Thanks for linking to that story, I enjoyed reading it again. I think you should consider editing your comment to remove the spoiler though, if this was the first time I'd read the story that would have spoiled it a little for me.
I love so much the effortlessness of steeping in a culture of people with such similar tastes and preferences enabled by the internet (and, to a lesser extent, HN).
I'd like to know what people think, since I haven't shown it to anyone before. I don't write fiction often and was experimenting with the writing style, and I'm not sure if it's too over-written.
Overall, the story is verbose, and I think it would be much improved if you shortened it by 25-50%. In the beginning, you use too many pronouns ("he" or "him" is in nearly every sentence). I liked the juxtaposition of changing to she half way through. Maybe you could also add 1st and 2nd person narratives for more variety. Similarly, the first usage of sentence fragments was a good change of pacefrom the stilted introduction, but I think you started overusing it towards the end. If you replaced some of the narrative with dialog, you might solve these problems. But be careful not to get too close to the style of "the egg."
Keep it up! I love fiction like this that tries to tackle deep topics.
I've always felt this way... enjoying a story is more about the experience the writer creates while telling it. I always encourage people to go ahead and "spoil" the story for me.
"enjoyment" as measured rather arbitrarily. there is a quieter form of enjoyment in enjoying a story as the author intending it, deciding to let the author surprise you.
psychological results being misused to say "Be glad it got spoiled, now you'll like it!" irritates and offends me.
Great story, thanks! I don't believe in the collecting of experiences through past lives thing. However, I sometimes think if the Borg are misrepresented in Star Trek: wouldn't it be great if we could save all experiences and thoughts of all beings on earth living now and also have a way to easily browse this vast collection? The Internet to the n'th degree.
Sure, but they were depicted as ugly and, well, borg-like. Whereas I would envision such a race to be highly rational but also emotional (you have access to the world's emotions), perhaps like Ancient Greece, on steroids!
Though I don't really get why the borg need all organisms of a species. If they just took a few millions here and there, nobody would complain - or at least not that loudly.
> wouldn't it be great if we could save all experiences and thoughts of all beings on earth living now and also have a way to easily browse this vast collection?
No.
I'm thinking of a short story I read long ago, about a man who invents a device which can be used to view the past, despite mysterious attempts to sabotage his work.
That sounds like a business idea (that I'm already working on actually). Archive everyone's personal online history and let them contribute/share their experiences with the 'collective'
See, I think Borg-like archiving is the easier part of the problem (although of course, I have no idea to capture and save perception, I believe it can be done, and anyway simpler capture process, like yours can be created). The real challenge is how to catalog and browse such a database. When I enter my personal history, it needs to be analyzed, main themes (and memorable parts) labeled using an ontology and all this needs to be presented using an intuitive UI.
Researchers have pursued similar goals for image/video databases for more than a decade now, with little success (think how you search YouTube or Flickr: mainly through manual tags). Any that is a much simpler problem.
The Boltzmann brain paradox is that it is more likely that a brain randomly forms out of the chaos with false memories of its life than that the universe around us would have billions of self-aware brains.
Thank you for sharing that. I find it interesting that (from Wikipedia here) the paradox is based on the idea that "it is more likely for one instance of a complex structure to arise than for many instances of that thing to arise".
What interests me about this is that a physicist is capable of such complex ruminations vis-a-vis self-awareness without indicating the slightest apprehension of self-replication.
Instead of electrons, everyone in the universe is the same person.