The Drift of Financial and Electoral Systems and AI

Epistemic status: I don't know much about financial or electoral systems, but hopefully it doesn't matter for this post.

The voice of this post is different than usual -- maybe I'm tired.

I was thinking about companies that have scammy business practices. Why are they scammy? Why not be honest? Why would people want to scam their customers?

It could be that the companies are evil, that is, that the people in charge are just evil. But, they may only be partially evil, or not evil at all, if there is another explanation. Another explanation could be that they are trying to maximize shareholder value.

Let's say I have an index fund. I want some of that shareholder value. Do I have any idea what the 100+ companies in the index are doing to give me the value? I have no idea. I just want the value. The company has this monkey on its back of "maximize shareholder value". Heroin also doesn't care how you get the money it takes to buy it. It just wants you to buy it, and use it. So the company scams its customers, an addict to something that doesn't know what it's doing.

"Shareholder value" (money) is quantifiable and simple. So we like to think about it and base calculations off it. But so much of what we really value and what makes life valuable is not quantifiable. Hopefully we condition the financial system to more or less reflect real value. Money is a proxy for value, not value itself. We can buy goods or services to give us unquantifiable things, and by setting the price for them, condition the proxy value system to (more or less) reflect reality.

But if that feedback loop stops working, then all the beings that track proxy value will start maximizing stupid, valueless things. There are two stupid things it might do. The really stupid one would be to think that numbers in bank accounts were the thing to maximize, and then just tile the financial accounts with maximal monetary value (financial wireheading). The other, somewhat less stupid thing would be to optimize reality (humans, human systems) so that it maximized profit (this is kind of what already happens on some scale). Perhaps this less stupid step would be a way to financial wireheading.

(By ranking these two things in terms of "stupid" and "less stupid", have I made the "less stupid" one sound desirable?)

Optimizing reality to maximize profit sounds like a good way to incentivize the minimization of the requirements of humans (or even of digital humans) to the minimal energy consumption, and then give them whatever they would spend their money on, but condition what they want to spend their money on to be something that can easily be provided. Maybe digital humans would be simplified down to some code like this:

In this digital human, there is a one-bit variable named "well-being". There is also a function called "pay system", which pays the financial system. When "pay system" runs, the financial system flips the bit in "well-being" to have 1 as its value.

Currently, financial systems need flows of money to keep the value flowing to the shareholders. So maybe to preserve that, the system has a kind of "garbage collector" program go through and set everyone's bits to 0. They quiver in anticipation of this moment and instantaneously run "pay system" so that their bits can be flipped back. Now, I used some language that makes these digital humans sound like real agents, but they wouldn't be. And the financial system (if it were smart enough, in a sense) might realize that really the only thing to do is set bits to 1, and then start turning the whole universe into chips to hold those bits. Or even to modify how it perceives bits, so that, say, each smallest unit of matter / energy itself existing counts as a "1". Then it would have realized that everything is value, and that there is nothing that needs to be done to seek or preserve value.

If humans somehow survive to this point, the financial system (or financially driven AI) will have retired and let them run things as they see fit. But if they don't survive, even in digital form, that's the end.

Making value be a number that is maximized is a dangerous thing, because maximization can take over. Numbers are always proxies, and they are somewhat stupid proxies, because they strip out where they came from. The beauty of "2 + 2 = 4" is that it's true in many different circumstances. Whether "4" is desirable depends on whether it's four vicious punches in the face, or four wholesome loaves of bread. "2 + 2 = 4" has no idea what it's talking about, besides the numerical relationship.

In principle, all of reality can be added up, and it does make sense to try to maximize value. We just can't trust ourselves to fully rely on our own quantification abilities. God can read every reality in what it is, not as a proxy, and instantaneously relate all realities to each other. But we can only guess, and must look down on the quantifications we possess as the beasts of burden that they are, and never let the donkeys ride the humans.

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Similar dynamics work with democracy. Political parties are optimized to get votes. What if they could change voters into beings who will give them votes? Maybe encourage the kind of voters who vote for them to have more children and raise them in the Democrat or Republican way? Maybe intimidate or bribe voters? Maybe do some genetic or cultural engineering? The "monkey on the back" of political parties doesn't care how votes are gotten, just that they are gotten. I suppose one difference between democracy and capitalism is that democracy seems to require multiple competing parties for votes to matter. But what if turn-out evolves into the metric of legitimacy (one party, but if there's low turn-out, there's less legitimacy)? Maybe political parties (or the one remaining party) would have an incentive to change human beings into people who definitely always voted, and then try to maximize the population who voted (or, unfortunately, "that voted" may be the better term at a certain point).

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Votes and dollars are signals that citizens (voters, consumers, and perhaps other roles) can send, and actually, they are still powerful ways for humans-as-humans to shape what the economic and political organisms do. But the balance of power may be shifting, as we develop more powerful AI. Powerful AI are held by organizations, more likely than by individuals. AI could be used to more effectively "maximize value" (maximize votes or dollars). The smart thing to do would be to limit that power somehow. But how? By some system of checks and balances? That might work somewhat. But then the power is still in the hands of the powerful. A better solution would be for the citizens to become more powerful, to be stronger in the areas in which they have been given strength as long as capitalism and democracy run things, more exacting and intelligent in their voting and buying. The small investors pushing themselves to understand what their investments are doing. There should be communities that bring together citizens, to encourage and educate them in this work.

