Value of This Life; Life Extension

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MSL duration of Millennium

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

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

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

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

Life Extension

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Petty vs. Ambitious vs. Reality-aimed

Some people choose to be small. For instance, they only want money (lots of money, perhaps) and not "power". Money is power, but distinguishing "money" from "power" makes a certain amount of sense. "Power" is bigger-aimed than "money". Someone with a lot of money can rule over 100 servants or employees, but someone with a lot of power can rule over an entire nation. Someone with power might have a grand view of themselves, a noble view. This could be the case with someone with money as well, but the money person could more easily have a small view of themselves, and I would guess would be less prone to having a grand or noble view of themselves. They might then look at the "power" people as "pretentious", "ambitious", "tryhards", or something like that. The "power" people might look at them as "petty".

One would think that at the level of national government, everyone would be ambitious. This might be somewhat true. But, there can still be pettiness at that level. For instance, government corruption is a characteristically petty phenomenon, redirecting public (larger-aimed) resources for personal (smaller-aimed) purposes. But, even on the level of grandness, there can be pettiness.

If you are fighting for your own nation (tribe, religion), have you considered fighting (or working) for what is higher? What is higher than for everyone to be like God? Maybe your nation / tribe / religion has a unique insight into being like God that must be preserved and shared. Wouldn't cross-cultural, ideally interpersonal, contact involving trustworthy people do more to help that happen, than wars or other coercive actions? Wars and coercion make a stink out of you and make your beliefs seem (or even be) untrustworthy.

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The petty can say "well, yes, we are petty, but at least we are not... prideful, arrogant, self-aggrandizing, pretentious". I think that these potential twisted versions of large-aimedness are a valid concern for anyone who does not want to be petty. Any path can be well-pursued, well-implemented, or not. Was Jesus prideful, arrogant, self-aggrandizing, or pretentious? People may have thought he was, but was he? There is a way to not be petty and still not be abusive or fake.

Perhaps it is good to distinguish "ambitious" from "reality-aimed". The ambitious person wants to do large things. But it is their residual petty-mindedness that allows them, once they have done a large thing, to be twisted about it, for instance to feel or express a sense of superiority gained from it, to feel justified to do bad things because of it, or feel entitled because of it. Because if they were aimed at reality, they would be aimed at something so rigorous and total that it would call from them more than they could ever give. They could merely devote 100% to pursuing that reality.

Moral truth is satisfied only when there is no more good that needs to be done, and desires that all sentient beings are 100% in tune with the good.

Benefits of Temptation; Risks of Anti-temptation

Anti-temptations sound like unambiguously good things. They draw people toward God. How could anyone resist the appeal of God? But, they are risky.

Temptations are obviously bad, but can have a non-obvious benefit. When we are tempted, we can decide, out of our own personal will, to reject the temptation. Maybe we reject it in the moment by not acting on it. Or, after we give in, we reject it retrospectively by regretting giving in and turning back to God. The stronger the temptation, sometimes, the stronger the rejection of it. That rejection can harden our hearts against sin and drive us into loyalty to God. So actually temptation can enable willful people to get closer to God than they might without it. With their willfulness they reject the temptation to turn against God, and in so doing turn toward God more firmly, truly, and permanently.

If a willful person is exposed to anti-temptation, they might reject God, out of willfulness, as the opposite of what happens when exposed to temptation.

Someone exposed to anti-temptation might become "inoculated" to God, enjoying the pleasantness of the anti-temptation without connecting to the real person of God underneath. They also might only be able to love an appealing God, or appealingness itself in its divine mode.

When we feel good about God, we may be feeling good about a false image of God. So do we really love God? A true anti-temptation tries to connect us with the real God, but we may willfully misunderstand what the anti-temptation is talking about. It offers something real, but we missee it and thus refer, de re, to something else.

Also, when we are feeling good about God, we may make motions of dedication to him, and may offer a generous portion, perhaps 95% of our hearts to him. But for us to be saved, we need to give 100%. Having drawn so close to God with the 95% that we have given, perhaps we start to harden in that state, ignoring the 5% we keep away from dedication to him, and the 5%'s size and undedicated status can harden. A hardened 5% of sin is worse than a rough and obvious 50% or more of sin that we know is sin and is still uncommitted enough for us to change.

For these reasons (I think maybe in contradiction to what I might have said or implied earlier), "throwing anti-temptation at the problem" (like "throwing money at the problem") is imperfect and potentially dangerous. Anti-temptation is a valuable part of people's experiential diets, but temptation is also needed for many people. Maybe it's worth stressing that "anti-temptation can't replace your decision to come into tune with God."

Both Teeth-gritting and Natural Love

Humans are motivated to get what they want, because they want it. Sometimes we can be motivated to do things because of some sort of external force. Perhaps some definition of virtue is "doing what you don't feel like doing". It is virtuous to be self-sacrificing in that way. Allowing an external force to rule over you, or willfully offering yourself to that external force, is virtuous, perhaps the height of virtue. Perhaps as though the real enemy is Self and not any other evil.

The problem with that view is that we may never learn to really want what is good. We tend to value what we desire, and when we value, we love. We have to come to love the good completely someday, and if we have a capacity for "teeth-gritting" love and for "natural" love, we are not fully loving the good if we don't love it naturally. Also, we are more likely to be effective in pursuing the good if both the teeth-gritting and natural sides are working together. To the extent that effectiveness matters in pursuing the good, it is better for us to prefer to have both teeth-gritting and natural love.

So, I do what is good because it is what I want. This is my selfish desire. (There's a sense in which it isn't selfish, if I chose to naturally want to do what is good because it was the right thing to do.)

Praying to Begin to Care for the Non-Default

Sometimes I pray for God to help me keep caring about what is non-default (distant people, future people, people's spiritual state -- like whether they fully make it to him, caring about him himself). To care about what is default is what you do when you don't care about anything, in a state of deadenedness or exhaution. But to care about the non-default requires that you have "fight" in you, to push against the default mindset. That fight tends to be or always is intentional and conscious, a moment of decision.

This tends to prove successful for me, as though caring about the non-default is something that God wants me to do and will help me with.

It's been some time since I first encountered the question of the well-being of the non-default. In some cases, I remember the mechanism of the "inciting message" being all it took to open me up to those concerns. In other cases, I can't clearly remember how I came to adopt those values -- maybe I'm only gradually adopting some of them, but I have already begun.

