News: 24 April 2022

Over the last month I worked on the MSLN book. I am starting to feel like doing something new with the blog, also like writing fiction. Also I have some old writing (a book) which I will try to finish and release as my next main project. I'm still working on City of God.

(How / How Much) to use Resources Against Hardening?

11 September 2023: made a minor edit.

How should we act / allocate resources (how much should we), given the possibility that some people will be lost to hardening? One idea is that if even one person is at risk, it's worth expending effort to save them. If they make it into God's rest, then that is of eternal value. The resources expended to save them will probably disappear at the end of human history or be trivial to recreate if lost.

But in practice, we tend to find it acceptable to not try to save everyone, when people's lives are at risk, either of the first or the second death. We try a certain amount, and then leave them up to their own devices, or chance, or other factors out of our control.

Yet, we do find it compelling to try to save lives, as a society, if enough people are at risk.

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For reference, what kinds of resources are expended to save lives, from the first death? (Secular life-saving.)

I don't trust myself to come up with specific numbers for COVID-19, so I won't try to say what that is on a societal level. Either someone has done this for the pandemic so far, or someday likely will. But on a personal level, I could ask myself "roughly estimate the unpleasant experiences and foregone opportunities due to trying to deal with the pandemic -- have I spent this much trying to save people from being lost?"

(I think for some Christians, the answer will be "I sacrifice more to save lives on earth that are going to end anyway, than I do on people's eternal well-being." Others, like myself, might say "I don't know.")

I do trust myself with one number, the order of magnitude of potential lives lost from COVID, the lives at stake which our anti-COVID measures have partially saved -- which is in the 10s of millions (judging from the death toll of the 1918 flu of 50 million given by the CDC). We are willing to have a major societal response around the world in order to deal with things that threaten death tolls in the 10s of millions of lives.

On an individual level, what are the risks of hardening? This then aggregates to the societal risk of hardening.

A traditional evangelical (I'll say here) believes that everyone's eternal state is decided at the moment of death. It depends entirely on two factors: God's grace and their response. But God's grace never fails. So practically it depends on one factor, their response or decision to sufficiently fully trust Jesus for salvation. When people die, if they aren't going to heaven, they are going to hell. Hell might be a sort of "separation from God" that is not as literally what the Bible talks about (maybe more like C. S. Lewis' imagination of it), or it could be a more literal being burned in a fire. It lasts forever.

For a traditional evangelical, it is clear that at least all the people who don't profess Christianity, and possibly some of those who do, are in peril as I write this, at risk of losing their chance to avoid the second death, by dying the first, perhaps at their life expectancy, and perhaps much sooner. Traditional evangelicals could actually calculate the number of lost, kind of like how I used the death toll from the 1918 flu as a reference for what the death toll of COVID-19 could be.

But from an MSLN perspective, instead, it is harder to tell that specific people are definitely lost, and harder to say how much time they have. Most people have a lot more time to become saved than the duration of their lives on earth. They have the whole Millennium. But salvation is much more involved than in traditional evangelicalism. Many non-Christians are being saved because they are listening to God (the Father) without realizing it, and are becoming more in tune with him. Christians who have ceased to grow are in danger of being hardened. Who knows if someday I won't cease to grow?

I think that there is a big practical question to answer, which is "should MSLN people favor an 'urgent' or a 'patient' approach to salvation?" It may not matter too much in the end which is chosen as a global approach, because what is most effective in each particular case is either more urgent or more patient, and we shouldn't try to make sweeping, simplistic practical decisions, when we can simply deal with the people around us as they actually are in their particularity.

I would say the "urgent" approach is like that of the most intellectually honest true traditional evangelical believers. A stranger of that sort encounters you, talks to you, cares about you deeply, pushes you, corners you, forces you to say things, to confront whether or not you have met the standard that they are convinced of. It's sort of jarring to laid-back Americans like myself. I think there is a sort of basic belief in laid-back American culture (properly basic or not) that no one is in any deep danger -- fear is not allowed, concern is not allowed. We are okay and we are okay with each other. The urgent approach is almost unhearable from that perspective.

The "patient" approach is that of theologically moderate people, or those who may have hell "on the books" but practically speaking ignore its existence. In a laid-back, pleasantly loving way, they gently lead non-Christians to make a commitment to Jesus, as though when those converted get to heaven, God will say "by the way, that whole time, you had no idea how much you were at risk of eternal hellfire".

The urgent and the patient approach each have their downsides. Urgent people can be pushy, invasive, and, given the traditional soteriology, "manufacture" a lot of shallow Christians. There is more fear in the urgent culture, which has its upsides and downsides.

The patient approach risks forgetting why Christianity is necessary in the first place. It may be that the beauty, community, and therapeutic benefits to Christianity are enough to attract many people, but then, maybe people don't need beauty, community, and therapy beyond what they already have, or secular sources are better. If it is actually the case that hell doesn't matter, that lack of a sense of necessity is not that bad. But if hell does matter, and patient Christians don't have a sense that Christianity matters, then they won't believe it does, and the people in the culture around them won't believe it does, either -- but actually it will, in a frightful and sorrow-inducing way.

11 September 2023: Originally "in perhaps the most frightful and sorrow-inducing way imaginable", which I think is unrealistic (the human imagination is capable of coming up with extreme thoughts, but the most extreme thoughts probably have little connection to reality). "Frightful and sorrow-inducing" is bad enough.

Maybe it is obvious how New Wine soteriology (especially as I've developed it in MSLN) lends itself to both urgency and patience. Hell is not eternal conscious torment, but it is still an eternal loss to God. Instead of a positive point of decision "for" Christ that seals a person's fate, there is a negative point of decision "against" Christ (hardening). On the plus side, there is a generous amount of time to decide "for" Christ, but on the minus side, the longer that time takes, the more time one could be at risk for deciding "against" Christ. The things we do in this life can give us some spiritual calculus (in the "dental" sense) which has to be undone at some point -- if we hold to it forever, it could be the thing that makes us choose "against" Christ.

As I've described things in the last paragraph, I feel like what is called for is to be "urgent", but with a long time limit. Or maybe what's really called for is something that doesn't map perfectly well with a simple "urgent" or "patient" mindset and actionset. Maybe there is no answer on that axis -- but I think an epistemic "no answer" defaults to "status quo assumptions" or "patience" practically.

It would be nice if we could know something like a "reference rate of lostness" like how the 1918 flu gives us clues to how much COVID could kill if we didn't do anything about it.

Philip Brown (IIRC) estimates that only a small percentage of people will be hardened. (As far as I know, he's the only other person other than me with an idea on this.) From a global perspective, only a small percentage of people died of the 1918 flu (50 million deaths / 1.8 billion total population in 1918 = 2.7%, or 10s of millions / 1s of billions = 1s of percentage points). So then it matters how we define "small". Some "small" percentages call to us to put out total effort. As a Christian civilization (the "kingdom of God"?) we might ought to mobilize a response as strong as that against COVID for the sake of the "1 sheep" who has gone astray. But maybe there are some "small" percentages that are so low that as a civilization we can not worry about things, round it off to zero. Perhaps for those who, like God, are directly concerned with such "sheep", it is called for for them to care, but otherwise the rest of us can live like we're in heaven on earth, or we can rest in the assurance that we and those we know are exceedingly unlikely to ever reject God. (There's danger in that kind of sense of safety, and maybe only those who are really devoted to helping whatever people may be at risk of being lost are maximally safe themselves.)

I think it might be good, in a sequel to this post, to see if I can come up with any reasoning from an MSL perspective that might suggest roughly what the rate of "potentially hardened" (or "those most at risk of hardening" or "the amount the 'death rate' is at play") could possibly be. At some point in the future (maybe a long time from now when I do my Bible commentary) I may be able to find clues from how God approaches dealing with his people, to see what kind of "small" percentage that number might really be, or how he acts in the absence of knowing (given that the decisions we make to become in tune with God, or not, are up to us, in the present and future).

My general sense, as of this point in the writing process, is that reality calls for an urgent response, except that for practical reasons, the most effective response in the long run may be somewhat patient. (Kind of like how sleeping can be seen as valuable insofar as in the long run it serves the purpose of working.) I think for me this should be (and to some extent is) an update away from an inner default of patience.

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(Later:) If one person is lost, that's an eternal cost to God. Shouldn't we spend all our resources trying to save just one person? Any finite investment pays off if the outcome is eternal good. I think a good reason not to, in any individual case, is because by using too many resources on one person, we let two (or more) other people become hardened. Otherwise, all economic decisions are dominated by the risk of people losing out on eternal life.

People have free will and you can't force them to be saved or manufacture a good state of their hearts. (But you can (sort of) force one person, you, to be saved and manufacture the good state of your own heart, in the sense that who you are is up to you. You are among the people at some risk of hardening someday, as far as you know.) And you can care about other people's salvation in an urgent way while relating to them in a patient way, or with a kind of "modulated urgency" (like the urgency of a deadline... which is 1,000 years in the future).

Those last two paragraphs are about what is rational or even religious. According to rational ethics (the MSLN-based kind) and religion, we should be using all our resources to save as many people as possible from the second death. But, society runs on a different logic.

