I love both of these, and I wonder why would I need mainstream religion when stories like these are deep enough to provide answers, hope and meaning for those who seek it. If the message resonates with you, why not adopt it? Nobody could ever prove they’re just fantasy.
Sorry for the digression, I’m just an atheist with a love for philosophy and spirituality.
Engage in the thought experiment that you are/were/will be every human for a sec. Is self-harm morally ok? Many would say yes. So "the egg" already gives those people a pass to hurt everyone else in this world because it's a form of self-harm. Great. Now for those who explicitly don't want to self-harm. "The egg" implies that your rebirths happen serially in meta-time. You live this life, then the next, then another,... those lives may overlap on earth, but in egg-time, they don't. This means you can statistically expect you've already lived 50% of them. There's no guarantee of this, but the distribution is normal, not uniform [1] (similar reasoning found in doomsday argument [2]). 50%, give or take, humans out there you've already been. Everything you do to them, you do to your PAST self. You're not only absolved of moral accountability, but also of the physical consequences of treating them horribly. So while "the egg" tries to do the opposite, it really seems to justify psycho maxxing.
Everyone is hung up on the self-harm thing. This thought experiment is bigger than what most people give it credit for, in fact one could say this is the be all end all of thought experiments because the question factors in things like quantum physics, consciousness, determinism, etc. You could go up your own theoretical butthole with the kinds of philosophical extrapolations through this rabbit hole (so to speak).
Self-harm isn't moral or amoral, it just is. It's as moral or amoral as deciding if you should or shouldn't eat another animal (yes, this includes humans -- Donner party anyone?).
Life isn't black and white. Where I've landed with this thought experiment through my own meditations and readings is that the universe/reality is a recursive fractal of spectrums within spectrums.
And this is just scratching the surface of this stuff.
What is moral? It is not a law of the universe. It is a subjective and culture-defined human construct. It is very ineffective to try and understand metaphysics through the ever-shifting lens of morality.
2. Who says the living of lives does not repeat over time? Your/our "next" life may start in 300 B.C.
Two things science knows barely something about: consciousness and the arrow of time. The self is only an illusion. Physics has lots of symmetry. Therefore, it would make sense if the universe was fair in the end. So the egg theory actually makes sense, more sense than anything else I've heard actually.
The thing that makes harming others wrong is the lack of consent. That allows us to avoid the sticky question of what is "harm." For self-harm, consent implied, what is "harm?" Exercise with a risk of injury? Failing to exercise, with a risk of decreased life span? Failing to optimize your exercise routine? Surgery? Drinking alcohol? Dating the wrong person?
Re 2, yes and in 300 BC you're also expected to already have been 50% alive there.
Your egg can't explain consciousness or the arrow of time either. How is the person in egg limbo, the fetus being developed I mean, conscious? How does the egg limbo work at all? You're gonna need a big hand to wave the (meta-)physics of your little egg universe away.
The situation described in The Egg replaces morality with a direct reason not to harm others, because you are the person who will suffer because of it. So if you're complaining that the story's premise kinda eliminates our usual ideas about morality, my response is: Yes. That's part of what makes it an interesting story.
As for the meta-time thing, functional decision theory [1] solves this. The application is particularly clean because your memories are erased between lives. There's no factor of 2 free lunch from temporal ordering.
> The situation described in The Egg replaces morality with a direct reason not to harm others, because you are the person who will suffer because of it.
Or you've already been said person, in which case it won't harm you anymore. Not to mention that it's inevitable that you will hurt the victim because it already happened from the victim's POV, who you've already been. The egg is in a fundamentally contradictory realm anyway because it's asserting free will and same-universe time travel at the same time.
> the story's premise kinda eliminates our usual ideas about morality
Allowing for psycho maxxing, yes. You can take "I should be a good person" from it, but so far you haven't made a compelling case. There's no reason why you shouldn't be an exploiter in 1-10% of your lives, living off the direct and indirect suffering of the 90%. Kind of like within a modern life you can choose to suffer 90% of the time (work, gym, studying,...) to get a halfway decent 10%.
Assuming the premise of the short story is true, of course. Otherwise, what's the point. I can't simultaneously grant the premise and pretend that I didn't just grant it, by denying my knowledge of the rebirth mechanism.
I probably should have phrased it "do you have a moral right to self-harm"? The starting point is usually that you're allowed to do anything you want, total freedom, and then we blacklist everything we deem immoral. You don't have an explicit license to breathe either, it's just not blacklisted, not by your gov, nor morally. As far as I can tell, many people refuse to morally blacklist self-harm, because there's no victim other than the perpetrator. This is doubly true in the egg scenario where you are also everyone who suffers any secondary harm from the self-harm, like also being every saddened family member. To make a long story short, I'm not asking about goodness of anything here, "ok" just means "granted."
I go against the grain and say that I dislike the egg. It is spiritually stupid and heretic and morally fake enlightened.
I don't know. I just read it now—my thought was that it was an interesting idea (thankfully now overly long).
"“Seriously? You’re asking me for the meaning of life? Isn’t that a little stereotypical?”"
I think the word he was looking for was clichéd.
That's such a great read.