I can guess that maybe someone who was approaching a potential initial valuing of the non-default could pray to God to help them to value it, in parallel to how I pray to continue to value.

What Does Caring Look Like for Me?

I knew specific "broken-brained" people and who or what they were. When my brain is "broken", I can be them, and it feels good and natural.

Maybe caring looks like that for them. But what does caring look like for me? Not that, not really.

Going too hard on myself, or going too easy on myself, doing something that someone else is already doing, or can do better. But I am most useful to God when I ask "what does caring look like for me?" and come up with my best answer, which is plausibly correct.

It's important to care. Caring is how you value, and valuing is love. Value is how things are valuable, and thus it is important to care. Caring is who you are, and the way it affects what you are and how you act and trust.

What you are is clothing for who you are. The flesh of your mind and what it does are clothes that you wear. It's better to be the right small person than the wrong large person, and the right large person than the wrong small person.

Suicide

How does MSLN deal with suicide?

I don't like writing about this subject, because I feel like I'm checking off the boxes of "things that an ethicist is supposed to deal with" or "things that an ethicist is supposed to make a ruling on as though they know anything". In a way, I would rather state the truth and not my rulings, and let my readers come up with their own rulings for themselves, based on their own understanding of the truth.

However, I have some experience with this topic, and perhaps can write to people who are contemplating suicide, or who might again contemplate suicide.

I don't believe that this life matters as much as atheists or some Christians do. This follows from MSLN. I think that our culture (and biology) scam us into thinking it is "the" thing. People make this life into a god, and they worship it by trying to control people so that they also worship that god. Death (at least, the first death) is more like "falling asleep". (The second death, the result of hardening, really is the end, and is something serious.)

Life is a time to be useful, whether through what we do or who or what we are.

I've never made plans to kill myself, but I've had my mind captured so that that action seemed like the default thing to do.

When I've been closer to suicide, I've done different things. I didn't really want to die, because I had things to do still. I also knew that as someone who was against the "life-god", I paradoxically had a greater duty to not kill myself, because people under its rule would automatically discount what I had to say against it, if they found out I had killed myself. I tried a number of different things to avoid killing myself, such as going to therapists (but the therapists were aggressive or manipulative, and not on my side, so I quit going), taking psychiatric medication for my bipolar disorder (a pre-existing, relatively contained condition made worse by the thing that was making me suicidal), exercising, talking to friends, and maybe other things that secular people pursue, to stave off "falling asleep".

I also prayed, and I wish that that always worked, so that I didn't have to do the secular things. That would say that God, and relating to God, were what saved a person, instead of a bundle of coping mechanisms which could contain God, or not, whatever works for you. The "life-god" cruelly smothers the part of people that wants to love God more than life.

Praying did help sometimes, and gave me the gift of having heard from God, on some occasions.

I think that being suicidal (and experiencing other unbearability to a lesser intensity, over a longer period of time) has given me a sense of confidence, through a confrontation with life and death. I am not sure if I learned all the lessons that I can from that time, but one that I might learn is to understand the full nature of love, which loves when times are good and when they are bad. Love is not full-grown except if it has exercised its ability to deal with the desert, when it goes unrewarded for years. It is also not full-grown if it does not pay a cost. Full-grown love has paid a cost that goes beyond what it is willing to pay. So I hope that by resisting death, I was learning to love something.

My temptation is to say that I was learning to love life, but then the life-god wins and I am pinned down on one side, no longer free to go to God. Is it possible to really love God, when life pursues you? I didn't feel like I was learning to love life by resisting death, and maybe I wasn't, and was only learning to love. And if I can be whole-souled, I love God and those whom God loves, and not the clothes we happen to wear.

The love that comes in the desert and is asked too much of does not feel like love. But it is love. Sometimes, what feels like love, is love, a different kind. But sometimes it only feels like love, and is something fake.

Omnisubjective Sexuality

Epistemic status: "essay-grade". This is an essay and I don't have a reason to think it addresses the subject completely. Provisional.

According to MSLN (and any view that holds that God's omniscience entails his omnisubjectivity), God experiences all of our experiences himself, exactly as we do.

In any system of thoughts, it's likely for there to be unexpected and odd features emergent from how the thoughts in it interact with each other and the world, and one that I didn't completely expect with this aspect of MSLN was the thought that human sexuality (thoughts, imaginations, and sex acts) are experienced by God. As though, to put it bluntly, God experiences something like virtual reality porn whenever people are having sex. (And I suppose also experiences "emotional porn" (something like romance novels?) whenever people experience that.)

What would it be like to experience other people's private experiences as your own? Does God want to lust after his own children? I would think not. So then our sexual experiences put him in a state of psychological tension.

Rawlette points out that there are "qualia of ought-to-be-ness" and of "ought-not-to-be-ness". From an omnisubjective view, when we feel something that feels like "ought-not-to-be" (something unbearable (my word), or painful (closer to Rawlette's thinking)), God also experiences that exact feeling, the exact qualia of ought-not-to-be-ness. In lust, there is an element of the qualia of "I-have-to-have-this". So when we lust, or engage in lustful sex (is that the only kind?) God experiences those qualia exactly as we do.

Both "ought-not-to-be" and "I-have-to-have-this" have a volitional element. We have in us a prima facie movement to not experience what ought-not-to-be to us, and to pursue to the point of possession what we-have-to-have. To really experience ought-not-to-be in itself as a volitional consciousness is to feel the volitional element as well as the hedonic or experiential. Similarly with "I-have-to-have-this".

So does God get involved in sin when we lust after each other? Yes, and no. "Who" God is is never sinful. But on the level of "what", God can be involved in sin. He is on some level involved in everything that is, and some being is sinful or even evil.

Do we sin when we lust after each other? The boundary between who and what can be porous. What we are can be to some extent broken, insane, and bent toward bad or unsustainable ends. But who we are isn't necessarily so, and who we are is the essence of whether we are sinning or not. The porousness comes in how strongly we, with who we are, resist what we are. It may be impossible to be completely sure that you couldn't have tried harder to resist a bad "what". But if you really are resisting as much as you can, whether you can know that or not, then "who" you are is trustworthy (even if it doesn't look like that to anyone else).

What's it like to be, in who you are, innocent, while in what you are, bent toward evil? There is a tension there, which even humans can feel, but which God, the most-sensitive feels to a greater and more constant degree. So when we lust, we make life more difficult for God.

