Power is a Broken Relationship

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

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

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

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

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

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

Legitimism Without Atonement

Here is another angle on legitimism. (You may want to read that post to make sense of this, if you haven't already.)

Legitimism requires that if legitimacy is capable of bearing the burdens it lays on those whom it creates, it must. If God is infinite (very big, very fast, even if not truly infinite -- or even infinite, if infinity can be actual?), then he can experience all the experiences that any beings experience. And in fact, he should, simply in order to have metaphysical contact with all beings. (And in order to be able to speak the simantic word of "all things" to us.) So it is easy to see how he could literally bear the burden of each thing that occurs to any and all of his creatures. However, he could not experience what it was like to experience all these things and not simultaneously experience everything else that exists.

I don't want to take away from God's firsthand experience of what each person experiences. It is literally as intense as whatever each person experiences. It would have to be. God would have to experience the tunnel vision each of us experiences, where we only know what we know. That's what it means to experience literally the same experiences we experience. And yet he would experience the rest of his experiences as well.

By knowing the bigger picture, though he really would experience exactly what his creatures experienced, he would know more, and on some level that would enable him to have distance from their experiences that they don't have. He would really know enough of what was going on to be justified in making the laws of the universe (in the sense of knowing how everything relates to every other existing thing), and he would also be justified by having the disposition to bear our burdens to as great an extent as he could, but one could say that there is a missed opportunity, which he can't take, to be a creature and nothing but a creature.

If it is possible for God to share the formation of the laws of the universe with a finite being, then that being can live an ordinary human life, without the distance that comes from greater awareness, and that finite being could then play a part in upholding legitimacy. It would be by his will as well as God's that the laws of the universe were formed. The two would authoritatively assent to the laws, and thus give them their legitimacy, and thus they would both be God (in the legitimist sense, of the highest being, most worthy, most authoritative, deciders of the way things are, the single source of legitimacy, made up as it seems it must by more than one person). If it were possible for God to co-create with a finite being, he should, in order to enable there to be a member of legitimacy who could experience the finite element of creaturely life. Since he can, and should, he did.

However, now we come to the question, how many finite lives must be lived by the finite co-creating member of God (the Son)? Will the Son live every human's life? Or just one? The argument for just one could be that for the sake of justice, the Son could only die once. As a member of legitimacy, the Son does no injustice and does not deserve death, but could die for others' injustices. Having paid for them once, he couldn't die again, since he would be paying for nothing, and thus there would be no redeeming value for the extra injustice of each further death he experienced. This is something that fits into biblical Christianity, and I want to support that option (as I have begun to in this post on the Atonement.)

However, I think it's possible that the story given above, which would limit the number of deaths that the Son could undergo, could possibly not be true. I think if someone "entered the MSLN path" from a secular beginning, they might not see justice and Atonement as necessarily following from the founding principles of MSLN. So legitimism could be seen as having a more, and less, biblical interpretation. The less biblical one might find some other limit to the number of deaths that Jesus would undergo, but I can't think of one right now. So instead I will try to account for how the Son could experience the lives of each person (or animal, assuming as is reasonable that they are "minds" in a Berkeleian sense, or even in some sense "personal beings"), as a finite being with as little extra context beyond what each creature experiences in their life, for as many creatures as possible.

The Son could share subjectivity with the stream of consciousness that is identical to that of a creature, unable to do anything to affect what happens in it. It would be like watching a movie, in total detail (or even more so, entering an experience machine). He would do this for each of the billions of creatures that have ever lived or ever will live. Because the Son is finite, he would experience each one in order, one after another. This process would take a finite amount of time, and might be compressed. So the Son might experience them all in a second of the "master clock", even if it took him billions of years in his subjective time. In this way, he would be able to bear the burden of all beings.

(13 June 2021, update: I think it unlikely now that there could be a real difference in rates of subjective experience. So I would say that it really may take Jesus billions of years to go through all those lives, not compressed into one second. Perhaps all other beings would sleep and not notice the passage of the billions of years, when only the Father and Son would be awake.)

In order for him to still be himself while experiencing this, he would still have to add something to his experience of the creature while he experienced it. There is no substitute for being yourself and nothing more. But he need not be aware of the full range of knowledge normally available to him. When he is experiencing what an atheist experiences, he might be an atheist, or doubt the existence of God to as great a degree as possible for him, due to the perspective of the atheist, which does not trust the appearances of God in life. He might not know anything more than what they know, from birth, besides whatever bare amount is necessary for the Son to be the Son. So he could bear our burdens in a finite though still not identical way, and, given the requirements of legitimacy to have the maximal willingness to bear the burdens of those under its rule, he should and thus does.

But it is possible that you could say that the Son doesn't really die if all he's doing is "watching movies". Perhaps if he lives his own life on earth, and no one else's, then he can be fully immersed in that life and experience death the same way we do. But when he shares a life, he may always find some distance from the shared life, as when we watch even the most immersive movies, the distance which enables him to remain being himself as he "watches".