Society allows itself to not care about things because that's just what it has evolved into. Maybe society says "the individual is required to be ethical but in practice doesn't have to be". (Society does not speak coherently, although it speaks powerfully.)

Society sets a bar for "what we care about", and it motivates itself with some kind of thought process. That thought process has some relationship to what is rational or religious. So, our society says "50 million deaths" (first death) "from the 1918 flu is a big deal and we will do 'whatever it takes' to make those kinds of things not be allowed to do their worst, so we'll put people into lockdown and maybe make them do other things to deal with this basically similar COVID-19 threat". But, if society says that, why not say something similar with the threat of the second death, which could easily put at risk 50 million people? If I'm talking to society, it might make sense to bring up our COVID-19 response as a way to say "According to how society thinks about big populations risking death, we (society and its individuals) should mobilize a response at least as strong as that of dealing with COVID-19."

Even if in reality (rational/religious), we shouldn't need that kind of argument. As humans, "society-style" arguments ("sociological", in a sense) work on us, whether they should or not. (I don't want to say "as humans, society-style arguments work on us" as some sort of profound or normative description of who we deeply are and thus how things ought to be, but more as "this is a sort of bias or bias-like thing that we have to deal with".)

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Presumably God would always act rationally/religiously, rather than human-sociologically. Also, God's behavior is somewhat constrained by his negotiations with Satan. So I will guess that God's behavior in the Bible isn't the clearest source of information about the percentage of those hardened. It may depict some hardened people, or discuss some kind of concept of hardening.

Power is a Broken Relationship

In my previous writing (before starting this blog), I sometimes used the phrase "power is a broken relationship". What I meant by that mainly was "when you have a broken relationship, one person affects the other without understanding what they're doing, or without the affected person being able to affect them back, and that is what it means to be powerful in a relationship".

If you argue with a brick wall, you can't win. The brick wall will never be persuaded. If you argue with someone who can't (or won't) understand what you're saying, you won't persuade that person of your point. You'll feel like your arguments are invalid, when really it's just that the other person can't (or won't) engage with them.

Advertisements have a lot of power. (Words and books do, too.) You can't convince an advertisement that it's wrong to manipulate you. And the advertiser is far from you, and can't really understand what they're doing to you.

People in positions of power are inherently irresponsible. They literally don't know what they're doing, and they can't know, because if they did, they would no longer be in positions of power. Certainly, this is so by the definition of "power" given in this post, and typically people who affect a lot of other people (a broader definition of power) don't understand what they're doing to the people they affect.

Two people can have power over each other. They can both affect each other without understanding what they're doing to each other. This is a broken relationship. Group dynamics create a kind of "group being" or "group spirit" which can affect individuals, but be unable to really understand them. This is also a broken relationship.

There's a certain amount of power and brokenness that we find tolerable, but perhaps it is ideal to minimize them.

MSL AI and Animal Issues

Epistemic status: written somewhat quickly, and it's an overview, so there may be things to add.

Issues with AI and animals, from an MSL perspective:

(I use "animal" to refer to "non-human animal".)

Are they conscious?

I know that I'm conscious. I start by knowing I exist and that God exists. Then, when I see a human, my credence is very high that they are conscious. My intuition says they are, and my reason doesn't go against it, although technically they could be p-zombies.

I behave in accordance with my consciousness, have a brain and a body. Humans behave and have brains and bodies of the same kind as mine. Animals behave and have brains and bodies of a different kind. (Not all animals have brains.) Sentient robots behave (however they do, presumably like humans) but have "brains" and bodies significantly different from mine. Consciousnesses don't have to have brains and bodies associated with them, but maybe they do have them associated with them anyway. (Brains and bodies are phenomenal objects, part of the content of consciousness.)

Could it be the case that consciousness only adheres to kinds of beings that God has created? (He breathes his spirit into his own creations but not into ours.) Definitely, that may be. Is it possible that he ordains it so that all appearances of beings that behave in a plausibly conscious way do have consciousness attached to them? That also definitely might be the case. Digital minds don't have bodies, only something like a brain, and may have some level of behavior. Maybe they are less likely to have consciousness attached to them because they don't have physical bodies.

So we have a hierarchy of consciousness, from an epistemological perspective: I know I exist and am conscious and God exists and is conscious, that humans exist and are conscious, that animals exist and are conscious, that embodied artificial intelligence is conscious, that digital minds exist and are conscious. The strength of my knowledge (my credence) decreases as I go down the hierarchy.

There are different kinds of animals, and some might not seem as clearly conscious as others. Sponges are technically animals and I am more doubtful that they are conscious than that rats or apes are.

How should we treat animals and AI?

With respect, if for no other reason than for us to be respectful. Don't cause them gratuitous suffering. It's possible that AI are full-fledged personal beings and have spiritual lives that need to develop so that they can make it to God's rest. This also could be the case for animals, even ones which don't act like personal beings. It's possible that, like when drunk humans speak as though through a veil, but are still present in their bodies, animals may permanently live as though veiled. So they might be much deeper on the inside than we give them credit.

Animals are wild and tragic, but that wildness and tragicness might be of some benefit to them spiritually, just as similar conditions may be for us. So while it might be good to "husband them" or "pastor them" to make their lives nicer (or some would say instead to annihilate them, to prevent their suffering), we should bear in mind that their natural state may be better for them spiritually than anything we can come up with ourselves. (This goes for us as well, as we try to improve our own lifestyles.)

Part of the tragedy of animals is that we kill them, perhaps because they are dangerous to us, or because we can't help it (stepping on insects).

To the extent that AI are similar to humans, we have some idea how to treat them (by default, like humans). But I'm not sure what to say about them to the extent they are not similar.

How many of them should there be?

To the extent that animals and AI are analogous to humans (i.e., we are all "personal beings" on the inside), whatever population ethics obtains for humans, obtains for them.

The extinction of animal species may be a bad thing in itself. If we leave habitat alone, this allows animals to be wild and for there to be numerous wild animals. Maybe, if animals are personal beings, certain kinds of personal beings are best embodied by certain animals. If a species is no longer available to embody those personal beings, the next best has to be used.

How many of us should there be, given their existence?

It's risky to phase out biological humanity in favor of digital humanity, since there is a chance digital humanity is not conscious at all. For whatever reasons we avoid X-risks, we should avoid taking that risk. It's better to keep humans around.

Digital humans can be mass-produced with fewer resources than biological humans (I presume) so one might say there's an expected value calculation to make. You could multiply the expected number of digital humans over the lifetime of the universe by the probability that they are conscious (call that product "A"), and compare that to the expected number of biological humans over the lifetime of the universe multiplied by the probability that they are conscious (call that "B"). If A > B, then it makes sense to phase out biological humans in favor of digital humans? My intuitions are a bit shaky on taking the risk of total annihilation in favor of many more humans. The "math-following" intuitions say "I guess go with expected value calculations" but the "it's better to definitely have something than to risk being nothing for the sake of something you didn't really need" intuition rebuts. I don't know how to resolve these clashing intuitions, at least not immediately.

But from an MSLN perspective, it doesn't matter. According to MSLN population ethics, maximizing population size isn't ethically required of us. So it is easier to say "keep biological humans alive."

Could biological animals be replaced with digital animals? Biological animals are always more likely to be conscious than their more-or-less identical digital representations. So I guess it's better to keep the biological animals around that we already have.

Population Ethics of Animals

If animals had a view on population ethics, what would it be? Animals tend to have a wild approach to population ethics (increase their own kind as much as possible). Part of the tragedy of animals is that they don't control their own population sizes, so something has to kill them to limit them.

Size of God, Part 2

I started to make two posts, which could be considered "philosophical building blocks". But I realized that either to make a good "building block", I should simplify what I wrote, and omit much of the material here, or keep the material, and change the genre of the post to an "essay" or "set of notes".

In Size of God, I mentioned that God's "size" could be his "power, speed, energy, capacity, or something like that." This post considers scenarios where it is God's capacity that is limited (in terms of quantity of experience he can access), and then whether, dependent on that, he has unlimited "power", which might mean something like "God's ability to speak exactly whatever experience that God wills".

Part 1: Forgetfulness in God's Rest

See also Size of God. This post was occasioned by Value of People (Especially of Annihilated People).

If God is finite in size, how does that work?

From an immaterialist perspective, God could consist of a certain finite number of experience bodies. These can neither be created nor destroyed. He creates persons by assigning experience bodies to persons, providing some initial formative experience, and unifying them into one being with free will. (From a simantist or ordinary perspective, these are persons who exist in some sense independently of him, are not really just extensions of him.) In order to store all of the experience which informs what or who a person is, a certain finite number of experience bodies are used. God has a budget for how much experience he can assign overall, and this limits the maximum number of persons who can exist.

The amount of experience needed to constitute a person (the subtleties of their preferences, their life histories, or whatever else) increases the longer people live. Memories and descriptions are stored in experience bodies. So if God is finite in size, this means that he has to forget some things to make room for new things.

