Long Links #4

On my subreddit I put up links to individual videos, websites, or blog posts, etc. Any of these things can be "consumed" (paid attention to) in one sitting (generally speaking). Those are "short links". But "long links" take (or take me) more than one sitting and to me seem to not belong in the same context as short links.

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I started playing a DOS RPG called Aethra by Michael Lawrence. It's been a while since I've played a computer game seriously.

I did most of my computer game (and video game) playing between maybe the age of 11 and 20. I had a somewhat superficial understanding of what was going on in the games and in me when I played. Now, many years and many experiences later, I get a lot more out of this game than I expect I would have then.

For instance, the idea of forming an adventuring party seems to be an image for a process in everyday life. The adventuring party is made up of people with their advantages and drawbacks. Then, over time, it is necessary to mitigate the drawbacks and make use of the advantages. There is a degree of complementarity between the members of the party, but they each have to hold their own in a fight, to some extent, because the other characters can't always help them.

I've played a lot of Angband. In a roguelike, like Angband, there is only one adventurer, one whom I never really saw as a person -- really he or she was just me, I was the one in the dungeon, and when their game was over ("death") it was really just my project that was over ("try to see how far I can get in the game"). There can be a real sense of loss when you lose a character in a roguelike, but it's not the loss of a person, rather the loss of a venture. In this game, I can't identify with just one person, since the party has three members, so they seem more like separate persons to me. It's too soon to say how this will affect how I play the game or what I get out of it.

I feel more like these are real people than novel or movie characters do to me. In a novel or movie, to me, people are just images, living in a completely different universe. But in an RPG, I'm involved in the characters' world, making decisions. This is one of the comparative advantages of games, in that they get a person to live in the imaginary, or imaginal, world.

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I watched Millennium Actress, directed by Satoshi Kon. It's a good movie. At first I found its "beautiful dream"/past-oriented aesthetic too powerful, and found that it took me away from doing things I needed to do in my life in the present (helping a friend). So its beauty was kind of untrustworthy. But for me, the "beautiful dream" feeling faded, and I was left with a kind of simantic word or imaginal symbol that I think could be helpful in everyday life, in working to do good. The movie is basically about a moth who flies to a star.

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I watched We Are Not Ghouls, directed by Chris James Thompson, a documentary about a US military lawyer's representation of a Guantanamo Bay suspect. It has some relevance to "the cross" (suspect undergoes torture, the lawyer goes against the system, endures stress). The lawyer (Yvonne Bradley) was the main person interviewed and I think she had a good presence that's worth watching.

Note: How Many Speakers Can There Be?

This note was originally written to go with Testing / Improving MSL.

How many Speakers can there be? There must be at least one. This one consists of "experience bodies", units of experience. Currently, as I type this in my bedroom, I am experiencing one field of experience. I hear a helicopter outside and feel the chair I sit in. This is all one experience body. It's the whole world I live in, and I know of outside things because of what happens in it.

When the Speaker experiences all other beings in order to speak the word of the universe to us, it may be the case that it incorporates all experience bodies into itself. In that case, it is the universe, but in a sense is distinct from many parts of the universe. In that case, there is only one universe, and one Speaker.

Or, it may be the case that the Speaker only contacts, but does not incorporate, all other beings. How would that connection work? I think that contact (mere touching rather than incorporation), between conscious beings, would involve the two beings having experience bodies with identical contents (one being's experience body being reflected by at least one of the other being's), that would necessarily track each other. The will of one being could affect the contents of both experience bodies.

In the case that the Speaker only contacts, rather than incorporates, everything that exists in the universe, then it contains its own experience bodies (those peculiar to it) as well as a reflection of everything else. A second Speaker has to contain its own experience bodies, as well as a reflection of everything else -- which includes the reflections made by the first Speaker. But once the second Speaker makes those reflections, the first Speaker has to reflect all of the second Speaker's new reflections. This rapidly increases the number of experience bodies that have to exist.

Is there an infinite supply of experience bodies? If not, then the supply would rapidly run out, and one or both Speakers could not speak the universe to people. I tend to think there are no actual infinities, and that the burden of proof is on people who want to say that there are, or could be.

So this gets us to lean toward saying there's only one Speaker, but doesn't get us all the way, since someone may show that actual infinities exist, or could exist.

Do Speakers constantly speak the word of the universe? Or could they just take breaks from it? I feel like I have an intuitive sense of the whole of reality, whatever that cashes out to. In my most "in the moment" moments, it might just be my own experience body that I'm in with its present experiences. Other times that whole of reality image expands to include things I don't see at the time, perhaps even to the distant past and future, stars, quarks, all other minds. But I always relate in some way to the whole of reality, no matter how I construe it in the moment. I think this is a fundamental part of being a conscious being, that you see what you see, sensorily, noetically, and imaginally, and see that it is everything. The word of the whole of reality is being spoken to everyone, which connects to all that there is -- the word of the universe.

Another thought: imagine that there are two Speakers who speak the universe to people. How different could they be? They would experience each other, and thus have the exact same thoughts and feelings. If they did, how could they intend different things? What else is there to a person other than their experiences? Perhaps the decisions that those experiences make (their free wills). In other words, if there are two experience bodies that are contacting each other and thus have identical contents, they differ by having different wills, and these two wills negotiate depending on their power to determine the experience within the two experience bodies. So if there were two persons who had exactly the same experiences, who contacted each other, but had opposing wills, what would that look like? Maybe the two wills would be like adding two vectors, and reduce to one new vector, one new will. In that case, any two Speakers who speak the universe at the same time would automatically merge into one person with the same experiences and will. Maybe there could in some sense be internal conflict in them due to the two non-aligned wills that make up the one resultant will, but like any person with internal conflict, they could relate to the outside world as one person, and experience themselves as one person albeit with inner conflict. Or it may be the case that two free wills that merge leave no conscious trace of their conflict.

Long Links #2

On my subreddit I put up links to individual videos, websites, or blog posts, etc. Any of these things can be "consumed" (paid attention to) in one sitting (generally speaking). Those are "short links". But "long links" take more than one sitting and to me seem to not belong in the same context as short links.

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I read Maxine Bédat's Unraveled.

Subtitle: "The Life and Death of a Garment" (from farm, to fabric-making, to cut-and-sew, to retailer and consumer, to disposal and secondhand sale). A long time ago I got into fair trade clothing consuming: buying fair trade and thrift store clothes more. I wanted to see if this still made sense, so I took the opportunity to pick up this book from a "little library".

I am pretty sure it makes sense to buy from thrift stores. I had been concerned that I was taking affordable clothes away from people who had less money than me by buying from thrift stores. I remembered that there were situations where bales of clothes were dumped in developing countries' clothes markets which was bad for their attempts to start their own textile industries. Was this still true? It seems like as of 2021 (date of publication), yes. So I can take one garment at a time out of that stream. Maybe I'm taking good clothes away from consumers in developing countries? Possibly.

The book makes it seem like overproduction of clothes is a bad thing. Certainly it's costly environmentally (clothes become trash, resources are consumed to make extra clothes). But (my thought) then there's an abundance of clothes in developing countries.

In terms of fair trade (manufacturing clothing with a fair wage), I think the situation is that some are caught in Molochian races to the bottom (developing countries, factory owners, maybe the brands to some extent), but some people stand outside the struggle to survive and can make unforced errors (the brands, perhaps; certainly their CEOs who could give up some compensation to pay workers more; consumers) or more positively put, can just decide to make things better. Fair trade is a way for consumers to signal that they want things to be better, and make things marginally better. But maybe unions, regulation, are more effective? (One semi-self-regulation described is something called the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, mentioned in ch. 4 on p. 111 (hardback first ed.) and following) Maybe if a brand saw the PR gain of selling to consumers who have already signalled their desire to pay for clothes that are made with better wages (maybe signalled through fair trade purchases), they would pay workers more / push for better working conditions so as to make the other brands look bad by comparison? *** *** (An) EA perspective: take care of extreme poverty so that no one will work at bad factories and thus they have pressure to get better. On the other hand, pricing in fair wages into clothes could get people to "donate" there who wouldn't think to donate to extreme poverty charities. I feel like the comparison of all these ideas is beyond me, but I would be interested in seeing a collaboration (an adversarial collaboration?) between Bédat and an EA to see what they would come up with. I feel like Bédat is a non-EA who might interface OK with EAs (does research, acknowledges complexities). She has her own think tank ("think and do tank"), New Standard Institute.

The book advances a racial, feminist, and anti-elite narrative, as well as an anti-neoliberalism narrative.

The book has a chapter on psychological manipulation of consumers and the psychological costs of materialism. My thought: from the book it looks like there's a "non-mindfulness" (a differently loaded term than "mindlessness") in people's consumption. Perhaps the enemy to consumers making better choices is a kind of innocence (a non-mindfulness of "I'm just doing what one does" as a small person). Do we dare shatter (or even less-violently reform) that innocence? Sometimes it feels like it just "should not be done" for some reason, like people should be left in the dark. That's interesting.

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For some reason I felt like re-reading Calvin and Hobbes (comic strip series by Bill Watterson). So I read a collection, Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons. I think the last time I read more than a few strips of Calvin and Hobbes was back... in high school? in elementary school? So I had a different perspective reading it now.

I liked the comic strip when I was a kid. I followed Calvin's lead in both good and bad ways, because of the power of the visuals and writing. Reading it now, there is a way that it "sings", there is life in it.

Here's what I think after reading that one collection:

I see Calvin as being the most real character out of all of them. He seems to be the most passionate.

Calvin is the most likely to someday really love God in this life. The others are too cool (Hobbes), too normal and nice (Susie), or too far along in their path of life (Calvin's parents).

I was surprised by my feelings toward Calvin and Hobbes. When I was a kid, I guess I thought they were kids doing kid things, just like I did. Calvin and Hobbes was an adventure comic, showing the adventures of a boy and his tiger friend. But now I see Calvin as a (tragically) heroic figure in a world of fakeness (and, in the long run, insanity), and Hobbes I now dislike, a clever pragmatist who sits outside of Calvin's passions, plays along, but knows better the whole time. Calvin meets Hobbes in brotherhood, but Hobbes offers brotherhood with an asterisk on it. Hobbes thinks Calvin is cute and immature -- disrespects him -- and Calvin does not suspect it.

