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.
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