Why Must the Past be Remembered?

This post is in "essay" format where I try different things, some successful and some unsuccessful (which I guess at this point, to be honest, is what I am choosing because I think there might be some value in the parts that I would otherwise cut, but I'm too tired to figure exactly what's good about them).

I will try to answer the question "why must the past be remembered?" by considering how it might constitute who we are, and also how it is part of the truth. Also, how it might in large part constitute the present.

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In Size of God, Part 2, I wrote that what makes a person who they are includes their life history.

Is this true? In what sense of "life history" is it true?

It certainly is the case that cultural memory is part of what makes a nation "who" it is. Cultural memory is an account of the past which may or may not be what literally happened, which forms part of a culture's identity. Individual people are like nations with a population of one, and there is a kind of "personal cultural memory" to each person.

How thick is this? (How much memory does it take to store it, for instance?) In my case, it's pretty thin. I don't have a strong sense of personal history or identity. However, I suppose there are a few things I can say about myself if I'm explaining my life and who I am, which I think are important to say.

These things present to me as being the truth about my past. But, what is the whole truth about the past? Doesn't it include many, many more details than I can remember? Even people with a thick personal cultural memory remember far less than what actually happened.

So if my personal cultural memory claims to be about the past, can it be correct in making that claim if less than the full past informs it?

For me to be a completely legitimate being, perhaps I need to be able to tell the truth in all things, and so I could only have a personal cultural memory if there was a complete record of the past, not necessarily consciously possessed by me, but at least by God, who could validate it by apprehending all things and affirming me when I say that what happened happened.

In order for me to be anyone at all, I must claim "this is who I am" with 100% definiteness -- it's part of what I sense when I say "I", is implicit in my saying "I". I make this claim during my life, but I'm sometimes wrong, because I can't access my past. My concept of my past does not line up with God's concept, both because of this ignorance, and because I have not fully come into tune with him, so that if I look at any part of my past, I do not judge it the way he would. (I'm guessing that the Millennium is a time in which people face their pasts.) But once I have come to terms with my past as it actually is/was, I will be able to say "this is who I am" with 100% definiteness and 100% truth, and thus 100% legitimacy.

I think part of who I am is accessible through what I intuitively refer to when I say "I". That "I" contains my whole past. "My whole past" refers to "every decision I've made" and "that I failed to choose to make decisions over stretches of my life", among other things.

It could be the case that God's personal cultural memory requires that he remember everything that goes into us becoming ourselves. We can construct a simplified cultural memory, but he has to remember the truth as it actually happened. I have some awareness of the history of England and can form a rudimentary identity of the country. There is an "American's identity of England" in me, and perhaps similar but different ones in other Americans. These have something to do with us Americans, and something to do with England itself, and how English people see themselves. God has such cultural memory / identity for each of us, and he has to see it according to his character, which is truthful. It was part of his life that we went through all the things we went through, and those events were significant to him, because they were part of how we came to be... whatever we are going to end up being, but hopefully to become completely legitimate like him.

Is the truth something that is inviolable, such that to delete it is to falsify something and break legitimacy? This makes some sense from a Biblical Christian perspective. God wants to forgive us, so he must send his Son to die. But, why not just delete the past, if that's an option? But he had to send his Son to die.

I think the above reasons are satisfying enough for me for now, to basically say that the truth makes up who we are and is also inviolable.

But, this raises a question for my concept of heaven given the possibility that the "size" of God is finite (see here). How can we have eternal life if God will run out of memory to store the truth? I had thought that the answer was to keep all the memories that go into who we are, but that since in heaven, nothing affects who we are, God could delete memories formed in heaven from time to time.

Wouldn't this introduce falsehood? Maybe it would be okay if God intended to keep all the memories, but ran into one of his own limitations, and so took the least-falsifying route, which would be to leave our earthly and Millennial histories untouched, but delete some heavenly history to allow us all to keep living. God must intend the best, but can be kept from doing the best by some limitation or other.

But then, why not just delete all of our pasts, to have even more people in heaven? From the reasons given in the post, this would make it so that we couldn't truthfully say who we were.