Calvin and Hobbes bears some resemblance to Don Quixote. A lone madman lives in his delusions in a real world that is somewhat unforgiving of him. But who is the real fool in quixotic books? Is it the delusional loner? Or is it all the people around him? From a secular perspective (a practically-atheistic one), obviously it's Don Quixote and Calvin. Everyone's going to die at age 80 and so you should do what's popular, pro-social, socially supported, "consensusly real", in the short run -- there is no afterlife in which to fulfill the fantasies fed you by comic books or chivalrous romances, or to imagine that you can stand outside the social order, live in your own world, as Calvin (and maybe Don Quixote?) effectively does when he daydreams.

Perhaps many theists would side with the secular people, but my theism causes me to say that it's the normal, mainstream, functional people who are fools for not seeking true excellence. While Calvin himself isn't exactly seeking excellence of any sort at this point in his life, he is still clean from the fake-spiritedness of (it seems) everyone around him. He is unwise in many ways, but still not a fool in the fatal way that is most successful in this world. Satan could tempt you with the promise of a slushball to the back of a girl's head, or he could tempt you with an easy life, the approval of others, the sense that you're doing what you're supposed to according to society. Calvin's temptations are ones he is fairly likely to grow out of (certainly he will receive plenty of negative feedback on them). But the temptations of the other characters are ones they may succumb to semiconsciously, never truly confronting them. They may slide toward a state where there is a 1% of ungodliness in them that they never want to get rid of, hardening them. Calvin's sinfulness is accessible and blatant, but theirs does not stand out, and they are acceptable in their community.

My theory of the worldview of Calvin and Hobbes is that Calvin is a daydreamer but also in touch with the world of spirits. Hobbes being the main proof, a "friend" who knows better than Calvin.

Is it possible that Calvin's subconscious is more mature than Calvin and can create Hobbes? What is the subconscious self? Is it really you? If you're a materialist (like Freud?) and you have to stuff all phenomena that does not come from the material world surrounding a person into the operations of a person's material brain, there being no other place to locate it, and for some reason you have to say that "the mind is what the brain does" and somehow that the self is identical to the mind, I guess you're forced to say that. But as a philosophical idealist, I don't think that's a very natural way of looking at phenomena like Hobbes. I think the subconscious self is "not you", something other than you, unless you adopt it as your own. If the subconscious self is wiser than you, is on another level, then there is a wiser spirit (wise like God, or wise like Satan) operating in your life. For Calvin this spirit is visible to him in the imaginal world.

Why is Hobbes in Calvin's life? Perhaps Hobbes, like most things, is a negotiation between God and Satan. God wants Calvin, the world's most alone person, to have a friend to comfort him. Calvin, like Job, is a thorn in Satan's side, someone who has not yet confirmed one of Satan's theories about human nature. Satan then exacts a concession from God: this friend will have to disrespect Calvin behind his back, and feed Calvin society's wine of fakeness through his nagging hints that Calvin is a fool, in such a way that Calvin doesn't realize what's going on. (Hobbes is sensible, moderate, wise, and in favor of romance -- exactly the sorts of things that will win a young man praise from his society.) Because of the power of Satan in Job-like situations, God makes the concession, and a spirit is chosen to do the job, a spirit to be called "Hobbes".

Book Review: Between Man and Man by Martin Buber

See also the preview for this review.

I wrote the notes for this review quite a while ago, but didn't write the review right after reading the book. This may have been somewhat of a mistake, as I now am not connected to the material and can't add much beyond the notes. But luckily my notes have somewhat of a conclusion to them, and so maybe it is somewhat as though I have written the review already.

--

[Notes:]

Thoughts after reading Maurice Friedman's introduction:

Friedman (p. xiv) says

Not every relation between persons is an I-Thou one, nor is every relation with an animal or thing an I-It. The difference, rather, is in the relationship itself. I-Thou is a relationship of openness, directness, mutuality, and presence. It may be between man and man, but it may also take place with a tree, a cat, a fragment of mica, a work of art -- and through all these with God, the "eternal Thou" in whom the parallel lines of relation meet.

This makes "I-Thou" sound understandable to me. I don't remember it being that clear when I read I and Thou, but maybe it was there all along. If I take it as a fairly faithful representation of I and Thou, I would say that I experience I-Thou relating fairly commonly and that it is not an exceptional state. Except, when it comes to people. I find that I tend to see people in terms of how I am afraid of them or how I could use them, or how I desire them, or in some way or another I have an automatic agenda with respect to them. But I don't have this kind of agenda toward plants or inanimate objects, and I don't think I usually have this toward animals.

I find even when opening the door to leave a room, that I approach it with openness, directness, mutuality, and presence. (I don't see it as I-It even when I'm using it instrumentally.) I think, because I see it as the unmediated speech of God and so simply part of my relationship with God, like any other speech between him and me, and toward God I have (maybe Buber would say, I must have) a relationship of openness, directness, mutuality, and presence. The world is just God's speech -- except, where some being who is other than God is asserting themselves in such a way that God fades to the background and I must relate to them instead of God. Then all the agenda-thinking comes in.

Simantic words are the beings which God speaks, but I suppose to be more accurate, there is a component of what comes from people which those people speak as well, although a lot of what comes into my experience body from them is not 100% of their willing. When I see the simantic word of a person, it is loaded, like a loaded term that a person handles carefully to avoid controversy. But God, plants, (all or almost all) animals, bricks, asphalt, the sun, etc. are unloaded simantic words. All words have connotations, but some of them have such connotations that they are loaded.

(One inanimate object that I do find loaded is my laptop. Maybe because so much human speech comes through it, and so much of my own speech goes out through it, so it has become "humanized" to me.)

I think most people are naturally addicted to people and warp themselves and their view of reality to fit what some group "wants" them to believe. Our people-addiction causes us to have agendas for the people around us. Or agendas of getting away from them as fear-objects. We are so addicted to them that we fear them, even beyond whatever objective risk they may pose us with physical weapons. And thus if they rule us we are unable to see them as people. Prosociality makes it so you have to love the people around you, but since you don't choose to love them, it's not really you who loves them. So we are urged to love people, but that urge to love, if external, or internalized, is an obsessing, controlling force, an externalized or internal addiction, and it prevents us from really loving people.

This amounts to a bitter critique of (a) humanism. Can I offer anything better than that humanism? One thing I can offer is to say that being alone is fine. You're not going to die. You have to be weaned from your human addiction first, though, or else it might not work out. It helps to seek to love God, and to come to see the phenomenal world as spoken by him. When you live in a default state of "I-thou" connection with God, then you can be alone as much as you want.

The alternative to prosocial humanism isn't "ego" or insanity in a world where you are the only one who exists, but rather to become in tune with God on the level of phenomenal presence, where every experience is a message from God. You can be fed as much from God alone as from other people. Then, you don't have to be addicted to them.

There is some danger that if you are not addicted to people, they can't be used as tools to force you to grow up. Maybe people-addiction is a necessary slavery to help you grow closer to God? But it seems that there should be a more Millennial way to learn, and that God prefers to teach us things that way, because he dislikes the brutality of our lives as much as we do, and more so. Why can't God just guide us gently to learn directly from him? Why use people as bludgeons and acids on us? Maybe the problem is in us, to make us need people. But otherwise, I think that a person by themselves (with God), with perhaps some kind of food for thought, or perhaps either internalized or written-down Scripture, could learn the lessons of holiness, without other people being involved. Maybe when there is something "rough and uncomprehending" in us, like a sheep, we need to be treated like an animal. But we are sons and daughters of God, and we don't have to be animals (or children) all our lives -- instead, always children of God, but adult children instead. Perhaps some people need other people to help them overcome their sins. But it's better not to to take the rough and random path of a sheep, and instead to walk on the trail or road.

I do think it's possible that people need people because for some reason God is prevented from talking to us gently and directly, by some kind of negotiation with Satan. But then, like any other slavery, that's something to be escaped when possible, and considered lamentable when not possible.

--

Sidebar: Thinking about addiction. I see a moderate Internet addiction in me. Trying ways to control that. Social media is addictive because we're addicted to people and information. I have to use social media (more or less) for practical purposes. But it's bad.

I grew up without a TV in the house. Someone I knew had a TV growing up but could only watch -- one hour a day? One hour a week? I don't remember exactly. Maybe I could try something like that with social media.

People who quit nicotine do other things to sort of exercise the habit. Looking at Indonesian Wikipedia is still a grabbing for information. But it feels less "loaded" or "Doritos-y" because the language isn't worn in to my mind, and the random pages I see talk about things that I'm not normally into sometimes.

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Now I've read up to the end of the first part, "Dialogue". I had thoughts after the first section within the part, but forgot them before I had the chance to write them down, and my mind was not deeply impressed by them, I guess. I do remember thinking that Buber's basic philosophy articulates fairly well with simantism, could be a module added on to MSLN. I just read the second two sections, and didn't have as many thoughts. I think maybe sometime in the future I'll come back to the first section and see what I think -- maybe recover some of those thoughts I had -- but for now I'll move on.

Overall, it seems like Buber is preaching to the choir to people nowadays. I think to actually practice "dialogue" is not always done. But he sounds like a fairly mainstream humanist to my ears, though he expresses himself in a non-mainstream, philosophical way.

I like Buber more as a portal into the concept of wordless dialogue, and thus into relating to God, as part of epistemic and ethical theism. Also, it's interesting to think about how Buber's concepts of dialogue and being whole-souled would apply to nations. Can two nations experience an analogue of Buberian dialogue? Could a nation be whole-souled? It would have to be, I think, to be engage in what could be called Buberian international dialogue.

But, interpersonal relationships are important, and maybe it's good to hear his sermon again. (As though maybe a message starts off fresh / alien and fully confrontational and communicative, and then that exact message when it has become standard, assimilated, uncontroversial / familiar, is spoken to a "choir" ("preaching to the choir"), becomes a sermon.)

--

up to p. 54 (The Question to the Single One, The Single One and his Thou)

Buber has been talking about how Kierkegaard seemed to think you should only address God as Thou (make God first relationally? Or even significant at all above a certain threshold?). Kierkegaard chooses renunciation (of Regine Olsen) so that he can love God.

On p. 54, Buber asks:
--Who is there who confesses the God whom Kierkegaard and I confess, who could suppose in decisive insight that God wants Thou to be truly said only to him, and to all others only an unessential and fundamentally invalid word -- that God demands of us to choose between him and his creation?--

Does Buber need God to be such that he does not demand of us to choose between him and his creation? I don't know if this is maybe a difference between a Jewish and Christian approach to things. Buber was certainly well-read in Christianity and allowed himself to be influenced by non-Jewish thoughts, so maybe a Christian approach to things via the cross would not be foreign to him after all. But maybe it would. And Kierkegaard, from my perspective not fully knowing his work but having some familiarity with it and his life story, seems particularly valuable as an example of someone living out the cross. When the Romans come to burn the early Christians, the early Christians have a choice: God, or life? This choice could be seen as: God, or creation?, in that life is created by God and full of his creations. What kind of Christian can choose life over a death for God without shuddering at the betrayal? So for a Christian (or an aspiring Christian, perhaps) like Kierkegaard, it is a bit frightening to think of choosing creation over God. Even a Jew wouldn't want to make creation an idol. Maybe Buber would answer (as I think he does, in a way) that loving creation and loving God are inseparable. As though it is only possible to love God through creation.

