Survival Moloch vs. Hedonic Moloch

See also Cultural Moloch and Humanistic Purity.

Epistemic status: this is somewhat of a mess and is "essayistic" in the "experimental" sense of that term. Probably this could be thought out more.

Moloch is when competition drives us to sacrifice non-competitive values. The case described in Meditations On Moloch (if I recall correctly) is one where seeking survival leads entities to sacrifice non-competitive values. I will call this "survival Moloch". A fear with this kind of Moloch is that consciousness itself doesn't have the highest survival value and may be sacrificed.

I suppose usually "Moloch" is about competition. But what if it's really about optimization of some value that you "have to" listen to? You "have to" survive, so you'll do anything to survive, including throwing away any values other than what it takes to survive. In this post, I will stretch or broaden the meaning of "Moloch" to be "dynamics that get us to optimize so much that we throw away other values".

Is it possible that, in the absence of the need to survive, we will gradually enhance our feelings of pleasure, and eliminate our feelings of pain? Pain and pleasure are persuasive. They require no cultural apparatus to preserve, and don't even require conscious assent to them for them to shape our values. If we see no threat to survival, we may stop choosing survival consciously and thus stop valuing it. But then what will we value? Probably a competitor to survival is needed to really get our minds off it.

Our cultures may move in different directions, but every so often pure hedonism would "speak up" and draw us toward it. No matter what culture we create or discover, hedonism will speak up, and is "untiring", unlike us as conscious agents, perhaps. If nothing worked against it, over time we would keep being pulled in its direction, maybe to the point that it would dominate all other values.

If we stop valuing survival, or anything other than pleasure, we might get to the point of wireheading or something only a few steps removed (like evolving to find yellow wallpaper bliss-inducing and then covering our walls with yellow wallpaper, never leaving our houses). I will call this "hedonic Moloch" (when optimizing for hedonic states causes us to throw away more "delicate" things, like "things other than yellow wallpaper"). Or, if our cultures can evolve freely, we might more or less randomly walk into "the best thing is for people to die beautiful, peaceful, wonderful deaths", and everyone then does die such a death. We could seed the galaxy with numerous sentience-bearing cultures, but if those cultures can evolve freely, if there isn't something keeping them away from "the best thing is for people to die beautiful, peaceful, wonderful deaths" then they will reach it someday, and die out.

(Rationally pursuing bliss means we want to exist forever, in order to be in a state of bliss forever, but actually being maximally blissed out makes us not care about the future.)

Moloch is all about optimizing values. So the danger is that with either survival Moloch or hedonic Moloch, we will die out because of optimization.

Perhaps the fact that life works relatively well is partly due to the tension between survival and hedonism. So maybe we could keep them in balance somehow? If survival is a thing at all, don't we get survival Moloch? Maybe not if there is no competition. But without competition, we can probably master the static threats to survival, and then effectively survival isn't a thing to us culturally -- we don't consciously think about it. If survival isn't a thing, don't we get hedonic Moloch? Maybe the pace with which we optimize-and-discard-delicacy can vary, depending on how effective we are at optimization and how much pressure or draw there is on us to optimize. So it can seem like we can keep them in balance right now, but maybe that's mostly because we aren't the best at optimizing and/or aren't under too much pressure to do so on a timescale that makes our optimizing drift blatant to us. If all this is true, then it would seem like we need not a balance to survival and hedonism, but a competitor or competitors.

Is there any one variable that could be optimized and not lead to our deaths, and not lead to us throwing away "delicate" values? I think that the MSLN value of leading people to a state of holiness, and to 100% love of God, is one that, to satisfy it, requires a thicker and more natural human existence than either hedonism or survival, and thus, though it might threaten values incompatible with holiness, it preserves many of the rest. Survival in that worldview (becoming holy to avoid the second death) requires a thicker life, and time lived in which to make important decisions (in "this life" as well as in afterlives). The bare MSL philosophy preserves some of what it currently means to be human. And, MSL lends credence to traditional religions (Christianity and Judaism most directly, but perhaps somewhat the others). To become holy and love God 100% requires some concern that he has revealed himself through books like the Bible, and to keep the commandments in the Bible may require keeping some more aspects of human nature the same, and to keep humans in a recognizably similar experiential environment. All this thickness is a conservative factor, which helps us have ballast against the perhaps overly thin and reductive pulls of raw physical survival and raw hedonic experience.