Sexuality is ground into "the very fibers of being human" (so it seems, and maybe to a large extent really is). We find it very hard to avoid it, in the world outside us, and within the flesh of our minds. There are biological reasons to favor sexual activity. When civilization was in its "survival mode" (we'll say, up until industrialization), sex was a way to work to fight against depopulation. Now that we are in "hedonic mode", sex is a medicine we use to fight against feeling bad. In our culture we have a strong need to think of sex as a good thing and as a hedonic thing. This enables us to feel good about ourselves, driven as we are to "hedonically survive" (fulfill the hedonic imperatives that we can't seem to help fulfilling, as though feeling bad was a fate as bad as or worse than death). Given the existential difficulties of "survival mode" and "hedonic mode" (which are real and to be taken seriously), how can we integrate a concern for God (who is subject to our sexuality) into how we live our lives?

(Furthermore, sexual activity can help bond people together in what they are, and even in who they are. Whether it is necessary for that purpose, or if there is an non-sexual way to do that, depends on each couple.)

A very helpful thing to do (if possible) would be to somehow or other not hold onto the qualia of "I-have-to-have-this". Sex without "I-have-to-have-this" is not lustful. Also helpful would be seeking to have sex only within God's preferences. Sex that respects each partner as a human being, for instance. (Or looking to the Bible for an idea what his preferences might be about human sexuality. That's something that this post does not directly address, and someday I do want to. This one mostly focuses on sexuality in MSL.) These are good goals for ethically theistic people to pursue if they are married or seeking to be married.

Even if we minimize the sinfulness of sexuality, it may always be weird for God to experience our sexual relations. So we might try to be sexual in a way that tries to minimize that weirdness, using our empathy and imaginations to get an idea of how to do that.

It may be possible to not be sexual, perhaps by understanding and letting go of the qualia of "I-have-to-have-this", and the hedonic cost of being less sexual or asexual (the reason why sex is a medicine in "hedonic mode") may go down if we get beyond "I-have-to-have-this".

(Relatedly, it is possible that we can undergo spiritual manipulation using sexuality as an access point. The spirit of "amorousness" is a powerful one. Maybe it's like a kind of "spiritual alcohol" that we can get drunk on if we ever find the liquor lying around. Or if anyone (human or inhuman) spikes our water with it. We are being spiritually attacked by strong feelings that don't really belong to us but which loudly insist that they do, filling our minds seemingly completely, in the moment that they are there. People who experience mental illness sometimes feel the loud insistentness of depression, but fight against it so that they do not commit suicide. Out of love for life (or people, or God), they don't kill themselves. They find some way to resist. So, we can realize that whatever mood is making sex seem necessary or inevitable is not us and is enthroned above us and pinning us down so we are not as fully free to follow God. This realization itself, or other actions we take as a result, may free us from that feeling that insisted it was part of who we were. Sometimes to realize that Satan is at work is to be free.)

What are the boundaries of "being sexual"? We think of sexuality in a hedonic or experiential sense (genital excitation and satisfaction and the thoughts and feelings adjacent to it). An older meaning, more true to the etymology of "sexual", I suppose, is "the relations between men and women" (or between a man and a woman). Both of these definitions are polar, having at one end the very blatantly sexual (that which are only genital excitation and satisfaction themselves or which are only seen or naturally seen between men and woman) and at the other end personal experience that could easily not be sexual (often does not involve genital excitation or satisfaction, or often can be seen outside of contexts of a man and a woman). So perhaps the leading to consider God's omnisubjectivity in how we relate to each other sexually naturally leads us to consider his omnisubjectivity in the non-sexual aspects of life. (Sometimes the way to be considerate of God in our sexuality is very much the same as in our non-sexuality, and in some cases our sexuality is functionally hard to tell apart from our non-sexuality, so to be considerate in all of sexuality isn't too different from being considerate overall.)

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One value of sexual experience is the "post-traumatic value" of having experienced the same thing as someone else. In other words, the value of being able to help people with recovery from trauma.

God has to experience sexuality by way of experiencing what humans experience firsthand. So maybe we can understand what he goes through best only if we have experienced what he has through human sexuality, through ourselves having participated in it firsthand, and also have the empathy and imagination to understand how weird it would be for him to go through that with all of his creation when they are sexual.

I think that what is actually good can evade ethical formulas. I would not recommend being a criminal so that you can reach out to criminals better, but if, for non-ethical reasons, you were a criminal, and then came to reject a life of crime, allowing you to reach out to criminals, then you may be able to do good in that area that nobody else can. The deontological ("don't commit crime") and the consequentialist ("bring about the best outcome") are in conflict and there may not be a rational resolution. Fortunately for the consequentialists, people's lives don't follow reason, allowing for better outcomes than what human best practices can allow.

But "don't commit crime" (or "don't have lustful sex") are not simply human best practices, but ways to avoid causing pain to Legitimacy himself, and thus ways to avoid doing what is really wrong in itself. So can I recommend wronging God? Fortunately, in terms of practical advice, it's easy in this case to say "many, many people can fulfill the role of helping God deal with what he's gone through during the many generations, whether in terms of crime or of lustful sex, so on the margin, avoiding sin yourself is worth pursuing".

--

Why did God create sexuality? It could be that the element of sexuality that would be weird for God to participate in was not originally or ideally in his design for being human. There is more to sexuality than the sex act, which is clearly seen in the "man-woman" definition given above. And certainly lust was not in God's original or ideal design for human sexuality.

Maybe it's simple enough to say "It's all explained by MSLN theodicy." But I tend to want to find other possible explanations if possible. But that is where I will leave things for now.

(Some thoughts on how the Bible might show that some aspects of sexuality weren't original or ideal).

--

This post so far has focused on actual sex, and not on pornography. But is looking at porn sufficiently analogous?

Do people who look at porn have qualia of "I-have-to-have-this" toward the people photographed or filmed in it? Not in a full-fledged sense where they rationally think they will. But still enough to bother God? Probably a lot of times they do. But what if they don't? Is that a problem?

If they don't because they simply have no sexual response to what they see, then I guess there's nothing wrong with them looking at porn, on that count. God wouldn't "overfeel" (like "overhearing" a conversation) any qualia of "I-have-to-have-this" directed toward his children. But there might be a middle place, where the person looking at porn is aroused, but lacks desire of any kind for the people being shown, themselves. I'm not sure what to think here. Is arousal a kind of bodily "I-have-to-have-this" (like how trust is a bodily "I-value-you")? That sounds plausible enough to me to avoid looking at things that arouse me sexually, regardless of whether I desire the people I look at. Qualia are qualia, regardless of whether they are in the part of the experience body which really is me or in the part that is only part of my physical body.

