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.

Simantism, Part 2

We get more meaning from things than we put in. I think this is true of everything we encounter, but we really notice it with certain things that speak to us strongly and deeply. What we experience is that they speak to us, just as that they are meaningful. They tend to speak to us in a way that has something to do with who we are. Because they really are in accordance with who we are, they can speak to us. They are meaningful, and they use this platform to speak meaning to us.

For instance, suppose you hear that if you donate a kidney, it can save the life of somebody -- a stranger. This idea speaks to you. Because of who you are, the idea of donating a kidney is appealing, rather than disturbing or uninteresting. But the idea itself has vocal strength, it can speak to you strongly, beyond the energy you have already. So it can motivate you, in ways that you wouldn't have already been motivated.

Sometimes, having gained entry by meaning something in tune with who you are, such an idea (or other simantic word) can speak to you so strongly that you change. You are strongly tempted (or anti-tempted) to choose to see things its way. There is a lot of power in the things that can speak to us.

I think that all the time, this speech is the speech of a personal being to a personal being. Sometimes this is more clear than other times. We might see it more clearly when something speaks to us in a very personal way. How could an experiential word mean something so personal if it wasn't spoken by a person? We can take as an analogy for simantic meaning (a personal relating with something) the finding of semantic meaning (decoding of written or spoken symbolic language). I can imagine a book in the Library of Babel having wonderful poetry in my native language, but most of what is in the Library of Babel is meaningless. A typical book from the Library would be like reading pages and pages of mashed keys on the keyboard. If we tried to get semantic (rather than simantic) meaning, we would get nothing from it. The bits that made any sense might give us whiplash -- words could arise by chance, followed by other unrelated words. Somewhere in that Library there is a book that gives some kind of interpretive key to the nonsense that is before me, but it could take more than my whole life to find that key, and in the meantime I would have had to go through oceans of nonsense in all the books I search through, with no keys provided for them.

There are simantic words that are like books in the Library of Babel, things that give us a kind of whiplash, or that blank out our ability to assign a level of importance to them, to integrate them into the flows of our lives as ourselves, as personal beings. But most simantic words far more resemble novels or instruction books or phone books or newspapers. We find those writings meaningful because they were written by people. So simantically speaking, we find ourselves in something more akin to Wikipedia or the Internet as a whole, rather than a Library of Babel. It looks like we live in a world spoken by a person, as though the key to speaking to personal being is to understand it yourself, as a person.

If we were very lucky and found a book of lost greatness in the Library of Babel, some great poem, the poem wouldn't mean anything to us unless we understood the language it was written in. That language is where most of the meaning of the book is stored. We would have had to learn the language.

And in order for children to learn language, language must speak to them. They have to be drawn to the sounds and the gestures by which their parents try to teach them. There is a personal communication, a wordless dialogue which draws us to learning words.

The wordless dialogue might be identified as "deep calling to deep", that which underlies, for instance, the semantic words "I love you" spoken by someone like Boaz to someone like Ruth. "I love you" from the Library of Babel does not mean the same as "I love you" from Boaz to Ruth. The words "I love you" mean something coming from the dictionary, and they are useful in a general sense. But their real meaning comes from what "I" and "love" and "you" mean specifically between a given pair of people. Because they mean something specific, fleshed out by personal relation and intention between two discrete personal beings, there is a wordless dialogue between Boaz and Ruth, and it is actually spoken by God, is God's poem for each of them, the poem in which the two characters are them, saying "I love you" one to the other. They choose to say "I love you", but it is God who speaks the depths between them. Perhaps this expression of the wordless dialogue really originates with Boaz, but Ruth can hear it in many other contexts, the basic root or silent embodiment of other poems, unrelated to him. For our part, as liberal modern people, the word "democracy" speaks to us, or as humanists, the word "empathy". These semantic words do so because they are representatives of the underlying simantic words of democracy and empathy, the life realities in the world. How can democracy speak to us personally? How can empathy? The wordless dialogue is with a person, who speaks through our ideas to us.

We are spoken to by the things that are "deep calling to deep", but even with mundane simantic words like trash cans or bricks, or whatever is on your desk, the words being spoken have a personal origin, similar to how if you were married to someone named Sam, there would be something spousal and Sam-like when they say "I put the food in the refrigerator". We can tell when persons are speaking to us. Even before we know much about our spouse, before they become our spouse although not before they become who they are, we can hear their voice. So bricks and trash cans are not necessarily persons in their own right, but as words are extensions of the personality of the Speaker.

The set of all existing things is something to which we can relate. That simantic word refers to all things that exist. It can speak to us. How can it do that unless somehow it is a person? The set of all things can be a person if all things are conscious, parts of one person, who includes all experience into one complex of experiences, as is the case with the metaphysical organism.

The Original Person

The following is a chapter taken from How Can We Love? that I originally wrote in 2014. Since then, my views have changed in some ways relevant to this, and I will discuss those changes at the end. I will also discuss how I find the ideas in this useful in 2020. (So if you clicked on a link to this page from somewhere else on the blog, you may find what you're looking for there most directly.)

2014:

[Chapter title:] FREE WILL

Defined: A determination is that which decides how things will be.

Defined: A will is the part of a personal being that decides how things will be -- the personal determination.

Defined: Freedom is undetermination.

Assumed: Everything needs a determination, or is an undetermined determination, or determines itself and other things. (Perhaps there are things that are undetermined and determine nothing else, but these are left aside as they affect nothing and are affected by nothing and so are effectively not part of our universe.)

Is the universe an undetermined determination? It is said that the physical universe began with the Big Bang (or a Big Bang). That cannot be explained. It simply is. Why did the Big Bang unfold in the way that it did? How can one reason from the singularity at the inception of space and time to all the particularity of the present world? But let us say there is some rule for this. Then what explains that rule? Perhaps it is "the very nature of reality" -- then what determines that? Something just is just the way it is.

Under this story, of materialism, it seems impossible for the human will to be free. This human will emerges from the interaction of determined physical particles. Therefore it must obey the one true undetermined, the Big Bang (or if there's anything more primary than that, then that reality). Or there must be some kind of intervention, some way in which the neurons can rebel, apart from that which emerges from the Big Bang. And we don't see any physical evidence of such an intervening thing existing, and anyway, where else would that intervention have its determination but from the one true undetermined -- the Big Bang or whatever might come before it?

But materialism may not be true.