In that case, if the Atonement only limits his deaths to one, he could still "co-live" multiple lives. He could know the finite lives of each being (and would, for the sake of legitimacy), to the greatest extent possible, and thus would experience all of our lives. This makes fairly literal what Jesus says when he says "what you do to the least of these, you do to me".

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In the case where we assume the Atonement and justice do not obtain such that the Son's deaths are limited to one, then how many times would the Son have to die in order to bear our burdens? He would have to experience his own life and death by himself, to understand that aspect of human experience. There is something unique in human experience of living your own life and no one else's. He would also experience each of our unique ways of living and experiencing death. Would the Son need to keep living lives and dying by himself? He would have already experienced all the uniqueness of our lives and deaths (by having co-lived them as described above). But would he have to experience them for himself, without being separate from our consciousness? Maybe. Perhaps the Son lives and dies lives, by himself, which are similar to every other human life, so as to experience all of them, for and by himself. I think (for now) as long as the number of these lives are finite, I don't see a problem with affirming this.

We could say that each simantic word (of the extraordinary, but finite, number of possible simantic words), which humans experience in their lives, mostly have already been experienced by the Son and the Father as they "coined" them before bringing humans into consciousness. But to whatever extent they attain a new meaning, and to whatever extent they can be experienced as a single human in a limited lifetime, the Son could experience each word as such.

One problem, though, is that if the simantic words have not been modified until after humans live their lives, then the Son would not be able to live them until after those lives were over. But many lives will continue forever, and presumably simantic words will keep evolving or being refined for all eternity. The Son can't bear the burden of all of our existences.

However, one could argue that the burden of legitimacy is different from the freedom of it. The burden will all be lifted when all sin is gone. The way things should be is liberation for those in tune with trustworthiness, who can therefore trust. (Trust and trustworthiness are liberation.) The way things should be is a burden when it demands that we change or that we pay a price, because we are out of tune with trustworthiness.

In any case, if it is impossible for the Son to not bear a burden, then he does not have to. Legitimacy arises (at least, this is a necessary condition) from the disposition, as far as is possible, to bear the burdens you levy on others when you make a law.

Can God Understand Love and yet be Evil?

What can we know about God by examining the simantic words?

Can an evil being truly understand love and remain evil? How about the opposite? Can God truly understand sadism (or whatever other lovelessness) and remain good?

Do sadists truly understand sadism? Then they would understand the consequences of their sadism. They never do, never feel the affliction of those they torture as the afflicted one feels their affliction. Someone who understands sadism fully who also understands love fully will prefer love over sadism.

Christian Reasons For Expanding the Moral Circle

Writing status: This is a little out-of-hand and probably raises some questions I'm not aware of.

The moral circle is the set of all beings to which we consider ourselves to have moral obligations. Something can be inside, or outside, one's moral circle, a member, or not, of the set of beings to which we consider ourselves to have moral obligations. The reason for why something belongs in the moral circle is because it has feelings, especially that it suffers, in such a way that we need to respond to its circumstances. Generally, we need to respond when something threatens a feeling being's well-being. (This is how "moral circle" is generally used, and that is how I'll be using the concept in this post. Conceivably, we could have moral obligations for other reasons.)

As we come to really take into account the existence of feeling beings, we include them in our moral circle. So for instance, we might consider that the impairment of well-being that happens in distant countries of people we will never know personally is just as bad as that which happens to us or to people we care about personally, in our own lives. Therefore, if we are morally obligated to help the people in our own lives, we should help the people far away if we can, all things being equal.

A Christian could counter-argue that righteousness comes by faith, and that the point of the gospel is that it is not you who save yourself by your works, but rather God who saves you by his grace. It could be argued that to a Christian, moral obligation does not exist. We live in the freedom of being covered by Jesus' blood, shed on the cross.

Is it really Christian to say "I don't have to worry about anything in secular ethics. I don't rely on reason. I rely on grace. I am OK."?

It may be the case that salvation is only by grace, apart from works. I think this is an area that is nuanced. Perhaps forgiveness of sins is by grace, but repentance is up to us. I think that makes sense, and maybe I will find that the Bible supports it, when I do another study of the Bible to check against the religious philosophy I've been working on. I think something like that is what the New Wine System teaches, according to its developer.

But I will grant for the sake of argument that perhaps grace saves, and "saves" means "does everything that it takes to give a person eternal life". In that case, if your only concern is salvation, then great. As soon as you do whatever it is you need to in order to receive that grace (or even, nothing at all, if that's all that's required), then you can live your life as you please. You can be as moral as you feel like, and no more moral than is reasonable, in your eyes.