So some memory is off-limits for deleting, the memory having to do with who we are. So once we are in heaven, who we are can't change.

This is not too big a deal to say with respect to our characters, how we are aligned with God. Once our hearts are like God's hearts, we can't change and wouldn't want to.

But who you are involves more than just your character. It also involves identity.

I am (more or less) an American. Let's say, in the following hypothetical, that I died without ever having eaten Mexican food, having heard Mexican music, participated in any Mexican holidays, and so on. And I continued through the Millennium somehow without ever encountering a Mexican person or a Mexican thing. In heaven, let's say I spend 20,000 years with Mexicans, eating Mexican food, dancing Mexican dances, visiting heavenly replicas of Mexican ruins and of what those ruins were in their unruined state, speaking Spanish to Mexicans and listening to them talk about things in Spanish in a Mexican way. I fully immerse myself in Mexican culture. At the end of the 20,000 years, am I at all Mexican in who I essentially am? No. Those were just interests I had, choices I could unmake.

"Having interests" in a temporary and non-essential way is different from something being part of who you are. Those 20,000 years will fade away as God (and everyone else) forgets them. We all know that they will go away, so we don't hold onto them. For 20,000 years I can be a Mexican, and perhaps I can be a Mexican for all time, cycling through temporary years. But I could always cease to be Mexican -- but, whether I like it or not, to the extent that being American has already seeped into who I am, being American will be with me at all times now and forever.

The freedom to forget these phases or their earlier parts allows us to keep existing. But the memories that make up our character as aligned with God have to be protected. Was it we who really decided to follow Jesus? Whoever it was who made that decision, it had better be us. All the steps of repenting are decisions that we made, in the past. How was it that we, in all our particularity derived from everything we have experienced, including the memories we had in the past, come to choose to trust and obey God? God has to remember this to know for certain that it was we who repented, and not someone else.

Perhaps God could look on us in heaven and see that we never sin anymore. Was it the case that we chose to be against sin, or was it rather the case that we were given a sinless nature? How can we know a person if not to observe their behavior? If we could simply be given good natures, then God would have, and we would never be subjected to life on earth, only granted life in heaven. It is our decisions that make us who we are. God can know that it was we who decided to become who we are, if he remembers the moments in which we made those decisions, and everything that fed into those moments.

If God doesn't know who we are, he can't trust us fully, and must make us make all those decisions over again, to prove that it wasn't just that we had good natures.

What if God deleted the memories of the pasts that led to our salvation, but kept a note to himself saying "I can trust myself, and since I had seen how these people were as good as their behavior, I don't need to remember the decisions that went into that."? But those memories make up part of who God is. How could God know who he was without them? Without the memory, he couldn't be certain that he was legitimate, and thus he would cease to be legitimate and cease to exist. If legitimacy can't trust itself, it is not legitimate, because what is truly legitimate is 100% trustworthy to legitimacy, and legitimacy itself must be truly (100%) legitimate. His own legitimacy comes from his decisions.

But he could infer from the fact that he was able to delete the memories that he was trustworthy and legitimate, because if he wasn't legitimate, nothing would exist anymore. He had been 100% legitimate up to the point in time when he deleted the memories.

So perhaps God can delete the memories of our past.

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Another argument for why our memories must be preserved: While in one sense, the only thing that exists is the present, in another sense, the past exists. It's like if you have a book that exists only in the present, but the pages store the memories of the past. In the world of the pages, the past exists. We live in the world of the pages, and what makes us who we are exists in the world of the pages. I suppose the pages make God legitimate, which enables him to validate the book that stores all experience, including the pages.

If the past really exists, then I "currently" (book perspective) exist in the "past" (pages perspective), as much as I do in the present. Thus, who I am depends on who I was and how I became who I am now. My present depends on a chain of past selves, experiences, and experience bodies, all of which (book perspective) currently exist, written on pages. For them to be deleted makes it impossible for me to be who I am. But, once I have fully become who I am, to delete subsequent pages does not threaten my legitimacy, and I can safely exist, though pages are forgotten. Maybe it's like the author has fully developed the character's perspective, and after that, everything is fan fiction. The fan fiction can explore all kinds of possibilities, but can never change the canon interpretation of the characters. In this fan fiction, the characters always act in character with the canon version of them, but are in all kinds of other scenarios. This fan fiction can be periodically deleted when the server runs out of storage space.