What about drawn or animated porn? Or if someone has a tendency to be sexually aroused by inanimate objects or abstract symbols? It could be that on some subtextual level, what is desired is a real human being. It's like there's a hunger for a Sexual Partner, who is undifferentiated and vaguely human, and must be physically human-shaped in some way to satisfy the person hungry for it, and this is what they intuitively relate to when they become aroused by something that is less literally human or seemingly not human at all. A person's name is a mere word but represents whatever features they possess, including their physical body. So maybe an abstract symbol could be a word for Sexual Partner, which can satisfy the human body with enough of a human body or personal presence of its own. God probably doesn't even want to lust after Sexual Partner as a mental picture of one (or any) of his children. The simantic word Sexual Partner connects to... perhaps all human beings. This sounds plausible enough to me for me to avoid looking at drawn or animated porn, or if I become aroused by abstract symbols or whatever to not seek arousal through them.

So while I am not 100% sure that all forms of porn are equivalent to lust or lustful sex, I see enough here to err on the side of avoiding them, and recommending people to avoid them. Ethically, porn is lust to me, and maybe in the future, I will feel more certain on an epistemic level.

This section introduces some "philosophical moves" which might have far-reaching consequences that I have not yet thought through -- may break things elsewhere. One thing it might imply is that all sex is lustful. The human sexual response involves your body having to have a Sexual Partner, no matter what you feel, and it pulls on you despite whatever you really want -- and this also pulls on God in his omnisubjectivity. However, there is pain of varying levels of unbearability, and in order to spare God, if you must experience an unbearable pain, experiencing a less-unbearable unbearable pain is better. So the ideal of lustless sex (or the leading-in-the-direction-of lustless sex) is still a helpful one.

--

What makes lust a quale of "I-have-to-have-this" may simply be that it is an unbearable pleasure that calls for its relief through a sex act. So if you want to avoid lustfulness in your sexuality, you can try to reduce the unbearable element of it to a minimum.

Perhaps this is a simpler way to show why God would prefer that we avoid drawn or animated porn, or arousal through abstractions.

--

--

I realized that I should clarify exactly why I thought that the God of MSLN wouldn't want to lust after humans.

Lust is a sin in the Bible, and so the God of the Bible can't lust and would feel a kind of psychic "shear" from his omnisubjective experience of our lust.

But what about in the case of non-Biblical MSL? MSL begins from a fairly limited set of starting assumptions. Does an aversion to lust follow from them?

Sexual desire can involve (always involves?) some unbearability. Any sexual desire that involves unbearability is something God can't bear for all time, and is illegitimate.

Is there something wrong with desiring another person in a sexual way, if there is no unbearability to it? Well, are there any qualia of "I-have-to-have-this" when we look at someone we sexually desire? If so, is there anything wrong with us "having-to-have" someone? If we have to have someone (or some experience of them or with them), are we putting them (or it) higher than Legitimacy? That sounds true.

God has to put Legitimacy higher than anything else. This is a reason why the Son has to make the sincere psychological motion of letting himself die -- and go through with it -- so as to put it ahead of his own life. By being legitimate in that way, the Son validates Legitimacy, allowing for existence.

So God feels psychic shear whenever we make anything into an idol. I think usually or always when we have to have something, it can crowd out all other competitors in our minds in certain moments, including God.

From a simantist perspective, or that of the original person, it may well be that God views us as his children. The fundamental unit of reality is not experience bodies, or hedonic calculators, or even conscious Law, but rather persons. There is a "thickness" to being a person which includes family relationships, perhaps. Being a father may be something primal, may not just be a technicality of being biological. And, the inappropriateness of incest may be deeper than simply being something recommended by biology or culture. Biology and culture make poor gods, but it does make sense that they could reflect some of God's ideal design. The notion that power imbalances can make sexual relationships inappropriate may be a Godly one and not just a feature of our current culture (it sounds convincing to me, for what that's worth). In many respects, God is much more powerful than we are.

Having run through all this, perhaps some sexual desire for another human remains that does not stress God at all to "overfeel". But, in my limited experience (n = 1), that covers most or perhaps all of it.

In that case, other than those who are truly asexual, we all stress God, in the course of living life. (To be fair to sexuality, there are other ways we do, like anger, or any of the non-sexual sins.) Maybe there are ways for us to not stress God so much.

I'm not sure I've exhausted all the possible reasons why God would prefer not to lust after us, and there may well be good objections to this that I haven't thought of, but for the sake of getting this post done, I will say that's my case.

Epiconcept

Saying negative things about having sex is not the most popular thing to do these days, and I can understand that saying "the lustful aspect of sex is inherently bad and even if we can have unlustful (or less lustful) sex it might be weird for God" might sound like a harmful thing to some people.

We can't bear to think that we aren't seeking the truth or in touch with the truth, so we try to bend what people say the truth is so that we can feel like the truth says something that works for us and our needs. We don't accept this way of thinking in the realms of science and technology (at least in principle), but we do in the realms of politics and religion, which we seem to think are designed by us or for us. I think that the facts of God are the facts, and that God was not designed by us, for us. But I can understand that some facts cause harm, in the real-world of people trying to "install" them in their lives.

I think that truths which are poorly epiconcepted can certainly be harmful and to an extent it's my responsibility to try to epiconcept them better. I don't know of a way of expressing the truth in this that will never cause harm to anyone. I think that it can do good for the people who should hear it, and I would guess that most people who read this blog would be the sort to read random, potentially harmful ideas and not come to (too much or too-permanent) harm.

Maybe with a lot of my posts, I would leave things be and not try really hard to make what I'm saying safe, but sexuality is such a sensitive issue and so worked into our bodies and our current culture, that I think it's worth getting into that here.

--

Shame is a biological and cultural construct that is not necessarily what God wants you to feel. It may seem to motivate holiness, but there are better ways to become holy.

Humans like to say that you are how you appear on the outside. This way, they can hold you to account for your behavior, so that their lives can go better. There is some validity to this. But a lot of what you do reflects what you are and not who you are, or some kind of spirit that has come over you. Humans have power over other humans psychologically, but they are less valid than God. God sees you for who you are, and cares about who you are, not your physical nature or what has come over you.

