The Egg (2009)

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.

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...

The Horror of Eternal Life | Isaac Asimov’s The Last Answer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9R16NV9Imo

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.

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 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.

> 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.

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....

> 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.

At least the duration is short.

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.

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.

Just because a conclusion is repugnant doesn't mean it is beyond consideration.

https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/Central_Finite_Curve

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.

> 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.