Is there a hard logical reason to suppose that there is only one undetermined thing? It seems as though there can only be one thing that is completely free. Otherwise, some equal thing could impinge on its freedom. Of course, if that equal power had the same will, then there never would be an impingement. In that case, there would be only one will which was completely free.

Concluded, then?: There can be only one completely free will.

But could there not be a number of partially free wills? That is, wills that can be limited in scope by outside determination.

We could picture the universe as being a field in which wills or determinations interact. There could be one primary determination that brings about the existence of numerous derivative determinations without determining their natures. If one undetermined thing exists, why not a number of others, if not powerful enough to resist all influence, at least possessing some originality of determination? And then all of these free or partially free determinations could interact, to produce all the rest of the universe's development.

(Think of a board game. Each player is constrained by the rules of the game and the structure of the board, but each makes some choices as to what his or her piece does, and these pieces interact with each other to form the development of that particular playing of the game.)

But how can this primary free will give birth to more free or partially free wills? If it creates them out of some material, won't that material have to have been made the way it is by the primary free will, the creator? And thus determined by the creator. It seems a will that is built by another will cannot choose against how it's built.

But what if the primary free will makes them out of its own uncreated nature -- and that very nature entails freedom of the will? It does not create it by writing its essence down as instructions in the pages of a book, but by offering pages out of itself -- the real thing that makes a thing the way it is is its material, not its abstract definition.

The human body is like a machine, and so I suppose that God created the body like a mechanic designing and interconnecting the parts of a machine, bringing into physical reality a pattern only existing, before, in the mechanic's mind. But the will of human beings, if nothing else, cannot be created in that way. Instead, God gives himself into a limit, a finite pond washed up by an infinite ocean. (In the Hebrew of the Bible, humans are both "made" and "created".)

Because this human free will is limited in power, it cannot rule the entire person, and so humans have only partially free will. There is an aspect of the human's nature which does come from a friend or a parent or the physical body or some accident of the weather or digestion or physical illness. Yet "the pond within" is a piece of God, and cannot be denied its "little God"-hood. It is materially free.

Can God be free? If freedom is an inexplicable quality and therefore objectionable, then which is worse, that the Big Bang has it, or that God has it? Freedom has to exist, magical as it is.

But can God impart his own material into a limit? How can an infinite being separate a finite reality from itself? The Big Bang singularity is said to exist without time and space. Can there be limits to a physical entity without time and space? No spatiotemporal limits, at least. So the singularity somehow falls out of its own infinity into limitation. This is inexplicable to me -- perhaps it is only "magical" and is explicable to some other human being. But explicable or not, it happened. And so if that is possible for the Big Bang singularity, then what would make such a move impossible for God? He could impart himself into limited regions of space-time, numerous times, and thus create us.

And so I see a way in which, if God exists, there can be human free will.

2020:

One thing that this says, that I want to bring into 2020, is that free will is something that can't have arisen from a mechanistic process. If we really do have free will (in other words, if we do anything at all, rather than forces outside us acting on us), then that capacity to be ourselves must have come directly, imparted as one would split water off from the ocean to make a tide-pool. This is a way of saying that the origin of the personal must be the personal. So we descend from some original person.

I suppose I could add the original person to the list, along with the metaphysical organism, the Speaker, and the Father of legitimism, all as names for the same being. So it might seem I ought to change "MSLN" to "OMSLN". I'm considering doing a clean-up of all the terminology that I use philosophically, if there comes a time that I consider myself to be markedly more ready to try to promote MSLN, but until then, I will not change "MSLN", because of the work involved in doing so.

I don't keep up very carefully on cosmology, so either a) what I wrote above about the Big Bang might not be what people thought then or b) it might not be what people think now.

In the past, I wanted to defend the description of God that included "actually infinite" in its list of properties. I don't currently think that the description of God needs to include "actually infinite", and I am not sure that there is such a thing as actual infinity. I would tend to think that there is not (nothing in our experience is actually infinite) -- except in the case of everlastingness (e.g. processes which have always lasted a finite amount of time but which never stop increasing in duration). But I have not fully explored the question yet, and probably should in some other post.

"The real thing that makes a thing the way it is is its material, not its abstract definition." is an interesting statement. If I want to defend my past usage, I would say that what I probably meant was "abstract definition" (formal cause?) does make something the way it is, but "material" (material cause?) is the truer root of what makes a thing the way it is. I think in context of How Can We Love?, the emphasis on spiritual material over constructedness is fitting. How Can We Love? is about change in material, in part.

I think this charitable interpretation has some evidence in its favor from the original text, in the case where humans are implied to have been both "made" and "created". If God both made and created us, perhaps by "creating" us he was putting us into the finite ponds, and by "making" us he was making our bodies (including our brains and that which our brains determine about who we are).

What makes us "really" who we are? Our constructedness? The many layers of mechanism which determine many of the facts of our life and how we behave and appear to others? Or the fact that we are free, that we exist at all as persons?

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If I title this post "The Original Person", then maybe I ought to give some thought as to what this argument can tell us about God.

A short way to put this is: We are persons, not wills and consciousnesses. Persons have wills and consciousnesses. We do things, we make decisions, knowingly, as opposed to being forced to by mechanistic forces. We exist, as persons. We exist, as partially undetermined beings. It is in our undeterminedness that we do things. So the question is not "free will", but "free persons". Free persons descend from a free person. They can't be fully determined by anything else, so their undetermination must come from undetermined personhood.

We get the whole of personality from a personal source. People are different -- have different "constructednesses" or are "made" different ways. But what we all have in common is our material. The original person is a person in the most minimal sense, has will, consciousness, and preferences. He has a constructedness which differs from each of us, but whatever is necessarily a part of all personal being can be found in him. I'm not sure at the moment what, if anything, to add to "will, consciousness, and preference" among the foundation of personhood, but perhaps there are more features to be added.

MSLN Theodicy

31 October 2022: noting today that there are some things in this I should try to fix someday, but I'm taking a break from philosophy.

Addendum: Legitimacy Can't Go Back on Itself.

The argument

A theodicy is an attempt to justify God, given the evil of the world. I do think it is possible to justify the God of MSLN. Essentially, the argument goes like this:

1. God is good, absolutely.

2. Enough of us begin our existence not yet fully aligned with him.

3. We have to make choices -- real choices -- to become like him.

4. a. For these choices to exist, they have to be arranged to exist, so that we see them.

4. b. And the simantic word of "You can do wrong / choose against legitimacy" has to be spoken to us.

4. c. Enough of the time, 4. a. and 4. b. can't be done by God -- he can't tempt. He is too good, and too loving, to be able to will violations of legitimacy, and to cause us to will them.