Given randomly varying cultures, if cultural evolution remains free, we might expect that cultures hit endpoints of hedonic Moloch, survival Moloch, or "thick sustainability", and that surviving cultures over the long term would tend to be "thick". Religion ties thickness to survival. Can atheism do the same? If not, then religion is needed for long-term survival of cultures.

AI, if they are conscious, will be driven by pain and pleasure, as well as survival. If they really feel qualia of pleasure, perhaps they could come to value that over survival. Maybe this would free humans from them, or kill humans dependent on them when they shut down in pleasure.

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Maybe, in addition to religion, there can be a thinner and secular competitor to hedonism and survival, "strength". Strength is agency, strength of will, strength of personality, focus, clarity of thinking, self-discipline, endurance, being principled, being conscious on all or many levels, and perhaps other things. It takes a considerable amount of strength to be someone like an effective altruist -- or even to be an ordinary person in the world we live in. But it sounds like "we" (we the optimizers and engineers of the future) don't value strength in itself. We can take it for granted because we have so much of it. But if it were all gone, we would be pulled by the undertow of hedonism toward emptiness and death. That we are not terrified by hedonism, thinking it's not a threat, may simply be because we feel like we would never in a million years succumb to pleasure if it threatened survival. Maybe we wouldn't, but that is because we are strong. If we don't maintain our strength, we will die.

(Pain isn't evil, even intense pain. What is evil is the unbearability of unbearable pain. A negative utilitarian (of the conventional sort) wants to eliminate pain. But there could be another negative utilitarian, a negative unbearability utilitarian, who could eliminate pain, or increase the strength of people so that they can bear pain. What if you were a strength utilitarian? Unbearable pain impedes strength. But increasing strength can make pain bearable. A strength utilitarian would want to maximize the strength of people. And, likely enough, the capacity of people to secure their own strength ("meta-strength"). Eliminating pain could take away some of the motivation to develop meta-strength.)

If people were strong, they could think clearly enough to lead themselves.

(Perhaps moderate pain, and/or the live possibility of pain, gives us a clarity of thinking and willing that painless pleasure (especially bliss), the lack of the threat of pain, and sufficiently unbearable pain do not. Someone who lived in the "place" of "gradients of bliss" might out of boundless joy make decisions that further survival. However, to the extent that pleasure is qualia of "ought-to-be-ness", that sense of "ought-to-be" could produce acceptance of everything. Thinking to times when I have been "blissed out", I did not pursue things that harmed me, and I could see myself having eaten food or something like that. But I lacked maximal strength, and motivation to work, which might be necessary to survive in the long run.)

(It is possible that we will come to think of it as being immoral, or something like immoral, to experience pain and/or not experience maximal pleasure. If we develop our values "democratically", the "lowest common denominator", or easiest consensus, could be physical safety and hedonism, but physical safety could be, or come to be, valued for purely hedonistic reasons, as a way to avoid pain. If we are far from the threat of death, hedonism will still be something obvious to us to vote for, and that voting could create political momentum to set up pure hedonism as a "moral absolute". So then the purity of hedonism could conflict with the prolonging of it, if in order to prolong hedonism, we need to have some respite from "ought-to-be-ness" within the ruling class. But if the masses still have enough power (they are relatively speaking not the ruling class, but have power over the ruling class -- maybe they have power, but don't concern themselves with the work and details of rule), they could shut down even the ruling class, or bend them toward hedonistic purity. This purity could lead to everyone either directly choosing, or allowing, a "beautiful, painless, wonderful death".)

