'Am I to understand that right now, you and I are the same person in some sort of meta-egg?'
"Not as far as I know."
'Then it seems like you're teaching me to be moral for a reason that doesn't actually apply in the real world.'
"Get back in the box."
The Show Must Go On.
I asked Weir about the The Egg at a signing and whether he planned to write anything similar- I got a weird vibe back, "I shat it out over a weekend" - like be kinda resented it or possibly just people asking about it.
Honestly I am not surprised. I imagine he wrote it quickly as this fun quirky look at the universe but then it got extremely popular, kurzgesatz video released and all. A lot of people based their personal beliefs off of the story.
Imagine you write a small story for fun but then it becomes nearly a religion. It must be a little frustrating for Andy.
> but then it becomes nearly a religion
Life of Brian when he opens the window...
Which is strange, because unlike his other works, this one actually has something a reader can introspect about instead of, you know, just reading "efficacy porn".
These two works express their ideas in very different ways and with very different details, structures, and styles.
That's like saying that Orwell's 1984 is a plagiarism of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We or that Harry Potter is a plagiarism of Ursula K. Le Guin's Wizard of Earthsea.
You are just tackling similar topics. Maybe he took some inspiration from you. You should be proud instead of being butthurt for 15 years.
By the way, the notion that all beings are manifestations of a single consciousness—or that we are all God—is far older than either of you.
I think the concept is a common insight among people who introspect a bit. The first time I read the story I was surprised because it closely mirrored one of my own musings. In retrospect that’s probably because it is one of those “obvious” ideas that presents itself from the memetic environment of the moment. That’s also probably why it’s irritating to Weir that it practically became a religion lol.
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This story makes me cry every time I read it, at the line "You were victimizing yourself". It's not an ugly cry, but a sort of somber pain. I think humans are predisposed - probably evolutionary - to remember the bad more than the good. The world, nature, is unkind and our survival doesn't much depend on our ability to recall positive feelings beyond procreation and good food.
I want, desperately, to be the best steward in providing kindness and assistance to anyone and everyone I can within my means while also living the most fulfilling life I can and sharing my knowledge with others.
If anyone asks me if I'm religious, this is the answer. I've always thought of religion - for the rational, at least - to be a sort of known double-think. A known suspension of belief as a tool. When I need that tool, I think of the egg.
Whenever I think about how cruel someone is being to others, I take some solace in imagining that at some point, they too, will experience their own cruelty. Not in a "they deserve punishment way" but in a "they will understand, someday" way.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
If you “touch” a piece of paper, aren’t your electrons a fraction of a distance above the paper, and not coplanar at all?
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.
> 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
Imagine two men. I will make this extreme for sake of example: One of them is Saint Francis of Assisi. The other is Oskar Dirlewanger, infamous SS war criminal.
Are they, as the story suggests, the same man? Is it the case that every choice they made in life can be attributed solely to circumstances and history -- and that both men, under the same circumstances, would make the same choices? (Being, after all, the same man, with the same soul.) Thus doesn't the story presume that there is no such thing as personality, and that the "soul" is a free rider -- all actions in life coming down to sheer biological and circumstantial determinism?
This total erasure of individuality -- with the same person doomed to exhibit all moral and ethical extremes -- is something I believe every philosopher would call a repugnant conclusion.
You can believe in compatibilism and still believe that there are actions that are inconsistent with your own nature. That, as the story suggests, you must become both torturer and tortured is horrifying.
> blank-slate reincarnation
At least it never implies, in any religious tradition, that you are all of your contemporaries. People would rightly recoil from such a teaching.
> every philosopher would call a repugnant conclusion
Just because a conclusion is repugnant doesn't mean it is beyond consideration.
The horrifying part, for me at least, might be only 1 non-predetermined per universe. The rest of "you" is "you" putting on the Truman show.
If it were true, the idea that I was Hitler and everyone that worked at unit 731 is pretty horrifying.
> There's nothing any more horrifying about this than about bog-standard reincarnation.
Under that wouldn't I be one of many going through some different lives? Rather that there is only one person ever who goes through all lives.
> Rather that there is only one person ever who goes through all lives.