5. So temptation must be done by beings other than God.

6. These beings are never more powerful than God, but are needed by God for their role in our salvation.

7. So these beings have bargaining power, and can negotiate a world order that is worse than what a loving God would ordain.

Now, fleshing out each point:

1. God is good, absolutely

This follows from legitimism.

2. Enough of us begin our existence not yet fully aligned with him.

Probably each of us can easily remember some time in our past when we were not aligned with God. It's likely we were born with tendencies which made us painful people, to ourselves and others. We did not do the kind of things that a completely empathic being would be able to bear forever. So we have to become like him somehow. If we see our destination as people as being in tune with him, then we must mature into that final state.

3. We have to make choices -- real choices -- to become like him.

If we are to become like him, it should be we who do so, rather than something else that determines us. So we have to be presented with situations where there is some uncertainty, where something bad seems good enough to be worth trying, or where we seem to ourselves unworthy of doing what is really good, or something else of that nature.

4. We need to be tempted, but God cannot tempt us.

Temptation is when we're put in a position where we are willed to choose to do bad. ("I will you to choose bad" -- you feel a push or pull from that willing, toward doing bad.) We have situations in our lives that seem to have been set up to tempt us. (As though the situation were saying "I will you to choose bad".) Also we can hear a voice speaking the simantic word of temptation to us. (The tempting situation needs someone to speak for it, to point out its potential.) God cannot will us to choose to do bad. He is absolutely good, legitimacy itself. He loves us too much to will that we be opposed to him through doing or being wrong.

He can't speak the word of temptation, or at least, he cannot will it. For legitimacy to will illegitimacy would be to make it legitimate. He can set up situations that tend to tempt us, but he can't will that they tempt us, and he can't set up situations that are designed to tempt us, by his own will. God often does what other beings will him to do (you can demonstrate this by making a decision and acting in the world, which he conveys to the people you interact with). Sometimes he does not approve of what he does on behalf of others. But the will had to come from somewhere. If he allows anything to happen, it's by his will, unless someone else chooses to use the free will granted to them by him, to do something against his will.

5. So temptation must be done by beings other than God.

Other spirits can set up situations where we are tempted, and can also will the speaking of the simantic word of temptation. If there are times where spirits are not available to speak that word, for tempting situations they don't set up, it could be that God speaks it in accordance with the situation's inherent potential for temptation, according to a law that the spirits are able to bind on him.

6. These beings are never more powerful than God, but are needed by God for their role in our salvation.

These spirits are subordinate to God, and God could stop them any time he wanted. But, for us to mature, he needs them.

7. So these beings have bargaining power, and can negotiate a world order that is worse than what a loving God would ordain.

He can't force them to do what they do, or else it would be by his will that the tempting is done. So they can freely choose to not tempt us. But God needs them to tempt us, although he also fights against them, by giving us reasons to disfavor choosing wrong. Because God needs them, and they know this, they can refuse to work unless they have "good working conditions". These "conditions" may include causing suffering beyond what is needed for our maturation. The spirits (enemies of God), want to hurt him, and also know that broken expectations create doubt and decrease motivation in us. Many of us have an expectation (whether supported by our official beliefs or not) that life will go well, make sense, flow, as though a loving God were caring for us. This expectation can be broken by the gratuitous evil in the world, which can then weaken our will to do what we really want to do, and thus makes it more likely for us to choose evil instead.

God puts the spirits in a situation where their evil nature is revealed. They may not really be tempted, in the sense that they experience no inner struggle -- they simply reveal who they are, by doing evil. But for them to take on the role of tempter is a complex thing. God intends them to be tempters according to the legitimate function of a tempter in bringing us in line with God. Their motives are more to pain him and lead us into enmity with him. And we choose how to respond to temptation. There are three stakeholders in the process of temptation: God, the tempters, and us, and each of us has our unique contribution to the question of whether we choose wrong. God does not have full control of reality. That way he can let us really exist as persons. Even though God wills us to be free, and wills the spirits to tempt us, he himself does not say that what is bad is good, as the spirits do. God does not violate his legitimacy by appointing them, in the way that he would if he tried to do what they do.

Is Eternal Conscious Torment Compatible with MSLN?

Epistemic status: provisional in the sense that, I think somewhere in MSLN there is reason to not believe in eternal conscious torment, but these arguments in their exact form may need revision; and also that I can only provide natural theological arguments right now.

9 May 2021: small edit, and added a postscript.

27 May 2021: added a paragraph, rewrote postscript.

Eternal Conscious Torment (ECT) is the doctrine that some people will go to hell, existing forever in a state of conscious torment. It is an offensive doctrine, but one which may yet be true. Ordinarily we look at the Bible as the source for this doctrine. In the future I may be able to consider what the Bible says, overall, but for now, I will consider natural theology: reasoning about God. Reason is used in interpreting the Bible, and many people find reason trustworthy in itself, perhaps more so than the Bible. Natural theology and the Bible talk about the same subject: God. So what does the natural theology of MSLN say about ECT?

Would God want to or need to send people to hell in MSLN?

One popular definition of hell is "separation from God".

God may be able to bear us for a long time, but what is unbearable at all can't be borne forever. Fundamentally, God is the way he is (he is the right way he should be from the beginning). We differ from God in some ways that he can't bear (we are "sinful"). So either we must change to fit God, or we must be separated from God. A separation into ECT? Or a separation that destroys us? (The latter view is called annihilationism; "Annihilation": to make nothing.) Presumably, no one can exist when completely separated from God.

MSLN argument: the metaphysical organism

The idea of the metaphysical organism is a hypothesis about the means by which otherwise separate consciousnesses connect. In it, a consciousness connects to another consciousness by being conscious of its exact consciousness. Further, whatever connects me to the outside world experiences exactly what I do. So that being would experience ECT as well as I would. If God is the being who connects all consciousnesses, he would have to experience the ECT of all those who made themselves enemies of him. Could God ever rest? He would experience the unbearability of their torment for all time. They might not have the ability to stop experiencing what they experienced, but he would. Arguably, unbearability can't be endured forever, not even by God, because God would experience the unbearability as unbearable. So then God would shut down their consciousnesses, and this would be like them being annihilated, rather than experiencing ECT.