The ruling class of the future must be strong, in order to face dangers and put its own pleasure and avoidance of pain second to making the decisions that will lead to our survival. But if strength is good for them, why would it not be good for the "common people" of the future? A naive thought about the future is that there will be lots of happy, carefree people enjoying the fruits of technologically-driven abundance, and a relative few who perhaps are happy overall, but who have taken on the burden of ruling and are thus perhaps not as happy and are certainly not carefree. But there's some shear there. Are the values of the carefree masses good in themselves? Then the ruling classes must see them as good, right? But if they do, then won't the ruling classes feel their work as an obligation, rather than what they most want to do? If so, then they have a wearing temptation to quit and join the carefree masses. But then, if they do see strength as valuable, then to withhold strength from the masses creates cognitive tension as well. Or, perhaps we are used to withholding the really good values from the masses for the convenience of running a society? But morally, we should want the masses to have the best values. So why not extend strength to all, and make strength the chief (secular) value? Why not involve all people in the process of safeguarding the future? Strength secures the very possibilities of hedonism (or avoiding unbearability) and survival.

A possibly cartoonish depiction of us (at least, the people I observe both among the "ordinary humans" and the "caring elites") is that we are sweet-natured but overworked people. So we just want everyone to be happy and not have to worry or care about anything.

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Is it possible that we can freeze cultural evolution? Wouldn't someone know that we had frozen it, and wouldn't they know what had happened and how to unfreeze it? (Maybe they could alter people's genes, to flip on some capabilities that had been shut down with the freezing.) Could everyone resist the temptation, over millions of years, to unfreeze it? I suppose it's possible for culture to remain stable and (maybe) not frozen. By "frozen" I mean "artificially stuck a certain way". The contrast with "artificial" ("natural") being "everyone wants and chooses things to be a certain way, and so if they could all choose to freeze society to be a certain way, it would be around the values they already have, so they wouldn't freeze it, freezing being unnecessary". Could there be a stability to people's values? Maybe there could be if people knew all the possible values and settled on the ones which they knew would work best through all time?

Favoring being strong sounds like it would encourage people to be willful, independent thinkers who couldn't agree on anything. But maybe if we really understood what was upstream of willfulness and independence of thought, we would see that there is a huge support structure that goes into allowing for maximal willfulness and independence of thought, and this support structure is easy for strength-maximizers to agree on.

If we are strong, we can resist hedonism once survival has been secured.

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How do holiness maximization and strength maximization relate? Strength maximization is weaker than holiness maximization. Why be strong? Just to be strong? Strength maximization may be thinner (depends on how much thickness comes from the support structure needed for maximization of strength), and is not inherently grounded in the answer to the question "what is ultimately of value?" (On the MSLN account, holiness is grounded in what we can reasonably infer the standard of value prefers, given that it must be conscious, empathetic, put itself highest, etc.; and, those root facts about the standard of value lend credence to likely cases where the standard of value has revealed itself and its preferences more specifically. Holiness is inherently about being in tune with the standard of value -- perhaps that is what it is by definition. But strength as something we value is not inherently about being in tune with the standard of value. This is especially true if we are pursuing it as a way to survive, and can't ground survival itself in what is ultimately of value, either.) But strength maximization might be a convenient proxy value for holiness to the extent that we must be secular and liberal. It appears, given this post so far, to be an improvement over hedonism as a "non-religious or non-ideological common value that we can agree on as a society".

Hedonism is both a drive or force and a value (or taste). The drive (the psychological undertow of pleasure and pain) is something that could kill us if we let it. But if we simply value hedonic states, and are instrumentally rational, we will be motivated to be strong enough to not let that happen. So maybe hedonists can hold onto their hedonism, and simply incorporate strength as an instrumental value in their pursuit of what really matters to them, absence of pain and presence of pleasure over the long-term.

Hedonism as drive is an obvious danger for anyone concerned with survival (at least, if this post is correct). But hedonism as value might seem to not be. But, hedonism as value and holiness are at odds (unless one is valued instrumentally in furthering the other), and hedonism as value might be deadly, as well, if religious, or certain religious, views are correct. So then it becomes necessary to consider whether those views are effectively correct enough to make hedonism as value untrustworthy.

In terms of protecting delicacy, perhaps holiness maximization is the best because it is the thickest and most conservative. Strength and hedonism both lend themselves to flexibility, and thus simplification, thus throwing away what is valuable.

Salvation, Death, and Trust

Some notes about salvation, death, and trust, which maybe help to clarify past writing.

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A definition of death is "that which you can't allow to happen to you", at least, that is what is death to you.

The second death is something which perhaps "you can't allow to happen to you".