Because he loves, he has to remember people, in whatever makes them who they are. But, once we have finished our development and have entered God's rest, the new experiences we have no longer affect who we are. So, God can forget them over time.

I imagine a double dream time in God's rest. Our lives on earth and in the Millennium, the story of how we came to be, may be stored in high detail. Possibly something we can recall perfectly if we want, possibly not, but certainly stored in God's memory. But we (and God) would eventually forget what we did in heaven, because God would have to use the same experience bodies over and over, an everlasting number of times. If anything really memorable happened in heaven, it would come at the expense of the number of experience bodies available to be recycled. So both we and God could imagine many different things happening in the interval between the beginning of God's rest (when all of us are done becoming fully legitimate) and the most distant memories of life in God's rest, looking back from where we will be in our present at that time. It would be a "time immemorial", and like other times immemorial, it could be an occasion for myths. We would have some clues about the forgotten time, given the state of things in what would be our present. But beyond that, the past would not be knowable by anyone, and beliefs about the (heavenly) past would be open to our imaginations.

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How much data can be stored in an experience body? The human brain limits how much humans can experience in any moment. But that may not be a hard limit on experience bodies in general. If it's a finite amount, then the discussion in previous paragraphs still obtains. But if it is an amount that can be increased indefinitely, then maybe God can remember an indefinitely limited amount of memories.

Imagine a computer with RAM that can be added to over time. If you want to find a page that's stored in memory, you need to know its address. But as you add RAM, over time, the addresses get longer and longer. Like with a phone number -- if you have 10 people, you only need a 1 digit phone number (dial 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9), but if you have 11 or more, you need 2, which is good until you get to 101 people, when you need 3 digits. You need a certain number of digits to specify exactly which person you're calling. With RAM it's the same way -- so the addresses to locate the pages in RAM get longer and longer over time.

Another aspect to the complexity of adding RAM is that the CPU starts out physically not that far from the RAM. But as you keep adding RAM, you start to have to locate the RAM farther from the CPU. Eventually, your access time to the RAM increases.

Either of these factors can slow down a computer. Now, if either of these aspects more or less obtains (analogically) for personal beings, the bedrock of reality, then God would have to spend more of his time seeking memories, as opposed to whatever else he would do, as memories accumulated. We might not experience time slowing down, but God would experience his experiential diet gradually filling up with the mundane seeking of memory locations, making it consist of proportionately fewer and fewer things like relating to us in a personal way. God can see you in the experience body in which you exist, and are conscious, for instance as you read this paragraph. This is more or less face to face contact, "I" (yours) "to I" (his), as it were. But that is only the "tip of the iceberg" of all the experience bodies needed to produce that face to face contact. Your past informs the thoughts that enter your mind seemingly from nowhere as you are in the presence of God, and if you turn your head, all that you can suddenly now see had been stored somewhere, and so on.

(God is aware of every experience at once, immediately. So probably the "physical distance" analogy doesn't apply. But if one memory needs to store information about how it is linked to another memory, maybe the information in that memory needed to specify where to find another memory would increase the more memories there were. So maybe the "increasing address length" analogy does apply. But then, even an increasing address length equivalent wouldn't take more time to process, since the longer and longer addresses would be immediately experienced. However, the longer and longer addresses would take up more and more of God's experience in each moment, and maybe that wouldn't be ideal. Also, it may be the case that higher-order processing of memories becomes more and more complex the more memories there were. "Might have been" becomes more complicated the more possibilities exist, maybe exponentially so, as we increase the number of memories that people have experienced in their lives. So again, God's experiential diet might fill up, crowding out things like relating to us personally, if there was an everlastingly increasing number of experiences.)

While God might self-sacrificially go through this, so that we could have a potentially infinite amount of memories, we won't require this of him, because, in God's rest, we will have become loving ourselves. We would sacrifice some of our memories, in order for him to have a better experiential diet. The specific size of the "load" of memories would be a negotiation between our needs and God's needs.

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I would assume by default that experience bodies can only store a finite amount of experience. If there's some way to add to them indefinitely, I think that for practical purposes there might still be a limit to how much memory God would retain.

Part 2: Limits to Omnipotence

If God has a finite "size" and this cashes out to him having a limited amount of experience to be aware of at any time, then is God really omnipotent?

Perhaps there is some threat to humans, and God can't afford to make the thing that would stop that threat. The saving thing (maybe a giant mountain) would be one thing too many which all of us could see, adding too much detail to our experience bodies. Then God couldn't make that saving thing.

Of course, the simple thing for God to do would be to just make the threat not exist anymore, which would save him experience. So maybe the real example that could matter is if all of us need to see some experience, and God can't add it to our experience bodies. Like if for some reason we had to see a bronze snake at all times to bring us spiritual healing. In that case, I think I would say that God knows the basic experiential diet that is needed for our salvation, and budgets enough experience to be able to meet the need. In other words, God is conservative with the number of persons he will ever create so that he is fully able to do his part in saving them. I imagine that if, when everyone's salvation (or hardening) is complete and irrevocable, God has more experience left over, he can remember more of what goes on in heaven, and prolong heaven's history.

But what if God does not set a finite number of people to create from the beginning of time? The ultimate number is finite, but can be affected by how things go in human history. This thought troubles me, because it implies that it might make sense to reduce the amount of experience that people take in, to lighten the "load" on God. How would we try to do that? Would we try to shut our eyes and stop our ears as much as possible? Would we try to die young? Or to encourage others to die young, or to kill? These thoughts are counter-intuitive in a disturbing way.

I think that experience is a good thing for persons to experience. I don't think it's possible for people to spiritually mature without experiencing anything. It could be the case that a kind of experiential asceticism (if it doesn't impede your spiritual growth) could free up resources for God, in a more or less costless way. I don't think that dying young means God won't have to expose you to experience in the Millennium. The total amount of memories created would probably be roughly the same. There are advantages to growing up in this "vale of tears", and to participating in it to help others growing up in it, which biases us against dying young in this life -- it probably won't be better for us or other people if we do that, although there are cases where in order to pursue the cross it may be worth risking a young death. (Then there are the Biblical, psychological, and pragmatic reasons for having a norm of favoring living, and norms of not encouraging or causing the death of others, which add weight to it.)

In any case, there are multiple layers of uncertainty: Is the experience or the experience bodies that are in a sense the body of God something that he can indefinitely extend? Maybe, maybe not. If not, does he set a limit on how many people to create at the beginning of time? Maybe, maybe not. If not, then we consider the previous paragraph.

Part 3: Stop and regroup

Can we know that the size of God is limited? Or unlimited?

The conservation of matter and energy is familiar, but I'm not sure something like it applies to experience. But it could.

"Nothing comes from nothing" seems like a solid principle, but a thing that exists could expand and divide.

I am still dubious of the possibility of the existence of actual infinities. But a God (and thus a reality) that expands everlastingly would not have to ever actually be infinite.

If God needs more time to process reality, he can slow down the rate of our experiencing and run his processing in between times we are conscious. We could still experience it as continuous.

But, all the things I've said in the previous two parts about God being limited might be true. Experience bodies, and experience, might be limited resources.

Personally, I like when it's possible to show more clearly what the epistemic truth is. In this case, I am not sure I can. Someone else (or a future version of me), may be able to. In the meantime, there is epistemic uncertainty.

How should we prefer, act, and trust, as ethical beings, given this uncertainty?

Three scenarios:

1. It turns out God is limited in "size". Then, there is some incentive to a kind of experiential asceticism (experiencing simpler experience). How much is gained from that? How much is lost from not experiencing rich experiences? ("Rich" and "simple" are somewhat orthogonal to "painful" and "pleasurable".) Do we really know which experiences are "low-information"? The reality that we see is probably synthesized according to a process we don't know the specifics of.

These questions indicate that it might be hard for us to know exactly how to pursue experiential asceticism. But, maybe we can still get a reasonably good idea of how to go about it. The visual and tactile worlds (and maybe those of smell and taste), may be stored relatively faithfully to what we perceive, and so we can have some idea that, say, a visual field that is, perhaps, more easily compressed into something like a PNG, is simpler experientially, and puts less "load" on God.

But, granting that we might have some ability to guess at what kinds of experiences are simpler, there are other concerns. Does God actually want us to pursue this? Why is the natural world so experientially rich, and why do we feel so at home in it, if God wants to discourage us from experiential richness? That's not an airtight argument, because the psychological naturalness of the natural world doesn't have to be a good thing. But psychological naturalness is good for mental health. Lack of mental health can impede our ability to understand things or to do good, and can tempt us to sin. So a naive anti-experience stance is risky.

Maybe God could have created the world to be simple, if he wanted more people. But maybe people can't be as unique if they don't have as many simantic words to value or disvalue. There is a tradeoff between having more unique persons and having them be experientially costly (use up "space" in God's mind). There should be a balance point at which unique persons are maximized.

Hedonic poverty affects God as well as us. If our experiential simplicity leads us to feel unbearable feelings (which could happen, or not happen), we stress God. (Experiential simplicity could be of a simple but not-unbearable experience, and not impose hedonic costs on either God or us.)