MSLN argument: simantism

However, maybe it is possible to think that God could cut himself off from these consciousnesses, and they could somehow exist apart from him. They would "speak" experience to themselves, in place of God, the Speaker. They would have a very limited simantic vocabulary compared to God. Maybe they could only speak the barest proto-conscious sense of will, preference, and trust. If he left them to an existence so minimalist that they couldn't torment themselves, it wouldn't be ECT, and it would resemble annihilation.

If they had a less-minimalist existence, could they torment themselves? Maybe, but not against their will, and though they might be the causes of their torment, the experience of the torment itself would be against their will. So it would be a case of them relating to what was not-them (simantism), and their torment would have to be spoken to them by another being. I have written in this paragraph as though it is possible to speak simantic words without God, but then, the simantic word of the entirety of reality, which is implied by a person's experience in the moment, would be spoken to them, and who can do that other than God? So God would have contact with them and would suffer as they did.

MSLN argument: legitimism

From the point of view of legitimism, whatever exists, in some sense should be, and should be absolutely. Absolute ought comes from a truly worthy will, is a truly worthy opinion. An opinion is conscious and personal, is part of a person. If God's opinion founds all of reality, he is conscious of all that is. Any lack of awareness on his part is of what does not yet exist. And what kind of opinion is so valid that it can found reality? The answer given in legitimism is that God is willing to take on the burdens he lays on others, and is maximally receptive to reality. So then, God would know of and directly experience the ECT of any who suffer it.

Summary so far

These considerations show that God himself can't escape ECT if any of us remain in it. It is reasonable to guess that God would prefer to rest than to suffer, and it seems that in the very nature of unbearability, there is the inability to willingly endure it forever. So these make a case against ECT.

Does MSLN in some way support eternal conscious torment?

On the other hand, do these natural theologies lend any weight in favor of ECT? Perhaps legitimism does. Legitimism says that there is an absolute ought, which can be violated by personal beings. The violations are an offense against what should be. We know as humans that sometimes exacting a just penalty from someone heals an injustice. And this may be a foundational principle of reality. So, when people do what is unjust, they must pay the penalty so that legitimacy can be healed, unless the penalty is paid for them. So if their injustices are infinite, they deserve infinite punishment, and this could lead to ECT. ECT as a means to justice.

Finite beings don't have the power to cause infinite injustice in a positive sense. So we wouldn't merit ECT. But perhaps by us turning away from helping others, we are willing to shut the door on potentially infinite numbers of people, for all we know or care about, in order to enjoy our small pleasures. This could be considered in some sense an infinite injustice for which we might have to pay eternally.

Counterpoint (27 May 2021):

Do people who neglect the well-being of others have hearts that truly intended to cause an infinite amount of suffering? Human beings are incapable of truly understanding infinity. It's not even clear that such a thing could actually exist. (In a sense, infinity is inconceivable, and normally, we think that that which is inconceivable can't exist.) I think a God who abides by the simantic word of "reasonable proportion" would say "their hearts were not infinitely bad -- finitely bad is bad enough". No one has a disposition sufficient to will infinity. And those who failed to will good (by turning away from the cries of others) did so at a finite, and not infinite, volume. Whatever concept they had of others suffering, from whom they turned away, was not actually infinite.

The past is broken, made illegitimate by our acts. To fix it, someone could pay the penalty. But we can't pay for all our acts -- we would all die, have to be destroyed. But God doesn't want us to be destroyed. So he created reality with a more-finite partner, who shares his character. The Father (the metaphysical organism and Speaker), creates with a Son. This Son is legitimacy, as much as the Father is, because they decided on reality together as beings who were disposed to experience the burdens they lay on us. So he can take on the penalty. He dies existentially alone, facing annihilation. He does this willingly. Because he is legitimacy, he does not deserve to die, and so in himself is able to pay the penalty. And so legitimacy is healed. (The penalty is paid once -- if the Son died again, that would create a new injustice, for which there could be no further healing. Having paid the penalty, the Son does not need to remain dead/destroyed, and so he is brought back to life.) This healing of the past of legitimacy, healing of justice, makes it so that the underlying issue of justice is not an obstacle to us avoiding hell.

Though God does not need to punish us for justice's sake, God may still find a kind of punishment useful. We sometimes forget that he loves foolish people and people with a certain amount of psychopathic traits, people who might only repent if they feared death and punishment. There is a place for death, and for suffering hell, in the plan of salvation. But the suffering need not be eternal in order to provide an incentive for the salvation of those who require it. On the other hand, the idea of ECT, in some cultures and time periods, might have been one we liked to believe as a civilization, and were benefited by, even if the reality is that there is no such thing. The stronger image of hell doesn't seem to have been as unacceptably scary in the past, and may have saved some people that the softer image would not have.

A parent might say, "The consequences for hitting your brother are that you don't get to play video games for the rest of the night." They don't want you to do that kind of thing or be that kind of person, and want to give you a reason to see things their way. Hitting your brother is replaying the story of Cain and Abel -- you should be cast out of your house with a mark on you for the rest of your life. But the pain your brother felt, and the pall you cast on the trust and trustworthiness of the house, only merit you missing out on your greatest pleasure for a few hours. So God as the parent can ordain consequences for injustice without them directly paying for the deeper, truer injustice. And like a parent, he would ordain these, one would think, in order to preserve the good of his children in the long run, not for justice's sake.

The natural theologies of MSLN say that ECT is unlikely (God wouldn't want to experience unbearability) and that the parts of legitimism that lend themselves to ECT don't have to (given the death of the Son).

However, this is only part of MSLN. What remains is the interpretation of the Bible (the New Wine System).

What about the biblical component of MSLN?

I may turn toward study of the Bible itself, for myself, at some point, in evaluating MSLN. It seems like something I should do at some point. Until then, I will appeal to a few outside perspectives: the developer of the New Wine System, Philip Brown, favors annihilationism (giving arguments for that position in New Wine for the End Times) and this article and this article give me reason to believe that there are valid arguments for annihilationism, and that there is a debate -- it's not like annihilationism is a strange thing that no respectable Bible interpreter espouses. So for now I can leave the question of what the Bible says undecided, allowing for the possibility that the annihilationist part of the New Wine System is biblical, so that the Bible agrees with MSLN natural theology.

Postscript

Here's the strongest case I can make for ECT within MSLN terminology: God is legitimacy, and part of that is his justice. Now, you have to be careful how you think about this. If his justice is at all seen as separate from him, then we observe the following. Justice exists to punish violations of legitimacy (of God). So if justice itself perpetuates violations of legitimacy, then it loses its legitimacy. Perpetuating hell for all eternity violates legitimacy, since those in hell are illegitimate and God must be metaphysically connected to their existence. To whatever extent justice failed to bring about God's will (failed to serve legitimacy), it would no longer ought to be, and would not function. So for ECT to occur, it can't be that justice is separate from God, or a possession of God, over which he could have authority. Justice has to be an inherent element of God, one over which he does not have any sovereignty, because it is sovereignty (God) itself (himself).