So what? They're not really meaningfully one person until all the memories get collected. If they each start as a blank slate, they're all functionally separate people. It's not like they're experiencing loneliness during their lives because of any of this.
> If it were true, the idea that I was Hitler and everyone that worked at unit 731 is pretty horrifying.
That part is supposed to be uncomfortable, but I don't find it existentially horrifying. After all, given that Hitler exists, someone had to be him. Surely it's less horrifying for that person to also be all of Hitler's victims.
The social plane is built upon the physical. What an out of touch, privileged, insulated attitude, having them the other way around.
Well if you only focus on the bad stuff that happens during a human life, sure.
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...
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.
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.
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.
I believe the point is that the person in The Egg experiences every extreme example.
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.
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.
> 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:
Wait, this is Andy Weir? Like, that Andy Weir? Like, The Martian and Project Hail Mary Andy Weir? I had no idea.
He has a whole load of short stories on his website, and a whole series about a mermaid too
Yep. The Martian began as basically a blog, you know.
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Marcus Aurelius was meditating these thoughts in the last 13 years of his life running between the Germanic and Persian fronts while extremely sick. He believed he was one being participating in the universal Nous(Mind), and time and outer space yawns around his human lifetime.
4.23 All that is harmony for you, my Universe, is in harmony with me as well. Nothing that comes at the right time for you is too early or too late for me. Everything is fruit to me that your seasons bring, Nature. All things come of you, have their being in you, and return to you.
4.48 Mark how fleeting and paltry is the estate of man - yesterday in embryo, tomorrow a mummy or ashes. So for the hairsbreadth of time assigned to thee, live rationally, and part with life cheerfully, as drops the ripe olive, extolling the season that bore it and the tree that matured it.
7.9 All things are implicated with one another, and the bond is holy; and there is hardly anything unconnected with any other things. For things have been co-ordinated, and they combine to make up the same universe. For there is one universe made up of all things, and one god who pervades all things, and one substance, and one law, and one reason.
12.30 Everything harmonizes with me, which is harmonious to thee, O Universe. Nothing for me is too early or too late, which is in due time for thee. There is one light of the sun, though it is interrupted by walls, mountains and infinite other things. There is one common substance, though it is distributed among countless bodies which have their several qualities. There is one soul, though it is distributed among several natures and individual limitations. There is one intelligent soul, though it seems to be divided.
Just the other day I was thinking this hasn't been posted to HN for a while. I'm glad to see it again. Although I feel no need for religion in my life, I recognize that most people seem to need it. So why not this? I think it's better than any of the other ones.
I really wish browsers would default to Reader mode for documents like this.
It would make "web 1.0" content much more usable, and would encourage people to create simple HTML because the default styling wouldn't look like crap.
You can set Safari to automatically open all web pages in Reader mode. Then for websites you regularly visit and want a non reader mode render, you can whitelist them for that.
If it's not possible now, I wonder if there could be a meta tag whereby a site owner could assign a page to use any reader-mode available in the browser as a first preference?
it's literally two clicks
When you know and remember it exists. Most people never find the feature.
I think the story presents a thought-provoking concept about life, death, and reincarnation. The idea that all humans are essentially different incarnations of the same soul, experiencing every perspective across time to mature into something greater, is both mind-bending and oddly comforting. It’s a clever twist on the meaning of existence, blending philosophy with a cosmic narrative.
I can't recommend this author enough. Project Hail Mary and The Martian are amazing works of science fiction. Project Hail Mary is actually amazing as an audiobook.
I enjoyed The Martian (novel and movie) but I didn't care for Artemis or Project Hail Mary. I thought the characters and dialogue were fairly weak, even though the underlying ideas were clever. Also I thought that "main character amnesia" was a frustrating plot device (in PHM).
Overall, his authorial voice reminds me a lot of YouTube hosts? Perhaps that's just the cultural moment we're in.
His stories are always extremely clever and he has an insane sense of rythm. But I hate his style, it reads like a giant Reddit post. My wife asked why I kept complaining about this book I couldn't put down.