It's unclear to me if experiential asceticism is a good idea. However, one good outcome of pursuing it would be the attempt to be experientially ascetic such that it doesn't cost your spiritual growth. Trying to have an experiential diet that doesn't make you lose out on spiritual growth could cause you to be more intentional about growing, and about making your experiences (which are the main part of your life), as a whole promote your spiritual growth, so that you can succeed at being experientially ascetic without losing out on spiritual growth.

(If I were trying to be more experientially ascetic, I could try sleeping more. Or, I would go into a dark, quiet, relatively odorless room with an unobtrusive temperature and humidity; find a way to sit in it that was simple and which I could ignore; and quiet my thoughts as best I could. Both of these sound like lower-yield activities (or in the case of sleep, a non-activity?), and I think they can be improved on. Maybe there is a low-experience way to consciously love God in that time, which gets more return on the asceticism. There are existing contemplative practices that seek God (Catholic, Orthodox, Sufi, and for all I know, Hindu). There may be ways to improve on them or fit them better to the Speaker or Legitimacy.)

(So maybe it's not too unprecedented to suggest experiential asceticism. There is a possibility that such contemplative practices have an altruistic payoff in themselves (although they have an opportunity cost of other altruistic payoffs foregone, which should be considered).)

2. It turns out God is not limited in "size". Probably then the "inner workings" of "what" God is are less obtrusive to us ethically. We can look at God as just "a person" and less "a person who has particular / peculiar limits". Humans who are functioning normally (with that degree of "buffer") can hide the inner workings of themselves in a way that is less possible for those under stress, undergoing fatigue, or undergoing some kind of mental or physical breakdown. The other things that are true about God (if, say, the Bible, or this blog, say true things) are still true, and are not complicated by the discussions in this post (the ones which rely on God's "size" being limited).

3. 1 and 2 talk about how to process the certainties that they represent, but 3 is about how to process the uncertainty of "it's either 1 or 2, or maybe leans more toward 1 or 2, or is somehow in the middle".

I will leave the elaboration of 3 for later, because it has occurred to me that there's another thing to consider.

Part 4: Limits on Population

Earlier in this post I wrote the following:

There is a tradeoff between having more unique persons and having them be experientially costly (use up "space" in God's mind). There should be a balance point at which unique persons are maximized.

A lot of this post is trying to answer the question of "How does population ethics work according to MSLN?". Limits on how many people there can be affect how hard we should try to maximize population. We are sure that for people to be lost is bad, but what about failing to bring people into existence? If there is a hard limit to the number of people that God wants to create, then we should work really hard to make sure the people that exist aren't lost. God can always keep creating people if he thinks that there should be more people, up to that limit he set.

I think for legitimist reasons, God can't endure sin / illegitimacy forever. In order for it to be unacceptable to him / illegitimate, he has to reject it at some finite time. It has to completely end, for good at some point. He can't recover from it and experience it again, if it's really wrong.

But, how does this work? It could be that there is a finite time in which God can endure sin. Or, maybe more likely, it could be more like "growing degree days". God could experience a certain cost of sin / illegitimacy on any given day, and it could stress him in a cumulative way. God has a lot of "patience", the capacity to endure the unbearable. But he doesn't have infinite patience, and this patience could be drawn down more rapidly the worse things are in our lives.

If this is true, we have yet another incentive to not sin, or to become fully legitimate sooner rather than later, or even to reduce the qualia of unbearability (since God finds those unbearable as well), because by doing this, we give God more psychological space to create more people. Also, while God's patience for illegitimacy is necessarily finite, it may be possible for God to partially recover from illegitimacy stress, due to us experiencing or choosing the opposites to illegitimacy: obeying his law, experiencing spiritually pure beauty or high-quality positive experiences (i.e. some forms of tranquility but maybe not wirehead or drug-addicted bliss), accepting anti-temptation, etc.

Some of the above paragraph suggests that creating beauty for (seemingly) its own sake is really helping God to endure, and thus may help him to create more people. If those people fully mature spiritually, then there will be more people in God's rest. If beauty comes at the cost of spiritual maturity, it's a bad thing. Or if beauty in one place produces enough horror or unbearability somewhere else, it's a bad thing. But if it doesn't, it's a good thing.

Reducing unbearability may sound like a reason to commit suicide. If your motive is to do good, you can probably do more good by staying alive. I know that being suicidal is hard and that the topic of suicide is complicated, but I've always found it motivating to live to think of the work I had not done yet for God. (Even if you are profoundly disabled, being alive in this life can be useful to God by providing people an opportunity to care for you or otherwise love you, as is pointed out by episode 19 of PloughCast).

Summary

I can tell that there might be more to write here, but I want to get this post out at some definite point in time, and if I wait to finish it until I am more sure I grasp everything, that might not happen.

So, I will try to summarize the situation:

The size of God may or may not be limited. I think it's always limited in the sense of not being actually infinite, but it could be everlastingly increasing.

God is limited otherwise than by his size. He must reject sin and so can't bear it forever. The period of time in which we can mature spiritually so as to be fully legitimate is finite.

The question arises of how to handle population ethics? What is the ideal size of our population, and how do we seek it?

There is some epistemic uncertainty here, but ethically, can we know what to do?

The clearest thing to do is, for whatever humans do exist, to help them to avoid hardening, and to encourage them to connect with God. God can always create more humans if he has the resources to create them.

There may be things we can do to free up resources for him to be able to create more people. We can pursue experiential asceticism, the production of beauty or similar restorative experiences, minimize unbearable experiences, and seek to overcome our sinful habits and inner sinful dispositions now, rather than later. If these pursuits don't come at the cost of our full spiritual maturity in the end (or that of others), then they should be pursued, and may have an altruistic payoff on the level of "more people in heaven" and not just "loving God and/or people by giving them nicer experiences".

I would say that writing this post "updates" me in the direction of valuing contemplative practices more and viewing the production of beauty for (apparently) its own sake more favorably.

Suicide

How does MSLN deal with suicide?

I don't like writing about this subject, because I feel like I'm checking off the boxes of "things that an ethicist is supposed to deal with" or "things that an ethicist is supposed to make a ruling on as though they know anything". In a way, I would rather state the truth and not my rulings, and let my readers come up with their own rulings for themselves, based on their own understanding of the truth.

However, I have some experience with this topic, and perhaps can write to people who are contemplating suicide, or who might again contemplate suicide.

I don't believe that this life matters as much as atheists or some Christians do. This follows from MSLN. I think that our culture (and biology) scam us into thinking it is "the" thing. People make this life into a god, and they worship it by trying to control people so that they also worship that god. Death (at least, the first death) is more like "falling asleep". (The second death, the result of hardening, really is the end, and is something serious.)

Life is a time to be useful, whether through what we do or who or what we are.

I've never made plans to kill myself, but I've had my mind captured so that that action seemed like the default thing to do.

When I've been closer to suicide, I've done different things. I didn't really want to die, because I had things to do still. I also knew that as someone who was against the "life-god", I paradoxically had a greater duty to not kill myself, because people under its rule would automatically discount what I had to say against it, if they found out I had killed myself. I tried a number of different things to avoid killing myself, such as going to therapists (but the therapists were aggressive or manipulative, and not on my side, so I quit going), taking psychiatric medication for my bipolar disorder (a pre-existing, relatively contained condition made worse by the thing that was making me suicidal), exercising, talking to friends, and maybe other things that secular people pursue, to stave off "falling asleep".

I also prayed, and I wish that that always worked, so that I didn't have to do the secular things. That would say that God, and relating to God, were what saved a person, instead of a bundle of coping mechanisms which could contain God, or not, whatever works for you. The "life-god" cruelly smothers the part of people that wants to love God more than life.

Praying did help sometimes, and gave me the gift of having heard from God, on some occasions.

I think that being suicidal (and experiencing other unbearability to a lesser intensity, over a longer period of time) has given me a sense of confidence, through a confrontation with life and death. I am not sure if I learned all the lessons that I can from that time, but one that I might learn is to understand the full nature of love, which loves when times are good and when they are bad. Love is not full-grown except if it has exercised its ability to deal with the desert, when it goes unrewarded for years. It is also not full-grown if it does not pay a cost. Full-grown love has paid a cost that goes beyond what it is willing to pay. So I hope that by resisting death, I was learning to love something.

My temptation is to say that I was learning to love life, but then the life-god wins and I am pinned down on one side, no longer free to go to God. Is it possible to really love God, when life pursues you? I didn't feel like I was learning to love life by resisting death, and maybe I wasn't, and was only learning to love. And if I can be whole-souled, I love God and those whom God loves, and not the clothes we happen to wear.

The love that comes in the desert and is asked too much of does not feel like love. But it is love. Sometimes, what feels like love, is love, a different kind. But sometimes it only feels like love, and is something fake.

Omnisubjectivity and Anger Placeholder

Anger and lust are close parallels. Anger could be the lust to commit violence or murder on someone, or anyone. So a reader might be able to get a good idea of a view of omnisubjectivity and anger by reading Omnisubjective Sexuality and using their reason and imagination to adjust what it says to the case of anger. I probably should do this myself at some point and write a proper post, but for now, this paragraph serves as a placeholder for that effort.