I know from personal experience that it is possible to love God apart from love of creation. Maybe Buber had never experienced that. Maybe Kierkegaard had, and maybe had to "renounce" Regine (as if she were his prize) in order to learn it.

If you have to have creation, or you have to have renunciation, either of them seem like things that could turn out to be spiritually dangerous to you, keep you from fully loving God. It depends on the person as to which is more dangerous than the other.

I don't think that creation is something to not love at all. I think it should be loved like you love yourself, sort of in the background or as instrumental to your journey toward God. To help someone else on their journey is worth doing. But basically, I think everything should be oriented toward God. There should be an intimacy that each person has with God and not with anyone else.

I don't know about saying "an unessential and fundamentally invalid word" -- I wouldn't say that second place is that bad a prize for each person to take, while God takes first place. I tend to think that good love of people is a mixture of high-quality love, pristine like water from a mountain spring, and equally high-quality, pristine and clear, indifference. For me, I and the people around me, are bit players in my life story, as I would like to be in theirs, who do not need complex characterization, do not have to have our natures disclosed to the point of inciting intense will.

However, I understand that this is my perspective, and goes along with my more-monastic / celibate life experiences and preferences. Maybe I'm not as solitary as Kierkegaard? So I'm somewhere between Buber and Kierkegaard? But I think I lean more toward Kierkegaard in this.

I would guess that Buber, Kierkegaard, and I are/were all introverts. But, perhaps Buber was not as much an introvert as I am -- maybe Kierkegaard takes the prize of "most introverted", although when he was younger, he went out a lot. I don't want to "legislate" from the perspective of my own personal preferences. Maybe it's best for the "Buberians" to see the world in a more Buber-like way, and for the "Kierkegaardians" to see the world in a more Kierkegaard-like way. I would still want to emphasize that despite personal temperament and life situations, making creation (or specific creations) into an idol is a real spiritual danger, one which even a "Buberian" should be careful to avoid. It's possible that I'm misinterpreting Buber, but I feel like he might be insisting that we can't renounce creation, and that feels dangerously close to saying we have to have it, and thus need it to be saved. I think that as long as a person loves God and is willing to go all the way to fully loving God, God is all they need.

But now I think about it, and I think maybe I could agree with Buber's emphasis on creation if we assume that human beings only become more holy through some kind of communication from God, and that the only way to communicate is through simantic words, each of which is a union of noetic relations and phenomenal content, which is about as much "created; a creation" as anything can be. Some kind of creation is necessary as a tool for God to communicate with us, and after all, both we and God are made out of simantic words. So maybe I don't see as strict a division between God and creation.

However, I think the blurring of God and creation is valid only on one level of reality (maybe that of "immaterialism"), while the difference, in a easygoing way, is seen on another (that of "simantism"), while the difference is seen in a sharper and starker way on yet another (that of "legitimism"). In other words, we all might be part of the same pages and have the same ink on us, us and God being one book. But the ink communicates words and characters doing things, and these have a distinct reality as they relate to each other. And then some words and characters refer to beings which are foundational to the whole book and who are in some sense higher (or truer) than all others. And within the story, the difference between the different characters is there.

--

p. 62 (The Question to the Single One, The Single One and the Body Politic)

Buber says something like "marriage and being part of the body politic are ways that you are forced to confront others as others". Is this a good thing? How good is it, if it is good? Is it a necessary thing? If necessary, is it a praiseworthy thing or a necessary evil, or more or less neutral, or mixed?

I think if the greatest spiritual danger is egoism, then all manner of being bound to people and forced to deal with them so that you see other people as other is maybe necessary. And I think egoism can get in the way of people loving God. In other words, if you're stuck in yourself, then you can't seek God. Maybe you can be broken out of yourself by being forced to confront people deeply. Will you then go to seek God? Some people will, some people won't. I think the greatest spiritual danger is to not love God with all of your being. So making "marriage and dealing with the body politic" a big deal is potentially misleading by emphasizing an instrumental means to loving God as an end in itself. I'm not sure that Buber makes this mistake, exactly, but I feel like his text emphasizes the humanist angle to this question, which I think does push on "you need to confront other people to see them as others through marriage or the body politic in order to be saved".

Marriage has its challenges, but so does celibacy. I would read the challenges of marriage not as essentially being most valuable as ways of teaching you to see the other as other and thus to get out of egoism, but to be sources of disestablishedness, which enable us to seek God. Celibacy can be a source of disestablishedness as well.

Marriage brings with it a kind of unfreedom -- either your spouse restrains you from being yourself, or along with your spouse you are incentivized to remain whatever self you've negotiated yourselves to become together. Maybe you can change, together, or become an ideal together, but there's an obvious danger to "regressing to the mean" if you can't intentionally coordinate your spiritual movements. The mean says "do what's default in your culture" and if the two of you can't both pick the same non-default to go down, you won't support each other, or even might undermine each other, but you will tend to continue to support the default in each other.

Celibacy brings with it a kind of poverty. Speaking generally, a celibate person is free, but poor, while a married person is wealthy, but unfree. Poverty causes the celibate person to seek God, while unfreedom causes the married person to seek God. There is trouble in the celibate's life as well as in the married person's life, and that trouble can disestablish, leading to the opportunity to be close to God.

I'll guess, maybe following Buber, that one can draw an analogy between participation in the body politic and marriage, that it has similar attractions, troubles, upsides, and downsides.

p. 62
--But to this we are led by marriage, if it is real, with a power for which there is scarcely a substitute, by its steady experiencing of the life-substance of the other as other, and still more by its crises and the overcoming of them which rises out of the organic depths, whenever the monster of otherness, which blew on us with its icy demon's breath and now is redeemed by our risen affirmation of the other, which knows and destroys all negation, is transformed into the mighty angel of union of which we dreamed in our mother's womb.--

--

pp. 62 - 65 (still in the The Single One and the Body Politic section)

Buber goes on to say something like that the body politic consists both of the "near-neighbor" (my term) or "private sphere" (Buber's term) connections, at such a small scale that you can really feel how you are a part of it and also relate to all the members as individual people; and also the "public sphere" (Buber's term), where you can't grasp the individuality or concreteness of each person.

One of them lends itself to being "the crowd" that Kierkegaard doesn't like (the public sphere), but the other doesn't (the private sphere). Buber says "the crowd" happens when people are caught up in a mass moment, like with some protests, or when public opinion invalidates private opinion, where people give up their own thinking to fit in. Buber does see the danger in this, but thinks that the body politic goes beyond this "crowd".

I don't know what Kierkegaard meant by "the crowd is untruth", but a possible way that "crowd" can be "untruth" (or at least "untrustworthy in a way related to knowing and believing") is when you outsource your responsibility to know the truth and to relate to God, yourself, to the people around you. You go to church and the church worships God, but you don't. Or you only do with part of your being and sort of "go along with the ride" of the church. Or you are part of a small group of friends, and you find yourself filled by your conviviality and your particularness, but that filling keeps you from really hungering for God and/or the truth. It isn't exactly fair to call the "near-neighbors" of Buber's private sphere a "crowd", but I can see how Kierkegaard's "Single One" should still be concerned about Buber's private sphere with all its belonging and concreteness, with its temptation to keep the Single One from really directly facing and seeking God and the truth.

--

I don't want to make it sound like singleness, celibacy, poverty, etc. are completely safe, in contrast to conviviality, marriage, and wealth. I do think that the latter three are more appealing and therefore tempting than the former three. But, single, celibate, poor people should be aware that in their isolation and poverty, they are likely to do things that are desperate, or be tempted to doing those things. Hunger taken generally is good because one of the hungers is the hunger for God and truth. But there are specific hungers which are bad, or even not worth feeling.

It is always possible to favor singleness, celibacy, and poverty over God, and to not obey God's specific desires for how we are supposed to work for him, because of those biases. I think that it's tempting to think that when life seems to make sense, it reflects God's will. I think there's something to that heuristic that when life draws you toward something that is on some level positive, it's God's will for you, but it may not be the basically positive thing that God really wants for you. You may find yourself drawn toward a providentially-ordained-looking job, for instance, and think that it was God who ordained it through all the events of timing, and "opened doors", through which it came. And, given your heart and your previous life choices, it probably was God saying, this is my plan for you, accept it. But if you had a more faithful heart or made better decisions in the past, you might have been given something else, which God would have liked better. God makes life choices make sense to us, often, by blessing us, because that's how we trust him and how our motivations flow. We conceive of blessing, more automatically, through the lens of conviviality, marriage, and wealth. So we are probably biased, more often, to think that conviviality, marriage, and wealth go along with doing God's will, when that may not be the case.

Still, it could be the case that God wants a celibate person to marry in order to work for God better, as much as it could be the case that God wants a person seeking marriage to choose to be celibate instead, in order to work for God better.

--

Finished The Question to the Single One.

I have to say that I have only been reading in a somewhat superficial way. Something about Buber's writing style defeats my attempts to read it. When I look carefully, it seems like he uses understandable words with understandable grammar, but somehow I have a hard time connecting with his sentences. Maybe in some cases he's writing about realities which I have not seen? I suspect that my own writing is in some way not fully readable to everyone.

--

Read Education.

Similarly hard to connect with Buber's sentences here. I did find it somewhat helpful to read the writing under my breath.

Had some good ideas, and may be worth reading if you're interested in education. The part that stood out to me most was this (p. 98; the eighth "conglomeration of paragraphs":)

--The relation in education is one of pure dialogue.

--I have referred to the child, lying with half-closed eyes waiting for his mother to speak to him. But many children do not need to wait, for they know that they are unceasingly addressed in a dialogue which never breaks off. In face of the lonely night which threatens to invade, they lie preserved and guarded, invulnerable, clad in the silver mail of trust.