I had similar feelings for PHM, but it was hard to put a finger on why. I enjoyed it well enough to make it to the end, but I think I have a limited appetite for his "authorial voice". I read it directly after The Bone Clocks and remember thinking I missed David Mitchell's "voice" and wishing there were a way to experience books through another author's voice. Outside the copyright concerns, this could be an interesting use case for AI, a cover band for literature. It's definitely the only way we'll ever get Wes Anderson Star Wars
I like his concepts, and his stories, but agree about the characters. Every single one of them talks like a snarky sarcastic white dude. All the side characters in The Martian, the teenage girl in Artemis, and the rock alien in Project Hail Mary, all speak in the same voice, that of a jokey middle-aged dad.
Some other recommendations depending on what you liked about The Egg/Project Hail Mary/The Martian:
If you liked explorative / conceptual Sci Fi, more for the thought exercise than anything else:
- Exhalation by Ted Chiang. A collection of scifi short stories that are quite thought provoking. Some sprinklings of religion in some of them.
- The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury. A classic, also a short story collection. Golden age scifi.
- Project Hieroglyph. A collection of authors that partnered with Phd students to write short stories based on their research papers. Great concept with great stories.
If you liked Andy Weir's focus on engineering/building:
- Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor. A man uploads himself into a Von Neummann probe and replicates himself to play Factorio among the stars.
- Destiny's Crucible by Olan Thorensen. MC gets sent to an alternate earth in a technological past, and attempts to re-introduce modern technology and build industry.
I went into Project Hail Mary knowing nothing beyond it was from the author of The Martian. It may have been the most enjoyable reading experience I've ever had.
I'm in the back third of Project Hail Mary now. Same. I went into it blind and it's great. I did have to take a break in the very beginning just because dealing with my own existential crisis was enough that I didn't need a fictional one ... lol?
Artemis was good too.
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Then why are you in this thread
I will never fail to be amused by people here and on Reddit who spend their calories diving into discussions about things they don't like to tell people they don't like them.
If they actually take the time to write a thoughtful critique, that's one thing. But just saying they don't like something really doesn't add to the discussion.
You are absolutely correct, Mary is amazing as an audiobook. Loved both his books.
Funny coincidence - I just finished the Project Hail Mary audiobook this morning and loved it.
Any recommendations for the next audiobook?
Mickey7 is pretty good if you enjoyed Project Hail Mary. Alternatively, the Murderbot series.
I can 2nd the murderbot series.
Also there bobiverse series is great IMHO
On the vein of similar books, in the late 80s, early 90's a read a science fiction anthology that had more or less the same exact story as Mickey7.
Humans discover a place (I think on Mars), built by Aliens, but it's a deathtrap. So they send someone in to navigate the deathtrap using a clone, and a sort of remote control (something like Avatar).
Each time the clone dies, the person piloting it survives, but has gained the memory of what went wrong, and can try again (kind of like Edge of Tomorrow).
The point of the story is the very end, when the pilot makes it fully through the space.
Has anoyone every heard of this storay and know the name/author? (Bonus points of you know the anthology as well)
I answered my own question! It's called Rogue Moon (1960) by Algis Budry, and was in the anthology The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two
The main thing keeping me from the murderbot series is the value prop. They are incredibly short which doesn’t play as well with a credit based purchasing system. For seven credits I get a little over 20 hours of content. Project Hail Mary is 16 hours for one credit.
Just finished Mickey7, lot's of fun. I gotta see the movie now.
What exactly do you mean by "plagiarizing" here? Sharing the basic idea?
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I read this some time ago and really enjoyed it, and personally, it does align somewhat with how I feel about the world. I don't treat it like a bible or anything, but the concept of, at some point, being the consciousness inside of everyone, past and future, does make a certain amount of sense to me
Pleasant way to start today thanks for submitting.
Back then what I liked about this story was the fact that a single "soul" experiences itself across infinite timelines.
What I found interesting though was the temporal like experience presented from the pov of God. It doesn't seem like the God in the story is omnipotent.
Feels vaguely reminiscent of Scott Adams' "God's Debris" which was also making the rounds in the 00's. Essentially just interesting thought experiments playing with the "what if" idea of a higher power.
Is there any website of more science fiction extra-short stories that are this short? I know sci-fi might not be the preferred term for stories that are this philosophical or borderline religious, but I don't know a better term.