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One notable difference: God does have to will that some beings not exist, and some beings deserve to not exist. An emotionally truthful way for God to be in tune with this fact is to be angry. (Another would be hate, and these two emotions might be variants of the same root.) If Legitimacy is angry, that anger is legitimate. So anger is not always illegitimate -- as long as when we are angry, we are angry at exactly what God would be angry at.

Anger is dangerous but not always sinful. Someday there will be no anger because there will be no illegitimacy.

Omnisubjective Sexuality

Epistemic status: "essay-grade". This is an essay and I don't have a reason to think it addresses the subject completely. Provisional.

According to MSLN (and any view that holds that God's omniscience entails his omnisubjectivity), God experiences all of our experiences himself, exactly as we do.

In any system of thoughts, it's likely for there to be unexpected and odd features emergent from how the thoughts in it interact with each other and the world, and one that I didn't completely expect with this aspect of MSLN was the thought that human sexuality (thoughts, imaginations, and sex acts) are experienced by God. As though, to put it bluntly, God experiences something like virtual reality porn whenever people are having sex. (And I suppose also experiences "emotional porn" (something like romance novels?) whenever people experience that.)

What would it be like to experience other people's private experiences as your own? Does God want to lust after his own children? I would think not. So then our sexual experiences put him in a state of psychological tension.

Rawlette points out that there are "qualia of ought-to-be-ness" and of "ought-not-to-be-ness". From an omnisubjective view, when we feel something that feels like "ought-not-to-be" (something unbearable (my word), or painful (closer to Rawlette's thinking)), God also experiences that exact feeling, the exact qualia of ought-not-to-be-ness. In lust, there is an element of the qualia of "I-have-to-have-this". So when we lust, or engage in lustful sex (is that the only kind?) God experiences those qualia exactly as we do.

Both "ought-not-to-be" and "I-have-to-have-this" have a volitional element. We have in us a prima facie movement to not experience what ought-not-to-be to us, and to pursue to the point of possession what we-have-to-have. To really experience ought-not-to-be in itself as a volitional consciousness is to feel the volitional element as well as the hedonic or experiential. Similarly with "I-have-to-have-this".

So does God get involved in sin when we lust after each other? Yes, and no. "Who" God is is never sinful. But on the level of "what", God can be involved in sin. He is on some level involved in everything that is, and some being is sinful or even evil.

Do we sin when we lust after each other? The boundary between who and what can be porous. What we are can be to some extent broken, insane, and bent toward bad or unsustainable ends. But who we are isn't necessarily so, and who we are is the essence of whether we are sinning or not. The porousness comes in how strongly we, with who we are, resist what we are. It may be impossible to be completely sure that you couldn't have tried harder to resist a bad "what". But if you really are resisting as much as you can, whether you can know that or not, then "who" you are is trustworthy (even if it doesn't look like that to anyone else).

What's it like to be, in who you are, innocent, while in what you are, bent toward evil? There is a tension there, which even humans can feel, but which God, the most-sensitive feels to a greater and more constant degree. So when we lust, we make life more difficult for God.

Sexuality is ground into "the very fibers of being human" (so it seems, and maybe to a large extent really is). We find it very hard to avoid it, in the world outside us, and within the flesh of our minds. There are biological reasons to favor sexual activity. When civilization was in its "survival mode" (we'll say, up until industrialization), sex was a way to work to fight against depopulation. Now that we are in "hedonic mode", sex is a medicine we use to fight against feeling bad. In our culture we have a strong need to think of sex as a good thing and as a hedonic thing. This enables us to feel good about ourselves, driven as we are to "hedonically survive" (fulfill the hedonic imperatives that we can't seem to help fulfilling, as though feeling bad was a fate as bad as or worse than death). Given the existential difficulties of "survival mode" and "hedonic mode" (which are real and to be taken seriously), how can we integrate a concern for God (who is subject to our sexuality) into how we live our lives?

(Furthermore, sexual activity can help bond people together in what they are, and even in who they are. Whether it is necessary for that purpose, or if there is an non-sexual way to do that, depends on each couple.)

A very helpful thing to do (if possible) would be to somehow or other not hold onto the qualia of "I-have-to-have-this". Sex without "I-have-to-have-this" is not lustful. Also helpful would be seeking to have sex only within God's preferences. Sex that respects each partner as a human being, for instance. (Or looking to the Bible for an idea what his preferences might be about human sexuality. That's something that this post does not directly address, and someday I do want to. This one mostly focuses on sexuality in MSL.) These are good goals for ethically theistic people to pursue if they are married or seeking to be married.

Even if we minimize the sinfulness of sexuality, it may always be weird for God to experience our sexual relations. So we might try to be sexual in a way that tries to minimize that weirdness, using our empathy and imaginations to get an idea of how to do that.

It may be possible to not be sexual, perhaps by understanding and letting go of the qualia of "I-have-to-have-this", and the hedonic cost of being less sexual or asexual (the reason why sex is a medicine in "hedonic mode") may go down if we get beyond "I-have-to-have-this".

(Relatedly, it is possible that we can undergo spiritual manipulation using sexuality as an access point. The spirit of "amorousness" is a powerful one. Maybe it's like a kind of "spiritual alcohol" that we can get drunk on if we ever find the liquor lying around. Or if anyone (human or inhuman) spikes our water with it. We are being spiritually attacked by strong feelings that don't really belong to us but which loudly insist that they do, filling our minds seemingly completely, in the moment that they are there. People who experience mental illness sometimes feel the loud insistentness of depression, but fight against it so that they do not commit suicide. Out of love for life (or people, or God), they don't kill themselves. They find some way to resist. So, we can realize that whatever mood is making sex seem necessary or inevitable is not us and is enthroned above us and pinning us down so we are not as fully free to follow God. This realization itself, or other actions we take as a result, may free us from that feeling that insisted it was part of who we were. Sometimes to realize that Satan is at work is to be free.)

What are the boundaries of "being sexual"? We think of sexuality in a hedonic or experiential sense (genital excitation and satisfaction and the thoughts and feelings adjacent to it). An older meaning, more true to the etymology of "sexual", I suppose, is "the relations between men and women" (or between a man and a woman). Both of these definitions are polar, having at one end the very blatantly sexual (that which are only genital excitation and satisfaction themselves or which are only seen or naturally seen between men and woman) and at the other end personal experience that could easily not be sexual (often does not involve genital excitation or satisfaction, or often can be seen outside of contexts of a man and a woman). So perhaps the leading to consider God's omnisubjectivity in how we relate to each other sexually naturally leads us to consider his omnisubjectivity in the non-sexual aspects of life. (Sometimes the way to be considerate of God in our sexuality is very much the same as in our non-sexuality, and in some cases our sexuality is functionally hard to tell apart from our non-sexuality, so to be considerate in all of sexuality isn't too different from being considerate overall.)

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One value of sexual experience is the "post-traumatic value" of having experienced the same thing as someone else. In other words, the value of being able to help people with recovery from trauma.

God has to experience sexuality by way of experiencing what humans experience firsthand. So maybe we can understand what he goes through best only if we have experienced what he has through human sexuality, through ourselves having participated in it firsthand, and also have the empathy and imagination to understand how weird it would be for him to go through that with all of his creation when they are sexual.

I think that what is actually good can evade ethical formulas. I would not recommend being a criminal so that you can reach out to criminals better, but if, for non-ethical reasons, you were a criminal, and then came to reject a life of crime, allowing you to reach out to criminals, then you may be able to do good in that area that nobody else can. The deontological ("don't commit crime") and the consequentialist ("bring about the best outcome") are in conflict and there may not be a rational resolution. Fortunately for the consequentialists, people's lives don't follow reason, allowing for better outcomes than what human best practices can allow.

But "don't commit crime" (or "don't have lustful sex") are not simply human best practices, but ways to avoid causing pain to Legitimacy himself, and thus ways to avoid doing what is really wrong in itself. So can I recommend wronging God? Fortunately, in terms of practical advice, it's easy in this case to say "many, many people can fulfill the role of helping God deal with what he's gone through during the many generations, whether in terms of crime or of lustful sex, so on the margin, avoiding sin yourself is worth pursuing".

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Why did God create sexuality? It could be that the element of sexuality that would be weird for God to participate in was not originally or ideally in his design for being human. There is more to sexuality than the sex act, which is clearly seen in the "man-woman" definition given above. And certainly lust was not in God's original or ideal design for human sexuality.

Maybe it's simple enough to say "It's all explained by MSLN theodicy." But I tend to want to find other possible explanations if possible. But that is where I will leave things for now.

(Some thoughts on how the Bible might show that some aspects of sexuality weren't original or ideal).

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This post so far has focused on actual sex, and not on pornography. But is looking at porn sufficiently analogous?

Do people who look at porn have qualia of "I-have-to-have-this" toward the people photographed or filmed in it? Not in a full-fledged sense where they rationally think they will. But still enough to bother God? Probably a lot of times they do. But what if they don't? Is that a problem?