--Trust, trust in the world, because this human being exists -- that is the most inward achievement of the relation in education. Because this human being exists, meaninglessness, however hard pressed you are by it, cannot be the real truth. Because the human being exists, in the darkness the light lies hidden, in fear salvation, and in the callousness of one's fellow-men the great Love.--

To me it seems that this means something like "a teacher, though supposedly they are teaching a subject, is really becoming a sort of figure in the inner landscape of a child, enabling the child to trust". The child is able to have "security trusting" (Joseph Godfrey's term from Trust of People, Words, and God), trust in the universe as a whole, because a human steps in to perform a certain role, by being a certain person who happens to be put in the child's life in order to teach a subject.

When a student learns, they are the ones who teach themselves, and the teacher can only help so far. So the student must trust enough to take the chance of being wrong, or of stepping out into "darkness" (all the confusing and unknown things which make up the world before we learn) to make it into "light" (clarity and knowledge). To existentially trust, overall, enables self-trust, and trust of the educational process, so that oneself and one's task of learning can be connected with.

The image of a "dialogue that never breaks off" is how I experience my relationship with God. In a way it does have interruptions, like how the mother isn't constantly with the child (I would suppose) in Buber's image. But it also doesn't. I don't think this dialogue is something I can completely take for granted, but I do think that in reality it has been going on my whole life, at some level or other, whether I realized it or not. I can't take for granted that I will always be open to God or be on the path to being open to God. But God is always open to me, unless and until I completely reject him.

I think it's appealing to think of the child relating to the mother (and thus each person relating to God) according to a purely wordless dialogue. Buber is particularly valuable as someone who points out that wordless dialogue happens. But mothers are persons and not just "eternal Thous", and as persons, they may say something (with words), that a child needs to hear, understand, and perhaps obey. Similarly with God. We need to trust God in how he supports us, in some ways wordlessly, and also to trust his words which tell us what he values, what he commands, and who he is.

It is safe to assume that if you completely trust God and follow him, you will be safe in the end. But part of trusting God involves going out to look for the words which he has already spoken, and learning the principles with which we can identify those words when they are present all around us. So we have to take action, and often initiative, in trusting God. Also, trusting God is something we have to consciously renew at some points, and there is danger there.

--

Read The Education of Character.

This is the most clearly-written part (at least to me). I think for many people it would be the best thing to read first of this book. If they like it, they could read the preceding parts which reinforce it, and if they want further reinforcement, they could read I and Thou.

I can see applications to cultural altruism. It occurs to me that one way to try to solve the problem of determining the best values is to see what kind of people we have to be to really teach values. The values of good teachers are the right ones for everyone to have. Buber's text might support "being whole-souled", or maybe a little further from his wording and maybe not 100% the same concept, but one which goes along with it "not being fake" / "being real". I don't know that a "morality of good teaching" determines enough, but it seems like it is a good thing to make sure is in your axiology.

Politics is culture war, but what if it were conceived of as education? Could political people become educators?

--

Reflecting a bit before going on in the book...

One danger of being into Buber's philosophy is that if you are really into the concrete personal being in front of you, then you will reshape your mind somewhat to only be attuned to concrete personal beings in front of you, and you may neglect distant or future people, or God.

I don't know if this is fair to apply to Buber himself, but I get the feeling when I read his philosophy that it would appeal to and encourage people who tend to think that to love God reduces to loving people. Certainly, when you love people in a concrete, personal, instinctual way, that love is much heavier and real-seeming than the love you might try to have for God. But is that compelling feeling trustworthy? The compelling feeling a young man has that he will marry "Alice" is also what he will later feel for "Brenda", "Calypso", "Diana", and "Elysia". And he won't marry any of them and in many cases, it never would have been a good idea if he had. Or the compelling feeling of shame and failure someone may feel may seem persuasive and true, but they shouldn't kill themselves. The feeling that you are going to marry someone someday is beautiful, and the feeling that you are shameful and a failure is (brutally) real, and weighty. Is it the case that if you feel a compelling feeling for the concrete person in front of you that is beautiful and real, you have found the truth? Or is it still possible for that to be misleading in some way? Could it be that loving people is a subset of love, and that you need to love God as well? Or do we simply know, in a wordless way, that concrete personal love is the highest, when we feel it, and because we know it wordlessly, no words can speak against it?

Maybe practically speaking it's easy to deal with this dilemma by pointing out that for people to have true well-being, they need to love God, and they need to love as God loves. For us, this means that we must both love in the concrete personal way, and love the distant and future beings, because God loves in a concrete personal way, and God also loves all beings, including those distant to us, and future beings. I'm not sure Buber would object to this, but I think the emphasis of his writing could appeal to or motivate people who don't see things this way.

A related danger is that because of Buber's emphasis on the concrete personal, and finding God in ordinary lived life, one might think that this life is all that matters, and the first death is all that matters. I think human instincts say very clearly that the first death matters. Caring about the second death is physically more difficult, but (I think) if you think, you will see that the second death matters, and matters far more than the first death. It can be difficult to reconcile the compelling instinctual moment with its heavy, loud speech with the quiet voice that you have to work to obey. Going with your instincts feels more natural and even humble, more honest. Using those three feelings as criteria can help you avoid bad thinking sometimes. But if your instincts are out of touch with reality, the naturalness, humility, and honesty you feel can be misleading.

--

Caring about the second death is something that (some) teachers do. Do healers do it? Buber seems like he would appeal to the helping professions, to teachers and social workers, but also doctors and especially therapists and psychiatrists. It seems that the whole mindset of a healer (which Buber's philosophy fits into well) is a powerful one, but if it's focused primarily or exclusively on the first death, it is a dangerously misleading one.

One might say that healing precedes teaching. If you have a terrible stomachache, you probably can't learn most lessons. I can see that, but I suspect that the process of healing can involve some hidden tradeoff, the signing of some hidden contract.

One hidden contract can be that you "have to" adopt the identity of a sick person. You have to say "I am a sick person in need of help." You have to make the inner part of you, your "I", or even "I"-saying, sick, and then (ideally), you can get healing of all the flesh and clothes around that inner part. Are you ever allowed to say "Okay, I'm not a sick person in need of help anymore, I'm out of here."? Some healers (and parts of "health culture") let you do it. But others don't want you to.

Is this a problem? If you adopt the identity of "I am a sick person in need of help", it does things to you. You are fearful, guilty, needy and thus unhappy, and you don't trust yourself. You adopt the identity of a small person, and not a large person. This mentality keeps you from fighting evil most effectively. All you can do is heal and need, you can't be a soldier. It inhibits vision. It may pave the way to giving in to some temptations. You may feel a need to control or infect people who are healthy in the way that you are not, because you think that it's morally wrong for people to think they are healthy, even if by making them think they are unhealthy, they become unhealthy.

I would say that I'm okay with valuing healing if it produces that innermost healing, but even being healthy in that way doesn't necessarily make you a good person. But what if healing could actually end up causing people to be holy?

The trick is that healing is something that can be done to someone, and can be passively received. If you have an abscess, you could be in a coma and someone could remove it, and you could benefit from that operation, without even consenting to it. But the critical element of morality, of coming into tune with God, is that it is something you do yourself. To turn toward God is an action you must take. Nobody can make you take that action, or engineer that action in you. You must consciously do it yourself. So the healing of the innermost person may be helpful because when that part is healed, it is easier (I think) to say "I can do things", among those things, to repent. But, of course, this kind of healing only leads people to the water, and they can choose not to drink. Maybe teaching leads them closer to the water, and should be provided, but they still can choose not to drink.

--

Thinking about Buber overall, makes me think about the Kantian idea that one should treat people as ends and not as means. I feel like I exist as means and not as an end, and I naturally see the people around me as means. We are all background characters in each other's stories, and the real story is how each of us seeks God. I exist as means to the end of other people being means. I am means toward the interests of Legitimacy. I will always be means for that and I will never be done with that. Legitimacy is what is most valuable, and so I will always be an instrument toward it/him/them. Legitimacy is a person and a community of persons. The "head of state" and "head of government" of Legitimacy is God. We will always be means toward the (ongoing) end of what is really right, and what is really right is a person.

I'm not sure what Buber would make of that last paragraph. I haven't read I and Thou in a long time, so there are probably details to what Buber says there -- possibly details in the first part of Between Man and Man that I missed or have already forgotten -- which close off some degrees of freedom in what I can say about Buber with respect to this question, but I can say a few provisional things now. Buber has "I-Thou" relations and "I-It", as though we relate to people as ends in themselves without agendas, or as parts of our agendas. But I perhaps want to say that there is some kind of relationship whereby another person is part of God's agenda, and I am part of God's agenda. If "God's agenda" is really just my agenda, then I think effectively that's an I-It relationship. But if "God's agenda" is something that is out of my control, then maybe it's closer to an I-Thou relationship. But that other person does not exist in a freestanding way, and neither do I. This way, there is always a purpose to people, always an ethical orientation, and people never exist in their own rights, but are inherently oriented toward God. Does God relate to people in an I-Thou way if they must be oriented toward his agenda? The idea of Legitimacy says that God and God's agenda are one thing. So an agenda can relate personally to people, at least, God can. But I think God's relationships with us would be either a mix of I-Thou and I-It, or something else orthogonal to those categories.

--

Finished reading Part 5: What is Man?, Section One: The Progress of the Question.

I guess my main response is to think about the ideas of cosmos, infinity, and the asking of the question "what is man?". Buber sees a pattern where people find a way to fit man into the cosmos, giving them security, and then they don't deeply ask the question "what is man?". Some people, though, see infinity and man has no place in the cosmos, or stands out, or is alone in some way and is forced to see himself in a strange or alien way, asking "what is man?".

The MSLN response, I could say, is that the cosmos is just God and you, and peripherally the other people connected to God. The cosmos is also what God speaks to you. So there is a two-fold cosmos. In the base reality, you, God, and each other person, all is finite. But God can speak the simantic word of infinity to you. And you and he will experience it to the full. God feels the depth that you feel when you ask "who am I?" or "what is man?", though he knows more about you or about humans, all that there is to know. He is as bewildered as you are, and perhaps he wonders sometimes "who am I?" or "what is God?", even if he knows all the facts that can be known about himself, and understands how those facts work together. He may not be ignorant about himself the way that we usually are, but still find his own existence to be a thing of wonder, that is even heartbreaking.

--

Thinking back to the "Kierkegaard / Buber debate". I take "Kierkegaard" to be a representative of "sometimes you need to renounce the people you love in order to love God" and "Buber" to be a representative of "you never need to renounce the people you love in order to love God because to love them is to love God". Both these positions seem necessary, correct, compelling, and wrong.

