The Egg (2009)

> 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.

> 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

> 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.