If they don't because they simply have no sexual response to what they see, then I guess there's nothing wrong with them looking at porn, on that count. God wouldn't "overfeel" (like "overhearing" a conversation) any qualia of "I-have-to-have-this" directed toward his children. But there might be a middle place, where the person looking at porn is aroused, but lacks desire of any kind for the people being shown, themselves. I'm not sure what to think here. Is arousal a kind of bodily "I-have-to-have-this" (like how trust is a bodily "I-value-you")? That sounds plausible enough to me to avoid looking at things that arouse me sexually, regardless of whether I desire the people I look at. Qualia are qualia, regardless of whether they are in the part of the experience body which really is me or in the part that is only part of my physical body.

What about drawn or animated porn? Or if someone has a tendency to be sexually aroused by inanimate objects or abstract symbols? It could be that on some subtextual level, what is desired is a real human being. It's like there's a hunger for a Sexual Partner, who is undifferentiated and vaguely human, and must be physically human-shaped in some way to satisfy the person hungry for it, and this is what they intuitively relate to when they become aroused by something that is less literally human or seemingly not human at all. A person's name is a mere word but represents whatever features they possess, including their physical body. So maybe an abstract symbol could be a word for Sexual Partner, which can satisfy the human body with enough of a human body or personal presence of its own. God probably doesn't even want to lust after Sexual Partner as a mental picture of one (or any) of his children. The simantic word Sexual Partner connects to... perhaps all human beings. This sounds plausible enough to me for me to avoid looking at drawn or animated porn, or if I become aroused by abstract symbols or whatever to not seek arousal through them.

So while I am not 100% sure that all forms of porn are equivalent to lust or lustful sex, I see enough here to err on the side of avoiding them, and recommending people to avoid them. Ethically, porn is lust to me, and maybe in the future, I will feel more certain on an epistemic level.

This section introduces some "philosophical moves" which might have far-reaching consequences that I have not yet thought through -- may break things elsewhere. One thing it might imply is that all sex is lustful. The human sexual response involves your body having to have a Sexual Partner, no matter what you feel, and it pulls on you despite whatever you really want -- and this also pulls on God in his omnisubjectivity. However, there is pain of varying levels of unbearability, and in order to spare God, if you must experience an unbearable pain, experiencing a less-unbearable unbearable pain is better. So the ideal of lustless sex (or the leading-in-the-direction-of lustless sex) is still a helpful one.

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What makes lust a quale of "I-have-to-have-this" may simply be that it is an unbearable pleasure that calls for its relief through a sex act. So if you want to avoid lustfulness in your sexuality, you can try to reduce the unbearable element of it to a minimum.

Perhaps this is a simpler way to show why God would prefer that we avoid drawn or animated porn, or arousal through abstractions.

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I realized that I should clarify exactly why I thought that the God of MSLN wouldn't want to lust after humans.

Lust is a sin in the Bible, and so the God of the Bible can't lust and would feel a kind of psychic "shear" from his omnisubjective experience of our lust.

But what about in the case of non-Biblical MSL? MSL begins from a fairly limited set of starting assumptions. Does an aversion to lust follow from them?

Sexual desire can involve (always involves?) some unbearability. Any sexual desire that involves unbearability is something God can't bear for all time, and is illegitimate.

Is there something wrong with desiring another person in a sexual way, if there is no unbearability to it? Well, are there any qualia of "I-have-to-have-this" when we look at someone we sexually desire? If so, is there anything wrong with us "having-to-have" someone? If we have to have someone (or some experience of them or with them), are we putting them (or it) higher than Legitimacy? That sounds true.

God has to put Legitimacy higher than anything else. This is a reason why the Son has to make the sincere psychological motion of letting himself die -- and go through with it -- so as to put it ahead of his own life. By being legitimate in that way, the Son validates Legitimacy, allowing for existence.

So God feels psychic shear whenever we make anything into an idol. I think usually or always when we have to have something, it can crowd out all other competitors in our minds in certain moments, including God.

From a simantist perspective, or that of the original person, it may well be that God views us as his children. The fundamental unit of reality is not experience bodies, or hedonic calculators, or even conscious Law, but rather persons. There is a "thickness" to being a person which includes family relationships, perhaps. Being a father may be something primal, may not just be a technicality of being biological. And, the inappropriateness of incest may be deeper than simply being something recommended by biology or culture. Biology and culture make poor gods, but it does make sense that they could reflect some of God's ideal design. The notion that power imbalances can make sexual relationships inappropriate may be a Godly one and not just a feature of our current culture (it sounds convincing to me, for what that's worth). In many respects, God is much more powerful than we are.

Having run through all this, perhaps some sexual desire for another human remains that does not stress God at all to "overfeel". But, in my limited experience (n = 1), that covers most or perhaps all of it.

In that case, other than those who are truly asexual, we all stress God, in the course of living life. (To be fair to sexuality, there are other ways we do, like anger, or any of the non-sexual sins.) Maybe there are ways for us to not stress God so much.

I'm not sure I've exhausted all the possible reasons why God would prefer not to lust after us, and there may well be good objections to this that I haven't thought of, but for the sake of getting this post done, I will say that's my case.

Epiconcept

Saying negative things about having sex is not the most popular thing to do these days, and I can understand that saying "the lustful aspect of sex is inherently bad and even if we can have unlustful (or less lustful) sex it might be weird for God" might sound like a harmful thing to some people.

We can't bear to think that we aren't seeking the truth or in touch with the truth, so we try to bend what people say the truth is so that we can feel like the truth says something that works for us and our needs. We don't accept this way of thinking in the realms of science and technology (at least in principle), but we do in the realms of politics and religion, which we seem to think are designed by us or for us. I think that the facts of God are the facts, and that God was not designed by us, for us. But I can understand that some facts cause harm, in the real-world of people trying to "install" them in their lives.

I think that truths which are poorly epiconcepted can certainly be harmful and to an extent it's my responsibility to try to epiconcept them better. I don't know of a way of expressing the truth in this that will never cause harm to anyone. I think that it can do good for the people who should hear it, and I would guess that most people who read this blog would be the sort to read random, potentially harmful ideas and not come to (too much or too-permanent) harm.

Maybe with a lot of my posts, I would leave things be and not try really hard to make what I'm saying safe, but sexuality is such a sensitive issue and so worked into our bodies and our current culture, that I think it's worth getting into that here.

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Shame is a biological and cultural construct that is not necessarily what God wants you to feel. It may seem to motivate holiness, but there are better ways to become holy.

Humans like to say that you are how you appear on the outside. This way, they can hold you to account for your behavior, so that their lives can go better. There is some validity to this. But a lot of what you do reflects what you are and not who you are, or some kind of spirit that has come over you. Humans have power over other humans psychologically, but they are less valid than God. God sees you for who you are, and cares about who you are, not your physical nature or what has come over you.

It can be hard to tell the difference sometimes between who you are and what you are. Maybe you could try harder to resist the spirits that possess you. Maybe sometimes you should. But what is clear is that you are not automatically the same as whatever you do, and it is possible that your sexuality is a thing that is tacked onto you, and not something that is essentially you.

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If you think you have harmed God, you might feel a lot of guilt. Your guilt feelings themselves are felt by God and are inherently negative. If they lead you to repent, or some other valuable change, they are worth feeling. But otherwise, no. You don't need to feel guilt over what you don't really have control over. It is important to try to do the right thing in the cases where it's really up for grabs (where you can succeed, as opposed to not having a real chance, due to what you are). Satan can use guilt feelings against you, which is something to consider.

What's really important is who you are in the end, not what or even who you are now. The present matters only to the extent that it feeds into who you are in the end. The present is important, but not the only period of time. God wants to help reclothe you with a better nature, if you will accept it.

Runners run better when they look ahead of them, even to the farthest horizon possible, rather than looking back. Looking at the pavement is necessary sometimes to avoid tripping, but the far horizon is a better place to look if you can.

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Your body is like your parents. Both your body and your parents were handed down to you. Ideally you honor your parents, even though there are aspects to them that aren't trustworthy. Your body is the same way. You can love your parents, and your body, overall, even if there are aspects to them that are untrustworthy.

The appearance of a human body can tempt people to lust. It's up to them to not give in, but it makes their lives harder when they have to experience that. Lusting after a body disrespects it, as well as hating it because it can be tempting.

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Look at sex not as negative or positive, but as a mixed thing.

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To a large extent, our ability to comply with God's wishes with regard to sexuality is limited, because our bodies are automatically sexual in ways we do not choose. God can give us new bodies which enable us to obey.

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The point of talking about sin and about harm to God is to love God, by turning against sin and ceasing to harm God -- especially, to someday become the person who loves God completely and does not sin or harm God at all.

Sexuality is not always the most morally relevant thing to consider. In some moments it can be very much the most morally relevant thing to consider. In other moments, there are other things that are more important. Some actions or attitudes (sexual or not) can have far-reaching negative consequences. Others don't. It's good to make sure you do what is really important, and avoid what it is really important to avoid, first, and after that worry about less important things. Sometimes sexual sin is not the most important problem to deal with, and dealing with it should be put off until later.