If my present self in the book requires all the past pages to be what it is, then I suppose in heaven, when the pages are cut from the book, they must be pared back from the latest pages back to some earlier point, perhaps to the beginning of God's rest (heaven) (if the book ends at p. 3,502, and heaven begins on p. 2,580, pp. 2,581 - 3,502 are all to be deleted), rather than, as I originally thought, leaving a gap between the last remembered page and the beginning of heaven (there can't be a gap, leaving any later page unsupported by all the pages leading up to it).

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Does the past cause the present? I suppose the only thing it doesn't cause in the present are the decisions being made in the present. If the past causes (most of) the present, how can it do that if it (the past) doesn't exist? Maybe it does exist. It could be a "page", still in the book, still existing, and cause (most of) the present.

I am aware that there is quite a bit to the philosophy of time, but I'm not aware all of what has been said there. I like the image of, everything exists in the present, and the past is simply a feature of the present. This preserves the past while sticking to my preference of "the only thing that exists is the present". I think the "pages in a book" theory of the past is possibly true.

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So overall, I think that the past must be remembered by God, and thus take up space in his memory -- or, it's possible that that is true -- I feel, right now, that it likely is true. If God is finite in "size", there is a limit to how much memory can be stored, and a certain amount is needed for each of us to develop to the point of being able to live with God forever.

Value of This Life; Life Extension

This is an important topic, and maybe I haven't done it justice here, in terms of content. The form, as I re-read it, is scattered, as well. In theory I could make a better version of this, and maybe I will. But at this point, I don't have the energy/focus to. A lot of times I write these blog posts as notes to myself, which I happen to share online with some hope that others will read them, and I'll say this is one of those.

Introduction

In Establishedness and Loving God, I wrote in one of the sections about why it is valuable for people to live in this life, rather than going straight to heaven, or to the Millennium. This meant that we have a reason to not abort the unborn. Otherwise it might seem like aborting the unborn could be seen as better than letting them live in this life, so that they could be better off spiritually in the next life.

The explanation I gave there was that while the Millennium is a better place, where Jesus is king, it is a more "established" place, in which the spiritual benefits of disestablishedness are lacking.

But then I thought about how unfortunate it would be to withhold disestablishedness from people in the Millennium, if it would be spiritually beneficial. Would God let them be lost if all it would take to not be lost was some kind of difficult experience? And I thought about how it sounds like in the next life there will be bad times for those who were rich, full, and laughing in this life (Luke 6:24-25), and "weeping and gnashing of teeth" in the outer darkness -- hell? or simply corrective experiences in the Millennium? As I recall, Philip Brown's opinion, for what it's worth, is that these dark passages are about the Millennium, not about hell. My sense, without doing the work to really be sure, is that ruling out the possibility that these could be only about the Millennium (the Millennium and not hell) would be difficult.

So I thought that that explanation for why it's worth living in this life (that this life is distinctively beneficial for being disestablished) is not a solid one. It should be possible for there to be disestablishedness in the next.

But then it occurred to me that this life could be valuable as an addition to the Millennium. In other words, the Millennium is a finite amount of time, as is each of our lives in this life, and thus our lives in this life extend the work of the Millennium.

The period of time called the Millennium might be literally 1,000 years long (the Millennium gets its name from Revelation, which is a vision and might not be literal, but details in it could always happen to be literal). Let's say I live 80 years in this life, and then 1,000 in the Millennium. 80 is 8% of 1,000, or if you want to do the math differently, it could be 7.4% of 1,080. That is a decent percentage of the total time. Presumably, getting more time to mature spiritually is better than getting less -- unless this life is particularly bad for people spiritually. Maybe there are too many temptations, not enough temptations, too few anti-temptations, too many anti-temptations in some way, too few influences of any sort that make us change (the result being that we get into hardened habits), or some other problem with the environment in which we decide for or against God. It's possible that this life is bad for people spiritually, more than good, but optimistically, people do grow spiritually (become more in tune with God) in this life, something we have some evidence of, and I think at worst I would judge myself uncertain as to whether this life is so much worse than the Millennium that to live here is a net-negative. So once again, I don't think we have a clear reason to abort children for the sake of their spiritual well-being.