You certainly care about your own well-being. You are covered by grace, and have received the gift of salvation, in which you rest. But do you love God? Do you have the same heart as he has for people? Can you love someone without caring about what they care about? If you're the kind of person who only cares about your own salvation, do you think God is pleased with you? Do you think God can leave you in that state? So God will eventually teach you to care like he does. If grace saves, then you were always saved. But God will make you care like he does.

Does God love you? Does he love people far away? If he loves you, why not people far away? Are you better than them, more deserving of a life of comfort and wealth than they are? It's true that there is some nuance to this. The material wealth of the West isn't all it's cracked up to be. Material wealth doesn't always make life better. And a certain amount of impaired well-being is an acceptable part of life. But some people suffer so much for being poor that there isn't really that much nuance in their case. Suffering itself beyond a certain threshold is impaired well-being, and God suffers with their suffering, just as he does with yours. If you can alleviate your own suffering, you tend to do that. So why not alleviate others' suffering? You love God by alleviating your own suffering, and you love him by alleviating that of distant people. This is the love of a healer healing, or a servant washing someone's feet.

So far, I haven't brought up the Bible. I can't provide a rigorous survey right now of the Bible's teachings on economic sin. But I can give some basic thoughts that are suggestive. In general, I know that many references to caring for the poor can be found in the Bible. The Old Testament prophets talked about that. Also in the New Testament, James speaks strongly against people who hold onto their wealth, causing the deprivation of those who work for them. One could say that James is no better than Paul, who says "salvation is by grace through faith, apart from works", but then, is Paul any better than James? I don't think that "salvation is by grace through works" means "we don't need to do the right thing" (not even Paul believed that), but if "grace" is taken to mean "we don't need to do works", then supposing that we need the words of Jesus to settle the dispute we might see between James and Paul, what does he say?

Luke 10:

25 Behold, a certain lawyer stood up and tested him, saying, "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?"

26 He said to him, "What is written in the law? How do you read it?"

27 He answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself."

28 He said to him, "You have answered correctly. Do this, and you will live."

29 But he, desiring to justify himself, asked Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?"

30 Jesus answered, "A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who both stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. 31 By chance a certain priest was going down that way. When he saw him, he passed by on the other side. 32 In the same way a Levite also, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a certain Samaritan, as he traveled, came where he was. When he saw him, he was moved with compassion, 34 came to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. He set him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. 35 On the next day, when he departed, he took out two denarii, gave them to the host, and said to him, 'Take care of him. Whatever you spend beyond that, I will repay you when I return.' 36 Now which of these three do you think seemed to be a neighbor to him who fell among the robbers?"

37 He said, "He who showed mercy on him."

Then Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise."

The people in Jesus' audience in 1st-century Palestine couldn't have been held accountable for people in the New World, and perhaps not for people in China. But nowadays, we can encounter people who are distant from us. We hear that they are metaphorically lying by the side of the road, and we can choose to be neighbors to them, or not. Do we want to do what Jesus said? Do we care what he thinks and feels? You could argue that technically, the priest and the Levite could have inherited eternal life, because the man by the side of the road was someone they didn't have to be a neighbor to, so he wasn't. But if we are to love God with all our beings, as Jesus and the lawyer agreed were the way to eternal life, then we have to be interested in what Jesus wanted.

It's interesting to note that the lawyer thinks (and Jesus doesn't contradict) that to do good to someone is to show mercy to them. Altruism can have different psychological fuels, like how you can have a gas stove, or a wood stove, which itself can burn different kinds of wood. If we have mercy, when we recognize that the people around us do not love like Jesus wanted us to love, and that we do not either, we do not judge.

At the same time, if we want eternal life, we need to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves. These commands are ones that we ourselves can keep, if we have time. So the New Wine System teaches that we have time in which to learn after death, before we are brought before God to be with him forever. Someday we must become the kind of people who really do have the heart of God.

Some might say things changed at the cross, though. Maybe much of Jesus' teaching can be set aside, since he taught it to people before his death. Once he died, his death covers our sins, so we no longer need to take his living words as literally. How much actually changed at the cross, though? Consider these two passages from Matthew:

Matthew 5 (Jesus speaking):

17 "Don't think that I came to destroy the law or the prophets. I didn't come to destroy, but to fulfill. 18 For most certainly, I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not even one smallest letter or one tiny pen stroke shall in any way pass away from the law, until all things are accomplished. 19 Therefore, whoever shall break one of these least commandments and teach others to do so, shall be called least in the Kingdom of Heaven; but whoever shall do and teach them shall be called great in the Kingdom of Heaven. 20 For I tell you that unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, there is no way you will enter into the Kingdom of Heaven."

And Matthew 22:

34 But the Pharisees, when they heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, gathered themselves together. 35 One of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, testing him. 36 "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law?"

37 Jesus said to him, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.'" 38 This is the first and great commandment. 39 A second likewise is this, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' 40 The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments."

