[chroma]

I guess I'm in the minority that doesn't find this story uplifting. The memory reset is the biggest problem, since it doesn't allow the main character to learn from his mistakes. At the end of time, the main character will have his memories and personalities merged. Then he'll look back on countless lifetimes of the same mistakes and regrets. It would be like if someone slipped you some Ambien (to prevent memory formation), played the same prank on you 20 times, then showed you a video of it after you sobered up. "Ha-ha, you fell for it every time! Classic!" Except instead of 20 times it would be billions (possibly trillions) of lifetimes. And instead of one prank, it would be countless heartbreaks, regrets, failures, and insecurities.

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.

[mdisraeli]

...how very human

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 ;)

[cjkarr]

Lovecraft kind of covered this in his Randolph Carter stories. Check out "The Silver Key"[1] as a prequel and "Through the Gates of the Silver Key"[2] as the payoff. It's not the typical horror he's known for, but definitely incorporates his larger cosmic themes.

[1] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Silver_Key

[2] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Through_the_Gates_of_the_Silve...

[rosser]

Years ago, there was a PBS documentary about the Buddha. [1] In it, one of the guests was addressing a question about the Buddhist belief in reincarnation. He dismissed the popular notion of reincarnation, where one was Napoleon or Cleopatra or the like in a previous life, instead likening it to repeating puberty over and over and over again.

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/

[jonmrodriguez]

What about the natural disasters? You're not choosing that pain and suffering. (Well, maybe a little bit nowadays through global warming, but at least before this century you weren't)

[rosser]

This gets back to the popular notion of Karma, which says that when bad shit happens to someone, they somehow "deserved" it.

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.

[chroma]

Thanks for explaining the Buddhist view. I don't know if you endorse it or not, but that sentiment really irks me. It reminds me of theodicy: 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.

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.

[rosser]

You're welcome. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm Buddhist, but I've found a lot of wisdom in and no small amount of inner peace through the Buddha's teachings.

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.

[cousin_it]

> The beauty of the world and the morality of what happens in it are utterly orthogonal. You're conflating those things

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

[acjohnson55]

And yet, many of the people who are undoubtedly suffering horribly still manage to find moments of happiness in short, brutal lives. We as privileged people should absolutely be doing all we can to help improve quality of life for all humans, but I think you're projecting bleakness you feel on situations that do in fact have moments of joy, and even peace.

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.

[JoeAltmaier]

That's a bleak outlook. In the end all we get are the "pretty flowers on the hillside". Look at the sadness and say "nothing can make up for that" and you've died already.

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

[zhaodaxiong]

Buddhism thinks general bad things as the person suffered do not understand the deterministic natural behind their suffering. So there is no good/bad, there is only knowning/unknowning

[fargolime]

You choose the pain and suffering (mixed in with the good stuff too) because otherwise you'd be as bored as it gets and can't even kill yourself. If you choose to believe that.

[judk]

It's not uplifting, it is a parable of karma. It is posing the claim that we are all one life, and you should seek to uplift all of humanity, because you will live every life, even the lowest.

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.

[wpietri]

Regarding the last line, I think you're thinking of the veil of ignorance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance

[judk]

Yes,thank you.

[syllogism]

Don't know that this is what the author put in, but what I took out was that he doesn't consciously remember the lives, but there's associative memory. In the Ambien hypothetical, you could imagine all sorts of different flinch reactions developing, without a conscious memory underpinning them.

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.

[NoodleIncident]

Interesting. I'd always made the assumption that something, at least, transferred from one life to the next. I figured that the worst and most selfish lives happened 'first', and the absurdly selfless lives happened 'last'.

[ssully]

He would experience all of the mistakes, regret, pain, suffering, and all that bad stuff, but he will also experience all of the love, joy, laughter, and all the other good stuff. In the end, one of his single lives still went through the same motions of all of his other lives together, just at a smaller scale.

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.

[mercer]

My thoughts exactly. I feel there's something interesting there that doesn't quite work. There needs to be a stronger link between re-living life and steadily 'improving', whether this 'improvement' is something alien to us (as mdisraeli suggests), or whether these improvements fit our human view of things.

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.).

[fit2rule]

Wouldn't it be interesting if there were some way to undo the reset of memory, and you gained control over the continual reset to the point where, in fact at the end of this life, you no longer get the memory reset, but can remember everything, understand everything, and know who you are in the great cosmos.

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 ..

[fargolime]

> No other kind of god would set up a system where you're forced to repeat the same mistakes for billions of years.

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.