As we can see, justice is something that conflicts with God getting what he wants. Perhaps God wants justice, but also wants everything to be in harmony with himself. How can he resolve this issue? Perhaps justice is so much more valuable to him than harmony that he really wants to suffer for all eternity so that justice can be served. (God suffers whenever we do.) God is so principled, and takes us so seriously as moral agents, that he is willing to sacrifice his peace of mind, for all eternity, just to hold us accountable. He is willing to violate himself by prolonging the existence of each person in hell beyond any point at which it might serve the purpose of giving him a world which is all good, just to get the greater good of justice. Maybe he can't sin against himself in this way by himself, but he contracts out the willing of this state of affairs to evil beings, as he did before with temptation. Temptation (and the willing-to-temptation) came into the world so that we could come into tune with legitimacy, but this willing-to-ECT came in order to prolong the existence of illegitimacy. But this is acceptable because in this case, the prolonging is because justice is being served, and justice outweighs the prolonging of sin and suffering.

Perhaps I could respond by saying that the nature of unbearability is such that for God to experience our unbearable suffering, over time the strength of the effect of the unbearability on God's will would be such as to reshape his values away from valuing justice. Or, the unbearability of God's experiencing of the existence of illegitimacy, could eventually corrode his willing of justice. This makes sense to me. However, isn't it possible that the lack of justice is unbearable to God? So then either way there would be unbearability. God would be trapped.

You could say that God could simply focus on the inherent attractiveness or life-givingness or the like of all the good in his experience, but for God to really experience what we do, God can't escape by shifting his awareness to what is positive. Could God take a break from tormenting the people in hell? (They sleep, perhaps?) But they would continue to have illegitimate hearts, dispositions that should not be. It is the awareness of "should not be" that is unbearable -- maybe Rawlette is right to some extent in saying that pain qualia are the qualia of "ought-not-to-be-ness". Whatever is truly bad about pain, as an experience, is that we can't accept it. Completely acceptable pain is not "eternal conscious torment", but is more like the sting of tolerable hot peppers (for those who like to eat such things), or sore muscles after reasonable exercise. What is unbearable is that which ought not to be, and sin (violations of legitimacy) ought not to be.

Clearly God can put up with some illegitimacy and unbearable suffering -- quite a lot. He must have some kind of patience for that. Is that patience sufficient to endure an eternity of illegitimacy and/or unbearable suffering? If it is finite, no. The prolonged unacceptability will eventually outweigh whatever finite patience that he has. But what if it is infinite? If God has infinite patience, then in his eyes sin and suffering is acceptable. He never needs to get rid of it, can tolerate it forever. At no time would he be unable to let it be part of his reality. But by definition, what should not be is unacceptable. If it can't be accepted, then at some time or other, God (legitimacy) has to do the opposite of accept it -- make it cease to exist. So legitimacy contains in it the necessity to bring about a state in which there is no illegitimacy.

So God would have to end the situation of unbearable lack of justice versus unbearable tolerance of sin and suffering. How could he go about doing this? He could annihilate the people who are illegitimate (adjust his concern for justice downward). Or he could come to find acceptable their sins. But then why keep them in hell? (I tend to think that sin is sin only if it violates the unchanging nature of God, but I won't argue for that here.) So either way, God does not permit or ordain ECT.

However, you could say that God can't change his own nature, or the nature of what is sinful. So he could be stuck with "sin is unchangeably unacceptable, and justice is unchangeably necessary, in such a way that ECT is necessary".

But we should remember that there is an anthropic principle to creation. According to the anthropic principle, we should expect to observe the universe to be a certain way because it permits life on earth to exist, allowing us to observe anything in the first place. So, we wouldn't have been created by God if he knew that there would be such a terrible and insoluble problem in his own future, if he were to go ahead and risk our existence. (God creates us with his own extensive but finite patience in mind, so that we can arrive at the final harmony before it runs out.)

I haven't quite absorbed all of these thoughts, but I think for now I am satisfied that this shows that ECT does not follow from MSLN.

Pascalian and Non-Pascalian Nonzeros

Pascalian and non-Pascalian nonzero chances, definition: Any conceivable thing has a nonzero chance of being real -- we can call that the Pascalian nonzero chance. When we have some more solid reason to believe in something, the chance of it being real is also nonzero, is somehow higher, and can be called a non-Pascalian nonzero chance.

--

In estimating risk and reward, there are two kinds of nonzero chances I know of: what I will call "Pascalian" and "non-Pascalian".

Blaise Pascal proposed a famous Wager, which goes something like this:

If God exists:

Being aligned with God promises eternal life. Value = infinity.

Not being aligned with God promises hell. Value = minus infinity.

If God does not exist:

Being aligned with God promises a finite life, followed by annihilation. (That life might be better or worse because of your alignment with the God-idea and God-community which must stand in for God if he doesn't exist.) Value = something finite.

Not being aligned with God promises a finite life, followed by annihilation. Value = something finite.

Expected value calculations are made by multiplying the expected payoff of a course of action by its likelihood. Investment is risky but can be rational if the expected profits are high enough. If you have good information about the likelihood and reward, if you keep pursuing investments with high expected values, in the long run you will win big at least a few times, and make up for all the times you don't. You can make expected value a part of your lifestyle, pursuing all kinds of rewards, so that at least one will take. This approach can be used when evaluating whether to invest in alignment with God.

Is it ever rational to act as though God doesn't exist? Seemingly, not if there is a nonzero chance of God existing. Can anyone be 100% certain that God does not exist? Is there any possible way that God could have been the one to create and sustain the world? One would think there is. So if there is a tiny but nonzero chance that God exists, you multiply that by the infinity of eternal life and still get an infinite payout. So your expected value is infinite, no matter how small that tiny but nonzero chance is. Likewise with the negative payout that comes with not being aligned with God. But if you don't align yourself with God, the most you can expect is something finite, a finite life. Align yourself with God, then, no matter what the truth is.