It can be hard to tell the difference sometimes between who you are and what you are. Maybe you could try harder to resist the spirits that possess you. Maybe sometimes you should. But what is clear is that you are not automatically the same as whatever you do, and it is possible that your sexuality is a thing that is tacked onto you, and not something that is essentially you.

--

If you think you have harmed God, you might feel a lot of guilt. Your guilt feelings themselves are felt by God and are inherently negative. If they lead you to repent, or some other valuable change, they are worth feeling. But otherwise, no. You don't need to feel guilt over what you don't really have control over. It is important to try to do the right thing in the cases where it's really up for grabs (where you can succeed, as opposed to not having a real chance, due to what you are). Satan can use guilt feelings against you, which is something to consider.

What's really important is who you are in the end, not what or even who you are now. The present matters only to the extent that it feeds into who you are in the end. The present is important, but not the only period of time. God wants to help reclothe you with a better nature, if you will accept it.

Runners run better when they look ahead of them, even to the farthest horizon possible, rather than looking back. Looking at the pavement is necessary sometimes to avoid tripping, but the far horizon is a better place to look if you can.

--

Your body is like your parents. Both your body and your parents were handed down to you. Ideally you honor your parents, even though there are aspects to them that aren't trustworthy. Your body is the same way. You can love your parents, and your body, overall, even if there are aspects to them that are untrustworthy.

The appearance of a human body can tempt people to lust. It's up to them to not give in, but it makes their lives harder when they have to experience that. Lusting after a body disrespects it, as well as hating it because it can be tempting.

--

Look at sex not as negative or positive, but as a mixed thing.

--

To a large extent, our ability to comply with God's wishes with regard to sexuality is limited, because our bodies are automatically sexual in ways we do not choose. God can give us new bodies which enable us to obey.

--

The point of talking about sin and about harm to God is to love God, by turning against sin and ceasing to harm God -- especially, to someday become the person who loves God completely and does not sin or harm God at all.

Sexuality is not always the most morally relevant thing to consider. In some moments it can be very much the most morally relevant thing to consider. In other moments, there are other things that are more important. Some actions or attitudes (sexual or not) can have far-reaching negative consequences. Others don't. It's good to make sure you do what is really important, and avoid what it is really important to avoid, first, and after that worry about less important things. Sometimes sexual sin is not the most important problem to deal with, and dealing with it should be put off until later.

Hopefully in some sense we are all growing in moral resources and thus over time can afford to pay for more good actions and get further and further into "diminishing returns". In other words, as you grow as a person, you can deal with (and thus are potentially responsible for) subtler things. It's like what happens when you know someone for a long time and have given them all the gifts that they most urgently needed, and now are finding more and more subtle or small ways to add to how you help them.

Avoiding sin in such a way that you don't love God is more undesirable to God, and more dangerous, than trying to love him as best as you can but having a hard time controlling what you do, feel, think, etc. The latter can be destructive to others and yourself, and can give God pain, but the former is more likely to lead you to hardening and to exuding a spirit that tempts people to harden themselves.

--

This is a basic attempt to epiconcept "omnisubjective sexuality". I don't know that it's the best that could be made. A really high-quality epiconcepting is done by people, not by words. In other words, in the context of a friendship, some difficult concepts can be made trust-able. Or, perhaps if two people who are married take this post seriously, they can help to develop an approach to sexuality together which is considerate of God -- maybe they have to come up with some of the aspects or practices of that themselves, and need each other to fully realize the epiconcept of this post.

I can't offer any of this, except the usual for a blog post, which is to offer to reply to comments on the post.

But I thought I should mention that epiconcepting can go farther than just a "disembodied" text.

Value of People (Especially of Annihilated People)

Epistemic status: provisional. I sense that I might not have thought through all its consequences, and it might break something else I've written.

Value values what is valuable. Legitimacy finds legitimate what is legitimate. God finds you valuable depending on how legitimate (in tune with him) you are.

But isn't it true that God finds sinners valuable, even though they sin? Isn't there a sense in which God values you just as you are?

God values the personal and the non-personal differently. Because you are a person, you unify experience into one thing (like a poem, or like how Berkeley's "minds" draw his "ideas" into one thing, themselves (in my terms, into one experience body)). God is not an experience, but rather is a person, and he relates to persons as his own kin.

Experiences don't have histories. They are part of histories, but do not have histories of their own. But persons have histories. An experience is not something that should have been or could have been other than itself. Sometimes it would have been better for a different experience to have existed in its place, but in itself it is what it is. But people can be beings which should have or could have been other than themselves.

Speaking positively, God values the "anti-sin" in you, the ways in which your "position" or "velocity" is aligned with him. These are contents of you or facts about you, but not you yourself. I think they are a promising thing to him, like a preliminary negotiation between you and him, where you take steps that help him believe that you will come all the way to him.

But God doesn't value the sin in you. These are also contents of you or facts about you. If you completely identify with the sin in you by hardening, you become incompatible with him and then in a way he doesn't value you -- your days are numbered. Everything is at least somewhat valuable as long as it exists, but its future might be taken away from it.

But for those who have not decisively chosen to hold onto evil in them, he considers them worth keeping in existence indefinitely, and forever by default -- that is, valuable. Value is reckoned by a person, and that person hopes, when possible.

I can't remember right now if MSL commits me to saying that people who are hardened will be punished for their sins. But it makes sense from a Biblical perspective, according to the New Wine System, which is the Biblical source of MSL. Given the possibility that those who are hardened will be punished for their sins, while they are being punished, they are still valued. In both MSL and the New Wine System, the hardened are finally annihilated. Once they are annihilated, they no longer exist and thus in a sense lack value. Except that God remembers who they were before they chose to be one with the sin in them, and in order to maximally love, God mourns the loss of those persons who existed before they effectively killed themselves by the act of hardening. Part of who you are is your essence, the concept or memory of who and what you are or were, or could have been, not just the existing reality of who and what you are. So that essence remains in God's memory, whatever in you existed apart from sin. Even if you can't exist, God loves as much of you as he can.

--

Does the essence of a person really exist? It seems to point to them. Is there a unicorn in the street right outside? When I look out the window, I observe no evidence of one. But I have the idea of a unicorn in the street. Is it like the unicorn exists in essential form and just needs one more property (existence) added to it, to make it real? Or is it that the unicorn does not exist unless it's actually "out there"? And I only have the idea of the unicorn.