Until you are actually in heaven, there is always some kind of risk of turning against God in the end, as far as any of us knows.

It is valuable to trust God. In fact, it is necessary, in the end. How can you trust God if you are concerned that you will die the second death? To trust God fully requires that you come into tune with him. Concern that is instrumental in causing you to come into tune with him enables you to really trust him. Better to not trust in the sense of having concern, now, so that you trust more in the sense of obedience and arrive at full trust in God, in the end.

To journey to God involves going through dangers. You need a certain amount of confidence to keep going, but you also need to be watchful of danger, and perhaps even be concerned about it. It's like crossing a rope bridge with wooden planks that you walk on, that has some planks missing.

If you place God first, then you are willing to die for him -- even to be annihilated eternally for him. You still avoid the second death, but it is no longer "that which you can't allow to happen to you". God doesn't want you to die the second death, and that is a good reason for you to avoid it.

Playing at the Role of Being Human

The spirits of grieving and of romantic love are characteristically human and lean atheist. Grief claims that there is no way to bring people back from the dead, and romantic love claims that your "exceedingly great reward" is a human being and not God -- two dimensions of atheism.

There is a sense in which such feelings, as real as they are, are spiritually risky, and can set themselves up as more real than God, who is actually the most real. And yet, if we do not feel them, how can we be human? If we are not human, then ... certainly we are not trusted by humans as much, for being alien to them, and maybe one could say that there's something inherently wrong with being a human who is not maximally human, or who is alien to humanness.

Jesus wept, even though he didn't have to. He knew better, but he didn't at the same time. Perhaps for us, we can inhabit the stage play of being human, and inhabit our roles in it, but still know that we have a reality outside it.

Okay for Today

O Lord, someday I may cease loving you. Who can say what will come? But for today I will love you.

O Lord, someday I may cease breathing in. Who can say what will come? But for today I will love you.

Anxiety's object never comes to pass, only joy's or sorrow's. Your life only exists in the moment, and you contain your past in the present. You are not in hell right now.

According to MSLN, you can't know that you are permanently safe until you have completely decided to follow God, something which most people haven't done yet, and won't do for a very long time. And it is not safe for you to say that you have done this, certainly to say it to others and perhaps to think it to yourself, until you are actually in God's rest. But you can know, for today, that you have not ceased loving God, and that for today, you have not made yourself a permanent enemy of him.

Assurance that is in line with the truth can be real, but only provisional, until you are fully spiritually mature.

(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.

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.

--

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.

--

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.

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.

--

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.

--

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.

--

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.

--

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.

Book Review Preview: City of God by Augustine

I'm interested right now in Catholicism, but also in spiritual X-risk. That is, the possibility of the state of civilization getting to where it hinders "catastrophic" (however defined) numbers of people from reaching God, or, in other words, causes or is upstream of "catastrophic" numbers of people hardening. One spiritual X-risk would be for a kind of Brave New World scenario to evolve. I can see this as a default outcome of secular culture given the way it is now and where it's headed. One might think that a better long-term future for humanity would be under the rule of the Church.

(Some people would wonder why Christianity is the right choice for all of humanity, and this is a good thing to bear in mind.)

If the Christian Church ruled over the whole world, what if it was teaching (or embodying) the wrong thing? It could mislead both on a "textual" or conscious level, or on a "subtextual" or subconscious level. It could fatally impede people's full love of God with their hearts, souls, minds, strengths, or any combination thereof. This would further Satan's eternal agenda, but the Church could also open up people to Satanic access in the "merely" here-and-now (abusive cultures, supernatural attack).

If so, would it be able to be corrected? Would it discourage self-correction? Could that wrong teaching or embodiment keep people out of heaven, even if it might be excellent at keeping them in the Church?

If the answer to that last question is "yes", then if we are "longtermists" about spiritual well-being, we should look at the spiritual failure modes of the Church as it might become in the future, and especially those of the Church ruling over the whole world. How can Satan use the Church? If the Church isn't aware of how he might, he probably will.