Inspired by Pascal's Wager, some people have discussed Pascal's Mugging. It goes something like this:

A man walks up to you on the street. He says, "I know you're a rational person. So I have an offer to make you. If you give me $100, there's a nonzero chance that I will give you any finite amount of goodness you want -- just name your price. There's a nonzero chance that I have magical powers." A truly rational person, aware of expected value theory, will seemingly have to offer the mugger the money, in order to follow the dictates of reason which they always do. So knowing this, a mugger can exploit rationalists, by playing on their devotion to expected value.

But rationalists (and atheists) hardly ever seem to want to fall for these appeals. I don't know if real Pascal's Muggings happen (although scams do, and appeals to enormous but unlikely future goods occupy some minds), but I would bet someone has offered Pascal's Wager to an atheist, and the atheist was unimpressed. But what's wrong with the Wager and the offer in the Mugging? If you stick to the possibility and logic, they look pretty good. Why do we have an intuition against them?

I'm not sure this really explains the intuition, but I can think of one problem with Pascal's Wager, which is that you have to ask "which God?". Any conceivable thing has a nonzero chance of being real -- we can call that the Pascalian nonzero chance. When we have some more solid reason to believe in something, the chance of it being real is also nonzero, is somehow higher, and can be called a non-Pascalian nonzero chance. Well, if being aligned with God requires us to do certain things and hold certain attitudes, we want to know which God that is, to know what those behaviors and attitudes specifically ought to be. If any one deity can be considered to possibly exist simply because he is conceivable, then why not all the other conceivable ones? If we have to satisfy every conceivable deity, we may end up with all of their demands cancelling each other out. And if they don't, it will probably take too much of our time to figure out how they all add up and balance. Deities could be into all kinds of things, in all kinds of proportions, to all kinds of tolerances.

Perhaps a similar objection can be made to the Mugger. Yes, there is a nonzero chance that the mugger is both honest and possessing sufficient magical powers, but if that chance is exactly as high as the chance that anything conceivable can be true, then it is equally likely that some magical thing will happen to cancel out the good the mugger promises (a leprechaun interferes, perhaps). Then if I take the offer, I'm out $100 and I don't get anything back in the end.

What is the size of a Pascalian nonzero? I don't know if anyone has defined it. A solid 1% chance is definitely non-Pascalian. That's something you can work with. 0.1% or 0.01% are also okay. If you keep adding zeros, though, at some point you get Pascalian. Presumably in people's minds (or guts) there's some exact quantification of "Technically it's got a nonzero possibility because it's conceivable". But I'd be hesitant to mention what it is for me, perhaps because if I did the math I'd have to do something I didn't want to do. I would have been hoping the low number I'd assign to my Pascalian nonzero would make it effectively zero in all practical calculations, but some mugger could offer me a sufficiently high reward, and I'd feel rationally compelled to give him $100.

Do People Exist Apart From Their Phenomena in the Moment?

Epistemic status: provisional.

Do people exist apart from their phenomena in the moment? If everything is consciousness, it might seem not -- in other words, that people are identical with their experience bodies. One seeming counterpoint is sleep, another comas. If it's possible for there to be true unconsciousness, followed by a return to being more or less the same person, then does our new self each morning or after a coma pop into existence out of nothing, strangely similar to or even almost the same as before we lost consciousness? I know that I exist as a person, this is the root of my knowledge. That person is not contingent on whether I slept or underwent a coma. But of course that person changes over time, and the philosophy of personal identity raises questions about the ability to say that there is one subject per life-story. And yet my root knowledge is that one subject exists, that is me. That one subject is the one to whom I relate as myself. There are aspects of who I am that are not accessible to me in my experience body, in the moment. Yet I know that I exist, that I have depth. My past choices are real and sometimes really part of me even if I have forgotten them.

The MSLN approach to this is to say that through God, all the phenomena in my own or another's experience body is known by God, and God has his own opinions of who we are. In a sense, we are each simantic words, and the words take their definition from God's understanding of them. We are people with depth because God speaks our experience bodies in a way consistent with who we are as simantic words. Over time, we shape that simantic word, through our choices in the present moment, as subjects.

Because God knows us and remembers who we are, he can recreate us whenever we become conscious. He is conscious of us when we are unconscious.

There is a certain extent to which our past selves really are our present selves, and also an extent to which they are not. When we have really grown past the past, it is allowed to no longer bear on the present. (For instance, God "remembers our sins no more".) So it is possible for us to no longer be the people we were in the past, even though our history will always be ours. Painful past memories can be looked at with neither the shame of being the victim nor of being the perpetrator, when we are no longer the same people.

Approach With Courage, Believe in the Existence of Yourself

Who are you, really? What are you responsible for, in any situation? Some people are unable to voluntarily move, except for their eyelids, by which they can communicate -- or some, not even that. What are they responsible for? Who are they? The connection there is "who you are is what you choose". Maybe that's an overly simplistic view of human nature, but I think it at least captures something important, and I tend to want to favor it.

We face limitations due to aging -- we may all face that, either now, or, if we survive, in our future. There are other limitations besides that, which occur with less universality. Are we defined by our limitations? It depends on what we mean by "we". I would say that the paralyzed person is not defined by their paralysis. If they were put in a different body somehow, they would physically act out their personality. The body is accidental, not essential. I can't hold a paralyzed person responsible for not moving -- maybe partially so if they knowingly chose to paralyze themself (a rare occurrence), but even then, they would no longer be able to change their minds after the fact, and would have to live with the decision of their past self, who increasingly would be becoming to them a separate person. Likewise, I can't hold myself 100% responsible for the body or life that I'm stuck with. To an extent, it's not me. Essentially, it's something stuck to me, and to a large extent, other things than my choices are responsible for it.

However, it is more true that the way that I approach life emotionally, with my inner eye, and with my inner will, and the way I choose to think, does express who I am. If I were completely paralyzed, but still myself and still conscious, how I thought about life, and paralysis, would be me, would be an exercise and expression of me being myself. The state of my heart in the present moment is a root responsibility that I am always capable of disposing of properly.

So in this space of minimal limitation, in the world of what I choose to think and how I choose to see, I can express and exercise my heart (the true preferences and intentions within me) by having courage. To approach whatever there is, and whatever limits me, without flippancy, arrogance, impatience, or despair, but rather with courage.

--

Forces like depression and anxiety can seem to be me, and I can feel, in despair, that they are more powerful than me, that I must bow to them. In a sense, perhaps I must. If I must bow to them, how can there be a God? My mind can shut down to the spiritual and intellectual world if I identify so totally with my limitations. I can live in a narrow world, made up of practical concerns and the desire for the luck or therapy for me to not be beset by my psychological problems. If I am so limited, in a world where the only relevant thing is my narrow well-being, and God is not admitted as a person who can address that narrow well-being, of course for me God does not exist. I might say that he exists, or halfway believe it, but on the level of trusting, I do not believe that he exists.