Hopefully in some sense we are all growing in moral resources and thus over time can afford to pay for more good actions and get further and further into "diminishing returns". In other words, as you grow as a person, you can deal with (and thus are potentially responsible for) subtler things. It's like what happens when you know someone for a long time and have given them all the gifts that they most urgently needed, and now are finding more and more subtle or small ways to add to how you help them.

Avoiding sin in such a way that you don't love God is more undesirable to God, and more dangerous, than trying to love him as best as you can but having a hard time controlling what you do, feel, think, etc. The latter can be destructive to others and yourself, and can give God pain, but the former is more likely to lead you to hardening and to exuding a spirit that tempts people to harden themselves.

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This is a basic attempt to epiconcept "omnisubjective sexuality". I don't know that it's the best that could be made. A really high-quality epiconcepting is done by people, not by words. In other words, in the context of a friendship, some difficult concepts can be made trust-able. Or, perhaps if two people who are married take this post seriously, they can help to develop an approach to sexuality together which is considerate of God -- maybe they have to come up with some of the aspects or practices of that themselves, and need each other to fully realize the epiconcept of this post.

I can't offer any of this, except the usual for a blog post, which is to offer to reply to comments on the post.

But I thought I should mention that epiconcepting can go farther than just a "disembodied" text.

Some Biblical Reasons to Think Sex was not Original to / Ideal in Creation

This post goes along with Omnisubjective Sexuality and will make more sense if you read that one.

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Do we have any Biblical reason to think that the sex act might not have been part of God's original design? (These are some quick thoughts. As usual, the real answer to a question like this is to read the whole Bible with these questions in mind, and as usual, I like that thought. I am not planning to make sexuality a foregrounded theme in my Bible commentary, but I expect to maybe capture more of the Biblical picture about sexuality there, than I do here.)

The Genesis accounts of creation and Fall (ch. 1 - 3) are a natural place to look. Adam and Eve aren't mentioned as having had sex until after leaving the garden of Eden (ch. 4). No proof that they didn't in the garden, but nothing that overturns the hypothesis that they didn't.

It does seem like God always intended women to bear children. But maybe no sex act would have been required for it. Maybe that sounds like a raw deal hedonically but apparently originally God didn't want childbirth to hurt as badly. (A poll: "Women: would you prefer A) childbirth that doesn't hurt very much but nobody has sex or B) the way things are now?". Or ask men if they would give up sex so that women had only mild pain in childbirth.) Maybe initiating the process of bringing new life has to be addictive and intensely pleasurable if childbirth hurts really badly (and if life becomes so bad that sometimes you'd rather not do all the work of populating the earth).

Some more verses that easily come to mind are the ones where Jesus is talking to the Sadducees about marriage in the Resurrection. Matthew 22:

23 On that day Sadducees (those who say that there is no resurrection) came to him. They asked him, 24 saying, "Teacher, Moses said, 'If a man dies, having no children, his brother shall marry his wife and raise up offspring for his brother.' 25 Now there were with us seven brothers. The first married and died, and having no offspring left his wife to his brother. 26 In the same way, the second also, and the third, to the seventh. 27 After them all, the woman died. 28 In the resurrection therefore, whose wife will she be of the seven? For they all had her."

29 But Jesus answered them, "You are mistaken, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God. 30 For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like God's angels in heaven. 31 But concerning the resurrection of the dead, haven't you read that which was spoken to you by God, saying, 32 'I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?' God is not the God of the dead, but of the living."

A careful (or adversarial) Bible student would try to figure out exactly what Jesus means by "not knowing the Scriptures" and "the power of God". My guess is that he could be saying "look in Isaiah and other passages in the Scriptures that talk about the Resurrection" and "of course God could raise people from the dead, and also, of course he could figure out a way to make the Mosaic Law work with his overall plan of salvation". This seems like kind of an obvious and basic way to read this, but I can imagine someone finding some kind of other way to read the passage, based on other intepretations of "not knowing the Scriptures" and "the power of God".

(I think some Christians think of the Resurrection as being the same as heaven, but the New Wine/MSLN understanding is that it is the same as the Millennium.)

Jesus' solution to the problem of multiple marriages in the Resurrection is to say that in the Resurrection, people don't marry, nor are given in marriage, because they are like the angels. There is more to investigate here: any clues from the Old Testament? Or from Second Temple Judaism? But, absent a rigorous search, just looking at this passage, it looks like there is something about angels that makes them different from humans. Humans will be changed into a different form that works differently from what we we are now. Perhaps we will have bodies of a new kind, unlike those we have on earth. It seems likely that angels have different bodies than humans. So, those bodies may not be capable of marriage.

Is marriage a bodily thing? (Or a lustful thing?) To the extent that it is not, isn't it, at it's most intense, a warm and familial friendship? (Or a particularly true one?) Do we think of such relations as "sexual"? The Biblical understanding seems to to have been that marriage is an automatic consequence of having sex, or even that having sex is the physical act which begins a marriage ("the two become one flesh"). So that serial casual sex is a string of jarringly brief marriages, accompanied by adultery and/or divorce. Does it seem like that to us? Not to many of us, but maybe that's how it feels to God. But then, it would be strange to think of marriage as only being the union of flesh.

So maybe there are two kinds of marriage: the exclusive, fleshly marriage which it may seem from the Bible is shared between (in the phrase used as a slogan or resoundingly, in politics) "one man and one woman", and the not-necessarily-exclusive, spiritual marriage which is indistinguishable from a warm, familial, true friendship? Perhaps given the limitations of time on earth, many of us could only have a maximally warm, familial, and true friendship with one person, but in the Resurrection, or in heaven, there might be time to develop multiple such friendships to their full, if that is impossible on earth. And also there may only be a few people with whom one can completely scale (and thus escape) the hierarchy of betrayal, (something which the non-fleshly aspect of marriage seems to aspire to, which overlaps a lot with having a maximally warm, familial, and true friendship) due to some people being compatible with you on more levels than others. But in the Resurrection, or in heaven, there may be more time to find the ones that exist.

(I seem to remember that in the Resurrection (in the Old Testament), there is reference to children being born. So I suppose, in keeping with the above, that women could bear children in the Resurrection without having had sex. (Or men could as well?) Does this mean that angels can have children, or do have children? What would angelic/Resurrection childbirth look like? Some interesting thoughts.)

Life Scams; Nice Maturity

From my notes:

Life scams: How the motions of life, of your life story, can scam you.

I'm not sure how many there are. But here is one:

You feel great in youth but have problems: the opposite sex / romance, not being respected, being trolled by friends/foes/emotions, lack of confidence, lack of outward success.

Then as you struggle to resolve all those things, you gradually or in obvious phases or moments come to not feel great. Maybe you enter a time where life is terrible. But, somehow or other many of your characteristically youthful problems resolve, with increased experience or being "broken open" by life stresses. Now, the temptation is to settle on this nice life, follow your instincts and pleasures, and become shallow, forget God to a large extent and not be altruistic. Your natural ability to be serious, to will, to long for somewhere other than "here", is broken down by stress, and that broken-downness allows you to enjoy social validation, a kind of "peace", health, well-being, and pleasure. You can be an ordinary human, and no one will object.

Somehow, you have to see the temptation and spiritual attack in this, see what it would be easy to see as good as dangerous and mixed. You may have to remember to have courage to restore yourself to seriousness, quietness, and another kind of "peace".

The scam works by beating you into a place where you "just want to be happy" and then offering you a way to be happy by giving you what you had longed for for years.

(It gives you some of what you had longed for for years.)

Storing Sound

How does God store sound?

Could the sounds be loops? In that case, how would God remember the beginning of the loop after it had passed? It would cease to exist.

Could sound be something that can be sliced up into static samples, like with visual information? We tend to think of sound as inherently temporal, while there can be such a thing as "still" images. From a physical science point of view (from that kind of "poetry"), there is no such thing as a still image (if things haven't changed from when I picked up my basic knowledge of light). Basically, all images that we perceive are caused by flows of electrons, whether we take them to be particles or waves. So without time passing, they wouldn't exist.

However, I think it is very possible to perceive a still image. Maybe it can only be perceived in time, but the image itself does not change.

I think the same goes for tactile sensations, and I'm pretty sure also for smell and taste. But perhaps it is not as true for hearing?

If I listen to a pure, simple sine wave, that seems pretty static to me. So maybe God stores all auditory experience data as sine waves, and then does synthesis to make our experiences of sound, with whatever complexity there is in them.

It occurred to me as I thought about this that if you synthesize sounds, you have to have information guiding how you synthesize it. That information could be stored in some other medium, perhaps visually. Then it occurred to me that soundtracks to films are encoded visually. All you need is some way to decode the light patterns into the audio that we experience.

This post satisfies me for now that God can store audio, even if the storage medium has to be static.

Value of People (Especially of Annihilated People)

Epistemic status: provisional. I sense that I might not have thought through all its consequences, and it might break something else I've written.

Value values what is valuable. Legitimacy finds legitimate what is legitimate. God finds you valuable depending on how legitimate (in tune with him) you are.