Jesus says, in Matthew 5, that there is a law that lasts until heaven and earth pass away (which means, we are still under it). Is this the law of Moses? Or is this the law of loving God with all your being, and your neighbor as yourself? This might be hinted by the Matthew 22 quote. Or is it some other law?

It seems like another candidate might be "profess to be a Christian and approve of the people in your life". Grace says "You aren't any better than anybody else -- you need grace -- so approve of other people. And faith is how you're saved -- just think that you trust God, and you do." That sort of sounds like it's a subset of "love God with all your being and love your neighbor as yourself". Certainly disapproving of people can hurt people sometimes.

Note that the "profess and approve" (arguably grace-and-faith-based) formula does fairly well with leading you to love your neighbor as yourself, but not as well with leading you to love God with all your being. The profession is only a beginning compared to loving God with all your being.

Because "profess and approve" is easier, it's popular, and the kind of thing people like to believe. It's an easy way to get people to like you. Just say "Let's go easy on each other and ourselves and approve of each other, professing faith in God", and you are more likely to make friends than if, among your prosocial "love your neighbor as yourself" (which might win you some popularity points, since it causes you to benefit people), you also say "love God with all your being". "Profess and approve" is a version of Christianity that the universal culture would select for. (To the extent that "love God with all your being and your neighbor as yourself" is popular and selected for, it tends to downplay loving God in any way that threatens to take away from human well-being, and so it tends to be a different flavor of the same appealing-to-humans thing.)

But the law that lasts to the end of heaven and earth that is actually offered by Jesus might be "love God with all your being and love your neighbor as yourself", but he did not set up the "profess and approve" law (or the "love God with all your being which means nothing other than loving your neighbor a lot" law). He didn't want us to judge, and yet he himself did not approve of everyone and everything. He told people he was being kind to to stop sinning. Professing allegiance to Jesus certainly counts for something, and something like approving of other people (not judging them, as Jesus commanded) also counts for something, and they could be considered part of the "love God with all your being and your neighbor as yourself" law. They are an entry point to the bigger and fuller law of love. (And so can the "love people" laws that are used as substitutes for "love God with all your being and love your neighbor as yourself".)

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Many people, among those who "profess and approve" and those who "love people", if asked, would identify as those who love God. If we identify as those who love God, then why shouldn't we care about how he feels about his other children? To live up to our calling as lovers of God -- as children of God -- we should care about people who live far away from us. There are practical limitations to our ability to help people far away, but they are not absolute, and within them we should do something.

However, is this exactly the same thing as "expanding the moral circle" in a secular sense? Is this really moral obligation, and is this something done as a response to the impaired well-being of another feeling being? In Jesus' parable of the Samaritan helping someone he runs into on the side of the road, the action taken is definitely in response to the injury of a feeling being.

As to moral obligation, if we want eternal life, we must obey God's commands to love. You could look at that as moral obligation -- "we must" -- or not -- "we must only if we want eternal life and" -- presumably -- "we want God's approval" -- he set up the incentive to make things be the way he wanted them. But God's approval is the approval of legitimacy itself, and what is required to satisfy legitimacy is morally obliged, since morality is what legitimacy wants.

We find ourselves unwilling to say "thus says God" in moral areas (rely on God's commands to love as the foundation of moral obligation) and tend to rely on secular morality instead. Maybe it sounds overbearing to bring God into the picture. So instead we rely on the secular psychology of morality that relies on instinct and social pressure to produce feelings of moral obligation. But with God as the basis of moral obligation, there can be such a thing as realistic absolute standards -- grace allowing for the attainment of uncompromising holiness. Whereas, godless morality throws out wild absolutes with no way to live up to them -- so people become moral anti-realists. God, who is legitimacy itself (/himself), the truth, requires us to be aligned with him -- being aligned with legitimacy is itself to have fulfilled moral obligation. So I think we are morally obligated due to other's impaired well-being, but that moral obligation doesn't work the same in the context of God, as in the context of godlessness.

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What about non-human animals? Extending the moral circle to non-human animals makes sense from a secular perspective. Materialists tend to want to do that, because animal brains aren't sufficiently different from ours in most (or all?) cases for us to think that they don't suffer consciously. From an immaterialist standpoint, we may think that animal bodies that appear before us only appear to have consciousnesses (similarly, we may think that other people are only p-zombies). But ordinaristically, we see that people are conscious and so are non-human animals. Even if we are sticklers for immaterialist ontology, ignoring the ordinary, we should have uncertainty that non-human animal bodies do not have animal consciousnesses associated with them, in the way that each of our own bodies are associated with each of our consciousnesses. This uncertainty should keep us from disregarding them as feeling beings.

Similarly, it makes sense to have some sense of uncertainty that artificial intelligences that behave sufficiently like humans are not conscious.

