08/divided-by-infinity" rel="nofollow">http://www.tor.com/stories/2010/08/divided-by-infinity</a>
This seemed cute the first time I read it, and it explains the "why I am me?" question that most religions just don't.<p>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.
First 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:)
I'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.
The 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.
The Gentle Seduction is a similar short story in regards to singularity that The Egg reminded me of
<a href="http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/GentleSeduction.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/GentleSeduction.html</a>
This would mean that life is an episode in a Monte-Carlo simulation traversing the state space of all possible human lifes.<p>The story also suggests that the simulation is heavily parallel and complete knowledge of all episodes (rather all paths) makes you god.
I 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].<p>[0]: <a href="http://www.galactanet.com/comic/view.php?strip=1" rel="nofollow">http://www.galactanet.com/comic/view.php?strip=1</a>
[1]: <a href="http://www.galactanet.com/writing.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.galactanet.com/writing.html</a><p>... hmm, now I'm a little disapointed in myself that I didn't recognize the domain name too.
I 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
Ah, 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.<p>Of course, it's just a thought experiment - though it is interesting.
Same premise as Mark Twain's <i>The Mysterious Stranger</i> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Stranger" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Stranger</a>
<p><pre><code> The rate of information increases.
</code></pre>
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.<p>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.<p>The implication here is that even in their case, their ends become information to something else.<p>The first to be surprised — to introduce new information — doesn't "win" or "sin". What's to be felt about the falsity that<p><pre><code> The rate of information increases.
?</code></pre>