"The Machine Stops" is one that is always in my memory - not quite as short as this, but very short nonetheless. And impressive given that it was written in 1909:
I don't know of a website. But I bet there are published collections out there though I don't have one.
Reading this on 4chan in high school is what got me into science fiction. Brings back memories! Very happy that Andy Weir got his due with The Martian.
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Vastly parallel reinforcement-learning-like self-play with no obvious in-game real-time feedback loop. No breaks to explicitly integrate experience into strategy ("... there’s no point to doing that <remembering> between each life.”). How the protagonist learns ("matures") in this game?
Does anyone remember the parody of this where the answer is an “abbatoir” and the character also has to be every animal?
I've always liked the story but if I was presented with that revelation I'd be questioning to what extent these other me's are really me and how really everything else (genetics, environment) is shaping behaviour and I'm what? A vessel that gets all the memories at the end?
>“Every time you victimized someone,” I said, “you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you.”
I mean, not really, since I wouldn't do quite all those things as I am now. In this framework I'm just forced into doing those things by the factors going into those particular lives.
50 billion different innies
It would be cool to see how this conversation changes after various incarnations die.
One of my favorite short stories
It's basically the same way you train an LLM, forcing them to reproduce all human writing. You'd have to RLHF the being produced by this egg to avoid him falling in Hitler patterns all the time.
'Am I to understand that right now, you and I are the same person in some sort of meta-egg?'
"Not as far as I know."
'Then it seems like you're teaching me to be moral for a reason that doesn't actually apply in the real world.'
"Get back in the box."
The Show Must Go On.
I asked Weir about the The Egg at a signing and whether he planned to write anything similar- I got a weird vibe back, "I shat it out over a weekend" - like be kinda resented it or possibly just people asking about it.
Honestly I am not surprised. I imagine he wrote it quickly as this fun quirky look at the universe but then it got extremely popular, kurzgesatz video released and all. A lot of people based their personal beliefs off of the story.
Imagine you write a small story for fun but then it becomes nearly a religion. It must be a little frustrating for Andy.
> but then it becomes nearly a religion
Life of Brian when he opens the window...
Which is strange, because unlike his other works, this one actually has something a reader can introspect about instead of, you know, just reading "efficacy porn".
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And who wrote
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe (1940)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_You_Zombies (1959)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Folded_Himself (1973)
?
This is not plagiarism.
These two works express their ideas in very different ways and with very different details, structures, and styles.
That's like saying that Orwell's 1984 is a plagiarism of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We or that Harry Potter is a plagiarism of Ursula K. Le Guin's Wizard of Earthsea.
You are just tackling similar topics. Maybe he took some inspiration from you. You should be proud instead of being butthurt for 15 years.
By the way, the notion that all beings are manifestations of a single consciousness—or that we are all God—is far older than either of you.
I think the concept is a common insight among people who introspect a bit. The first time I read the story I was surprised because it closely mirrored one of my own musings. In retrospect that’s probably because it is one of those “obvious” ideas that presents itself from the memetic environment of the moment. That’s also probably why it’s irritating to Weir that it practically became a religion lol.
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This story makes me cry every time I read it, at the line "You were victimizing yourself". It's not an ugly cry, but a sort of somber pain. I think humans are predisposed - probably evolutionary - to remember the bad more than the good. The world, nature, is unkind and our survival doesn't much depend on our ability to recall positive feelings beyond procreation and good food.
I want, desperately, to be the best steward in providing kindness and assistance to anyone and everyone I can within my means while also living the most fulfilling life I can and sharing my knowledge with others.
If anyone asks me if I'm religious, this is the answer. I've always thought of religion - for the rational, at least - to be a sort of known double-think. A known suspension of belief as a tool. When I need that tool, I think of the egg.
Whenever I think about how cruel someone is being to others, I take some solace in imagining that at some point, they too, will experience their own cruelty. Not in a "they deserve punishment way" but in a "they will understand, someday" way.
Related, some past submissions:
- 2018, 51 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17145811
- 2014, 153 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203095
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
The Egg - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37852535 - Oct 2023 (6 comments)
The Egg - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31687818 - June 2022 (1 comment)
The Egg – In Animation Format - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20856614 - Sept 2019 (1 comment)
The Egg (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17145811 - May 2018 (51 comments)
I am Andy Weir, and I wrote "The Egg". AMA - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15673764 - Nov 2017 (1 comment)
The Egg (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203095 - Feb 2014 (153 comments)
The Egg - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489497 - July 2010 (20 comments)
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
If you “touch” a piece of paper, aren’t your electrons a fraction of a distance above the paper, and not coplanar at all?