But what does the Bible say? There's nothing in the Bible about artificial intelligences, unless you expand what you mean by that to include organizations and states, which do not seem to be regarded as having personhood in a literal sense (although they can in a symbolic sense, as in prophecy). As to animals, again, this is not an exhaustive survey, but in Jonah 4, it says:

10 Yahweh said, "You have been concerned for the vine, for which you have not labored, neither made it grow; which came up in a night and perished in a night. 11 Shouldn't I be concerned for Nineveh, that great city, in which are more than one hundred twenty thousand persons who can't discern between their right hand and their left hand, and also many animals?"

This lends some weight to the thought that God cares about animals. From Jesus (Matthew 10):

29 "Aren't two sparrows sold for an assarion coin? Not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father's will. 30 But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. 31 Therefore don't be afraid. You are of more value than many sparrows."

God cares more about humans, but vs. 31 wouldn't be as reassuring if we thought that God didn't care about the value of sparrows at all.

Why might God care about animals, but not as much as about humans? I'm not really sure. One possibility is that humans are sons and daughters of God, while animals are no more nor less than animals. God is more akin to us than he is to animals (the Bible says that we are made in his image, but does not say this of non-human animals).

I have thought before that animals may be persons -- do I think they are persons in the full-fledged sense that we are? In the sense that we say "I think, therefore I am", the way that we know ourselves as people, the full meaning behind the "I" that we speak there? Or are they only persons in the sense that they are consciousnesses with wills and preferences? Is there a difference between the latter and the former? If there is, then animals can still suffer, trust and have their preferences thwarted, and yet not be full persons.

Animals may not have free will in the same way that we do, at least to the extent of not being capable of moral reasoning, and thus are not capable of really loving God, really choosing him, or any other being, for that matter. When animals love, they have no choice, perhaps. It is also possible to look at lives and persons as different in terms of valuing them. So it's valuable to God to make animal lives go well (e.g., not be unremitting suffering), but animals themselves, as persons or proto-persons, are not as valuable. (The contents of these last two paragraphs are speculations that I may revisit later.)

From all this, I feel somewhat safe saying that the Bible supports eliminating gratuitous animal suffering, such as that caused by factory farming or cruelty to animals. We have enough uncertainty about whether God cares about animal suffering (importantly, it's hard for us to rule out that his care does not include caring about their suffering) that in cases where we don't really need to cause animal suffering, we shouldn't.

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Finally, it is important for Christians to include God in their moral circle. This is part of loving God with all our being. God has well-being. The Scriptures say that he has emotions, which have been negative in response to events on earth, and our time is no exception. So we have a reason to care about him, in himself. But we tend to forget this.

One possible reason for this is that among Christians there are two opposing ideas (or ideas like one or the other of them): one, that we should adjust ourselves to fit God because he is perfect (and he is perfect according to a human idea of what perfection is -- he is all-great and thus can't have any kind of need by which we could benefit him); and the other, that God exists primarily to serve human well-being, or that human well-being was always truly what God wanted (and well-being is to be understood according to a human understanding of well-being), therefore we have no need to inquire into God's well-being, since God's well-being, if it exists, is identical with ours as we understand it (and perhaps we would also want to include the rest of creation to be considered with us -- plants, and animals, and so on). We can see the influence of these two ideas, or ideas like them, in various parts of Christianity, and perhaps there are not so many who are free from both of them.

If God is part of our moral circle, we might have to change to adjust to that fact, just as how the inclusion of distant people into our moral circle can change our lives.

God is a Good Utility Monster

In calculating well-being, we might want to know who it is whose experiences matter most. One approach, used here, is to count neurons. The more neurons, the more experience, and the more moral value.

This is a somewhat crude way to do things, but the underlying assumption makes sense on some level. There is some quantity of psychological sensitivity which can be taken to correlate with number of neurons. What we're really interested in is that quantity of psychological sensitivity, which can be aggregated. We can add up quantities of sensitivity within and among beings, and compare those numbers, judging that certain groups or individuals suffer more than others.

This leads us to the subject of utility monsters. A utility monster is very psychologically sensitive, and so the satisfaction of their subjective well-being seems to legitimately call for more of society's resources, taking away from those who are less sensitive. There becomes an incentive for everyone to become more and more sensitive. Perhaps if an AI rules the world, programmed to be compassionate, if you want to game it to get more of the world's resources, then construct a being who wants what you want, but who is extremely psychologically sensitive.

What would the MSLN view of the subject be?

It seems that the metaphysical organism (the "M" in "MSLN") would have the greatest psychological sensitivity of all. Because it is conscious of all other consciousnesses, it is sensitive to all the pain and pleasure or other meaningful states of all other beings. Further, as a person, it can see all the different perspectives that arise from comparing all other psychological states, and all other second-order thoughts about all beings' psychological states.