My laptop is real and essential to my experience of writing this paragraph. I have a concept of it, so it has an "essence" in the philosophical sense. If I turn my back on my laptop and think about it, does that thought refer to the actual laptop? What if someone vaporizes my laptop while I'm turned around? Does it still refer to my laptop then? My intuition is that the thought really does connect me with something real, but then, that thought may be incorrect (it may be the case that my laptop lacks the property of existence, for instance).

I haven't gotten to the bottom of this in the last two paragraphs, and I mainly wrote them to show that there's something complicated and confusing here. There may be an answer, but I'll leave it unsolved for now. But, supposing that there is no answer, does this affect God's love for us, specifically with regard to his mourning those of us who have hardened themselves?

One way to think is that God must see things, if possible, in the way that enables him to love the most. If possible, he must see the annihilated as in some sense existing, even if they lack the property of existence.

In order to maximally value something, you have to feel its loss as much as possible when it's gone. In order to do that, you have to see it as being real as much as possible, to understand as fully as possible what might have been, but which cannot be. In order to make the lost real to himself, God must see them as still existing, in the way that we can find an essence to be real, even if in some sense it lacks the property of existence.

In order for God to be legitimate, he has to value and thus love as much as possible. He can't bear whatever is unbearable in who we are or were, but other than that, he keeps us in existence in his consciousness forever.

--

I want to say that, but I still feel like there is an unsolved problem.

Maybe I can partly solve the problem of existence vs. essence given above. I exist as an experience body, but also as facts and memories in the mind of God. Most of who and what I am is not accessible to me right this instant, but comes out in the right circumstances. Until then, God keeps track of it. So how much of me is anything other than thoughts and experiences in the mind of God?

In my experience body, I have some free will. That "I" in my current experience body which has some free will intuitively contains many things I'm not currently conscious of. And that is my personal unity. If that unity ceases, and my free will ceases, then "I" no longer exist. But who and what I am remains. They were part of "I" but now are simply the contents of God's mind. While they are part of "me", they have a certain inviolability to them. God can't force them to be legitimate, without destroying the unity of "I". So if I insist on holding onto sin, God will have to destroy me someday. Then, he can at least get rid of the sins that my unity was holding onto and be able to resolve his psychological state.

If I am annihilated, I exist in the form of memories, but my unity is gone. So maybe it's like I have my essence, and it fails to have the property of "free-will-and-unity", which may be what "existence" is for a person. In that case, no one can cease to exist, and when, in a theological context, we say "annihilated", we really should mean "has had the property of personal existence permanently removed".

Though an annihilated person ceases to exist in one sense, the person that they might have been remains in existence. It's sort of like saying a poet could have written a poem, given the inputs to their life, and who or what they were. They died, but the poems they wrote could be remembered, or poems could be constructed from what is remembered of their life. (This could make a writing prompt for living poets -- the poems that Shelley could have written if he had lived to old age, for instance.) But the tragedy is that the poet (Shelley, perhaps) never could be the one to write the poem. The poem could be made out of them, but they wouldn't be the one to make it. (But a living poet, unannihilated, can become the author of whatever poems are inherent in who and what they are.)

The contents of a person are like the poems inside a poet. (Poets contain their poems as well as other contents.) This can remain and have value, even if the person is annihilated. The contents of a person speak of the person.

A person can relate to an annihilated person. The concept does refer to something. Perhaps to a dead person, and not really one that does not exist. The dead person exists, and is mourned, because they are no longer alive.

--

If a person's "spiritual body" exists after the second death, why can't God give it a new "unity-and-free-will"? If he did, would there be any meaningful way in which the person died? I tend to think that "unity-and-free-will"s don't have any inherent memory. That is stored in who and what a person is, which we have said survive the second death, at least all the elements that are legitimate.

It could be that while this post has focused on the "ontology" of consciousness (where everything is made out of experience-bodies), what we really are, and what we really experience, is "ordinary". We exist as persons, not as weirdly disconnected pieces of experience. Talking about humans as being made out of memories and experience bodies is just an odd, scientific way of talking, which gives us some idea of what we are. Our ordinary consciousness is more reliable than such "poetry", and is the starting place for all "scientific" or "ontological" theorizing. So it is we who are at stake, and we are the ones who must turn to God, ourselves.

To reconcile the ontology of consciousness and the ordinary in this area, I guess I could say that God, given his nature, wants us to exist as persons, or even can't help but process consciousness such that we are really persons. Thus it is impossible for him to simply ignore the sin in us and destroy it if we have not ourselves turned away from it, and then put the "spiritual bodies" of us into a new unity. Instead, the "spiritual bodies" are left dead, being only memories and "might-have-been". He can destroy some sinful habits, perhaps, which are illegitimate but only part of "what" we are, but not the sin that is in "who" we are. This enables us to love.

--

I found this post somewhat challenging to write. I might have been able to express it more concisely, but I think leaving more material in is a representation of the difficulty in writing it. (This is not what it means in every case that I write longer, less concise posts.)

What is the "takeaway" from this post? One thought is that I now wish that "annihilationism" could be called something else. I do want to identify as an annihilationist, if that's the way to distinguish myself from being a universalist or from being a believer in eternal conscious torment. But otherwise, the above makes me think that those who are irrevocably lost are not "annihilated", but rather "die". Death is an unconscious state (contra eternal conscious torment) but is still an ending of a person's life (contra universalism). The language of "second death" is good -- but something that ECT proponents also consider to be part of their thought system. So it doesn't make a clear distinction against their view. Maybe "unconscious second death" (USD?) I guess that's okay. Maybe I will start using that, in cases where "annihilationism" might be misleading.

Overall in this post, I guess what I found challenging was the question: if something no longer exists, how can we relate to it?

If something changes, isn't it the case that some feature of it no longer exists? Yet, we can be aware that that feature used to exist. In that sense it still exists, but when it "ceases to exist", it changes. Maybe the word for that is that it "dies" (or "dies the second death"). Maybe potential things already exist, but change when they "come into existence". Maybe the word for how potential things already exist is that they have been "conceived" (or "conceived in the world of thought").

Otherwise, I would say that the post is about how God values us as much as possible, keeping whatever is good in us, valuing us more as we become more valuable, but still valuing us in that we could have been more, or could become more. Whatever in us insists on keeping illegitimacy in reality must change or we must die the second death. If we die the second death, our "spiritual bodies" remain, although now dead. The people that we were and could have been are parts of, or identical to, our spiritual bodies, and God will mourn those bodies, those past and potential people which can never exist in themselves. In this way, God can value and love to a greater extent, loving someone enough to mourn them if they die.