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.
> 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
Imagine two men. I will make this extreme for sake of example: One of them is Saint Francis of Assisi. The other is Oskar Dirlewanger, infamous SS war criminal.
Are they, as the story suggests, the same man? Is it the case that every choice they made in life can be attributed solely to circumstances and history -- and that both men, under the same circumstances, would make the same choices? (Being, after all, the same man, with the same soul.) Thus doesn't the story presume that there is no such thing as personality, and that the "soul" is a free rider -- all actions in life coming down to sheer biological and circumstantial determinism?
This total erasure of individuality -- with the same person doomed to exhibit all moral and ethical extremes -- is something I believe every philosopher would call a repugnant conclusion.
You can believe in compatibilism and still believe that there are actions that are inconsistent with your own nature. That, as the story suggests, you must become both torturer and tortured is horrifying.
> blank-slate reincarnation
At least it never implies, in any religious tradition, that you are all of your contemporaries. People would rightly recoil from such a teaching.
> every philosopher would call a repugnant conclusion
Just because a conclusion is repugnant doesn't mean it is beyond consideration.
The horrifying part, for me at least, might be only 1 non-predetermined per universe. The rest of "you" is "you" putting on the Truman show.
https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/Central_Finite_Curve
If it were true, the idea that I was Hitler and everyone that worked at unit 731 is pretty horrifying.
> There's nothing any more horrifying about this than about bog-standard reincarnation.
Under that wouldn't I be one of many going through some different lives? Rather that there is only one person ever who goes through all lives.
> Rather that there is only one person ever who goes through all lives.
So what? They're not really meaningfully one person until all the memories get collected. If they each start as a blank slate, they're all functionally separate people. It's not like they're experiencing loneliness during their lives because of any of this.
> If it were true, the idea that I was Hitler and everyone that worked at unit 731 is pretty horrifying.
That part is supposed to be uncomfortable, but I don't find it existentially horrifying. After all, given that Hitler exists, someone had to be him. Surely it's less horrifying for that person to also be all of Hitler's victims.
Another (very) short story that plays with this idea is Neil Gaiman's Other People: https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/other-people/
The social plane is built upon the physical. What an out of touch, privileged, insulated attitude, having them the other way around.
Well if you only focus on the bad stuff that happens during a human life, sure.
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...
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.
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.
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.
I believe the point is that the person in The Egg experiences every extreme example.
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.
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.
> 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....
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Eternal afterlife is a incoherent concept.
The Horror of Eternal Life | Isaac Asimov’s The Last Answer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9R16NV9Imo
>it plays out over a trillion or so years
At least the duration is short.
Wait, this is Andy Weir? Like, that Andy Weir? Like, The Martian and Project Hail Mary Andy Weir? I had no idea.
He has a whole load of short stories on his website, and a whole series about a mermaid too
Yep. The Martian began as basically a blog, you know.
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Marcus Aurelius was meditating these thoughts in the last 13 years of his life running between the Germanic and Persian fronts while extremely sick. He believed he was one being participating in the universal Nous(Mind), and time and outer space yawns around his human lifetime.
4.23 All that is harmony for you, my Universe, is in harmony with me as well. Nothing that comes at the right time for you is too early or too late for me. Everything is fruit to me that your seasons bring, Nature. All things come of you, have their being in you, and return to you.
4.48 Mark how fleeting and paltry is the estate of man - yesterday in embryo, tomorrow a mummy or ashes. So for the hairsbreadth of time assigned to thee, live rationally, and part with life cheerfully, as drops the ripe olive, extolling the season that bore it and the tree that matured it.
7.9 All things are implicated with one another, and the bond is holy; and there is hardly anything unconnected with any other things. For things have been co-ordinated, and they combine to make up the same universe. For there is one universe made up of all things, and one god who pervades all things, and one substance, and one law, and one reason.