We can intensify this by bringing in simantism and legitimism ("S" and "L"). The metaphysical organism is also simantism's Speaker, who speaks each simantic word to each person, keeping track of how all the words relate to each other, being prepared beforehand to speak a word to someone whose preferences call for it, having in mind each word. Legitimism adds that this Speaker (God) establishes ought, a specific way that things should be which is absolute, and thus that things can really be absolute violations of this ought. And thus it can be incredibly painful, and elating, to be God, extraordinarily psychologically complex.

This makes it sound like God is the ultimate utility monster. And perhaps that is appropriate. In the Bible, God says "have no other gods before me". There is a parallel between utility monsters and gods. We think we must serve them. But we might mistake which of them are really most deserving. So to avoid idolatry, if we want to be utilitarians, we should identify the true utility monster, and this will be the being that we and our civilization serve.

God is a good utility monster because he is inherently in solidarity with us. In other words, from the metaphysical organism idea, what we know about God is that he experiences exactly what we experience, and thus finds unbearable exactly what we find unbearable. So God is on the side of our lives going well, at least in the sense of them being bearable. And we also can suppose from the metaphysical organism idea that God values our existence -- otherwise why go through all the unbearable feelings that we occasion? He could cease to experience us (and so we would cease to experience anything coming from him, which is all or nearly all of what we experience.) Enduring the unbearable is hard for any being. So our existences, the fact that we exist as persons who experience, is of high value to God. Therefore whatever he calls for, as the ultimate utility monster, will have to involve the ultimate elimination of all unbearable psychological states, and the prolonging of the existence of all personal beings.

This does not exhaust the subject of what God calls for, but it is a baseline by which we can know him to be trustworthy from our perspective. So, unlike some false ones, God is a good utility monster.

Trusting God, Caring Like God

Should we trust God in everything? Or should we care like God cares? Is it the case that everything turns out according to his will? Or is there an element of tragedy possible in the world?

If our trust in God prevents us from caring like he does, there could be a problem. Likewise if our caring prevents us from trusting in him, there could be a problem. Either way, we could fail to become like him, when we could have had greater kinship. Trusting God enables him to change us into being more like him, and caring like God cares helps us to become like him.

By trusting in God, we can come to care more. By caring, we put ourselves in the position to trust. The more we care, the more we consider something to be valuable. Then, the more valuable it is, the more we can entrust when we put it in God's hands.

Work For Treasure

We have a tendency to treasure the things we work for. As an experiment, you can try this and see if it's true for you. Pick something you don't care about, then work to preserve it. You may find yourself caring about it. I have found this to be the case for me with house flies and with computer game monsters.

"Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also". It is when we are doing the work to secure our treasures, or when we spend time in the presence of our treasures, that we live real life.

The Tongue as Organ of Sight

The tongue as an organ of perception. One meaning: taste and mouthfeel. Another: we speak reality to ourselves. So, to see things from the Spirit's perspective, and to speak as though God exists.

Humans are actors. When we say the lines, we become the character, and see things from the character's point of view.

Simantism

See also Parts of a Simantic Word and Simantism, Part 2

Edited for tone and correctness.

What if there was a philosophy that was the opposite of nihilism? Nihilism denies meaning. So what would we call its opposite? The Greek for "meaning" is "semantos". That's ancient Greek. But in modern Greek it's "simantos" -- modern Greek for meaning as it's experienced everyday nowadays. So, it could be called "simantism".

Everything has meaning. When you look at something, you see its meaning, the way that it registers in you. In The Little Mermaid movie, the mermaid sees a fork as a comb (which she calls a "dinglehopper"). When she looks at it, it means that to her, but it means "fork" to us. Physically, it's the same. But the world isn't fundamentally physical. A thing is a thing according to its meaning.

How can a thing mean what it does? It does, we do not perceive that we project meaning on to it. What we actually experience is not that we project. We don't think we project the physical world. If we assume that the physical world is ultimate reality, we have to assume that the meaning of a thing can't be stored in the matter of a thing, and so must be a projection. But what we really experience is that a beautiful thing is beautiful, and a sunset is a sunset, not billions of unrelated dust and water particles lit up by light, which we "make" into a sunset. A sunset is a real thing independent of us. You do not make a sunset, you see it. You don't make it beautiful, it is beautiful.

So then, materialism goes against empiricism. When we deny our experiences, life becomes less meaningful. We become dishonest on a certain level.

What we see to be beautiful deserves to be beautiful. So there is an element of legitimacy in meaning. Human well-being is deeply meaningful to people because it deserves to be meaningful. If we think "I'm projecting deservingness onto this", it weakens the meaning of it.

But sometimes interpretations betray us. So we learn to not trust our perceptions. Does this mean that we do not really perceive what we perceive? No, we really perceive the sunset to be a sunset and a beautiful sunset. We really perceive wrong as wrong and right as right. We really perceive people as this way or that way. The perceptions may turn out to betray, but they really are what they are.