1,000 is much greater than 80. I would guess that 1,000, if it is not the literal number of years in the Millennium (hm... I probably should have called it the Resurrection, an alternate biblical name according to the New Wine System, for cases like this), is meant to not mislead, and so we should think of the time in the Millennium/Resurrection as being "large but finite", I would guess somewhere around the same order of magnitude if not greater. It would be weird for the Bible to say 1,000 when it really meant 1, also if it really meant 10, and also if it really meant 100. Maybe it could really be 900 or 800 years? I can't really be sure. So maybe this life matters more, or less, but probably is no more than about 10% (80/800) of the amount of life that is at play. So if a person were to be aborted, or was miscarried, it's probably only a moderate disadvantage for them spiritually, but not a stark and terrible one. Still, the ethical/practical scales are tilted toward being pro-life, at least to some extent.

MSL duration of Millennium

From an MSL perspective (MSLN without reference to the Bible), how long should we think the Millennium/Resurrection would be? It's hard to say. I would assume that since God wants to save everyone, he would allocate enough time that most people could sufficiently make up their minds to follow him (or if they want, to reject him, knowing what they are doing). But, some people would be basically eternal procrastinators, and need a deadline to come to a decision. So, I will speculate, if I were designing this system, my naive first thought would be to allocate enough time that the non-procrastinators could make their decision, and then maybe a certain amount extra so that the procrastinators could do their relatively rapid, "night-before-the-test" changes to reach their final decision. (God might say "You have 1,000 years to fully repent and come into tune with me." and then extend the deadline to accommodate procrastinators, those who were motivated by the impending end of the 1,000 years, developed a good spiritual "velocity" at the last minute, and asked (individually or collectively) for an extension of the deadline.)

I don't know that God could predict in advance how many procrastinators there would be and exactly how long it would take the non-procrastinators to get through their decision-making processes. There must be a final deadline, because the duration of illegitimacy must be finite (God (Legitimacy) can only endure illegitimacy for a finite time for it to be illegitimate), and that deadline might be "rough", and some people could be lost at the deadline, for not being able to repent fast enough. So I don't think procrastinating on becoming holy is a good idea, and the more that people don't procrastinate, the fewer will be lost.

I still don't know how much time to guess the Millennium will be, apart from the rough clue given in the Bible. I think whatever it will be will be adequate -- generally speaking, basically -- and will be more adequate the more seriously we take the process of becoming holy.

How does this affect the math done in the previous section (80:1000)? Is the ratio between this life and the Millennium (given MSL) more like 1:10 (relatively close to 80:1000)? Is it something like 1:5? 1:2? 1:1? I can only guess based on my sense of how spiritual growth works in this life, but 1:1 is probably too fast for most people (in other words 80 years of this life, followed by 80 years of "Millennium"). The longer the "Millennium", the more plausible. 1:5 starts to feel like it might be generous. 1:10 and beyond is at least as generous as the literal-biblical 1,000 years. So, I guess this life might be as high as 80/400 (20%) or 80/480 (16%), in terms of how much of a person's development happens during it, for calculations of how bad abortion is in terms of depriving people of time in this life. A really safe assumption might be to make the "Millennium" even shorter, but it seems less plausible the shorter you get. Again, I find 80:80 to be hard to believe. This paragraph is guesswork that for me has at least that much structure.