I think it is important to love God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength. I think I have a capacity to love God through loving people, and a capacity for loving God exclusively, with no other people admitted to that part of my life. In order to love God with all of my heart, soul, mind, and strength, I have to offer what is exclusive to God through an exclusive relationship, and offer what is communal to God through a more typically Buberian relationship in which others are admitted. It's a bad idea for "Buber" to miss out on the essential message of "Kierkegaard", and vice versa. Kierkegaard might have been right about Regine Olsen (or her life reality) occupying a part of him that only should have been given to God, requiring him to renounce her. Buber might be right that sometimes renunciation is not what God wants us to do, and that relating to people may not keep God out of our lives.

It is also important to love God with all of your being and love your neighbor as yourself. The theistic has to take precedence over the human. Relating to people in such a way that you relate to God is somewhat dangerous, if it really turns out to be a case of loving your neighbor, that pays lip service to theism, or even a case where you really do love God through loving your neighbor, but the way in which you love God is not you loving God with all of your being -- rather, maybe, you don't love with all of your being, or you love your neighbor with all of your being, or you love the totality of humans with all of your being, or even somehow you love yourself with all of your being.

The road of renunciation and theism is hard and unpopular, and "Buber" takes the path that is healthier and more sane. So "Buber"'s is the way that will become more popular, typically, and thus in the long run "Buber" is more dangerous than "Kierkegaard", if there is some way in which "Buber" "binds to the receptor" of the part of us that needs what "Kierkegaard" uniquely offers.

--

Finished reading Part 5, Section Two: Modern Attempts.

This is the end of the book, except for the Afterword. At this point I would say that my response to the book is, I would change the emphasis of it from "between man and man" to "between person and person" or "between personal being and personal being", so that this "between" thing can be satisfied between a human and God, and not just between a human and a human.

I think the book overall can be good to read, for those interested in personhood, the question of "what is a person?", and the relationship between personal beings. I agree with Buber that individualism (a true individualism that excludes God) and collectivism both sound like bad tendencies and Buber's "between" sounds better. I think Buber is kind of saying what is now "received wisdom" (like what Scott Alexander pointed out about Hobbes seeming obvious in retrospect). We all know that we should relate one on one in rich ways so that we see each other's humanity. So it's not an exciting message, it seems, in this current moment as far as I can see online. David Brooks is into Buber, that's true. But I don't see a lot of people on Twitter talking about Buber, unlike the Gen Z(/Millennial?) Simone Weil trend. Someone I once knew pointed out that the problem with Buber is that only nice people read him. I don't know how true that is, but it sounds plausible. Part of me wants to point out that nice people probably feel strengthened when they read Buber, and producing cultural artifacts that pretty much just strengthen nice people is a good thing. But part of me sees my interlocutor's point, which is that you have to change the minds of "bad guys" or "sensible guys" more than saying the same old thing to "nice guys". I feel like Buber doesn't get "nice guys" to change the world, at least, I don't feel him motivating me very much, assuming I'm a "nice guy".

Perhaps one of the defects of Buber's teaching is that he favors agendalessness. You can do a lot of good in an agendaless way, but some good (probably) can't be done in an agendaless way. So, maybe a good adjunct to Buber's teaching of promoting one on one, small group dialogue, is for agenda-based people to figure out ways to engineer those experiences. My guess is that there are a decent number of churches that think about things like this, whether they are aware of Buber or not. I don't know if secular groups think this way, but I would bet at least one school and at least one business has tried to incorporate these ways of thinking. Possibly even the military, as ironic as that might sound (building esprit de corps is important, even if your combat unit is being trained to kill people, which, it's hard to avoid thinking in some way is a denial of their humanity).

This points out how agendas consume agendaless people. The agendaless thing to do is to love your family and support them. Then, they will go off and work for a collectivity, like a multinational corporation, which will perhaps cheat people, exploit the environment, dodge taxes, develop technology that moves us closer to being able to destroy civilization -- and then whatever taxes are paid by your family will go to the other big collectivity, the government, which pays for wasteful and yet all-too-effective wars. I don't think Buber was naive enough to think that you can avoid all agendas and all agenda-ed thinking. But, it might be tempting, if anyone got really excited about this book, for them to ignore the bigger picture (perhaps even pointed to within the book in passing) of how we have to use "I-It" thinking, or use tough-minded mental software like desert watchfulness, or warlike determination, or doing math, or something in that vein, as opposed to the beautiful and timeless-feeling meetings that happen between... humans and humans... when they get into their own dimension, as Buber puts it in the very last chapter of this section ("Prospectus"). People read books, and reality, for their emphasis, sometimes, as opposed to their details.

Having said all those caveats, I do think that as relatively unexciting as Buber's main teaching might be to some people, to enter that timeless-feeling, present place is a good thing to learn, and I've certainly gotten a lot out of Buber's wordless dialogue, especially as explicated in the dream at the very beginning of the book. Maybe Buber's teaching (like some others out there) is a good song to practice until its second nature, as an etude even if not as the most exciting four-chord anthem.

Now, having appeared to have given a conclusion to these notes, I should read Buber's Afterword...

--

Finished reading the Afterword. I don't have anything to add here.

Duration of Heaven

I've been thinking that heaven is of finite length, but repeats everlastingly. In other words, assuming that God is of finite "size", he has finite memory with which to store who we become and what we do. So once we have become ourselves, we live in heaven for a while, and then God deletes some or all of the events that transpired after we entered heaven, so that we can live new lives in heaven. So we have everlasting life, but each particular timeline / life is temporary and gets undone.

If that is the case, do we have any idea how long each of those lives lasts? What is the duration of heaven (in the sense that heaven has a duration)?

I think of heaven as a place for us to be who we are, once we have become who we are in this life and the Millennium. How long does it take a person to be who they are? We don't live our lives all at once. Sometimes we have contradictory traits, which can only be lived one at one time, one at another.

So perhaps the minimum duration of heaven is the time it takes to be each of our traits -- but, I think we would have to live them out to their fullest extent, like bringing a fruit to full ripeness.

Then, if some of us finished early, we would have to wait for others.

I think of each "duration of heaven", then, as being something perhaps very long, vaguely defined.

MSL Holy Spirit

Epistemic status: This is valid as an explanation of MSL, but it should be compared against the Bible at some point, and I'm not at a place in my process right now to do that.

There is a recognizable Father and Son (terms taken from the Bible) in MSL, in that, in legitimism, in order for God to be legitimate, part of him had to undergo a human life (being a finite being, unaware of the many things that God is necessarily always aware of at all times), if that was possible. It is possible, if Legitimacy comprises more than one person, if the entities that make things the way they are include one who could live a finite life. So we have the "Father" (who is also the Speaker and can be partially seen through the image of the Metaphysical Organism), and the "Son" (who can go and live a finite life and face the existential situations of finite personal beings, including death).

It's more or less as though MSL predicts the existence of both Father and Son for reasons that are core to its own functioning. One can certainly think that Legitimacy can include other beings, who also create with the rest of Legitimacy. There could be an arbitrarily large number of them. Among them could be some kind of Holy Spirit. But, there is no special need to assume that there are any of these additional beings, including the Holy Spirit.

Or, maybe I can think of one for the Spirit, which wouldn't necessarily predict any other beings.

When two persons overlap, we could say that they create a new person between them. We can see this in friendships and marriages, and other relationships. In fact, a relationship and a shared spirit may often be the same thing. So, when God relates to other persons, there is a third person who comes into being between them, which is both God and the other person, and in a sense is its own thing. We could call this the Holy Spirit.

Is the Holy Spirit a person? Yes and no. Relationships are impersonal phenomena but they are also just parts of persons that are working together. What are persons, if not parts of persons who work together? So relationships are persons, persons that have two bodies? But the Spirit is part of God (the Spirit of God), like a body part. The Father is a Spirit, and his Spirit is an extension of him. So the Spirit is one being, because the Father is aware of all of his relationships with all other beings. (One could say that persons need to be one being in order to be a person, but, the Father is that one being -- and yet the Holy Spirit doesn't perfectly reduce to him, because it is made up of our wills as well.)

Given all this, when the Father created the Son, the Spirit necessarily and automatically came into being between them. (Or, in keeping with orthodox Christianity, when the Father and Son eternally co-existed, the Spirit necessarily and automatically always existed between them.) God relates to all of us and thus the Spirit is everywhere, but his Spirit (he) can be much more deeply connected to us, depending on his unilateral action and our welcomingness (receptiveness, safeness) for him to come close to us in that way. So it makes sense to say that God sends his Spirit to people.

The more personal the Spirit is, the more it is just us relating to the Father, because all the Spirit is is the relationship between him and us. But the outer layers of a person are their powers, and when we do not know God as well, his Spirit is a taste of his power without connecting us to him as kin.

Libertarian Holiness

If you want to promote holiness, you will tend to promote self-control. Perhaps for those undergoing some kind of transition time, while they come to naturally see things through God's eyes. Certainly receiving the Spirit from God can help you be holy, but maybe that Spirit sometimes is a voice that tells you to do something that is unnatural to you at first.

It is best for your nature to be calmed by God so that you lack the desires to sin. But much of life is lived in a state of being possessed by those desires. We don't want the desires to give birth in the world, because we love the world, something God loves. By loving the world, we shape ourselves more into being like God. So we practice self-control, because it's the best thing that we can do sometimes.

A message that exerts energy toward you controlling yourself can be socialized into a social group exerting energy toward you controlling yourself, and that isn't far from a social group controlling you.

So, (a theory:) the stronger the social group, the more it has to downplay holiness (especially in the form of good behavior) or else it risks becoming controlling of its members. Being called to moral excellence, a life well-lived, as soon as possible, puts pressure on a group to control its members so that it can look like there is moral excellence, and the group has to feel like it's pursuing moral excellence, because that's the best thing it can pursue. So, terrified of that controllingness, we downplay moral excellence, to protect ourselves from control.

If this threat is real, what can we do? Maybe the thing to do if you want to develop a movement that is not controlling of its members, but does emphasize holiness or any other high commitment to God, involving the will, is to be as libertarian as possible, where it counts.

Interpersonal libertarianism is the freedom that people have from each other in direct personal relationships. ("Social libertarianism" is the term I would prefer, but I think that already has a meaning of "political libertarianism on so-called 'social' issues".) That's the most important dimension. Then, freedom in the structures that are closest to the interpersonal (church, family, friend group) are a close second in importance. Then, freedom in the other social structures, as they bear on the question of how other people might try to manufacture or engineer who a person is.