In some way, the sense that I am not myself in the face of mental forces connects with my inability to say "God exists". Perhaps because in order for me to believe in the existence of God, I need to believe in the existence of myself. Myself, a free-willed being, who sees things according to his own lights, and thus is able to see the intellectual and spiritual world, things which are true in themselves, apart from what is forced on me, things which I must find unbearable or attractive in the pragmatic, personal, social, psychological world.

In a natural theology like simantism, it is important that I exist, a person, and that I can relate to what is not-me. From this, there is relationality, and I am not alone. From this, and for other reasons, if I am a person, then the universe can be personal. There is a give-and-take between me and what is not-me that suggests that what is not-me is a person. There is an analogy between myself, who is conscious, and what is not-me, which then might ought to be seen as conscious. If I, a consciousness, choose and cause, then what I experience might ought to also be chosen and caused by a conscious person. For these reasons, I might think that I live in relationality to all that is, and that all that is is a person. But if I am not a person, then maybe it is not.

If I exist, on some level, I am awake, in a way that I am not when I somehow think that I don't exist.

Perhaps too, if I slip below the waves into non-existence, I can no longer relate to God, can no longer really be a moral person or an obedient person, for not being able to be myself, choosing. I can still go through the motions of life -- who wouldn't? I can flow away from unbearability and toward what is attractive, automatically and inevitably. But on a deeper level, I can't relate to God, and on a deeper level, what we can't or don't relate to, doesn't exist to us.

But as long as I can recognize facts, I recognize the fact that I exist.

--

You have real limitations, but if you can remember, you always exist. And then there is always some level on which you can be courageous, given whatever limitations you have.

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.

Agency and AI

There are probably other ways to come to define agency, but I come at this from the angle of thinking about artificial intelligence.

One version of our (perhaps not-so-distant) AI-affected future is that one AI will completely take over, rule the whole world. (The other version is that there will be multiple AI (and perhaps humans) which collectively, perhaps as something scene-like analogous to the international system of national governments, rule or prefer not to rule the whole world.)

If one AI takes over the whole world, we would hope that it was programmed in such a way that it was aligned with human well-being. But there's at least two problems. One is, the technical challenge of getting an AI to actually be aligned any particular way. It isn't always easy to code concepts, even ones which you can more or less live according to, yourself, as a human. The other is that people don't really know what human well-being is. I can think of a few different approaches to well-being: humans should feel pleasure, should not feel pain, should feel "ought-to-be-ness" (a concept to be discussed in my upcoming review of The Feeling of Value), should have their preferences satisfied, should have their trust maximized, should be "good people" (according to Christianity? What kind of Christianity? Or a kind of Islam? Or another religion? Or a branch of secular thinking?), should relate properly to reality (what does that mean?), should relate properly to God (which one?).

Given this profusion of options, one might conclude that it is unlikely that this is even the complete list, and also that if you wanted to code all these, it would be difficult, and you would tend to have to make a lot of decisions about how to balance goals that seemed to contradict in particular cases. And, at best, one strain of humanity would actually like what you were coming up with. As you designed your AI, you would be writing the constitution of the future world's culture and government, but it's likely that many or most people wouldn't approve of the decisions you were making.

So you might think that the wise and humble thing to do would be to try to make an AI that ceded as much decision-making ability to humans as possible. That way, over the coming centuries, humans could all participate in a process that humans have been participating in for hundreds of years, of proposing one or another version of human well-being and living by it, hoping to win over their neighbors. Perhaps someday we would have settled on one version of human well-being, and AI could maximize that. (Or maybe even then it should hang back, and we should hang back a little ourselves, because human consensus does not prove alignment with ultimate reality.) But until then, the AI would simply facilitate that process by which we make decisions.

So the AI might try to maximize agency. Agency, in this particular formulation, being "the ability to secure one's own decision-making ability and minimal physical liberty". The AI would try to keep people from dying, and help build them up to be capable of seeing things from their own point of view, so that they could make their own decisions if they chose to, and then at least minimally act on them, by not being impeded from moving their bodies. The AI would take into account the ways in which people's actions impair each other's decision-making abilities (psychological coercion, causing trauma, causing pain above a certain threshold, etc.), and do its best to create a society with fewer such impairments.

So there could be such a thing as "agency utilitarianism", whereby we try to build up the greatest number of people in the greatest way, to be able to function and make their own decisions, and sometimes to defend themselves, if they want to.

We already have world-ruling AI (of a sort), which are states. We also have elite cultures, such as those capable of designing powerful technologies or policies, or those capable of significantly influencing those designers. People in a position of power or "eliteness" are in a position where they can make decisions on behalf of other people. The greater the power, and the greater the differential between elites and non-elites, the more that elites or states resemble world-ruling AI. States and elites, like AI, also have the problem of not really knowing what human well-being is, and of not necessarily being aligned with it, whatever they take it to be. (The people who design AI are themselves part of the elite.)

It's hard to "code" a particular definition of well-being in systems made up of human beings, just as it is in AI. How would we actually get a state, an elite culture, or a culture at large (all of which rule over individual citizens) to adhere to one, correct, fully-featured definition of well-being? If we try to coordinate them all on one idea, the simpler the better. So perhaps the idea to implement should be for each citizen to be able to pursue a true definition of well-being, and to be able to pursue that and offer to share it with others, in ways that do not impede others' pursuit of the same. And thus, agency as the value for rulers to maximize, while citizens may seek anything more intense and true.

Scenes

What is a scene?

Take for example an open mic scene. It might start with one cafe having an open mic night one night a week. It's fairly successful, and some of the people who attend would be willing to go to another open mic night on a different night. So another cafe nearby starts having an open mic night on a different night of the week.

If you go to one open mic, people there will talk about the other. The best way to find out about open mics is to go to one and hear from people where the others are. (In my experience, online directories of open mics exist, but are poorly maintained / tend to be out of date -- that's been true of San Diego, at least.)

Cafe 1 generally does not (or even could not) cause Cafe 2 to start their open mic, and similarly has limited ability to shut down Cafe 2's open mic.

Venues are quiet but important elements of scenes. You can have an open mic in a cafe, at a beach, in a park, a student union -- but you have to have it somewhere. And each venue has some influence over what kind of open mic can be done there. If a venue is no longer available (like a cafe goes out of business), then that disrupts the scene. An open mic can move to a different venue, but people might not follow.

