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.

[1] http://www.pbs.org/thebuddha/

First off, I don't think Buddhism even has a notion of "bad". It recognizes that there is suffering, but it doesn't say suffering is bad; it merely says, matter-of-factly and without judgement, that suffering is a consequence of desire. In order not to suffer, the Buddha teaches, one must (among other things) be in accord with and accepting of one's circumstances, whatever they may be. Buddhism is very practical that way; there's the old saw about the Zen master who quipped, "Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water."

When "bad" shit happens, in that light, the suffering one experiences doesn't come from the thing that happened, but instead from wishing things were somehow different than they are. When you do that, you're diverting your awareness and mental energy from the reality that is manifest and present in front of you, and instead focusing on something that is not only not real, but can never be real.

And when you do that, you completely miss the fact that, up there, on that ledge, a lone flower has somehow managed to survive all the carnage around you. Had you not been preoccupied with wishing the world was other than it is, that flower would have reminded you that, even in the presence of destruction, life and beauty are resilient, and will ultimately triumph.

Except, it isn't. It's worse than you can possibly imagine.

Over 6 million children under the age of 5 died last year, mostly from disease. That's a Hiroshima bombing every week, killing only children under the age of 5. In the time it's taken you to read this paragraph, a handful of children will have died in terror and agony. Their parents will be filled with grief and guilt for years, if not the rest of their lives.

That is suffering, and it is bad. And no amount of platitudes or pretty flowers on a hillside can make up for it. If anything's in charge of this cosmos, they've got a hell of a lot of explaining to do. Of course, it would be satisfying to point a finger. Reality is more frustrating: The universe is indifferent; horrifically so. For example, nothing in physics prevents a tiny protein-encased strand of DNA from killing 400 million people in the 20th century.[1]

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox

Note: Parts of this post are paraphrasing an argument originally made by Sam Harris. Credit where credit is due and all that.

Play with words enough, and you can claim the world is a beautiful place. Except, it isn't. It's worse than you can possibly imagine.

The beauty of the world and the morality of what happens in it are utterly orthogonal. You're conflating those things in a way that, frankly, I find rhetorically cheaper than much of the sophistry that calls itself theodicy, and which, it appears, we both disdain.

That is suffering, and it is bad.

No, it's not; it's experience. It just is, whatever you may think of it, and what you think of it doesn't change the thing you're experiencing one whit. Calling an experience "bad" — or anything else that makes a moral, aesthetic, or other kind of qualitative judgement — is something you did, intrinsic neither to the experience, nor to the thing being experienced, but only to you. There's no such thing as "bad" anywhere in the whole universe except in your mind.

Buddhism isn't about trying to make unpleasant feelings "go away", or pretending they don't exist. Of course they do; you're feeling them! It's about being present to those feelings, rather than wishing they weren't there, and recognizing them to be as transient as the pleasant feelings and everything else in life, including life itself.

He's right to conflate these things. Suffering is not beautiful.

Suffering is.

Accept.

Beauty is.

Accept.

not Beauty also is.

Accept.

I don't agree with the ur-parent that Buddhism thinks that if you can clear away the illusions of everyday life that you will see beauty. I think it believes that if you clear away the illusions, then you will see clearly, and that this is something worth doing because it will end your suffering, no matter who you are and what is happening to you.

But it's also believed by most Buddhists that this rarely happens, that it takes many many lifetimes for it to happen to anyone. So they also believe that helping reduce the suffering of all other sentient beings is one of their missions.

And I think joy is a better word than beauty. Beauty kind of implies to me objective truth, but joy can be found even in unimaginable trying situations where no objective person would see beauty.

I guess at the end of the day, all you can really choose is to believe in something or to believe in nothing.

I say "look at the flowers on the hillside, nothing can cancel that out"

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

Perhaps also check out his "Fine Structure" http://qntm.org/structure (different kind of thing, but it's good scifi..) and perhaps the ongoing series / work in progress "Ra" http://qntm.org/ra

* 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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe

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.

Or WILL live as all of them on the way up, depending on your worldview.

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.

2) Emergent behavior in the brain

3) Big bang

Treating these questions as unanswerable assumes a very weak form of materialism.

Your question itself is enough evidence that humans didn't invent teleology, but merely recognized its existence. You are asking for a reason why. You are asking a teleological question.

Two year old children do the same thing, constantly. They ask why.

It is natural to ask why.

It is very unnatural to deny the naturalness of asking why, or to try to suppress it, as if the desire to understand why didn't exist in all of us.

Indeed, the answer to the "why" question is one of the four causes Aristotle says we must explain to understand what a thing is. We must understand the why behind it. That is the final cause, or the purpose for the thing.

What you cannot answer is this: How can final cause -- purpose or motivating reason for something -- arise out of nothing? Indeed, the intelligent person recognizes that such an idea is non-sense, and rejects it out of hand.

You get purpose, or reason for being, from a priori purpose or reason. I work in order to have money. I want money in order to buy food and shelter. I want food and shelter to continue to survive. And so on.

You never get purpose, or reason for being, from nothing.

You think by asking me to show that teleology is more than a human construction, that you will bolster your evidence for reductive materialism -- especially if I can't provide an answer that meets your satisfaction. But in so doing, you are demonstrating teleology. You have a goal. You are driving towards that goal. And your goal is self-contradictory. Your goal is to establish that teleology is somehow not Real, not inherent in the universe, and not inherent in us. But goal-based action is what teleology is all about. So you are engaging in the very behavior you are seeking to prove doesn't exist, except as a figment of our imagination.

A house divided against itself cannot stand.

I can indeed answer this, and I will. Also, it strikes me as bad form to imply that someone who disagrees with you is unintelligent because they do not reject the ideas you want them to reject.

Now to my answer: purpose arises from lack of purpose because purpose itself is merely emergent behavior in the neurons of our brains, arising from the laws of physics.

You get purpose, or reason for being, from a priori purpose or reason. I work in order to have money. I want money in order to buy food and shelter. I want food and shelter to continue to survive. And so on.

You never get purpose, or reason for being, from nothing.

You still have to show that purpose, itself, exists in any form other than a chemical arrangement in our brains. For that matter, you have to define the "nothing" from which purpose is supposed not to have originated, before I can agree that, indeed, that sort of "nothing" is incapable of creating "purpose", or even agree that such a definition of "nothing" is tenable.

But in so doing, you are demonstrating teleology. You have a goal.

I may have a goal behind this comment, but behind that goal is an emergent phenomenon of the laws of physics, and as such, my "goal" is not incompatible with my claimed nonexistence of teleology.

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...

[0] http://www.tor.com/stories/2010/08/divided-by-infinity

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 won't read because of op bad title choice :(

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.

?

    God: Oh yes, yes! Souls... I remember those. Great idea at the time. Yeah, I wrote those a loooong time ago. They're causally insignificant now, I'm pretty sure. Obviously it's all automated by now.