12.30 Everything harmonizes with me, which is harmonious to thee, O Universe. Nothing for me is too early or too late, which is in due time for thee. There is one light of the sun, though it is interrupted by walls, mountains and infinite other things. There is one common substance, though it is distributed among countless bodies which have their several qualities. There is one soul, though it is distributed among several natures and individual limitations. There is one intelligent soul, though it seems to be divided.
Just the other day I was thinking this hasn't been posted to HN for a while. I'm glad to see it again. Although I feel no need for religion in my life, I recognize that most people seem to need it. So why not this? I think it's better than any of the other ones.
Kurzgesagt adaptation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoUMY-I_m7c
This was my introduction to it!
I really wish browsers would default to Reader mode for documents like this.
It would make "web 1.0" content much more usable, and would encourage people to create simple HTML because the default styling wouldn't look like crap.
You can set Safari to automatically open all web pages in Reader mode. Then for websites you regularly visit and want a non reader mode render, you can whitelist them for that.
If it's not possible now, I wonder if there could be a meta tag whereby a site owner could assign a page to use any reader-mode available in the browser as a first preference?
it's literally two clicks
When you know and remember it exists. Most people never find the feature.
I think the story presents a thought-provoking concept about life, death, and reincarnation. The idea that all humans are essentially different incarnations of the same soul, experiencing every perspective across time to mature into something greater, is both mind-bending and oddly comforting. It’s a clever twist on the meaning of existence, blending philosophy with a cosmic narrative.
I can't recommend this author enough. Project Hail Mary and The Martian are amazing works of science fiction. Project Hail Mary is actually amazing as an audiobook.
I enjoyed The Martian (novel and movie) but I didn't care for Artemis or Project Hail Mary. I thought the characters and dialogue were fairly weak, even though the underlying ideas were clever. Also I thought that "main character amnesia" was a frustrating plot device (in PHM).
Overall, his authorial voice reminds me a lot of YouTube hosts? Perhaps that's just the cultural moment we're in.
His stories are always extremely clever and he has an insane sense of rythm. But I hate his style, it reads like a giant Reddit post. My wife asked why I kept complaining about this book I couldn't put down.
I had similar feelings for PHM, but it was hard to put a finger on why. I enjoyed it well enough to make it to the end, but I think I have a limited appetite for his "authorial voice". I read it directly after The Bone Clocks and remember thinking I missed David Mitchell's "voice" and wishing there were a way to experience books through another author's voice. Outside the copyright concerns, this could be an interesting use case for AI, a cover band for literature. It's definitely the only way we'll ever get Wes Anderson Star Wars
I like his concepts, and his stories, but agree about the characters. Every single one of them talks like a snarky sarcastic white dude. All the side characters in The Martian, the teenage girl in Artemis, and the rock alien in Project Hail Mary, all speak in the same voice, that of a jokey middle-aged dad.
Some other recommendations depending on what you liked about The Egg/Project Hail Mary/The Martian:
If you liked explorative / conceptual Sci Fi, more for the thought exercise than anything else:
- Exhalation by Ted Chiang. A collection of scifi short stories that are quite thought provoking. Some sprinklings of religion in some of them.
- The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury. A classic, also a short story collection. Golden age scifi.
- Project Hieroglyph. A collection of authors that partnered with Phd students to write short stories based on their research papers. Great concept with great stories.
If you liked Andy Weir's focus on engineering/building:
- Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor. A man uploads himself into a Von Neummann probe and replicates himself to play Factorio among the stars.
- Destiny's Crucible by Olan Thorensen. MC gets sent to an alternate earth in a technological past, and attempts to re-introduce modern technology and build industry.
I went into Project Hail Mary knowing nothing beyond it was from the author of The Martian. It may have been the most enjoyable reading experience I've ever had.
I'm in the back third of Project Hail Mary now. Same. I went into it blind and it's great. I did have to take a break in the very beginning just because dealing with my own existential crisis was enough that I didn't need a fictional one ... lol?
Artemis was good too.
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Then why are you in this thread
I will never fail to be amused by people here and on Reddit who spend their calories diving into discussions about things they don't like to tell people they don't like them.
If they actually take the time to write a thoughtful critique, that's one thing. But just saying they don't like something really doesn't add to the discussion.