Someone in the open mic scene might decide to put on a house show that is mostly attended by people from the scene, a one-off event. This isn't strictly speaking an open mic, but it's still part of the same scene.

When I was attending UC Davis, there was a monthly open mic that was led by a group of people, some students who were poets. I don't know how organized their group was, but at least they always performed a group poem at the start of the open mic nights -- they had to coordinate at least a little in that. (So, an organization can put on regular events.)

There weren't a lot of other open mics in Davis at that time, but that particular open mic generated its own small scene. I was part of a collaboration that came out of the open mic, made a song with two other artists connected through the scene. The collaboration was not caused by the open mic organizers as such, was something independent that "arose emergently" from the open mic.

A church is more like an organism, while a scene is more like a space or matrix that contains organisms. But like the Davis open mic, a church itself functions as a scene, to some extent.

A scene can contain sub-scenes. For instance, the universal church is not a single organization, but rather is a scene. But within the universal church is "the set of churches or other Christian social phenomena in San Diego County". I can't very practically interact with Christian in-person things in Los Angeles (speaking as a San Diegan), so the LA scene is mostly not directly relevant to me. But it's certainly possible for me to hear about another church in San Diego, to leave whichever one I might be attending and go to it. It's certainly possible for me to say "I'm going to go see what they have in LA" and visit, and then find a church there. Or happen to hear of an LA church from someone in San Diego, maybe someone who moved here for a job and left a church they liked. But it's less likely than getting caught up in what's happening in San Diego County.

(God's perspective on the universal church is that it is the body of Christ -- not that it is merely a scene. A body has a deep kinship and claim (whether manifested or not) to being one interconnected thing. But scenes do not, not necessarily. (The cells in a body differ though most of them share the same DNA. A diseased body could be like a poorly-connected scene.))

Scenes have definitions to them, loose as they are. The open mic scene is made up of open mics, and the people who meet each other through open mics. A Christian scene is made up of Christians, and the people who meet each other through the elements of the Christian scene. In a sense, an open mic is part of one great scene, for instance, the social life of San Diego or even the United States or the world. The boundaries of scenes are fuzzy and can be continuous with other scenes, both broader and less definite ones (San Diego's open mic scene could be continuous with the overall social life of San Diego) or narrower, more definite ones (and it could be continuous with the local drum circle scene). If you are at an open mic, you are definitely participating in the open mic scene. If you are at a house show and everyone there is from the open mic scene and they all met each other through the open mic scene, then you are part of the open mic scene. But if there start to be non-open mic people at events, perhaps at some level of non-open mic person attendance, they aren't really open mic scene events.

A focal point (sometimes referred to as a "Schelling point") is a solution that people tend to choose by default in the absence of information (according to Wikipedia). This is relevant when trying to coordinate people's actions. Maybe someone explicitly sets up a focal point (informs people), but once this is done, it just "floats" in the culture -- maybe is hard to undo. Scenes involve focal points, perhaps more so than organizations, because they don't provide explicit direction to coordinate people.

An important basic focal point is "I'm going to go there [to a particular event or venue] because other people go there." I go "there" because I think explicitly "there are going to be people there". But I also go "there" because I am in the habit of going there. I rely on the habitual nature of others to feel like there is a "there" (socially speaking, a populated space) to go to.

Something that is in the neighborhood of a focal point is the "spirit" of a scene. A spirit is an animating breath, something with both a power and a quality to it. Somewhat like a fuel: wood burns differently than natural gas. Some spirits are contagious, and can be caught within an organization or scene. The metaphor of a fire: the coal can burn outside the fire, but burns out much sooner than if it were among fellow coals in the fire. Spirits are a third reason (besides habit and rational anticipation), that people decide to show up to (or find themselves showing up to) specific events or group meetings within a scene.

The definition of a scene selects a certain kind of person to be a participant in it (for instance, the extent to which the label "Christian" is taken up by a certain kind of person who then seeks the Christian scene). Due to this, and other habits, expectations, and spirits, people within a scene behave a certain way toward each other. Scenes shape individuals in (hopefully) congruent ways, so that the individual-to-individual interactions (those farthest from conscious organization) are still affected by the fact of being within the scene as a whole.

Are scenes really spaces where impersonal forces emergently generate social interaction and culture? In a sense, no. Each thing is caused by a consciousness. A consciousness that causes has preferences and will, and in that at least minimal sense is a person. So somebody causes each thing, including the basic actions occurring in a scene. These actions may interact in ways that no one person foresaw or intended, but the choice of personal beings was operative in everything.

God chooses some things and might run parts of the world in a mechanistic, systemic way, but this is less true of social systems, which are more under our own responsibility. Some features of scenes that appear to be unchosen are the aftereffects of choices made in the past, or the choice to not choose, or the preference to not choose. Scenes behave differently when there are people making conscious choices in them versus ones in which people choose not to choose or prefer not to choose. Every element in a scene participates because someone chose to participate, so without choice, there would be no scene.

Certainly one of the virtues of a scene is that it does not control people, and another is that it is not subject to the life and death cycle of an individual organization. It is good to choose not to control scenes or their elements, to preserve the ability of individuals to make choices and test their preferences against reality. However, there are times when a person's agency is threatened by another member of a scene, and then it can be justified for someone within the scene to exert some kind of control against the other member (a group bans someone from their events, for instance). A general goal for scenes (for people thinking about scenes) can be agency-maximization.

The preceding three paragraphs together say something like: you have to choose in order to do your part in developing a scene, but generally it is best to not make other choices within a scene, to allow other people to make their own choices. If you make very many choices for other people in a scene, you start to turn it into one large organization, instead of a scene.

So maybe I can try to define a scene, having given those examples: A scene is an interconnected collection of essentially independent elements of social life (events, venues, groups, individuals), and their spirits and "institutions" (habits and expectations).

Individuals (individually or corporately) are aware of other elements of the scene and have some ability to interact with multiple elements, or to refrain from one element in order to participate in another. So a scene can include loyalty to one group, but also includes all the other possible groups, and the pathways by which people can participate in other groups. It tends to include features that seemingly nobody consciously chooses, things that are "in the air". No one person or organization is in control of a scene as a whole. Anyone can extend a scene, without permission, simply by making an element known to people in the scene that is fitting with the concept of the scene (Christianity, open mic nights, etc.) or which mostly attracts people who primarily know each other from the scene.