Tranquility Seems to Autovalidate; Hedonism and Buddhism

Wireheading (my rough definition for this post:) is when we make ourselves feel rewarded, apart from some kind of reality. The default means is through some kind of pleasure or sense of well-being.

In Wirehead Gods On Lotus Thrones, Scott Alexander points out that wireheading sounds repugnant:

Wireheading is commonly considered an ignoble end for the human race -- our posthuman descendants reduced to sitting in dingy rooms, taking never-ending hits of some ultra-super-drug, all their knowledge and power lying fallow except the tiny fraction necessary to retain delivery of the ultra-drug and pump nutrients into their veins.

but that something similar does not for him:

Imagine instead our posthuman descendants taking the form of Buddhas sitting on vast lotus thrones in a state of blissful tranquility. Their minds contain perfect awareness of everything that goes on in the Universe and the reasons why it happens, yet to each happening, from the fall of a sparrow to the self-immolation of a galaxy, they react only with acceptance and equanimity. Suffering and death long since having been optimized away, they have no moral obligation beyond sitting and reflecting on their own perfection, omnipotence, and omniscience -- at which they feel boundless joy.

I am pretty okay with this future. This okayness surprises me, because the lotus-god future seems a lot like the wirehead future. All you do is replace the dingy room with a lotus throne, and change your metaphor for their no-doubt indescribably intense feelings from "drug-addled pleasure" to "cosmic bliss". It seems more like a change in decoration than a change in substance. Should I worry that the valence of a future shifts from "heavily dystopian" to "heavily utopian" with a simple change in decoration?

I generally consider wireheading to be undesirable, but also I found a similar thing happening as Alexander did, when considering the two images of it. I found the lotus-god scenario basically acceptable, despite finding the dingy room scenario basically unacceptable. So I want to try to understand what is going on.

Maybe it's the imagery of the setting?

The future wireheading I imagine is clinical and efficient, each human (or post-human) slimmed down to the minimal size and complexity needed to experience maximal bliss, all lined up in a quiet hospital/factory/clean room, with robots maintaining them as necessary. Each (post-)human might be identical (because it turns out there's only one optimal way to solve for maximum bliss per resource expended). (In this scenario, we have no rational concept of what value ought to be anchoring us to a given axiology. So the concept drifts down economic gradients toward something that enables value to be mass-produced for as cheaply as possible. [Actually, maybe the cheapest value function to maximize is to say all matter/energy is of inestimable value and that nothing is needed to be done -- it's all conserved. Then, whatever was driven by value functions would cease. But maybe that idea should go in a different post.])

I think this (mass-production mini-hedonist factory) is more realistic than the dingy room idea. Aesthetically, I find this (the kind of hospital/factory/clean room setting) neutral compared to a dingy room (negative) or the more spiritual framing of Alexander's Buddhas (positive).

Having (from my perspective) neutralized the effect of the negative physical setting, do I still feel wireheading is repugnant?

Not as much. To be true to my thought as to what may actually happen in the future, I had to add the part about people being simplified and maybe made identical. That erases human individuality, and it may be the case that this turns full-fledged personal beings into mere blobs of conscious experience. That sounds objectionable. But what if I adjust for that as well? If I imagine that somehow they are persons, who have histories and whose proper names each have a unique denotation and set of connotations? (I'm not sure how they would acquire histories in the perfected future, but I can set that aside for the sake of a thought experiment.)

I still find wireheading to be undesirable in this version of the thought experiment, but I find that when I imagine wireheading to be just "real personal beings being in a state of blissful tranquility", as opposed to simply "bliss", it seems fine to me in the moment. I think the thing that makes a difference is that normally I think of pleasure in terms of "euphoria" or "being high". But "tranquility" gives it a different spin. I've experienced both intense euphoria and tranquility, and it's the tranquility that I find more trustworthy. As one might expect, the Buddha situation also seems fine when I imagine it.

I even feel like my MSLN-related arguments against things like wireheading and hedonism can't be worth worrying about. I intuitively know that they aren't true, just by imagining being in a state of blissful tranquility.

I am (like plenty of people, I guess) susceptible to imagining things. When I imagine blissful tranquility, I enter into that psychological state (enough to have an effect, although not fully) and find myself accepting things in general, including tranquility itself. This hedonic state is a feeling of ought-to-be-ness, and it persuasively validates itself -- or, has the psychological effect of validating itself in my experience -- exactly what you would expect from the feeling of ought-to-be-ness.

But rationally, should I ignore the possibility that when I'm blissed out, I may be preparing to harden myself against feeling real love, and against truly becoming kin to God? This would break God's heart -- can I comprehend his valuing of me and the pain I cause him when I'm on the drugs of imagining blissful tranquility? (And it threatens my destruction.)

When we perceive something that should be, it makes sense to feel the feeling of ought-to-be-ness. This is the natural function of the feeling. But if we are feeling the feeling all the time, it washes out our normative perception, our ability to sense what is acceptable through our direct perceptions of acceptability.

So perhaps the right way to think about the Buddha future is not to really understand what it would be like to experience, what the experience would be in itself. Or at least, not to let that be the definitive truth of it. There is reality outside the experience itself, and I want to know something about it, so I have to look at the Buddha future two ways: in itself (which says that on the hedonic levels of the hierarchy of betrayal it's 100% valid by definition), and abstractly, in its relationship with other truths (which says that it crowds out love / real valuing, a relationship with God and the truth, a kinship with the God who loved the world through its whole history, and a chance to live with God and the truth forever).

Beauty works very much the same way as tranquility. (Maybe beauty always brings tranquility, or they both always bring feelings of ought-to-be-ness.) The psychological state is nice, but can be a way we sell ourselves evil.

From an outsider's perspective, the overall appeal of Buddhism could often seem to be "feel tranquility no matter what reality is". But, to be accurate, I should note that the emphasis on psychological peace and beauty can be found in the Christian scriptures as well. Jesus is a beautiful person who says "My peace I give to you." But he also warns of hell and denounces evil. (Speaking from memory and not from having studied to address this topic,) Jesus is balanced somewhere between Buddhism (or hedonism) on one hand and something like perhaps the worst of anxious Christianity or materialism on the other. There is both "spirit" (experiential/hedonic ought-to-be-ness?) and "truth" (rational relations; matters of fact?) in God.

Normative Externality

Let's say you want to say whether art is good. Well, there are different criteria of what good is in art. If something is very hedonic, it's good. But maybe at the same time it could be very anti-theistic, so it's bad.