Life Extension

Notice that prolonging a person's life gives them an advantage spiritually (important caveat: as long as this life is more spiritually beneficial than not, which I think is currently the case and probably always has been up to now). So attempts to prolong people's lives (using things like insecticide-treated bednets to prevent malaria) could be significantly valuable even with respect to the second death, which they do not directly address. But people could end up in local environments where this life is more harmful than good spiritually. Perhaps in some seemingly utopian future, every part of civilization will be more harmful than good spiritually.

Now, in an artificial world, what if people are prolonging their lives with life extension technology, but hardening themselves in the process? They could live 10,000 years in this life -- then, the ratio given above could turn out to be 10,000:1,000 or 10:1, roughly the opposite of the biblical 80:1000. The pessimist in me says that that would be terrible, and that we should avoid doing that kind of thing. Life extension might be one of the most dangerous technologies we can develop, from a spiritual point of view. I do think we should be very careful with life extension, given that risk. But, the less pessimistic side of me hopes that even after 10,000 years of shallowness, ease, emptiness, and lack of loving, 1,000 years in the Millennium could still undo a lot of that, all of that for many people. Still, I wouldn't risk a spiritually shallow extended-life world if I were the designer of things.

(Could God extend the Millennium in response to human life-extension? I don't remember everything I may have written relevant to that, but I do think that if the "size" of God is limited, and if your past is a necessary part of who you are that only exists if it is remembered ("to be is to be perceived"), God may face a tradeoff between extending the Millennium and creating more people because he would run out of resources to remember everyone's pasts. In that case, a further argument against life-extension could be that with enough life-extension, the Millennium might have to be shortened, and that people in the era of history in which they can extend their lives would have an unfair advantage (assuming their lives brought them closer to being in tune with God) than those in the past who could only manage to live 20, 50, or 80 years. The difference between living 5 years and 80 years isn't enormous with respect to 1,000 years, but the difference between 100,000 and 5 years is, and enough 100,000 year lifespans could draw down the Millennium so that it's only 500 years long or something like that.)

What if the Millennium is actually 1,000,000 years long? I think that is consistent with the Bible calling it "1,000". The reader of the Bible could be uncertain whether it means "literally 1,000 years" or "a really big number of years; an age or eon". 1,000 years enables us to trust God to a certain extent, to expect a certain number of years for our spiritual development. So if it's at least 1,000 years, then either the "literally 1,000 years" and "age or eon" interpretations are good in terms of delivering on whatever promise we see in "1,000 years". So 1,000,000 years could be biblical. And there is no reason to think, from MSL, that a 1,000,000-year Millennium is impossible. A ratio of 80:1,000,000 is even more generous than 80:1,000.

In that case, life extension isn't that bad, at least, if it's not extreme. But we don't know that we actually have a 1,000,000 year Millennium.

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Some of the unfairness of modern or transhuman life extension can be ameliorated (perhaps) by God not giving life-extended people as much time in the Millennium. So, if they live 500 years + the usual 80, and if the Millennium is normally 1,000 years long, they get 500 years in the Millennium. This works out okay, but not if people are extending their lives more than the length of the Millennium. This suggests that some life extension might be okay (maybe 100 or 200 years beyond 80?), as long as it's high-quality from a spiritual standpoint, such that the person whose life was extended wouldn't be at a disadvantage for missing out on the Millennium.

Another thought counterweighing the unfairness of modern or transhuman life extension, is that generally when people live less than, say 60 years, or 40, or 20, it's because their lives are hard. Disestablishedness may be better than establishedness, because it's a more ready teacher of "the cross". So they might not be at as much disadvantage as their shorter lifespans would indicate. Should we still help people in that life live longer? It's good for our spiritual well-being (all else equal), as wealthy people, to live for someone else, and we tend to have atheistic sides to us which say that "this life is all there is", so from that perspective, it still makes sense to help people live longer. From a spiritual perspective, it's for our sakes, but from an atheistic perspective, it's for theirs, and it's because it's for theirs from an atheistic perspective that it's particularly good for us from ours. But even an MSLN theist should care about alleviating unbearable suffering, because that's something God cares about. I think, spiritually speaking, there are diminishing returns on suffering beyond a certain point, and low-hanging fruit for would-be generous people to pick in their own lives by helping those who suffer.