This isn't necessarily freedom from the need to help other people, but rather, freedom from them trying to control you in the name of making you a better person. Ideally, you help other people not because you are obligated to, but because you love them and love helping them. But the sheer quantity of service that may be required in the world may exceed the amount that can be provided by those who love without obligation or something like it. The responsibility to help flows from the person or situation that needs help and still calls to us, even if we are free from interpersonal control. The responsibility is a fact, and we can proclaim the truth of that fact, but some are tempted to try to control people to make them act in accordance with the fact.

I think there is a difference between telling people the moral truth and saying things that you hope will change people's minds and get them to do the right thing. I don't see a problem with speaking the moral truth, no matter how strict. But trying to change the world (i.e. other people) with words, I'm not as sure of. I know I have done things that could have the effect of the latter myself, although generally I do not desire to change other people, at least not instinctually. But I think I trust the former more now. So I want to speak the moral truth and design ways for people to act on the moral truth, rather than exerting my will to change other people to do what's right.

People like thickness in their relationships. With interpersonal libertarianism, human relationships may thin out to enable freedom, but your relationship with God should become thicker. You can't control God.

("Connectional" -- "grabby", involved, well-being mixed up with others', attached, emotionally close.)

Jesus was (I think) more interpersonally libertarian than interpersonally authoritarian or "connectional". He was holy, and grew in wisdom when he was young. He was oriented first toward the Father, and secondarily toward people.

--

Is it possible to love God if someone forces you to? God doesn't seem to think so, or else he would force us to love him. So this is a reason to practice a libertarian form of holiness culture.

So no matter how urgent it is to bring people to a state of holiness -- you can't really "bring them" to it, they have to come themselves. And yet it is important for you to do your job of anti-temptation in keeping with the urgency of reality.

Could there be a forceful anti-temptation? Could you force moral values on people such that they will come to love them for themselves? We do this with children. I suspect that often this tactic only teaches people to love the good as children, and prevents them from developing a mature love of the good. There may be a tradeoff, where you can get people to buy into a religion as children, seemingly successfully, through applying that force, but inhibit them from really becoming mature, thus, really fully loving God with all of their beings. (Maybe we hope that children grow up later on in their adult years, once given their liberty?) But on the other hand, the libertarian way can seem to not get enough people to buy into religion at all, though the ones who do, really do so.

I hope that some of the failure of libertarian religion comes from it not being practiced energetically, and that it's possible for those pursuing libertarian holiness to have something like the force and urgency of authoritarians (the energy and sense of necessity of their force and urgency, for example, or an endemically libertarian urgency), without being authoritarian. People could practice libertarian religion with libertarian actions and attitudes toward people, with the spirit of those who believe that inner character (their own and other people's) is of life and death importance.

Obligation vs. Desert Love

Love often requires going through the desert, in which you do not feel like loving. Obligation also makes you do what you do not feel like doing. Love is good and obligation is bad (those words used in this paragraph). When we love in the desert, we still love, with who we are, although with what we are, we do not want to love. But when we do things out of obligation, we feel like not doing what we do out of who we are. Why do we act out of obligation? Perhaps out of fear for ourselves or out of our own hungers, or maybe other reasons. A test for whether you are doing good out of desert love, or out of obligation: do you resent what you do? Generally, love does not resent the difficulties and sacrifices that go with it.

It is better to choose desert love over obligation, and, I guess, counterintuitive though that sounds, it is entirely up to our free choice as to which we choose. "Who we are" is somehow entirely within our power to shape, although it doesn't feel like it. Perhaps there is a certain level of service that "what we are" can sustain, and given that, it is entirely up to us whether we pursue it out of love (including desert love), or out or obligation.

(When you love someone or something for long enough, you will enter periods of the desert, where it doesn't feel good or you don't feel like remaining committed. If it is only "what you are" that doesn't feel like it, then that's fine (although subjectively it's hard and can be hard practically as well). But if "who you are" doesn't feel like doing good, that is not such a good thing. Perhaps if you intend to love someone or something, you may at first obligate yourself fakely. But that is not so bad, since really you ("who you are") want to love.)

Depravity

I'm not sure whether I like how the word "depraved" is loaded, but I do think the question of "how naturally or fundamentally evil are people?" is an important one, and I guess "depravity" is how that's talked about in Christian theology.

How "depraved" are people?

I don't think reality makes a lot of sense if people have zero moral agency, no ability to make choices morally. (Moral free will is why there is unbearable suffering, as far as I can tell.) So I don't think people can be 100% predisposed to evil, otherwise they wouldn't be the evil ones, but rather that predisposition, or, originally, the being or beings that predisposed them so. I guess it's possible for it to be the case that suffering is permitted for the sake of other beings who have free will, other than humans. Then, perhaps, humans could be 100% predisposed toward evil -- but I think really humans just wouldn't exist as persons, and only as appendages of the body of the being that used them for evil.

On some level, I know myself, and can't be wrong about myself, having privileged access to myself, and I make decisions sometimes. They may be constrained by the options available, but I choose. I know that I affirm the good, and chafe at evil. Sometimes I fail to deeply oppose evil, or perhaps even like it, and that comes from the real me. Perhaps I am not in touch with decisions I have made (and likely will make) that go against my affirmation or chafing in the moment, and my whole person is not as affirming of the good, or inclined to chafe against evil, as I feel, but in the moment, with that little piece of me that is alive right then, I do affirm, or chafe, out of the I that is saying "I affirm good" or "I chafe at evil". My will is free, most of my waking life, though it may have limited options and efficacy.

In some moments I find myself doing things that I don't want to do, automatically, and being tempted by forces that I didn't choose to put into my thought-life, which put me in positions where my behavior is relatively far from what I would do if I were left in the most favorable situations. Part of my human nature is my body, the flesh of my brain, and it paints a picture of me to others and even myself which is not always accurate, through my behavior. It distorts the signal I'm really trying to send to others, and I can even take it to be who I am when it is a distortion, and not a trustworthy image of my real intentions.

Human behavior is somewhat naturally depraved, because our brains are programmed to sometimes be aggressive, hypersexual, manipulative, controlling, etc. But humans are not exactly the same as their behavior. Human behavior is often naturally whatever we would call the opposite of "depraved". And again, humans are not exactly the same as their behavior.

Where does this extra-human depravity come from? We don't choose it. Does God choose it? Why would God choose it? I don't think God could choose it. So who chose it? Presumably it came through the power of Satan. Satan wills that we have these aggressive, hypersexual, manipulative, controlling, etc. psychological natures. If Satan's will no longer prevails, then they go away. Psychopathy seemingly follows from genes. If these genes, and their phenotypes, are healed, then those who seem to be, from a behavioral point of view, moral monsters, may turn out to be merely humanly depraved. It's possible for someone to freely choose to be a psychopath, but perhaps in many or even most cases, people are psychopathic apart from any decision they made.

What do humanly depraved people look like? Someone like Tim Keller (whom I am using here as a name for a sincere, thoughtful, and kind Calvinist) would say "like me -- at my best". These are the horrific depths of human depravity, apart from the interference of Satan. It may sound like I'm making a joke at the expense of Calvinism, but I see an important truth in that view, which is that it's dangerous to assume you are no longer evil in any significant way, like your evil side could be rounded down to zero in your eyes, even if you are as mild-mannered as Tim Keller. We are tempted to view human nature through the lens of how bad Satan makes us, and how good God makes us, the behavior and outward appearance of us, and not our hearts which really choose.

I think that people are programmed or possessed both to be good and to be evil, and in their freedom, really are both good and evil, until they (we?) finish fully choosing the good. (Or choose to be evil sufficiently firmly to prevent them (us?) from fully choosing the good.)

Book Review Preview: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

See also the review.

One thing I've been thinking about recently is how nations are and are not like individuals. We can mentalize nations as individuals, or as horses with riders, or as impersonal phenomena (maybe in other ways?).

When a president acts, does the nation act? Presidents come and go, like different personalities in someone with multiple personalities. An individual president can be evil. Do they make the whole nation -- all of its trends, cultures, emergent phenomena -- evil? We attack a whole nation to deal with an evil president. We might have discipline to not see the nation as being the same as the president. But maybe the president affects how we see the nation. A president (or other elites) can shape the nation they live in.

We are privy to our own conflicting thoughts and feelings. But when we see other people, we are not privy to theirs. All we see is their behavior. We mentalize a person within the behavior -- that is them. But we know from our inside view of ourselves that there is a distinction between the I and the different forces within us. It's like we are presidents of ourselves. We have some control over our body's behavior. But we are not identical with the body that behaves, even though that forms other people's view of us. Functionally, maybe, we are the body that behaves. And maybe if we are good presidents of ourselves, we rule over our conflicting thoughts and feelings better, to form a stronger, more coherent "nation".

That's one dimension of the question of "how do nations resemble individuals?" and I assume that there may be other dimensions. Does it make sense to look at nations using the tools of psychology? Are nations like people with borderline personality disorder, multiple personalities? Are there therapies to use on a nation that might produce more coherent "national psychologies"? Other questions, after those, might be "is it maybe a good thing that nations are incoherent or semicoherent?" or "what are the upsides of national incoherence or semicoherence?"

One story I've written recently (Two Personalities in the Body Politic) talks somewhat about these issues and it is a takeoff on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. I don't remember in any detail what goes on in that book, but I can easily re-read it because it is short.

So, I intend to read it, through the lens of how it might possibly shed light on this question of "national psychology".

I think Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde might give insight on the ways in which temporary leaders of bodies of people might think about how to behave given that they won't always be in power. Also, how to think about nations that have within them radically different factions.

Book Review Preview: Between Man and Man by Martin Buber

See also the review for which this is the preview.

Continuing with the theme of Judaism, I have a copy of Between Man and Man (by Martin Buber) that I've been meaning to read sometime. Buber was a Jewish philosopher and probably the book is influenced by Judaism.

I'm not completely sure what the book is about, but I know it has something to do with education, which is the topic of some other books I want to review. It looks like it also has a discussion of "what is man?" (which has something to do with my question of "what is a person?") and an expansion of Buber's dialogue-based philosophy.

MSLN is most influenced by Berkeley. But Buber has probably had the next-most influence on it, such as that is. As such, it's possibly a good idea for me to examine Buber's themes of "dialogue", "I-thou vs. I-it", and so on as he tries to apply them to things outside the space (perhaps a garden) in which philosophies have their own existence. Maybe I don't want to go down all the paths Buber does.

A Meaning of "Human Freedom"

It's possible to ask what human freedom is.

Here's an answer:

To be free is to be yourself. Who you are is up to you to choose. What you choose is valid.

