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.
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 ;)
[1] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Silver_Key
[2] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Through_the_Gates_of_the_Silve...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.).
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 ..
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.
“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.
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".
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
* Ted Chiang - Exhalation - http://www.nightshadebooks.com/Downloads/Exhalation%20-%20Te...
* Ted Chiang - Hell Is the Absence of God - http://www.ibooksonline.com/88/Text/hell.html
* Sam Hughes - Ed stories - http://qntm.org/ed
* Isaac Asimov - The Last Answer - http://www.thrivenotes.com/the-last-answer/
* Aaron Diaz - Hob series - http://dresdencodak.com/2007/02/08/pom/
* Greg Egan - Closer - http://eidolon.net/?story=Closer
* Marc Stiegler - The Gentle Seduction - http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/GentleSeduction.html
* Clarke - The Nine Billion names of God - http://downlode.org/Etext/nine_billion_names_of_god.html
* if you like this, then two of his novels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel) ("Wang's Carpets" later became a chapter in this book) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City
* Ray Bradbury - The Veldt - http://www.veddma.com/veddma/Veldt.htm
"Homer composed the Odyssey; given infinite time, with infinite circumstances and changes, it is impossible that the Odyssey should not be composed at least once. No one is someone; a single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, hero, philosopher, demon, and world."
Honestly, just about all of Borges' fictions are really neat for the technically minded. Highly recommended!
Here's an obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/505/
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.
To get the most learnings, you need to be completely open, unbiased.
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.
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.
That said, most of them do believe quit a bit of their chosen religion.
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.
Edit: I suppose it's just as horrible regardless of whether or not you experience them...
"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.
I don't get what's interesting about this story. It's pretty silly and not very enlightening.
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.
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.
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.
What we like to call free will is just the deterministic result of processes to complex to be understood, modelled or predicted.
Quantum theory disproves this thesis, and quantum theory is the best-confirmed of any current scientific theories, i.e. it's very likely to reflect a basic truth about reality. Quantum theory shows that, even though physical laws, and cause/effect relationships, still exist, outcomes aren't predetermined -- there is more than enough indeterminacy in outcomes to justify an argument for free will.
Someone might argue that, if quantum probability only allows a certain number of possible outcomes and one of those outcomes will be selected randomly, therefore free will is disproven by that essentially mathematical process. But if there are enough such outcomes in a timeline, the real difference between many stochastic quantum picks and what most people think of as free will, may seem academic.
> What we like to call free will is just the deterministic result of processes to complex to be understood, modelled or predicted.
That may be true, but it cuts both ways. It can be used to argue for a purely mechanistic unpredictability with no involvement for conscious agents, but it can be used to argue for the opposite case (conscious choices, "free will") with equal justice. And we might never know which is true.
http://smile.amazon.com/Martian-Andy-Weir-ebook/dp/B00EMXBDM...
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.
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.
(In this case, the first line might have worked just as well, though: "You were on your way home when you died...")
I don't feel it's any greater spoiler than "The Last Question"
edit: oops
The story also suggests that the simulation is heavily parallel and complete knowledge of all episodes (rather all paths) makes you god.
[0]: http://www.galactanet.com/comic/view.php?strip=1 [1]: http://www.galactanet.com/writing.html
... hmm, now I'm a little disapointed in myself that I didn't recognize the domain name too.
Of course, it's just a thought experiment - though it is interesting.
>How can you bootstrap such a world with only one soul?
The rate of information increases.
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.
?