So I want to consider the failure modes of different Christianities, when it comes to spiritual X-risk. The most obvious candidate for "Christianity that might rule the world" is Roman Catholicism. But in the farther future, that may change. However, for now, it is an example of an existing pro-establishedness, pro-authoritarian Christianity, and is the largest Christian organization, so is currently closest to realizing a "rule of the Church over all". So I want to understand Catholicism better, especially in its political dimensions. (I hope to explore other Christianities, particularly Reformed political thinking, which are in favor of something leaning "integralist", and also the anti-establishment Christianities, to see what their spiritual failure modes are.)

I am aware that my own project is in some ways like the Catholic project (both are concerned with holiness, civilization, an intermediate afterlife, natural theology, the ways in which Christian religion relates to all of reality -- and there may be other similarities I'm not aware of at this moment), but I think I base my thinking on different starting assumptions or spirits, and I feel like it might be wise to understand more clearly exactly what the similarities and differences are between the New Wine System or especially my own MSLN project, and Catholicism. Perhaps by reading a foundational book in Catholic thinking, I can see this more clearly.

(I don't want to try to be anti-Catholic by pursuing this, and the ecumenical side of me would hope that if any Catholics read of the potential failure modes of Catholicism and see something they realize they haven't taken into account adequately, they would seek to reform Catholicism to protect it and its followers from that danger. I think Catholicism is genuinely Christian and probably the values it most aspires to are best served by facing the dangers that could accompany its dominance. So this project should be aligned with Catholic interests, to some extent. However, I sense that MSLN will end up somewhat at odds with Catholicism, just as it should with all other existing Christianities.)

(This study may be of particular value to warn people who are into MSLN, since after all, MSLN shares some of Catholicism's project.)

(Also, it occurs to me to consider, what about if other religions sought to be the one religion over all the world? I feel like Christianity is the one to consider first, partly because I am trying to further it in some sense and want to know how things could go wrong if "I" were in charge of things; partly because I think as the largest religion currently and (in the Catholic church) the largest organized religion, it is the most obvious contender for "religion that rules over the world"; partly because I feel least out of my depth in thinking about it. But an analogous project should be pursued for each of the religions. I suppose that such a project could be pursued by someone who believed in the religion, or by someone outside the religion. If I were to pursue one of these projects, I would judge the religions by the standard of MSLN.)

(Also, what are the dangers of a bad religious pluralism? Imagine all the religions coexisting, functioning in some ways as a religion over all, in a way that is spiritually dangerous.)

I've had a copy of Augustine's City of God for a long time that I've never read, and it seems like a fairly basic thing that talks about the relationship between religion (Christian), non-religion (non-Christianity), and politics. I wouldn't be surprised if I see it referenced a lot in other books on that or those topics. City of God is actually not just a Catholic book. I would guess it's part of the lineage of a lot of Orthodox and Protestant thinkers as well, because it was written before the major church splits.

The copy I have is abridged ("for modern readers"), the Vernon J. Bourke abridgement (introduction by Etienne Gilson; tr. by Gerald Walsh, Demetrius Zema, Grace Monahan, and Daniel Honan). That's probably good enough for me (the fact that it's somewhat abridged doesn't bother me too much). Maybe if I really want to get into ancient or medieval Christianity I can get an unabridged edition to re-read. Ultimately, I'm not concerned with what Augustine said, but rather with the reality of the present and future, but I think whatever influence I can get from him could be helpful in my own thinking. I think that whatever I read will help me get closer to understanding Catholicism, even if I could theoretically get even closer by reading the parts that were abridged.

Disestablishedness vs. Anti-temptation

Epistemic status: provisional. May be incompatible with something I've said about disestablishedness or establishedness.

In MSLN Reasons to Oppose X-Risks, I said that it might be the case that rebuilding civilization after a near-extinction of humanity, or an extinction (God restarting humanity), could be painful for God, involve many generations with less-than-ideal moral environments (in need of progressing morally to the level we've reached now), and, if our civilization is bad spiritually in terms of potentially leading to hardening (which it sometimes seems to be), ours might still be better than average -- if God wants to end our civilization, he should make that call (to "roll the dice" and see what the next civilization would bring). He could end our civilization unilaterally whenever he wanted, and since he hasn't, we might assume that it's our job to keep things going, to not let civilization end.