When we misinterpret a person, we really are relating to some kind of reality. It isn't them, but we really are perceiving something. This something has meaning to us. Illusions and lies have meaning to us. Doubts do. They all really do. We really do perceive.

So how can we explain meaningful perception? There are beings (objects, people, phenomena, ideas, etc.) which are not us. We directly perceive these things. And yet these beings which we could never conjure on our own in some way are what they are in a way that follows from who we are. The sunset is beautiful, has an intuitive meaning, to me because of who I am as well as because of how it is. So these things, which I do not make, which do not follow from my will, which sometimes surprise me, sometimes surprising me in how they are meaningful, somehow "know" me in order to speak to me the way that they do, be the way that they are.

Is there anything other than consciousness? If so, then how would that non-consciousness interact with consciousness? I'm not sure that it's possible for something that is essentially not conscious to "bring about" or interact with consciousness. But it makes perfect sense to say that consciousness perceives appearances of non-consciousness (for instance, perceives matter), and that consciousnesses can interact with consciousnesses.

On the other hand, if we look at what is the most fundamental reality, we arrive at "I think, therefore I am." It could be that only I exist. If so, then what do I think about myself? If I am the base unit of reality, then why should I question my sense that I am a full-fledged person, rather than some stringing-together of matter or impersonal consciousness? The person becomes the fundamental unit of reality.

But if only I exist, how do I explain all the things that are not-me that I interact with? And how is it that these things that are not-me somehow "know" how to be connected to who I am in their very being? Are they each conscious beings who know me?

Perhaps. If so, then what about the way in which everything that exists (as a whole) can speak to me, can mean a certain way to me? Does that mean that everything that exists is a conscious being who knows me? It could be that I have my own individuality and yet am part of another being. If we look at things from the "everything is consciousness" lens, a consciousness (a "coordinating consciousness") could connect with another consciousness by sharing that other being's exact consciousness. If I feel pain, this coordinating consciousness could feel the exact experience I do, not a copy. And this coordinating consciousness could connect to all other conscious beings, and communicate their intentions into my consciousness. It might be like how a live TV director can see a bank of different potential camera angles on different screens all at once. This could bind things together using pure consciousness.

So, the being that is conscious of everything could be everything that is -- a person who is distinct from all the things that it is and yet contains everything / everyone. This being is fully empathic -- goes beyond empathy as humans know it, by perfectly experiencing what we experience exactly as we do. Through that experience, it is able to communicate things to us exactly as we would perceive them. Its motive would be to eventually eliminate the betrayals we experience, because a betrayal of us is a betrayal of it, as well as bringing us into tune with itself so as to eliminate the ways we betray it. It puts up with our suffering, and our betrayals of it, without deciding to make us not be one of the things that are -- why? It must value us on some level.

Basically, this being sounds like God.

What about legitimacy? Is it possible for things to really be as we interpret them? Can something really be wrong? We might be wrong about it being wrong, maybe it's right, but is there any possibility of us being right about it? If we internalize on some level that no one really knows what's right or wrong, beautiful or ugly, we don't trust our plain, honest perceptions of things. And, supposing that there is a real right and wrong, if we think it's just "my take on things" that something is wrong, we don't do what's really right or avoid what's really wrong, because we can't fully trust our own values.

The problem comes because people's values differ. People's opinions differ. So is there an opinion that can decide between different values, opinions, cultures? What is it that would make an opinion most valid? Is it that the opinion-haver is powerful? Or rather that they are in touch with reality? Or they are reality? We tend to find valid the opinions of people we respect. Who is the most-respectworthy, most-valid person? What would they look like?

If a leader imposes a situation on you, shouldn't they also experience what you do as much as you have to? Isn't being all about experiencing, about trust? So then to really be, you have to be disposed to trust, to connect to and accept as beneficial on some level even the worst things. God experiences all the bad things we do (and the good), so then what is left to validate his legitimacy but for him to experience life (and death) as a limited being? So there must be some way in which the author of legitimacy can be a limited being. This would make sense if reality, the language of reality, of how things mean to personal beings (a sunset is a simantic word that many people can share, but which means something a little different to each person), and thus the language of what is and what is legitimate, was first coined and developed by two or more beings in collaboration, one of whom was all-things, conscious, some of whom were limited but of the same kinship group.

If God exists and is the foundation of legitimacy, then if we align our thinking with God's existence and values, then we can minimize how much we interpret things a certain way and then turn out to be wrong. We can find meaningful the things that God finds meaningful to a greater degree than if we based them on "what I feel, or what everybody sort of feels" -- we might say "I like loving people", but if we acknowledge the reality of God, then we have to really love people, even more than we would like. And we would have to approach love itself from the angle that God really exists (viewed Spiritually), and not make love (or some version of it) a pitiless, brutal god of its own, an impersonal idol.