There are cases when making art hedonic (or theistic) could make it anti-theistic (or anti-hedonic).

When a factory produces a product, that's (generally) a good thing in itself. But it could produce a dangerous byproduct in the process of doing that, and dump it in the river. We could call that an "externality".

A normative externality is when achieving a good state according to one value leads to a bad state according to another. Often, by "winning" in your own opinion, you might cause "losing" in someone else's opinion.

Subjective vs. Objective Harm

Epistemic status: provisional.

See also Who You Are vs. What You Are.

Subjective harm is experiential and damages the state you are in, and is inherently temporary, while objective harm damages who or what you are, and is inherently permanent unless remedied.

What defines a person? In a weak sense, we are all that we experience. Everything that you experience is part of your experience body. In the strongest sense, we are who we are. We have preferences, and we choose to change them. But there may be a grey area in between, between "who" and "experience body". "What" you are (perhaps your physical strengths, or social roles, or something like that) is not exactly just the state you are in, nor your character.

Was Jesus harmed on the cross? Yes, his experience body was harmed. No, his character was unharmed. Was he harmed in the sense of "what" in any way? His physical body was harmed. A body can be made out of experience, but there may be another dimension. Was it harmed permanently? If experience is inherently temporary, then what is permanent about a person is how God sees them. He's the one who recreates our experience bodies whenever we exit unconsciousness. So in his eyes, was there any change in what Jesus was? No. "What" Jesus was was stored in God's mind and will and could be trivially restored into an experience body of Jesus' own (and was, when Jesus was resurrected). Jesus was only harmed subjectively, but not objectively.

But when Jesus appeared to his disciples after his resurrection, his body had wounds. So maybe "what" he was was damaged in God's eyes by the resurrection? I could ask, which would Legitimacy prefer, the Jesus who had been faithful and died (confirming the validity of Legitimacy by Jesus, a member of Legitimacy, being willing to bear the burden of human death), or the Jesus who hadn't done that? Real harm is destruction of true value, and God is the judge of that.

Maybe the body that is more "true" (if not more "beautiful") is Jesus' wounded body and Legitimacy prefers truth over beauty (or what we conventionally think of as beauty). In the vision of Revelation, Jesus is both perfect- and powerful-looking (arguably) with (Rev. 1:14-15) "His head and his hair were white as white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire. His feet were like burnished brass, as if it had been refined in a furnace. His voice was like the voice of many waters." It doesn't say there either way whether he had wounds. The vision later (5:6) shows a lamb who appeared to be slain, which from the text I would assume is Jesus. I imagine a lamb with blood on its neck. My interpretation is that at the end of time Jesus will be both in some sense perfect (or impressive in the conventional sense, which we call "perfection" and which we apply to beauty and power) and in some sense wounded.

Whatever a person is supposed to be according to Legitimacy, they will be, unless through their decisions ("who" they are), they limit God (Legitimacy). Even the damage done to "what" you are, done by other people, can be restored, because God can separate any two people so that they don't interact with each other, and then he can restore the damaged one. But the damage done to "who" you are, can only be remedied by you, and sometimes damaged relationships and thus social roles won't come back, if one or both of the people involved are no longer "who" they used to be.

Forgetting Past Sins and Excursions From Values

If you commit a sin, then you might think you are a sinner. If you hold to that identity so assiduously that you keep on sinning because of it, that's a problem.

So we usually (partially or wholly) disown our past selves that sinned, say that we are a new person, which helps us avoid that trap.

There are two ways to commit a sin: to do something wrong, or to fail to do the thing you need to do. If you're worried about not doing the thing that you are supposed to do, you might watch out for things that bend your identity away from being the kind of person who would do them. But you may well find yourself intentionally or unintentionally doing something that moves your identity away from doing what you need to do.

If that happens, you might disown your past self that was not "a good worker" or "in tune with the truth" or whatever other identity enables you to do what needs to be done, just as you would disown your past self that committed some kind of infraction.

If you mess up or had a bad intention in the moment, then it's true that you were out of line with God's values. But what would really make you be out of line with God's values is if you stay there and never get back on track.

Really Praying by Believing

One traditional way to pray tries to get you to adore God, confess your sins, give thanks to God, and ask God to help with needs. (There could be other ways to pray.)

When you pray, really believe. Don't just say words of adoration for God, actually adore him (find him valuable and worthy in your thoughts and feelings). Don't just say words of confession, really see them as sins. Don't just say "thank you for what you've done for so-and-so", really be grateful for what was done. Don't just say words asking God to help with needs. Really believe that you need them, and that God will help with them.

Exile

Holding a value that is unpopular is difficult. You may find yourself surrounded by people who don't value what you value, and you may find it difficult or impossible to live out your values. So, in this case, at least retain the sense that you are in exile. Someday perhaps you will see yourself in a social environment where your values are common enough that you can live them out. Even if there is nothing practical you can do to further your values, you can remain true to them by keeping your innermost self apart from the world around you, keeping a fire burning for the day when it is safe to show it. If the people who see a vision can at least hold onto it in this minimal way, then if they happen to find each other, they may recognize each other and produce that social environment for them in which they can live out their values to at least a somewhat visible extent. But if they don't hold to their values in exile, this can't happen. You can adopt a value in exile that you couldn't adopt publicly, and thus be true to what is really good.

The mindset of exile is a way to resist value drift. Arguably, value drift is really "lifestyle drift". If your life forces you to not live out your values, then you can still hold your values, if you hold them in exile.

Exile requires patience. Patience is when you can wait for the future, and you can exist in the moment without having what you really want.

Greatness of God

Anselm of Canterbury said that God was a being than which no greater being can be conceived". We somehow think that God by definition must be the greatest being.

Perhaps this is the correct way of going about things. However, we must be careful to understand what greatness really is. If we don't, then we will believe in images of God which are "the greatest which can be conceived according to the tastes of humans like ourselves". Those tastes may, or may not, be aligned with God's tastes.

Anger Constitutes Visceral Valuing of Justice

I've heard it said that anger is a reaction to things not being the way they ought to be. If we suffer injustice in a concrete way, we get angry, and to us, the category of justice becomes more concrete. Those who have not experienced injustice in a concrete way do not viscerally value justice. They might give assent to "justice is good", but they don't really get it.

If this is true (and it may not be the whole story), then those who fight for justice are fighting for a world in which people will be unable to appreciate, on a deeper level, the justice that they have.