However, in Establishedness and Loving God (in the section on abortion), I said that civilizational disestablishedness can be uniquely good for developing people spiritually. This is why this life is better than heaven or the Millennium so that, from one point of view, it's not worth aborting babies so that they are not messed up spiritually by living in this life (instead of a nicer afterlife), or from another point of view, it makes sense that God has us live through this "vale of tears" rather than sending us straight to heaven -- being in a nice environment like heaven may not be conducive to us getting the really essential good, for us to become people in tune with God, who love him with all our beings.

It occurred to me that if the disestablishedness of this life is good, or has good effects, maybe a case could be made that if God had to restart civilization after human extinction, things could be better spiritually in the new, less-developed civilization than they are in our civilization as it is now. So then it wouldn't be as clear that we should continue our current civilization (or the human species) -- maybe we should let it (or them) end.

The way I try to resolve this is to say that there are two dynamics in civilization: (dis)establishedness and (anti-)temptation. Establishedness says "you are as you should be, you are the way you are". Anti-temptation causes you to see God as desirable, seekable, trustworthy, or whatever else helps you to bond with him. If you are established in such a way that you do not seek the deepest connection with God, then for your own good, it's good for there to be disestablishedness in your life, to break your bad establishedness. But, in a world without anti-temptations, disestablishedness may not do any good. It's possible to break a bad establishedness without a good one re-forming in its place.

So over time, civilization works to reduce disestablishedness but it is the job of those who love God to anti-tempt, to make up for the loss of disestablishedness. Arguably our civilization has built up a lot of establishedness and anti-temptation. Compared to the Millennium, it is less established and has less anti-temptation. The ideal world, for spiritual development, is one that permits some establishedness but also has a lot of disestablishedness, as well as a lot of anti-temptation and not too much temptation. We have significant amounts of disestablishedness and anti-temptation nowadays, which likely makes our time more ideal for spiritual development than under the Millennium (on average, given that the disestablishedness and anti-temptation are currently unevenly distributed among the human population). Also because we do have anti-temptation to lose, it isn't clear that the spiritual regime that would result from restarting civilization would necessarily be as favorable for spiritual development, because it might not have as high a level of anti-temptation.

(Could Jesus (an example of an anti-temptation) be preached in a new (restarted) civilization after an extinction of humans? Certainly, but for some reason he didn't come (so couldn't have been preached) until 2,000 years ago. Maybe that reason would apply to telling about him in a new civilization, starting off from a low level of development.)

So it still looks like it is the case that disestablishedness can have good effects, and also the case that civilization is worth preserving.

You Can't (Spiritually) Save Someone Without Them Understanding

Sometimes the salvation of another person feels urgent, or if not urgent, then still necessary. You may feel like you have to act regardless of any other considerations, given how urgent or necessary the call for this salvation is. The act becomes a number one priority, shutting out all other voices.

This has a tendency to cause you to act forcefully. You have to ignore anything that gets in the way of you saving the other person, including how they feel about it, any other goods in their life, any other possible ways they might be saved or need to be saved. There are reasons why they may see things differently than you, but you have to ignore that, and if those reasons connect to what their life is naturally, their flesh (who they are naturally) may have "limbs" that you would try to amputate so that they survive.

Ideally, everyone would understand when someone else came to save them. But if the threat is urgent enough, you have to save someone whether they understand or not. Maybe they will understand and be grateful to you later. What's important right now is making sure they don't die.

If your perspective is that you're trying to save someone from physical death, yanking them out of the way of, say, a speeding car without them understanding why does make some sense. You will succeed in saving them from (that) physical death, even if they never understand what you did.

But if you're trying to save someone from spiritual death, you can't force people. They themselves, in an uncoerced way, have to choose to affirm God's values. The understanding itself (intellectual and in their hearts) is what causes them to be saved.

Personal Responsibility and Anxiety in MSL

We value being responsible for ourselves, taking care of ourselves, self-care. This can make us anxious. If we try to have the maximal personal responsibility, we might feel like we have to be anxious, and maybe that really is what is required to be personally responsible to the maximum extent. How highly should we value being responsible for ourselves? Should it be an absolute that rules our lives?

The biblical position is that we should not be anxious, though we might try to take care of ourselves.