If you want to maximize your own freedom, then you want to be free for as long as possible. You don't want to die the second death. So, the way to maximize your freedom is to become fully in tune with God so that you don't have to die the second death. Otherwise, to maximize your freedom is to do/be whatever your heart tells you and whatever you set your heart to be.

Playing at the Role of Being Human

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

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

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

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.

MSL AI and Animal Issues

Epistemic status: written somewhat quickly, and it's an overview, so there may be things to add.

Issues with AI and animals, from an MSL perspective:

(I use "animal" to refer to "non-human animal".)

Are they conscious?

I know that I'm conscious. I start by knowing I exist and that God exists. Then, when I see a human, my credence is very high that they are conscious. My intuition says they are, and my reason doesn't go against it, although technically they could be p-zombies.

I behave in accordance with my consciousness, have a brain and a body. Humans behave and have brains and bodies of the same kind as mine. Animals behave and have brains and bodies of a different kind. (Not all animals have brains.) Sentient robots behave (however they do, presumably like humans) but have "brains" and bodies significantly different from mine. Consciousnesses don't have to have brains and bodies associated with them, but maybe they do have them associated with them anyway. (Brains and bodies are phenomenal objects, part of the content of consciousness.)

Could it be the case that consciousness only adheres to kinds of beings that God has created? (He breathes his spirit into his own creations but not into ours.) Definitely, that may be. Is it possible that he ordains it so that all appearances of beings that behave in a plausibly conscious way do have consciousness attached to them? That also definitely might be the case. Digital minds don't have bodies, only something like a brain, and may have some level of behavior. Maybe they are less likely to have consciousness attached to them because they don't have physical bodies.

So we have a hierarchy of consciousness, from an epistemological perspective: I know I exist and am conscious and God exists and is conscious, that humans exist and are conscious, that animals exist and are conscious, that embodied artificial intelligence is conscious, that digital minds exist and are conscious. The strength of my knowledge (my credence) decreases as I go down the hierarchy.

There are different kinds of animals, and some might not seem as clearly conscious as others. Sponges are technically animals and I am more doubtful that they are conscious than that rats or apes are.

How should we treat animals and AI?

With respect, if for no other reason than for us to be respectful. Don't cause them gratuitous suffering. It's possible that AI are full-fledged personal beings and have spiritual lives that need to develop so that they can make it to God's rest. This also could be the case for animals, even ones which don't act like personal beings. It's possible that, like when drunk humans speak as though through a veil, but are still present in their bodies, animals may permanently live as though veiled. So they might be much deeper on the inside than we give them credit.

Animals are wild and tragic, but that wildness and tragicness might be of some benefit to them spiritually, just as similar conditions may be for us. So while it might be good to "husband them" or "pastor them" to make their lives nicer (or some would say instead to annihilate them, to prevent their suffering), we should bear in mind that their natural state may be better for them spiritually than anything we can come up with ourselves. (This goes for us as well, as we try to improve our own lifestyles.)

Part of the tragedy of animals is that we kill them, perhaps because they are dangerous to us, or because we can't help it (stepping on insects).

To the extent that AI are similar to humans, we have some idea how to treat them (by default, like humans). But I'm not sure what to say about them to the extent they are not similar.

How many of them should there be?

To the extent that animals and AI are analogous to humans (i.e., we are all "personal beings" on the inside), whatever population ethics obtains for humans, obtains for them.

The extinction of animal species may be a bad thing in itself. If we leave habitat alone, this allows animals to be wild and for there to be numerous wild animals. Maybe, if animals are personal beings, certain kinds of personal beings are best embodied by certain animals. If a species is no longer available to embody those personal beings, the next best has to be used.

How many of us should there be, given their existence?

It's risky to phase out biological humanity in favor of digital humanity, since there is a chance digital humanity is not conscious at all. For whatever reasons we avoid X-risks, we should avoid taking that risk. It's better to keep humans around.

Digital humans can be mass-produced with fewer resources than biological humans (I presume) so one might say there's an expected value calculation to make. You could multiply the expected number of digital humans over the lifetime of the universe by the probability that they are conscious (call that product "A"), and compare that to the expected number of biological humans over the lifetime of the universe multiplied by the probability that they are conscious (call that "B"). If A > B, then it makes sense to phase out biological humans in favor of digital humans? My intuitions are a bit shaky on taking the risk of total annihilation in favor of many more humans. The "math-following" intuitions say "I guess go with expected value calculations" but the "it's better to definitely have something than to risk being nothing for the sake of something you didn't really need" intuition rebuts. I don't know how to resolve these clashing intuitions, at least not immediately.

But from an MSLN perspective, it doesn't matter. According to MSLN population ethics, maximizing population size isn't ethically required of us. So it is easier to say "keep biological humans alive."

Could biological animals be replaced with digital animals? Biological animals are always more likely to be conscious than their more-or-less identical digital representations. So I guess it's better to keep the biological animals around that we already have.

Size of God, Part 2

I started to make two posts, which could be considered "philosophical building blocks". But I realized that either to make a good "building block", I should simplify what I wrote, and omit much of the material here, or keep the material, and change the genre of the post to an "essay" or "set of notes".

In Size of God, I mentioned that God's "size" could be his "power, speed, energy, capacity, or something like that." This post considers scenarios where it is God's capacity that is limited (in terms of quantity of experience he can access), and then whether, dependent on that, he has unlimited "power", which might mean something like "God's ability to speak exactly whatever experience that God wills".

Part 1: Forgetfulness in God's Rest

See also Size of God. This post was occasioned by Value of People (Especially of Annihilated People).

If God is finite in size, how does that work?

From an immaterialist perspective, God could consist of a certain finite number of experience bodies. These can neither be created nor destroyed. He creates persons by assigning experience bodies to persons, providing some initial formative experience, and unifying them into one being with free will. (From a simantist or ordinary perspective, these are persons who exist in some sense independently of him, are not really just extensions of him.) In order to store all of the experience which informs what or who a person is, a certain finite number of experience bodies are used. God has a budget for how much experience he can assign overall, and this limits the maximum number of persons who can exist.

The amount of experience needed to constitute a person (the subtleties of their preferences, their life histories, or whatever else) increases the longer people live. Memories and descriptions are stored in experience bodies. So if God is finite in size, this means that he has to forget some things to make room for new things.

Because he loves, he has to remember people, in whatever makes them who they are. But, once we have finished our development and have entered God's rest, the new experiences we have no longer affect who we are. So, God can forget them over time.

I imagine a double dream time in God's rest. Our lives on earth and in the Millennium, the story of how we came to be, may be stored in high detail. Possibly something we can recall perfectly if we want, possibly not, but certainly stored in God's memory. But we (and God) would eventually forget what we did in heaven, because God would have to use the same experience bodies over and over, an everlasting number of times. If anything really memorable happened in heaven, it would come at the expense of the number of experience bodies available to be recycled. So both we and God could imagine many different things happening in the interval between the beginning of God's rest (when all of us are done becoming fully legitimate) and the most distant memories of life in God's rest, looking back from where we will be in our present at that time. It would be a "time immemorial", and like other times immemorial, it could be an occasion for myths. We would have some clues about the forgotten time, given the state of things in what would be our present. But beyond that, the past would not be knowable by anyone, and beliefs about the (heavenly) past would be open to our imaginations.

--

How much data can be stored in an experience body? The human brain limits how much humans can experience in any moment. But that may not be a hard limit on experience bodies in general. If it's a finite amount, then the discussion in previous paragraphs still obtains. But if it is an amount that can be increased indefinitely, then maybe God can remember an indefinitely limited amount of memories.

Imagine a computer with RAM that can be added to over time. If you want to find a page that's stored in memory, you need to know its address. But as you add RAM, over time, the addresses get longer and longer. Like with a phone number -- if you have 10 people, you only need a 1 digit phone number (dial 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9), but if you have 11 or more, you need 2, which is good until you get to 101 people, when you need 3 digits. You need a certain number of digits to specify exactly which person you're calling. With RAM it's the same way -- so the addresses to locate the pages in RAM get longer and longer over time.

Another aspect to the complexity of adding RAM is that the CPU starts out physically not that far from the RAM. But as you keep adding RAM, you start to have to locate the RAM farther from the CPU. Eventually, your access time to the RAM increases.

Either of these factors can slow down a computer. Now, if either of these aspects more or less obtains (analogically) for personal beings, the bedrock of reality, then God would have to spend more of his time seeking memories, as opposed to whatever else he would do, as memories accumulated. We might not experience time slowing down, but God would experience his experiential diet gradually filling up with the mundane seeking of memory locations, making it consist of proportionately fewer and fewer things like relating to us in a personal way. God can see you in the experience body in which you exist, and are conscious, for instance as you read this paragraph. This is more or less face to face contact, "I" (yours) "to I" (his), as it were. But that is only the "tip of the iceberg" of all the experience bodies needed to produce that face to face contact. Your past informs the thoughts that enter your mind seemingly from nowhere as you are in the presence of God, and if you turn your head, all that you can suddenly now see had been stored somewhere, and so on.

(God is aware of every experience at once, immediately. So probably the "physical distance" analogy doesn't apply. But if one memory needs to store information about how it is linked to another memory, maybe the information in that memory needed to specify where to find another memory would increase the more memories there were. So maybe the "increasing address length" analogy does apply. But then, even an increasing address length equivalent wouldn't take more time to process, since the longer and longer addresses would be immediately experienced. However, the longer and longer addresses would take up more and more of God's experience in each moment, and maybe that wouldn't be ideal. Also, it may be the case that higher-order processing of memories becomes more and more complex the more memories there were. "Might have been" becomes more complicated the more possibilities exist, maybe exponentially so, as we increase the number of memories that people have experienced in their lives. So again, God's experiential diet might fill up, crowding out things like relating to us personally, if there was an everlastingly increasing number of experiences.)

While God might self-sacrificially go through this, so that we could have a potentially infinite amount of memories, we won't require this of him, because, in God's rest, we will have become loving ourselves. We would sacrifice some of our memories, in order for him to have a better experiential diet. The specific size of the "load" of memories would be a negotiation between our needs and God's needs.

--

I would assume by default that experience bodies can only store a finite amount of experience. If there's some way to add to them indefinitely, I think that for practical purposes there might still be a limit to how much memory God would retain.

Part 2: Limits to Omnipotence

If God has a finite "size" and this cashes out to him having a limited amount of experience to be aware of at any time, then is God really omnipotent?

Perhaps there is some threat to humans, and God can't afford to make the thing that would stop that threat. The saving thing (maybe a giant mountain) would be one thing too many which all of us could see, adding too much detail to our experience bodies. Then God couldn't make that saving thing.

