This episode is also on Bilibili too.
Today I want to talk about what I consider the greatest miniature science-fiction story ever, The Egg. First I’ll retell it, then analyze what makes it so mind-blowing. It touches on perhaps the universe’s most elusive ultimate philosophical question: why does consciousness exist, and why do we all have subjective experience?
The Egg was written by Andy Weir, author of The Martian and Project Hail Mary. It’s only about two thousand words, so let me retell the main story—
The protagonist wakes somewhere, sees only empty space, and remembers a serious car accident. A man approaches from across the void (let’s call him “the mysterious man”). The protagonist asks: Am I dead?
The mysterious man nods. “Yes. But don’t be sad. Everyone dies.”
“Where is this? Is it the afterlife?” The mysterious man says, “You could put it that way.”
“So you’re God?” “Yes, I’m God.”
“Where do I go now? Heaven, hell, or somewhere else?”
“None of those. You’ll be reincarnated.”
“Oh, reincarnation is a Hindu belief. So Hinduism was right. But I don’t like it. I’ll be a blank slate again, right? Everything I experienced and did in this life will no longer matter. What’s the point?”
“Not exactly! All the knowledge and experience from your past lives come with you. You simply don’t remember them now.”
The mysterious man solemnly adds: “Your soul is far more magnificent, beautiful, and vast than you imagine. A human brain can hold only a tiny part of you. You put a small part of yourself into this container; when you take it out, you gain all its knowledge.”
“You haven’t had time to stretch yourself out and experience the other parts of your immense consciousness. If we stayed long enough, you’d remember everything. But we don’t need to do that between every reincarnation.”
“How many times have I been reincarnated?”
“Many, many times. … In your next life, you’ll be a Chinese peasant girl in 540 CE.”
“You’re sending me into the past?”
“Well… theoretically. The time you understand exists only in your universe. The place I come from is different.”
“Where do you come from?”
“Somewhere. There are beings like me there. I know you want to know what it’s like, but honestly, you wouldn’t understand.”
“If I can reincarnate into other times, could I sometimes meet myself? (I could even reincarnate as the person in front of me. Isn’t that weird?)”
“Of course. It’s always happened. But each life remembers only itself, so when you meet, you don’t notice.”
Still hung up on losing his memories, the protagonist mutters, “What’s the point of all this?”
The mysterious man looks into his eyes. “The meaning of life—and why I created this universe for you—is to make you mature.”
“Make ‘me’ mature? You mean all humanity? You want humans to mature?”
“No. You. I created the entire universe for you. In every life you grow, becoming more mature and wiser.”
“Just me? What about everyone else?”
“There is no one else. In this universe, there are only you and me.” Everyone else… “is you. All your different reincarnations.”
“Wait! I’m everyone!?? Every person who ever lived was me?”
“The living are too.”
“Was I Lincoln?”
“Of course. You were also John Wilkes Booth,” the man who assassinated Lincoln.
“Was I Hitler too?”
“Yes, but you were also the millions he murdered.”
“Was I Jesus?”
“Exactly. You were all his followers too. Every time you hurt someone else, you hurt yourself. Every act of kindness helps yourself. You will experience every joy and pain others have experienced or will experience.”
After recovering, the protagonist asks, “Why? Why do this?”
“Because one day you’ll become a being like me. You are my kind. You are my child.”
“You mean I’m a god too?”
“Not yet. You’re an embryo. You’re still growing. After living every life of every person across all time, you’ll be mature enough to be born.”
“So this entire universe is just a…”
“An egg.” Then: “It’s time for your next life.”
The mysterious man sends the protagonist on his way.
That’s where the story ends.
Now, why do I consider this the greatest miniature science-fiction masterpiece? Because it directly answers one of my ultimate philosophical confusions.
This question has haunted me for half my life. In plain English: “Why does ‘I’ exist? Why am I here and now, experiencing the world through my eyes and subjective experience, rather than somewhere else in someone else’s subjective experience?”
Unable to find a formal philosophical discussion, I named it myself: the problem of the asymmetry of subjective experience under the hard problem of consciousness.
I know that’s a mouthful. Ultimate philosophical confusions are complicated. Please bear with me.
Let me explain—the phrase has two key terms:
1. The hard problem of consciousness—philosophers have seriously discussed this.
2. The asymmetry of subjective experience—I couldn’t find discussion of this part.
1. The Hard Problem of Consciousness
First, what does “the hard problem of consciousness” mean?
Philosopher David Chalmers proposed the concept. He said consciousness requires explanation on two levels.
