[HN Gopher] The Egg (2009)
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       The Egg (2009)
        
       Author : jxmorris12
       Score  : 218 points
       Date   : 2025-03-31 11:45 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.galactanet.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.galactanet.com)
        
       | Klaster_1 wrote:
       | Kurzgesagt adaptation:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI
        
         | numinix wrote:
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoUMY-I_m7c
         | 
         | This was my introduction to it!
        
       | jt-hill wrote:
       | Wait, this is Andy Weir? Like, _that_ Andy Weir? Like, The
       | Martian and Project Hail Mary Andy Weir? I had no idea.
        
         | rpmisms wrote:
         | Yep. The Martian began as basically a blog, you know.
        
         | voidUpdate wrote:
         | He has a whole load of short stories on his website, and a
         | whole series about a mermaid too
        
       | pkilgore wrote:
       | Pleasant way to start today thanks for submitting.
        
       | zidad wrote:
       | Love it! I liked his other short stories as well:
       | https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35502775-the-egg-and-oth...
        
       | A_D_E_P_T wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | _def wrote:
         | Well if you only focus on the bad stuff that happens during a
         | human life, sure.
        
           | A_D_E_P_T wrote:
           | 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...
        
             | bccdee wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | wat10000 wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | bccdee wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | wat10000 wrote:
               | I believe the point is that the person in The Egg
               | experiences every extreme example.
        
               | bccdee wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | wat10000 wrote:
               | 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.
        
         | wrinkl3 wrote:
         | Another (very) short story that plays with this idea is Neil
         | Gaiman's Other People: https://xpressenglish.com/our-
         | stories/other-people/
        
           | sdwr wrote:
           | The social plane is built upon the physical. What an out of
           | touch, privileged, insulated attitude, having them the other
           | way around.
        
         | nthingtohide wrote:
         | Eternal afterlife is a incoherent concept.
         | 
         | The Horror of Eternal Life | Isaac Asimov's The Last Answer
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9R16NV9Imo
        
         | bccdee wrote:
         | > 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.
        
           | A_D_E_P_T wrote:
           | > _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.
        
             | bccdee wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | A_D_E_P_T wrote:
               | > _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.
        
               | rmwaite wrote:
               | > every philosopher would call a repugnant conclusion
               | 
               | Just because a conclusion is repugnant doesn't mean it is
               | beyond consideration.
        
               | weard_beard wrote:
               | 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
        
               | naikrovek wrote:
               | > 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.
        
               | bccdee wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | singleshot_ wrote:
               | If you "touch" a piece of paper, aren't your electrons a
               | fraction of a distance above the paper, and not coplanar
               | at all?
        
               | yetihehe wrote:
               | 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.
        
           | IanCal wrote:
           | 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_.
        
             | bccdee wrote:
             | > 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.
        
         | ivm wrote:
         | _> 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....
        
         | NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
         | >it plays out over a trillion or so years
         | 
         | At least the duration is short.
        
       | flenserboy wrote:
       | that would torque me off so bad...
        
       | pavlov wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | syncr0 wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | agos wrote:
         | it's literally two clicks
        
           | pavlov wrote:
           | When you know and remember it exists. Most people never find
           | the feature.
        
       | xutopia wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | maxhille wrote:
         | Funny coincidence - I just finished the Project Hail Mary
         | audiobook this morning and loved it.
         | 
         | Any recommendations for the next audiobook?
        
           | dmcc365 wrote:
           | Mickey7 is pretty good if you enjoyed Project Hail Mary.
           | Alternatively, the Murderbot series.
        
             | chrismatheson wrote:
             | I can 2nd the murderbot series.
             | 
             | Also there bobiverse series is great IMHO
        
             | thoughtpalette wrote:
             | Just finished Mickey7, lot's of fun. I gotta see the movie
             | now.
             | 
             | LOVE the Murderbot series, highly recommend.
        
             | dmayle wrote:
             | 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)
        
               | dmayle wrote:
               | 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
        
             | tstrimple wrote:
             | 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.
        
         | heymijo wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | natebc wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | jpm_sd wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | psadauskas wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | nartho wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | bodine30 wrote:
           | 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
        
         | malshe wrote:
         | You are absolutely correct, Mary is amazing as an audiobook.
         | Loved both his books.
        
         | jjcm wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | Tenoke wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | thehappypm wrote:
         | 50 billion different innies
        
       | p2detar wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | jpm_sd wrote:
       | (2009)
       | 
       | See also:
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Egg_(Weir_short_story)
        
       | aitchnyu wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
       | I loved that!
       | 
       | Thanks for posting it.
        
       | voidUpdate wrote:
       | 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
        
       | geor9e wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | ghaff wrote:
         | I don't know of a website. But I bet there are published
         | collections out there though I don't have one.
        
         | gambiting wrote:
         | "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/...
        
         | skiman10 wrote:
         | 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
        
       | siliconc0w wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | Ashymad wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | mariusor wrote:
           | 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".
        
           | m463 wrote:
           | > but then it becomes nearly a religion
           | 
           | Life of Brian when he opens the window...
        
       | croisillon wrote:
       | Related, some past submissions:
       | 
       | - 2018, 51 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17145811
       | 
       | - 2014, 153 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203095
        
         | dang wrote:
         | 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)
        
       | throw310822 wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | 0xbadc0de5 wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | fogbeak wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | okonomiyaki3000 wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | wishinghand wrote:
       | Does anyone remember the parody of this where the answer is an
       | "abbatoir" and the character also has to be every animal?
        
       | prettyblocks wrote:
       | It would be cool to see how this conversation changes after
       | various incarnations die.
        
       | OscarCunningham wrote:
       | '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."
        
         | weard_beard wrote:
         | The Show Must Go On.
        
       | vegadw wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | synergy7 wrote:
       | 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?
        
       | Gene5ive wrote:
       | One of my favorite short stories
        
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