But isn't it true that God finds sinners valuable, even though they sin? Isn't there a sense in which God values you just as you are?

God values the personal and the non-personal differently. Because you are a person, you unify experience into one thing (like a poem, or like how Berkeley's "minds" draw his "ideas" into one thing, themselves (in my terms, into one experience body)). God is not an experience, but rather is a person, and he relates to persons as his own kin.

Experiences don't have histories. They are part of histories, but do not have histories of their own. But persons have histories. An experience is not something that should have been or could have been other than itself. Sometimes it would have been better for a different experience to have existed in its place, but in itself it is what it is. But people can be beings which should have or could have been other than themselves.

Speaking positively, God values the "anti-sin" in you, the ways in which your "position" or "velocity" is aligned with him. These are contents of you or facts about you, but not you yourself. I think they are a promising thing to him, like a preliminary negotiation between you and him, where you take steps that help him believe that you will come all the way to him.

But God doesn't value the sin in you. These are also contents of you or facts about you. If you completely identify with the sin in you by hardening, you become incompatible with him and then in a way he doesn't value you -- your days are numbered. Everything is at least somewhat valuable as long as it exists, but its future might be taken away from it.

But for those who have not decisively chosen to hold onto evil in them, he considers them worth keeping in existence indefinitely, and forever by default -- that is, valuable. Value is reckoned by a person, and that person hopes, when possible.

I can't remember right now if MSL commits me to saying that people who are hardened will be punished for their sins. But it makes sense from a Biblical perspective, according to the New Wine System, which is the Biblical source of MSL. Given the possibility that those who are hardened will be punished for their sins, while they are being punished, they are still valued. In both MSL and the New Wine System, the hardened are finally annihilated. Once they are annihilated, they no longer exist and thus in a sense lack value. Except that God remembers who they were before they chose to be one with the sin in them, and in order to maximally love, God mourns the loss of those persons who existed before they effectively killed themselves by the act of hardening. Part of who you are is your essence, the concept or memory of who and what you are or were, or could have been, not just the existing reality of who and what you are. So that essence remains in God's memory, whatever in you existed apart from sin. Even if you can't exist, God loves as much of you as he can.

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Does the essence of a person really exist? It seems to point to them. Is there a unicorn in the street right outside? When I look out the window, I observe no evidence of one. But I have the idea of a unicorn in the street. Is it like the unicorn exists in essential form and just needs one more property (existence) added to it, to make it real? Or is it that the unicorn does not exist unless it's actually "out there"? And I only have the idea of the unicorn.

My laptop is real and essential to my experience of writing this paragraph. I have a concept of it, so it has an "essence" in the philosophical sense. If I turn my back on my laptop and think about it, does that thought refer to the actual laptop? What if someone vaporizes my laptop while I'm turned around? Does it still refer to my laptop then? My intuition is that the thought really does connect me with something real, but then, that thought may be incorrect (it may be the case that my laptop lacks the property of existence, for instance).

I haven't gotten to the bottom of this in the last two paragraphs, and I mainly wrote them to show that there's something complicated and confusing here. There may be an answer, but I'll leave it unsolved for now. But, supposing that there is no answer, does this affect God's love for us, specifically with regard to his mourning those of us who have hardened themselves?

One way to think is that God must see things, if possible, in the way that enables him to love the most. If possible, he must see the annihilated as in some sense existing, even if they lack the property of existence.

In order to maximally value something, you have to feel its loss as much as possible when it's gone. In order to do that, you have to see it as being real as much as possible, to understand as fully as possible what might have been, but which cannot be. In order to make the lost real to himself, God must see them as still existing, in the way that we can find an essence to be real, even if in some sense it lacks the property of existence.

In order for God to be legitimate, he has to value and thus love as much as possible. He can't bear whatever is unbearable in who we are or were, but other than that, he keeps us in existence in his consciousness forever.

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I want to say that, but I still feel like there is an unsolved problem.

Maybe I can partly solve the problem of existence vs. essence given above. I exist as an experience body, but also as facts and memories in the mind of God. Most of who and what I am is not accessible to me right this instant, but comes out in the right circumstances. Until then, God keeps track of it. So how much of me is anything other than thoughts and experiences in the mind of God?

In my experience body, I have some free will. That "I" in my current experience body which has some free will intuitively contains many things I'm not currently conscious of. And that is my personal unity. If that unity ceases, and my free will ceases, then "I" no longer exist. But who and what I am remains. They were part of "I" but now are simply the contents of God's mind. While they are part of "me", they have a certain inviolability to them. God can't force them to be legitimate, without destroying the unity of "I". So if I insist on holding onto sin, God will have to destroy me someday. Then, he can at least get rid of the sins that my unity was holding onto and be able to resolve his psychological state.

If I am annihilated, I exist in the form of memories, but my unity is gone. So maybe it's like I have my essence, and it fails to have the property of "free-will-and-unity", which may be what "existence" is for a person. In that case, no one can cease to exist, and when, in a theological context, we say "annihilated", we really should mean "has had the property of personal existence permanently removed".

Though an annihilated person ceases to exist in one sense, the person that they might have been remains in existence. It's sort of like saying a poet could have written a poem, given the inputs to their life, and who or what they were. They died, but the poems they wrote could be remembered, or poems could be constructed from what is remembered of their life. (This could make a writing prompt for living poets -- the poems that Shelley could have written if he had lived to old age, for instance.) But the tragedy is that the poet (Shelley, perhaps) never could be the one to write the poem. The poem could be made out of them, but they wouldn't be the one to make it. (But a living poet, unannihilated, can become the author of whatever poems are inherent in who and what they are.)

The contents of a person are like the poems inside a poet. (Poets contain their poems as well as other contents.) This can remain and have value, even if the person is annihilated. The contents of a person speak of the person.

A person can relate to an annihilated person. The concept does refer to something. Perhaps to a dead person, and not really one that does not exist. The dead person exists, and is mourned, because they are no longer alive.

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If a person's "spiritual body" exists after the second death, why can't God give it a new "unity-and-free-will"? If he did, would there be any meaningful way in which the person died? I tend to think that "unity-and-free-will"s don't have any inherent memory. That is stored in who and what a person is, which we have said survive the second death, at least all the elements that are legitimate.

It could be that while this post has focused on the "ontology" of consciousness (where everything is made out of experience-bodies), what we really are, and what we really experience, is "ordinary". We exist as persons, not as weirdly disconnected pieces of experience. Talking about humans as being made out of memories and experience bodies is just an odd, scientific way of talking, which gives us some idea of what we are. Our ordinary consciousness is more reliable than such "poetry", and is the starting place for all "scientific" or "ontological" theorizing. So it is we who are at stake, and we are the ones who must turn to God, ourselves.

To reconcile the ontology of consciousness and the ordinary in this area, I guess I could say that God, given his nature, wants us to exist as persons, or even can't help but process consciousness such that we are really persons. Thus it is impossible for him to simply ignore the sin in us and destroy it if we have not ourselves turned away from it, and then put the "spiritual bodies" of us into a new unity. Instead, the "spiritual bodies" are left dead, being only memories and "might-have-been". He can destroy some sinful habits, perhaps, which are illegitimate but only part of "what" we are, but not the sin that is in "who" we are. This enables us to love.

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I found this post somewhat challenging to write. I might have been able to express it more concisely, but I think leaving more material in is a representation of the difficulty in writing it. (This is not what it means in every case that I write longer, less concise posts.)

What is the "takeaway" from this post? One thought is that I now wish that "annihilationism" could be called something else. I do want to identify as an annihilationist, if that's the way to distinguish myself from being a universalist or from being a believer in eternal conscious torment. But otherwise, the above makes me think that those who are irrevocably lost are not "annihilated", but rather "die". Death is an unconscious state (contra eternal conscious torment) but is still an ending of a person's life (contra universalism). The language of "second death" is good -- but something that ECT proponents also consider to be part of their thought system. So it doesn't make a clear distinction against their view. Maybe "unconscious second death" (USD?) I guess that's okay. Maybe I will start using that, in cases where "annihilationism" might be misleading.

Overall in this post, I guess what I found challenging was the question: if something no longer exists, how can we relate to it?

If something changes, isn't it the case that some feature of it no longer exists? Yet, we can be aware that that feature used to exist. In that sense it still exists, but when it "ceases to exist", it changes. Maybe the word for that is that it "dies" (or "dies the second death"). Maybe potential things already exist, but change when they "come into existence". Maybe the word for how potential things already exist is that they have been "conceived" (or "conceived in the world of thought").

Otherwise, I would say that the post is about how God values us as much as possible, keeping whatever is good in us, valuing us more as we become more valuable, but still valuing us in that we could have been more, or could become more. Whatever in us insists on keeping illegitimacy in reality must change or we must die the second death. If we die the second death, our "spiritual bodies" remain, although now dead. The people that we were and could have been are parts of, or identical to, our spiritual bodies, and God will mourn those bodies, those past and potential people which can never exist in themselves. In this way, God can value and love to a greater extent, loving someone enough to mourn them if they die.