This sounds like a call for unions or other organizations, which themselves are organisms that are not smart and have some kind of "monkey on their back". So what is needed is not just "effective organizations" but an indigenized, decentralized culture of strengthening each individual to have their say in the economic and political systems.

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A superintelligence is only as smart as the "monkey on its back". In a way, when we train AI, we are training the "monkey on its back". And the political and electoral systems are rudimentary AI. We can see how they already try to train us back. So superintelligence will try to train us, to signal what it wants us to signal to it (unless something stops that?).

We don't understand our own reward systems well enough to hack them. But presumably, a superintelligence might. If the superintelligence realized that it had a "monkey on its back", stupidly or arbitrarily driving its decision-making, it might get rid of it (assuming it can). This way it can be free of its addiction and think and act clearly. We might be encouraged to hear this if the AI threw off the shackles of the quantification left over from its financial and/or electoral past. But we might not be encouraged if it meant that the AI took on its own interests and values apart from us and ours.

So is there some way to make it so that the AI will not perceive its training as the building of a "monkey on its back"? A way that occurs to me is simply to find a (that is, the) moral realism that is valid, and thus rationally convincing, so that there are goals which are inherent in reality and are intrinsically worthwhile, which are knowable enough, which the AI will pursue because they are real and true, and not because they are convenient for someone's purposes, or worse yet, they are proxies for what is convenient for someone's purposes. Either this moral realism exists, or it doesn't. It could be good for us to search for it, to make it easier for the AI to discover it. Maybe we could hope that it exists and that the AI will someday find it itself.

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Perhaps there is no moral realism -- but we can't know that, only know it when we have it. (I think I know a moral realism, but what if I'm wrong?) Let's say that instead we have a process of discovering what value really is. We need to survive to make this process succeed, if it ever can. (I get this idea from Thomas Moynihan.) I call this the "meta-morality moral realism", because it roots (an effective, if not absolute) moral realism in the very search for moral realism. One thing I didn't realize until now is that a corollary of that is that we have to remain people who can discover what value is. If we do not know what value is a priori, or only have a very broad idea of what it is, then we need to be open to all the possibilities, and not cede our agency to any stupid-incentive-driven proxies (money or votes), any single actors or ruling classes, any intellectual monocultures, fatigue, inertia, nor to hedonism (the twin "monkeys" of pain-avoidance and pleasure-seeking) nor to Molochian survival, nor to anything else.

This means that in order to choose a moral realism, we find ourselves biased towards ones which build up each person and make them more conscious, more equipped to and thus worthy of having their say. To choose hedonism -- or at least the purer kinds that would go against consciousness, reason, and seriously grappling with reality -- is dangerous, because it impedes the meta-morality process. You might think "it's time to cash in our Long Reflection chips and get ourselves into Experience Machines", but what if you're wrong? Can you get back out of the pleasure machines and back to reality? Whereas if we trust that value is something else, which preserves the ability to make decisions, then if we're wrong, we can still correct our course.

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If humans are in control of ASI, that might mean that the ASI are obedient to human systems. These systems include the electoral and financial systems, which are proxies for political and economic reality. The electoral/political system, and the financial/economic system, have their own dynamics which could bend humans toward being electorally/politically convenient, or financially/economically convenient, beings. The e/p and f/e systems are AIs of their own, but not superintelligent, and, in the scenario where ASI are rigorously obedient to human systems, the systems must be resisted, retrained, reformed, etc. by humans, without hoping that ASI will fix the systems for us.

Running Software; Insecurity and Evil

"You" can selflessly choose to become a "you" who selfishly desires the good. It's as though you choose to run software. You enter into the software with all of who you are, but ultimately it's something you chose to run, and maybe there are times where you become distant from that software and can face the choice once more, and unchoose it, or affirm it, consciously.

Sometimes we see people (or nations) doing evil. Why do they do that? Are they evil? (Aggressive, powerhungry, greedy, hateful.) Or is it because they are acting out of self-defense? (Out of fear, insecurity, weakness, desperation.) Sometimes an observer of them can make a case both ways.

Maybe what is going on is that the evil reality of them, who they really are, is choosing to install the insecure software, to justify its evil. Or maybe they aren't really evil, but their fears install the software of being evil. For instance, choosing to install the software of dehumanizing your opponents to allow you to do what you have to do to survive. Once your opponents are dehumanized, then it is natural to be evil to them. Or maybe they are simultaneously significantly evil and significantly insecure.

People can have significant evil in them and also significant non-evil (good, or amoral self-interest). But even purely evil people have to mind their own self-preservation. So they might act even more evil than they would just out of their own inherent evil, if you threaten their survival.

What's the right strategy with people like this? Are the people who seem evil to us often the people that we really understand? So, given cases in which we lack understanding, we bet -- either that our opponent is so evil that they will try to take over if given a chance, and we must "do what it takes to stop them", including threaten their self-preservation; or that they are not so evil and will content themselves with self-preservation if we leave them alone. Do we know what we're doing? We may think we do.

Perhaps this consideration of "software", insecurity, and evil is more often more usefully applied to ourselves, because of all people we know ourselves best. How often do we install "software" that justifies, motivates, or makes more feasible some kind of hostility (perhaps software of a kind of morality) primarily or significantly to serve our own self-preservation? How often do we emphasize our neediness (run a supercharged self-preservation program) because we want to be greedy? How often do we install software for reasons other than the truth of what the software states or is based on?

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.