If a society acknowledges God, then it can really be good. And it can take into account working according to God's interests, not just its own. Humans have something outside themselves to look to, so that humanity itself does not become a collective (semi-personal) idol.

People get focused on their own pain, their own ability to trust. But there is a reality outside of well-being and the obsession with well-being -- the world of meaning, of things that exist just in themselves, apart from anyone's interests. On a certain level, this is what we want when we seek after truth.

So this is a sketch of a philosophy which supports or even maximizes meaning, to provide an opposite to nihilism.

Knowing Others Better

It's dangerous to think that you know someone better than they know themselves.

First, it's dangerous if you're wrong. You may see certain aspects of a person clearly, but it's unlikely that you have all the data. So you can possess a distorted view of someone which is very compelling to you. Then, you reflect that view back to them, directly or indirectly.

But also, it's dangerous if you're right. You have a lot of power if you understand someone better than they understand themselves. You'll know better how to defeat them in arguments. You'll approach them with a settled confidence about who they are which they can't contradict -- after all, you're the one with a better command of the facts of who they are. You set yourself up as the trustworthy, wise one, and the wise are those whose decision-making has legitimacy, and thus social power.

When in possession of this power, you can put the other person in a dependent state, setting their horizons within the bounds of your vision. This can prevent them from being the person that God wants them to be.

--

Which is better, to know someone accurately, or to share the same reality as them? People who share the same reality can be friends. So you make the choice (or life makes it for you): to see things your way (to see the facts) or to share a journey with someone else.

If you know someone better than they do, you don't need to listen to them anymore. Speech is how we create reality, how we express ourselves.

Book Review: Grotta on Tolkien

I wrote a longer draft about the Tolkien biography I finished reading recently, Daniel Grotta's J. R. R. Tolkien: Architect of Middle-Earth (1978 ed.), but this excerpt is what I will share:

Here's a quote from Tolkien that surprised me (p. 105):

"If you really come down to any really large story that interests people and holds their attention for a considerable time, it is practically always a human story, and it is practically [always] about one thing all the time: death. The inevitability of death. Simone de Beauvoir once said that there is no such thing as a 'natural' death. Nothing that ever happens to man is ever natural. And his presence calls the whole world into question. All men must die, but for every man his death is an accident, and even if he knows it ... an unjustifiable violation. You may agree with these words or not, but those are the keyspring of The Lord of the Rings

I would have guessed that the Lord of the Rings had nothing to do with death. Some characters die -- but characters must always die. I wouldn't guess most of the youthful fans of Tolkien found LOTR to be so existential. If I had guessed, before reading the quote, as to what LOTR is about, it is about how a story can get into you and take you somewhere else -- as though everything is a story.

Another surprising quote from Tolkien (p. 123):

"I know that one interviewer explained it: It is written by a man who has never reached puberty and knows nothing about women but as a schoolboy, and all the good characters come home like happy boys, safe from the war. I thought it was very rude -- so far as I know, the man is childless -- writing about a man surrounded by children, wife, daughter, granddaughter. Still, that's equally untrue, isn't it, because it isn't a happy story. One friend of mine said he only read it at Lent because it was so hard and bitter."

This reminds me of criticisms of the Book of Job's framing story. "How cheap! He gets it all back in the end." But Job never gets his first set of children back. The Bible can be dry and sort of laconic, you can miss the details. Similarly, it seems, with The Lord of the Rings. Somehow Tolkien and at least one person he knew (maybe someone closer to his generation?) saw the death in a fairy story, and we are the ones who can't see it.

Empathy of the Image of Suffering

I'm reading a biography of J. R. R. Tolkien. He fought in World War I. There's a description of trench warfare in the book: no sleep, cold, wet, people froze to death, had lice, got diseases, and when they tried to fight, mostly they just got killed, and there was chemical warfare. Tolkien lost all but two of his childhood and college friends to the war.

Tolkien was scarred by the war, but went on to be a father and husband, write books, have a career. Reading the description of World War I, I had a feeling of "how could a person live through that?" But I think I was getting caught up in the image of hardship and suffering, rather than the reality. I don't know what trench warfare is like from personal experience, so instead I imagine the way it is. To actually go through it is to have to live through it, you're living through it, you can live through it (although not everyone survived). Death is something you live through when it comes, you're living through it, in a sense you can live through it, it is something you can bear when it comes.

One of the failure modes of empathy is when it becomes about the image of someone else's suffering or hardship rather than the reality. The person who is living through it can get through it, or even die from it in an acceptable way, but the person on the side fears for them, feels pity for them, feels discouragement for them, based on the image. Cowardice or lack of self-confidence, self-pity, and a spirit of depression make it harder for a person to live through their real suffering and hardship, and can be communicated from the "empathy of the image" person to the person actually suffering.