The first is the “easy problems”: what physical system (mainly the human nervous system) produces consciousness, and by what rules? In effect, they ask what consciousness’s physical basis is.
You may be surprised: isn’t that already an incredibly difficult problem? How is it “easy”?
Exactly. Neuroscientists have barely scratched the surface of consciousness’s neural basis. What nervous system produces consciousness under what conditions? It may be neuroscience’s hardest problem, and there’s still no answer.
Yet compared with the real “hard problem,” it really is “easy.”
So what is David Chalmers’s “hard problem” of consciousness?
Why is there subjective experience? Why do we feel that an “I” is perceiving the world?
Physically speaking, the conscious human brain is merely rearranged particles of matter. If the material world is objective, why does subjective experience emerge within it?
Physicist Max Tegmark describes the hard problem in Life 3.0 like this:
When driving, you experience colors, sounds, emotions, and a sense of self. But why? Does a self-driving car have experiences? Both you and it receive sensor input, process it, and issue movement commands. Yet the subjective feeling of driving is another matter. Is experience optional? If so, what causes it?
Tegmark is asking:
If the universe is objective matter, shouldn’t complex organisms like us be self-driving cars without subjective experience—what philosophers call “philosophical zombies,” things that respond like humans but feel nothing? Our nervous systems might handle every environment, but there should be no “I” in our brains, no subjective world observing the surroundings.
An unbridgeable chasm separates objective matter from subjective experience. That is the hard problem of consciousness, perhaps the universe’s most astonishing mystery.
2. The Asymmetry of Subjective Experience
The existence of “I” is already astonishing. More baffling still: why am “I” in this body, seeing and feeling the world through these eyes?
That is the second key term: the problem of the asymmetry of subjective experience.
If subjective experience exists equally and symmetrically in all matter (or at least all nervous systems), why doesn’t “I” appear behind your eyes, or in any other person’s nervous system, past or future?
Why is only this I, here and now, me?
The subjective world exists asymmetrically, only here and now, observing the world through my eyes!! That’s what I mean by the “asymmetry of subjective experience”—a term I made up.
(If your answer is, “Obviously it’s because your genes and experiences differ from mine; they’re unique, so of course you’re in your own body,” then you haven’t understood me. You’re arguing at the level of the easy problems of consciousness.)
After turning over this asymmetry again and again, I can think of roughly two explanations—
The first is:
Conscious experience is inherently asymmetric, because in this world there is actually only one ‘subjective experience’ – ‘my’ subjective experience. Everyone else in the world is just a walking, talking body without subjective experience (or, to put it philosophically, a ‘zombie’).
In other words, although I am now enthusiastically flying through the air and transmitting my thoughts to you, making it seem as if you, I, and everyone else all have subjective experience alike, you actually have no subjective experience at all. I am really just talking to empty air.
If I accept this interpretation, I am basically declaring myself the center of the universe. This interpretation is so absurdly narcissistic it can hardly be surpassed. I do not like it.
The second interpretation:
So that leaves only the second interpretation: ‘asymmetry’ does not exist. All subjective experiences in this world are actually equal and shared.
That means that one day, in some form, ‘I’ will live through ‘your’ subjective experience. All the subjective experiences that have ever existed in the universe, from ancient times to the present, will somehow be felt once by ‘me.’ Once you look at it that way, asymmetry disappears – because ‘you’ are ‘me’!
Although right now, here, I can experience and observe this world only from inside my own body, at some unknowable time and place, I will eventually experience and observe this world from inside your body. Then, in one subjective experience after another, I will perceive this world…
In the end, perhaps within some ineffable being, ‘I’ and ‘you’… through countless ‘cycles of reincarnation,’ all the subjective experiences I have ever lived through will somehow converge into one. That will be the moment I truly ‘wake up.’
– Is that not exactly the second interpretation described in Andy Weir’s The Egg? That is why, when I read it back then, I felt my scalp explode, and could not recover for a long time. Maybe this is the truth about ‘subjective experience.’
I had brought up these philosophical puzzles with friends before, and not a single person understood. Little did I know that a science-fiction writer in the United States, on the other side of the Earth, was clearly wrestling with the very same questions – and the answer he offered in The Egg was exactly the only reasonable interpretation of this puzzle, at least in my mind.
The shock I felt then is still as fresh in my memory as ever.
One day, I will find a chance to discuss this question face-to-face with Andy Weir.
I am Zhichao Wei. I will keep sharing, discussing, and interpreting all kinds of books with you on this channel. If you enjoy my programs, please follow, like, save, and comment – they mean a lot to me. Thanks for your support, and see you in the next episode.
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