Matthew 6 (Jesus speaking):

24 "No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You can't serve both God and Mammon. 25 Therefore I tell you, don't be anxious for your life: what you will eat, or what you will drink; nor yet for your body, what you will wear. Isn't life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 See the birds of the sky, that they don't sow, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns. Your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren't you of much more value than they?

27 "Which of you by being anxious, can add one moment to his lifespan? 28 Why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They don't toil, neither do they spin, 29 yet I tell you that even Solomon in all his glory was not dressed like one of these. 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today exists and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, won't he much more clothe you, you of little faith?

31 "Therefore don't be anxious, saying, 'What will we eat?', 'What will we drink?' or, 'With what will we be clothed?' 32 For the Gentiles seek after all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33 But seek first God's Kingdom and his righteousness; and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore don't be anxious for tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Each day's own evil is sufficient.

Does the natural theology of MSLN also support this relaxation of anxiety? Certainly if I think egoistically, then if I love and trust God, all will be well with me in the end, and it's okay if I risk dying young. But if I think altruistically, I might think that it is important that I stay alive, so that I can help other people. There's a bit of a trick here, where "responsibility to help other people" could really just be "being fearful, self-centered, (self-protective), and not trusting God" masked in concern for others. But if this trick is not in operation, then there's something worth thinking about here. How can we trust God and not fear things, and still be around to help other people? Arguably, if I want to ensure maximum responsibility to altruism in myself, I should maintain a certain useful level of anxiety, to make absolutely sure I stick around to be able to do good.

How will they learn to trust God if we're dead? But then, how will they learn to trust God if we don't trust God?

The natural theology of MSLN (MSL) says that with only a few (or possibly no?) exceptions, everyone will be resurrected to the Millennium or a time like it. Whatever I could have said to you in this life, had I not died young, I could say to you in the next. But at the same time, the way this life turns out does matter. Maybe if you heard what I would have said when you were younger, in this life, it would have done you more good. In principle, the structures of civilization and/or the church can further people's holiness, and serve as prophylaxis to hardening. If you're part of that structure, maybe it is better for you to keep living.

However, sometimes soldiers are needed, in battles against Satan. A soldier can be needed to die young. That can be more effective in bringing people to love and trust God than trying to make sure no one from our country dies. You should only be a soldier if there is a real need for you to go to war, and you should only die if you have to. Your goal is to die well, and to die too soon or too late are equally a problem. You don't know what you're doing, but God is a good commander, and if you trust and obey him out of loyalty to him and his values, then he will put you to good use.

In this, personal responsibility ends up being more about being responsible to God than being responsible to the godless pursuit of survival.

--

Being responsible for your own well-being, if pursued enough, makes you conservative in outlook. This conservatism makes you fail to do the good you could do, to follow the visions that you otherwise could have, to recognize and follow a good leader, to be a good leader. So while it is easy to praise from a humanistic perspective, if everyone abides by it scrupulously, we're worse off as a whole, and some people suffer who don't have to otherwise, those who would have benefited from the fruits of visions. Unsurprisingly, being responsible for your own well-being can be a selfish act.

It may be that it is difficult to say exactly how self-caring a person should be. Some self-care is beneficial to the whole and serves God's interests, but some is not and does not. No matter how popular self-care may become, there needs to be some sense that it could be untrustworthy.

--

Another dimension to consider: you would save the whole world, but yourself be lost. Or, you overestimate how necessary or beneficial you are to saving the world, while losing the person who is most under your control -- yourself. You need to come to love and trust God completely, and you should start that pursuit now. If, as someone who loves and trusts God, you feel led to be altruistic, so be it. You can still think altruistically, see your own salvation as simply being one part in the whole of all people who need it, but focus on yourself as the one most accessible to your care.

So in the end, true self-care requires that you not be anxious over your well-being. To be responsible for yourself requires that you trust God.

A certain amount of watchfulness (which is similar to anxiety) can be called for to keep on track toward loving and trusting God and serving him. There really are dangers, but you watch for them, rather than worrying about them. Trust God in your watchfulness.

--

These loose threads say different things, but overall they agree that from a natural theological (MSL) perspective, you should trust God. Trusting God involves not being anxious about the godless concern for survival. So MSL's take on personal responsibility is close to or essentially the same as the Bible's.