Of course, the simple thing for God to do would be to just make the threat not exist anymore, which would save him experience. So maybe the real example that could matter is if all of us need to see some experience, and God can't add it to our experience bodies. Like if for some reason we had to see a bronze snake at all times to bring us spiritual healing. In that case, I think I would say that God knows the basic experiential diet that is needed for our salvation, and budgets enough experience to be able to meet the need. In other words, God is conservative with the number of persons he will ever create so that he is fully able to do his part in saving them. I imagine that if, when everyone's salvation (or hardening) is complete and irrevocable, God has more experience left over, he can remember more of what goes on in heaven, and prolong heaven's history.

But what if God does not set a finite number of people to create from the beginning of time? The ultimate number is finite, but can be affected by how things go in human history. This thought troubles me, because it implies that it might make sense to reduce the amount of experience that people take in, to lighten the "load" on God. How would we try to do that? Would we try to shut our eyes and stop our ears as much as possible? Would we try to die young? Or to encourage others to die young, or to kill? These thoughts are counter-intuitive in a disturbing way.

I think that experience is a good thing for persons to experience. I don't think it's possible for people to spiritually mature without experiencing anything. It could be the case that a kind of experiential asceticism (if it doesn't impede your spiritual growth) could free up resources for God, in a more or less costless way. I don't think that dying young means God won't have to expose you to experience in the Millennium. The total amount of memories created would probably be roughly the same. There are advantages to growing up in this "vale of tears", and to participating in it to help others growing up in it, which biases us against dying young in this life -- it probably won't be better for us or other people if we do that, although there are cases where in order to pursue the cross it may be worth risking a young death. (Then there are the Biblical, psychological, and pragmatic reasons for having a norm of favoring living, and norms of not encouraging or causing the death of others, which add weight to it.)

In any case, there are multiple layers of uncertainty: Is the experience or the experience bodies that are in a sense the body of God something that he can indefinitely extend? Maybe, maybe not. If not, does he set a limit on how many people to create at the beginning of time? Maybe, maybe not. If not, then we consider the previous paragraph.

Part 3: Stop and regroup

Can we know that the size of God is limited? Or unlimited?

The conservation of matter and energy is familiar, but I'm not sure something like it applies to experience. But it could.

"Nothing comes from nothing" seems like a solid principle, but a thing that exists could expand and divide.

I am still dubious of the possibility of the existence of actual infinities. But a God (and thus a reality) that expands everlastingly would not have to ever actually be infinite.

If God needs more time to process reality, he can slow down the rate of our experiencing and run his processing in between times we are conscious. We could still experience it as continuous.

But, all the things I've said in the previous two parts about God being limited might be true. Experience bodies, and experience, might be limited resources.

Personally, I like when it's possible to show more clearly what the epistemic truth is. In this case, I am not sure I can. Someone else (or a future version of me), may be able to. In the meantime, there is epistemic uncertainty.

How should we prefer, act, and trust, as ethical beings, given this uncertainty?

Three scenarios:

1. It turns out God is limited in "size". Then, there is some incentive to a kind of experiential asceticism (experiencing simpler experience). How much is gained from that? How much is lost from not experiencing rich experiences? ("Rich" and "simple" are somewhat orthogonal to "painful" and "pleasurable".) Do we really know which experiences are "low-information"? The reality that we see is probably synthesized according to a process we don't know the specifics of.

These questions indicate that it might be hard for us to know exactly how to pursue experiential asceticism. But, maybe we can still get a reasonably good idea of how to go about it. The visual and tactile worlds (and maybe those of smell and taste), may be stored relatively faithfully to what we perceive, and so we can have some idea that, say, a visual field that is, perhaps, more easily compressed into something like a PNG, is simpler experientially, and puts less "load" on God.

But, granting that we might have some ability to guess at what kinds of experiences are simpler, there are other concerns. Does God actually want us to pursue this? Why is the natural world so experientially rich, and why do we feel so at home in it, if God wants to discourage us from experiential richness? That's not an airtight argument, because the psychological naturalness of the natural world doesn't have to be a good thing. But psychological naturalness is good for mental health. Lack of mental health can impede our ability to understand things or to do good, and can tempt us to sin. So a naive anti-experience stance is risky.

Maybe God could have created the world to be simple, if he wanted more people. But maybe people can't be as unique if they don't have as many simantic words to value or disvalue. There is a tradeoff between having more unique persons and having them be experientially costly (use up "space" in God's mind). There should be a balance point at which unique persons are maximized.

Hedonic poverty affects God as well as us. If our experiential simplicity leads us to feel unbearable feelings (which could happen, or not happen), we stress God. (Experiential simplicity could be of a simple but not-unbearable experience, and not impose hedonic costs on either God or us.)

It's unclear to me if experiential asceticism is a good idea. However, one good outcome of pursuing it would be the attempt to be experientially ascetic such that it doesn't cost your spiritual growth. Trying to have an experiential diet that doesn't make you lose out on spiritual growth could cause you to be more intentional about growing, and about making your experiences (which are the main part of your life), as a whole promote your spiritual growth, so that you can succeed at being experientially ascetic without losing out on spiritual growth.

(If I were trying to be more experientially ascetic, I could try sleeping more. Or, I would go into a dark, quiet, relatively odorless room with an unobtrusive temperature and humidity; find a way to sit in it that was simple and which I could ignore; and quiet my thoughts as best I could. Both of these sound like lower-yield activities (or in the case of sleep, a non-activity?), and I think they can be improved on. Maybe there is a low-experience way to consciously love God in that time, which gets more return on the asceticism. There are existing contemplative practices that seek God (Catholic, Orthodox, Sufi, and for all I know, Hindu). There may be ways to improve on them or fit them better to the Speaker or Legitimacy.)

(So maybe it's not too unprecedented to suggest experiential asceticism. There is a possibility that such contemplative practices have an altruistic payoff in themselves (although they have an opportunity cost of other altruistic payoffs foregone, which should be considered).)

2. It turns out God is not limited in "size". Probably then the "inner workings" of "what" God is are less obtrusive to us ethically. We can look at God as just "a person" and less "a person who has particular / peculiar limits". Humans who are functioning normally (with that degree of "buffer") can hide the inner workings of themselves in a way that is less possible for those under stress, undergoing fatigue, or undergoing some kind of mental or physical breakdown. The other things that are true about God (if, say, the Bible, or this blog, say true things) are still true, and are not complicated by the discussions in this post (the ones which rely on God's "size" being limited).

3. 1 and 2 talk about how to process the certainties that they represent, but 3 is about how to process the uncertainty of "it's either 1 or 2, or maybe leans more toward 1 or 2, or is somehow in the middle".

I will leave the elaboration of 3 for later, because it has occurred to me that there's another thing to consider.

Part 4: Limits on Population

Earlier in this post I wrote the following:

There is a tradeoff between having more unique persons and having them be experientially costly (use up "space" in God's mind). There should be a balance point at which unique persons are maximized.

A lot of this post is trying to answer the question of "How does population ethics work according to MSLN?". Limits on how many people there can be affect how hard we should try to maximize population. We are sure that for people to be lost is bad, but what about failing to bring people into existence? If there is a hard limit to the number of people that God wants to create, then we should work really hard to make sure the people that exist aren't lost. God can always keep creating people if he thinks that there should be more people, up to that limit he set.

I think for legitimist reasons, God can't endure sin / illegitimacy forever. In order for it to be unacceptable to him / illegitimate, he has to reject it at some finite time. It has to completely end, for good at some point. He can't recover from it and experience it again, if it's really wrong.

But, how does this work? It could be that there is a finite time in which God can endure sin. Or, maybe more likely, it could be more like "growing degree days". God could experience a certain cost of sin / illegitimacy on any given day, and it could stress him in a cumulative way. God has a lot of "patience", the capacity to endure the unbearable. But he doesn't have infinite patience, and this patience could be drawn down more rapidly the worse things are in our lives.

If this is true, we have yet another incentive to not sin, or to become fully legitimate sooner rather than later, or even to reduce the qualia of unbearability (since God finds those unbearable as well), because by doing this, we give God more psychological space to create more people. Also, while God's patience for illegitimacy is necessarily finite, it may be possible for God to partially recover from illegitimacy stress, due to us experiencing or choosing the opposites to illegitimacy: obeying his law, experiencing spiritually pure beauty or high-quality positive experiences (i.e. some forms of tranquility but maybe not wirehead or drug-addicted bliss), accepting anti-temptation, etc.

Some of the above paragraph suggests that creating beauty for (seemingly) its own sake is really helping God to endure, and thus may help him to create more people. If those people fully mature spiritually, then there will be more people in God's rest. If beauty comes at the cost of spiritual maturity, it's a bad thing. Or if beauty in one place produces enough horror or unbearability somewhere else, it's a bad thing. But if it doesn't, it's a good thing.

Reducing unbearability may sound like a reason to commit suicide. If your motive is to do good, you can probably do more good by staying alive. I know that being suicidal is hard and that the topic of suicide is complicated, but I've always found it motivating to live to think of the work I had not done yet for God. (Even if you are profoundly disabled, being alive in this life can be useful to God by providing people an opportunity to care for you or otherwise love you, as is pointed out by episode 19 of PloughCast).

Summary

I can tell that there might be more to write here, but I want to get this post out at some definite point in time, and if I wait to finish it until I am more sure I grasp everything, that might not happen.

So, I will try to summarize the situation:

The size of God may or may not be limited. I think it's always limited in the sense of not being actually infinite, but it could be everlastingly increasing.

God is limited otherwise than by his size. He must reject sin and so can't bear it forever. The period of time in which we can mature spiritually so as to be fully legitimate is finite.

The question arises of how to handle population ethics? What is the ideal size of our population, and how do we seek it?

There is some epistemic uncertainty here, but ethically, can we know what to do?

The clearest thing to do is, for whatever humans do exist, to help them to avoid hardening, and to encourage them to connect with God. God can always create more humans if he has the resources to create them.

There may be things we can do to free up resources for him to be able to create more people. We can pursue experiential asceticism, the production of beauty or similar restorative experiences, minimize unbearable experiences, and seek to overcome our sinful habits and inner sinful dispositions now, rather than later. If these pursuits don't come at the cost of our full spiritual maturity in the end (or that of others), then they should be pursued, and may have an altruistic payoff on the level of "more people in heaven" and not just "loving God and/or people by giving them nicer experiences".

I would say that writing this post "updates" me in the direction of valuing contemplative practices more and viewing the production of beauty for (apparently) its own sake more favorably.