Asimov's 'The Last Question' is another good one that's in line: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
I love both of these, and I wonder why would I need mainstream religion when stories like these are deep enough to provide answers, hope and meaning for those who seek it. If the message resonates with you, why not adopt it? Nobody could ever prove they’re just fantasy.
Sorry for the digression, I’m just an atheist with a love for philosophy and spirituality.
Engage in the thought experiment that you are/were/will be every human for a sec. Is self-harm morally ok? Many would say yes. So "the egg" already gives those people a pass to hurt everyone else in this world because it's a form of self-harm. Great. Now for those who explicitly don't want to self-harm. "The egg" implies that your rebirths happen serially in meta-time. You live this life, then the next, then another,... those lives may overlap on earth, but in egg-time, they don't. This means you can statistically expect you've already lived 50% of them. There's no guarantee of this, but the distribution is normal, not uniform [1] (similar reasoning found in doomsday argument [2]). 50%, give or take, humans out there you've already been. Everything you do to them, you do to your PAST self. You're not only absolved of moral accountability, but also of the physical consequences of treating them horribly. So while "the egg" tries to do the opposite, it really seems to justify psycho maxxing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument
Everyone is hung up on the self-harm thing. This thought experiment is bigger than what most people give it credit for, in fact one could say this is the be all end all of thought experiments because the question factors in things like quantum physics, consciousness, determinism, etc. You could go up your own theoretical butthole with the kinds of philosophical extrapolations through this rabbit hole (so to speak).
Self-harm isn't moral or amoral, it just is. It's as moral or amoral as deciding if you should or shouldn't eat another animal (yes, this includes humans -- Donner party anyone?).
Life isn't black and white. Where I've landed with this thought experiment through my own meditations and readings is that the universe/reality is a recursive fractal of spectrums within spectrums.
And this is just scratching the surface of this stuff.
What is moral? It is not a law of the universe. It is a subjective and culture-defined human construct. It is very ineffective to try and understand metaphysics through the ever-shifting lens of morality.
1. No, self harm is not ok.
2. Who says the living of lives does not repeat over time? Your/our "next" life may start in 300 B.C.
Two things science knows barely something about: consciousness and the arrow of time. The self is only an illusion. Physics has lots of symmetry. Therefore, it would make sense if the universe was fair in the end. So the egg theory actually makes sense, more sense than anything else I've heard actually.
The thing that makes harming others wrong is the lack of consent. That allows us to avoid the sticky question of what is "harm." For self-harm, consent implied, what is "harm?" Exercise with a risk of injury? Failing to exercise, with a risk of decreased life span? Failing to optimize your exercise routine? Surgery? Drinking alcohol? Dating the wrong person?
1 reply →
Re 1, why?
Re 2, yes and in 300 BC you're also expected to already have been 50% alive there.
Your egg can't explain consciousness or the arrow of time either. How is the person in egg limbo, the fetus being developed I mean, conscious? How does the egg limbo work at all? You're gonna need a big hand to wave the (meta-)physics of your little egg universe away.
1 reply →
The situation described in The Egg replaces morality with a direct reason not to harm others, because you are the person who will suffer because of it. So if you're complaining that the story's premise kinda eliminates our usual ideas about morality, my response is: Yes. That's part of what makes it an interesting story.
As for the meta-time thing, functional decision theory [1] solves this. The application is particularly clean because your memories are erased between lives. There's no factor of 2 free lunch from temporal ordering.
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.05060
> The situation described in The Egg replaces morality with a direct reason not to harm others, because you are the person who will suffer because of it.
Or you've already been said person, in which case it won't harm you anymore. Not to mention that it's inevitable that you will hurt the victim because it already happened from the victim's POV, who you've already been. The egg is in a fundamentally contradictory realm anyway because it's asserting free will and same-universe time travel at the same time.
> the story's premise kinda eliminates our usual ideas about morality
Allowing for psycho maxxing, yes. You can take "I should be a good person" from it, but so far you haven't made a compelling case. There's no reason why you shouldn't be an exploiter in 1-10% of your lives, living off the direct and indirect suffering of the 90%. Kind of like within a modern life you can choose to suffer 90% of the time (work, gym, studying,...) to get a halfway decent 10%.
I don't think you're "absolved" if you don't know you're harming, in fact, yourself. Guilt is all about intention.
Assuming the premise of the short story is true, of course. Otherwise, what's the point. I can't simultaneously grant the premise and pretend that I didn't just grant it, by denying my knowledge of the rebirth mechanism.
> Is self-harm morally ok?
Is self-harm ok? What could be considered good about it?
I probably should have phrased it "do you have a moral right to self-harm"? The starting point is usually that you're allowed to do anything you want, total freedom, and then we blacklist everything we deem immoral. You don't have an explicit license to breathe either, it's just not blacklisted, not by your gov, nor morally. As far as I can tell, many people refuse to morally blacklist self-harm, because there's no victim other than the perpetrator. This is doubly true in the egg scenario where you are also everyone who suffers any secondary harm from the self-harm, like also being every saddened family member. To make a long story short, I'm not asking about goodness of anything here, "ok" just means "granted."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI
(animated version)
Amazing. So, I am most of you commenting here, and the author of this incredible short story. Thank [myself] for sharing!