You are absolutely correct, Mary is amazing as an audiobook. Loved both his books.
Funny coincidence - I just finished the Project Hail Mary audiobook this morning and loved it.
Any recommendations for the next audiobook?
Mickey7 is pretty good if you enjoyed Project Hail Mary. Alternatively, the Murderbot series.
I can 2nd the murderbot series.
Also there bobiverse series is great IMHO
On the vein of similar books, in the late 80s, early 90's a read a science fiction anthology that had more or less the same exact story as Mickey7.
Humans discover a place (I think on Mars), built by Aliens, but it's a deathtrap. So they send someone in to navigate the deathtrap using a clone, and a sort of remote control (something like Avatar).
Each time the clone dies, the person piloting it survives, but has gained the memory of what went wrong, and can try again (kind of like Edge of Tomorrow).
The point of the story is the very end, when the pilot makes it fully through the space.
Has anoyone every heard of this storay and know the name/author? (Bonus points of you know the anthology as well)
I answered my own question! It's called Rogue Moon (1960) by Algis Budry, and was in the anthology The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two
The main thing keeping me from the murderbot series is the value prop. They are incredibly short which doesn’t play as well with a credit based purchasing system. For seven credits I get a little over 20 hours of content. Project Hail Mary is 16 hours for one credit.
Just finished Mickey7, lot's of fun. I gotta see the movie now.
LOVE the Murderbot series, highly recommend.
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18 years ago you wrote an essay which shares the general premise with this short story: https://charmonium.com/infinite-reincarnation/
What exactly do you mean by "plagiarizing" here? Sharing the basic idea?
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I read this some time ago and really enjoyed it, and personally, it does align somewhat with how I feel about the world. I don't treat it like a bible or anything, but the concept of, at some point, being the consciousness inside of everyone, past and future, does make a certain amount of sense to me
(2009)
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Egg_(Weir_short_story)
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Pleasant way to start today thanks for submitting.
Back then what I liked about this story was the fact that a single "soul" experiences itself across infinite timelines.
What I found interesting though was the temporal like experience presented from the pov of God. It doesn't seem like the God in the story is omnipotent.
Love it! I liked his other short stories as well: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35502775-the-egg-and-oth...
Feels vaguely reminiscent of Scott Adams' "God's Debris" which was also making the rounds in the 00's. Essentially just interesting thought experiments playing with the "what if" idea of a higher power.
Is there any website of more science fiction extra-short stories that are this short? I know sci-fi might not be the preferred term for stories that are this philosophical or borderline religious, but I don't know a better term.
"The Machine Stops" is one that is always in my memory - not quite as short as this, but very short nonetheless. And impressive given that it was written in 1909:
https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/...
You might enjoy some of qntm's work[0].
Maybe start with this short ("I Don't Know, Timmy, Being God Is a Big Responsibility")[1] since it is similar to The Egg in my opinion.
[0] https://qntm.org/fiction [1] https://qntm.org/responsibilit
I don't know of a website. But I bet there are published collections out there though I don't have one.
Reading this on 4chan in high school is what got me into science fiction. Brings back memories! Very happy that Andy Weir got his due with The Martian.
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Vastly parallel reinforcement-learning-like self-play with no obvious in-game real-time feedback loop. No breaks to explicitly integrate experience into strategy ("... there’s no point to doing that <remembering> between each life.”). How the protagonist learns ("matures") in this game?
Does anyone remember the parody of this where the answer is an “abbatoir” and the character also has to be every animal?
I've always liked the story but if I was presented with that revelation I'd be questioning to what extent these other me's are really me and how really everything else (genetics, environment) is shaping behaviour and I'm what? A vessel that gets all the memories at the end?
>“Every time you victimized someone,” I said, “you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you.”
I mean, not really, since I wouldn't do quite all those things as I am now. In this framework I'm just forced into doing those things by the factors going into those particular lives.
50 billion different innies
It would be cool to see how this conversation changes after various incarnations die.
One of my favorite short stories
It's basically the same way you train an LLM, forcing them to reproduce all human writing. You'd have to RLHF the being produced by this egg to avoid him falling in Hitler patterns all the time.
I loved that!
Thanks for posting it.
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that would torque me off so bad...